This is precisely why I love Slashdot. An insightful political statement that suddenly pulls a screaming left turn into a Star Trek analogy. It just brings tears of joy every time I see something so astute and yet jaw-droppingly nerdy. I love this place...
Come to think of it, wasn't their a TOS episode in a parallel universe where the parallel Kirk had a drop dead gorgeous #2 and he kept looking at her ass every time she went past his chair?
I believe the Kirk situation was actually covered in an episode of TOS where a computer explains why the captain shouldn't be leaving on the away mission. They got rid of the computer though
Last time, Bush probably did the right thing in staying the hell away from the rescue efforts and not getting in the way. The problem was that the emergency planning was utterly incompetent, not that the President was not on site.
This time they are going to make the opposite mistake. And McCain-Palin (sounds like a comedian) will be going off to campaign in the disaster zone during the disaster.
This is the reason they have a VP, or rather one of the few uses that has been found for a VP. You send the VP off to the disaster zone because they have the same clout and get it fixed capacity as the President in those situations but only require one tenth the amount of secret service etc. entourage. When Bush visited New Orleans to make a PR stop after it was realized he had blundered, they shut down relief for a day.
It is all deeply unserious, its about managing the next news cycle, not getting stuff done. Bush did not need to go to NOLA, he could have demonstrated he was in the loop by holding daily press conferences in the White House.
James T. Kirk made the exact same mistake in Star Trek TOS. When it came to TNG they realized that it somewhat strained credibility to have the captain of the ship lead the away teams each week. That was clearly Riker's job.
And talking about unserious choices, manipulation of the news cycle etc, I wonder which VP would be more competent in a situation like this.
I don't see why TI would have Mastercard and Visa involved here. They don't have an RFID payment scheme. The only RFID payment scheme I know of is that speedpass thing some of the gas companies use.
This is odd because CAs should never have a copy of their client's private keys in the first place.
And that never happened in this case either.
Eight years ago a group of hackers applied for two code signing certificates for microsoft.com. During the issue process it was discovered that the application was fraudulent and that the certificates had already been issued. A bug in the issue processing software had allowed a single operator to issue the certificate, the process is meant to require two.
The issue was immediately reported to Microsoft and a public statement made. The certificates were also placed on the certificate revocation list. The certificates expired many years ago and there is no evidence that they were ever used.
That is two process failures out of something like 400,000 SSL certificates issued each year.
The system is actually designed to cope with some failures, that is one reason we have CRLs and now OCSP.
How exactly does that keep the white house's email secret when communicating with people outside of that network? For example if you were someone in the White house sending an email to Russian or Chinese government officals?
No such network exists, white house email all travels through the regular Internet. The pentagon has some network capability of its own but that is mostly leased lines. Very few parts are actually pentagon controlled fiber. I have been in countless meetings where the pentagon has proposed building its own independent network.
Some White house email is encrypted. The pentagon has a massive email security project. But that only handles a portion of the traffic.
And the Bush administration have in any case been routing their communications through gwbush43.com which is run by an outside contractor and which must have been penetrated by the Russians, Iranians, Israelis and every other self respecting intel service.
You need to stop pretending that terrorism is a criminal act. Criminals don't seek to destroy a government or a people - as they ultimately are a sort of parasite that needs its host to live. Terrorists want to destroy the state and take over.
You need to stop the histrionics and start thinking.
West Germany and Great Britain both faced a terrorist threat in the 1970s. The West Germans responded treating the issue as a criminal matter and were very successful in containing the Baader-Meinhof gang. The British government responded with Bush style tactics and the problem only grew worse.
The British only began to be successful in rolling back the IRA when they started treating them as criminals. The IRA realized this and began campaigning for the British to treat them as political prisoners, not common criminals. Bobby Sands starved himself to death trying to stop the British government calling him a common criminal.
The war on terror campaign is completely counterproductive. It promotes Bin Laden to the status of a nation state. You go to war with countries, not criminals. And stop calling him a Jihadi and start calling him a hirabi instead.
Any fool can make tough talk about 'dead or alive', the fool in the white house has engaged in trash talk for the past seven years. But none of it has had any effect. Bin Laden is still alive, so is Al Zawahiri who is the real brains of the outfit.
Ignorance of the law -or the constitutionality of U.S. government requests- is no excuse.
Ignorance is one thing, getting a statement from government lawyers telling you that something is legal is something else. Even a statement from their own in-house counsel would provide some degree of protection as the FISA statute requires intent.
That is why John Yoo's torture memo was so disgusting, it quite probably gives a legal indemnity to the people who committed torture.
Fortunately, there is still a check. John Yoo became an accessory to the torture when he wrote the memo and he is not able to rely on his memo to provide him with an indemnity. It is still going to be very hard to prosecute him but not necessarily impossible.
Substituting the government lawyers for the telcos as the defendants in the wiretap case sounds like an excellent swap to me!
I'm not attacking you, but it you'd said something like that 3 months ago, you'd have been skewered, and your moderations would reflect it.
Actually I did.
The point of Karma is to weed out trolls, not to get worried about losing it. I don't think that my karma score has ever been much below 40 even when I was pointing out that we might well find out Napster's legal case was phony. There are some folk who abuse the moderation system to block unpopular points of view but they are nowhere near as big a problem as you might imagine.
