Why is it that the American government's style of attacking most technical problems seems to involve throwing a lot of money around and doing everything in the most grandiose and impractical way possible? It reminds me of the apocryphal story of the problem of writing in zero gravity, where NASA spent considerable money and resources to develop a pen that doesn't need gravity to feed the ink, and the Russians just took pencils.
During WWII, the Manhattan Project had problems getting copper for the huge electromagnets that they needed to build. No problem- they just went to the Treasury, borrowed 15,000 tons of silver bullion, and wound it into coils! What other country on earth would even have been able to consider such a thing back then? The bomb was a bad thing, etc., but I've always felt sort of proud that I live in a country that's been able to actually do crazy things like that.
What are you talking about? The punch card system proved itself to be a very accurate method of vote counting, even under the extreme condition of a tie- to a precision of several hundred votes. Much attention was paid to the relatively few cards that had chads hanging, but the vast majority of the cards were quite unambiguous in their representation of the voter's intent. Unfortunately they occurred in equal numbers for both candidates. The entire system was at least as auditable as any vote counting system can possibly be.
People don't understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision means that, given a measurable X, your measurements are sharply defined. But that is not the same as accuracy- which implies that the measurements actually reflect the true value of X, and not the influences of other sources of systematic error- like air resistance, or the thermal expansion of the ruler you're using, or the political affiliation of the manufacturer of your measuring equipment. A measurement is only accurate if sources of systematic error have been minimized. Sources of random error- like hanging chads- merely degrade precision.
The outcry for computerized voting that followed the 2000 election- to "bring our elections into the 21st century" and similar nonsense- was most unfortunate. We are making the transition from an accurate but slightly imprecise system to a new system that promises only extreme precision with no guarantees of accuracy. What is worse, we are about to trade susceptibility to random error for something far worse- susceptibility to systematic error- which is fundamentally different from a human perspective since it introduces a huge motive for people to screw with the accuracy of the electoral process.
The 2000 election had its share of systematic error. There was that butterfly ballot, which confused both Gore and Bush voters alike, but had the effect of transforming Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. There was the Florida felon purge, which knocked thousands of blacks but only dozens of Cubans off the rolls. The 2000 election is still bitterly disputed, but very few people still complain about the hanging chads, which were sources of random error with relatively nonpartisan effects. The sources of systematic error had a much more corrosive effect- they cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the outcome, since they gave the election the appearance of having been stolen.
I have no doubt that we have an ultraprecise election ahead of us- computers are good at being deterministic, after all- but as far as accuracy goes- we'll see. There are many who would love to insert some systematic error into those Access.MDB files. Election Day hasn't even arrived yet and already people have been busy introducing systematic error into the pool of registered voters. Even if the 2004 election involves pretty blinking lights, and is the most precise ever, it will undoubtedly be a less accurate measurement of the desires of the electorate than the election we had in 2000. This is what Stalin meant when he said that those who cast the votes decide nothing, and those who count the votes determine everything.
Sorry, I forgot to post a link to Drudge. Or if you'd rather not go there, here it is:
Halperin Memo Dated Friday October 8, 2004
It goes without saying that the stakes are getting very high for the country and the campaigns - and our responsibilities become quite grave
I do not want to set off (sp?) and endless colloquy that none of us have time for today - nor do I want to stifle one. Please respond if you feel you can advance the discussion.
The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.
Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.
We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that.
I'm sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.
It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.
I'm Canadian as well, and CNN scares the crap out of me.
Americans would typically respond with something like "well your news is biased too", because they have been well indoctrinated for years to have nothing but contempt for the notion that objective truth even exists. In the past few years this weird epistemological relativism has overtaken American public discourse. All that matters is the appearance that "bias" is equally balanced on both sides. An interview show will "balance" a Holocaust survivor guest by also inviting a Holocaust denier. If letters to the editor are skewed 100:1 following a given story, they'll still pick two or three letters from each side so as to give the impression that both viewpoints are equally valid. They are committed to providing no useful information at all. And contempt for objectivity has pervaded people's thinking across the board. Just look at politics.slashdot.org. Yesterday Michael posted two stories: "RNC and voter suppression" quickly followed with "DNC and voter suppression", as if both stories had substance to them. Again, notice the commitment to providing no information.
