No. Mock indignation, so everyone can try to look "less racist" than everyone else.
Which is precisely what the right has been using for the past quarter century to suppress liberal voices in the media since the religious reich got SOAP taken off the air. The comments that caused Bill Maher to be taken off ABC were far more defensible, in that case what sunk him was inadvertently telling rather more truth than folk could accept - if suicide bombers are 'cowards' dropping bombs from a plane is an even more cowardly way to act.
So now right wing racists finaly get measured by the same standards of gotcha that they have used to take liberals off the air for years. They have been blubbing about how a person can't make a racially insulting comment any more without being criticized for it all along, its not like they can pretend this was some sort of supprise.
There are plenty of liberal journalists who lost their jobs for nothing more than doing their jobs. Eric Alterman got dropped because he was too liberal, because his questions about the administration were too good. Nobody gets fired for being too Conservative, ask Bill O'Riely.
So now the same group of whackos who complained about the 'liberal' (i.e. true) journalism of Alterman and co get upset because the same tactics are used to take a racist, hate-filled bigot off the air.
Imus was canned because he had somehow got himself attached to the establishment. Politicians the establishment love to fawn over like Lieberman and McCain were regular guests.
Bill O'Rielly and Coulter both make far more outrageous remarks but they get a pass because the establishment does not take them seriously. Same goes for rappers.
What sunk Imus was not just the one comment, it was the history. In particular the long tirade against Gwen ifell.
OK so David Brock is no longer a right wing hit man, but is it an improvement now he is a left wing hit man?
Lieberman used to make his sanctimonious pleas against vulgarity in public life, then appear on Imus, go figure what type of hypocrite he is. Media Matters was tracking Imus precisely because he gave establishment war supporters a platform.
Ron Brown died under mysterious circumstances before he could be put in jail. "The most ethical administration in history" was not without more than its fair share of real scandal.
None of it turned into actual convictions. And in retrospect do you really beleive that Clinton was helping the CIA run drugs for the Contras while he was Governor or Arkansas? During the Clinton years there were numerous investigations but no convictions.
So far two of the top five Republicans in the House are in jail having admitted accepting over a million dollars in bribes. DeLay is indicted in one investigation and it looks likely that there will be at least another three Republicans indicted over the various Abramoff corruption scandals.
There really is no comparison, but the press which reported endlessly on the most stupid allegations imaginable (e.g. the drug running thing peddled by Pat Robertson) is curiously silent.
One serious possibility is that maybe it wasn't just the politicos who were attending the Wade/Wilkes Poker and Prostitutes parties in the Watergate, maybe some of those journalists who don't seem to be interested in journalism were also attending.
Its not like this is a moonbat allegation either, the parties are documented in indictments that led to guilty pleas. Yet no mention at all of such a juicy titbit in the establishment media.
War Powers Act. Unless Congress repeals it, he can send troops in for IIRC 60 days before having to explain himself
In an impeachment situation Congress can interpret the phrase 'High Crimes and Misdemeanors' any way it chooses. Losing a war certainly counts.
If Congress chooses to consider it so, the 60 day criteria is a limit on the exercise of Presidential power, not a grant of authority.
Impeachment is not a judicial proceeding, it is a political proceeding. Conviction is only possible if a President has completely exhausted their stock of political capital.
At this point Bush still has enough political capital to govern - barely. If he loses the support of his own party he is finished.
At the moment the strategy of the Democrats is to render the Bush administration impotent. Bush can keep the troops in Iraq but he has no domestic agenda whatsoever. His political legacy will expire shortly after his Presidency when the tax cuts expire in 2009/2010.
It isn't in the interests of the Democrats to impeach unless Bush starts to dig an even deeper hole for the country.
All the Iranians need to do to win a conflict started by the US is to sink one US capital ship out of the three that will be on station in the Gulf in May. Their odds are rather good because the straits are very narrow and the carriers target will be Tehran which is four hundred miles inland. The Iranian surface to ship missiles have a range of at least 200 miles. The US fleet would have to be 1,100 miles from Tehran to keep out of their range.
Starting a war in that tactical position would be an act of total stupidity. And yes, stupidity is an impeachable offense.
This isn't anti-Sco its a footling quibble about the brand of servers Groklaw is using this week.
If I was IBM I would not want to be giving gifts to Groklaw at the moment and if I was Groklaw I would not want to be taking them. Its too much of a conflict.
Knowing a possible mechanism is important, yes, but that's a long way from having a workable implementation of the method that is useful in a technological sense.
All interactions at the atomic level are quantum effects. A photon can only interact through quantum effects. The statement in the article is totally meaningless.
