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  1. Re:Bigger question than her tech positions on Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record · · Score: 1

    Do you actually know what La Raza is, or have you just been gulping down Limbaugh's tainted pablum? A more accurate translation of 'La Raza' is 'the community' rather than 'the race.' The root word from Latin is the same, but it developed different connotations in English and Spanish. Similarly, your comprehension of the New Haven case is about the same level; the racial disparity in the test meant that the city would be exposed to legal jeopardy if they used it as the basis for promotions and they were in fact complying with existing law in throwing it out. Just because you don't like that a bunch of white men lost their case does not mean the law said they should win or that she misinterpreted it.

  2. Re:Wait, what? on Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record · · Score: 1

    Depending on your state of residence, the landlord doesn't necessarily have the right to enter your apartment no matter how much notice he gives. A generic rental contract will probably include relevant language specifying when he can come in (such as to rent it out at the end of your contract) and how much notice is needed. And if you sign a lease that says he can wander in any time he wants, congrats, you gave him that right...

  3. Re:Cyberlaw on Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record · · Score: 1

    Sotomayor was also making that statement in the context of a much longer speech, in which she was making the point that any judge has a perspective arising from life experiences through which they will see the cases before them. Seeing as how many legal standards include the idea of a 'reasonable person,' it is not in fact unreasonable to think that a Latina woman might have in some respects a different idea of reasonability from a silver-spoon white man. Marie Antoinette thought 'Let them eat cake' was a reasonable idea, because her perspective didn't accord with the vast majority of the French population.

  4. Re:Cyberlaw on Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record · · Score: 1

    In theory he'll have that this summer, as soon as Al Franken gets out of the courtroom and into his Senate seat - or if not more than 60 votes, at least exactly 60, hence the filibuster-breaking power. But that relies on lots of other factors like keeping Arlen Specter in line (which Joe Sestak's primary challenge may help do), so waiting for 2010 makes sense regardless. It could also be a bit of sensible observation of precedent; Bork's nomination failed but Scalia's succeeded, and it's quite possible that had the two of them been nominated in the other order, Scalia could have brought the court rightwards enough to make Bork seem more acceptable. Running Bork up first left him looking impossibly out of the mainstream.

  5. Re:Hi Itninja on Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record · · Score: 1

    You can have your Duality, I'll take Trinity. Not the Christian one, the black-leather-trenchcoat one.

  6. Re:Cyberlaw on Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record · · Score: 1

    New TLD! .law ahoy!

  7. Re:OpenDNS isn't a DNS "hierarchy" on An Argument For Leaving DNS Control In US Hands · · Score: 1

    As to why some people love OpenDNS and hated their ISPs for doing much the same practices, I believe it's a matter of control. With the ISPs, you had no control over whether it happened and what sorts of blocking and filtering took place. OpenDNS is opt-in, so you aren't forced to use it if you don't want to, you can control what gets blocked and what doesn't, and you don't have to complain to some anonymous bureaucrat at your ISP to get the settings adjusted.

  8. Re:Product Placement on Sophos Releases Klingon Language Version · · Score: 1

    That brings up a thought. If he had been driving a Kia with a built-in Nokia, would the two have cancelled out and left him just zooming along by himself?

  9. Re:Klingon Linux distro on Sophos Releases Klingon Language Version · · Score: 3, Funny

    Klingons have a fondness for Windows because they hear it has lots of COM-BAT files.

  10. Re:And.... on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    There's certainly nothing wrong with proportional representation as a concept; it should be noted, however, that your mayor, chief of police, sheriff, school superintendant, and so on would not magically become representative of your interests under proportional representation. There is only one mayor (choosing the easy one for discussion's sake), and if you consistently vote for the losing candidate in mayoral races, and are then unhappy with your local government, that would probably not change under a proportional-representation system. If the proportion of people in your area who agree with you is less than fifty percent, you will still end up disliking most of the single-person positions. As for the various secretaries, those are appointed positions for a reason; the executive functions as a set of subordinates of the president, not politicians in their own rights. If the president did not trust half his cabinet, and therefore did not involve them in high-level discussions, there would be severe problems keeping vital services running. Judges are mostly appointed in the US under the premise that doing so permits most of them to be apolitical after appointment and be pre-selected for being better at their jobs rather than being good politicians. Some areas do elect their judges; you could always move to, say, Alabama, where it is my understanding that they elect judicial positions (or any others; I recall Alabama due to Roy Moore's foolishness).

  11. Re:And.... on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    Seeing as how the top rate for earnings over $250,000 is 35%, doubling that rate would mean paying 70% in federal income taxes on earnings over a quarter-million a year. Where does 'almost my entire income' come in? Cumulative state and local sales, income, and property taxes are eating up the other 30%? Share the numbers, otherwise this is clearly bupkus.

  12. Re:Hahaha, good one. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    So that's the latest definition of winning? Great. Let everyone know the next time it changes, and what counts as 'stable' these days, not to mention 'peaceful.' And as nice as it would have been to have a US-friendly nation in the middle east, that seems to be off the board, but fortunately that's not part of 'winning.' The occupation was an abject failure, and the only progress that has come about happened when Iraqis could see that the occupation was going to wind down, hence did not need them to resist it. The remnant internal violence is a degree of magnitude less.

  13. Re:Hahaha, good one. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    Oh, yes, that was the original rationale! All the 'Saddam has WMDs and we need to stop him before he nukes us' talk was just a synonym for 'we should out of the goodness of our hearts help the Iraqis set up a democratic form of government.' No, establishing a at-least-temporarily stable local government before leaving is a treaty obligation after invading another country. The Republican war in Iraq was a failure from the start; just because the mess is being cleaned up does not make the original goals successful. Go take some remedial poli-sci courses while you're taking that remedial English, too.