This is an extremely corrosive approach to journalism (not that Michael is a journalist) because it gives an extreme advantage to liars. If one candidate starts telling lies, it becomes incumbent on journalists to start digging through anything the other candidate said, anything at all, that might not be totally accurate, to support a headline like "Kerry, Bush Both Tell Fibs". Mark Halperin, a political director at ABC, recently wrote an internal memo to his staff that correctly noted that while neither Bush nor Kerry make factually correct statements 100% of the time, only one of the two has recently adopted a strategy of telling flat-out lies in the final weeks of the campaign, and that journalists working for ABC should not feel obligated to "balance" every major lie with some inconsequential lie from the other candidate unless the lie is obviously central to the candidate's effort to win. The memo was promptly posted on Drudge and has now become a "scandal". This is how far American journalism has deteriorated. Deviating from information-free "balanced" content gets you in trouble and ruins your career. "Balance" has won the war against truth in American journalism.
Another consequence of this thinking is the common retort: "the news isn't biased, because we have Fox, and you have CNN". CNN, however, has become practically indistinguishable from Fox. The only thing it doesn't have are the distinctive personalities (O'Reilly, etc).
1. They appear, and wish to appear, to the American public as the #1 official news source.
They all have that schtick going. The Daily Show makes fun of it- "The Most Important Show... Ever."
2. On many occasions, they sensationalise any possible "news" story. See Monica Lewinsky, OJ, Michael Jackson... You name it. Apparently that stuff is important in the US. It's not to the rest of the world, get over it. CNN - you're missing the real issues here.
They are no longer obligated to show news as a requirement of their broadcast licenses. So they are free to air entertainment that bills itself as news, which generates more advertising dollars. This includes not only the "Scott Peterson"-type stories, but also the slanted commentary by which talking points are distributed for public consumption. People are mesmerized by stupid stuff like this. Unfortunately, if you believe what you're watching is news, you'll believe anything they tell you.
3. CNN is completely biased. I remember during the opening hours of Iraq conflict (the current one) Aaron Brown trying not to cheer as he smirked watching the video feed of the tanks rolling into Iraq. "ooohhhh! look at the firepower! RA RA America." Way to be a journalist Aaron.
Fox News actually dropped party balloons from the ceiling at the moment Bush's "24 hour ultimatum" expired to begin the war.
Yeah, I was watching Kerry's rebuttal waiting for this too and was disappointed that he didn't mention it. They do talk about it in other venues so I was surprised he let it get by him. It was like money on the ground waiting to be picked up.
The Oregon report said one person "might" have seen 8-10 registrations shredded and another "might" have been encouraged to do so.
The second one references the same people as the first one (same individual, at least).
The third is a woman who says she was told to do something, by people who deny it, and never saw it happen.
Oh- the people accused deny it, and "never saw it happen!" That settles it then!
Your insinuation- that this is somehow nothing but hearsay, and that these are just mean Democrats making this stuff up about Sproul in Oregon- is laughable. The similar claims being made about him in Nevada are supported by physical evidence. He has been running this scam in multiple swing states.
Since you seem to be so insanely insistant I chastise the RNC, I will admit that if any of these cases are proven legitimate then the firms responsible should be held accountable. That's a long, long shot from the RNC itself being guilty of voter fraud.
And it seems the people who had their forms ripped up by RNC workers will not be allowed to re-register. A Republican judge this morning had told the two parties in the case to work out a compromise, which they apparently did. Hours later, the court reconvened and she denied the petition without hearing any arguments- reasoning that if a law was broken, the guilty party would be punished, end of story. The local news video about it is here.
Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.
The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.
Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.
Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.
But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.
That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.
And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.
Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems with their applications until it was too late.
Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations.
The case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials, as in 2000, to try to wrongly disenfranchise thousands of blacks - has been widely reported. Less widely reported has been overwhelming evidence that the errors were deliberate.
In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.
And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.
Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes of Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully counted if they are cast. Mr. Palast notes that in the 2000 election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were rejected because they were either blank or contained overvotes. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate that 54 percent of the spoiled ballots were cast b
Go watch it again. That is not what that comment was in response to. It was in response to Kerry wanting to raise the minimum wage. More handouts, more government control, same old liberal crap, new packaging.
No, YOU go watch it again.
SCHIEFFER: Let's go to a new question, Mr. President. Two minutes. And let's continue on jobs. You know, there are all kind of statistics out there, but I want to bring it down to an individual.