We have known that photosynthesis is a quantum effect since Einstein's paper on black body radiation.
Impeach him on what grounds? What law would he have broken? It's not a no-confidence vote. Now, if they passed a binding bill directing him not to do something (say, attacking Iran) and he did it, then they could impeach.
Waging war without legitimate authority of Congress.
Under the Constitution the Congress has the sole power to declare war. If Presidents go to war and win they can get away with it. If they fail, Congress can chose to call it a high crime.
What really cracks me up about all this is that, all through the 90s, it was Newt Gingrich and other Contract With America signatories who were assailing the democratic party for its "moral relativism."
It's called projection. All along they were acusing Clinton of being what they are.
Take the character issue, did Bush's behavior in the National Guard demonstrate 'character'? I certainly don't think so. His tenure as governor of Texas pretty much showed what sort of a person he is. The treatment of death penalty cases in particular where he appeared to show actual delight in putting people to death like it was some sort of perk of office.
Take the family issue, did Newt Gingrich demonstrate family values when he served divorce papers on his wife in the intensive care unit? Somehow that type of behavior got a pass.
I think that what really drove the GOP over the past 20 years or so was the devil's bargain they made with the 'religious' right. Pat Robertson and co were happy to let the GOP gain power provided they spent plenty of time talking about their agenda. But Gingrich, DeLay and co were no more religious than the typical American, they just talked that way because they wanted power and talking about religion helped them get it.
So you have all these people talking about religious values non-stop, values that they don't make any attempt to live up to. But they have to keep talking about them and even they can't pretend that its not hypocrisy. So they start excusing their behavior by saying that the Democrats do is so much worse.
And pretty soon there isn't anything left that they can't excuse away to themselves. They don't ever question their actions because they define themselves as posessing a monopoly on moral virtue - even as they are taking the bribes from the like of Abramoff and covering up the corruption of Ney, Cunningham and co and the odd pedophile in their midst.
And they get away with it all because the establishment media is hand in glove with them. They don't care whether the stories they print are true, all that matters to them is getting good copy.
And it all worked so well for them right until the bologsphere came along and the wheels fell off the tomato.
Cheney is the ringleader here. If Bush is to be impeached Cheney is clearly at least equally guilty.
Changing the color of the administration is exactly what the framers expected if an impeachment succeeded. Originally the Vice President was the runner-up in the Presidential contest.
Given the closeness of the past two elections I don't see any injustice whatsoever in the Whitehouse switching parties in the unlikely case that the President screws up so baddly that he loses a third of his own party in the Senate.
Besides which I think you would find that certain Democrats were at least equally upset at the idea of President Pelosi.
I abhor W as much as anyone, but what you are talking about isn't just your standard impeachment: it's a coup d'état. Since the third person in line is a democrat, this would be removing a democratically elected government in favor of the political enemies of those elected.
Which is why the Republicans were utter fools to attempt the impeachment of Clinton in the way that they did.
As a practical matter the constitution is more than robust enough here. no impeachment can take place unless there are 18 Republicans to back it in the Senate (Lieberman will continue to back Bush).
For an impeachment to succeed the President has to screw up on a genuinely heroic scale. So much so that 1/3rd of the Republicans in the Senate prefer Pelosi to Bush. Thats simply not going to happen unless the GOP has already written off their chances of winning the WH in 2008.
It is a very high bar, but one that I think Bush is quite capable of meeting. Loss of one or more capital shps in an unprovoked preventive war would be a military defeat of historical proportions, that would do it.
None of this is any different than the Clinton administration. The first thing Clinton did when taking office was fire all the attorneys in the DOJ and replace them. There was also a nearly identical scandal over lost email. Same corruption, different people.
This tired GOP talking point is completely untrue.
A USA can be replaced by the President. But the President cannot replace a USA in order to obstruct justice.
In the Carol Lam case the alleged reasons for firing her have all proven to be lies. The only credible explanation for her being fired was to prevent her continuing her investigation of corrupt Republicans - an investigation that had already resulted in two top House Republicans pleading guilty. When Lam was fired it appeared that an indictment of Jerry Lewis was likely to occur.
Two senior members of the GOP house leadership are in jail here. There is nothing remotely similar that occured during the Clinton admin.
Other USAs appear to have been fired for refusing to bring bogus charges against political opponents. This is also a form of obstruction of justice and is again a criminal offense.
There is more than enough evidence here to impeach Gonzalez. Any successor who did not immediately appoint a special counsel to investigate the corrpution allegations against Rove, Lewis, Foggo, Gonzalez and their subordinates should also be impeached.
Reno appointed independent prosecutors in cases where there was a clear conflict of interest. This administration should stop stalling and do likewise.
