uh no. dc resident here. you can see the lincoln memorial from the FDR memorial. while this google thing is odd, yes, if you can't find the lincoln memorial while you are standing around confused at the FDR memorial.. you have bigger problems to worry about.
Which is why, ultimately, the litter temper tantrum by the Beck haters on Google is futile. People will simply ask for directions if they're unsure. If the intent was truly to disrupt the assembly at the memorial, then not only will it be ineffectual, it won't speak very well of those critics on the web.
Glenn Beck fans cannot be fooled by simple misinformation, they have no need for geographical facts, their gut instincts will lead them directly to the rally.
I imagine they'll simply have enough sense to ask for directions.
As another poster pointed out with the China angle, your statement is laughable, sir. It would be more accurate to say that Google tries to downplay politics, but the company is neck-deep in politics every day.
Glenn Beck is getting the message not to piss off those who contribute to Wikis.
We're all getting the message that some Wiki contributors are throwing a temper tantrum because Glenn Beck is, horror of horrors, holding an assembly in front of the Lincoln Memorial. You know, like other people have been doing for years. What a crime, eh?
Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance.
This bill forces everyone to buy insurance whether they want to or not, and worse, forces them to buy it from a private third party under penalty of law. Not even the most extreme reading of the Commerce Clause justifies that, and I look forward to your excuses when SCOTUS throws the mandate out as unconstitutional.
If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.
If we really want to fix the problem... to the extent that it can be fixed... then we'll propose what we've proposed for years... for Congress to use the Commerce Clause in what is actually a productive, Constitutional manner and ban states from restricting interstate health insurance competition, which most of them do. This is one of the few issues where the states are wrong about the 10th Amendment. The states don't have a right to tell me I can't buy from a company in another state, and opening up a national market would mean national risk pools. Health insurance would then become more like car insurance. If car insurance were restricted by the states in the way that health insurance is, then no one could afford to drive either. There's a real market for auto insurance, though.
As for your concern about the poor, I might be moved more if I didn't suspect that your solution was probably "let the government handle it". You can help the poor without screwing the rights of everyone else, which this "reform" bill did. Further, this isn't an issue of "the poor", and never was. The poor have had access to paid healthcare for years. That's what Medicaid is, after all. In addition to that, most states have a program for uninsured children if you don't meet the poverty criteria but still have limited income. In Alabama it's called AlKids. The real issue is affordable health insurance for the not poor-and yet-not rich. Which *gasp!* a real market would go a long way towards helping.
I don't know about you, but when someone spends half a billion on a school building, I'd say that as long as we pay taxes here, that falls under Stuff That Matters.
Not to worry, the reset of the world can still do embryonic research.
Embryonic research never ceased in the US. It was never banned. Federal funding for it was restricted, but research continued from other funding sources. We've not yet reached the point where everything comes from the federal government. Yet.
Except that those 'bozos' aren't keeping you from life saving embryonic stem cell cures. Reality is. All of the big advances have come from non-embryonic cell research. And despite what you might have heard, no one stopped embryonic research. It continues to this day. Results-wise, it's just been a bust compared to adult stem cell lines.
(I know I left I lot out, but I don't think I'm distorting the meaning). As far as I can tell, liver cells in a petri dish would count as human embryos under that definition.
Then if President Obama wants the funding, he needs to convince Congress (which his party controls) to tighten the wording of the law, or repeal it altogether.
The judge pretty much had to block this. The President can't simply wave his hand and declare a law passed by Congress (and sighed by the previous President) to be null and void. There's still that whole separation of powers thing to consider. If the wording of the Dickey Amendment is too vague, then it's the responsibility of Congress to fix it.
It says said group does not want to be assimilated and would instead prefer retaining certain unique cultural and linguistic elements.
I think the truth is likely simpler than that. I think said group just didn't give a rats ass about learning proper English in school. I don't think it's a rebellion against assimilation as much as it's "F*ck this diagramming a sentence sh*t".
that they either take the company down (auto industry)
Just remember, it was management's idea to give those ridiculous retirement benefits, not the unions. The union requested a modest pay raise, and management thought they'd get away cheap by giving retirement bennies instead, thinking workers would only live to 68. In hindsight, the pay raise would have been much cheaper.
