This speech? I keep hearing how it cost him the Presidency, but I don't see what's so wrong about it. It seems to be saying that yes, we have challenges and problems, and here's how we're going to deal with them. A damn sight better than Reagan's mindless ego-stroking to convince us that we had no problems to deal with.
The crises in Iran and Afghanistan have dramatized a very important lesson: Our excessive dependence on foreign oil is a clear and present danger to our Nation's security. The need has never been more urgent. At long last, we must have a clear, comprehensive energy policy for the United States.
Via policies of whatever variety, say that one wealthy man gets a marginal income increase of $1 million. He may buy a burger, but I doubt he'll buy that many of them. Most of that money will be locked away as described.
Now say that a thousand middle-class folk get a marginal income increase of $1000. A far smaller portion of the same $1 million will be locked away.
Can we at least have a follow-up to this after three months, six months, a year, to see if levels of violent crime are affected by the ban? If these people are so attached to the idea that outlawing violent porn will reduce violent crime, we should at least be able to test the hypothesis now, right?
Ah, I hadn't noticed the reply. Hopefully you'll see this.
Well then why the fuck do you want to hand over power to the leftist Clinton-appointed judge? Why do the judges fly underneath your nutbag conspiracy theory radar? You trust them because they're liberals, and you're liberal. It's simple.
I don't want to "hand over power to the judge". See, the judge doesn't have absolute authority. The President doesn't have absolute authority. It's called separation of powers, and it's why we have three branches of government instead of just one.
But why would you trust a judge who is working for the enemy? They're trying to protect the rights of guantanamo detainees and other foreign extremists.
I believe in our system of laws, which provides for certain rights to the accused. If we chuck those laws because "ooh, it's important this time", then we never believed in them in the first place.
But you see that's not a liberal characteristic, they're all like you, they don't even trust themselves!
Unaccountable, secret government power is like the One Ring. Nobody can be trusted with it. Not the strong, not the wise. Hundreds of years of statecraft have been devised to avoid putting all the power in one man's hands. The point is that we don't have to trust anyone; we have accountability because we don't trust them.
And you'll have to understand that the president doesn't say who to tap. If the president were to tell his guys "Look, I want a transcript of every phone call coming in and out of DNC headquarters" he would go down in a white-hot blaze of media fury, and if he didn't go down immediately, someone would find out what he did when his term was up.
Do you know this somehow? Do you have an inside line to the White House? Is there the slightest reason to believe this scenario other than that it sounds good to you?
The quickest way you're going to know this 1982 scenario that you have nightmares about is coming true, is when the president makes himself perma-dictator, abolishing term limits. Not going to happen, dude.
So... if the President does anything short of that, he's beyond criticism?
The president informed people in the senate what he was doing. In this case, the legislature was the "check". The legislature can end his control, they can end this program,
The legislature outlawed this kind of stuff with FISA. If a few senators are craven enough to attempt to retroactively legalize, that still doesn't change that fact. Do you think they should have made it more illegal somehow? Written "MR PRESIDENT THIS MEANS YOU" on the bill in large, block letters?
Hah, I didn't call Hillary a lesbian. You're thick man, thick! She's a femenist, she would like to see women have more power in government.
An honest misunderstanding. I'll explain how I came to it.
Your remark "(I bet Hillary had more to do with it, seeing as how they're mostly women (butt-ugly women that Bill wouldn't be interested in))" played off Bill Clinton's well-known reputation as a skirt-chaser. The contrast that you appeared to be making was that Bill wasn't interested (in a sexual fashion) in "butt-ugly women", but Hillary was. It's a common epithet thrown at Hillary (there was a "cuckolded dyke" Googlebomb a while back) by people dumb enough to think it's an insult. See how I could have been confused?
Hey there's that word again, Red Herring. I love that! Care to use "straw men" in your next post? You liberals all use the exact same tactics, you say the exact same things, you probably all read the exact same propoganda too.
These words actually mean something. For instance, in your initial claim that the ACLU was opposed to all surveillance of anyone, anywhere, you made up an opponent who was
Are you trying to make the court look good? Because to me, it looks like they're getting progressively worse.