Also Bush should immediately pledge not to pardon any person who was a member of his administration. There is a strong suspicion that many are keeping quiet here in the hope that Bush will issue a blanket pardon after the November 2008 election.
He won't of course because he is as corrupt as they come, as well as being incompetent.
Honestly, I consider the remark more sexist that racist. I guess in this day and age sexism is tolerable, but racism is an unforgivable offense.
He got away with the remark. The reason he was fired was the long history of prior remarks that was unearthed once the story broke. What really finished him off was the series of attacks on Gwen Eifel.
Same thing happened with Trent Lott and George Allen. They mouthed off crypto-racist comments for years. Once the story broke it became obvious that it wasn't just a one-off mis-speaking, it was a pattern.
The only slight element of injustice is that Imus is nowhere near the worst offender out there. Ann Coulter's schtick is way more offensive but she still gets away with it. Matt Druge regularly gets caught 'making shit up' like his non-existent 'source' for the hit piece he did on Ware last week. But they don't get called on it because, well there are different standards for wingnuts. they are not expected to tell the truth or be civil so they can get away with it.
Twenty years ago it was the right that used to be behind this type of media firestorm. There used to be an amazing sit-com called SOAP which was completely brilliant. The religious right got it taken off the air.
Imus is no great loss to culture. SOAP was. So were the numerous programs like SOAP which simply could not be made until HBO started.
I don't suppose it's possible to impeach them both at the same time and disallow them to appoint karl rove as president.. is it?
Criminal trials routinely have more than one defendant. An impeachment takes the form of a criminal trial so there should be no problem impeaching both the President and Vice-President simultaneously.
I don't see that happening over the emails though. The Democrats are not going to impeach anyone unless there is a high probability that they can convict. At the moment it is doubtful that there would be more than five Republican Senators that have even serously thought about backing impeachment.
Gonzalez is another matter entirely. Unless he resigns soon he will be impeached. In his case the arithmetic is very different. A trial in the Senate would inevitably turn into a proxy for the impeachment of Bush. If the outcome of that trial was a 60:40 vote to convict the press would spend the next 18 months asking if the Democrats had found the seven votes they need to convict Bush. That is such a downside for the administration it cannot be allowed to happen. Gonzalez will go the minute Democrats start impeachment procedings.
The only situation in which Bush is likely to be impeached is if he launches an attack against Iran. That is more likely than not to end up an even greater fiasco than Iraq. Iran has more military hardware in the region than the US can call on. They have highly effective Chinese anti-ship missiles.
If the vulcans persuade Bush that bombing Iran would be a cakewalk it is sure to be another poorly planned fiasco premised on the idea that the enemy is a bunch of ingorant cowards who will roll at the first sign of a fight - yeah just like they did in the Iran-Iraq war when they lost a million lives.
If Bush bombs and the Iranians respond by sinking the Nimitz, closing the straits of Hormuz and launching a ground attack against Basra an impeachment becomes a very real likelihood. Short of that level of stupidity it is not likely to happen.
It's pretty clear from context that when Smith says "corporation" here, he means what'd we'd call a guild or an industry association. An organization which everyone in the industry was compelled to join and which had the power to regulate the business activities of everyone engaging in the trade. More like the AMA than, say, Microsoft or Google. Smith was not arguing for government antitrust regulation, but rather for governments to avoid mandating or encouraging industry self-regulation.
No it isn't.
Corporations existed before Smith. There is no reason why Smith would distinguish between a guild and a company in this case, the economic effect would be precisely the same.
Companies that are illegally engaged in price fixing are almost certainly also running a cartel. Otherwise it is pretty well impossible to keep the price fixing going.
Pretending that the only evil in the world comes from government is a childish notion.
Once upon a time there was this guy called Adam Smith who observed that whenever people engaged in the same trade meet they almost invariably engage in a conspiracy against the general public.
That same Adam Smith is the same Adam Smith who is the origin of pretty much everything that has historically been considered a free market.
In Smith's day state monopolies were a common means of raising revenue. Smith demonstrated that such restraints on trade have hidden costs that are much greater than were imagined at the time. The cost of the tax is much greater than the amount paid raised in revenue.
In libertopia they do things differently of course, the only evil that can ever exist in libertopia is the result of people consipiring together through the government. The fact that a large corporation has a similar coercive power to government is inconvenient ideologically and is thus ignored.
Nothing is going to happen here. At worst the SCOTUS redefine the interpretation of the anti-trust acts. But that might well be the best outcome long term for consumers since if Congress revisits price maintenance agreements making them explicitly illegal they wil probably act on advertised price maintenance as well.
