most people have moved on from the tragedy [the Benghazi attacks], considering [Hillary Clinton] accepted the blame for it a year and a half ago. It's not even clear what they want out of continually harping on this other than simply smearing her name.
Let's take it as a given that "What difference, at this point, does it make?" counts as claiming to accept blame for something. How does that work, exactly?
Let's use a concrete example. President Obama used drugs, primarily marijuana and cocaine, from his late teens into roughly his late twenties. My source for this is Dreams From My Father, his autobiography. The book came out about 15 years before his Presidential campaign started, and he's answered questions about it throughout his political career. His answers have largely been, "It was stupid. Pay attention in class and don't do drugs." Anyone who was going to vote against him because he used drugs had all the information to do so, straight from the horse's mouth. That's what taking responsibility for something means.
If Hillary Clinton is legitimately culpable for the lack of security at the compound in Benghazi, then her negligence led to the death of four Americans in a terrorist attack. According to you, Clinton has already admitted this. Being responsible, through negligence, for the deaths of four Americans is a legitimate campaign issue, and the Clinton campaign (and you) should be prepared for Benghazi to be held against her throughout the campaign. That's what taking responsibility for something means.
Hillary Clinton hasn't, in fact, admitted that she is responsible. Democrat hacks are STILL pretending the Youtube video spurred a demonstration that Clinton couldn't have forseen. (Eleanor Clift made this claim on The McLaughlin Group on Sunday.) The genesis of this claim is a set of talking points put out by the State Department (led, at the time, by Hillary Clinton) to conceal the issue until after the 2012 election. The coverup, is a separate issue that Clinton is responsible for.
Right now, it looks like Hillary Clinton was legitimately negligent in preparing for the Benghazi attack AND that she led a coverup of the attack to benefit her party on the eve of a Presidential election. We don't know, largely because the Democrats have been stonewalling on this since September 13th, 2012. The American people deserve to know what happened, and that goes double if we're being asked to vote for Clinton for President.
NJ already has a law on the books that says that once "smart guns" become commercially available, all guns sold to consumers must be equipped with the "smart" technology.
Step two happened before step one did, because the people who want to outlaw private ownership of firearms have been telegraphing their intention for a generation.
Perhaps, but they are not going to start backing Republicans. Democrats are still more union-friendly than Republicans.
Your first sentence is a red herring. Democrats enacted a plan that hurt the union members who helped elect them, and now they're being dicks about it. Calling the health insurance people use to take care of their family "fancy stuff" or even "Cadillac level" is tone deaf. Democrats are holding up the Keystone pipeline, which will be built with unionized labor. Private sector union jobs are very much down under this President, and further down still if you count back to when the Democrats took over the Senate in 2006. (Of course, private sector non-union jobs are also down, which also doesn't help matters.)
So I don't know that Democrats are better for rank and file union members. Certainly the Cadillac tax hurts union members almost exclusively. Whether Republicans can translate that into electoral success has nothing to do with the fact that Obamacare is bad for union members.
And just wait until things like the "Cadillac plan tax" kick in - when the US government starts taxing health benefits. That'll really piss people off.
Those with fancy stuff who hate taxes probably already hate Democrats anyhow.
Actually, the Cadillac plan tax is projected to mainly affect health plans run by unions. Unions, and in most unionized industries union members, overwhelmingly support Democrats.
How can you ensure that the job is going to the best candidate though? If you agree that women should not be unfairly disadvantaged, how can you enforce that except by equality of outcomes?
Ensuring that women aren't unfairly disadvantaged shouldn't be the goal. Ensuring that no one is unfairly disadvantaged should be the goal. Enforcing the kind of equality of outcomes you are talking about essentially means putting men at a disadvantage, which you also shouldn't be OK with.
... which doesn't apply to countries outside the US
It also doesn't apply to countries inside the US. The FCC doesn't have the necessary power to create net neutrality regulations, and Congress has decided that they aren't a good idea, so there are no Net Neutrality regulations in force in the US either.
Where is, for example, Microsoft, so support a competing product with $1 billions and to come in protection of basic rights of your fellow citizens?
