Without linking to the original context of the testimony
The summary HAS the context. You're grasping at straws that aren't there.
The second laughable problem is that the FBI shouldn't need to justify the emergency.
Of course they do. You ever hear of these things called warrants? Subpoenas? How about due process?
If a police officer turns on his lights and sirens simply to run a red light and causes an accident, you get a fat check! The FBI doesn't need to demonstrate that it has an actual emergency, but does need to be held accountable to what it's done after the fact.
No, you ignorant boob. The point of having a Bill of Rights is to prevent abuses from happening in the first place, not to punish government officials after the fact.
or against abolishing the death penalty are not liberal or conservative, they are centrist.
How do you figure that, exactly? Aside from the morality of execution, there's the high rates of errors in death penalty cases, lack of good public defenders for those who can't afford their own, and the dozens of innocent people who were put on death row only to have their sentences overturned.
...a straight face after the last decade? Look at how the media treated Bush vs how they treated Gore. How the media's discussion of Iraq is still dominated by pro-invasion hawks - those who opposed the war from the beginning are as excluded now as they were in 2002. Remember Gary Condit and Chandra Levy? At about the same time, an intern was found dead in Congressman Joe Scarborough's office from massive head trauma. Where was the scandal on that one?
It's not about individual reporters, as anyone can assemble a collection of individual stories that lean "left" or "right". And it's not about a "conservative" or "liberal" bias either...it's about media memes that are biased towards conservatives. And the media does that consistently and on a massive scale.
You're just a clueless moron spouting terms you don't understand.
Projecting again, I see.
The real problem with the NRA is that when people actually do use firearms to protect themselves from run away law enforcement, they're on their own. Randy Weaver? No help from the NRA. Same for the Branch Dividians. Or Cory Maye. An organization devoted exclusively to gun rights and the 2nd most powerful domestic lobby doesn't do shit to defend gun users, and people bitch when the ACLU doesn't take firearms cases.
But all people can do is make jokes about him being in the NRA.
I can see how you'd draw such a conclusion, given the large numbers of NRA jokes in the summary. Why, I had no idea Heston was an actor until I read your post.
I'm always amused that the 2nd most powerful lobby in the U.S. alternates between egocentric bravado and paranoid victim hood.
Wow, are you also pissed at Apple for not maintaining the same level of support for Pascal that they did in 1985? The writing has been on the wall for over ten years now that Classic API's were obsolete and Cocoa was the future and Carbon was a transition. 10 years, as another poster said, is a geological epoch in computer terms. If that's not enough time for you, you're in the wroooooooong industry.
You want über backwards compatibility, you can take Microsoft's 5-7 year release schedule and 10 frikkin gigabyte installs.
You make development sound so hard, as if Apple randomly changes API's for shits and giggles so developers have to keep rewriting code. The Cocoa app you write in 2002 might not be able to use CoreImage, but it should still work just fine.
but at the same time, Apple is being a pretentious prick that doesn't want to meet in the middle with the needs of developers.
Because a decade of transition time isn't good enough for you? Somebody may be being a pretentious prick here, but it sure isn't Apple. Thanks, but I'll take Apple's OS release schedule - major update every 2-3 years, actually useful new features - over Microsoft's glacial pace and bloat, thankyouverymuch.
No dice. How does a promise made in 2006 and broken in 2007 explain the previous 9 years of footdragging, from 1997-2006? Sure, you can blame Apple for changing their announced development path, but that doesn't excuse Adobe dragging their feet on moving to Cocoa.
On the flipside, the Tiananmen Square incident involved not 10, not 20, not 100, but thousands of people. Thousands of people the government was able to silence without repercussion.
Changes nothing. Say the protesters were heavily armed and armored. Chinese military would have just called up more troops and more ordinance. You brought AK-47's? We brought napalm. You brought RPG's? We'll just shell the whole neighborhood. Fighting with LEO's only brings more LEO's with more guns and an ever increasing desire to kill you.
No, that's conservatives. The Republican party no longer represents conservative values.
Green Greenwald did a nice piece debunking that particular wishful talking point. "Conservatives" are distancing themselves from the Republican Party because the GOP is incredibly unpopular and it has failed.