Except that they got pay raises and exorbitant benefits. And I'm going to need to see some kind of citation about the benefits being management's idea. Every time the UAW threatens to strike, benefits seem to be at the heart of their demands.
I love it when teachers bitch about pay (although, sometimes warranted)
Except that I'm not sure they're really underpaid. Education majors attract among the lowest SAT/ACT scoring students. It also attracts more females than males, and includes a large number of people teaching primary school rather than secondary school. High Schools pay more because more knowledge is needed. And some districts pay by expertise rather than a flat scale regardless of subject... thus, in some school districts, math and science teachers will make more money than history or English teachers, which aren't as scarce. And just like in the "real world", this disparity in pay can be quite large. I had math and science teachers that left to take jobs in the private sector. I can't say I ever recall a social studies teacher getting such job offers. Skills matter in a market, and we use markets.
The average starting salary for an education major is around $35K a year. The average starting salary for a business grad is around $41K. The average salary high point for an education degree is about $54K, but that does not include the considerable benefits package that teachers get, which can be valued up to $25K a year. So... are they really underpaid?
If they put the same effort into doing something about Osama bin Laden as they're putting into doing something about Julian Assange, I suspect bin Laden would be either in Gitmo or 6 feet under by now.
Oh please. Bin Laden is near-paranoid in the measures he takes to hide himself. He's willing to undergo great hardship and deprive himself of even the most basic luxuries to continue his war against the West. He's been meticulous about hiding, going so far is living in caves at times. Assange is an attention whore. It's not like it's hard for anyone to find him. Saying that Assange's arrest proves that we're not looking hard enough for Bin Laden is downright foolish.
Well, swedish law classifies a lot of things as "rape" that wouldn't be rape in other countries (this can be seen by looking at swedish rape statistics before and after the relevant changes to the law).
So are you pulling a Whoopi Goldberg and saying that this isn't "rape rape"?
... the MSNBC lefty spin vortex... the NPR Intelligensia Superiore Ruling Class network... the ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN all-Obama-pats-on-the-back-all-the-time networks...
Thank you for demonstrating so thoroughly what GPP was talking about.
So there's no leftward lean to traditional MSM outlets?
"An academic study cited frequently showing a liberal media bias in American journalism is The Media Elite,* a 1986 book co-authored by political scientists Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter. They surveyed journalists at national media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and the broadcast networks. The survey found that most of these journalists were Democratic voters whose attitudes were well to the left of the general public on a variety of topics, including such hot-button social issues such as abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights. Then they compared journalists' attitudes to their coverage of controversial issues such as the safety of nuclear power, school busing to promote racial integration, and the energy crisis of the 1970s. The authors concluded that journalists' coverage of controversial issues reflected their own attitudes, and the predominance of political liberals in newsrooms therefore pushed news coverage in a liberal direction. They presented this tilt as a mostly unconscious process of like-minded individuals projecting their shared assumptions onto their interpretations of reality."
You know why Fox exists? Why it has dominating ratings? Because there was such a vacuum in the TV media when it came to anything but left-leaning views that a huge chunk of the public absolutely distrusted what they saw on TV, and a great deal of what they read in papers. And that distrust was warranted considering what we now know... Dan Rather's firing over the faked memos, the New York Times getting pulitzers for guys that basically worked for Joseph Stalin... it's said that nature abhors a vacuum. That's why Fox is so successful. Not because people are suckers, or because of any right-wing conspiracy. If a large part of the public likes beef, but all you'll sell them is chicken, they're going to go elsewhere.
Guys like you seem to think that if you could ban Fox... and Limbaugh and talk radio for that matter.... then suddenly, the scales would fall from people's eyes, and they'd suddenly become liberal. That's part of your problem right there. Fox exists because more Americans are conservative than liberal. The tail isn't wagging the dog here. Ban Fox today, and that same huge portion of American voters aren't going to just submit and watch left-leaning outlets. They're going to go elsewhere and make their own. Blaming Fox for American's conservative views is kind of silly. Fox simply exists because there's a market for them. A large and profitable one.