Declan's worldview seems to be "Let me make up a whole bunch of shit about other people so I can sell copy/ads without any regard for the truth." If we're to take him as a proper representative of the Libertarians, then the Libertarians deserves to remain a fringe group. (Btw, I don't think we should take Declan as a proper representative of all Libertarians - I know some of them who are capable of making intelligent and honest assessments. Declan swims in similar waters as Ann Coulter.)
I don't think he is really thinking about how to sell ads, the Ann Coulter comment is more on target.
Declan is a libertarian, not a Libertarian. I would certainly not consider him a partisan booster for anything other than himself and his own career.
Finally, it's not over. The EFF is now suing the government directly. I'm not happy with this state of affairs, but Obama is still the better of the two when it comes to this issue.
Bingo,
The EFF could not sue the government directly before as the government was claiming that all the information was classified.
Now we have the necessary proof that the illegal conduct occurred and that it was authorized by the government officers. That was the objective from the start.
The suits against the telcos are not completely over yet, nor will they be over until the next government takes office. The EFF will continue to litigate them in order to prevent the destruction of the evidence.
This isn't very hard to understand--the entire reason for the existence of the FISA law is that it explicitly states that the telcos are not to listen to the executive branch, even if it makes such an order. They blatantly ignored the law that was written exactly to stop this sort of situation.
You might think that, I might think that.
Unfortunately the current federal bench has been largely appointed by Republicans and in particular the DC Circuit has a bunch of very partisan judges - the folk who brought us the infamous Kenneth Starr and is unable to get the fact that the constitution absolutely prohibits any number of criminal activities of the Bush regime: torture, imprisonment without trial, wiretapping, etc. etc.
The problem with FISA was that the 'lawyers' for the Bush regime had purportedly found that the President could disregard any law he liked by exercising the 'inherent powers' of the Presidency. FISA did not have a sufficiently strong exclusivity clause to absolutely knock that defense out. So the compromise reached was to let the telcos off the hook in return for the administration allowing the replacement bill to specify exclusivity.
It is not a great result, but it was the best that could be obtained with the Republicans holding the Whitehouse and the Democrats only holding the Senate on the vote of Joe Lieberman. Throughout the process it was the Republicans in general and John McCain in particular who were arguing to trash civil liberties and the Democrats who were arguing to restore them. The only exception was on torture where John McCain claimed that he was going to be tough with the administration, fooled everyone into believing he was being honest then agreed to everything the administration asked for. If you care about civil liberties it makes no sense to vote for John McCain on the basis that the Democrats were unable to stop the Republicans!
Civil liberties are not just a moral issue, they are essential if you are going to have an effective government. The torture of three Al Qaeda operatives was not just bad morally, it was a total disaster from the point of view of stopping terrorism. The administration got absolutely no useful information as a result: they got a series a bogus leads that all turned out to be wild goose chases. And now that the use of torture is known there is no prospect of getting any criminal convictions in a real court of law.
We tried the Bush administration tactics against terrorism in the UK at the start of the Northern Ireland troubles. To say they were a disaster is an understatement. First off the troops originally went in to protect the Catholics from the Protestant terrorists. The Provisional IRA was essentially a product of the British Internment policy. And the use of aggressive interrogation techniques that fall far short of the Bush administration torture lost popular sympathy abroad, here we are talking about 'hooding', not the sleep deprevation, shaking or such that the Bushies are still using. Folk like Rudy Giuliani were so disgusted by these tactics that they headed numerous IRA fundraisers and Rudy even gave Gerry Adams a humanitarian award.
McCain is simply more of the same, he thinks that the solution to every problem is the use of more force. He is completely unable to comprehend that force might create more problems than it can solve.
Actually he is a libertarian, he once told me that he was just interested in knocking down both sides.
His original piece was classic Declan: he used references to two previous non-stories he wrote to create another non-story. The C-Net rankings he referred to were a piece he wrote himself as was his complaint about not being allowed to attend the invitation only W3C workshop on use of the Web in government.
And what of Obama's support for illegal wiretapping indemnity?!?
Folk got way to over-excited about it. Unfortunately the telcos probably had a viable defense that they were acting (1) on government instructions and (2) on government advice that their action was legal.
The original objective in bringing the lawsuits was to uncover the criminal behavior by the Bush administration so that they could be held accountable for it. Suing the telcos was the only way to force the documents into the open.
Do not confuse the tactics adopted by people trying to stop the abuse with the objectives of the perpetrators. Phil Z. is pointing out that on civil liberties issues McCain is every bit as bad as Bush, we can expect a continuatio of the same lawless behavior.
McCain is old, yet:
-it's Obama who needs a week-long vacation
Does Obama need the vacation, or his young children? McCain did not do a full campaign during the Olympics either, in fact most days he made no public appearances.
it's Obama who thinks there are 57 or 58 states
Here it is pretty clear what your game is, that particular quote was analyzed by snopes. There is a long pause between 'fifty' and seven, then he goes on to say he has visited all the states but one and was not allowed to go to Hawaii or Alaska. It is pretty clear that he meant 48 continental states.
McCain on the other hand has made more than just one memory gaffe, he can't remember what factions are fighting in Iraq, which ones are with us and which against. Its not just the fact he had to ask an aide how many houses he has or what car he drives.