Mr. President, what do you say to someone in this country who has lost his job to someone overseas who's being paid a fraction of what that job paid here in the United States?
BUSH:I'd say, Bob, I've got policies to continue to grow our economy and create the jobs of the 21st century. And here's some help for you to go get an education. Here's some help for you to go to a community college.
We've expanded trade adjustment assistance. We want to help pay for you to gain the skills necessary to fill the jobs of the 21st century.
You know, there's a lot of talk about how to keep the economy growing. We talk about fiscal matters. But perhaps the best way to keep jobs here in America and to keep this economy growing is to make sure our education system works.
I went to Washington to solve problems. And I saw a problem in the public education system in America. They were just shuffling too many kids through the system, year after year, grade after grade, without learning the basics.
And so we said: Let's raise the standards. We're spending more money, but let's raise the standards and measure early and solve problems now, before it's too late.
No, education is how to help the person who's lost a job. Education is how to make sure we've got a workforce that's productive and competitive.
Got four more years, I've got more to do to continue to raise standards, to continue to reward teachers and school districts that are working, to emphasize math and science in the classrooms, to continue to expand Pell Grants to make sure that people have an opportunity to start their career with a college diploma.
And so the person you talked to, I say, here's some help, here's some trade adjustment assistance money for you to go a community college in your neighborhood, a community college which is providing the skills necessary to fill the jobs of the 21st century. And that's what I would say to that person.
A note about the Pell Grants he talks about: they are automatic, not something that is "expanded" deliberately by a president. You become eligible for Pell Grants once your income falls below a certain level. The fact that more people are getting Pell Grants than before is not something for him to be bragging about- it's a direct consequence of increased poverty during his administration. It takes a lot of gall for him to actually brag about Pell Grants expanding.
Remember before mistake #2 (failure to secure Iraq after the war), was mistake #1: a virtually unilateral decision to remove Saddam from power when he did NOT present a clear and present danger to the United States.
I would include #1.5 : Passing up several chances to kill Zarqawi in Northern Iraq before the war started because it would undercut the case for war against Saddam. Even though NBC News reported this story back in March 2004, Zarqawi's existence in Iraq is still commonly used to justify the war.
"People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president's policy of preemption against terrorists," according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.
Doesn't it sound a little hypocritical when you censor a news story that disagrees with your political views?
A. This is not a "news story". It is a 90 minute Swift boat smear commercial for Bush, uninterrupted by other commercials, being presented under the guise of news.
B. The right to a free press is restricted to those with printing presses. Sinclair does not own the public airwaves it will use to broadcast this garbage. Any right-wing media conglomerate is free to express its opinions under First Amendment protection, using cable, a web site, or a bullhorn- once its broadcast license has been revoked in accordance with the law. Broadcasting an infomercial for the president on public airwaves is a blatant violation of McCain-Feingold. Amazingly, the FCC under Michael Powell shows no interest in enforcing the law in this case.
C. There is a conflict of interest here. One of Sinclair's wholly owned subsidiaries (Jadoo Power Systems) has just been awarded a contract to develop power systems for the US Special Operations Command. The other major investor in Jadoo is Contango Capital Management, located in Houston TX, whose Managing Partner is John Berger who used to manage energy trading books for Enron Corporation and who also served as an advisor to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2002 and 2003. This stinks to high heaven.
However, the accusations coming from Terry McAuliffe and others, is it because they are some elements of this that may reflect poorly on John Kerry? That it's somehow an in-kind contribution of George Bush?
If you use that logic and reasoning, that means every car bomb in Iraq would be an in-kind contribution to John Kerry. Weak job performance ratings that came out last month would have been an in- kind contribution to John Kerry. And that's just nonsense.
This is news. I can't change the fact that these people decided to come forward today. The networks had this opportunity over a month ago to speak with these people. They chose to suppress them. They chose to ignore them. They are acting like Holocaust deniers, pretending these men don't exist.
So press coverage of car bombs and unemployment statistics is equivalent to unfair free campaign commercials for Kerry. And the rest of the press are "Holocaust deniers" for denying partisan political hacks a forum from which they can make baseless thirty-year-old accusations on the eve of a close election.
This from the same media conglomerate that back in April suppressed Nightline's reading of the names of soldiers killed in Iraq because it was "contrary to the public interest." Riiiight.