I don't have a link handy, but Microsoft actually tried getting an Amendment added to the state constitution of Washington explicitly legalizing gay marriage. Their logic went, "Say we're targeting a world class developer because we want to hire them to work at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond.. We're obviously going to put together a compensation package to try to bring them on board. Part of it is obviously "Redmond is a great place to live." If they're gay, and gay marriage is legal in Washington, that's another point in our column."
Now that comes down to your main point: have the government change from being in charge of marriage to only having civil unions and give the word "marriage" over to religion. Many states already have civil unions that function like that already. But that is not enough: people want to be called married when they commit themselves to one another.
So they can call themselves married. We have free speech in this country, right? They can throw a ceremony officiated by an Elvis impersonator if they want to, and they can call the ceremony whatever they want. (In some jurisdictions, the Elvis impersonator has to be a clergyman. However, there are "religions" that exist only so you can join it so you can say "I'm a clergyman. License me to perform marriages.")
However, what they can't do is NOT have a ceremony. There is no legitimate reason for the government to mandate a ceremony, and CERTAINLY no legitimate reason for them to mandate that if you want to have a close friend perform the ceremony, that the friend has to claim to be a clergyman.
The government has a legitimate cause to regulate taxes, which are a business relationship between the citizens and the government. (They also have a legitimate cause to regulate certain business transactions between two groups of citizens (e.g. a couple and a hospital).) The government can and should separate the tax and business part of it from the ceremonial part of it. And since we're only able to regulate what the government calls something ANYWAY, let's have the government part be the one that gets a different name.
No church does have a monopoly on the word marriage.
Right now, in every state in the union, in order to get a marriage, you need to:
1. Have both spouses appear before a clerk in the jurisdiction that you're getting the marriage in.
2. That clerk will give you a form that you take to a Licensed Marriage Officiant.
3. The Marriage Officiant will perform a ceremony and fill out the form.
4. You send the form back to the clerk.
5. The clerk sends you a marriage license.
There's no real requirements for the Licensed Marriage Officiant or the ceremony that they perform. Religious leaders routinely maintain licences to perform marriages in the jurisdiction that they minister in, but since the fee to get licensed in a new jurisdiction is nominal, they will get licensed in whatever jurisdiction the wedding takes place in if necessary. Religious leaders, of course, perform the ceremony dictated by their religion, but the government doesn't dictate what the ceremony contains. If you don't want to have a religious ceremony, you can get a Justice of the Peace to be your Marriage Officiant. They are government officials, so sometimes their jurisdiction imposes some light requirements on what their ceremony entails. Most jurisdictions allow regular lay persons to get licenses to be Marriage Officiants (as long as they pay the fee), but that doesn't matter because there are "religions" that you can join solely so you can say "I'm a religious leader. Give me a license to perform a marriage between these two people I know who have asked me to perform their marriage." As long as you pay the fee, you can go that route.
Whether the couple is gay or straight, there's no legitimate governmental interest in making sure a "wedding ceremony" takes place. The government's interest should end at the point where you register your "domestic partnership" with the clerk in Step 2. If you want a ceremony on top of that, the government shouldn't be involved. That should be between the couple and their clergyman, friend, or Elvis impersonator.
Many insurance companies and private businesses already allow for 'domestic partners' when it comes to insurance, I don't see any requirement there that those partners be having sex.
I agree with your point. However, plenty of organizations limit benefits for "domestic partners" to "same sex domestic partners, with the implication that it's only for gay couples.
You are right, though. The government shouldn't have any place regulating the sex lives of consenting adults. People's business relationships, especially with the government, can and should be regulated without regard to whether the people involved are having sex.
But I have the perception, rightly or wrongly, that nearly every top executive position (even at nonprofits) pays a salary that is not commensurate with the person's work or value to the organization, and that these positions are instead used as a reward for people who the company directors happens to like.
So, I am comfortable with Eich, or even someone more hateful, being paid a high but appropriate salary for doing lots of good work for the company. But if, as I believe, most of the CEO's salary is a reward from the board of directors for being the person they like the most, then I feel justified in throwing a fit if I don't like him the most.
Immediately before being promoted, Eich had been the Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla. He's also the guy who invented Javascript. Do you really think he didn't make an technical contribution to Mozilla's products?
