Ronald Reagan almost won the Republican primary against incumbent Ford. With the Clinton's power over the Democratic party, I think it would be very easy for Hillary to knock off Kerry in the 2008 primary. She could run either to the left or right of Kerry depending on how he screws everything up.
Civil liberties? The best way to protect civil liberties is to have law enforcement use the best technology and tools, including the Patriot act, to enforce the law with the fewest number of police. Bush has been criticized for not having enough police, Kerry is both for the Patriot act and for hiring more police. Computers, don't infringe civil liberties, people do. So why are libertarians not in favor of using the Patriot act and other technology to cut both the budget and the size of the police force?
Smaller government? Bush has limited the growth of regulation and is for much less spending than Kerry. His tax cut is actually too small according to the Economics Nobel Prize winner.
War? The world is now more peaceful than ever. Coverage of war and bloodshed on the news may be at an recent high but the actual number of conflicts and amount of bloodshed has declined to an all time low under Bush. Bloodshed in Iraq is less than under Saddam. The long war in Afghanistan is over, and the Administration has negotiated a cease-fire in southern Sudan, ending a civil war that killed over two million people, and the Administration has kept Darfur from turning into a Rwanda. Bloodshed has also decreased in Palestine, Kashmir, and Africa.
If Kerry has enough time to go goose hunting and then use the Red Sox game as an excuse for being too lazy to carry the goose he supposedly shot, then he should at least be able to get the score correct.
We know that Kerry is getting all his sports wrong because we are informed about sports. How much do you think Kerry gets wrong about subjects you are not well informed about?
And you are assuming that kerry get non-faulty intelligence on everything else? John Kerry skips almost all of his intelligence committee meetings, and gets his faulty intelligence from the NY Times (explosives that were missing before the invasion) and forged documents (Bush's guard records). Kerry was also very much in favor of invading Iraq until we actually did so.
This is a classic case of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. You read a news story about your field of expertise and you notice that the story is completely innacurate, and then you read news stories in fields you don't know much about and assume that they are accurate.
The public knows when Kerry is bullshitting about the Red-Sox and other sports ("Lambert Field") because we know more about sports than Kerry. Slashdot knows when Kerry is bullshitting about technology (his support for the clipper chip, etc...) because we know more about technology than Kerry. The MSM is good at detecting when Kerry contradicts his own past statements (flip-flopping) because the MSM is proficient with Lexis-Nexis and other search tools. We don't detect when Kerry is bullshitting when he is talking about subjects that we don't know much about, like economics, military strategy, health-care, science, especially stem-cells (people will get up and walk), and everything else. You can check out any Kerry blog to see informed writers exposing all of his bullshit.
Support more choices in government -- vote in the primary. The general election is the runoff. The primary is the true multi-party election, with multi-person debates and a low threshold for participation. If you just started paying attention now and want to vote for someone other than the two finalists, you're several months too late.
Instead of having multiple parties choosing sides to form a majority after a general election, we have the multiple factions choosing one of two sides before a primary election. Our two parties are not political parties in a true sense, they are political coalitions. Our third-parties are just factions who refused to choose sides, and thus did not participate in the primary debates and elections.
Send the multi-party voting method debate to new democracies that has not yet converged to the two-party equilibrium, like Afghanistan and Iraq.
By full disclosure I meant reporting payola as income and disclosing it on the web or in a database like political contributions. I was not referring to the "this song presented by..." message that transforms a song into a commercial. Just let the money flow transparently for all to see.
Just legalize payola, with full disclosure. That way all broadcasters, web-casters, satellite, TV, etc. big and small can compete fairly for promotional money from the industry. With a ban, only the major radio players can use the loophole to collect there money while the smaller players are locked out. Closing the loopholes would only drive the big players to find new loopholes. Now would be a good time to deregulate music promotion.
Legalizing payola would create a shock to the industry's business models. Any shock can only have positive results given the state of current business models.
The primary requirement to have a police state is to have too many Police. What scares me are the politicians who say that we are 'losing our civil liberties' in Washington and then say that we need more 'boots on the street' in their home districts. The current administration has not been asking for any large increase in law enforcement personnel.