And another problem with McCain is that he keeps denying what he said in previous interviews, or tries to pass his previous comments off as jokes.
it's Obama who is afraid to debate McCain at 10 town-hall style meetings, after saying he would debate him anywhere and anytime.
Obama never said that, another McCain lie I am afraid. Only a fool would imagine that a skilled politician would unconditionally agree to debate his opponent in his opponent's favored format. It is one of those lies that are put out because they know that the faithful will believe it. It isn't meant to be believed by anyone other than the Republican party base.
McCain only invites GOP donors to his so-called town hall meetings. The campaign does not want to risk putting their candidate in a situation where someone would ask about the Rovian slime McCain is putting out in his TV ads. They certainly don't want someone else asking if he is too old and getting another 'you little creep' out of McCain. Why on earth would Obama want McCain to choose the audiences he speaks to?
Nope, you are pointing to gizmodo recycling the Declan MuCullagh article which is a POS by a partisan hack.
If you want to find out what Joe Biden or John McCain think about something go to anywhere you like and it is more likely to be accurate than Declan. In that piece he uses two other pieces he wrote to bolster his story but somehow forgets to mention he wrote them.
Biden is quoted as saying that there is no need to legislate net.neutrality because "any bit-filtering violations would provoke such a huge public ruckus they'd have to hold congressional hearings anyway--and they'd be standing-room only."
In other words, he said we will legislate that bridge when we come to it. Which is in fact what is starting to happen. The FCC is taking a pro-neutrality line.
That is the way the Senate likes to work on technology issues, they wait until the problem has become real and then they write legislation. Most often the problem never occurs. In many cases what people imagined was the problem was not the problem. Early on we had Time magazine pimping censorship legislation with their 'cyberporn' story. The result, COPA is still being litigated.
A trillion dollars a year? If you are trying to make points with numbers and there is no question it is costing a lot, you should probably use the right numbers. The Iraq war has cost a little over $500 billion to date, over five years, not $1 trillion a year. It is just like the 500,000 Iraqi civilian death number thrown out there by some on the far left, the real number is more around 150,000 and the point is still valid, but over-sensationalizing the hard numbers makes it easier to refute your point, even if it is a valid one.
The budget appropriations alone sum to more than $1 trillion, and those do not count the ongoing cost of veterans benefits for the wounded which are going to continue for the next 40 years, nor do they include the cost of borrowing. All told the out of pocket cost of the war is $400 billion a year of which $180 or so is in the form of an emergency supplemental and the rest is on budget. In addition there is $200 million in interest charges on the first five years of the war.
We will be paying for this war for the next 50 years. Even if the war ends tommorow it will be costing $300 million a year. And that figure goes up with every further year the US stays.
On the civilian casualties, the administration has made great efforts to prevent any accurate assement. We do have 150,000 reported casualties, but those only include the areas where the press was actually able to count reports.
The UN studies of civilian casualties report between 500,000 and 1,000,000 civilian casualties. The right has attacked these figures but made no effort to provide figures of their own. The UNJ was right on the WMD, cheney's office was wrong. So why now should the UN casualty figures be dismissed simply because Cheney and McCain find these inconvenient as well?
I'm going to think very poorly of anyone who votes for either of these two buffoons. If you want real change in DC, it's not going to come from McSame or Obama; you're going to have to vote for someone else. Sure, the chances of a third party winning this race are smaller than the chances of us being killed by a giant asteroid before November, but are you a hypocrite, or do you really want change?
Why don't we settle for choosing the candidate least likely to start unnecessary wars and end the Bush fiasco in Iraq that is costing a trillion dollars a year eh?
Then folk who want to make self-indulgent political gestures can choose one of the races down-ticket for the purpose eh?
I'm no McCain supporter, but my understanding is that he said this tongue-in-cheek in response to a question asked to him. I.e., he was joking.
It was a serious question, it was a relevant question and it was an important one. McCain is running for President of the USA, not host of the Daily Show.
McCain has a habit of dodging hard questions and covering his gaffes by claiming that they were jokes. Politics ain't beanbag. McCain knew that his comment was going to be interpreted seriously, if he gave a joke answer to avoid giving an answer it is very clear that he has left the Straight Talk Express.
I think it's a little obnoxious that Obama supporters keep bringing it up.
I think it is a little obnoxious that McCain runs racist ads like 'Celebrity'. I think it more than a little obnoxious that he runs away from his own words. The words 'sniveling' and 'coward' come to mind.
NATO's "wingnut philosophy" was created and implemented by Democrats, thanks. Furthermore, it was built on ideas that went back to that famous Republican, Woodrow Wilson... oh wait.
Thank you for conceding that NATO was built by Democrats.
Now please do not ruin it by attempting to use it for your idiotic wingnut imperialist lunacies.
Common defense means just that, the French and the Germans have zero intention of declaring war on Russia. So either McCain was being stupid when he proposed letting Georgia join, or more likely he was being deliberately misleading, making what appears to the uninformed to be a strong position in the secure knowledge that the French and Germans would veto the proposal.
Then NATO has become a farce administered by cowards. The whole idea was to keep free European nations free by guaranteeing collective security. Attack one, and the rest attack you in return.
Precisely, so France and Germany thought that it was probably not a good idea to allow Georgia into NATO before the border dispute with Moscow had been settled. Otherwise NATO would be obliged to come to the defense of Georgia even if Georgia happened to be in the wrong.