Windows XP hides extensions by default. You have to find and uncheck the "Hide extensions for known file types" checkbox which renders "ILOVEYOU.TXT.vbs" as "ILOVEYOU.TXT".
The sole purpose of hiding extensions is to avoid scaring imbeciles who freak out at the sight of a period and three letters.
No, if you read their comments more closely, you'll see that they're not exactly saying "two wrongs make a right". They're saying an actual wrong and a hypothetical wrong make a right. "If your side was in power they'd be doing this too so it's OK."
But I asked what the President could do, not the government as a whole.
You're right, this situation is not just the president's fault. Responsibility lies with the Republican-controlled Congress, the Republican-controlled Senate, and the president.
Dated? Cheney made his Ebay comment on September 9, 2004, just under a month ago.
For comparison, Gore's made his unfortunate "inventing the Internet" gaffe on March 9, 1999. I don't remember anyone saying that one was "dated" in 2000.
The drift velocity for DC current is around a few mm/sec, but the individual root-mean-square electron velocities in a wire are comparable to c. (Regardless of current.) Although they keep scattering off the copper atoms and off each other and change direction all the time, so they don't travel very far. But the signal propagation velocity through a wire depends much more on the rms velocity than the aggregate current drift velocity.
People are generally surprised that drift velocity of electrical current is so slow. When I was in middle school there were two water fountains in the cafeteria, separated by a hundred feet or so. A common trick was to wait until someone was drinking at one fountain, then turn the handle on the other fountain really fast- on/off/on/off/on/off- and they would instantly get sprayed in the face. Even though the bulk of the water itself drifted slowly through the pipes as you drank it, the individual water molecules were bouncing around in all directions at high speeds and the signal conduction through the water between the fountains was very fast.
What about microscopic steam-based logic gates?
on
Fluid Logic Chips
·
· Score: 2, Funny
That would be totally retro. And it would allow AMD to enter the business.
Oh, we were talking about an American jury trial? Here i thought we were talking about a country proven to have previously owned and used weapons of mass destruction.
Just using the example of a jury trial to explain the hole in your logic. You said it was a "binary determination" between weapons/no weapons, and that his failure to prove he had no weapons is equivalent to proof that he has weapons. Which is nonsense.
The 50,000 troops sitting on the Korean DMZ are there to die and buy us time in the event the North decides to move in. Lets say we know N. Korea is about to launch a nuke at S. Korea with a full scale attack. Do we wait on the "Global Test" or do we turn them in to glass? Where is this "Global Test" defined?
This is what Kerry actually said:
No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.
But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.
Bush and Rove have seized on the two words "global test" and run with them, spreading the notion that under something called "the Kerry Doctrine" Paris would have veto power over the ability of Congress to declare war. But Kerry is plainly using the past tense ("where you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons") which unambiguously answers your question- we do not "wait on the Global Test" before acting. The "Global Test" needs no defining because it was a fucking figure of speech.
The nation deserves more than this absurd overparsing of substrings.
uh...let them search me and my house for weapons, randomly and without limits?
I heard people saying (before the invasion) that if no weapons were found, that would be all the proof we'd need that Saddam was trying to hide them and reason enough to go to war.
W00t! I figured it out! If something is binary, weapons or no weapons, it can be proved one way or the other.
And by that logic, innocent until proven guilty == guilty until proven innocent. I hope you never serve on a jury.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that the American government's style of attacking most technical problems seems to involve throwing a lot of money around and doing everything in the most grandiose and impractical way possible? It reminds me of the apocryphal story of the problem of writing in zero gravity, where NASA spent considerable money and resources to develop a pen that doesn't need gravity to feed the ink, and the Russians just took pencils.
During WWII, the Manhattan Project had problems getting copper for the huge electromagnets that they needed to build. No problem- they just went to the Treasury, borrowed 15,000 tons of silver bullion, and wound it into coils! What other country on earth would even have been able to consider such a thing back then? The bomb was a bad thing, etc., but I've always felt sort of proud that I live in a country that's been able to actually do crazy things like that.
Buggy as compared to the chads?
.MDB files. Election Day hasn't even arrived yet and already people have been busy introducing systematic error into the pool of registered voters. Even if the 2004 election involves pretty blinking lights, and is the most precise ever, it will undoubtedly be a less accurate measurement of the desires of the electorate than the election we had in 2000. This is what Stalin meant when he said that those who cast the votes decide nothing, and those who count the votes determine everything.
