I quoted your use of the words "conspiracy" and "elite" from your post, to mock your usage of them. "Fascist", "lies" and "propaganda" I used in exactly their correct sense.
You're "not a huge fan of Bush" - worth nothing. That's just a cop out. You're defending Bush, you're cherry picking, straw-manning and otherwise tossing fallacious arguments to back him up. Anyone paying attention to Bush has indigestion.
Thanks for proving the stereotype of the snarky, know-it-all, yet oblivious to reality law school student. You've got a lot to learn, especially when arguing about "semantic attacks" and calling Bush a "Socialist". Yeah, Bush the "Socialist". National Socialist, maybe. You know that you're going to be working on the principle that "government is good", earning your entire living because of the government, right? Lawyers. Law school students. Ugh.
It's the signing statement, snappy. When president (Jenna) Bush is making laws with signing statements without Congress, you'll get the point. You won't be complaining, because lawyers won't have to argue with judges any more, just submit the forms, pay the "fees", and hope the Brownie-ocracy sees it your way.
No, for me the world is groaning under the weight of a few conspiracies supported by people like you. Who will just insist that Bush won the recount, for example, when Gore won. Except the Supreme Court decided otherwise.
You blew your cover you maintained with some dignity in your previous few posts. You're a Bush worshipper like the rest of your rightwing buzzword parrots.
Take your coincidence theories and share them with your own abject elite: the fascist propagandists who own the media, the government and the entitlement to say whatever you want, no matter how rotten the lie.
I read it. And the part I quoted invalidates the rest you're trying to throw. Did you read the page I cited, which examines the current problem bill in the context of Field v Clark in detail? Because that analysis shows that the bill is not a valid law.
Even more important, the basic facts show that this law is unconstitutional.
But that's not even the worst. As I originally posted, this little crisis is just the pretext to create legal weight in presidential signing statements. The most important problem, which you have not addressed at all.
Maybe you're a lawyer. Then you should understand that a "crime" does not always require a law to be broken, especially when the laws governing it are being gamed to commit the crime against our republic. And you should then care more about the real crime than whether it's "punishable" or not, unless maybe you're Hastert or Bush.
Your reference's definition of an "enrolled bill": "The final copy of a bill or joint resolution that has passed both houses of a legislature and is ready for signature."
In fact, the bill I mentioned had passed each house in a different form, had not passed both houses, and was not, therefore, ready for signature.
I invite you to research the problem with an evidentiary rule like Field v Clark. Here's a start: " Dennis Hastert has violated his constitutional oath by attesting to the accuracy of the bill, knowing that the House version was different (and having intentionally avoided fixing the discrepancy when it came to his attention before the House vote)."
There's lots more in just that one discussion, including 'Field v. Clark itself, in which the Court agreed that "it cannot be doubted" that a bill signed by the President "does not become a law of the United States if it ha[s] not in fact been passed by Congress. . . . There is no authority in the presiding officers of the House of Representatives and the Senate to attest by their signatures, nor in the President to approve, nor in the Secretary of State to receive and cause to be published, as a legislative act, any bill not passed by Congress."'
Then there's the reality that these Republicans have now conspired to create an entirely new legal instrument that circumvents Congress to make laws, founded on an unconstitutional passage of a law by a signing statement.
Anyone who thinks that's OK is a traitor to our country.
FDR created a larger Supreme Court to accommodate a larger, more complicated government he created to cope with both 20th Century Depression and World War. Whether that was to get his way politically or not, he made the Judiciary Branch more powerful. That was within, and therefore with respect to, our democratic republic.
These actions by Bush are designed to completely subvert the government. To get it out of the way of corporations. That's a lot different from tweaks like more Justices, or direct election of senators, or black/youth/female sufferage. It's subversion. And, by subverting the Constitution itself, treason. That cannot be said of the politicians who have come before.
I see you are insisting on quaint pre-9/11 civics notions. As I detailed, Alito and Roberts believe that the old "checks and balances" system should be replaced with the "unitary executive", unchecked (and unbalanced). Using the signing statement to declare the law gives their cabal the legal tools to enforce signing statements.
