Except that contrary to popular belief we are not in a legally defined war. We haven't been since the end of WWII For that purpose there has to be a formal declaration from "Congress" to that effect. Without that, you cannot invoke the authorities given to you given a "State of War".
Actually, this is totally wrong, and came about in several ways. Bush, and now Obama, has too blank checks in his hand.
a) Congress basically gave Bush the power to do anything in its first war on terror legislation following 9/11. Essentially, this legislation allowed the President to declare any state a terrorist state and to take military action in any way he sees fit.
b) Congress further affirmed the war on terror with its Iraqi war resolution.
You can say that these resolutions are not "declarations of war", but in my mind, when you say, "the president is authorized to use the armed forces of the united states to do whatever he wants to bad guys", that, sounds a lot like a declaration of war to me.
Of course, with all that said, I agree that the mindset of being in a continual war is cancerous to democracy. If we are to have a war, we should have raised an army of 5 million men, taken over the entire middle east, occupied the place, burned all the mosques, and ethnically cleansed Islam down into yet another European style Democracy that we imposed on Germany, and now can't even live up to ourselves.
The reason that the Constitution is so short, and so vague, is that it is a Treaty among the states that could not agree on anything. Prior to the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the states, having just rebelled against a Federal Power in Great Britain, did not want any power over them at all. They only adopted the Constitution because the founders recognized that there existed a need for a small, but powerful, Federal Government, to provide for some basic, common things, like military and regulation of commerce among the states.
Anything else, not in the Constitution, is explicitly left to the states, and that says, essentially, that if it is not in the Constitution, then the Federal Government is NOT allowed to do it.
So yeah, you could make a pretty strong case that, in the strict sense, Bush's wiretapping is illegal as it is not an enumerated power. However, this country, perhaps wrongly, largely believes that the Constitution is a "living document", not the treaty that it is. While this view is propagated by the American left wing - Obama even spells this out in his book, it is also true that the right wing, particularly under President Bush, has also taken the "living document" approach. Thus, the Federal Government now has the power to regulate the environment, local schools, hiring practices, voting within the states (and THAT is blatantly unconstitutional), and any other number of things.
So, it's not just that Bush is unconstitutional. It's that, every President since even Jefferson and arguably even George Washington has been unconstitutional! Jefferson, you will recall, argued rather violently against a strong federal government, but then had no problem with actually going out and purchasing the Louisiana territories from the French, lying to Congress, fighting an undeclared war against the French and Barbary Pirates, all the while writing about Freedom in an enormous set of letters to Madison and everyone else, bitching about slavery while knocking his own slaves up.
So yeah, you -could- make the case, that all the Presidents are unconstitutional, and the whole damn thing was a failure, except that, there were those who actually saw the Constitution as the creation of a President as essentially a king for a democratically restricted length of time, his power for war and taxation removed from him, but pretty much able to do whatever he wanted, and within that history then, you would really have to square Dick Cheney's view of the Presidency as Hamiltonian, more than anything else.
This is a lie. The republicans held 51 seats of the senate from 2002-2004 and gained even more in 2004-2006.
Actually, not. Before you go and start calling people liars, you should learn how to read. You show a chart for the election in 2002, which was held in November. The Iraqi war vote took place BEFORE that election. Here, check this out..
As I've said. The facts are there. One month before an election where the Democrats were in trouble, (they would ultimately lose), they voted to hand George Bush JR a blank check to invade Iraq. Senior Democrat Robert Byrd said, on the floor of the Senate, these three things:
a) there was not sufficient evidence that Iraq was building WMD b) they were voting on a defacto declaration of war. and finally c) this was a gulf of tonkin resolution, which only reaffirms the idea of trumped up charges leading to a us intervention.
Therefor, if one of the more respected leaders (earmarks aside) of the Democratic Senate thought the war was a crock, and lead a charge of some against it, then, obviously, Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and others were rolling the political dice when they voted for it, and THEY KNEW IT.
So all this talk about the war being a lie cooked up by Bush and the Democrats were just goaded into it and were victims, is a lie. Bush may have pushed for war for oil, but Democrats did it just so they could pick up some votes in an election they would lose anyway, and then, to evade any moral responsibility with their own base, they went and cooked up the "lie" story, and idiots on the left just believed it.
You are quite plainly advocating violence against people who have done nothing but speak.
I understand your point but they are not speaking. They are making animalistic grunts, lowering the whole of human civilization. Maybe jail is too harsh of a sentence, but, clearly there should be a penalty for someone whose actions clearly have a social penalty!
Would dumping a quart of motor oil on the ground be so large of a crime? Certainly not! But it is a terrible legal offense in many states, as well it should be. We seek to better ourselves, in one measure, by learning to use a gentler hand on the living things around us. Dumping a quart of motor oil on the ground, is, in that sense, an environmental profanity. Similarly, we have also to tend to the quality of our speech, our verbal and written environment, and there should be fines for that as well. You are not passing these laws to throw people in jail for dumping oil or swearing, as much as you are as to provide a firm incentive to stay the harder but more useful and rewarding road so as to benefit humanity as a whole.
If she can't figure out how to type a document in any kind of computer, quickly, and get it out the door, then, really, what kind of college material is she really.
I mean, its one thing to coddle to the masses, but the buck should stop when it comes to a degree. A degree should mean that you are not stupid, and in her case, it probably won't.
You know, I understand her point from the inconvenience, but in the larger sense of the word, I thought college was partially a test in determination and overcoming adversity. Not everything goes right when in school and those who make it through it overcome it, and those who do not, don't.