In this latest dispute the Georgian side fired the first shot. It appears that Russia is actually telling the truth when it claims that the population of S. Ossettia would prefer to be under Russian rule and the Georgian government appears to have taken a number of hostages.
We recognized the independence of Kosovo on the basis that the local population had the right to decide that they would not be part of Serbia any more. We should now recognize the exact same principle in Georgia.
Putin is certainly a bad lot, he was a KGB colonel and only a complete fool would look into his eyes and pronounce what an exceptionally fine soul he has. Putin has murdered his opponents on many occasions - in one case on the streets of London.
But Putin is certainly not an existential threat to the west or to any western government. There is not going to be a Russian invasion of Poland or Slovakia.
Now we could embark on another wingnut fantasy exercise in wishful foreign policy. I don't think that we can risk ayet more neo-con naivety.
And, perhaps strictly-speaking, you didn't provide ad hominen attacks, but you certainly weren't short on personal insults. Here's a few words you used: senile, out of touch, slime merchants, pathetic broken shell of a man, elected out of sympathy, poor vet, sob, and blubber.
And prepared to justify the use of every term.
Senile: McCain cannot remember how many houses he has or what car he drives without being told by an aide. More worrying he makes gaffe after gaffe such as accusing the Shiite Iran of arming the Sunni militants. In fact Iran is the biggest backer of Maliki (after the US).
Out of touch: He thinks that you have to make $5 million a year to be 'rich'?
Slime merchants McCain hired the crew that created the race baiting ads used against Harold Ford, including the notorious 'call me' ad. Nobody seriously disputes that these were racist now that Ford has been defeated and nobody will dispute that the McCain 'celebrity' ad had the same purpose either.
pathetic broken shell of a man once McCain was investigating the likes of Ralph Reed who bilked Indian tribes out of millions of dollars, in Reed's case taking money from one gambling tribe to run a fake anti-gambling campaign against a competitor. Today McCain has them heading his fundraisers. Which side of his mouth is McCain talking out of there? Which set of supporters is he planning to betray after the election - the 'religious' right who he once called 'agents of intolerance' or those who oppose their bigotted aims?
elected out of sympathy
I said that he is trying to get elected out of sympathy, I call it as I see it. At every opportunity he pulls the 'blub blub blub, booo-hooo I was a POW forty years agoo, bwwaahhhahhhhaaaaaa, blub sob, how dare anyone criticize me?"
Fact:Duke Cunningham was a genuine flying ace, he was a top gun trainer. He is currently in jail for accepting over $1.4 million in bribes. If Duke Cunningham could sell out later in life, why is it unfair to point out McCain has done the same?
Since you asked, I will. Ad Hominem is a logical fallacy, it takes the form "John McCain argues X', 'John McCain is senile', therefore 'X must be false'. That is an ad hominem fallacy, I did not make an argument of that form.
The question at issue here is suitability for office, McCain is a candidate. In this situation 'John McCain is senile' or 'John McCain with his seven houses is out of touch with ordinary Americans' are not 'ad hominem' fallacies but entirely relevant issues.
Nor can McCain complain, since he has spent $5 million attacking Obama as a 'celebrity' - or rather that is what he claimed to be doing. In actual fact what the slime merchants he hired were really up to was the old 'race-baiting' trick. The not so subtle undertone to the 'celebrity' ad was 'black men want to rape white women, thats why McCain's slime merchants showed Obama next to Britney Spears (a Republican known for her promiscuous sexual behavior) and Paris Hilton (parents Republican, notorious for her promiscuous sexual behavior). The idea was that Obama would respond to this racist ad as racist and McCain would then reply with the reverse-racism bid for sympathy.
The same slime merchants McCain hired did the exact same thing to Harold Ford with a series of race baiting ads 'Fancy Ford'. They tried the same on Obama util David Gergen belled the cat pointing out that the real message of the ad was 'uppity'.
Far from being a self-assertive warrior, McCain is a pathetic broken shell of a man who wants to be elected out of sympathy. Any time he gets asked a difficult question he tries to dodge it by talking about his POW days: "Bleat, bleat, oh have pity on this poor vet, don't hit me, don't ask me diffcult questions, bleat, sob, blubber".
Oh, come on. His whole point was that if Georgia had been quickly allowed into NATO when it SHOULD have been allowed in, Russia wouldn't have sent tanks into it in the first place. Are you unable to grasp the utility of a deterrent? There's a reason we never "declared war" on the Soviets.
You overlook the fact that the reason Georgia was not allowed to join NATO was precisely the fact that they had an existing border dispute with Russia. Moreover the current Georgian President was elected on a platform of starting a war with Russia to reclaim the territories concerned.
So why exactly should NATO give Georgia a blank check here? NATO has always been a defensive alliance, McCain is proposing turning it into an offensive alliance. The regions concerned have been occupied by Russia since 1992, Georgia has only been independent since 1991. Russia does in fact have a reasonable claim to make that the people who actually live in the region would prefer to be a part of Russia than Georgia.
Russia would not have sent the tanks in if the Georgians had been competent and blocked the only tunnel between Russia and S. Ossettia. So not only would McCain have us take sides in this squalid irredentist dispute, he would have us ally ourselves to an incompetent.