I don't see an argument being made that prohibiting retail price maintenace is unconstitutional. Even though many members of SCOTUS are notorious partisan hacks I don't see that as being very likely.
What amazes me is the fact that nothing in the current draft of the GPLv3 forbids novell-microsoft deal. This means they are intending to insert something that doesn't exist or are actualy trying to keep people on microsoft's products. I'm willing to bet that if pushed, this will be shown in court and the GPLv3 will end up destroying/fracturing yet another portion of the FOSS comunity.
RMS can play his silly games but at this point the constituency for GPL3 is simply not large enough to be worth worrying about. He is trying to exert leverage that he simply does not have.
The Microsoft promise was a pretty significant piece of legal work. The fact is that the legal issues concerning intellectual property are both complex and unpredictable. Nobody can predict with certainty how a court will react to any extended license scheme. The traditional reciprocal license terms offered in the IETF turned out to be quite likely unenforceable.
If RMS thinks he can get the standards community to click its heels and jump to attention here he is very much mistaken. He is not the decider here, the W3C, OASIS and IETF are the deciders here and quite frankly I don't think that the 'open source' community in those institutions automatically falls into lockstep behind RMS any more.
Open source is important in those institutions, I would certainly never make a proposal if I didn't have at least a scheme to create some open source reference code somehow or expect some to be written by others. But the people who carry weight in the open source movement are people who write code, not the ones who vent on slashdot and like forums.
The lecturer pointed out that, by Poppers standards, Newtonian mechanics would be a pseudoscience (eg 'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' being logicaly equivalent to Freuds 'Every dream is a neurotic symptom').
This was not a problem for Popper though.
The physicists accepted Popper because they were not at all worried by the question of whether they qualified as scientists. A high bar suited them because they didn't care about meeting it or not. The physicists were not interested in claiming infalibility.
For the Marxists and Freudians of course this was the whole point of the game.
Your message reminds me of the Popper's objection to evolution: it is impossible to disprove it since whichever way organisms turn out is fine from the evolutionary standpoint. He concluded then that evolution is not a scientific theory according to his definition.
Popper's opinion of scientific process would have more force if he had been a scientist.
In fact Popper's barely concealled objective was to provide a definition of science that Marxist and Freudian pseudoscience would be unable to meet. In particular he objected to the fact that both claimed to be 'scientific' while declaring their core theories to be absolute truth beyond the possibility of doubt.
Scientists of the day were happy to go along with Popper's definition because they didn't like the specious nonsense from the followers of Marx, Freud, Jung et al either. In point of fact neither did Marx by the end 'all I can say is that I am not a Marxist' (letter to Engel).
It took another couple of decades for folk to start noticing that what scientists did didn't meet the standards Popper had set either. Or rather it took that long for people to start mentioning the fact. By then the 'scientific' claims of the Marxists and Freudians had been effectively buried and the original political ibjective had been met.
Popper himself accepted that according to his definition there had been perhaps two genuinely falsifiable theories in the history of science.
The falsification canard is regularly trotted out by folk trying to push intelligent design but they miss the entire point. Popper's definition is based on intent. Except in very rare circumstances it is generally not possible to fully meet the falsifiability criteria in full. The real question is not whether the criteria are met but whether the practitioners have the intention of seriously testing their theory by attempting to disprove it or not.
In the case of evoloution the historical theory that we are the product of evolution is inherently untestable, but so is the theory that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. What is testable is the volumes of evidence that support the claim that evolution is the simplest method of interpreting and explaining the fossil record, the one that has provided the greatest predictive power with respect to new discoveries and the one that is consistent with modern experiments that do meet the falsifiability criteria.
Intelligent Design on the other hand is exactly the type of nonesense concocted to support a preconceived notion that the practioners have no intention of seriously testing that Popper was trying to eliminate.
The value of a machine is directly proportional to the number of distinct tasks that an average user can realistically accomplish with it.
In the case of UNIX this is close to zero. The average user is not going to delve into csh and pretending that its possible to use Linux without being prepared to do this is nonsense.
Just trying to get a system running can be a serious effort.
How do you explain "windows being the dominant OS (yet)", then? Just curious.
That should be obvious.
UNIX is still in the remedial class as far as usability goes. Apple is an entirely proprietary scheme forcing you to buy hardware and software from the same vendor at outrageous prices.
The value of a machine is directly proportional to the amount of software it can run. So there is a selection bias towards already dominant O/S.
I'm more concerned that ONE COUNT of copyright infringement plus conspiracy to commit same can get you more time in prison than if you'd committed any number of violent crimes, up to and including some instances of first degree murder...
Twaddle, you are comparing apocryphal reports of MINIMUM sentences with the MAXIMUM sentence.