I know a guy who is getting his degree despite missing a finger and the use of an eye compliments of a tour in Iraq, all while trying to support a wife and son. I would think -he- has some problems to overcome.
woman has a computer that's not what she expects? I would suggest that, if she has a paper due, get on the internet, find out what she has, learn quickly, and get something out the door. She might, well, learn something, and I thought that was what college was for!
The people allegedly hired the president, we have a right to check his work.
You have a right to check his work but have no right to how he does it. You have no right to his personal thoughts or associations. He is an employee, not a slave.
You have the result, and if you like it, you can re-elect him to one term, and if you don't, then you don't. That's all you get because it is all you need.
We have 'em screaming in the streets, we have 'em tippin' over shit and breakin' fuckin' windows of small businesses, and settin' fuckin' fires! and settin' fuckin' fires! and settin' fuckin' fires!
Do you really need to wonder why these guys get called niggers? There, there's some free speech for you!
Oh, you can't you stand the word nigger?
Well, maybe some people don't like the word fuck either. You can't make a statement expressing your right to be an asshole, without someone else doing the same.
If we had some incentive to clean up our language?
Let's face it, the steady tirade of profanity has undermined the arts, lowered public discourse, and has reduced our level of civilization. Instead of searching for a short phrase that describes a situation and enriches us, we take the easy road and apply a profanity to any situation that causes us unpleasantness.
Some might argue that profanity is a form of self-expression but in reality it is another cancer eroding at self expression. By encouraging profanity, we lose our ability to communicate genuinely and express ourselves fully, and undermine ourselves as a free society. Just as Orwell's state changed all descriptions of a situation to double plus good, or plus good, so too we now have situations as f----.
I think that this whole business of constantly suing the President by the Congress for all of the records of his or her deliberations is a load of shit. It was wrong when Republicans did it to Bill Clinton and it is wrong for Democrats to do it to Bush and will be wrong when Republicans do it again to Obama.
The President is an independent branch of government from the Congress and the only essential things he could really do that cause his removal would be to attempt to engage in a power that belongs properly to the Congress.
You final paragraph is weak rhetoric. Congress was given lies and failed to call Bush on it. but guess what? It was a Republican controlled Congress and Bush was head of the party, so again, the responsibility lies at his feet.
Uh, Democrats controlled the Senate at the time the war resolution was voted on. So, basically, what you are saying is that the Democratic Party abdicated its responsibility to assess the claim of war on its merits.
And, what lies, exactly, was the Congress given? Seriously, I would have thought that if there was a document that was forged by the administration, then, Congress would have surely, by now, have produced it. They haven't. Similarly, given the number of Democrats within the CIA and Pentagon and government that leaked everything that could be leaked, going all the way up to the vote on the war, how can you credibly say that the Democrats didn't know?
I mean seriously, what evidence of WMD did Bush present to Congress in his case for war? On the surface it was a joke to begin with. Let's see, we had a bunch of model airplanes that might carry, well, something. We had a few milk trucks that might carry, maybe, well something. We had some left over parts from rockets and testimonials from people that even at the time our own allies were screaming that was not credible evidence. Then, we had, Saddam Hussein, decades of brutal dictatorship, ethnic cleansing of the shiites and kurds, and 20 trillion dollars worth of oil. You are telling me that Democrats voted to invade Iraq on the basis of a Bush claim that model airplanes might attack the USA? That's retarded. No, the real issue was always unfinished business with Saddam and the need to extricate US troops from Saudi Arabia and the only way to do that was to take Saddam down, which we did.
Now. Go turn off Fox News and stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. Time to go get your own thoughts.
And what own thoughts do you have? The basis of your complaint that George Bush lied when he said Saddam Hussein had model airplanes that could fly 1/50th of the way needed to hit the USA with some terrible bio weapon that he was manufacturing in the back of an ice cream truck. Yeah, like, really, really, the Democratic Party saw THAT as a threat, and voted for war, while meanwhile Iran builds 5000 f--- uranium centrifuges, openly declares that its going nuclear, and your party demands, what, negotiations?
If you actually thought for yourself, you would realize that the whole "Bush lied" thing is just Democratic cover for them to protect their own political base and provide room for them to maneuver in case the war went south. But oh no, you just go on and spout your retarded DailyKos propaganda without actually even taking two sentences to parse Colin Powell talking about model airplanes at the UN leading to essentially a declaration of the war by the united states.
Atheism is impossible because the world is irrational. Therefor, you are doomed to invent something in your mind that acts a religion, even if you do not call that, and has a god at the head of it, or gods. In your case, your god is your depersonalized ideal of a constitution that is very personal and very polarizing. See, you can act like a religious nut without even having a conventional god.
The crime isn't that he lied. The crime was that he lied when he took the oath of office to uphold the constitution
He did uphold the Constitution, on the whole, and in fact, its arguable that he has held up the Constitution more so than many liberal Presidents. If the Constitution is a "Living Document", like so many of Bush's political opponents argue, then, you have to live with the consequences of your abandonment of the view of the Constitution as a Treaty. If you are allowed to change the rules, to suit your fancy, then, everyone else is too. So when you argue that the right to keep and bear arms isn't really a right to keep and bear arms, that, the commerce clause really could mean the right to regulate everything from the environment to financial aid to sports teams, when you can invent the notion of an entitlement into a document that expressly puts those responsibilities into states hands, not federal hands, then George Bush can also argue, quite legitimately, that as Commander in Chief, he has the right to monitor conversations of citizens with nationals of other nations. If anything, George Bush is the MOST Constitutional President this country has had in 70 years.