The government must establish justice and provide for the common defense. It can do this by having more people in law enforcement and/or by having better information for law enforcement. In all the spy TV series (Alias, The Agency, etc.), the same small cast of agents with perfect access to information can stop terrorists and save the world every week. This should be our target. Having better access to information is good for civil liberties if we use it to reduce the total number of law enforcement personnel. Less cops with more information is better for our civil liberties than having more cops with less information. It is much easier to control the number of cops, they cannot hire more without taking more money away from you to pay them. It is much harder to prevent a large police force from gaining access to more information. It should be easy enough to make sure that we don't have too many cops with access to good information that the information gets abused significantly. And better information means more jobs for geeks, more cops means more jobs for jocks. Slashdot geeks should like this.
The use of better access to information is that terrorists act in networks, not alone. Once we have a suspect, we should open the book on the suspect to either find the links to the rest of the network or quietly determine their innocence if there are no links. It looks like there is proper concern and safeguards for accountably to make sure that the information does not get abused.
The problem with Teresa's taxes, what little we know about them, is that the contradict Democrat's rhetoric. First she reports only $6.8M of income on a growing fortune of $1B. This means that most of her fortune is sheltered, which Democrats disfavor. She pays less taxes because much of here reported income is from tax-exempt interest. This means she holds lots of government bonds, which means that the government has lots of her money from borrowing and not taxes. Democrats say that the rich should pay higher taxes, and ignore bonds as revenue. She pays lower taxes on capital gains and dividends. Investment creates jobs and taxing investment is bad for the economy no matter who invests. Also her charitable contributions go mostly to activists (Tides, etc.) and not to the needy.
I think that Teresa should be made an example that deficits don't matter. We can cut everybody's involuntary tax burden and those who can afford to pay more can voluntarily lend their money to the government like Teresa. Bonds are voluntary and are the most progressive way for the government to raise money. Taxes are involuntary and regressive. Anyone who thinks the government needs more money should buy bonds instead of trying to get taxes increased.
Government spending, not deficits, matters. Taxes and bonds both take the same amount of money away from the public, and debt roll-over just transfers money and does not increase the money taken away from the public. This is why increasing the deficit by increased spending is much worse than increasing the deficit by cutting taxes.
Experience. There are many people with no government experience who have run for Governor, the Senate, the House, and other elected office and won, and many who have done a good job. But for THE President of the United States of America, it is best to have a leader with elected experience and a record to judge how they might act as President. Otherwise, we might as well have a reality show to choose the president.
One of the above was able to refer to their record many times to back up his answers. Another has served in the Senate but only referred to it once, "have worked in the Senate to ensure that...", on the sexed question. The other responder and all of the candidates excluded have no significant Government experience.
A Two party system is actually more democratic than a multi-party system. With many parties and proportional representation, you get more choices, but then the parties must assemble undemocratically after the election into a majority coalition to form a government. With winner-take-all, all of the factions and parties that would otherwise exist assemble into two coalitions before the election, and voters choose the majority coalition directly. Voting for the ruling coalition directly is more democratic than voting for parties, even though there are less choices to vote for.
A Two party system also forces both parties and candidates to pander to and move to the middle in order to win an absolute majority. When more parties split the vote, it is possible to form a majority coalition that doesn't include the center. Having two indistinguishable candidates running to the center is equilibrium. Our two-party politics represents convergence, not disfunction.
If you are dissatisfied with both candidates, than you are not in the middle. If you want to get your views represented, then you need to move the middle by lobbying your views. There is no shortage of independent voices, and no shortage of quality libertarian and libertarian leaning voices, they just don't run for president. Many of the 'right-wing radio hosts' have significant libertarian leanings. Elder, Drudge, even Rush, and many more local hosts. People need to get past the Rock-the-Vote mentality and focus an more than just the presidential election and read/listen/watch all the other independent voices.
We are also voting for President of the United States, Leader of the Free World, not American Candidate (the showtime reality series). It would help to actually have some significant elected experience to run on.
John Kerry has already messed with fate when he was in Green Bay and referred to Lambeau Field as 'Lambert Field'. His disgraceful sacrilege has already cost the Packers two home losses. Kerry's heresy will cost him dearly when the Packers win in Washington and then Bush wins Wisconsin and wins the election in a landslide.
This is bad for the welfare of humanity. The Copenhagen Consensus has ranked climate measures, especially Kyoto, as "bad", dead last behind AIDS, Malaria, malnutrition, free trade, clean water, economic freedom, and migration measures in ratio of social benefit to cost. The more climate research that is done the more evidence we find against human caused global warming. But once an environmental movement is started, no amount or reason can stop it.