Whoa, stop right there. Who's arguing for the complete abolition of government? That would be anarchists. Who, from my eyes, tend to be more on the left side of the political spectrum than the right. Conservatives want minimal government, not no government. We couldn't have police or fire or military forces without a government.
... we would have no workplace safety laws, no child labor laws, we would still have segregation in the south, hell, we would still have slavery.
Really, slavery and segration were because of lack of government? Government legalized and protected both. Read the Constitution, and look up the part where slaves are counted as part of a free man for representation purposes. Anarchy didn't give us slavery and Jim Crow. Quite the opposite.
Government is only a problem when the rich are allowed to corrupt the democratic process.
See, that's interesting, because there were these countries... the Soviet Union, The People's Republic of *fill in many countries here*, etc.... they didn't have any rich people... they made a habit of, oh, killing them, and yet, government was very much their problem. Are you saying that having rich people in a country = corrupt governments? Looking at history, do you honestly think corruption would go away if we got rid of all the rich people?
Good government does not end up as evil without help
Which is exactly what the Founders thought. Which is why their distrust of human nature.... not "rich" nature, but human nature... led them to make the federal government a limited government.
and that is what we need to stop, not government itself.
Again, please point out to me who is arguing for the abolition of government?
You want to know what "good" government is? Here it is, in a nutshell:
"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government. " - Thomas Jefferson
An interesting effect of this is that your "left wing" president is in complete lock step with the UK Conservative party which has been accused of being the most right-wing mainstream political party in Europe.
Really? Because Brits think that our President hates their guts. One of the first things he did was to diss the sitting LabourPrime Minister. So you're honestly going to argue that Barack Obama has warm feelings for the Tories?
And just who is it that's "accusing" the UK Conservative Party of being the most right-wing of the mainstream parties in Europe? Would that be, oh.... Labour? I mean, that would be a shock now, wouldn't it?
The political spectrum in America has shifted so far to the right that pre-80s Republicans and modern-day Democrats are very similar. Eisenhower, Nixon, Theodore Roosevelt, would all be drummed out of the Republican party today for being extreme liberal socialists.
How so, and by what measure do you say this? During Ike's term, defense spending took up 50 percent of the total budget. It's been nowhere near that since then, even during Reagan's term. Ike had an anti-illegal immigration program... Operation Wetback... that actually rounded up illegal Mexicans by the shipfull, and then sailed them down to southern Mexico and dropped them off at their southern borders so they couldn't immediately re-cross our border. Not only was Bush II pro-amnesty, Reagan signed an amnesty that instantly legalized millions of illegals. Reagan made the VA... truly, a socialized medicine scheme... a freakin' cabinet position, and Dubya signed a prescription drug benefit program into law that would have given FDR a boner. Ike, meanwhile, told Americans that if they wanted new services, they'd have to pay for it upfront with new taxes, right now.
Tell me again how much farther to the right Republicans are today? Really? If anything, this is one of the things New Gingrich is actually right about, when he called guys like Bob Dole... who supported Obamacare, by the way... a "tax collector for the welfare state".
And Teddy Roosevelt? How do you think he would have responded to 9/11? I'll lay cash that it wouldn't have been with Dubya's soothing speeches about how "Islam is a religion of peace". The Rough Rider would have turned Mecca into a sea of glass. So enough with the "today's GOP is so extreme" nonsense. Compared to what?
You do know that NY-Washington already has high speed rail, right? It could be better, but it's the only one in the country at the moment, and it makes Amtrack money hand over fist.