How is killing something that isn't alive as bad as killing something that is alive?
Enemies of the Republican Party are not forms of life.
See, the trap here, is that, you have your definition of what is alive, and what is not, and in forming that, of merely asserting the right to form that opinion, then, everyone else has that right too. So you could have a cellular count as your definition, or birth, and other people could just as easily argue that its the adoption of christianity, fealty towards capitalism, or even a favorite tv show.
Oh, what the heck does that mean? I mean, come on dude. Just because you are a jew doesn't entitle you to some special prize.
My question is, what new things do you expect to learn? Is there any reason to read these emails? We know what they did and who is responsible. Maybe we don't have every gory detail. I doubt we need them. We could already try the major players.
The real problem is, that, even if the left wing unearthed every email that it could unearth, and tried Bush, we on the right wing have decided that he did not do anything wrong, and interpret what you are doing as a sort of an act of political persecution, and would respond in kind, if we regained power, or, would use to bolster a cause of revolution, if we could not.
He was within his right, as commander in chief and approval by the congress, to invade Iraq. Congress gave him permission, under the constitution, and that made the war legal. Actually, the Iraq war resolution was MORE of an honest and legal authorization of the President to use force than any President has even bothered to try and obtain since FDR asked Congress for a declaration of war.
Now, it doesn't matter whether Bush oversold the war or not. In fact, he probably lied. All Presidents lie. You can't goad people honestly into war or tell the truth as to why you have them. War is as much an act of statecraft and politic on the national stage as any other and honesty in war making is arguably detrimental to national security.
In any case, this is why we have separate branches of government. I mean, come on, Bush "lied about the war" is a joke. Congress saw what Bush had to offer and approved it. Wilson lied about World War I, Roosevelt lied about World War II. Truman lied to get us into Korea... like come on, how are the North Koreans going to attack the US without a Navy in 1950. Oh, that leads us up to Vietnam. THAT was an honest war.
So they trumped up bogus evidence to started a bogus war that killed many thousand people and put ...Bitches about killing in war as his party wants to dole out abortions to everyone. Get over it dude. Killing is killing, just because your killing suits your tastes doesn't make you better than someone else's. But I would point out that killing of Baathists [read, neo-nazi muslims], is actually probably more useful than killing our own before they are born.
If you could fault anything for Bush about Iraq, its that he did not conclusively grab the oil. However, hopefully the Democrats won't screw it up and pass Waxman's legislation that bars American companies from bidding on Iraqi oil development.
It turns out that one thing that brings together the radical leaders of both political spectrums really is a good cup of Joe.
I'll take your recommendation then.
on
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I don't think you should be modded troll at all. I think you've made a well thought out recommendation based on some good working knowlege of the issues at hand, and I'll give old OpenSUSE a try again down the road.
Might actually be to tax banks. Its a thought because right now the problem is that banks aren't lending to cover their failed assets, a problem which TARP was supposed to fix but didn't.
Some new deal ideas to try and increase the velocity of money might not be so bad. In general, where money is being hoarded, it should be taxed, so that, holders -must- invest or spend it. And you might want to look at hoarding in other areas as well, and ask questions like, does buying gold or silver or other commodities constitute hoarding? I would think that it would, so you might tax that. Similarly, you might have to ask, well, do futures contracts constitute hoarding? If you want to put money in the hands of the most people, you probably need to make sure that no commodity sits unused.
Re:Yeah but KDE doesn't work.
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Screwed up kernel... BTW, what distro are you running, and what version of KDE 4.x did you run?
I am running Ubuntu Hardy Heron with nVidia drivers. The problem was the KDE, and I think it was 4.0, went and updated my kernel. This in turn hosed my nVidia drivers for some god aweful reason and brought down my whole desktop.
I used to use OpenSuse before Ubuntu and that was where I really liked KDE the best. It was nice because under OpenSuse you could switch between KDE and Gnome quite effortlessly and this has never really worked under Ubuntu. However, there's a lot that I do like about Ubuntu, in particular, the whole package management system is out of this world good compared to OpenSUSE when I used it, and honestly, I think Gnome desktop just looks a lot more polished even though KDE has a lot of features to it.
Re:Yeah but KDE doesn't work.
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
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I wonder if you ever had to develop new widgets based on GTK... This post should get developers quite excited.
You know, I forgot all about that. I looked at building a grid control for GTK and it was, well just aweful. Even Windows SDK was easier to make widgets for and GTK managed to screw that up completely.
Wow, I'm totally wrong. Thank you for reminding me of that.
Well, to be honest, the economy was actually growing very fast under the New Deal, between 5% and 10% every year, from 1933 right up to the US entry into WW2. Millions of jobs were added before WW2. There was only one recessionary year when the Government tried to cut spending too early, but quickly corrected it.
What?! That's crazy talk. The unemployment rate in 1939 was 17.2%. Oh, ok, I've read that this statistic was cherry picked because it ignores all those "good" years before hand where unemployment was only 10-15%, but even if you go by the best way of interpreting the New Deal, unemployment was never lower than 9%, INCLUDING make work jobs, which means that, 8 years of Roosevelt were NEVER as good as the WORST year of George Bush JR. They should put Bush on the dime, and take Roosevelt off!