Kyoto will help the environment by at most 0.02 Celsius by 2050. It will also be bad for the environment as more people worry more about CO2 and less about real air pollution that causes acid rain and other environmental damage, and less about more significant greenhouse gases like dihydrogen-monoxide and methane. Many Americans have already been completely ignoring the reductions in pollutants like NO2, O3, SO2, CO, and PM in the U.S. before and during the Bush administration when attacking him for not supporting CO2 reductions. Also Kyoto will increase energy prices in clean energy-efficient countries shifting more manufacturing to dirty inefficient energy-consuming developing countries like China, causing more global pollution.
And the last foreign language speaking leader to give a speech before a joint congress and senate was...? Tony Blair is the only other foreign leader to give a speech before a joint congress in my memory. Other visiting foreign leaders appear with the President in joint press conferences, and give other interviews to the media.
Speeches before joint sessions of congress are very rare and should be held to a very high standard. It is absolutely appropriate that Allawi had help with phrases and delivery of his speech to live up to that standard.
Allawi only received help writing and delivering his speech, and there is no evidence that he did not agree with anything in the speech. The content of the speech matches what he has said in many other interviews and press conferences. Anyone who would ignore everything Allawi has said and done in the past and in the future because he was helped with his speech, who did not attend the speech, insults Allawi, and disrespects the contributions of our allies, gives me no confidence that they are interested in bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people.
Remember: Allawi and his speech-writers write in Arabic for an Iraqi audience. Of course he is going to get help on a speech delivered in English for an American audience. If you want more authentic Allawi, read his speech to the U.N. General Assembly he gave the next day. The Arabic translated into English is far more bland and unappealing but the content is the same. You can also read the press conference he gave afterward, or an interview to the Washington Post, or anything else you can google if you want to read what Allawi says without assistance from American speech writers.
Bit Torrent is substantially useful because it is not p2p. It uses central content, like the web, so that it can be an authoritative distribution medium. And it uses central management of connections so that it can provide better service than central download. BT user nodes are mirrors not peers. It gets called p2p because people want there to be substantial non-infringing uses of p2p.
If your content is worth anything you can use free services, purchase web service, or find someone to mirror your content. There is a huge market for hosting multimedia content on the web. The web allows you to better control, promote, and monitor your content.
I said there has not been any substantial useful use. I imply that p2p is either infringing or useless, not illegal.
1, 2: Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.
3: CAFE standards drive people into either small cars or exempt trucks instead of safer larger cars.
4: Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder. No beholder no beauty. And drilling would not affect the wildlife.
5: Burn, California Burn. Forest management reduces forest fire damage.
6: China allows free trade with their people, Cuba does not.
7: The IMF has not been very effective in helping 3rd world people, just 3rd world governments.
8: Campaign finance reform and the 1st amendment are in conflict.
9: The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
10: Price controls are a bad idea, importing price controls from Canada is an even worse idea.
VCR, DVR, MP3 Players all had substantial new useful non-infringing uses. They had uses that could not be done with other technology at the time. I have yet to see any useful uses for p2p file sharing. The web, email, IM, and online music stores all provide a better way to distribute content than p2p. The best reason that has been given to distribute legitimate content on p2p networks is specifically to demonstrate non-infringing use for the purpose of Betamax. P2P has yet to have any legitimate use that is definitively substantial.
In choosing which polling stations would be audited, the CNE (Venezuelan electoral council) refused to use the random number generator recommended by the Carter Center. Instead, the CNE insisted on its own program, run on its own computer.
This allowed Chavez to rig many electronic voting machines knowing that they would not be audited.
For discreet issues, the majority position should have already been legislated. Discreet issues should only be legislated when the majority shifts to the other side and when new legislation can just barely pass. More complex issues will usually have amendments added to sweeten or sour the legislation so that is will just barely pass. A mature democracy should never have any new legislation pass with a large majority.
Politics is many dimensional but should eventually settle to two parties that split between the best fit line through multi-dimensional opinion space. Third party tools like approval voting are very relevant to new democracies like Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries that will be liberated in the future. It takes a long time to converge to a two party democratic equilibrium.
It is good to have two parties with two center seeking candidates that appear indistinguishable from each other, and split the vote evenly between them. It is good if everything congress can agree on has already been passed into law, and everything else before congress is gridlocked. Agreement on a quantity (taxes, spending, etc.) is when exactly half think the quantity is to high, and the other half thinks it is too low. Some people see our two party winner take all system as dysfunctional, when it is really mature democracy near equilibrium. 3rd parties, bipartisan agreement, and a widely varied candidate positions is really disequilibrium.