I see you're not even paying attention to impeachement. A Republican Congress can impeach a president for lying about a blowjob. But even inconsequential censure is an unacceptable Congressional action when a Republican president violates FISA and the 4th Amendment.
You act like this president, Supreme Court and Congress are like the ones that came before them: that they respect government. They don't.
In the 5 days since I posted that comment, it has garnered no flames. The only possible "Flamebait" in it is where I point out the poster I'm rejecting is called "InsaneGeek", and living up to their name.
TrollMod is another obvious standard Republican denial projector.
The US has now installed both Roberts and Alito onto our Supreme Court with their "judicial philosophy" of a "unitary executive". That is, the president runs the entire government from his Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch just finds ways to interpret the president's decisions, and Congress is a medium to the public, to be informed of policy details when it suits the president.
Just this week, Bush signed into law a bill that was not Constitutional, because it had not been agreed in the same terms by both Senate and House of Representatives. So he "fixed it" with a "signing statement" declaring how he will execute the law. Signing statements have no force of law, or any existence beyond a recent ceremonial ritual. But now someone can bring this unconstitutional law before the Supreme Court, where Roberts and Alito can lead a decision to create a precedent for making the signing statement the executable law.
When the Senate confirmed Alito everyone knew he considers Congress optional. Now they've sent him the legal tools to make that the force of law. Why should the UK have all the dictator fun?
Why should the Supreme Court waste time deciding who's responsible for consuming prohibited information when they're busy spending the afternoon with Anna Nicole Smith?
And I've got thousands of music albums on HD, with metadata in a Postgres DB. Others have thousands of movies. The hardest part is replacing a shelf of titles with something as easily browsable (not just searchable), especially at scales bigger than traditional libraries handle.
So who's got a content GUI that's better than walls of shelves?
I wonder how much faster the Arab info society would evolve if there weren't such a brain drain to EurAmerican society. Even in Arab countries, many talented and productive people get sucked into EurAmerican corporate and government jobs, which suck the value into the foreign info societies, rather than feeding back locally. And which Westernize the participating Arabs, so they don't contribute "Arab" solutions to the global info society.
Meanwhile Europe and America have local labor who don't want to compete with Arab visitors who subsidize their lower costs with time spent back in cheaper Arab countries, invest in homes and retirements there, etc.
Is there a mutual development benefit to restricting foreigners from joining EurAmerican labor pools, rather than taking the easy way out with only small benefits to Arab workers? And if Arabs had to grow their own domestic info societies, would they also grow their own local democracies, to reflect the increasing power of their middle class?
Is the balance of benefit to the actual workers in each country closer to staying home than to the current brain drain? Is there a better way to get that balance than just keeping foreign labor from visiting the more developed countries?
No, they use the term "fiscal imbalance". Which is a euphamism, appropriate to explaining the damage the politicians they back have done to us. No surprise that you're spinning the $45TRILLION debt they admitted even harder than they are, because you're just posting ideology on Slashdot.
* the state of owing something (especially money); "he is badly in debt"
* money or goods or services owed by one person to another
* an obligation to pay or do something
It doesn't matter to whom we owe the debt. What matters is that we're committed to the debt. Although the candidates, especially China and Arab banks do present serious problems beyond the interest payments.
I don't know what you're getting at with Social Security. SS is a working program that is working. It pays not only for itself, but funds a lot of our debt. If anything, SS needs to be fixed to accomodate profligate Baby Boomers by getting interest from the rest of the Federal debt it supports. But as a Federal pension program, which invests in the steady huge productivity growth of American labor, it is a sound success.
Now, if you want to talk about the returns on our $1T annual military/intelligence investments, I think we have a lot of pork we can eliminate from the $45T in committed debt. Otherwise, we're not going to washing dishes in mainland Chinese restaurants. We're just going to pay lots more for yuan and euros to prop up what's left of our society, while Eurasia takes America's place in the 21st Century, and America takes Brazil's.