Now, with that said, the reason that the new deal "failed" was that it had Keynes tendency to not actually buy anything of lasting value... like, I was dead set against Bush just throwing money out there with these refund checks because, you've got so much money supply contraction taking place anyway that its not enough. Instead you have to create things that create wealth. So, if anyone actually really ended the great depression, ( the economy sucked under Truman ), it was Eisenhower, when he built the US interstates. Created lasting value, generated all sorts of opportunities. I'm hoping Obama's investments in energy and infrastructure will yield similar fruits, and then, if that works, then, put his ass on the dime, and get Bush off.
I'm not sure where you are getting the mercantilism connection to Keynesian policies. Keynesians were very much against the Gold standard... Everyone from Friedman to Keynes to Bernanke agree the Gold standard was a primary cause of the Depression.
If you substitute dollars for gold, every economy aside from the USA and the EU, is essentially mercantile.
Look at asia.. they get dollars, and they -hoard them-.
Hoarding is the hallmark of mercantilism and is ultimately why its ultimately a foolish economic policy. It could be gold or any standard, but hoarding is the problem. You have a room full of gold, or dollars, and its not in the economy, that means people aren't investing, building, making more of it. When we talk about the cause of the great depression and how it was prolonged, its hoarding. Hoarding is ultimately stupid, and that's why you saw FDR confiscate all of the gold, so he could spend it, because nobody else would.
The cause of this depression is hoarding. You have asian countries piling up tons of dollars doing nothing, and, the world loses all of that economic activity.. ultimately it screws the USA so the USA borrows, and the asians hoard more dollars, until, well, Bush pulls the plug on it all and devalues the dollar, to say, hey, I can change the value of your hoard at any time. This did not have the desired effect, obviously, but it made sense to do it at the time.
That's why you see Bernanke and our friends in Europe trying to have some brains and flood the capital markets with currency, to get the rest of the world to start spending and quit hoarding.
You clearly oppose Globalization, but I don't think it really matters.
My problem with being against globalization automatically is that I happen to love Italian wine and French Chardonnay and I know that Europeans should eventually come to realize the superiority of American Whiskey over other distilled spirits.
So, when passions are aside, I would say that I'm against globalization unless all the trading partners agreed to abandon mercantilism and we sort out how to avoid bankers shopping workers into the ground. I would certainly, though, be open to a free trade zone between the USA and European Union, and I also think we should have a NATO Day within the alliance to promote the idea of the West and transatlantic solidiarity. I think THAT would kick ass, and someday, once the USA gets its health care system and tax structure roughly in line with what the EU offers... I'm not saying that because I necessarily believe in it, but only that the EU health system and taxing regime seems to offer their corporations a competitive advantage.
Yeah but KDE doesn't work.
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Merge the teams, move forward with KDE and lets get Linux on the desktop in earnest.
Over my dead body. I can't stand KDE 4.0. It was nice under KDE 3.5 but KDE 4.0 just flat out didn't work well enough for me, broke my installation, screwed up my kernel, and you want me to go and do this again? I think it will be nice to run Qt applications under Gnome, which I can do just fine, while the KDE people go off into plasma la-la land.
The only reason I really liked KDE was because of KDevelop for C++, but KDevelop is languishing these days and NetBeans 6.5 seems just as good for C++ as KDevelop ever did.
It's good news, but is it too late?
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
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I mean, the need for GUI toolkits that are portable was a void that Qt was early to fill, but now, there's a lot of choices out there, and I think those choices might have undermined Trolltech's business post Nokia purchase. Like, 5k was a good thing to pay when there were no portable frameworks, but, there are plenty of them out there.
First off, there's Java. As the old saying goes, if you want an application framework that does everything, maybe C++ isn't your language. Java is portable, has several very good IDEs for it, from NetBeans 6.5 is nice and I think JBuilder is actually good as well.
For C++, wxWidgets is actually pretty impressive and it increasingly has GUI designers that you can use. Then, there is the C++ GTK toolkit, which is out there. And then, there's any other number of frameworks that are a bit less tried and true. And, honestly, C++0x is going to have so many changes to it, that, you almost have to wonder how much a good legacy C++ codebase is actually worth. Qt was born in an era when even templates didn't work right, and now, C++ is fairly mature, C++0x builds on that, and, you almost have to wonder, if the U/I toolkits don't need to be rethought in terms of modern things like STL under C++0x, new closure features coming, and so forth.
Small problem: the FCC has nothing to do with Imaginary Property, copyright enforcement, nor software patents. Thank you, drive through
The FCC stands for "Federal COMMUNCICATIONS Commission". Therefor, it can really be about anything that involves communications, including property rights and software patents. It most certainly could. In fact, there's probably quite a bit of jockeying in the government as to what organization will actually manage IP in the digital age. Surely the FCC wants a piece of that!
Wow, you really are a loon. The open Internet pretty much made Obama President
The open internet didn't do jack shit. Sorry, all of your writing on blogs and having a little cluster fuck in praise of Obama didn't do anything. What got Obama elected was Obama first and foremost, because he sensed that voters were fed up with the economic status quo from free trade, put his thoughts out on the table, and his book sold and took off like wildfire. He was also a very savvy politician and an excellent fundraiser, and great public speaker, at a time when the country wanted a good public speaker. Meanwhile, his political opposition ran a completely inept campaign. The whole strategy to bail on Bush completely backfired. Had they ran out Bush doing his town halls constantly like he had in 2004, and a candidate that defended the war and explained the problems in ways that said they are being worked on, and not been so stupidly anti-union, then Republicans probably could have won the election.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that contrary to popular belief we are not in a legally defined war. We haven't been since the end of WWII For that purpose there has to be a formal declaration from "Congress" to that effect. Without that, you cannot invoke the authorities given to you given a "State of War".