It looked like we were close to equilibrium in 2000. The problem was that both candidates and the center were all disastrously wrong on counter-terrorism policy before 9/11. And when congress was unanimous after 9/11, it was only because we were disastrously wrong before, not that there was any new sense of cooperation after.
Of course, everyone would like it if the "center" was closer to their own views. But that is what contributions, lobbying, and political action is for. Everyone can be a special interest, all you have to do is open your checkbook or write your representatives.
3rd parties would be more effective as lobbies or think tanks. CATO is more effective at moving the center than the libertarian party, and environmental lobbies are more effective than the green party.
Families and Businesses collect money from voluntary exchange of money for labor, goods, and services (revenue), or for money in the future (borrowing). Only government has the ability to collect money involuntarily from taxation. The government actually collects very little voluntary revenue, and should stay out and leave business to the private sector. Why should money from involuntary taxation count toward balancing the budget?
Raising money from selling bonds is voluntary, and is perfectly progressive. Only people who can afford to buy bonds do so, and those who cannot afford to do not. The rich buy most of the bonds, and our children will be more rich than we are, just as we are more rich than our parents were. Taxes are involuntary and regressive. Many people cannot afford their tax bills, and many small businesses cannot afford to both grow and pay taxes. Bonds can be sold and traded in free markets, while taxes require a huge bureaucracy, the IRS, and lots of private tax accountants and lawyers to collect. Interest on government debt is a smaller drag on the economy than reduced growth from high taxes.
There is a continuous demand for treasury bonds, and this demand will increase as the economy grows. The market cap of treasuries (federal debt) should always be increasing. As long as government debt grows more slowly than the economy (GDP) it is not a problem. We should be able to pay for a "Libertarian dream budget" solely by selling bonds. What could be more liberty-arian than funding the government by voluntarily borrowing the entire budget instead of balancing it by taxes?
Slashdot Mirror
Ronald Reagan almost won the Republican primary against incumbent Ford. With the Clinton's power over the Democratic party, I think it would be very easy for Hillary to knock off Kerry in the 2008 primary. She could run either to the left or right of Kerry depending on how he screws everything up.
Civil liberties? The best way to protect civil liberties is to have law enforcement use the best technology and tools, including the Patriot act, to enforce the law with the fewest number of police. Bush has been criticized for not having enough police, Kerry is both for the Patriot act and for hiring more police. Computers, don't infringe civil liberties, people do. So why are libertarians not in favor of using the Patriot act and other technology to cut both the budget and the size of the police force?
Smaller government? Bush has limited the growth of regulation and is for much less spending than Kerry. His tax cut is actually too small according to the Economics Nobel Prize winner.
War? The world is now more peaceful than ever. Coverage of war and bloodshed on the news may be at an recent high but the actual number of conflicts and amount of bloodshed has declined to an all time low under Bush. Bloodshed in Iraq is less than under Saddam. The long war in Afghanistan is over, and the Administration has negotiated a cease-fire in southern Sudan, ending a civil war that killed over two million people, and the Administration has kept Darfur from turning into a Rwanda. Bloodshed has also decreased in Palestine, Kashmir, and Africa.
If Kerry has enough time to go goose hunting and then use the Red Sox game as an excuse for being too lazy to carry the goose he supposedly shot, then he should at least be able to get the score correct.
We know that Kerry is getting all his sports wrong because we are informed about sports. How much do you think Kerry gets wrong about subjects you are not well informed about?
And you are assuming that kerry get non-faulty intelligence on everything else? John Kerry skips almost all of his intelligence committee meetings, and gets his faulty intelligence from the NY Times (explosives that were missing before the invasion) and forged documents (Bush's guard records). Kerry was also very much in favor of invading Iraq until we actually did so.
This is a classic case of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. You read a news story about your field of expertise and you notice that the story is completely innacurate, and then you read news stories in fields you don't know much about and assume that they are accurate.