The government has "promised to pay" $45TRILLION more than it can reasonably expect to receive, given what it has "promised to do". Those promises are laws. With our entire society based on those payments.
Sure, we can just rip off those SS cardholders - tell them they paid into the program their whole lives, and now we're stealing their money so they can die in poverty while Bush's cronies wallow in $BILLIONS of pork. We can break the law, too.
But no one will believe the US when it makes a law. No one will lend us any more money, or will do so at the usurious rates we get ourselves when we starve Africa and South America.
Robbing old people and destroying America isn't just "fairly" dire. It's a nightmare we're just starting to sink into. Which will last the rest of our lives. Your tactic of minimizing it with a few flip words doesn't get you out of it.
"Committed debt" is debt to which we're committed. Understanding its meaning requires basic English skills.
I'm not engaging in technical economics analysis on Slashdot. Though I did back up the clear term with extremely credible technical economics analysis from AEI. Which you reject with "is not". And don't even bother to read the report, which makes clear that the debt, as always, is income (including revenues) minus expenses, resulting in $45TRILLION we need but won't have. You can "think", "suspect", or call it whatever you want, without any basis but your denial. But that doesn't change the problem.
Read the study. Then wake up from your fantasy that "everything will be OK because it's too scary not to". When you know what you're talking about, try talking about it again.
Bush is responsible for most of that debt, as it's been introduced in the last 5 years. Most of the rest of that debt was produced by Reagan/Bush in 1981-1993. Only a tiny fraction was produced prior to Reagan. Clinton produced a net surplus in his 8 year administration. So it's pretty clear that this is a "Bush debt". You want to run the country, you own the results you create. You break it, you own it.
We are currently paying out that debt, including huge (and only growing) interest. We just raised the (sneakily minimized) debt ceiling to accomodate our wasteful spending. We need to spend $45TRILLION that we don't have in the foreseeable future, beyond what we do/will have, which is substantial.
I see no sign that anyone "with sense" will change the law. Clinton was able to do it with good management skills and extreme luck in getting a huge productivity jump with little competition to manage. Despite that, mismanagement of the debt has created a huge, complex system with hundreds of millions of stakeholders locking it into dysfunction. And huge financial industries and markets are now built on the structure of the US debt. With only the underrepresented American with interest in reducing it. Looks hopeless to me. Maybe the day will come when a president will tell a Congress that a war will last a few weeks and pay for itself, and Congress will impeach him rather than pay the bill for such a fantasy.
The "gross global product" is about $35TRILLION annually. We accumulate lots of value from year to year, though lots of production is consumed food, energy and other nondurables. Lots of trade is just exchanged in a cycle, raising the counter, like stock market equities and derivatives. But 6 BILLION people represent only $8,000 apiece for $48TRILLION, so the "world's value" is clearly more than that.
But all those measures are theoretical. The closest real amount is US GDP, which is about $12TRILLION. So the US has committed 4 years of our total output in debt. Of course, it's impossible for the US to do without consuming most of our own output, so even that is nonsense.
What is very real is the $45TRILLION we've committed to owe. And no real way to pay it, except by accumulating more debt to do so. Pretty bad scene. Thanks, Bush!
You don't understand what committed debt is. It's the amount of debt that current budgets, in law, commit the US to.
The highly Conservative, and often machiavellian supporter of Bush, American Enterprise Institute produced a study of the "fiscal imbalance" to which we're committed for Paul O'Neill, then Secretary of the Treasury. That got O'Neill fired by Bush because it revealed the depths of catastrophe to which Bush has condemned us. Bush has since created only more debt.
$45 TRILLION in committed debt. $45 TRILLION. $45 TRILLION.
Slashdot Mirror
Parrot?
I quoted your use of the words "conspiracy" and "elite" from your post, to mock your usage of them. "Fascist", "lies" and "propaganda" I used in exactly their correct sense.