That, or the requests are getting sketchier. Without seeing the requests, do you have any way of knowing? And whichever it is, the court is (a) not flat-out rejecting proposals, and (b) not even modifying a significant portion of the submitted wiretap requests.
And I know people who work at the NSA. Yes they're just like me. You can trust them to a) not give a damn what you're doing, supposing they stumble across something intimate, and b) give a pretty good damn about terrorists and c) report anything illegal as is his duty. If nobody ever trusted Lincoln, where would we be today? Where would we be if nobody ever trusted anybody?
So, we go from "don't trust your government with unchecked secret powers" to "nobody should ever trust anybody". And sorry, but your assurances that the NSA is staffed with Really Nice Guys doesn't cut it.
The legislature has oversight over the president when it comes to this, not the judge.
The legislature has exercised their oversight; they specifically outlawed what the President is doing under FISA. Haven't you been paying attention? The administration is claiming that Congress doesn't have the power to check the president's authority.
This is a war we're in.
Later on you can explain where the Constitution says that we become a dictatorship in time of war.
That would be a cogent and valid point... if the "middle" could, by acquiring money (and where did you get that the same people trash-talk the rich as tell the middle class to mindlessly accrue wealth?) become rich. To put it in perspective, consider the top 1%, the truly rich, the "creamy layer", who had a quarter of the assets in this country in 1995. (I'll eat a lot of crow if that number's gone down since then, but let's say it's still that.)
Average income (the table breaks down the averages into two segments; I'm recombining them) is about $500k per year. Why, that's only a bit more than ten times what the median family makes; all we middle-class folk have to do is work ten times as hard!
Oh, wait, the assets average $6.8 million. So given that the median lifetime pre-tax income is about $1.8 million (wild guess there, $40k, working from 20 to 65)... hey, all we have to do is work for nearly four lifetimes without spending a cent. Eminently reachable! I have a hard time seeing the difference between the rich and the middle class sometimes myself!
Don't think that a silly thing like the rule of law will save you. The President has made it quite clear that he's willing to do whatever he feels like, so long as he can find someone with "Esq." after their name to whisper an incantation in his ear that sounds legal enough. Hence the GP's inclusion of "signing statements".
I'd complain about habeas corpus, but anyone who can do so firsthand has been conveniently disappeared indefinitely. One could also mention the right of privacy guaranteed by the fourth amendment, and the President's illegal wiretapping program.
And while the rule of law isn't exactly a constitutional right, it's the basis on which our system of government is founded. If the President claims that he only needs to follow the law if he feels like it, I'd say that makes our system of laws meaningless. If you think that the most basic Constitutional right is to have your government actually work according to said Constitution, then there's that, too.
Ah, Zheng He's fleet. If the Pacific weren't so darn wide, maybe Columbus would have run into Chinese colonists when he reached the American shores, eh? But the dissolution of the treasure fleet was motivated largely by economics. The voyages didn't pay for themselves; they were funded by the sale of an enormous tract of land that the Mongols (the Yuan Dynasty) had turned into a park. When the land had finally all been sold, the federal budget shrank, and it ended up as a historical blip and not much more.
People can be against abortion without believing that fetuses have human rights. For instance, there's the ever popular "punish that slut!" model, which has nothing to do with the fetus at all, but still leads to opposition of abortion.
Thanks; I should be more polite about this, but I really do want to bap the guy on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. And the frustrating thing is that I'm going to keep seeing this kind of trivially-debunked nonsense for the next ten years or so. There's as much excuse for it as there was for Ted Stevens' "series of tubes!" comment.
It's only legal in the sense that the President says his legal staff approves. And not even all the time. The Attorney General admitted it was being done in contravention of the law. They know full well it's against the law; the arguments they've made are that (quoting Wikipedia again, because I'm too tired to paraphrase) (a) FISA is an unconstitutional violation of the President's "inherent powers" and/or that (b) FISA was implicitly overridden by other acts of Congress.