You're confusing a natural instinct to have the federal government NOT INVOLVED in every little aspect of your life with being uninterested.
Funny the way that wingnuts cannot talk to anyone without denigrating them as ignorant, stupid, etc. I guess that must be over-compensating for having a candidate who cannot remember what car he drives or how many houses he has. Is he really that confused or just senile?
McCain has never displayed the slightest interest in domestic policy. That is a problem because the levees that McCain called 'pork' are what the inhabitants of New Orleans called their protection from flooding.
Why aren't you concerned with how little thoughtful observation time Obama seems to be giving the actual reality on the ground in the middle east, as it relates to what the troops - whom he wants to command - are accomplishing?
McCain has made many untrue claims here. Was he lying when he said Obama had not talked to Petraus or had he merely forgotten that McCain was present when Obama questioned Petraus in the Senate hearings? You are repeating a Rovian talking point, it has no basis in fact.
Or (just as likely) he has a very predictable, oily level of disengenuous scorn for the people on the left to whom he's been promising one thing when - of course - he'll "refine" his position, and simply ignore once he gets the job.
Projection, projection. The party of Abramoff, Reed, DeLay, Stevens, Ney, Cunningham did exactly that. They promised much and then when they got into government they spent their time making it bigger and selling favors to their fat cat friends. They were willing to let Stevens build his billion dollar bridge to nowhere because they were going to get a cut from his kickbacks as well. Stevens got a $500,000 house renovation done for free by Veco, how much did the rest of the sleazy gang get?
Now once there was a guy called John McCain who used to be against that type of thing, but unfortunately its not that McCain who is on the ballot. Instead we have Rove-McCain, which is what you get when the old John McCain sells out all his principals to the religious right and the corruption wings of the GOP to win the primary. The old McCain is gone, all that is left is the empty husk left to be filled by his aides.
Slashdot Mirror
Come to think of it, wasn't their a TOS episode in a parallel universe where the parallel Kirk had a drop dead gorgeous #2 and he kept looking at her ass every time she went past his chair?
Anyone else remember that episode?
Now what does that remind you of?
Oh yes "Bin Laden determined to strike in US"
This time they are going to make the opposite mistake. And McCain-Palin (sounds like a comedian) will be going off to campaign in the disaster zone during the disaster.
This is the reason they have a VP, or rather one of the few uses that has been found for a VP. You send the VP off to the disaster zone because they have the same clout and get it fixed capacity as the President in those situations but only require one tenth the amount of secret service etc. entourage. When Bush visited New Orleans to make a PR stop after it was realized he had blundered, they shut down relief for a day.
It is all deeply unserious, its about managing the next news cycle, not getting stuff done. Bush did not need to go to NOLA, he could have demonstrated he was in the loop by holding daily press conferences in the White House.
James T. Kirk made the exact same mistake in Star Trek TOS. When it came to TNG they realized that it somewhat strained credibility to have the captain of the ship lead the away teams each week. That was clearly Riker's job.
And talking about unserious choices, manipulation of the news cycle etc, I wonder which VP would be more competent in a situation like this.
I don't see why TI would have Mastercard and Visa involved here. They don't have an RFID payment scheme. The only RFID payment scheme I know of is that speedpass thing some of the gas companies use.
And that never happened in this case either.
Eight years ago a group of hackers applied for two code signing certificates for microsoft.com. During the issue process it was discovered that the application was fraudulent and that the certificates had already been issued. A bug in the issue processing software had allowed a single operator to issue the certificate, the process is meant to require two.
The issue was immediately reported to Microsoft and a public statement made. The certificates were also placed on the certificate revocation list. The certificates expired many years ago and there is no evidence that they were ever used.
That is two process failures out of something like 400,000 SSL certificates issued each year.
The system is actually designed to cope with some failures, that is one reason we have CRLs and now OCSP.
No such network exists, white house email all travels through the regular Internet. The pentagon has some network capability of its own but that is mostly leased lines. Very few parts are actually pentagon controlled fiber. I have been in countless meetings where the pentagon has proposed building its own independent network.
Some White house email is encrypted. The pentagon has a massive email security project. But that only handles a portion of the traffic.
And the Bush administration have in any case been routing their communications through gwbush43.com which is run by an outside contractor and which must have been penetrated by the Russians, Iranians, Israelis and every other self respecting intel service.
You need to stop the histrionics and start thinking.
West Germany and Great Britain both faced a terrorist threat in the 1970s. The West Germans responded treating the issue as a criminal matter and were very successful in containing the Baader-Meinhof gang. The British government responded with Bush style tactics and the problem only grew worse.
The British only began to be successful in rolling back the IRA when they started treating them as criminals. The IRA realized this and began campaigning for the British to treat them as political prisoners, not common criminals. Bobby Sands starved himself to death trying to stop the British government calling him a common criminal.
The war on terror campaign is completely counterproductive. It promotes Bin Laden to the status of a nation state. You go to war with countries, not criminals. And stop calling him a Jihadi and start calling him a hirabi instead.
Any fool can make tough talk about 'dead or alive', the fool in the white house has engaged in trash talk for the past seven years. But none of it has had any effect. Bin Laden is still alive, so is Al Zawahiri who is the real brains of the outfit.
Ignorance is one thing, getting a statement from government lawyers telling you that something is legal is something else. Even a statement from their own in-house counsel would provide some degree of protection as the FISA statute requires intent.