You're "not a huge fan of Bush" - worth nothing. That's just a cop out. You're defending Bush, you're cherry picking, straw-manning and otherwise tossing fallacious arguments to back him up. Anyone paying attention to Bush has indigestion.
Polly-anna want a cracker?
Thanks for proving the stereotype of the snarky, know-it-all, yet oblivious to reality law school student. You've got a lot to learn, especially when arguing about "semantic attacks" and calling Bush a "Socialist". Yeah, Bush the "Socialist". National Socialist, maybe. You know that you're going to be working on the principle that "government is good", earning your entire living because of the government, right? Lawyers. Law school students. Ugh.
It's the signing statement, snappy. When president (Jenna) Bush is making laws with signing statements without Congress, you'll get the point. You won't be complaining, because lawyers won't have to argue with judges any more, just submit the forms, pay the "fees", and hope the Brownie-ocracy sees it your way.
GoDaddy funnels its income into rightwing politics.
No, for me the world is groaning under the weight of a few conspiracies supported by people like you. Who will just insist that Bush won the recount, for example, when Gore won. Except the Supreme Court decided otherwise.
You blew your cover you maintained with some dignity in your previous few posts. You're a Bush worshipper like the rest of your rightwing buzzword parrots.
Take your coincidence theories and share them with your own abject elite: the fascist propagandists who own the media, the government and the entitlement to say whatever you want, no matter how rotten the lie.
I read it. And the part I quoted invalidates the rest you're trying to throw. Did you read the page I cited, which examines the current problem bill in the context of Field v Clark in detail? Because that analysis shows that the bill is not a valid law.
Even more important, the basic facts show that this law is unconstitutional.
But that's not even the worst. As I originally posted, this little crisis is just the pretext to create legal weight in presidential signing statements. The most important problem, which you have not addressed at all.
Maybe you're a lawyer. Then you should understand that a "crime" does not always require a law to be broken, especially when the laws governing it are being gamed to commit the crime against our republic. And you should then care more about the real crime than whether it's "punishable" or not, unless maybe you're Hastert or Bush.
This Supreme Court installed Bush because doing over the failed 2000 election was "too hard".
Now, with Roberts and Alito the Court will continue to take "the easy way" out... straight to the dictatorship Bush prefers.
S. 1932, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005
The fix is in, the party is over.
The bat wins.
Your reference's definition of an "enrolled bill":
"The final copy of a bill or joint resolution that has passed both houses of a legislature and is ready for signature."
In fact, the bill I mentioned had passed each house in a different form, had not passed both houses, and was not, therefore, ready for signature.
I invite you to research the problem with an evidentiary rule like Field v Clark. Here's a start:
" Dennis Hastert has violated his constitutional oath by attesting to the accuracy of the bill, knowing that the House version was different (and having intentionally avoided fixing the discrepancy when it came to his attention before the House vote)."
There's lots more in just that one discussion, including 'Field v. Clark itself, in which the Court agreed that "it cannot be doubted" that a bill signed by the President "does not become a law of the United States if it ha[s] not in fact been passed by Congress. . . . There is no authority in the presiding officers of the House of Representatives and the Senate to attest by their signatures, nor in the President to approve, nor in the Secretary of State to receive and cause to be published, as a legislative act, any bill not passed by Congress."'
Then there's the reality that these Republicans have now conspired to create an entirely new legal instrument that circumvents Congress to make laws, founded on an unconstitutional passage of a law by a signing statement.
Anyone who thinks that's OK is a traitor to our country.
FDR created a larger Supreme Court to accommodate a larger, more complicated government he created to cope with both 20th Century Depression and World War. Whether that was to get his way politically or not, he made the Judiciary Branch more powerful. That was within, and therefore with respect to, our democratic republic.
These actions by Bush are designed to completely subvert the government. To get it out of the way of corporations. That's a lot different from tweaks like more Justices, or direct election of senators, or black/youth/female sufferage. It's subversion. And, by subverting the Constitution itself, treason. That cannot be said of the politicians who have come before.