The public knows when Kerry is bullshitting about the Red-Sox and other sports ("Lambert Field") because we know more about sports than Kerry. Slashdot knows when Kerry is bullshitting about technology (his support for the clipper chip, etc...) because we know more about technology than Kerry. The MSM is good at detecting when Kerry contradicts his own past statements (flip-flopping) because the MSM is proficient with Lexis-Nexis and other search tools. We don't detect when Kerry is bullshitting when he is talking about subjects that we don't know much about, like economics, military strategy, health-care, science, especially stem-cells (people will get up and walk), and everything else. You can check out any Kerry blog to see informed writers exposing all of his bullshit.
Support more choices in government -- vote in the primary. The general election is the runoff. The primary is the true multi-party election, with multi-person debates and a low threshold for participation. If you just started paying attention now and want to vote for someone other than the two finalists, you're several months too late.
Instead of having multiple parties choosing sides to form a majority after a general election, we have the multiple factions choosing one of two sides before a primary election. Our two parties are not political parties in a true sense, they are political coalitions. Our third-parties are just factions who refused to choose sides, and thus did not participate in the primary debates and elections.
Send the multi-party voting method debate to new democracies that has not yet converged to the two-party equilibrium, like Afghanistan and Iraq.
By full disclosure I meant reporting payola as income and disclosing it on the web or in a database like political contributions. I was not referring to the "this song presented by..." message that transforms a song into a commercial. Just let the money flow transparently for all to see.
Just legalize payola, with full disclosure. That way all broadcasters, web-casters, satellite, TV, etc. big and small can compete fairly for promotional money from the industry. With a ban, only the major radio players can use the loophole to collect there money while the smaller players are locked out. Closing the loopholes would only drive the big players to find new loopholes. Now would be a good time to deregulate music promotion.
Legalizing payola would create a shock to the industry's business models. Any shock can only have positive results given the state of current business models.
Why should anyone regulate VoIP?
Because you need some regulation in order to keep others' hands off of VoIP so that it does not get strangled.
Primarily that means the California PUC, which wants to license and charge VoIP providers as telephone operators.
It is also important that Democrat FCC Commissioner Michael Copps not become Chairman, because he is the biggest proponent for wire-tapping VoIP, censoring the media, and over-regulating broadband.
The primary requirement to have a police state is to have too many Police. What scares me are the politicians who say that we are 'losing our civil liberties' in Washington and then say that we need more 'boots on the street' in their home districts. The current administration has not been asking for any large increase in law enforcement personnel.
The government must establish justice and provide for the common defense. It can do this by having more people in law enforcement and/or by having better information for law enforcement. In all the spy TV series (Alias, The Agency, etc.), the same small cast of agents with perfect access to information can stop terrorists and save the world every week. This should be our target. Having better access to information is good for civil liberties if we use it to reduce the total number of law enforcement personnel. Less cops with more information is better for our civil liberties than having more cops with less information. It is much easier to control the number of cops, they cannot hire more without taking more money away from you to pay them. It is much harder to prevent a large police force from gaining access to more information. It should be easy enough to make sure that we don't have too many cops with access to good information that the information gets abused significantly. And better information means more jobs for geeks, more cops means more jobs for jocks. Slashdot geeks should like this.
The use of better access to information is that terrorists act in networks, not alone. Once we have a suspect, we should open the book on the suspect to either find the links to the rest of the network or quietly determine their innocence if there are no links. It looks like there is proper concern and safeguards for accountably to make sure that the information does not get abused.
The problem with Teresa's taxes, what little we know about them, is that the contradict Democrat's rhetoric. First she reports only $6.8M of income on a growing fortune of $1B. This means that most of her fortune is sheltered, which Democrats disfavor. She pays less taxes because much of here reported income is from tax-exempt interest. This means she holds lots of government bonds, which means that the government has lots of her money from borrowing and not taxes. Democrats say that the rich should pay higher taxes, and ignore bonds as revenue. She pays lower taxes on capital gains and dividends. Investment creates jobs and taxing investment is bad for the economy no matter who invests. Also her charitable contributions go mostly to activists (Tides, etc.) and not to the needy.
I think that Teresa should be made an example that deficits don't matter. We can cut everybody's involuntary tax burden and those who can afford to pay more can voluntarily lend their money to the government like Teresa. Bonds are voluntary and are the most progressive way for the government to raise money. Taxes are involuntary and regressive. Anyone who thinks the government needs more money should buy bonds instead of trying to get taxes increased.
Government spending, not deficits, matters. Taxes and bonds both take the same amount of money away from the public, and debt roll-over just transfers money and does not increase the money taken away from the public. This is why increasing the deficit by increased spending is much worse than increasing the deficit by cutting taxes.