What are you talking about? The punch card system proved itself to be a very accurate method of vote counting, even under the extreme condition of a tie- to a precision of several hundred votes. Much attention was paid to the relatively few cards that had chads hanging, but the vast majority of the cards were quite unambiguous in their representation of the voter's intent. Unfortunately they occurred in equal numbers for both candidates. The entire system was at least as auditable as any vote counting system can possibly be.
People don't understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision means that, given a measurable X, your measurements are sharply defined. But that is not the same as accuracy- which implies that the measurements actually reflect the true value of X, and not the influences of other sources of systematic error- like air resistance, or the thermal expansion of the ruler you're using, or the political affiliation of the manufacturer of your measuring equipment. A measurement is only accurate if sources of systematic error have been minimized. Sources of random error- like hanging chads- merely degrade precision.
The outcry for computerized voting that followed the 2000 election- to "bring our elections into the 21st century" and similar nonsense- was most unfortunate. We are making the transition from an accurate but slightly imprecise system to a new system that promises only extreme precision with no guarantees of accuracy. What is worse, we are about to trade susceptibility to random error for something far worse- susceptibility to systematic error- which is fundamentally different from a human perspective since it introduces a huge motive for people to screw with the accuracy of the electoral process.
The 2000 election had its share of systematic error. There was that butterfly ballot, which confused both Gore and Bush voters alike, but had the effect of transforming Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. There was the Florida felon purge, which knocked thousands of blacks but only dozens of Cubans off the rolls. The 2000 election is still bitterly disputed, but very few people still complain about the hanging chads, which were sources of random error with relatively nonpartisan effects. The sources of systematic error had a much more corrosive effect- they cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the outcome, since they gave the election the appearance of having been stolen.
I have no doubt that we have an ultraprecise election ahead of us- computers are good at being deterministic, after all- but as far as accuracy goes- we'll see. There are many who would love to insert some systematic error into those Access
I'm Canadian as well, and CNN scares the crap out of me.
Americans would typically respond with something like "well your news is biased too", because they have been well indoctrinated for years to have nothing but contempt for the notion that objective truth even exists. In the past few years this weird epistemological relativism has overtaken American public discourse. All that matters is the appearance that "bias" is equally balanced on both sides. An interview show will "balance" a Holocaust survivor guest by also inviting a Holocaust denier. If letters to the editor are skewed 100:1 following a given story, they'll still pick two or three letters from each side so as to give the impression that both viewpoints are equally valid. They are committed to providing no useful information at all. And contempt for objectivity has pervaded people's thinking across the board. Just look at politics.slashdot.org. Yesterday Michael posted two stories: "RNC and voter suppression" quickly followed with "DNC and voter suppression", as if both stories had substance to them. Again, notice the commitment to providing no information.
This is an extremely corrosive approach to journalism (not that Michael is a journalist) because it gives an extreme advantage to liars. If one candidate starts telling lies, it becomes incumbent on journalists to start digging through anything the other candidate said, anything at all, that might not be totally accurate, to support a headline like "Kerry, Bush Both Tell Fibs". Mark Halperin, a political director at ABC, recently wrote an internal memo to his staff that correctly noted that while neither Bush nor Kerry make factually correct statements 100% of the time, only one of the two has recently adopted a strategy of telling flat-out lies in the final weeks of the campaign, and that journalists working for ABC should not feel obligated to "balance" every major lie with some inconsequential lie from the other candidate unless the lie is obviously central to the candidate's effort to win. The memo was promptly posted on Drudge and has now become a "scandal". This is how far American journalism has deteriorated. Deviating from information-free "balanced" content gets you in trouble and ruins your career. "Balance" has won the war against truth in American journalism.
Another consequence of this thinking is the common retort: "the news isn't biased, because we have Fox, and you have CNN". CNN, however, has become practically indistinguishable from Fox. The only thing it doesn't have are the distinctive personalities (O'Reilly, etc).
1. They appear, and wish to appear, to the American public as the #1 official news source.
They all have that schtick going. The Daily Show makes fun of it- "The Most Important Show... Ever."
2. On many occasions, they sensationalise any possible "news" story. See Monica Lewinsky, OJ, Michael Jackson... You name it. Apparently that stuff is important in the US. It's not to the rest of the world, get over it. CNN - you're missing the real issues here.
