I thought the Iraq war was your proudest moment? When George Bush showed true leadership and courage by kicking the weapons inspectors out and invading, to prove to the world there were WMDs hidden under Saddam's bed.
Why are you so unwilling to take full credit for it now? This wasn't a problem back in the 2002 election cycle, or even in 2004, why now?
I didn't annoit Michelle Malkin, and I'm a Republican. The logic is stupid. Does that mean that Dennis Kucinich speaks for all Democrats?
No, because Democrats recognize Kucinich as a kook and don't invite him to hang with the kool kids.
But Malkin, is quite popular. She makes it on the tv shows, and runs one of the highest trafficed Republican websites.
I don't know what to say. If you don't like Malkin, then maybe you should do something about her to get her to shut the fuck up? Good luck with that though, having been to the Republican caucuses back in 1988 to speak out against Pat Robertson, I'm afraid you're more likely to get your ass kicked for speaking up against one of the annointed ones.
Didn't the Democrats put 200,000 Japanese citizens in concentration camps during World War II?
Didn't Michelle Malkin write a book about how the concentration camps were a good thing? By golly, yes she did. Title is "In Defense of Internment".
So one of the annointed few who is allowed to speak on behalf of the Republican party is running around the airwaves defending the japanese internment... Whereas the Democrats apologize for it whenever it's brought up.
It's examples like this which lead people to the conclusion that the Democratic party is the one with moral superiority.
It's one thing for abuse to occur, but it's quite another to defend abuse.
If you believe shit pollutes the water, you should stop shitting immediately, because every time you shit you are polluting the water. If people had believed that the Clean Water Act could have extended to shit, it never would have passed.
I think it's interesting in a time where modern power supplies are pretty solid, and the electrical current coming across the wire is pretty consistent, that only now do these companies start selling line conditioners.
I have some higher end cables in my system, but it's only because they look nice and are easier to hook up. There is a difference between a $1 cable, and a $20 cable, but not much between $20 and $400. The fact that the people who promote the $400 cable are adamantly against double-blind testing is evidence of that.
As is far too often the case, the right does not believe that their stated public positions, in this instance support for law and order, are applicable to them. It is all just moral relativism's smoke and mirrors of wafting mendacity.
I think it's not realy morality, but rather politics.
It's only bad, if they can blame a Democrat. Otherwise, it was a good thing. The point being, they aren't using a moral compass to determine this, but rather base politics.
The Ruby Ridge wingnuttery is a prime example of this. Even when it's clear it happened under a Republican administration, they work hard to blame Clinton. But if the same thing happened today with GW Bush, they ignore it.
There was an incident just a year or two ago, where the DEA served a no-knock warrant on the wrong house. The elderly woman inside the house put up a fight, fired at the officers, and was killed herself.
But you don't hear them yelling and screaming about this.
Hell, actually, I suspect they'll probably blame it on the Democratic President who takes office in 2009.
It is going to be brutal, the next Presidency. Unless we get Obama or maybe Romney, expect an attempted crackdown on web reporting.
I could definately see this happening with Giuliani, possibly McCain if his finger in the wind determines it's good polling. Not sure about Romney. Hell, nobody is certain where Romney stands on anything.
But yeah, it's going to get worse. I try to live in a cash society now. I purchase most everything using cash, because I'm tired of people trying to track me.
Besides the impeachment(which in retrospect looks even more ridiculous today then it was then), the big connection with Clinton and/. back then were the various attempts of bills to protect children from the internet. I forget what they called the bill now. Also stuff on the v-chip, and backdoors for encryption.
Again, in retrospect, the supposed problems we all had in 1998 with the government look pretty mild.
I thought he was being called a hypocrite because he had written an article back in 1998 saying a President who got a blowjob wasn't morally fit to govern?
But apparnetly that morality doesn't apply to himself.
It's funny, because I remember Bob Livingston when he got caught in adultery at the same time he was attacking the President. That's the guy Vitter replaced, after Livingston resigned in shame.
I don't actually have a problem with what Vitter did. But I think if he's preaching, he ought to be leading by example, and resign like Livingston did.
Great, the city should have held a bond referendum. Or even the state.