Actually, this is totally wrong, and came about in several ways. Bush, and now Obama, has too blank checks in his hand.
a) Congress basically gave Bush the power to do anything in its first war on terror legislation following 9/11. Essentially, this legislation allowed the President to declare any state a terrorist state and to take military action in any way he sees fit.
b) Congress further affirmed the war on terror with its Iraqi war resolution.
You can say that these resolutions are not "declarations of war", but in my mind, when you say, "the president is authorized to use the armed forces of the united states to do whatever he wants to bad guys", that, sounds a lot like a declaration of war to me.
Of course, with all that said, I agree that the mindset of being in a continual war is cancerous to democracy. If we are to have a war, we should have raised an army of 5 million men, taken over the entire middle east, occupied the place, burned all the mosques, and ethnically cleansed Islam down into yet another European style Democracy that we imposed on Germany, and now can't even live up to ourselves.
The reason that the Constitution is so short, and so vague, is that it is a Treaty among the states that could not agree on anything. Prior to the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the states, having just rebelled against a Federal Power in Great Britain, did not want any power over them at all. They only adopted the Constitution because the founders recognized that there existed a need for a small, but powerful, Federal Government, to provide for some basic, common things, like military and regulation of commerce among the states.
Anything else, not in the Constitution, is explicitly left to the states, and that says, essentially, that if it is not in the Constitution, then the Federal Government is NOT allowed to do it.
So yeah, you could make a pretty strong case that, in the strict sense, Bush's wiretapping is illegal as it is not an enumerated power. However, this country, perhaps wrongly, largely believes that the Constitution is a "living document", not the treaty that it is. While this view is propagated by the American left wing - Obama even spells this out in his book, it is also true that the right wing, particularly under President Bush, has also taken the "living document" approach. Thus, the Federal Government now has the power to regulate the environment, local schools, hiring practices, voting within the states (and THAT is blatantly unconstitutional), and any other number of things.
So, it's not just that Bush is unconstitutional. It's that, every President since even Jefferson and arguably even George Washington has been unconstitutional! Jefferson, you will recall, argued rather violently against a strong federal government, but then had no problem with actually going out and purchasing the Louisiana territories from the French, lying to Congress, fighting an undeclared war against the French and Barbary Pirates, all the while writing about Freedom in an enormous set of letters to Madison and everyone else, bitching about slavery while knocking his own slaves up.
So yeah, you -could- make the case, that all the Presidents are unconstitutional, and the whole damn thing was a failure, except that, there were those who actually saw the Constitution as the creation of a President as essentially a king for a democratically restricted length of time, his power for war and taxation removed from him, but pretty much able to do whatever he wanted, and within that history then, you would really have to square Dick Cheney's view of the Presidency as Hamiltonian, more than anything else.
This is a lie. The republicans held 51 seats of the senate from 2002-2004 and gained even more in 2004-2006.
Actually, not. Before you go and start calling people liars, you should learn how to read. You show a chart for the election in 2002, which was held in November. The Iraqi war vote took place BEFORE that election. Here, check this out..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Majority_Leader
And explain to me, how Tom Daschle, a Democrat, is Senate MAJORITY leader, up until 2003? Just thought I'd throw that out there.
The Iraqi War Resolution was passed in October 2002. Democrats were desperate to retain the Senate, so they voted for the war really for politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution
As I've said. The facts are there. One month before an election where the Democrats were in trouble, (they would ultimately lose), they voted to hand George Bush JR a blank check to invade Iraq. Senior Democrat Robert Byrd said, on the floor of the Senate, these three things:
a) there was not sufficient evidence that Iraq was building WMD
b) they were voting on a defacto declaration of war.
and finally
c) this was a gulf of tonkin resolution, which only reaffirms the idea of trumped up charges leading to a us intervention.
Therefor, if one of the more respected leaders (earmarks aside) of the Democratic Senate thought the war was a crock, and lead a charge of some against it, then, obviously, Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and others were rolling the political dice when they voted for it, and THEY KNEW IT.
So all this talk about the war being a lie cooked up by Bush and the Democrats were just goaded into it and were victims, is a lie. Bush may have pushed for war for oil, but Democrats did it just so they could pick up some votes in an election they would lose anyway, and then, to evade any moral responsibility with their own base, they went and cooked up the "lie" story, and idiots on the left just believed it.
You are quite plainly advocating violence against people who have done nothing but speak.
I understand your point but they are not speaking. They are making animalistic grunts, lowering the whole of human civilization. Maybe jail is too harsh of a sentence, but, clearly there should be a penalty for someone whose actions clearly have a social penalty!
Would dumping a quart of motor oil on the ground be so large of a crime? Certainly not! But it is a terrible legal offense in many states, as well it should be. We seek to better ourselves, in one measure, by learning to use a gentler hand on the living things around us. Dumping a quart of motor oil on the ground, is, in that sense, an environmental profanity. Similarly, we have also to tend to the quality of our speech, our verbal and written environment, and there should be fines for that as well. You are not passing these laws to throw people in jail for dumping oil or swearing, as much as you are as to provide a firm incentive to stay the harder but more useful and rewarding road so as to benefit humanity as a whole.
I agree that Slashdot 2.0 does suck.
If she can't figure out how to type a document in any kind of computer, quickly, and get it out the door, then, really, what kind of college material is she really.
I mean, its one thing to coddle to the masses, but the buck should stop when it comes to a degree. A degree should mean that you are not stupid, and in her case, it probably won't.