This is false. The reason there's no US troops in Iraq today is that the democratically elected Iraqi government wouldn't agree to a status of forces agreement with us. Status of forces agreements are pretty standard, the US has agreements with every country that we have troops in, especially our allies like Germany and Japan. The Iraqi government decided they didn't want to agree to a SOFA, so we left. If the Iraqi government were our puppets, we would have pressured them into agreeing to the SOFA.
BTW, did anybody invited US into... Afghanistan?
That's different. bin Laden was hiding out in Afghanistan and launched terrorist attacks against the United States. The Taliban was supporting him, both before and after the 9/11 attacks. If you go around committing acts of war, you can expect a military response.
Vietnam?
Actually, the United States was in Vietnam at the request of the South Vietnamese government, who wanted our help repelling the North Vietnamese army, who had invaded South Vietnam in violation of a UN order. So yes, the US was asked to intervene in Vietnam.
Posting party affiliation doesn't really help spot the bullshitters. There are bullshitter Republicans AND bullshitter Democrats.
However, the poster who was complaining about posting party affiliation was complaining about how Slashdot tends to only use the party label when a Democrat does "good things*" or a Republican does "bad things*." Democrats doing "bad things" and Republicans doing "good things" don't get a party label.
When a serious organization does this over time, this leads to the perception that "Democrats are the party that do "good things"" and "Republicans are the party that do "bad things."" Which, of course, is itself bullshit.
Slashdot is NOT a serious organization. I think they label Democrat "good things" and Republican "bad things" but leave party labels off the reverse because that will antagonize posters, who will then post a bunch of arguments back and forth. EXACTLY like this thread. All this means is more ad dollars for Dice.
If Slashdot wanted to be taken seriously, they would put a party label on every politician on first reference. Sadly, they don't.
*By good things and bad things, I mean "popularity among the Slashdot groupthink." On technology vs. business issues (like this bill) most of Slashdot will come down pretty clearly on one side, even if the bill is popular among the population as a whole. Obviously, on issues like "Is it OK for politicians to sell Russian weapons to terrorists," Slashdot groupthink is pretty in line with the population as a whole.
Yes. Aptitude means "skill at," not "amount of time spent preparing for." If you want a test that shows how well you prepared for the test, put a lot of trick questions and penalize going with gut instincts (guessing.)
The World Series is so-named because the best baseball players in the world come to the United States to play because US teams will pay them more money than teams in their country.
Also, Fox News is *not* a news channel. They do not do journalism.
But then...
MSNBC has people like Rachel Maddow who actually report **news** in a professional journalistic presentation
If you're making this comparison, you clearly have no idea what the hell you are talking about. As you acknowledge later in your post, Maddow is "slanted to a progressive... standpoint." That's because Rachel Maddow is not a journalist, and her show isn't journalism. Her show is the moral equivalent of MSNBC's editorial page, where news organizations traditionally tell people what the news organization thinks. Maddow was hired because she reliably agrees with the MSNBC decision makers, and so is a good choice to tell people the editorial viewpoint of MSNBC.
Compare this to Fox News. At 9:00 PM, opposite Maddow's show, Fox News runs "The Kelly File," where Megyn Kelly presents the editorial viewpoint of Fox News. (Kelly is a relative newcomer to this time slot; Sean Hannity's show (also an editorial show) ran there for almost a decade.) Kelly's show is the moral equivalent of the Fox News editorial page. Like it or not, 24 hour news stations, including both Fox News and MSNBC, tend to put editorial shows on between 8:00 and 10:00 PM ET.
If you want to compare straight news coverage to straight news coverage, we can do that. If you want to compare the amount MSNBC editorial hosts lie to the amount Fox News editorial hosts lie, we can do that too. But those are comparisons of two wildly different things.
Saying Fox News is slanted because they don't have good people like Rachel Maddow (whose job it is to be slanted) is like saying a pickup truck is a bad vehicle to haul lumber because it doesn't have the acceleration of a sports car.
Funny story about that. The IRS planned to implement the sequester cuts by furloughing, without pay, for five days during 2013. (Each of the 5 days would have been immediately preceding or immediately following a holiday weekend.) By mid July, the IRS "came up with some emergency funding" that they could use to offset the sequester cuts, meaning IRS staff only had to take 3 days without pay.