Experience. There are many people with no government experience who have run for Governor, the Senate, the House, and other elected office and won, and many who have done a good job. But for THE President of the United States of America, it is best to have a leader with elected experience and a record to judge how they might act as President. Otherwise, we might as well have a reality show to choose the president.
One of the above was able to refer to their record many times to back up his answers. Another has served in the Senate but only referred to it once, "have worked in the Senate to ensure that...", on the sexed question. The other responder and all of the candidates excluded have no significant Government experience.
A Two party system is actually more democratic than a multi-party system. With many parties and proportional representation, you get more choices, but then the parties must assemble undemocratically after the election into a majority coalition to form a government. With winner-take-all, all of the factions and parties that would otherwise exist assemble into two coalitions before the election, and voters choose the majority coalition directly. Voting for the ruling coalition directly is more democratic than voting for parties, even though there are less choices to vote for.
A Two party system also forces both parties and candidates to pander to and move to the middle in order to win an absolute majority. When more parties split the vote, it is possible to form a majority coalition that doesn't include the center. Having two indistinguishable candidates running to the center is equilibrium. Our two-party politics represents convergence, not disfunction.
If you are dissatisfied with both candidates, than you are not in the middle. If you want to get your views represented, then you need to move the middle by lobbying your views. There is no shortage of independent voices, and no shortage of quality libertarian and libertarian leaning voices, they just don't run for president. Many of the 'right-wing radio hosts' have significant libertarian leanings. Elder, Drudge, even Rush, and many more local hosts. People need to get past the Rock-the-Vote mentality and focus an more than just the presidential election and read/listen/watch all the other independent voices.
We are also voting for President of the United States, Leader of the Free World, not American Candidate (the showtime reality series). It would help to actually have some significant elected experience to run on.
John Kerry has already messed with fate when he was in Green Bay and referred to Lambeau Field as 'Lambert Field'. His disgraceful sacrilege has already cost the Packers two home losses. Kerry's heresy will cost him dearly when the Packers win in Washington and then Bush wins Wisconsin and wins the election in a landslide.
Go Bush, Go Packers, Go Football Fans For Truth.
This is bad for the welfare of humanity. The Copenhagen Consensus has ranked climate measures, especially Kyoto, as "bad", dead last behind AIDS, Malaria, malnutrition, free trade, clean water, economic freedom, and migration measures in ratio of social benefit to cost. The more climate research that is done the more evidence we find against human caused global warming. But once an environmental movement is started, no amount or reason can stop it.
Kyoto will help the environment by at most 0.02 Celsius by 2050. It will also be bad for the environment as more people worry more about CO2 and less about real air pollution that causes acid rain and other environmental damage, and less about more significant greenhouse gases like dihydrogen-monoxide and methane. Many Americans have already been completely ignoring the reductions in pollutants like NO2, O3, SO2, CO, and PM in the U.S. before and during the Bush administration when attacking him for not supporting CO2 reductions. Also Kyoto will increase energy prices in clean energy-efficient countries shifting more manufacturing to dirty inefficient energy-consuming developing countries like China, causing more global pollution.
And the last foreign language speaking leader to give a speech before a joint congress and senate was...? Tony Blair is the only other foreign leader to give a speech before a joint congress in my memory. Other visiting foreign leaders appear with the President in joint press conferences, and give other interviews to the media.
Speeches before joint sessions of congress are very rare and should be held to a very high standard. It is absolutely appropriate that Allawi had help with phrases and delivery of his speech to live up to that standard.
Allawi only received help writing and delivering his speech, and there is no evidence that he did not agree with anything in the speech. The content of the speech matches what he has said in many other interviews and press conferences. Anyone who would ignore everything Allawi has said and done in the past and in the future because he was helped with his speech, who did not attend the speech, insults Allawi, and disrespects the contributions of our allies, gives me no confidence that they are interested in bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people.
Remember: Allawi and his speech-writers write in Arabic for an Iraqi audience. Of course he is going to get help on a speech delivered in English for an American audience. If you want more authentic Allawi, read his speech to the U.N. General Assembly he gave the next day. The Arabic translated into English is far more bland and unappealing but the content is the same. You can also read the press conference he gave afterward, or an interview to the Washington Post, or anything else you can google if you want to read what Allawi says without assistance from American speech writers.