(a) argues that the President gets to make up laws. It's this "unitary executive" bullshit. (b) is impressive only in its twelve-pound-brass-balls nature, as the President is effectively telling Congress what they meant. Apparently if you squint hard enough at an authorization to send troops, it looks like an authorization to tap phones. This is nothing more than the rankest wishful thinking by the administration, and we do our system of laws a disservice when we take it seriously.
And furthermore, if the administration thought they weren't doing anything illegal, they wouldn't have lied about it.
The program was reviewed by BOTH sides of Congress, who approved the program.
You mean that the Attorney General showed it to some buddies, or that they actually voted on it, making it, y'know, law? Because the first one doesn't actually make anything legal. Not even kinda legal. The Attorney General admitted this (see above.)
Even more bizarre is that years earlier, the New York Times editorialized in favor of this very kind of surveillance program, criticizing Bush for not having one in place. So it was put in place, and then they exposed it and killed it.
I really, really want to see where the Times editorialized in favor of the President having unaccountable, secret wiretapping capability. I want to see where they asked for him to have the exact same powers he had under FISA, but without even the small degree of oversight he had before. I want to see where they asked for this. I look forward to eating some delicious crow.
The issue what I have with it, the issue that the ACLU and the New York Times have with it, is that it places secret, unaccountable power in the hands of the President. He was secretly breaking the law for years, and when it was revealed, he claimed that he had the power to break the law all along. If he wanted this secret, unaccountable power, he should have asked Congress.
But he didn't. The only two reasons I can think of that he would engage in this are (a) brass-ball swinging, to assert that he has kingly power. This is a bad reason. (b) wiretapping political opponents. This is also a bad reason. If you can think of another reason, I'm all ears.
I think I've figured out why radicals anger me. I have a strong patriotic streak. I believe that the system we have, while nontrivially flawed, is a good system. And when someone says, in effect, that the system is garbage, no better than Russian under Stalin, and that we should throw it out and seek political change through violence, well... it seems demeaning to the whole liberal democracy experiment---and insulting to all those who sought to build and improve the country, as if to say that all their contributions don't mean shit.
The state maintains (or attempts to maintain) a monopoly on violence. This is how it gets its authority. The idea is that the state will act more justly than a million Hatfields and McCoys seeking bloody revenge. Yes, if the terrorists decide to hole up somewhere and build a patchouli wall to keep out the feds, violence could ensue. But there's an important difference between vigilante justice and the state's criminal justice system. The ends may in some cases be the same, but the means do matter.
Because the courts have been infiltrated by leftists, just like journalism has. Clinton appointed some of the worst, most obstructionist judges we've ever seen. (I bet Hillary had more to do with it, seeing as how they're mostly women (butt-ugly women that Bill wouldn't be interested in)). The secret court was being very obstructive during the Bush administration. In the cases the warrants were rejected (all of them during GW's presidency, BTW) they were all eventually granted on appeal, so these judges are just being nit picky. Why the fuck do judges get to decide national security issues?
The nit-picky, leftist, Clinton-appointed, obstructionist judges who rejected around one out of every five thousand warrant applications? Could you be more specific about the warrants that were "all" rejected during GW's presidency? Perhaps we're talking about a different FISA court, though I don't see how.
We elect the president, he doesn't want to get impeached and shit, that's why I trust him. I trust the NSA because it's run by ordinary people, like myself.
Your faith in the government is touching, really, but I don't think I should have to hand power without oversight to people and then trust them to do the right thing with it. (And what does "he doesn't want to get impeached and shit" have to do with anything?)
Judges don't have any concern or oversight, they can make a bad decision and nobody will know/care. Look at this latest attempt by some nut judge to block the NSA program. Fucking nut judges.
Yes, darn them, with their "constitution" and "the President has to follow the law" and "checks and balances".
So you either trust secret court judge, or you trust the president, obviously you trust secret court judge more. What you refer to as accountability, I refer to as bureaucracy.