But the Federal Govt? We have better places to spend $500 million. We've got existing bridges which are actually used that could be fixed for far less and benefit far more people.
Clinton was corrupt and had no respect for civil rights AND murdered his own citizens. Waco. Ruby Ridge.
I'm always amazed at the utter stupidity of your average wingnut.
Ruby Ridge occured in 1992. Somehow though, they get confused, and think since the election occured in 1992 that it must have been Clinton who done it. Not realizing that Clinton didn't take office until 1993. Oops.
Waco happened only a few weeks after Clinton had taken office, and like a week after Janet Reno had been confirmed. The staging, the setup, the planning for this had been in the works since the summer of 1992. The only thing Reno did was briefly review the plans and say "Ok, go for it."
And then they apologized when it all went wrong. Something no Republican would have ever done.
Democrats are all about the freedom for things like gay marriage, but want to make it illegal to say things that hurt others feelings (hate speech laws).
The latest thing from the Republicans has been trying to define anti-Christian statements as hate speech.
There's this whole sub-cult, which is kind of funny, they like to promote books about the War on Christmas and such.
Now of course there are exceptions to these rules, and if you are voting for someone in the major parties that's what you have to look at, is their politics not the party politics because BOTH parties are for big government and BOTH are for restricting personal freedom. You can also vote libertarian, at least assuming they'll run a candidate that isn't a complete nutjob in your area.
Unfortunately voting for the loonietarian is generally a waste.
It's better to be strategic, and kick the bastards out when they overreach. I don't care where they come from, I think going back and forth is good, but even better is a nice gridlock.
If you're going to post this, where are the stories about Senator Feinstein directing more than a billion dollars toward a company her husband controls? Or how about Harry Reid's son's and son in law all being lobbyists, one even lobbying him?
Well, what do you have to write a story about?
Are you just promoting inuendo because you are a partisan shill, or is there something there? If there's something there, we ought to hear about it, don't you think?
But if we're going to start seeing claims that republicans under "clouds" I think it would only be fair, and unbiased, to start running stories on democrats under similar situations.
The next time a Democrat in Congress passes a bill offering a government buyout to a fishing co-op, in order to artificially restrict the market and thus drive up prices, at the behest of a son who is getting paid $10k/month to lobby on it's behalf... Especially if said Democrat had made ludicruous and funny statements about the nature of the internet. I'm quite certainly slashdot will report on the story.
But it seems what you really want is to defend the Republicans with the "They're all bad" defense. I mean look at this shit:
Even worse, I've seen numerous blogs trying to excuse democrats or come up with ways to somehow explain away the problem.
I read the primary Democratic blogs routinely. dailyKos, Talkingpointsmemo, atrios and so on. Not once have I ever seen this. It was a blogswarm from these blogs who got William Jefferson stripped of his leadership post, and then later his committee positions when he was eventually indicted. Hell, the blogs put a *LOT* of effort to try to get William Jefferson replaced in the primary before the last election.
Now that's something you won't see from Republican blogs. Instead they sit there whining about how the media is biased against Republicans, and how we should be talking about all the Democrats who steal lollipops from children as being comparable to Duke Cunningham taking $2.4 million in bribes.
Generally the problem I have with cooking, is that you end up making a lot more than two people can eat. Say a pot roast, well that's lik 3-4 lbs of meat you are cooking up. So ok, we've got $10 for the beef and maybe another $5 in vegetables. It's enough to feed 4-6 people. So maybe if you are talking two people, in that sense you are putting more in than you can eat.
But a pot roast meal at the restaurant is going to cost $15 just by itself.
Multiply that times 6.
$15 in the pot is a lot cheaper.
Alternatively, the fridge works wonders for keeping things til the next meal.
Resolution aside, you still get two things that a DVD player won't do: progressive scan, and widescreen
DVD players have been doing progressive scan and widescreen since like at least 2002. That's when I bought my Sony HDTV set and Panasonic DVD player with progressive scan.
For the past 3 or so years, they've been doing upsampling to 720p via HDMI outputs.
It's a nice feature missing from XP. With user switching, you could walk up to any desktop that is locked, switch user logon yourself and get to your files/mail/whatever.
It'd be a nice little productivity boost at many companies.