First off, it's the only profitable line on Amtrak. Second, define "hand over fist"? How do you know what the profit margin is? Third, it's a special case, because of the crowded air routes in that corridor, and the long waits imposed by security measures now make flying impractical for much of that area. You could drive between cities faster in some cases. And Acela riders tend to be higher income, unlike the masses scrambling for $99 dollar flights on Southwest. So add it all up, and what you have is a unique situation that probably can't be replicated anywhere else in America. Flying similar distances... say, LA to Phoenix or San Francisco to Las Vegas... doesn't entail nearly as much hassle as flying between Washington DC and the cities in surrounding states.
raise your hand. What, no one can hear me? IF YOU THINK THIS WILL WORK, RAISE YOUR HAND! Is this thing on?
If he can develop an audience, then it'll work. Period. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.... in other words, I pay for my news because I think it's a better product than its competitors.
If a commercial product is worth your time, then its worth your money.
professional journalism, in the mainstream, died decades ago.
And if your definition of professional journalism is "unbiased writing", then it never existed in the first place.
Too many people believe in this mythical golden age of journalism, when all reporters were unbiased and pure of heart. Which is bunk, because it never existed. Pulitzer prize winning reporters for the NY Times were nothing but flacks for Joseph Stalin (especially Walter Duranty). Walter Cronkite reported that America couldn't win in Vietnam on the eve was what was the biggest military victory for the US in the war. Had Dan Rather not gotten caught, he'd still be anchor at CBS today.
Reporters have had bias as long as there have been reporters.
You do realize Hurd saved HP billions of dollars, right? He turned that company around.
Frankly, $40mil is not a bad deal for what they got.
The only real downside is he acted like a dumbass and they had to fire him to save face. They still need his help over there.
Hurd came in at precisely the right time. Fiorina may have been hated at HP, but the Compaq merger was completely her idea, from top to bottom, and it's far more responsible for HP's market position than anything Hurd did. I didn't even agree with it at the time, but in hindsight, it accomplished exactly what she thought it would. And Fiorina has to be laughing her ass off right now about this.
Slashdot Mirror
uh no. dc resident here. you can see the lincoln memorial from the FDR memorial. while this google thing is odd, yes, if you can't find the lincoln memorial while you are standing around confused at the FDR memorial.. you have bigger problems to worry about.
Which is why, ultimately, the litter temper tantrum by the Beck haters on Google is futile. People will simply ask for directions if they're unsure. If the intent was truly to disrupt the assembly at the memorial, then not only will it be ineffectual, it won't speak very well of those critics on the web.
Glenn Beck fans cannot be fooled by simple misinformation, they have no need for geographical facts, their gut instincts will lead them directly to the rally.
I imagine they'll simply have enough sense to ask for directions.
Google tries to stay out of politics.
As another poster pointed out with the China angle, your statement is laughable, sir. It would be more accurate to say that Google tries to downplay politics, but the company is neck-deep in politics every day.
Glenn Beck is getting the message not to piss off those who contribute to Wikis.
We're all getting the message that some Wiki contributors are throwing a temper tantrum because Glenn Beck is, horror of horrors, holding an assembly in front of the Lincoln Memorial. You know, like other people have been doing for years. What a crime, eh?
Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance.
This bill forces everyone to buy insurance whether they want to or not, and worse, forces them to buy it from a private third party under penalty of law. Not even the most extreme reading of the Commerce Clause justifies that, and I look forward to your excuses when SCOTUS throws the mandate out as unconstitutional.
If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.
If we really want to fix the problem... to the extent that it can be fixed... then we'll propose what we've proposed for years... for Congress to use the Commerce Clause in what is actually a productive, Constitutional manner and ban states from restricting interstate health insurance competition, which most of them do. This is one of the few issues where the states are wrong about the 10th Amendment. The states don't have a right to tell me I can't buy from a company in another state, and opening up a national market would mean national risk pools. Health insurance would then become more like car insurance. If car insurance were restricted by the states in the way that health insurance is, then no one could afford to drive either. There's a real market for auto insurance, though.
As for your concern about the poor, I might be moved more if I didn't suspect that your solution was probably "let the government handle it". You can help the poor without screwing the rights of everyone else, which this "reform" bill did. Further, this isn't an issue of "the poor", and never was. The poor have had access to paid healthcare for years. That's what Medicaid is, after all. In addition to that, most states have a program for uninsured children if you don't meet the poverty criteria but still have limited income. In Alabama it's called AlKids. The real issue is affordable health insurance for the not poor-and yet-not rich. Which *gasp!* a real market would go a long way towards helping.