That's a crock, as "conservatives" backed the GOP and Bush to the hilt in both his elections and when he had 60%+ approval ratings. The problem: just as the GOP has failed, conservatism has failed wholesale on every level on every issue.
Digby:
There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals. Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It's a lot like communism that way.
Maybe it was the way I was taught to drive... but...
Drive how? Snobby? If a yellow light is shortened by three seconds, your choices are going to consist of running a red light, or slamming on the brakes and facing a much higher risk of a rear end collision. Studies have shown that adding an additional second to yellow light times means few red lights will be run and there will be fewer accidents.
But why use common sense when you can generate revenue from sheep?
Arbitrary rules like the inexplicable drop in speed limit you described or the shorter yellow light associated with red light cameras that others have pointed out are the exception, not the rule.
But setting low limits and treating traffic enforcement as a source of revenue is the rule. There was a recent state supreme court ruling in my area that my city had traffic citations much greater than state law allows. The first thing the city complains about? Lost revenue. A few years ago Toronto police stopped writing petty traffic tickets as part of a labor dispute, as they weren't allowed to strike. There wasn't a rash of accidents as a consequence, but the city did lose $1.5 million per month as a result.
Exceeding the speed limit != dangerous driving. Most police work is either revenue generation (writing traffic tickets) or enforcing draconian drug laws in the War on Drugs, or as I like to call it, Prohibition 2.0. Legalizing drugs and setting reasonable speed limits would free cops to go after real crimes and do wonders for cop/citizen relations.
But why be reasonable when you can be a revenue generating sheep instead?
Unfortunately, no amount of money spent on high-tech weapons and defenses will keep our country safe from terrorist attack.
Preventing terrorism is a matter of intelligence gathering and foreign policy. We spend more on arms than the rest of the world combined, and it didn't do jack to stop 911.
Obviously some people are pissed off that we're there, but other people would be pissed off if we abandoned the Iraqi people and left them to be slaughtered in sectarian violence that would quickly spread to neighboring countries.
Except there already is a great deal of sectarian violence and we can do nothing to stop it. We either need to pull out or send in another 500,000 troops to quell the violence, and that's just for the city of Baghdad. By staying in as we are, we aren't doing a thing to stop the violence, only getting our own peopled killed in it.
I'm actually more radical, in some ways than you are. I think we should pull our military home. Period. We should be spending all the money used to keep our troops deployed over seas on incentives going towards high tech weapons and defenses.
I think our military spending should be based on our actual needs, not jingoism and pork. On two sides we are surrounded by friendly, peaceful nations, and on the other two sides we are surrounded by the world's two largest oceans. The Soviet Union has been gone for almost two decades now. Our actual military needs are pretty damned small at this point; spending should be in the hundreds of millions, not hundreds of billions. We could eliminate the army and the marine corpse, and get by just fine with the national guard and a greatly reduced navy and air force.
If you do something, you piss people off. If you do nothing, you piss people off. It is a lose lose proposition if you think we can avoid pissing people off.
False equivalency. What do you think we face more potential terrorist attacks from in the next few decades, failing to stop the genocide in Rwanda or for turning Iraq into a clusterfuck of clusterfucks?
Think of all the wars that would break out if the US wasn't there to keep things more or less peaceful. Israel, Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan, Korea, Africa.
I'll give you Korea. Iraq is of course not better off from our presence, and Afghanistan isn't that much better. Israel can complain about security and "terrorism" when they go back to their 1948 borders and grant Right of Return. There aren't enough extremist Muslims in Pakistan to overthrow the government. Africa has suffered from dictatorships, civil wars, genocides and a partridge in a pear tree, and the U.S. has done virtually nothing.
Because the American media sucks balls, that's why. Reporters have been replaced with "annalists". Rampant consolidation has reduced the number of viewpoints, and given the media an incredible pro-corporate bias; business interests outnumber labor or consumer representatives by something like 20 to 1.
After decades of conservatives complaining about a non-existent "liberal bias" in the media, the press goes incredibly easy on Republicans (like CNN splicing video to make McCain look better on his false claims linking Iran to Al Queda) while playing hardball with Democrats (like when Tim Russert lambasted Howard Dean for not knowing the exact number of Americans in the armed forces, when he gave Bush a complete pass on a similar question about nuclear missiles in 1999).