No, the point is that we don't have to trust one person or group. This is why we have separation of powers. This is why we don't allow power to be centralized in one place.
And what makes the NSA "ordinary people", but the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "bureaucracy"?
You just want some perma Clinton appointee to be dictating national security issues. It's simple, really.
Speaking of Clinton, would you be kosher with Clinton wielding this sort of power? Would you be okay with the knowledge that Clinton could be wiretapping anyone, anywhere, and nobody outside his administration would ever know? Would you trust him not to be wiretapping RNC headquarters? If not, doesn't your faith in assigning these kingly powers (and make no mistake, this "unitary executive" nonsense where the president makes up his own laws is nothing if not kingly) to the office of the President mean that you simply trust the man? Are you comfortable with the next administration having the power to make up laws as they see fit? With the next Democratic administration doing so? And if not, why are you convinced that the government, once given this power, will politely put it away and never use it again?
How do you get off calling me a liar? I don't see why my personal integrity should come into question here. It's a cheap tactic, it's about all you leftists can hack up these days.
Well, your claim above that FISA warrants were being denied was trivially debunked. Were you lying and hoping that I wouldn't look it up? Had you seen the claim somewhere and were just parroting it back at me, being too lazy to look it up yourself?
And if calling you a liar is all I can "hack up these days", why didn't you respond to my initial questions about why the President, if he needed some powers he didn't have, didn't actually ask for them? That is how our system of government works, you know. The legislative branch makes the law, and the execu
I want to say that this study says something about broccoli intake affecting caffeine metabolism, but I don't speak biologist enough to know.
Aha. Apparently this all has to do with enzyme CYP1A2, which breaks down caffeine (under "substrates") as well as many other drugs, and whose action is increased by broccoli, as well as by chargrilled meats, insulin and certain drugs such as Prilosec.
You failed to respond to a single one of the points that I made. Because I'm a a nice guy, I'm going to respond to yours.
Nice, name calling! Why does everything have to be so STUPID with you types?
Well, it's possible you were too lazy to do the cursory research required to discover the points I outlined above. It's also possible you're just lying about what the controversy was because you were wrong and don't want to admit it.
When you say the administration wants to wiretap "people" you fail to mention these "people" are foreigners with terrorist links.
Again: do you have any, any way of knowing that other than the fact that the government assured you this was so? How do you know this program isn't being abused horribly? Why do you trust the government that much? If you know they're willing to break the law in this instance, what makes you think they'll respect it in any other?
And if those are the only two possible reasons you can come up with, you're the one who's ignorant, brotha. Ignorant and stupid.
Then please, please enlighten me. The only difference between wiretapping with FISA and wiretapping without it is that the wiretapping is carried on without any shred of accountability whatsoever. Why do you hate accountability so much?
And the ACLU is a politically biased organization. MOST of what they do is politically motivated. Go read the FAQ on their website on why they don't defend people's second amendment rights.
I, also, disagree with their second amendment stance. This has anything at all to do with the wiretapping controvery because... ?
Thank you for the explanation. I don't think that scientists are ogrish puppy-punchers, but you must admit that they look kind of bad when they're hidden in some lab somewhere and the only easily available explanation for what goes on in there comes from ALF wackjobs who conveniently leave out the part about anesthesia.
And, like it or not, a lot of the institutional safeguards against puppy-punching are there because of animal-rights activists.
Also, people bring up vaccines and drug tests a lot, but the research in question was basic, not applied. You can't really refuse benefits of this kind of research, because the benefit is knowledge that's not directly practical. More's the pity, I suppose; it could really be poetic.
Ooh, you could piss off both the far-lefties and the far-righties with that.
But seriously, what sorts of things were you researching? Would one of these ALF nuts be able to twist your work into "this person stabbed baby rats in the eyes with forks and then killed them"? It doesn't sound particularly cruel the way you're describing it, and I'm trying to reconcile your descriptions of animal research with ALF's.
Slashdot Mirror
This speech? I keep hearing how it cost him the Presidency, but I don't see what's so wrong about it. It seems to be saying that yes, we have challenges and problems, and here's how we're going to deal with them. A damn sight better than Reagan's mindless ego-stroking to convince us that we had no problems to deal with.