I think not. Why is this on slashdot?
I don't know about you, but when someone spends half a billion on a school building, I'd say that as long as we pay taxes here, that falls under Stuff That Matters.
And what precisely makes him a wacko? Be specific.
Not to worry, the reset of the world can still do embryonic research.
Embryonic research never ceased in the US. It was never banned. Federal funding for it was restricted, but research continued from other funding sources. We've not yet reached the point where everything comes from the federal government. Yet.
Adult stem cells are sub-par replacements for embryonic stem cells.
And yet, despite your claim, almost all of the big advances from stem cell research has come from non-embryonic lines of cells.
Because we suffer from some bozo's religion.
Except that those 'bozos' aren't keeping you from life saving embryonic stem cell cures. Reality is. All of the big advances have come from non-embryonic cell research. And despite what you might have heard, no one stopped embryonic research. It continues to this day. Results-wise, it's just been a bust compared to adult stem cell lines.
(I know I left I lot out, but I don't think I'm distorting the meaning). As far as I can tell, liver cells in a petri dish would count as human embryos under that definition.
Then if President Obama wants the funding, he needs to convince Congress (which his party controls) to tighten the wording of the law, or repeal it altogether.
The judge pretty much had to block this. The President can't simply wave his hand and declare a law passed by Congress (and sighed by the previous President) to be null and void. There's still that whole separation of powers thing to consider. If the wording of the Dickey Amendment is too vague, then it's the responsibility of Congress to fix it.
It says said group does not want to be assimilated and would instead prefer retaining certain unique cultural and linguistic elements.
I think the truth is likely simpler than that. I think said group just didn't give a rats ass about learning proper English in school. I don't think it's a rebellion against assimilation as much as it's "F*ck this diagramming a sentence sh*t".
Also, what do people make of NK identifying itself as male, and being interested in men?
Kim is really, really ronery.
Just remember, it was management's idea to give those ridiculous retirement benefits, not the unions. The union requested a modest pay raise, and management thought they'd get away cheap by giving retirement bennies instead, thinking workers would only live to 68. In hindsight, the pay raise would have been much cheaper.
Except that they got pay raises and exorbitant benefits. And I'm going to need to see some kind of citation about the benefits being management's idea. Every time the UAW threatens to strike, benefits seem to be at the heart of their demands.
I love it when teachers bitch about pay (although, sometimes warranted)
Except that I'm not sure they're really underpaid. Education majors attract among the lowest SAT/ACT scoring students. It also attracts more females than males, and includes a large number of people teaching primary school rather than secondary school. High Schools pay more because more knowledge is needed. And some districts pay by expertise rather than a flat scale regardless of subject... thus, in some school districts, math and science teachers will make more money than history or English teachers, which aren't as scarce. And just like in the "real world", this disparity in pay can be quite large. I had math and science teachers that left to take jobs in the private sector. I can't say I ever recall a social studies teacher getting such job offers. Skills matter in a market, and we use markets.
The average starting salary for an education major is around $35K a year. The average starting salary for a business grad is around $41K. The average salary high point for an education degree is about $54K, but that does not include the considerable benefits package that teachers get, which can be valued up to $25K a year. So... are they really underpaid?
If they put the same effort into doing something about Osama bin Laden as they're putting into doing something about Julian Assange, I suspect bin Laden would be either in Gitmo or 6 feet under by now.
Oh please. Bin Laden is near-paranoid in the measures he takes to hide himself. He's willing to undergo great hardship and deprive himself of even the most basic luxuries to continue his war against the West. He's been meticulous about hiding, going so far is living in caves at times. Assange is an attention whore. It's not like it's hard for anyone to find him. Saying that Assange's arrest proves that we're not looking hard enough for Bin Laden is downright foolish.