The impression I get though from California is different. Most of their problems actually come from hispanic citizens. They just confuse them with illegals, because they can't tell who is who and it's easier to bash on illegals then citizens.
Hey, not arguing it wasn't a bad bill. It was, for a variety of reasons. The family provision was also one bad thing about the bill.
But you have to admit, most of the opposition coming from the Tom Tancredo types was more about letting brown people become citizens then anything else. That was a good 40 of the senators voting against, the remainly dozen or so had more noble reasons.
Lou Dobbs is interesting, and I think was one of the few saner voices in opposition because it was about how this bill was just a giveme to corporate america looking for a source of cheap labor.
Oh, and was I the only one who found it despicable that they mash together such a massive bill that makes changes to legal immigration, deals with border security, works in an amnesty provision, and who knows what else?
That's how bills are passed. It's called compromising. You get this, but I want that. If they'd tried to do each individually, each would have failed individually due to lack of support.
That I don't have a complaint with. What I disliked was just the whole premise of a subclass of cheap labor. Europe tried that, and it's been a disaster.
You are wrong when you say that I'm out of touch with reality. If you lived in California and saw how much illegal immigration impacts our daily lives, then you'd understand why it is such a major problem. If you live in California and you still believe that no one cares, then I'm sorry to say you're the one that's out of touch with reality.
It's interesting, cause I'm from the midwest... and area that did not have large hispanic populations until about 15 years ago.
Now I think it's quite clear that if there is a huge influx of non-europeans, we notice it.
And we don't care. As long as they work hard, don't cause problems, obey the laws... just like everybody else. We say "Welcome to America".
Honestly, I think you are quite out of touch with reality. Not surprising if you're spending your time listening to radio talk show hosts.
When you go out and talk to actual people, the vast majority of them just don't care. They'd rather see immigrants in the system, rather than operating illegally. As such they support paths to citizenship. That's what the polling shows, and it's what the 2006 election showed where candidates who campaigned strongly on anti-immigration got their asses handed to them.
There's a vocal fourth of the country that complains about letting all them brown people become citizens. They're the ones who got a good portion of the senators to vote against this. That move is going to have political implications for a generation, and it won't be in their benefit.
The other deal breaker, was the going back to country of origin, the high fee it was going to demand, and chief amongst most labor unions and human rights groups is the whole notion of a subclass of legal slave labor by way of the worker permits.
I didn't see any opposition over Real ID, so this is kind of silly. Although when you get such a close vote, if 2 people changed due to one issue, then maybe you could say it was a deal breaker, even though another 49 were against it for something else.
I used to run a small state campaign website for Wesley Clark back in '03. Didn't go anywhere, but it was a good experience, and it introduced me into the world of political software.
The Republicans have held a technology advantage over the Democrats for several election cycles. Mostly in the way of mapping software and databases. If you saw the Gerrymandered redistricting in Texas, it was obvious that map came from a GIS system loaded up with demographics data. No human would have come up with something so bizarrely complicated. This is in part due to monetary advantage. The GOP had a supreme fundraising advantage, and as such funnelled a lot of it back into their friends by way of hiring contractors to build things. Thus, more of their software is composed of enterprise development tools such as Java or ASP.NET.
On the Democratic side, it was mostly volunteer work that introduced technology to the campaigns. Initially the old organizers were leary of technology, preferring their old lists and such that had worked well for them in the 1960s and 1970s. Brute force and constant nagging pushed them into the present time.
Things are changing slightly, but there is still a different dynamic. I think the Republicans are better with data-mining. The Democrats on the other hand are better with social networking. That's in part representative of the way the parties differ... Democrats are more about the conversation, Republicans are more about bottom line. But it may also be due to when the technology arrived in Internet time.
Republicans have fantastic email lists, and early blogs where opinions are published(instapundit, powerline, etc). But they don't have a feedback loop. Most Republican blogs don't allow for comments, if they do they are roundly ignored(redstate). This comes from their very top-down approach from the 1980s and 1990s. Radio, magazines, newspapers just turned into websites and email lists where they could tell their supporters what to do to help.