You know, I understand her point from the inconvenience, but in the larger sense of the word, I thought college was partially a test in determination and overcoming adversity. Not everything goes right when in school and those who make it through it overcome it, and those who do not, don't.
I know a guy who is getting his degree despite missing a finger and the use of an eye compliments of a tour in Iraq, all while trying to support a wife and son. I would think -he- has some problems to overcome.
woman has a computer that's not what she expects? I would suggest that, if she has a paper due, get on the internet, find out what she has, learn quickly, and get something out the door. She might, well, learn something, and I thought that was what college was for!
The people allegedly hired the president, we have a right to check his work.
You have a right to check his work but have no right to how he does it. You have no right to his personal thoughts or associations. He is an employee, not a slave.
You have the result, and if you like it, you can re-elect him to one term, and if you don't, then you don't. That's all you get because it is all you need.
We have 'em screaming in the streets,
we have 'em tippin' over shit and breakin' fuckin' windows of small businesses,
and settin' fuckin' fires!
and settin' fuckin' fires!
and settin' fuckin' fires!
Do you really need to wonder why these guys get called niggers? There, there's some free speech for you!
Oh, you can't you stand the word nigger?
Well, maybe some people don't like the word fuck either. You can't make a statement expressing your right to be an asshole, without someone else doing the same.
If we had some incentive to clean up our language?
Let's face it, the steady tirade of profanity has undermined the arts, lowered public discourse, and has reduced our level of civilization. Instead of searching for a short phrase that describes a situation and enriches us, we take the easy road and apply a profanity to any situation that causes us unpleasantness.
Some might argue that profanity is a form of self-expression but in reality it is another cancer eroding at self expression. By encouraging profanity, we lose our ability to communicate genuinely and express ourselves fully, and undermine ourselves as a free society. Just as Orwell's state changed all descriptions of a situation to double plus good, or plus good, so too we now have situations as f----.
Profanity -should- be banned.
I think that this whole business of constantly suing the President by the Congress for all of the records of his or her deliberations is a load of shit. It was wrong when Republicans did it to Bill Clinton and it is wrong for Democrats to do it to Bush and will be wrong when Republicans do it again to Obama.
The President is an independent branch of government from the Congress and the only essential things he could really do that cause his removal would be to attempt to engage in a power that belongs properly to the Congress.
You final paragraph is weak rhetoric. Congress was given lies and failed to call Bush on it. but guess what? It was a Republican controlled Congress and Bush was head of the party, so again, the responsibility lies at his feet.
Uh, Democrats controlled the Senate at the time the war resolution was voted on. So, basically, what you are saying is that the Democratic Party abdicated its responsibility to assess the claim of war on its merits.
And, what lies, exactly, was the Congress given? Seriously, I would have thought that if there was a document that was forged by the administration, then, Congress would have surely, by now, have produced it. They haven't. Similarly, given the number of Democrats within the CIA and Pentagon and government that leaked everything that could be leaked, going all the way up to the vote on the war, how can you credibly say that the Democrats didn't know?
I mean seriously, what evidence of WMD did Bush present to Congress in his case for war? On the surface it was a joke to begin with. Let's see, we had a bunch of model airplanes that might carry, well, something. We had a few milk trucks that might carry, maybe, well something. We had some left over parts from rockets and testimonials from people that even at the time our own allies were screaming that was not credible evidence. Then, we had, Saddam Hussein, decades of brutal dictatorship, ethnic cleansing of the shiites and kurds, and 20 trillion dollars worth of oil. You are telling me that Democrats voted to invade Iraq on the basis of a Bush claim that model airplanes might attack the USA? That's retarded. No, the real issue was always unfinished business with Saddam and the need to extricate US troops from Saudi Arabia and the only way to do that was to take Saddam down, which we did.
Now. Go turn off Fox News and stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. Time to go get your own thoughts.
And what own thoughts do you have? The basis of your complaint that George Bush lied when he said Saddam Hussein had model airplanes that could fly 1/50th of the way needed to hit the USA with some terrible bio weapon that he was manufacturing in the back of an ice cream truck. Yeah, like, really, really, the Democratic Party saw THAT as a threat, and voted for war, while meanwhile Iran builds 5000 f--- uranium centrifuges, openly declares that its going nuclear, and your party demands, what, negotiations?
If you actually thought for yourself, you would realize that the whole "Bush lied" thing is just Democratic cover for them to protect their own political base and provide room for them to maneuver in case the war went south. But oh no, you just go on and spout your retarded DailyKos propaganda without actually even taking two sentences to parse Colin Powell talking about model airplanes at the UN leading to essentially a declaration of the war by the united states.
:I'm an atheist
Atheism is impossible because the world is irrational. Therefor, you are doomed to invent something in your mind that acts a religion, even if you do not call that, and has a god at the head of it, or gods. In your case, your god is your depersonalized ideal of a constitution that is very personal and very polarizing. See, you can act like a religious nut without even having a conventional god.
The crime isn't that he lied. The crime was that he lied when he took the oath of office to uphold the constitution
He did uphold the Constitution, on the whole, and in fact, its arguable that he has held up the Constitution more so than many liberal Presidents. If the Constitution is a "Living Document", like so many of Bush's political opponents argue, then, you have to live with the consequences of your abandonment of the view of the Constitution as a Treaty. If you are allowed to change the rules, to suit your fancy, then, everyone else is too. So when you argue that the right to keep and bear arms isn't really a right to keep and bear arms, that, the commerce clause really could mean the right to regulate everything from the environment to financial aid to sports teams, when you can invent the notion of an entitlement into a document that expressly puts those responsibilities into states hands, not federal hands, then George Bush can also argue, quite legitimately, that as Commander in Chief, he has the right to monitor conversations of citizens with nationals of other nations. If anything, George Bush is the MOST Constitutional President this country has had in 70 years.