Well, swedish law classifies a lot of things as "rape" that wouldn't be rape in other countries (this can be seen by looking at swedish rape statistics before and after the relevant changes to the law).
So are you pulling a Whoopi Goldberg and saying that this isn't "rape rape"?
Any enemy of the US is our friend.
It's not fair that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gets to post here when he keeps Iran's Internet connections locked down.
... the MSNBC lefty spin vortex ... the NPR Intelligensia Superiore Ruling Class network ... the ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN all-Obama-pats-on-the-back-all-the-time networks ...
Thank you for demonstrating so thoroughly what GPP was talking about.
So there's no leftward lean to traditional MSM outlets?
"An academic study cited frequently showing a liberal media bias in American journalism is The Media Elite,* a 1986 book co-authored by political scientists Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter. They surveyed journalists at national media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and the broadcast networks. The survey found that most of these journalists were Democratic voters whose attitudes were well to the left of the general public on a variety of topics, including such hot-button social issues such as abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights. Then they compared journalists' attitudes to their coverage of controversial issues such as the safety of nuclear power, school busing to promote racial integration, and the energy crisis of the 1970s.
The authors concluded that journalists' coverage of controversial issues reflected their own attitudes, and the predominance of political liberals in newsrooms therefore pushed news coverage in a liberal direction. They presented this tilt as a mostly unconscious process of like-minded individuals projecting their shared assumptions onto their interpretations of reality."
You know why Fox exists? Why it has dominating ratings? Because there was such a vacuum in the TV media when it came to anything but left-leaning views that a huge chunk of the public absolutely distrusted what they saw on TV, and a great deal of what they read in papers. And that distrust was warranted considering what we now know... Dan Rather's firing over the faked memos, the New York Times getting pulitzers for guys that basically worked for Joseph Stalin... it's said that nature abhors a vacuum. That's why Fox is so successful. Not because people are suckers, or because of any right-wing conspiracy. If a large part of the public likes beef, but all you'll sell them is chicken, they're going to go elsewhere.
Guys like you seem to think that if you could ban Fox... and Limbaugh and talk radio for that matter.... then suddenly, the scales would fall from people's eyes, and they'd suddenly become liberal. That's part of your problem right there. Fox exists because more Americans are conservative than liberal. The tail isn't wagging the dog here. Ban Fox today, and that same huge portion of American voters aren't going to just submit and watch left-leaning outlets. They're going to go elsewhere and make their own. Blaming Fox for American's conservative views is kind of silly. Fox simply exists because there's a market for them. A large and profitable one.
Without government...
Whoa, stop right there. Who's arguing for the complete abolition of government? That would be anarchists. Who, from my eyes, tend to be more on the left side of the political spectrum than the right. Conservatives want minimal government, not no government. We couldn't have police or fire or military forces without a government.
... we would have no workplace safety laws, no child labor laws, we would still have segregation in the south, hell, we would still have slavery.
Really, slavery and segration were because of lack of government? Government legalized and protected both. Read the Constitution, and look up the part where slaves are counted as part of a free man for representation purposes. Anarchy didn't give us slavery and Jim Crow. Quite the opposite.
Government is only a problem when the rich are allowed to corrupt the democratic process.
See, that's interesting, because there were these countries... the Soviet Union, The People's Republic of *fill in many countries here*, etc.... they didn't have any rich people... they made a habit of, oh, killing them, and yet, government was very much their problem. Are you saying that having rich people in a country = corrupt governments? Looking at history, do you honestly think corruption would go away if we got rid of all the rich people?
Good government does not end up as evil without help
Which is exactly what the Founders thought. Which is why their distrust of human nature.... not "rich" nature, but human nature... led them to make the federal government a limited government.
and that is what we need to stop, not government itself.
Again, please point out to me who is arguing for the abolition of government?
You want to know what "good" government is? Here it is, in a nutshell:
"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government. " - Thomas Jefferson
An interesting effect of this is that your "left wing" president is in complete lock step with the UK Conservative party which has been accused of being the most right-wing mainstream political party in Europe.