First degree murder is a mandatory life sentence virtually everywhere, parole is not likely for first degree murder before 10 years at the very least.
Sentences for crimes are intended to act as a deterent. There is considerably more incentive to commit property crimes so maximum sentences are high. Even though the guy is not accused of piracy for profit he did a heck of a lot of Warez and five years would not be unreasonable.
The fact that Adam Back is involved lends serious credibility to this effort. There may well be weaknesses, as with any scheme. But at least it's been looked at and implemented in part by one of the best in the biz.
Stefan is not exactly in need of credibility. We all know he can do the business on the technology side.
The main concerns here are first Stephan has a tendency to prioritize certain political attachments over practical issues. So the question is not whether the system will be as private as claimed but whether it will be realistic enough to be viable. The second concern is navigating the thicket of patent claims various parties control.
Tony Nadalin and myself have been proposing what appear to be similar schemes independently that do not offer the same degree of academic perfection (there is a possibility of registry default) but the IP is held (as far as we know) by companies that have a bigger interest in something happening than in milking their IP portfolios.
I don't yet have a white paper on the subject but I did present the scheme at RSA. Details should be comming out soon.
First of all you cannot be a party to a contract when you are under the influence period. That is why car sales need a notary to verify the sale.
Being drunk has almost no bearing on the validity of a contract. You can certainly be a party to a contract while drunk and persuading a judge that it should be otherwise is going to be exceptionaly difficult.
Car sales do not need a notary to verify a sale in this state and a notary is not required to determine whether the signatory is drunk or not.
Unfortunately that doesn't always work. Normally somewhere in the terms of sale you agree to NOT 'block' payment. If Amazon isn't able to charge your card, they'll just demand payment in some other form and eventually send you to collections.
I can't see a collections agency wanting to touch this type of 'debt'.
Once the charge has been disputed with the credit card company Amazon cannot sell it to a debt collection agency. It has become a disputed charge and selling it as a debt would constitute fraud.
Just sit back and wait for the class action suits to file.
Slashdot Mirror
So now right wing racists finaly get measured by the same standards of gotcha that they have used to take liberals off the air for years. They have been blubbing about how a person can't make a racially insulting comment any more without being criticized for it all along, its not like they can pretend this was some sort of supprise.
There are plenty of liberal journalists who lost their jobs for nothing more than doing their jobs. Eric Alterman got dropped because he was too liberal, because his questions about the administration were too good. Nobody gets fired for being too Conservative, ask Bill O'Riely.
So now the same group of whackos who complained about the 'liberal' (i.e. true) journalism of Alterman and co get upset because the same tactics are used to take a racist, hate-filled bigot off the air.
Now that is synthetic outrage.
Bill O'Rielly and Coulter both make far more outrageous remarks but they get a pass because the establishment does not take them seriously. Same goes for rappers.
What sunk Imus was not just the one comment, it was the history. In particular the long tirade against Gwen ifell.
OK so David Brock is no longer a right wing hit man, but is it an improvement now he is a left wing hit man?
Lieberman used to make his sanctimonious pleas against vulgarity in public life, then appear on Imus, go figure what type of hypocrite he is. Media Matters was tracking Imus precisely because he gave establishment war supporters a platform.
None of it turned into actual convictions. And in retrospect do you really beleive that Clinton was helping the CIA run drugs for the Contras while he was Governor or Arkansas? During the Clinton years there were numerous investigations but no convictions.
So far two of the top five Republicans in the House are in jail having admitted accepting over a million dollars in bribes. DeLay is indicted in one investigation and it looks likely that there will be at least another three Republicans indicted over the various Abramoff corruption scandals.
There really is no comparison, but the press which reported endlessly on the most stupid allegations imaginable (e.g. the drug running thing peddled by Pat Robertson) is curiously silent.
One serious possibility is that maybe it wasn't just the politicos who were attending the Wade/Wilkes Poker and Prostitutes parties in the Watergate, maybe some of those journalists who don't seem to be interested in journalism were also attending.
Its not like this is a moonbat allegation either, the parties are documented in indictments that led to guilty pleas. Yet no mention at all of such a juicy titbit in the establishment media.
In an impeachment situation Congress can interpret the phrase 'High Crimes and Misdemeanors' any way it chooses. Losing a war certainly counts.
If Congress chooses to consider it so, the 60 day criteria is a limit on the exercise of Presidential power, not a grant of authority.
Impeachment is not a judicial proceeding, it is a political proceeding. Conviction is only possible if a President has completely exhausted their stock of political capital.
At this point Bush still has enough political capital to govern - barely. If he loses the support of his own party he is finished.