That is why John Yoo's torture memo was so disgusting, it quite probably gives a legal indemnity to the people who committed torture.
Fortunately, there is still a check. John Yoo became an accessory to the torture when he wrote the memo and he is not able to rely on his memo to provide him with an indemnity. It is still going to be very hard to prosecute him but not necessarily impossible.
Substituting the government lawyers for the telcos as the defendants in the wiretap case sounds like an excellent swap to me!
Actually I did.
The point of Karma is to weed out trolls, not to get worried about losing it. I don't think that my karma score has ever been much below 40 even when I was pointing out that we might well find out Napster's legal case was phony. There are some folk who abuse the moderation system to block unpopular points of view but they are nowhere near as big a problem as you might imagine.
I don't think he is really thinking about how to sell ads, the Ann Coulter comment is more on target.
Declan is a libertarian, not a Libertarian. I would certainly not consider him a partisan booster for anything other than himself and his own career.
Bingo,
The EFF could not sue the government directly before as the government was claiming that all the information was classified.
Now we have the necessary proof that the illegal conduct occurred and that it was authorized by the government officers. That was the objective from the start.
The suits against the telcos are not completely over yet, nor will they be over until the next government takes office. The EFF will continue to litigate them in order to prevent the destruction of the evidence.
You might think that, I might think that.
Unfortunately the current federal bench has been largely appointed by Republicans and in particular the DC Circuit has a bunch of very partisan judges - the folk who brought us the infamous Kenneth Starr and is unable to get the fact that the constitution absolutely prohibits any number of criminal activities of the Bush regime: torture, imprisonment without trial, wiretapping, etc. etc.
The problem with FISA was that the 'lawyers' for the Bush regime had purportedly found that the President could disregard any law he liked by exercising the 'inherent powers' of the Presidency. FISA did not have a sufficiently strong exclusivity clause to absolutely knock that defense out. So the compromise reached was to let the telcos off the hook in return for the administration allowing the replacement bill to specify exclusivity.
It is not a great result, but it was the best that could be obtained with the Republicans holding the Whitehouse and the Democrats only holding the Senate on the vote of Joe Lieberman. Throughout the process it was the Republicans in general and John McCain in particular who were arguing to trash civil liberties and the Democrats who were arguing to restore them. The only exception was on torture where John McCain claimed that he was going to be tough with the administration, fooled everyone into believing he was being honest then agreed to everything the administration asked for. If you care about civil liberties it makes no sense to vote for John McCain on the basis that the Democrats were unable to stop the Republicans!
Civil liberties are not just a moral issue, they are essential if you are going to have an effective government. The torture of three Al Qaeda operatives was not just bad morally, it was a total disaster from the point of view of stopping terrorism. The administration got absolutely no useful information as a result: they got a series a bogus leads that all turned out to be wild goose chases. And now that the use of torture is known there is no prospect of getting any criminal convictions in a real court of law.
We tried the Bush administration tactics against terrorism in the UK at the start of the Northern Ireland troubles. To say they were a disaster is an understatement. First off the troops originally went in to protect the Catholics from the Protestant terrorists. The Provisional IRA was essentially a product of the British Internment policy. And the use of aggressive interrogation techniques that fall far short of the Bush administration torture lost popular sympathy abroad, here we are talking about 'hooding', not the sleep deprevation, shaking or such that the Bushies are still using. Folk like Rudy Giuliani were so disgusted by these tactics that they headed numerous IRA fundraisers and Rudy even gave Gerry Adams a humanitarian award.
McCain is simply more of the same, he thinks that the solution to every problem is the use of more force. He is completely unable to comprehend that force might create more problems than it can solve.
Actually he is a libertarian, he once told me that he was just interested in knocking down both sides.
His original piece was classic Declan: he used references to two previous non-stories he wrote to create another non-story. The C-Net rankings he referred to were a piece he wrote himself as was his complaint about not being allowed to attend the invitation only W3C workshop on use of the Web in government.
Folk got way to over-excited about it. Unfortunately the telcos probably had a viable defense that they were acting (1) on government instructions and (2) on government advice that their action was legal.
The original objective in bringing the lawsuits was to uncover the criminal behavior by the Bush administration so that they could be held accountable for it. Suing the telcos was the only way to force the documents into the open.
Do not confuse the tactics adopted by people trying to stop the abuse with the objectives of the perpetrators. Phil Z. is pointing out that on civil liberties issues McCain is every bit as bad as Bush, we can expect a continuatio of the same lawless behavior.
Phil is not the first person to feel that they have been deliberately misquoted by Declan 'make it up' MuCullagh, he probably won't be the last.
Does Obama need the vacation, or his young children? McCain did not do a full campaign during the Olympics either, in fact most days he made no public appearances.
it's Obama who thinks there are 57 or 58 states
Here it is pretty clear what your game is, that particular quote was analyzed by snopes. There is a long pause between 'fifty' and seven, then he goes on to say he has visited all the states but one and was not allowed to go to Hawaii or Alaska. It is pretty clear that he meant 48 continental states.
McCain on the other hand has made more than just one memory gaffe, he can't remember what factions are fighting in Iraq, which ones are with us and which against. Its not just the fact he had to ask an aide how many houses he has or what car he drives.