They are no longer obligated to show news as a requirement of their broadcast licenses. So they are free to air entertainment that bills itself as news, which generates more advertising dollars. This includes not only the "Scott Peterson"-type stories, but also the slanted commentary by which talking points are distributed for public consumption. People are mesmerized by stupid stuff like this. Unfortunately, if you believe what you're watching is news, you'll believe anything they tell you.
3. CNN is completely biased. I remember during the opening hours of Iraq conflict (the current one) Aaron Brown trying not to cheer as he smirked watching the video feed of the tanks rolling into Iraq. "ooohhhh! look at the firepower! RA RA America." Way to be a journalist Aaron.
Fox News actually dropped party balloons from the ceiling at the moment Bush's "24 hour ultimatum" expired to begin the war.
Yeah, I was watching Kerry's rebuttal waiting for this too and was disappointed that he didn't mention it. They do talk about it in other venues so I was surprised he let it get by him. It was like money on the ground waiting to be picked up.
The Oregon report said one person "might" have seen 8-10 registrations shredded and another "might" have been encouraged to do so.
The second one references the same people as the first one (same individual, at least).
The third is a woman who says she was told to do something, by people who deny it, and never saw it happen.
Oh- the people accused deny it, and "never saw it happen!" That settles it then!
Your insinuation- that this is somehow nothing but hearsay, and that these are just mean Democrats making this stuff up about Sproul in Oregon- is laughable. The similar claims being made about him in Nevada are supported by physical evidence. He has been running this scam in multiple swing states.
Since you seem to be so insanely insistant I chastise the RNC, I will admit that if any of these cases are proven legitimate then the firms responsible should be held accountable. That's a long, long shot from the RNC itself being guilty of voter fraud.
You should do some Google searches before posting. The firm in question (Sproul & Associates) was directly funded by the RNC to the tune of $488,000. The RNC is guilty of voter fraud.
And it seems the people who had their forms ripped up by RNC workers will not be allowed to re-register. A Republican judge this morning had told the two parties in the case to work out a compromise, which they apparently did. Hours later, the court reconvened and she denied the petition without hearing any arguments- reasoning that if a law was broken, the guilty party would be punished, end of story. The local news video about it is here.
Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.
The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.
Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.
Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.
But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.
That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.
And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.
Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems with their applications until it was too late.
Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations.
The case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials, as in 2000, to try to wrongly disenfranchise thousands of blacks - has been widely reported. Less widely reported has been overwhelming evidence that the errors were deliberate.
In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.
And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.
Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes of Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully counted if they are cast. Mr. Palast notes that in the 2000 election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were rejected because they were either blank or contained overvotes. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate that 54 percent of the spoiled ballots were cast b
No, YOU go watch it again.
A note about the Pell Grants he talks about: they are automatic, not something that is "expanded" deliberately by a president. You become eligible for Pell Grants once your income falls below a certain level. The fact that more people are getting Pell Grants than before is not something for him to be bragging about- it's a direct consequence of increased poverty during his administration. It takes a lot of gall for him to actually brag about Pell Grants expanding.
I would include #1.5 : Passing up several chances to kill Zarqawi in Northern Iraq before the war started because it would undercut the case for war against Saddam. Even though NBC News reported this story back in March 2004, Zarqawi's existence in Iraq is still commonly used to justify the war.
A. This is not a "news story". It is a 90 minute Swift boat smear commercial for Bush, uninterrupted by other commercials, being presented under the guise of news.
B. The right to a free press is restricted to those with printing presses. Sinclair does not own the public airwaves it will use to broadcast this garbage. Any right-wing media conglomerate is free to express its opinions under First Amendment protection, using cable, a web site, or a bullhorn- once its broadcast license has been revoked in accordance with the law. Broadcasting an infomercial for the president on public airwaves is a blatant violation of McCain-Feingold. Amazingly, the FCC under Michael Powell shows no interest in enforcing the law in this case.
C. There is a conflict of interest here. One of Sinclair's wholly owned subsidiaries (Jadoo Power Systems) has just been awarded a contract to develop power systems for the US Special Operations Command. The other major investor in Jadoo is Contango Capital Management, located in Houston TX, whose Managing Partner is John Berger who used to manage energy trading books for Enron Corporation and who also served as an advisor to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2002 and 2003. This stinks to high heaven.