Really? Because Brits think that our President hates their guts. One of the first things he did was to diss the sitting Labour Prime Minister. So you're honestly going to argue that Barack Obama has warm feelings for the Tories?
And just who is it that's "accusing" the UK Conservative Party of being the most right-wing of the mainstream parties in Europe? Would that be, oh.... Labour? I mean, that would be a shock now, wouldn't it?
The political spectrum in America has shifted so far to the right that pre-80s Republicans and modern-day Democrats are very similar. Eisenhower, Nixon, Theodore Roosevelt, would all be drummed out of the Republican party today for being extreme liberal socialists.
How so, and by what measure do you say this? During Ike's term, defense spending took up 50 percent of the total budget. It's been nowhere near that since then, even during Reagan's term. Ike had an anti-illegal immigration program... Operation Wetback... that actually rounded up illegal Mexicans by the shipfull, and then sailed them down to southern Mexico and dropped them off at their southern borders so they couldn't immediately re-cross our border. Not only was Bush II pro-amnesty, Reagan signed an amnesty that instantly legalized millions of illegals. Reagan made the VA... truly, a socialized medicine scheme... a freakin' cabinet position, and Dubya signed a prescription drug benefit program into law that would have given FDR a boner. Ike, meanwhile, told Americans that if they wanted new services, they'd have to pay for it upfront with new taxes, right now.
Tell me again how much farther to the right Republicans are today? Really? If anything, this is one of the things New Gingrich is actually right about, when he called guys like Bob Dole... who supported Obamacare, by the way... a "tax collector for the welfare state".
And Teddy Roosevelt? How do you think he would have responded to 9/11? I'll lay cash that it wouldn't have been with Dubya's soothing speeches about how "Islam is a religion of peace". The Rough Rider would have turned Mecca into a sea of glass. So enough with the "today's GOP is so extreme" nonsense. Compared to what?
You do know that NY-Washington already has high speed rail, right? It could be better, but it's the only one in the country at the moment, and it makes Amtrack money hand over fist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express
First off, it's the only profitable line on Amtrak. Second, define "hand over fist"? How do you know what the profit margin is? Third, it's a special case, because of the crowded air routes in that corridor, and the long waits imposed by security measures now make flying impractical for much of that area. You could drive between cities faster in some cases. And Acela riders tend to be higher income, unlike the masses scrambling for $99 dollar flights on Southwest. So add it all up, and what you have is a unique situation that probably can't be replicated anywhere else in America. Flying similar distances... say, LA to Phoenix or San Francisco to Las Vegas... doesn't entail nearly as much hassle as flying between Washington DC and the cities in surrounding states.
raise your hand. What, no one can hear me? IF YOU THINK THIS WILL WORK, RAISE YOUR HAND! Is this thing on?
If he can develop an audience, then it'll work. Period. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.... in other words, I pay for my news because I think it's a better product than its competitors.
If a commercial product is worth your time, then its worth your money.
professional journalism, in the mainstream, died decades ago.
And if your definition of professional journalism is "unbiased writing", then it never existed in the first place.
Too many people believe in this mythical golden age of journalism, when all reporters were unbiased and pure of heart.
Which is bunk, because it never existed. Pulitzer prize winning reporters for the NY Times were nothing but flacks for Joseph Stalin (especially Walter Duranty). Walter Cronkite reported that America couldn't win in Vietnam on the eve was what was the biggest military victory for the US in the war. Had Dan Rather not gotten caught, he'd still be anchor at CBS today.
Reporters have had bias as long as there have been reporters.
You do realize Hurd saved HP billions of dollars, right? He turned that company around.
Frankly, $40mil is not a bad deal for what they got.
The only real downside is he acted like a dumbass and they had to fire him to save face. They still need his help over there.
Hurd came in at precisely the right time. Fiorina may have been hated at HP, but the Compaq merger was completely her idea, from top to bottom, and it's far more responsible for HP's market position than anything Hurd did. I didn't even agree with it at the time, but in hindsight, it accomplished exactly what she thought it would. And Fiorina has to be laughing her ass off right now about this.