So... he strode across Europe and knocked down the Berlin Wall with his enormous swinging cod, then?
Oh. Right.
I'm going to go cry into my beer now.
Via policies of whatever variety, say that one wealthy man gets a marginal income increase of $1 million. He may buy a burger, but I doubt he'll buy that many of them. Most of that money will be locked away as described.
Now say that a thousand middle-class folk get a marginal income increase of $1000. A far smaller portion of the same $1 million will be locked away.
Savvy?
Can we at least have a follow-up to this after three months, six months, a year, to see if levels of violent crime are affected by the ban? If these people are so attached to the idea that outlawing violent porn will reduce violent crime, we should at least be able to test the hypothesis now, right?
Or you use rubberhose.
I don't want to "hand over power to the judge". See, the judge doesn't have absolute authority. The President doesn't have absolute authority. It's called separation of powers, and it's why we have three branches of government instead of just one.
I believe in our system of laws, which provides for certain rights to the accused. If we chuck those laws because "ooh, it's important this time", then we never believed in them in the first place.
Unaccountable, secret government power is like the One Ring. Nobody can be trusted with it. Not the strong, not the wise. Hundreds of years of statecraft have been devised to avoid putting all the power in one man's hands. The point is that we don't have to trust anyone; we have accountability because we don't trust them.
Do you know this somehow? Do you have an inside line to the White House? Is there the slightest reason to believe this scenario other than that it sounds good to you?
So... if the President does anything short of that, he's beyond criticism?
The legislature outlawed this kind of stuff with FISA. If a few senators are craven enough to attempt to retroactively legalize, that still doesn't change that fact. Do you think they should have made it more illegal somehow? Written "MR PRESIDENT THIS MEANS YOU" on the bill in large, block letters?
An honest misunderstanding. I'll explain how I came to it.
Your remark "(I bet Hillary had more to do with it, seeing as how they're mostly women (butt-ugly women that Bill wouldn't be interested in))" played off Bill Clinton's well-known reputation as a skirt-chaser. The contrast that you appeared to be making was that Bill wasn't interested (in a sexual fashion) in "butt-ugly women", but Hillary was. It's a common epithet thrown at Hillary (there was a "cuckolded dyke" Googlebomb a while back) by people dumb enough to think it's an insult. See how I could have been confused?
These words actually mean something. For instance, in your initial claim that the ACLU was opposed to all surveillance of anyone, anywhere, you made up an opponent who was
So, we go from "don't trust your government with unchecked secret powers" to "nobody should ever trust anybody". And sorry, but your assurances that the NSA is staffed with Really Nice Guys doesn't cut it.
The legislature has exercised their oversight; they specifically outlawed what the President is doing under FISA. Haven't you been paying attention? The administration is claiming that Congress doesn't have the power to check the president's authority.
Later on you can explain where the Constitution says that we become a dictatorship in time of war.
That would be a cogent and valid point... if the "middle" could, by acquiring money (and where did you get that the same people trash-talk the rich as tell the middle class to mindlessly accrue wealth?) become rich. To put it in perspective, consider the top 1%, the truly rich, the "creamy layer", who had a quarter of the assets in this country in 1995. (I'll eat a lot of crow if that number's gone down since then, but let's say it's still that.)
Average income (the table breaks down the averages into two segments; I'm recombining them) is about $500k per year. Why, that's only a bit more than ten times what the median family makes; all we middle-class folk have to do is work ten times as hard!
Oh, wait, the assets average $6.8 million. So given that the median lifetime pre-tax income is about $1.8 million (wild guess there, $40k, working from 20 to 65)... hey, all we have to do is work for nearly four lifetimes without spending a cent. Eminently reachable! I have a hard time seeing the difference between the rich and the middle class sometimes myself!
Don't think that a silly thing like the rule of law will save you. The President has made it quite clear that he's willing to do whatever he feels like, so long as he can find someone with "Esq." after their name to whisper an incantation in his ear that sounds legal enough. Hence the GP's inclusion of "signing statements".