Or how uniformly pro-war the media has been since Bush took office: now as in 2002, the "serious foreign policy analysts" invited to discuss the Iraq mess are pro-war hawks who have been wrong on Iraq every step of the way. Those who opposed the invasion on strategic grounds are as excluded from the debate now as they were 6 years ago.
So in many cases, yes, you'll find that the foreign presses coverage of American events is far superior to that of the American media.
Why in the world would you see accurate quoting as a bad thing?
Why in the world do you think this is about something as mundane as accurate quoting? It's about regurgitating talking points that are either disingenuous attempts at distraction (saying Bill Clinton fired all US Attorneys at the start of his first term as an excuse for Bush's DOJ when they fired a group halfway through his second term) or flat-out lies (Plame wasn't covert, ties between Iraq and Al Queda).
Case in point: the contrast in Pudge's journals that I linked to. He calls Barbra Boxer a liar for saying the Iraq invasion was about "WMD, period" when at least 90% of the justification for the invasion was the thread of WMD's. Yet he parrots the GOP line that Social Security is in a "crisis" a mere six days later.
90% isn't good enough to use the word "period", yet a problem four decades away that will only see a 25% reduction in benefits is a "crisis"? As I said, Pudge switches his standards so fast it would shatter the spine of Gumby.
Slashdot Mirror
Without linking to the original context of the testimony
The summary HAS the context. You're grasping at straws that aren't there.
The second laughable problem is that the FBI shouldn't need to justify the emergency.
Of course they do. You ever hear of these things called warrants? Subpoenas? How about due process?
If a police officer turns on his lights and sirens simply to run a red light and causes an accident, you get a fat check! The FBI doesn't need to demonstrate that it has an actual emergency, but does need to be held accountable to what it's done after the fact.
No, you ignorant boob. The point of having a Bill of Rights is to prevent abuses from happening in the first place, not to punish government officials after the fact.
Use your brain please.
You first, Mr. Pot.
or against abolishing the death penalty are not liberal or conservative, they are centrist.
How do you figure that, exactly? Aside from the morality of execution, there's the high rates of errors in death penalty cases, lack of good public defenders for those who can't afford their own, and the dozens of innocent people who were put on death row only to have their sentences overturned.
...a straight face after the last decade? Look at how the media treated Bush vs how they treated Gore. How the media's discussion of Iraq is still dominated by pro-invasion hawks - those who opposed the war from the beginning are as excluded now as they were in 2002. Remember Gary Condit and Chandra Levy? At about the same time, an intern was found dead in Congressman Joe Scarborough's office from massive head trauma. Where was the scandal on that one?
It's not about individual reporters, as anyone can assemble a collection of individual stories that lean "left" or "right". And it's not about a "conservative" or "liberal" bias either...it's about media memes that are biased towards conservatives. And the media does that consistently and on a massive scale.
It is NOT a "straw man".
Yes, it is. Look it up.
You're just a clueless moron spouting terms you don't understand.
Projecting again, I see.
The real problem with the NRA is that when people actually do use firearms to protect themselves from run away law enforcement, they're on their own. Randy Weaver? No help from the NRA. Same for the Branch Dividians. Or Cory Maye. An organization devoted exclusively to gun rights and the 2nd most powerful domestic lobby doesn't do shit to defend gun users, and people bitch when the ACLU doesn't take firearms cases.
...and where exactly is the PROBLEM in the 2nd most powerful lobby being
fixated on one or more elements of our Bill of Rights?
Straw man.
Screw 2nd most powerful. Why aren't they THE MOST POWERFUL?
There's the egocentric bravado, now where's the paranoid victimhood?
Would you rather the Oil Lobby take the NRA's place?
Straw man.
But all people can do is make jokes about him being in the NRA.
I can see how you'd draw such a conclusion, given the large numbers of NRA jokes in the summary. Why, I had no idea Heston was an actor until I read your post.
I'm always amused that the 2nd most powerful lobby in the U.S. alternates between egocentric bravado and paranoid victim hood.