Bit Torrent is substantially useful because it is not p2p. It uses central content, like the web, so that it can be an authoritative distribution medium. And it uses central management of connections so that it can provide better service than central download. BT user nodes are mirrors not peers. It gets called p2p because people want there to be substantial non-infringing uses of p2p.
If your content is worth anything you can use free services, purchase web service, or find someone to mirror your content. There is a huge market for hosting multimedia content on the web. The web allows you to better control, promote, and monitor your content.
I said there has not been any substantial useful use. I imply that p2p is either infringing or useless, not illegal.
1, 2: Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.
3: CAFE standards drive people into either small cars or exempt trucks instead of safer larger cars.
4: Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder. No beholder no beauty. And drilling would not affect the wildlife.
5: Burn, California Burn. Forest management reduces forest fire damage.
6: China allows free trade with their people, Cuba does not.
7: The IMF has not been very effective in helping 3rd world people, just 3rd world governments.
8: Campaign finance reform and the 1st amendment are in conflict.
9: The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
10: Price controls are a bad idea, importing price controls from Canada is an even worse idea.
VCR, DVR, MP3 Players all had substantial new useful non-infringing uses. They had uses that could not be done with other technology at the time. I have yet to see any useful uses for p2p file sharing. The web, email, IM, and online music stores all provide a better way to distribute content than p2p. The best reason that has been given to distribute legitimate content on p2p networks is specifically to demonstrate non-infringing use for the purpose of Betamax. P2P has yet to have any legitimate use that is definitively substantial.
For discreet issues, the majority position should have already been legislated. Discreet issues should only be legislated when the majority shifts to the other side and when new legislation can just barely pass. More complex issues will usually have amendments added to sweeten or sour the legislation so that is will just barely pass. A mature democracy should never have any new legislation pass with a large majority.
Politics is many dimensional but should eventually settle to two parties that split between the best fit line through multi-dimensional opinion space. Third party tools like approval voting are very relevant to new democracies like Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries that will be liberated in the future. It takes a long time to converge to a two party democratic equilibrium.
It is good to have two parties with two center seeking candidates that appear indistinguishable from each other, and split the vote evenly between them. It is good if everything congress can agree on has already been passed into law, and everything else before congress is gridlocked. Agreement on a quantity (taxes, spending, etc.) is when exactly half think the quantity is to high, and the other half thinks it is too low. Some people see our two party winner take all system as dysfunctional, when it is really mature democracy near equilibrium. 3rd parties, bipartisan agreement, and a widely varied candidate positions is really disequilibrium.
It looked like we were close to equilibrium in 2000. The problem was that both candidates and the center were all disastrously wrong on counter-terrorism policy before 9/11. And when congress was unanimous after 9/11, it was only because we were disastrously wrong before, not that there was any new sense of cooperation after.
Of course, everyone would like it if the "center" was closer to their own views. But that is what contributions, lobbying, and political action is for. Everyone can be a special interest, all you have to do is open your checkbook or write your representatives.
3rd parties would be more effective as lobbies or think tanks. CATO is more effective at moving the center than the libertarian party, and environmental lobbies are more effective than the green party.
Why does the Libertarians Party prefer taxes to borrowing?
Families and Businesses collect money from voluntary exchange of money for labor, goods, and services (revenue), or for money in the future (borrowing). Only government has the ability to collect money involuntarily from taxation. The government actually collects very little voluntary revenue, and should stay out and leave business to the private sector. Why should money from involuntary taxation count toward balancing the budget?
Raising money from selling bonds is voluntary, and is perfectly progressive. Only people who can afford to buy bonds do so, and those who cannot afford to do not. The rich buy most of the bonds, and our children will be more rich than we are, just as we are more rich than our parents were. Taxes are involuntary and regressive. Many people cannot afford their tax bills, and many small businesses cannot afford to both grow and pay taxes. Bonds can be sold and traded in free markets, while taxes require a huge bureaucracy, the IRS, and lots of private tax accountants and lawyers to collect. Interest on government debt is a smaller drag on the economy than reduced growth from high taxes.
There is a continuous demand for treasury bonds, and this demand will increase as the economy grows. The market cap of treasuries (federal debt) should always be increasing. As long as government debt grows more slowly than the economy (GDP) it is not a problem. We should be able to pay for a "Libertarian dream budget" solely by selling bonds. What could be more liberty-arian than funding the government by voluntarily borrowing the entire budget instead of balancing it by taxes?