Social Darwinist. Big difference, there. Darwinism is nearly meaningless as a social policy. Social Darwinism is an excuse for those in power.
I'd complain about habeas corpus, but anyone who can do so firsthand has been conveniently disappeared indefinitely. One could also mention the right of privacy guaranteed by the fourth amendment, and the President's illegal wiretapping program.
And while the rule of law isn't exactly a constitutional right, it's the basis on which our system of government is founded. If the President claims that he only needs to follow the law if he feels like it, I'd say that makes our system of laws meaningless. If you think that the most basic Constitutional right is to have your government actually work according to said Constitution, then there's that, too.
sudo close the libraries.
Ah, Zheng He's fleet. If the Pacific weren't so darn wide, maybe Columbus would have run into Chinese colonists when he reached the American shores, eh? But the dissolution of the treasure fleet was motivated largely by economics. The voyages didn't pay for themselves; they were funded by the sale of an enormous tract of land that the Mongols (the Yuan Dynasty) had turned into a park. When the land had finally all been sold, the federal budget shrank, and it ended up as a historical blip and not much more.
I'd consider Japan's isolationism policy, which lasted over two centuries, to be a more striking example.
Carter didn't inherit the Iranian hostage fiasco from anyone.
I suppose you'd rather he have appeased the terrorists with weapons. Why, they'd put you on the ten-dollar bill for that, I'd bet.
People can be against abortion without believing that fetuses have human rights. For instance, there's the ever popular "punish that slut!" model, which has nothing to do with the fetus at all, but still leads to opposition of abortion.
Thanks; I should be more polite about this, but I really do want to bap the guy on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. And the frustrating thing is that I'm going to keep seeing this kind of trivially-debunked nonsense for the next ten years or so. There's as much excuse for it as there was for Ted Stevens' "series of tubes!" comment.
(a) argues that the President gets to make up laws. It's this "unitary executive" bullshit. (b) is impressive only in its twelve-pound-brass-balls nature, as the President is effectively telling Congress what they meant. Apparently if you squint hard enough at an authorization to send troops, it looks like an authorization to tap phones. This is nothing more than the rankest wishful thinking by the administration, and we do our system of laws a disservice when we take it seriously.
And furthermore, if the administration thought they weren't doing anything illegal, they wouldn't have lied about it.
You mean that the Attorney General showed it to some buddies, or that they actually voted on it, making it, y'know, law? Because the first one doesn't actually make anything legal. Not even kinda legal. The Attorney General admitted this (see above.)
I really, really want to see where the Times editorialized in favor of the President having unaccountable, secret wiretapping capability. I want to see where they asked for him to have the exact same powers he had under FISA, but without even the small degree of oversight he had before. I want to see where they asked for this. I look forward to eating some delicious crow.
The issue what I have with it, the issue that the ACLU and the New York Times have with it, is that it places secret, unaccountable power in the hands of the President. He was secretly breaking the law for years, and when it was revealed, he claimed that he had the power to break the law all along. If he wanted this secret, unaccountable power, he should have asked Congress.
But he didn't. The only two reasons I can think of that he would engage in this are (a) brass-ball swinging, to assert that he has kingly power. This is a bad reason. (b) wiretapping political opponents. This is also a bad reason. If you can think of another reason, I'm all ears.
I think I've figured out why radicals anger me. I have a strong patriotic streak. I believe that the system we have, while nontrivially flawed, is a good system. And when someone says, in effect, that the system is garbage, no better than Russian under Stalin, and that we should throw it out and seek political change through violence, well... it seems demeaning to the whole liberal democracy experiment---and insulting to all those who sought to build and improve the country, as if to say that all their contributions don't mean shit.
Radicals really piss me off.
The state maintains (or attempts to maintain) a monopoly on violence. This is how it gets its authority. The idea is that the state will act more justly than a million Hatfields and McCoys seeking bloody revenge. Yes, if the terrorists decide to hole up somewhere and build a patchouli wall to keep out the feds, violence could ensue. But there's an important difference between vigilante justice and the state's criminal justice system. The ends may in some cases be the same, but the means do matter.