At the moment the strategy of the Democrats is to render the Bush administration impotent. Bush can keep the troops in Iraq but he has no domestic agenda whatsoever. His political legacy will expire shortly after his Presidency when the tax cuts expire in 2009/2010.
It isn't in the interests of the Democrats to impeach unless Bush starts to dig an even deeper hole for the country.
All the Iranians need to do to win a conflict started by the US is to sink one US capital ship out of the three that will be on station in the Gulf in May. Their odds are rather good because the straits are very narrow and the carriers target will be Tehran which is four hundred miles inland. The Iranian surface to ship missiles have a range of at least 200 miles. The US fleet would have to be 1,100 miles from Tehran to keep out of their range.
Starting a war in that tactical position would be an act of total stupidity. And yes, stupidity is an impeachable offense.
If I was IBM I would not want to be giving gifts to Groklaw at the moment and if I was Groklaw I would not want to be taking them. Its too much of a conflict.
All interactions at the atomic level are quantum effects. A photon can only interact through quantum effects. The statement in the article is totally meaningless.
We have known that photosynthesis is a quantum effect since Einstein's paper on black body radiation.
Waging war without legitimate authority of Congress.
Under the Constitution the Congress has the sole power to declare war. If Presidents go to war and win they can get away with it. If they fail, Congress can chose to call it a high crime.
Do we really need to start a new weenie-ism here?
It's called projection. All along they were acusing Clinton of being what they are.
Take the character issue, did Bush's behavior in the National Guard demonstrate 'character'? I certainly don't think so. His tenure as governor of Texas pretty much showed what sort of a person he is. The treatment of death penalty cases in particular where he appeared to show actual delight in putting people to death like it was some sort of perk of office.
Take the family issue, did Newt Gingrich demonstrate family values when he served divorce papers on his wife in the intensive care unit? Somehow that type of behavior got a pass.
I think that what really drove the GOP over the past 20 years or so was the devil's bargain they made with the 'religious' right. Pat Robertson and co were happy to let the GOP gain power provided they spent plenty of time talking about their agenda. But Gingrich, DeLay and co were no more religious than the typical American, they just talked that way because they wanted power and talking about religion helped them get it.
So you have all these people talking about religious values non-stop, values that they don't make any attempt to live up to. But they have to keep talking about them and even they can't pretend that its not hypocrisy. So they start excusing their behavior by saying that the Democrats do is so much worse.
And pretty soon there isn't anything left that they can't excuse away to themselves. They don't ever question their actions because they define themselves as posessing a monopoly on moral virtue - even as they are taking the bribes from the like of Abramoff and covering up the corruption of Ney, Cunningham and co and the odd pedophile in their midst.
And they get away with it all because the establishment media is hand in glove with them. They don't care whether the stories they print are true, all that matters to them is getting good copy.
And it all worked so well for them right until the bologsphere came along and the wheels fell off the tomato.
Changing the color of the administration is exactly what the framers expected if an impeachment succeeded. Originally the Vice President was the runner-up in the Presidential contest.
Given the closeness of the past two elections I don't see any injustice whatsoever in the Whitehouse switching parties in the unlikely case that the President screws up so baddly that he loses a third of his own party in the Senate.
Besides which I think you would find that certain Democrats were at least equally upset at the idea of President Pelosi.
Which is why the Republicans were utter fools to attempt the impeachment of Clinton in the way that they did.
As a practical matter the constitution is more than robust enough here. no impeachment can take place unless there are 18 Republicans to back it in the Senate (Lieberman will continue to back Bush).
For an impeachment to succeed the President has to screw up on a genuinely heroic scale. So much so that 1/3rd of the Republicans in the Senate prefer Pelosi to Bush. Thats simply not going to happen unless the GOP has already written off their chances of winning the WH in 2008.
It is a very high bar, but one that I think Bush is quite capable of meeting. Loss of one or more capital shps in an unprovoked preventive war would be a military defeat of historical proportions, that would do it.
This tired GOP talking point is completely untrue.
A USA can be replaced by the President. But the President cannot replace a USA in order to obstruct justice.
In the Carol Lam case the alleged reasons for firing her have all proven to be lies. The only credible explanation for her being fired was to prevent her continuing her investigation of corrupt Republicans - an investigation that had already resulted in two top House Republicans pleading guilty. When Lam was fired it appeared that an indictment of Jerry Lewis was likely to occur.
Two senior members of the GOP house leadership are in jail here. There is nothing remotely similar that occured during the Clinton admin.
Other USAs appear to have been fired for refusing to bring bogus charges against political opponents. This is also a form of obstruction of justice and is again a criminal offense.