Wow, are you also pissed at Apple for not maintaining the same level of support for Pascal that they did in 1985? The writing has been on the wall for over ten years now that Classic API's were obsolete and Cocoa was the future and Carbon was a transition. 10 years, as another poster said, is a geological epoch in computer terms. If that's not enough time for you, you're in the wroooooooong industry.
You want über backwards compatibility, you can take Microsoft's 5-7 year release schedule and 10 frikkin gigabyte installs.
You make development sound so hard, as if Apple randomly changes API's for shits and giggles so developers have to keep rewriting code. The Cocoa app you write in 2002 might not be able to use CoreImage, but it should still work just fine.
but at the same time, Apple is being a pretentious prick that doesn't want to meet in the middle with the needs of developers.
Because a decade of transition time isn't good enough for you? Somebody may be being a pretentious prick here, but it sure isn't Apple. Thanks, but I'll take Apple's OS release schedule - major update every 2-3 years, actually useful new features - over Microsoft's glacial pace and bloat, thankyouverymuch.
No dice. How does a promise made in 2006 and broken in 2007 explain the previous 9 years of footdragging, from 1997-2006? Sure, you can blame Apple for changing their announced development path, but that doesn't excuse Adobe dragging their feet on moving to Cocoa.
How does a promise made in 2006 and broken in 2007 explain the previous 9 years of footdragging, from 1997 to 2006?
How does a promise made in 2006 and broken in 2007 explain the previous 9 years of footdragging, from 1997-2006?
On the flipside, the Tiananmen Square incident involved not 10, not 20, not 100, but thousands of people. Thousands of people the government was able to silence without repercussion.
Changes nothing. Say the protesters were heavily armed and armored. Chinese military would have just called up more troops and more ordinance. You brought AK-47's? We brought napalm. You brought RPG's? We'll just shell the whole neighborhood. Fighting with LEO's only brings more LEO's with more guns and an ever increasing desire to kill you.
Green Greenwald did a nice piece debunking that particular wishful talking point. "Conservatives" are distancing themselves from the Republican Party because the GOP is incredibly unpopular and it has failed.
That's a crock, as "conservatives" backed the GOP and Bush to the hilt in both his elections and when he had 60%+ approval ratings. The problem: just as the GOP has failed, conservatism has failed wholesale on every level on every issue.
Digby:
Because, you know, standing in the streets believing in the power of your dreams is the only way to bring about effective change to a inhumane regime.
Yeah, because trying to fight off the Feds has worked so well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton#Chicago_police_raid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Kahl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_Siege
Fighting with LEO's only brings more LEO's with more guns and an ever increasing desire to kill you.
Of course it's a tax. A sin tax, same as buying cigarettes or alcohol.
Most traffic tickets have little to do with making roads safer, and everything to do with generating revenue.
Maybe it was the way I was taught to drive... but...
Drive how? Snobby? If a yellow light is shortened by three seconds, your choices are going to consist of running a red light, or slamming on the brakes and facing a much higher risk of a rear end collision. Studies have shown that adding an additional second to yellow light times means few red lights will be run and there will be fewer accidents.
But why use common sense when you can generate revenue from sheep?
Arbitrary rules like the inexplicable drop in speed limit you described or the shorter yellow light associated with red light cameras that others have pointed out are the exception, not the rule.
But setting low limits and treating traffic enforcement as a source of revenue is the rule. There was a recent state supreme court ruling in my area that my city had traffic citations much greater than state law allows. The first thing the city complains about? Lost revenue. A few years ago Toronto police stopped writing petty traffic tickets as part of a labor dispute, as they weren't allowed to strike. There wasn't a rash of accidents as a consequence, but the city did lose $1.5 million per month as a result.
When a Hummer rear ends you at 30 mph over the speed limit, I hope a video makes it onto Youtube.
Exceeding the speed limit != dangerous driving. Most police work is either revenue generation (writing traffic tickets) or enforcing draconian drug laws in the War on Drugs, or as I like to call it, Prohibition 2.0. Legalizing drugs and setting reasonable speed limits would free cops to go after real crimes and do wonders for cop/citizen relations.
But why be reasonable when you can be a revenue generating sheep instead?
Unfortunately, no amount of money spent on high-tech weapons and defenses will keep our country safe from terrorist attack.