The Democratic organization is the other way. It's much more about blogs, community comments, etc.(mydd, dailykos, talkingpointsmemo) The supporters tell the politicians to do this or fuck off, etc. But these types of internet things weren't available until relatively recently. So maybe there is a different question. Did the Democrats technology come because it was developed after 2000? Or are the Democrats dominant today because finally the internet had enabled the style of conversation their supporters liked? I think it's a bit of both. It was the internet blogs and communities who really railed against the Iraq policy from the start. It wasn't a question of Iraq going bad and being in the right place, this policy was profoundly flawed from the start. But if not for that internet conversation about how bad this policy was, the newspapers and mainstream media would have continued their lovefest and we wouldn't be having this current debate about where should America really stand on this issue of foolish intervention.
But as to whether linux or microsoft makes a difference. Nope. The wingnuttiest wingnuts I know are solid diehard Linux fans. Hell I know one guy who is a firm member of the 26% club who loves Apple Macintosh and Linux.
And most of my coworkers in the Microsoft space, support Obama or Clinton, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the Iraq war was your proudest moment? When George Bush showed true leadership and courage by kicking the weapons inspectors out and invading, to prove to the world there were WMDs hidden under Saddam's bed.
Why are you so unwilling to take full credit for it now? This wasn't a problem back in the 2002 election cycle, or even in 2004, why now?
No, because Democrats recognize Kucinich as a kook and don't invite him to hang with the kool kids.
But Malkin, is quite popular. She makes it on the tv shows, and runs one of the highest trafficed Republican websites.
I don't know what to say. If you don't like Malkin, then maybe you should do something about her to get her to shut the fuck up? Good luck with that though, having been to the Republican caucuses back in 1988 to speak out against Pat Robertson, I'm afraid you're more likely to get your ass kicked for speaking up against one of the annointed ones.
Didn't Michelle Malkin write a book about how the concentration camps were a good thing? By golly, yes she did. Title is "In Defense of Internment".
So one of the annointed few who is allowed to speak on behalf of the Republican party is running around the airwaves defending the japanese internment... Whereas the Democrats apologize for it whenever it's brought up.
It's examples like this which lead people to the conclusion that the Democratic party is the one with moral superiority.
It's one thing for abuse to occur, but it's quite another to defend abuse.
If you believe shit pollutes the water, you should stop shitting immediately, because every time you shit you are polluting the water. If people had believed that the Clean Water Act could have extended to shit, it never would have passed.
They're worth nothing.
I think it's interesting in a time where modern power supplies are pretty solid, and the electrical current coming across the wire is pretty consistent, that only now do these companies start selling line conditioners.
I have some higher end cables in my system, but it's only because they look nice and are easier to hook up. There is a difference between a $1 cable, and a $20 cable, but not much between $20 and $400. The fact that the people who promote the $400 cable are adamantly against double-blind testing is evidence of that.
I think it's not realy morality, but rather politics.
It's only bad, if they can blame a Democrat. Otherwise, it was a good thing. The point being, they aren't using a moral compass to determine this, but rather base politics.
The Ruby Ridge wingnuttery is a prime example of this. Even when it's clear it happened under a Republican administration, they work hard to blame Clinton. But if the same thing happened today with GW Bush, they ignore it.
There was an incident just a year or two ago, where the DEA served a no-knock warrant on the wrong house. The elderly woman inside the house put up a fight, fired at the officers, and was killed herself.
But you don't hear them yelling and screaming about this.
Hell, actually, I suspect they'll probably blame it on the Democratic President who takes office in 2009.
I could definately see this happening with Giuliani, possibly McCain if his finger in the wind determines it's good polling. Not sure about Romney. Hell, nobody is certain where Romney stands on anything.
But yeah, it's going to get worse. I try to live in a cash society now. I purchase most everything using cash, because I'm tired of people trying to track me.
Besides the impeachment(which in retrospect looks even more ridiculous today then it was then), the big connection with Clinton and /. back then were the various attempts of bills to protect children from the internet. I forget what they called the bill now. Also stuff on the v-chip, and backdoors for encryption.
Again, in retrospect, the supposed problems we all had in 1998 with the government look pretty mild.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
I've been reading /. since 1997, and there were plenty of articles back then about Clinton and such.
I don't recall anybody at the time whining about how unfair it was that we weren't talking about all the Democrats who weren't being indicted.