There is more than enough evidence here to impeach Gonzalez. Any successor who did not immediately appoint a special counsel to investigate the corrpution allegations against Rove, Lewis, Foggo, Gonzalez and their subordinates should also be impeached.
Reno appointed independent prosecutors in cases where there was a clear conflict of interest. This administration should stop stalling and do likewise.
Also Bush should immediately pledge not to pardon any person who was a member of his administration. There is a strong suspicion that many are keeping quiet here in the hope that Bush will issue a blanket pardon after the November 2008 election.
He won't of course because he is as corrupt as they come, as well as being incompetent.
He got away with the remark. The reason he was fired was the long history of prior remarks that was unearthed once the story broke. What really finished him off was the series of attacks on Gwen Eifel.
Same thing happened with Trent Lott and George Allen. They mouthed off crypto-racist comments for years. Once the story broke it became obvious that it wasn't just a one-off mis-speaking, it was a pattern.
The only slight element of injustice is that Imus is nowhere near the worst offender out there. Ann Coulter's schtick is way more offensive but she still gets away with it. Matt Druge regularly gets caught 'making shit up' like his non-existent 'source' for the hit piece he did on Ware last week. But they don't get called on it because, well there are different standards for wingnuts. they are not expected to tell the truth or be civil so they can get away with it.
Twenty years ago it was the right that used to be behind this type of media firestorm. There used to be an amazing sit-com called SOAP which was completely brilliant. The religious right got it taken off the air.
Imus is no great loss to culture. SOAP was. So were the numerous programs like SOAP which simply could not be made until HBO started.
Criminal trials routinely have more than one defendant. An impeachment takes the form of a criminal trial so there should be no problem impeaching both the President and Vice-President simultaneously.
I don't see that happening over the emails though. The Democrats are not going to impeach anyone unless there is a high probability that they can convict. At the moment it is doubtful that there would be more than five Republican Senators that have even serously thought about backing impeachment.
Gonzalez is another matter entirely. Unless he resigns soon he will be impeached. In his case the arithmetic is very different. A trial in the Senate would inevitably turn into a proxy for the impeachment of Bush. If the outcome of that trial was a 60:40 vote to convict the press would spend the next 18 months asking if the Democrats had found the seven votes they need to convict Bush. That is such a downside for the administration it cannot be allowed to happen. Gonzalez will go the minute Democrats start impeachment procedings.
The only situation in which Bush is likely to be impeached is if he launches an attack against Iran. That is more likely than not to end up an even greater fiasco than Iraq. Iran has more military hardware in the region than the US can call on. They have highly effective Chinese anti-ship missiles.
If the vulcans persuade Bush that bombing Iran would be a cakewalk it is sure to be another poorly planned fiasco premised on the idea that the enemy is a bunch of ingorant cowards who will roll at the first sign of a fight - yeah just like they did in the Iran-Iraq war when they lost a million lives.
If Bush bombs and the Iranians respond by sinking the Nimitz, closing the straits of Hormuz and launching a ground attack against Basra an impeachment becomes a very real likelihood. Short of that level of stupidity it is not likely to happen.
No it isn't.
Corporations existed before Smith. There is no reason why Smith would distinguish between a guild and a company in this case, the economic effect would be precisely the same.
Companies that are illegally engaged in price fixing are almost certainly also running a cartel. Otherwise it is pretty well impossible to keep the price fixing going.
Pretending that the only evil in the world comes from government is a childish notion.
That same Adam Smith is the same Adam Smith who is the origin of pretty much everything that has historically been considered a free market.
In Smith's day state monopolies were a common means of raising revenue. Smith demonstrated that such restraints on trade have hidden costs that are much greater than were imagined at the time. The cost of the tax is much greater than the amount paid raised in revenue.
In libertopia they do things differently of course, the only evil that can ever exist in libertopia is the result of people consipiring together through the government. The fact that a large corporation has a similar coercive power to government is inconvenient ideologically and is thus ignored.
Nothing is going to happen here. At worst the SCOTUS redefine the interpretation of the anti-trust acts. But that might well be the best outcome long term for consumers since if Congress revisits price maintenance agreements making them explicitly illegal they wil probably act on advertised price maintenance as well.
I don't see an argument being made that prohibiting retail price maintenace is unconstitutional. Even though many members of SCOTUS are notorious partisan hacks I don't see that as being very likely.
RMS can play his silly games but at this point the constituency for GPL3 is simply not large enough to be worth worrying about. He is trying to exert leverage that he simply does not have.
The Microsoft promise was a pretty significant piece of legal work. The fact is that the legal issues concerning intellectual property are both complex and unpredictable. Nobody can predict with certainty how a court will react to any extended license scheme. The traditional reciprocal license terms offered in the IETF turned out to be quite likely unenforceable.