  14. Re:Hahaha, good one. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    Yes. Those are some of the single-issue groups out there. Just because they have picked issues and gone crazily overdedicated to them to the point of terrorist activity does not mean that everyone who has concerns about those issues is being indicted. When the left-wing version of this report came out earlier this year, it identified environmentalist extremist groups like Earth First, and yet somehow people who like having a clean environment managed to not misinterpret the report to be accusing them of terrorist.

  15. Re:Hahaha, good one. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    Only in the paranoid we're-all-victims-really Fox world did the report say anything of the sort. Try actually reading the thing and see what it says. It very clearly indicates that it is examining the collection of right-wing extremist groups (and do try to find a single leftist among the abortion clinic bombers to make them not right-wing) and identifying characteristics of those groups, not identifying every person with those characteristics as a member of the extremist groups.

  16. Re:Revealing your own politics on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    A group that is so far right they call Mike Huckabee a "tax-increasing liberal governor of Arkansas" is quite extreme. Likewise, targetting blue state Republican senators like Arlen Specter and Lincoln Chafee for their refusal to support knee-jerk tax cuts regardless of the actual fiscal situation is not a sign of moderation. If the Club for Growth wants to not be considered a right-wing Republican faction, it would behoove them to stop supporting solely right-wing candidates (yes, including Henry Cuellar, as he was clearly more right-wing than Ciro Rodriguez).

  17. Re:Hahaha, good one. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    You seem to need some remedial English classes to help you with comprehension and grammar. Declaring 'this entire boondoggle is a failure from the start' in and of itself precludes even the possibility of wanting or needing the boondoggle in question to fail, because it already has. At that point, it's a debate between the people who want to minimize the damage caused by the failure and the people who keep insisting that the magical pixies really can fix everything and somehow retroactively 'win' if everyone just claps harder. If you're having trouble understanding - well, really, I'm not surprised.

  18. Re:Democrats far worse... on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    The 'demonizing' would seem to be a natural by-product of a little thing like him supporting the other party's candidate for president, don't you think? Not to mention spending the preceding six years loudly refusing to investigate the failures of the Bush administration, voting to confirm Bush's hard-rightist judicial appointments like Alito and Roberts, and opposing large sections of the Democratic platform. And yet somehow they still 'demonized' him all the way into getting to keep his committee chairmanship after all that once Democrats took the majority. So harsh!

  19. Re:The New Realignment on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    You only need the government license if you want the government benefits that come with government-recognized marriage. If the government did not provide any benefits that come with official recognition of marriage, no one would bother involving the government.

    Also, Proposition 8 was in fact exactly the opposite of what you describe; it was a proposition against government recognition of homosexual marriages, and it passed thanks to large-scale support by out-of-state Mormons. Black voters did end up voting in favor of passage, but the measure passed narrowly, by only a few percent, not handily. Without the Mormon church organizing the effort, it would have never even accumulated enough signatures for be put on the ballot in the first place.

  20. Re:As I'm sure someone has already pointed out... on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    Lieberman ran as an independent only after losing the Democratic primary, using a quirk of Connecticut law that allowed him to petition his way onto the general ballot as a third-party candidate the day after the primary. If 'losing the primary despite having party support' is a stab in the back, then anyone who loses a primary has been stabbed in the back. It's a particularly interesting 'back' when it comes after months of warnings that he would face a primary if he continued to refuse to investigate official misconduct by the department he was supposedly overseeing.

  21. Re:Pennsylvania Politics (As Usual?) on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    But only when you count their church donations as 'giving to the poor.'

  22. Re:Pennsylvania Politics (As Usual?) on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    Ah, yes. Byrd, the right-wing's favorite target on the topic of racism. Except that he renounced and rejected his earlier beliefs several decades ago, whereas a credible candidate for the RNC chairmanship this year mailed out CDs bearing a song entitled 'Barack The Magic Negro.' There is a vast difference between a former racist who recanted and an entire party that nearly makes a current, unrepentant racist its leader.

    Also, you would be much more likely to be taken seriously if you understood the rules of grammar thoroughly enough to distinguish between 'Democrat' and 'Democratic.' A 'Democrat' is a member of the 'Democratic' Party. Until you master that distinction, you pre-tag yourself as an ignorant and ignorable shill.

  23. Re:Awesome. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    tl;dr. Skimmed enough to see a nice long list of repeatedly-debunked right-wing talking points, though. Good job on the regurgitation!

  24. Re:Mixed value. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    You should try to learn the adjectival form of the word 'Democrat,' which would be 'Democratic,' as in 'Democratic Party.' It makes you sound much more intelligent to use the proper word when you're presenting a 'Get a brain morans' argument like this. After that it might be worth dissecting your novel interpretation of what fascism is; there are enough competing definitions of the term that anyone claiming to know, as you so claim, exactly what it is, is simply put, full of it.

  25. Re:Hahaha, good one. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 1

    Let's try it again slower for you. They voted for the side that recognized that there was no such thing as 'winning' in the current situation rather than the magic-pixie side that had been saying for six years running "You just have to clap harder and then we'll win!" without actually defining what 'winning' would be. 'Losing' the war would be easy: becoming overstretched to the point of being militarily incapable of continuing to field forces in the area. 'Winning' requires more than just staying there for another hundred years.