The sequester cuts were long over by the time you submitted your form in October. The government shutdown is also long over. The IRS is not "being forced to cut service" by the sequester or anything else.
It's worse than that. The largest of the "subsidies" that you have to include to get to the $1.3T figure they throw around is "negative externalities." Essentially, the environmentalists are making the argument that they want to create a "carbon tax" that they charge to energy companies, which the guy quoted in the article says would collect a total of $550 billion per year.
The carbon tax he's talking about isn't a law that's on the books. It's a proposal for a law that he wants the government to pass. And he's counting the failure of the government to pass that law as a subsidy.
Why be surprised at it, after all it's the same network that has or had Maddow, Mathews, and Olbermann on it and they've always had their faces stuck to the ass of the democratic party.
60 Minutes is a CBS thing. Maddow and Mathews work for NBC, and Olbermann used to work there as well. (He currently hosts a sports show on Disney/ABC-owned ESPN.)
Your larger point (about how all the networks openly support the Democrats) is spot on, but a better example of CBS's malpractice was Rather using forged documents to claim that George W. Bush didn't really serve in the National Guard.
The reason the NFL is in on this is because they have an exclusive deal with DirectTV; DirectTV is the only company allowed to broadcast non-nationally televised games outside the local broadcast area. DirectTV's deal costs $300, and you need to have satellite service. In exchange, you get EVERY out of market game. There's no option to just get a specific team's games.
I went to school in Rochester NY, where the local team is the Buffalo Bills. I grew up in New Jersey as a fan of the New York Jets. In order to legally get every Jets game, I would have had to get DirectTV service for $300 a year, and pay for 12 games a week I wasn't going to watch. Had Aereo been around, I would have subscribed to Aereo from my legal address (NJ) and watched the games in "my market" at a savings of $200.
The NFL doesn't want this, because it makes the deal they have with DirectTV less valuable. (Note that the other three American sports leagues have deals where you can pay the league directly to watch every one of your team's games over the Internet, so this IS technically feasible.) It doesn't make it right, but that's why they do it.
By the way, the NFL is a trade organization who promotes the interests of its members, the 32 teams. The teams pay dues to the league, which is where "the NFL" makes its money. This is a cost that teams pay out of their revenue. Another cost that teams pay out of their revenue is taxes. You have to tax where the money is, and the teams are the ones who have the money.
I think their business model relies on a loose definition of "live in the same metro area." If you're out of the area where you live for an extended period of time (e.g. on an extended business trip), you can watch the stations which would be local to you at home rather than the stations which are local to your current location.
In practice, on American network television, this pretty much affects two categories of programming, local news and football.
Slashdot Mirror
most people have moved on from the tragedy [the Benghazi attacks], considering [Hillary Clinton] accepted the blame for it a year and a half ago. It's not even clear what they want out of continually harping on this other than simply smearing her name.
Let's take it as a given that "What difference, at this point, does it make?" counts as claiming to accept blame for something. How does that work, exactly?
Let's use a concrete example. President Obama used drugs, primarily marijuana and cocaine, from his late teens into roughly his late twenties. My source for this is Dreams From My Father, his autobiography. The book came out about 15 years before his Presidential campaign started, and he's answered questions about it throughout his political career. His answers have largely been, "It was stupid. Pay attention in class and don't do drugs." Anyone who was going to vote against him because he used drugs had all the information to do so, straight from the horse's mouth. That's what taking responsibility for something means.
If Hillary Clinton is legitimately culpable for the lack of security at the compound in Benghazi, then her negligence led to the death of four Americans in a terrorist attack. According to you, Clinton has already admitted this. Being responsible, through negligence, for the deaths of four Americans is a legitimate campaign issue, and the Clinton campaign (and you) should be prepared for Benghazi to be held against her throughout the campaign. That's what taking responsibility for something means.
Hillary Clinton hasn't, in fact, admitted that she is responsible. Democrat hacks are STILL pretending the Youtube video spurred a demonstration that Clinton couldn't have forseen. (Eleanor Clift made this claim on The McLaughlin Group on Sunday.) The genesis of this claim is a set of talking points put out by the State Department (led, at the time, by Hillary Clinton) to conceal the issue until after the 2012 election. The coverup, is a separate issue that Clinton is responsible for.