And another problem with McCain is that he keeps denying what he said in previous interviews, or tries to pass his previous comments off as jokes.
it's Obama who is afraid to debate McCain at 10 town-hall style meetings, after saying he would debate him anywhere and anytime.
Obama never said that, another McCain lie I am afraid. Only a fool would imagine that a skilled politician would unconditionally agree to debate his opponent in his opponent's favored format. It is one of those lies that are put out because they know that the faithful will believe it. It isn't meant to be believed by anyone other than the Republican party base.
McCain only invites GOP donors to his so-called town hall meetings. The campaign does not want to risk putting their candidate in a situation where someone would ask about the Rovian slime McCain is putting out in his TV ads. They certainly don't want someone else asking if he is too old and getting another 'you little creep' out of McCain. Why on earth would Obama want McCain to choose the audiences he speaks to?
If you want to find out what Joe Biden or John McCain think about something go to anywhere you like and it is more likely to be accurate than Declan. In that piece he uses two other pieces he wrote to bolster his story but somehow forgets to mention he wrote them.
Biden is quoted as saying that there is no need to legislate net.neutrality because "any bit-filtering violations would provoke such a huge public ruckus they'd have to hold congressional hearings anyway--and they'd be standing-room only."
In other words, he said we will legislate that bridge when we come to it. Which is in fact what is starting to happen. The FCC is taking a pro-neutrality line.
That is the way the Senate likes to work on technology issues, they wait until the problem has become real and then they write legislation. Most often the problem never occurs. In many cases what people imagined was the problem was not the problem. Early on we had Time magazine pimping censorship legislation with their 'cyberporn' story. The result, COPA is still being litigated.
The budget appropriations alone sum to more than $1 trillion, and those do not count the ongoing cost of veterans benefits for the wounded which are going to continue for the next 40 years, nor do they include the cost of borrowing. All told the out of pocket cost of the war is $400 billion a year of which $180 or so is in the form of an emergency supplemental and the rest is on budget. In addition there is $200 million in interest charges on the first five years of the war.
We will be paying for this war for the next 50 years. Even if the war ends tommorow it will be costing $300 million a year. And that figure goes up with every further year the US stays.
On the civilian casualties, the administration has made great efforts to prevent any accurate assement. We do have 150,000 reported casualties, but those only include the areas where the press was actually able to count reports.
The UN studies of civilian casualties report between 500,000 and 1,000,000 civilian casualties. The right has attacked these figures but made no effort to provide figures of their own. The UNJ was right on the WMD, cheney's office was wrong. So why now should the UN casualty figures be dismissed simply because Cheney and McCain find these inconvenient as well?
Why don't we settle for choosing the candidate least likely to start unnecessary wars and end the Bush fiasco in Iraq that is costing a trillion dollars a year eh?
Then folk who want to make self-indulgent political gestures can choose one of the races down-ticket for the purpose eh?
It was a serious question, it was a relevant question and it was an important one. McCain is running for President of the USA, not host of the Daily Show.
McCain has a habit of dodging hard questions and covering his gaffes by claiming that they were jokes. Politics ain't beanbag. McCain knew that his comment was going to be interpreted seriously, if he gave a joke answer to avoid giving an answer it is very clear that he has left the Straight Talk Express.
I think it's a little obnoxious that Obama supporters keep bringing it up.
I think it is a little obnoxious that McCain runs racist ads like 'Celebrity'. I think it more than a little obnoxious that he runs away from his own words. The words 'sniveling' and 'coward' come to mind.
Thank you for conceding that NATO was built by Democrats.
Now please do not ruin it by attempting to use it for your idiotic wingnut imperialist lunacies.
Common defense means just that, the French and the Germans have zero intention of declaring war on Russia. So either McCain was being stupid when he proposed letting Georgia join, or more likely he was being deliberately misleading, making what appears to the uninformed to be a strong position in the secure knowledge that the French and Germans would veto the proposal.
Precisely, so France and Germany thought that it was probably not a good idea to allow Georgia into NATO before the border dispute with Moscow had been settled. Otherwise NATO would be obliged to come to the defense of Georgia even if Georgia happened to be in the wrong.
In this latest dispute the Georgian side fired the first shot. It appears that Russia is actually telling the truth when it claims that the population of S. Ossettia would prefer to be under Russian rule and the Georgian government appears to have taken a number of hostages.
We recognized the independence of Kosovo on the basis that the local population had the right to decide that they would not be part of Serbia any more. We should now recognize the exact same principle in Georgia.
Putin is certainly a bad lot, he was a KGB colonel and only a complete fool would look into his eyes and pronounce what an exceptionally fine soul he has. Putin has murdered his opponents on many occasions - in one case on the streets of London.
But Putin is certainly not an existential threat to the west or to any western government. There is not going to be a Russian invasion of Poland or Slovakia.
Now we could embark on another wingnut fantasy exercise in wishful foreign policy. I don't think that we can risk ayet more neo-con naivety.
And prepared to justify the use of every term.
Senile: McCain cannot remember how many houses he has or what car he drives without being told by an aide. More worrying he makes gaffe after gaffe such as accusing the Shiite Iran of arming the Sunni militants. In fact Iran is the biggest backer of Maliki (after the US).
Out of touch: He thinks that you have to make $5 million a year to be 'rich'?