Yup, that's pretty much why. I mean you didn't see a slashdot article about Vitter being in the pimps phone list, did you?
Anyway, whining is unbecoming.
I thought he was being called a hypocrite because he had written an article back in 1998 saying a President who got a blowjob wasn't morally fit to govern?
But apparnetly that morality doesn't apply to himself.
It's funny, because I remember Bob Livingston when he got caught in adultery at the same time he was attacking the President. That's the guy Vitter replaced, after Livingston resigned in shame.
I don't actually have a problem with what Vitter did. But I think if he's preaching, he ought to be leading by example, and resign like Livingston did.
Great, the city should have held a bond referendum. Or even the state.
But the Federal Govt? We have better places to spend $500 million. We've got existing bridges which are actually used that could be fixed for far less and benefit far more people.
I'm always amazed at the utter stupidity of your average wingnut.
Ruby Ridge occured in 1992. Somehow though, they get confused, and think since the election occured in 1992 that it must have been Clinton who done it. Not realizing that Clinton didn't take office until 1993. Oops.
Waco happened only a few weeks after Clinton had taken office, and like a week after Janet Reno had been confirmed. The staging, the setup, the planning for this had been in the works since the summer of 1992. The only thing Reno did was briefly review the plans and say "Ok, go for it."
And then they apologized when it all went wrong. Something no Republican would have ever done.
The latest thing from the Republicans has been trying to define anti-Christian statements as hate speech.
There's this whole sub-cult, which is kind of funny, they like to promote books about the War on Christmas and such.
Unfortunately voting for the loonietarian is generally a waste.
It's better to be strategic, and kick the bastards out when they overreach. I don't care where they come from, I think going back and forth is good, but even better is a nice gridlock.
Well, what do you have to write a story about?
Are you just promoting inuendo because you are a partisan shill, or is there something there? If there's something there, we ought to hear about it, don't you think?
The next time a Democrat in Congress passes a bill offering a government buyout to a fishing co-op, in order to artificially restrict the market and thus drive up prices, at the behest of a son who is getting paid $10k/month to lobby on it's behalf... Especially if said Democrat had made ludicruous and funny statements about the nature of the internet. I'm quite certainly slashdot will report on the story.
But it seems what you really want is to defend the Republicans with the "They're all bad" defense. I mean look at this shit:
I read the primary Democratic blogs routinely. dailyKos, Talkingpointsmemo, atrios and so on. Not once have I ever seen this. It was a blogswarm from these blogs who got William Jefferson stripped of his leadership post, and then later his committee positions when he was eventually indicted. Hell, the blogs put a *LOT* of effort to try to get William Jefferson replaced in the primary before the last election.
Now that's something you won't see from Republican blogs. Instead they sit there whining about how the media is biased against Republicans, and how we should be talking about all the Democrats who steal lollipops from children as being comparable to Duke Cunningham taking $2.4 million in bribes.
That doesn't make any sense.
Generally the problem I have with cooking, is that you end up making a lot more than two people can eat. Say a pot roast, well that's lik 3-4 lbs of meat you are cooking up. So ok, we've got $10 for the beef and maybe another $5 in vegetables. It's enough to feed 4-6 people. So maybe if you are talking two people, in that sense you are putting more in than you can eat.
But a pot roast meal at the restaurant is going to cost $15 just by itself.
Multiply that times 6.
$15 in the pot is a lot cheaper.
Alternatively, the fridge works wonders for keeping things til the next meal.
DVD players have been doing progressive scan and widescreen since like at least 2002. That's when I bought my Sony HDTV set and Panasonic DVD player with progressive scan.
For the past 3 or so years, they've been doing upsampling to 720p via HDMI outputs.
It's a nice feature missing from XP. With user switching, you could walk up to any desktop that is locked, switch user logon yourself and get to your files/mail/whatever.
It'd be a nice little productivity boost at many companies.
Quite possibly.
The impression I get though from California is different. Most of their problems actually come from hispanic citizens. They just confuse them with illegals, because they can't tell who is who and it's easier to bash on illegals then citizens.
But you have to admit, most of the opposition coming from the Tom Tancredo types was more about letting brown people become citizens then anything else. That was a good 40 of the senators voting against, the remainly dozen or so had more noble reasons.