Right now, it looks like Hillary Clinton was legitimately negligent in preparing for the Benghazi attack AND that she led a coverup of the attack to benefit her party on the eve of a Presidential election. We don't know, largely because the Democrats have been stonewalling on this since September 13th, 2012. The American people deserve to know what happened, and that goes double if we're being asked to vote for Clinton for President.
Step two happened before step one did, because the people who want to outlaw private ownership of firearms have been telegraphing their intention for a generation.
Star Wars Battlefront 1&2 have had dedicated servers since launch as well.
Perhaps, but they are not going to start backing Republicans. Democrats are still more union-friendly than Republicans.
Your first sentence is a red herring. Democrats enacted a plan that hurt the union members who helped elect them, and now they're being dicks about it. Calling the health insurance people use to take care of their family "fancy stuff" or even "Cadillac level" is tone deaf. Democrats are holding up the Keystone pipeline, which will be built with unionized labor. Private sector union jobs are very much down under this President, and further down still if you count back to when the Democrats took over the Senate in 2006. (Of course, private sector non-union jobs are also down, which also doesn't help matters.)
So I don't know that Democrats are better for rank and file union members. Certainly the Cadillac tax hurts union members almost exclusively. Whether Republicans can translate that into electoral success has nothing to do with the fact that Obamacare is bad for union members.
Those with fancy stuff who hate taxes probably already hate Democrats anyhow.
Actually, the Cadillac plan tax is projected to mainly affect health plans run by unions. Unions, and in most unionized industries union members, overwhelmingly support Democrats.
I'm pretty sure Verizon Wireless is not a free service, dude.
How can you ensure that the job is going to the best candidate though? If you agree that women should not be unfairly disadvantaged, how can you enforce that except by equality of outcomes?
Ensuring that women aren't unfairly disadvantaged shouldn't be the goal. Ensuring that no one is unfairly disadvantaged should be the goal. Enforcing the kind of equality of outcomes you are talking about essentially means putting men at a disadvantage, which you also shouldn't be OK with.
... which is a violation of Net Neutrality.
... which doesn't apply to countries outside the US
It also doesn't apply to countries inside the US. The FCC doesn't have the necessary power to create net neutrality regulations, and Congress has decided that they aren't a good idea, so there are no Net Neutrality regulations in force in the US either.
Where is, for example, Microsoft, so support a competing product with $1 billions and to come in protection of basic rights of your fellow citizens?
I don't have a link handy, but Microsoft actually tried getting an Amendment added to the state constitution of Washington explicitly legalizing gay marriage. Their logic went, "Say we're targeting a world class developer because we want to hire them to work at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond.. We're obviously going to put together a compensation package to try to bring them on board. Part of it is obviously "Redmond is a great place to live." If they're gay, and gay marriage is legal in Washington, that's another point in our column."
Now that comes down to your main point: have the government change from being in charge of marriage to only having civil unions and give the word "marriage" over to religion. Many states already have civil unions that function like that already. But that is not enough: people want to be called married when they commit themselves to one another.
So they can call themselves married. We have free speech in this country, right? They can throw a ceremony officiated by an Elvis impersonator if they want to, and they can call the ceremony whatever they want. (In some jurisdictions, the Elvis impersonator has to be a clergyman. However, there are "religions" that exist only so you can join it so you can say "I'm a clergyman. License me to perform marriages.")
However, what they can't do is NOT have a ceremony. There is no legitimate reason for the government to mandate a ceremony, and CERTAINLY no legitimate reason for them to mandate that if you want to have a close friend perform the ceremony, that the friend has to claim to be a clergyman.
The government has a legitimate cause to regulate taxes, which are a business relationship between the citizens and the government. (They also have a legitimate cause to regulate certain business transactions between two groups of citizens (e.g. a couple and a hospital).) The government can and should separate the tax and business part of it from the ceremonial part of it. And since we're only able to regulate what the government calls something ANYWAY, let's have the government part be the one that gets a different name.