How is killing something that isn't alive as bad as killing something that is alive?
Enemies of the Republican Party are not forms of life.
See, the trap here, is that, you have your definition of what is alive, and what is not, and in forming that, of merely asserting the right to form that opinion, then, everyone else has that right too. So you could have a cellular count as your definition, or birth, and other people could just as easily argue that its the adoption of christianity, fealty towards capitalism, or even a favorite tv show.
I hate war criminals because I am Jewish
Oh, what the heck does that mean? I mean, come on dude. Just because you are a jew doesn't entitle you to some special prize.
My question is, what new things do you expect to learn? Is there any reason to read these emails? We know what they did and who is responsible. Maybe we don't have every gory detail. I doubt we need them. We could already try the major players.
The real problem is, that, even if the left wing unearthed every email that it could unearth, and tried Bush, we on the right wing have decided that he did not do anything wrong, and interpret what you are doing as a sort of an act of political persecution, and would respond in kind, if we regained power, or, would use to bolster a cause of revolution, if we could not.
He was within his right, as commander in chief and approval by the congress, to invade Iraq. Congress gave him permission, under the constitution, and that made the war legal. Actually, the Iraq war resolution was MORE of an honest and legal authorization of the President to use force than any President has even bothered to try and obtain since FDR asked Congress for a declaration of war.
Now, it doesn't matter whether Bush oversold the war or not. In fact, he probably lied. All Presidents lie. You can't goad people honestly into war or tell the truth as to why you have them. War is as much an act of statecraft and politic on the national stage as any other and honesty in war making is arguably detrimental to national security.
In any case, this is why we have separate branches of government. I mean, come on, Bush "lied about the war" is a joke. Congress saw what Bush had to offer and approved it. Wilson lied about World War I, Roosevelt lied about World War II. Truman lied to get us into Korea ... like come on, how are the North Koreans going to attack the US without a Navy in 1950. Oh, that leads us up to Vietnam. THAT was an honest war.
So they trumped up bogus evidence to started a bogus war that killed many thousand people and put ...Bitches about killing in war as his party wants to dole out abortions to everyone. Get over it dude. Killing is killing, just because your killing suits your tastes doesn't make you better than someone else's. But I would point out that killing of Baathists [read, neo-nazi muslims], is actually probably more useful than killing our own before they are born.
If you could fault anything for Bush about Iraq, its that he did not conclusively grab the oil. However, hopefully the Democrats won't screw it up and pass Waxman's legislation that bars American companies from bidding on Iraqi oil development.
It turns out that one thing that brings together the radical leaders of both political spectrums really is a good cup of Joe.
I don't think you should be modded troll at all. I think you've made a well thought out recommendation based on some good working knowlege of the issues at hand, and I'll give old OpenSUSE a try again down the road.
Might actually be to tax banks. Its a thought because right now the problem is that banks aren't lending to cover their failed assets, a problem which TARP was supposed to fix but didn't.
Some new deal ideas to try and increase the velocity of money might not be so bad. In general, where money is being hoarded, it should be taxed, so that, holders -must- invest or spend it. And you might want to look at hoarding in other areas as well, and ask questions like, does buying gold or silver or other commodities constitute hoarding? I would think that it would, so you might tax that. Similarly, you might have to ask, well, do futures contracts constitute hoarding? If you want to put money in the hands of the most people, you probably need to make sure that no commodity sits unused.
Screwed up kernel... BTW, what distro are you running, and what version of KDE 4.x did you run?
I am running Ubuntu Hardy Heron with nVidia drivers. The problem was the KDE, and I think it was 4.0, went and updated my kernel. This in turn hosed my nVidia drivers for some god aweful reason and brought down my whole desktop.
I used to use OpenSuse before Ubuntu and that was where I really liked KDE the best. It was nice because under OpenSuse you could switch between KDE and Gnome quite effortlessly and this has never really worked under Ubuntu. However, there's a lot that I do like about Ubuntu, in particular, the whole package management system is out of this world good compared to OpenSUSE when I used it, and honestly, I think Gnome desktop just looks a lot more polished even though KDE has a lot of features to it.
I wonder if you ever had to develop new widgets based on GTK ... This post should get developers quite excited.
You know, I forgot all about that. I looked at building a grid control for GTK and it was, well just aweful. Even Windows SDK was easier to make widgets for and GTK managed to screw that up completely.
Wow, I'm totally wrong. Thank you for reminding me of that.
Well, to be honest, the economy was actually growing very fast under the New Deal, between 5% and 10% every year, from 1933 right up to the US entry into WW2. Millions of jobs were added before WW2. There was only one recessionary year when the Government tried to cut spending too early, but quickly corrected it.
What?! That's crazy talk. The unemployment rate in 1939 was 17.2%. Oh, ok, I've read that this statistic was cherry picked because it ignores all those "good" years before hand where unemployment was only 10-15%, but even if you go by the best way of interpreting the New Deal, unemployment was never lower than 9%, INCLUDING make work jobs, which means that, 8 years of Roosevelt were NEVER as good as the WORST year of George Bush JR. They should put Bush on the dime, and take Roosevelt off!