I see you are insisting on quaint pre-9/11 civics notions. As I detailed, Alito and Roberts believe that the old "checks and balances" system should be replaced with the "unitary executive", unchecked (and unbalanced). Using the signing statement to declare the law gives their cabal the legal tools to enforce signing statements.
I see you're not even paying attention to impeachement. A Republican Congress can impeach a president for lying about a blowjob. But even inconsequential censure is an unacceptable Congressional action when a Republican president violates FISA and the 4th Amendment.
You act like this president, Supreme Court and Congress are like the ones that came before them: that they respect government. They don't.
IOKIYAR. Of course their plan is A Permanent Republican Majority. Why should Mexico have all the Permanent Revolutionary Party fun?
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
In the 5 days since I posted that comment, it has garnered no flames. The only possible "Flamebait" in it is where I point out the poster I'm rejecting is called "InsaneGeek", and living up to their name.
TrollMod is another obvious standard Republican denial projector.
The US has now installed both Roberts and Alito onto our Supreme Court with their "judicial philosophy" of a "unitary executive". That is, the president runs the entire government from his Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch just finds ways to interpret the president's decisions, and Congress is a medium to the public, to be informed of policy details when it suits the president.
Just this week, Bush signed into law a bill that was not Constitutional, because it had not been agreed in the same terms by both Senate and House of Representatives. So he "fixed it" with a "signing statement" declaring how he will execute the law. Signing statements have no force of law, or any existence beyond a recent ceremonial ritual. But now someone can bring this unconstitutional law before the Supreme Court, where Roberts and Alito can lead a decision to create a precedent for making the signing statement the executable law.
When the Senate confirmed Alito everyone knew he considers Congress optional. Now they've sent him the legal tools to make that the force of law. Why should the UK have all the dictator fun?
Why should the Supreme Court waste time deciding who's responsible for consuming prohibited information when they're busy spending the afternoon with Anna Nicole Smith?
And I've got thousands of music albums on HD, with metadata in a Postgres DB. Others have thousands of movies. The hardest part is replacing a shelf of titles with something as easily browsable (not just searchable), especially at scales bigger than traditional libraries handle.
So who's got a content GUI that's better than walls of shelves?
I wonder how much faster the Arab info society would evolve if there weren't such a brain drain to EurAmerican society. Even in Arab countries, many talented and productive people get sucked into EurAmerican corporate and government jobs, which suck the value into the foreign info societies, rather than feeding back locally. And which Westernize the participating Arabs, so they don't contribute "Arab" solutions to the global info society.
Meanwhile Europe and America have local labor who don't want to compete with Arab visitors who subsidize their lower costs with time spent back in cheaper Arab countries, invest in homes and retirements there, etc.
Is there a mutual development benefit to restricting foreigners from joining EurAmerican labor pools, rather than taking the easy way out with only small benefits to Arab workers? And if Arabs had to grow their own domestic info societies, would they also grow their own local democracies, to reflect the increasing power of their middle class?
Is the balance of benefit to the actual workers in each country closer to staying home than to the current brain drain? Is there a better way to get that balance than just keeping foreign labor from visiting the more developed countries?
No, they use the term "fiscal imbalance". Which is a euphamism, appropriate to explaining the damage the politicians they back have done to us. No surprise that you're spinning the $45TRILLION debt they admitted even harder than they are, because you're just posting ideology on Slashdot.
English fails you (or rather, vice versa):
Definitions of debt on the Web:
* the state of owing something (especially money); "he is badly in debt"
* money or goods or services owed by one person to another
* an obligation to pay or do something
It doesn't matter to whom we owe the debt. What matters is that we're committed to the debt. Although the candidates, especially China and Arab banks do present serious problems beyond the interest payments.
I don't know what you're getting at with Social Security. SS is a working program that is working. It pays not only for itself, but funds a lot of our debt. If anything, SS needs to be fixed to accomodate profligate Baby Boomers by getting interest from the rest of the Federal debt it supports. But as a Federal pension program, which invests in the steady huge productivity growth of American labor, it is a sound success.