Right now, in every state in the union, in order to get a marriage, you need to:
1. Have both spouses appear before a clerk in the jurisdiction that you're getting the marriage in.
2. That clerk will give you a form that you take to a Licensed Marriage Officiant.
3. The Marriage Officiant will perform a ceremony and fill out the form.
4. You send the form back to the clerk.
5. The clerk sends you a marriage license.
There's no real requirements for the Licensed Marriage Officiant or the ceremony that they perform. Religious leaders routinely maintain licences to perform marriages in the jurisdiction that they minister in, but since the fee to get licensed in a new jurisdiction is nominal, they will get licensed in whatever jurisdiction the wedding takes place in if necessary. Religious leaders, of course, perform the ceremony dictated by their religion, but the government doesn't dictate what the ceremony contains. If you don't want to have a religious ceremony, you can get a Justice of the Peace to be your Marriage Officiant. They are government officials, so sometimes their jurisdiction imposes some light requirements on what their ceremony entails. Most jurisdictions allow regular lay persons to get licenses to be Marriage Officiants (as long as they pay the fee), but that doesn't matter because there are "religions" that you can join solely so you can say "I'm a religious leader. Give me a license to perform a marriage between these two people I know who have asked me to perform their marriage." As long as you pay the fee, you can go that route.
Whether the couple is gay or straight, there's no legitimate governmental interest in making sure a "wedding ceremony" takes place. The government's interest should end at the point where you register your "domestic partnership" with the clerk in Step 2. If you want a ceremony on top of that, the government shouldn't be involved. That should be between the couple and their clergyman, friend, or Elvis impersonator.
Many insurance companies and private businesses already allow for 'domestic partners' when it comes to insurance, I don't see any requirement there that those partners be having sex.
I agree with your point. However, plenty of organizations limit benefits for "domestic partners" to "same sex domestic partners, with the implication that it's only for gay couples.
You are right, though. The government shouldn't have any place regulating the sex lives of consenting adults. People's business relationships, especially with the government, can and should be regulated without regard to whether the people involved are having sex.
But I have the perception, rightly or wrongly, that nearly every top executive position (even at nonprofits) pays a salary that is not commensurate with the person's work or value to the organization, and that these positions are instead used as a reward for people who the company directors happens to like.
So, I am comfortable with Eich, or even someone more hateful, being paid a high but appropriate salary for doing lots of good work for the company. But if, as I believe, most of the CEO's salary is a reward from the board of directors for being the person they like the most, then I feel justified in throwing a fit if I don't like him the most.
Immediately before being promoted, Eich had been the Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla. He's also the guy who invented Javascript. Do you really think he didn't make an technical contribution to Mozilla's products?
US left Iraq because no powerful US corporation was interested enough in staying...
In other views the reason to invade Afghanistan was Afghanistan Oil Pipeline...
People of Crimea have had a referendum and by vast majority decided to join Russian Federation.
If you're going to ignore facts and spout crazy nonsense without evidence, while ignoring THE ACTUAL FACTS, then I can't help you.
Iraq is pretty much controlled by US.
This is false. The reason there's no US troops in Iraq today is that the democratically elected Iraqi government wouldn't agree to a status of forces agreement with us. Status of forces agreements are pretty standard, the US has agreements with every country that we have troops in, especially our allies like Germany and Japan. The Iraqi government decided they didn't want to agree to a SOFA, so we left. If the Iraqi government were our puppets, we would have pressured them into agreeing to the SOFA.
BTW, did anybody invited US into... Afghanistan?
That's different. bin Laden was hiding out in Afghanistan and launched terrorist attacks against the United States. The Taliban was supporting him, both before and after the 9/11 attacks. If you go around committing acts of war, you can expect a military response.
Vietnam?
Actually, the United States was in Vietnam at the request of the South Vietnamese government, who wanted our help repelling the North Vietnamese army, who had invaded South Vietnam in violation of a UN order. So yes, the US was asked to intervene in Vietnam.
However, the poster who was complaining about posting party affiliation was complaining about how Slashdot tends to only use the party label when a Democrat does "good things*" or a Republican does "bad things*." Democrats doing "bad things" and Republicans doing "good things" don't get a party label.
When a serious organization does this over time, this leads to the perception that "Democrats are the party that do "good things"" and "Republicans are the party that do "bad things."" Which, of course, is itself bullshit.
Slashdot is NOT a serious organization. I think they label Democrat "good things" and Republican "bad things" but leave party labels off the reverse because that will antagonize posters, who will then post a bunch of arguments back and forth. EXACTLY like this thread. All this means is more ad dollars for Dice.