Slime merchants McCain hired the crew that created the race baiting ads used against Harold Ford, including the notorious 'call me' ad. Nobody seriously disputes that these were racist now that Ford has been defeated and nobody will dispute that the McCain 'celebrity' ad had the same purpose either.
pathetic broken shell of a man once McCain was investigating the likes of Ralph Reed who bilked Indian tribes out of millions of dollars, in Reed's case taking money from one gambling tribe to run a fake anti-gambling campaign against a competitor. Today McCain has them heading his fundraisers. Which side of his mouth is McCain talking out of there? Which set of supporters is he planning to betray after the election - the 'religious' right who he once called 'agents of intolerance' or those who oppose their bigotted aims?
elected out of sympathy
I said that he is trying to get elected out of sympathy, I call it as I see it. At every opportunity he pulls the 'blub blub blub, booo-hooo I was a POW forty years agoo, bwwaahhhahhhhaaaaaa, blub sob, how dare anyone criticize me?"
Fact:Duke Cunningham was a genuine flying ace, he was a top gun trainer. He is currently in jail for accepting over $1.4 million in bribes. If Duke Cunningham could sell out later in life, why is it unfair to point out McCain has done the same?
Since you asked, I will. Ad Hominem is a logical fallacy, it takes the form "John McCain argues X', 'John McCain is senile', therefore 'X must be false'. That is an ad hominem fallacy, I did not make an argument of that form.
The question at issue here is suitability for office, McCain is a candidate. In this situation 'John McCain is senile' or 'John McCain with his seven houses is out of touch with ordinary Americans' are not 'ad hominem' fallacies but entirely relevant issues.
Nor can McCain complain, since he has spent $5 million attacking Obama as a 'celebrity' - or rather that is what he claimed to be doing. In actual fact what the slime merchants he hired were really up to was the old 'race-baiting' trick. The not so subtle undertone to the 'celebrity' ad was 'black men want to rape white women, thats why McCain's slime merchants showed Obama next to Britney Spears (a Republican known for her promiscuous sexual behavior) and Paris Hilton (parents Republican, notorious for her promiscuous sexual behavior). The idea was that Obama would respond to this racist ad as racist and McCain would then reply with the reverse-racism bid for sympathy.
The same slime merchants McCain hired did the exact same thing to Harold Ford with a series of race baiting ads 'Fancy Ford'. They tried the same on Obama util David Gergen belled the cat pointing out that the real message of the ad was 'uppity'.
Far from being a self-assertive warrior, McCain is a pathetic broken shell of a man who wants to be elected out of sympathy. Any time he gets asked a difficult question he tries to dodge it by talking about his POW days: "Bleat, bleat, oh have pity on this poor vet, don't hit me, don't ask me diffcult questions, bleat, sob, blubber".
You overlook the fact that the reason Georgia was not allowed to join NATO was precisely the fact that they had an existing border dispute with Russia. Moreover the current Georgian President was elected on a platform of starting a war with Russia to reclaim the territories concerned.
So why exactly should NATO give Georgia a blank check here? NATO has always been a defensive alliance, McCain is proposing turning it into an offensive alliance. The regions concerned have been occupied by Russia since 1992, Georgia has only been independent since 1991. Russia does in fact have a reasonable claim to make that the people who actually live in the region would prefer to be a part of Russia than Georgia.
Russia would not have sent the tanks in if the Georgians had been competent and blocked the only tunnel between Russia and S. Ossettia. So not only would McCain have us take sides in this squalid irredentist dispute, he would have us ally ourselves to an incompetent.
You're confusing a natural instinct to have the federal government NOT INVOLVED in every little aspect of your life with being uninterested.
Funny the way that wingnuts cannot talk to anyone without denigrating them as ignorant, stupid, etc. I guess that must be over-compensating for having a candidate who cannot remember what car he drives or how many houses he has. Is he really that confused or just senile?
McCain has never displayed the slightest interest in domestic policy. That is a problem because the levees that McCain called 'pork' are what the inhabitants of New Orleans called their protection from flooding.
Why aren't you concerned with how little thoughtful observation time Obama seems to be giving the actual reality on the ground in the middle east, as it relates to what the troops - whom he wants to command - are accomplishing?
McCain has made many untrue claims here. Was he lying when he said Obama had not talked to Petraus or had he merely forgotten that McCain was present when Obama questioned Petraus in the Senate hearings? You are repeating a Rovian talking point, it has no basis in fact.
Or (just as likely) he has a very predictable, oily level of disengenuous scorn for the people on the left to whom he's been promising one thing when - of course - he'll "refine" his position, and simply ignore once he gets the job.
Projection, projection. The party of Abramoff, Reed, DeLay, Stevens, Ney, Cunningham did exactly that. They promised much and then when they got into government they spent their time making it bigger and selling favors to their fat cat friends. They were willing to let Stevens build his billion dollar bridge to nowhere because they were going to get a cut from his kickbacks as well. Stevens got a $500,000 house renovation done for free by Veco, how much did the rest of the sleazy gang get?
Now once there was a guy called John McCain who used to be against that type of thing, but unfortunately its not that McCain who is on the ballot. Instead we have Rove-McCain, which is what you get when the old John McCain sells out all his principals to the religious right and the corruption wings of the GOP to win the primary. The old McCain is gone, all that is left is the empty husk left to be filled by his aides.