Now, with that said, the reason that the new deal "failed" was that it had Keynes tendency to not actually buy anything of lasting value... like, I was dead set against Bush just throwing money out there with these refund checks because, you've got so much money supply contraction taking place anyway that its not enough. Instead you have to create things that create wealth. So, if anyone actually really ended the great depression, ( the economy sucked under Truman ), it was Eisenhower, when he built the US interstates. Created lasting value, generated all sorts of opportunities. I'm hoping Obama's investments in energy and infrastructure will yield similar fruits, and then, if that works, then, put his ass on the dime, and get Bush off.
I'm not sure where you are getting the mercantilism connection to Keynesian policies. Keynesians were very much against the Gold standard... Everyone from Friedman to Keynes to Bernanke agree the Gold standard was a primary cause of the Depression.
If you substitute dollars for gold, every economy aside from the USA and the EU, is essentially mercantile.
Look at asia.. they get dollars, and they -hoard them-.
Hoarding is the hallmark of mercantilism and is ultimately why its ultimately a foolish economic policy. It could be gold or any standard, but hoarding is the problem. You have a room full of gold, or dollars, and its not in the economy, that means people aren't investing, building, making more of it. When we talk about the cause of the great depression and how it was prolonged, its hoarding. Hoarding is ultimately stupid, and that's why you saw FDR confiscate all of the gold, so he could spend it, because nobody else would.
The cause of this depression is hoarding. You have asian countries piling up tons of dollars doing nothing, and, the world loses all of that economic activity.. ultimately it screws the USA so the USA borrows, and the asians hoard more dollars, until, well, Bush pulls the plug on it all and devalues the dollar, to say, hey, I can change the value of your hoard at any time. This did not have the desired effect, obviously, but it made sense to do it at the time.
That's why you see Bernanke and our friends in Europe trying to have some brains and flood the capital markets with currency, to get the rest of the world to start spending and quit hoarding.
You clearly oppose Globalization, but I don't think it really matters.
My problem with being against globalization automatically is that I happen to love Italian wine and French Chardonnay and I know that Europeans should eventually come to realize the superiority of American Whiskey over other distilled spirits.
So, when passions are aside, I would say that I'm against globalization unless all the trading partners agreed to abandon mercantilism and we sort out how to avoid bankers shopping workers into the ground. I would certainly, though, be open to a free trade zone between the USA and European Union, and I also think we should have a NATO Day within the alliance to promote the idea of the West and transatlantic solidiarity. I think THAT would kick ass, and someday, once the USA gets its health care system and tax structure roughly in line with what the EU offers... I'm not saying that because I necessarily believe in it, but only that the EU health system and taxing regime seems to offer their corporations a competitive advantage.
Merge the teams, move forward with KDE and lets get Linux on the desktop in earnest.
Over my dead body. I can't stand KDE 4.0. It was nice under KDE 3.5 but KDE 4.0 just flat out didn't work well enough for me, broke my installation, screwed up my kernel, and you want me to go and do this again? I think it will be nice to run Qt applications under Gnome, which I can do just fine, while the KDE people go off into plasma la-la land.
The only reason I really liked KDE was because of KDevelop for C++, but KDevelop is languishing these days and NetBeans 6.5 seems just as good for C++ as KDevelop ever did.
I mean, the need for GUI toolkits that are portable was a void that Qt was early to fill, but now, there's a lot of choices out there, and I think those choices might have undermined Trolltech's business post Nokia purchase. Like, 5k was a good thing to pay when there were no portable frameworks, but, there are plenty of them out there.
First off, there's Java. As the old saying goes, if you want an application framework that does everything, maybe C++ isn't your language. Java is portable, has several very good IDEs for it, from NetBeans 6.5 is nice and I think JBuilder is actually good as well.
For C++, wxWidgets is actually pretty impressive and it increasingly has GUI designers that you can use. Then, there is the C++ GTK toolkit, which is out there. And then, there's any other number of frameworks that are a bit less tried and true. And, honestly, C++0x is going to have so many changes to it, that, you almost have to wonder how much a good legacy C++ codebase is actually worth. Qt was born in an era when even templates didn't work right, and now, C++ is fairly mature, C++0x builds on that, and, you almost have to wonder, if the U/I toolkits don't need to be rethought in terms of modern things like STL under C++0x, new closure features coming, and so forth.
Small problem: the FCC has nothing to do with Imaginary Property, copyright enforcement, nor software patents. Thank you, drive through
The FCC stands for "Federal COMMUNCICATIONS Commission". Therefor, it can really be about anything that involves communications, including property rights and software patents. It most certainly could. In fact, there's probably quite a bit of jockeying in the government as to what organization will actually manage IP in the digital age. Surely the FCC wants a piece of that!
Wow, you really are a loon. The open Internet pretty much made Obama President
The open internet didn't do jack shit. Sorry, all of your writing on blogs and having a little cluster fuck in praise of Obama didn't do anything. What got Obama elected was Obama first and foremost, because he sensed that voters were fed up with the economic status quo from free trade, put his thoughts out on the table, and his book sold and took off like wildfire. He was also a very savvy politician and an excellent fundraiser, and great public speaker, at a time when the country wanted a good public speaker. Meanwhile, his political opposition ran a completely inept campaign. The whole strategy to bail on Bush completely backfired. Had they ran out Bush doing his town halls constantly like he had in 2004, and a candidate that defended the war and explained the problems in ways that said they are being worked on, and not been so stupidly anti-union, then Republicans probably could have won the election.