The nit-picky, leftist, Clinton-appointed, obstructionist judges who rejected around one out of every five thousand warrant applications? Could you be more specific about the warrants that were "all" rejected during GW's presidency? Perhaps we're talking about a different FISA court, though I don't see how.
Your faith in the government is touching, really, but I don't think I should have to hand power without oversight to people and then trust them to do the right thing with it. (And what does "he doesn't want to get impeached and shit" have to do with anything?)
Yes, darn them, with their "constitution" and "the President has to follow the law" and "checks and balances".
No, the point is that we don't have to trust one person or group. This is why we have separation of powers. This is why we don't allow power to be centralized in one place.
And what makes the NSA "ordinary people", but the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "bureaucracy"?
Speaking of Clinton, would you be kosher with Clinton wielding this sort of power? Would you be okay with the knowledge that Clinton could be wiretapping anyone, anywhere, and nobody outside his administration would ever know? Would you trust him not to be wiretapping RNC headquarters? If not, doesn't your faith in assigning these kingly powers (and make no mistake, this "unitary executive" nonsense where the president makes up his own laws is nothing if not kingly) to the office of the President mean that you simply trust the man? Are you comfortable with the next administration having the power to make up laws as they see fit? With the next Democratic administration doing so? And if not, why are you convinced that the government, once given this power, will politely put it away and never use it again?
Well, your claim above that FISA warrants were being denied was trivially debunked. Were you lying and hoping that I wouldn't look it up? Had you seen the claim somewhere and were just parroting it back at me, being too lazy to look it up yourself?
And if calling you a liar is all I can "hack up these days", why didn't you respond to my initial questions about why the President, if he needed some powers he didn't have, didn't actually ask for them? That is how our system of government works, you know. The legislative branch makes the law, and the execu
I want to say that this study says something about broccoli intake affecting caffeine metabolism, but I don't speak biologist enough to know.
Aha. Apparently this all has to do with enzyme CYP1A2, which breaks down caffeine (under "substrates") as well as many other drugs, and whose action is increased by broccoli, as well as by chargrilled meats, insulin and certain drugs such as Prilosec.
By the way, the study I was in was published as a dissertation as well as in Aviat Space Environ Med.. I hadn't had call to look it up until now. Neat!
Well, it's possible you were too lazy to do the cursory research required to discover the points I outlined above. It's also possible you're just lying about what the controversy was because you were wrong and don't want to admit it.
Again: do you have any, any way of knowing that other than the fact that the government assured you this was so? How do you know this program isn't being abused horribly? Why do you trust the government that much? If you know they're willing to break the law in this instance, what makes you think they'll respect it in any other?
Then please, please enlighten me. The only difference between wiretapping with FISA and wiretapping without it is that the wiretapping is carried on without any shred of accountability whatsoever. Why do you hate accountability so much?
I, also, disagree with their second amendment stance. This has anything at all to do with the wiretapping controvery because... ?
Thank you for the explanation. I don't think that scientists are ogrish puppy-punchers, but you must admit that they look kind of bad when they're hidden in some lab somewhere and the only easily available explanation for what goes on in there comes from ALF wackjobs who conveniently leave out the part about anesthesia.
And, like it or not, a lot of the institutional safeguards against puppy-punching are there because of animal-rights activists.
Also, people bring up vaccines and drug tests a lot, but the research in question was basic, not applied. You can't really refuse benefits of this kind of research, because the benefit is knowledge that's not directly practical. More's the pity, I suppose; it could really be poetic.
Ooh, you could piss off both the far-lefties and the far-righties with that.
But seriously, what sorts of things were you researching? Would one of these ALF nuts be able to twist your work into "this person stabbed baby rats in the eyes with forks and then killed them"? It doesn't sound particularly cruel the way you're describing it, and I'm trying to reconcile your descriptions of animal research with ALF's.