Lou Dobbs is interesting, and I think was one of the few saner voices in opposition because it was about how this bill was just a giveme to corporate america looking for a source of cheap labor.
That's how bills are passed. It's called compromising. You get this, but I want that. If they'd tried to do each individually, each would have failed individually due to lack of support.
That I don't have a complaint with. What I disliked was just the whole premise of a subclass of cheap labor. Europe tried that, and it's been a disaster.
It's interesting, cause I'm from the midwest... and area that did not have large hispanic populations until about 15 years ago.
Now I think it's quite clear that if there is a huge influx of non-europeans, we notice it.
And we don't care. As long as they work hard, don't cause problems, obey the laws... just like everybody else. We say "Welcome to America".
Honestly, I think you are quite out of touch with reality. Not surprising if you're spending your time listening to radio talk show hosts.
When you go out and talk to actual people, the vast majority of them just don't care. They'd rather see immigrants in the system, rather than operating illegally. As such they support paths to citizenship. That's what the polling shows, and it's what the 2006 election showed where candidates who campaigned strongly on anti-immigration got their asses handed to them.
There's a vocal fourth of the country that complains about letting all them brown people become citizens. They're the ones who got a good portion of the senators to vote against this. That move is going to have political implications for a generation, and it won't be in their benefit.
The other deal breaker, was the going back to country of origin, the high fee it was going to demand, and chief amongst most labor unions and human rights groups is the whole notion of a subclass of legal slave labor by way of the worker permits.
I didn't see any opposition over Real ID, so this is kind of silly. Although when you get such a close vote, if 2 people changed due to one issue, then maybe you could say it was a deal breaker, even though another 49 were against it for something else.
I used to run a small state campaign website for Wesley Clark back in '03. Didn't go anywhere, but it was a good experience, and it introduced me into the world of political software.
The Republicans have held a technology advantage over the Democrats for several election cycles. Mostly in the way of mapping software and databases. If you saw the Gerrymandered redistricting in Texas, it was obvious that map came from a GIS system loaded up with demographics data. No human would have come up with something so bizarrely complicated. This is in part due to monetary advantage. The GOP had a supreme fundraising advantage, and as such funnelled a lot of it back into their friends by way of hiring contractors to build things. Thus, more of their software is composed of enterprise development tools such as Java or ASP.NET.
On the Democratic side, it was mostly volunteer work that introduced technology to the campaigns. Initially the old organizers were leary of technology, preferring their old lists and such that had worked well for them in the 1960s and 1970s. Brute force and constant nagging pushed them into the present time.
Things are changing slightly, but there is still a different dynamic. I think the Republicans are better with data-mining. The Democrats on the other hand are better with social networking. That's in part representative of the way the parties differ... Democrats are more about the conversation, Republicans are more about bottom line. But it may also be due to when the technology arrived in Internet time.
Republicans have fantastic email lists, and early blogs where opinions are published(instapundit, powerline, etc). But they don't have a feedback loop. Most Republican blogs don't allow for comments, if they do they are roundly ignored(redstate). This comes from their very top-down approach from the 1980s and 1990s. Radio, magazines, newspapers just turned into websites and email lists where they could tell their supporters what to do to help.
The Democratic organization is the other way. It's much more about blogs, community comments, etc.(mydd, dailykos, talkingpointsmemo) The supporters tell the politicians to do this or fuck off, etc. But these types of internet things weren't available until relatively recently. So maybe there is a different question. Did the Democrats technology come because it was developed after 2000? Or are the Democrats dominant today because finally the internet had enabled the style of conversation their supporters liked? I think it's a bit of both. It was the internet blogs and communities who really railed against the Iraq policy from the start. It wasn't a question of Iraq going bad and being in the right place, this policy was profoundly flawed from the start. But if not for that internet conversation about how bad this policy was, the newspapers and mainstream media would have continued their lovefest and we wouldn't be having this current debate about where should America really stand on this issue of foolish intervention.
But as to whether linux or microsoft makes a difference. Nope. The wingnuttiest wingnuts I know are solid diehard Linux fans. Hell I know one guy who is a firm member of the 26% club who loves Apple Macintosh and Linux.
And most of my coworkers in the Microsoft space, support Obama or Clinton, etc.