Now, if you want to talk about the returns on our $1T annual military/intelligence investments, I think we have a lot of pork we can eliminate from the $45T in committed debt. Otherwise, we're not going to washing dishes in mainland Chinese restaurants. We're just going to pay lots more for yuan and euros to prop up what's left of our society, while Eurasia takes America's place in the 21st Century, and America takes Brazil's.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
You likewise fail it.
The government has "promised to pay" $45TRILLION more than it can reasonably expect to receive, given what it has "promised to do". Those promises are laws. With our entire society based on those payments.
Sure, we can just rip off those SS cardholders - tell them they paid into the program their whole lives, and now we're stealing their money so they can die in poverty while Bush's cronies wallow in $BILLIONS of pork. We can break the law, too.
But no one will believe the US when it makes a law. No one will lend us any more money, or will do so at the usurious rates we get ourselves when we starve Africa and South America.
Robbing old people and destroying America isn't just "fairly" dire. It's a nightmare we're just starting to sink into. Which will last the rest of our lives. Your tactic of minimizing it with a few flip words doesn't get you out of it.
"Committed debt" is debt to which we're committed. Understanding its meaning requires basic English skills.
I'm not engaging in technical economics analysis on Slashdot. Though I did back up the clear term with extremely credible technical economics analysis from AEI. Which you reject with "is not". And don't even bother to read the report, which makes clear that the debt, as always, is income (including revenues) minus expenses, resulting in $45TRILLION we need but won't have. You can "think", "suspect", or call it whatever you want, without any basis but your denial. But that doesn't change the problem.
Read the study. Then wake up from your fantasy that "everything will be OK because it's too scary not to". When you know what you're talking about, try talking about it again.
Bush is responsible for most of that debt, as it's been introduced in the last 5 years. Most of the rest of that debt was produced by Reagan/Bush in 1981-1993. Only a tiny fraction was produced prior to Reagan. Clinton produced a net surplus in his 8 year administration. So it's pretty clear that this is a "Bush debt". You want to run the country, you own the results you create. You break it, you own it.
We are currently paying out that debt, including huge (and only growing) interest. We just raised the (sneakily minimized) debt ceiling to accomodate our wasteful spending. We need to spend $45TRILLION that we don't have in the foreseeable future, beyond what we do/will have, which is substantial.
I see no sign that anyone "with sense" will change the law. Clinton was able to do it with good management skills and extreme luck in getting a huge productivity jump with little competition to manage. Despite that, mismanagement of the debt has created a huge, complex system with hundreds of millions of stakeholders locking it into dysfunction. And huge financial industries and markets are now built on the structure of the US debt. With only the underrepresented American with interest in reducing it. Looks hopeless to me. Maybe the day will come when a president will tell a Congress that a war will last a few weeks and pay for itself, and Congress will impeach him rather than pay the bill for such a fantasy.
The "gross global product" is about $35TRILLION annually. We accumulate lots of value from year to year, though lots of production is consumed food, energy and other nondurables. Lots of trade is just exchanged in a cycle, raising the counter, like stock market equities and derivatives. But 6 BILLION people represent only $8,000 apiece for $48TRILLION, so the "world's value" is clearly more than that.
But all those measures are theoretical. The closest real amount is US GDP, which is about $12TRILLION. So the US has committed 4 years of our total output in debt. Of course, it's impossible for the US to do without consuming most of our own output, so even that is nonsense.
What is very real is the $45TRILLION we've committed to owe. And no real way to pay it, except by accumulating more debt to do so. Pretty bad scene. Thanks, Bush!
You don't understand what committed debt is. It's the amount of debt that current budgets, in law, commit the US to.
The highly Conservative, and often machiavellian supporter of Bush, American Enterprise Institute produced a study of the "fiscal imbalance" to which we're committed for Paul O'Neill, then Secretary of the Treasury. That got O'Neill fired by Bush because it revealed the depths of catastrophe to which Bush has condemned us. Bush has since created only more debt.
$45 TRILLION in committed debt. $45 TRILLION. $45 TRILLION.