D. In case you didn't think he was an asshat, the CEO of Sinclair made the following statement on CNN this morning:
So press coverage of car bombs and unemployment statistics is equivalent to unfair free campaign commercials for Kerry. And the rest of the press are "Holocaust deniers" for denying partisan political hacks a forum from which they can make baseless thirty-year-old accusations on the eve of a close election.
This from the same media conglomerate that back in April suppressed Nightline's reading of the names of soldiers killed in Iraq because it was "contrary to the public interest." Riiiight.
Do I see which as better? Better from whose perspective?
(I'm not trying to be a smartass- I don't understand your question.)
Windows XP hides extensions by default. You have to find and uncheck the "Hide extensions for known file types" checkbox which renders "ILOVEYOU.TXT.vbs" as "ILOVEYOU.TXT".
The sole purpose of hiding extensions is to avoid scaring imbeciles who freak out at the sight of a period and three letters.
I'm just glad that two wrongs make a right.
No, if you read their comments more closely, you'll see that they're not exactly saying "two wrongs make a right". They're saying an actual wrong and a hypothetical wrong make a right. "If your side was in power they'd be doing this too so it's OK."
Yeah, I should have guessed that...
I like it when guys post "mirror here" links to their little cable modems and then reply to their own posts a few minutes later pleading for mercy.
<title>Ook!</title>
<body>
Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.
</body>
</html>
Wow. That's a sentence I never expected to read.
Slashdot must be journalism. After all, its stories appear on Google News!
But I asked what the President could do, not the government as a whole.
You're right, this situation is not just the president's fault.
Responsibility lies with the Republican-controlled Congress, the Republican-controlled Senate, and the president.
Remember to vote against all three.
Funny, but sounds a bit dated.
Dated? Cheney made his Ebay comment on September 9, 2004, just under a month ago.
For comparison, Gore's made his unfortunate "inventing the Internet" gaffe on March 9, 1999. I don't remember anyone saying that one was "dated" in 2000.
The drift velocity for DC current is around a few mm/sec, but the individual root-mean-square electron velocities in a wire are comparable to c. (Regardless of current.) Although they keep scattering off the copper atoms and off each other and change direction all the time, so they don't travel very far. But the signal propagation velocity through a wire depends much more on the rms velocity than the aggregate current drift velocity.
People are generally surprised that drift velocity of electrical current is so slow. When I was in middle school there were two water fountains in the cafeteria, separated by a hundred feet or so. A common trick was to wait until someone was drinking at one fountain, then turn the handle on the other fountain really fast- on/off/on/off/on/off- and they would instantly get sprayed in the face. Even though the bulk of the water itself drifted slowly through the pipes as you drank it, the individual water molecules were bouncing around in all directions at high speeds and the signal conduction through the water between the fountains was very fast.
That would be totally retro. And it would allow AMD to enter the business.
Somewhat off topic...
During the debate (a few hours ago) Cheney incorrectly referred people to factcheck.com instead of factcheck.org.
It looks like the guy who registered "factcheck.com" was watching the debate. Check out where it redirects! BWAHAHAHAHA
Oh, we were talking about an American jury trial? Here i thought we were talking about a country proven to have previously owned and used weapons of mass destruction.
Just using the example of a jury trial to explain the hole in your logic. You said it was a "binary determination" between weapons/no weapons, and that his failure to prove he had no weapons is equivalent to proof that he has weapons. Which is nonsense.
This is what Kerry actually said:Bush and Rove have seized on the two words "global test" and run with them, spreading the notion that under something called "the Kerry Doctrine" Paris would have veto power over the ability of Congress to declare war. But Kerry is plainly using the past tense ("where you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons") which unambiguously answers your question- we do not "wait on the Global Test" before acting. The "Global Test" needs no defining because it was a fucking figure of speech.
The nation deserves more than this absurd overparsing of substrings.
uh...let them search me and my house for weapons, randomly and without limits?
I heard people saying (before the invasion) that if no weapons were found, that would be all the proof we'd need that Saddam was trying to hide them and reason enough to go to war.
W00t! I figured it out! If something is binary, weapons or no weapons, it can be proved one way or the other.
And by that logic, innocent until proven guilty == guilty until proven innocent. I hope you never serve on a jury.
That's a variant of a more popular spelling.