If Slashdot wanted to be taken seriously, they would put a party label on every politician on first reference. Sadly, they don't.
*By good things and bad things, I mean "popularity among the Slashdot groupthink." On technology vs. business issues (like this bill) most of Slashdot will come down pretty clearly on one side, even if the bill is popular among the population as a whole. Obviously, on issues like "Is it OK for politicians to sell Russian weapons to terrorists," Slashdot groupthink is pretty in line with the population as a whole.
aptitude = preparation...
Am I wrong?
Yes. Aptitude means "skill at," not "amount of time spent preparing for." If you want a test that shows how well you prepared for the test, put a lot of trick questions and penalize going with gut instincts (guessing.)
Posting to remove bad mod
The World Series is so-named because the best baseball players in the world come to the United States to play because US teams will pay them more money than teams in their country.
Also, Fox News is *not* a news channel. They do not do journalism.
But then...
MSNBC has people like Rachel Maddow who actually report **news** in a professional journalistic presentation
If you're making this comparison, you clearly have no idea what the hell you are talking about. As you acknowledge later in your post, Maddow is "slanted to a progressive... standpoint." That's because Rachel Maddow is not a journalist, and her show isn't journalism. Her show is the moral equivalent of MSNBC's editorial page, where news organizations traditionally tell people what the news organization thinks. Maddow was hired because she reliably agrees with the MSNBC decision makers, and so is a good choice to tell people the editorial viewpoint of MSNBC.
Compare this to Fox News. At 9:00 PM, opposite Maddow's show, Fox News runs "The Kelly File," where Megyn Kelly presents the editorial viewpoint of Fox News. (Kelly is a relative newcomer to this time slot; Sean Hannity's show (also an editorial show) ran there for almost a decade.) Kelly's show is the moral equivalent of the Fox News editorial page. Like it or not, 24 hour news stations, including both Fox News and MSNBC, tend to put editorial shows on between 8:00 and 10:00 PM ET.
If you want to compare straight news coverage to straight news coverage, we can do that. If you want to compare the amount MSNBC editorial hosts lie to the amount Fox News editorial hosts lie, we can do that too. But those are comparisons of two wildly different things.
Saying Fox News is slanted because they don't have good people like Rachel Maddow (whose job it is to be slanted) is like saying a pickup truck is a bad vehicle to haul lumber because it doesn't have the acceleration of a sports car.
The sequester cuts were long over by the time you submitted your form in October. The government shutdown is also long over. The IRS is not "being forced to cut service" by the sequester or anything else.
The carbon tax he's talking about isn't a law that's on the books. It's a proposal for a law that he wants the government to pass. And he's counting the failure of the government to pass that law as a subsidy.
Why be surprised at it, after all it's the same network that has or had Maddow, Mathews, and Olbermann on it and they've always had their faces stuck to the ass of the democratic party.
60 Minutes is a CBS thing. Maddow and Mathews work for NBC, and Olbermann used to work there as well. (He currently hosts a sports show on Disney/ABC-owned ESPN.)
Your larger point (about how all the networks openly support the Democrats) is spot on, but a better example of CBS's malpractice was Rather using forged documents to claim that George W. Bush didn't really serve in the National Guard.
I went to school in Rochester NY, where the local team is the Buffalo Bills. I grew up in New Jersey as a fan of the New York Jets. In order to legally get every Jets game, I would have had to get DirectTV service for $300 a year, and pay for 12 games a week I wasn't going to watch. Had Aereo been around, I would have subscribed to Aereo from my legal address (NJ) and watched the games in "my market" at a savings of $200.
The NFL doesn't want this, because it makes the deal they have with DirectTV less valuable. (Note that the other three American sports leagues have deals where you can pay the league directly to watch every one of your team's games over the Internet, so this IS technically feasible.) It doesn't make it right, but that's why they do it.
By the way, the NFL is a trade organization who promotes the interests of its members, the 32 teams. The teams pay dues to the league, which is where "the NFL" makes its money. This is a cost that teams pay out of their revenue. Another cost that teams pay out of their revenue is taxes. You have to tax where the money is, and the teams are the ones who have the money.
In practice, on American network television, this pretty much affects two categories of programming, local news and football.