Preventing terrorism is a matter of intelligence gathering and foreign policy. We spend more on arms than the rest of the world combined, and it didn't do jack to stop 911.
Obviously some people are pissed off that we're there, but other people would be pissed off if we abandoned the Iraqi people and left them to be slaughtered in sectarian violence that would quickly spread to neighboring countries.
Except there already is a great deal of sectarian violence and we can do nothing to stop it. We either need to pull out or send in another 500,000 troops to quell the violence, and that's just for the city of Baghdad. By staying in as we are, we aren't doing a thing to stop the violence, only getting our own peopled killed in it.
I'm actually more radical, in some ways than you are. I think we should pull our military home. Period. We should be spending all the money used to keep our troops deployed over seas on incentives going towards high tech weapons and defenses.
I think our military spending should be based on our actual needs, not jingoism and pork. On two sides we are surrounded by friendly, peaceful nations, and on the other two sides we are surrounded by the world's two largest oceans. The Soviet Union has been gone for almost two decades now. Our actual military needs are pretty damned small at this point; spending should be in the hundreds of millions, not hundreds of billions. We could eliminate the army and the marine corpse, and get by just fine with the national guard and a greatly reduced navy and air force.
If you do something, you piss people off. If you do nothing, you piss people off. It is a lose lose proposition if you think we can avoid pissing people off.
False equivalency. What do you think we face more potential terrorist attacks from in the next few decades, failing to stop the genocide in Rwanda or for turning Iraq into a clusterfuck of clusterfucks?
Think of all the wars that would break out if the US wasn't there to keep things more or less peaceful. Israel, Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan, Korea, Africa.
I'll give you Korea. Iraq is of course not better off from our presence, and Afghanistan isn't that much better. Israel can complain about security and "terrorism" when they go back to their 1948 borders and grant Right of Return. There aren't enough extremist Muslims in Pakistan to overthrow the government. Africa has suffered from dictatorships, civil wars, genocides and a partridge in a pear tree, and the U.S. has done virtually nothing.
Because the American media sucks balls, that's why. Reporters have been replaced with "annalists". Rampant consolidation has reduced the number of viewpoints, and given the media an incredible pro-corporate bias; business interests outnumber labor or consumer representatives by something like 20 to 1.
After decades of conservatives complaining about a non-existent "liberal bias" in the media, the press goes incredibly easy on Republicans (like CNN splicing video to make McCain look better on his false claims linking Iran to Al Queda) while playing hardball with Democrats (like when Tim Russert lambasted Howard Dean for not knowing the exact number of Americans in the armed forces, when he gave Bush a complete pass on a similar question about nuclear missiles in 1999).
Or how uniformly pro-war the media has been since Bush took office: now as in 2002, the "serious foreign policy analysts" invited to discuss the Iraq mess are pro-war hawks who have been wrong on Iraq every step of the way. Those who opposed the invasion on strategic grounds are as excluded from the debate now as they were 6 years ago.
So in many cases, yes, you'll find that the foreign presses coverage of American events is far superior to that of the American media.
Why in the world would you see accurate quoting as a bad thing?
Why in the world do you think this is about something as mundane as accurate quoting? It's about regurgitating talking points that are either disingenuous attempts at distraction (saying Bill Clinton fired all US Attorneys at the start of his first term as an excuse for Bush's DOJ when they fired a group halfway through his second term) or flat-out lies (Plame wasn't covert, ties between Iraq and Al Queda).
Case in point: the contrast in Pudge's journals that I linked to. He calls Barbra Boxer a liar for saying the Iraq invasion was about "WMD, period" when at least 90% of the justification for the invasion was the thread of WMD's. Yet he parrots the GOP line that Social Security is in a "crisis" a mere six days later.
90% isn't good enough to use the word "period", yet a problem four decades away that will only see a 25% reduction in benefits is a "crisis"? As I said, Pudge switches his standards so fast it would shatter the spine of Gumby.
I think the Pentagon really abandoned the plan because they realized wingnut bloggers will work for free.
C'mon folks, if you're getting your "hard facts" from blogs, you're already toast.
Not when your blog likes to back up statements with facts.