If RMS thinks he can get the standards community to click its heels and jump to attention here he is very much mistaken. He is not the decider here, the W3C, OASIS and IETF are the deciders here and quite frankly I don't think that the 'open source' community in those institutions automatically falls into lockstep behind RMS any more.
Open source is important in those institutions, I would certainly never make a proposal if I didn't have at least a scheme to create some open source reference code somehow or expect some to be written by others. But the people who carry weight in the open source movement are people who write code, not the ones who vent on slashdot and like forums.
This was not a problem for Popper though.
The physicists accepted Popper because they were not at all worried by the question of whether they qualified as scientists. A high bar suited them because they didn't care about meeting it or not. The physicists were not interested in claiming infalibility.
For the Marxists and Freudians of course this was the whole point of the game.
Popper's opinion of scientific process would have more force if he had been a scientist.
In fact Popper's barely concealled objective was to provide a definition of science that Marxist and Freudian pseudoscience would be unable to meet. In particular he objected to the fact that both claimed to be 'scientific' while declaring their core theories to be absolute truth beyond the possibility of doubt.
Scientists of the day were happy to go along with Popper's definition because they didn't like the specious nonsense from the followers of Marx, Freud, Jung et al either. In point of fact neither did Marx by the end 'all I can say is that I am not a Marxist' (letter to Engel).
It took another couple of decades for folk to start noticing that what scientists did didn't meet the standards Popper had set either. Or rather it took that long for people to start mentioning the fact. By then the 'scientific' claims of the Marxists and Freudians had been effectively buried and the original political ibjective had been met.
Popper himself accepted that according to his definition there had been perhaps two genuinely falsifiable theories in the history of science.
The falsification canard is regularly trotted out by folk trying to push intelligent design but they miss the entire point. Popper's definition is based on intent. Except in very rare circumstances it is generally not possible to fully meet the falsifiability criteria in full. The real question is not whether the criteria are met but whether the practitioners have the intention of seriously testing their theory by attempting to disprove it or not.
In the case of evoloution the historical theory that we are the product of evolution is inherently untestable, but so is the theory that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. What is testable is the volumes of evidence that support the claim that evolution is the simplest method of interpreting and explaining the fossil record, the one that has provided the greatest predictive power with respect to new discoveries and the one that is consistent with modern experiments that do meet the falsifiability criteria.
Intelligent Design on the other hand is exactly the type of nonesense concocted to support a preconceived notion that the practioners have no intention of seriously testing that Popper was trying to eliminate.
In the case of UNIX this is close to zero. The average user is not going to delve into csh and pretending that its possible to use Linux without being prepared to do this is nonsense.
Just trying to get a system running can be a serious effort.
That should be obvious.
UNIX is still in the remedial class as far as usability goes. Apple is an entirely proprietary scheme forcing you to buy hardware and software from the same vendor at outrageous prices.
The value of a machine is directly proportional to the amount of software it can run. So there is a selection bias towards already dominant O/S.
Twaddle, you are comparing apocryphal reports of MINIMUM sentences with the MAXIMUM sentence.
First degree murder is a mandatory life sentence virtually everywhere, parole is not likely for first degree murder before 10 years at the very least.
Sentences for crimes are intended to act as a deterent. There is considerably more incentive to commit property crimes so maximum sentences are high. Even though the guy is not accused of piracy for profit he did a heck of a lot of Warez and five years would not be unreasonable.
Stefan is not exactly in need of credibility. We all know he can do the business on the technology side.
The main concerns here are first Stephan has a tendency to prioritize certain political attachments over practical issues. So the question is not whether the system will be as private as claimed but whether it will be realistic enough to be viable. The second concern is navigating the thicket of patent claims various parties control.
Tony Nadalin and myself have been proposing what appear to be similar schemes independently that do not offer the same degree of academic perfection (there is a possibility of registry default) but the IP is held (as far as we know) by companies that have a bigger interest in something happening than in milking their IP portfolios.
I don't yet have a white paper on the subject but I did present the scheme at RSA. Details should be comming out soon.
Being drunk has almost no bearing on the validity of a contract. You can certainly be a party to a contract while drunk and persuading a judge that it should be otherwise is going to be exceptionaly difficult.
Car sales do not need a notary to verify a sale in this state and a notary is not required to determine whether the signatory is drunk or not.
I can't see a collections agency wanting to touch this type of 'debt'.
Once the charge has been disputed with the credit card company Amazon cannot sell it to a debt collection agency. It has become a disputed charge and selling it as a debt would constitute fraud.
Just sit back and wait for the class action suits to file.