Markets are intended to reward performance and promote capitalization, not provide and easier way for individuals to make money.
You do not understand the stock market.
Stocks were invented to provide an easier way for individuals to make money. Instead of starting and running a business, they can buy stock in someone else's, without doing any of the work. That's why they call it a stock market.
You also don't seem to understand why this isn't a big deal. The only time an executive can exploit this rule is by canceling a sale arranged long in advance. They know that the stock is under-valued, and therefore decide to hold their shares to sell them at a later date.
What message has this communicated to the markets? That the stock is going up. People make money. Nobody gets hurt. You can argue if you like whether or not it is a good thing that people who are rich enough to be that in tune with the market get richer, but I think that people making money by virtue of paying attention isn't all that bad. There isn't anything unethical here.
(attrib. Churchill but may be older.) Something like: "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.
It wasn't Churchill; it was a Frenchman, François Guisot (1787-1874).
My favorite quote along these lines:
In the end, conservatives always lose. If they didn't, we would still be living in caves.
If "sexual harassment" is so illegal an unethical, why not any kind of workplace intimidation of a non-sexual (or non protected-class) nature not illegal in any way
I just got out of harassment class today at my employer, and I have two points:
1. Sexual harassment is not illegal. Fostering a hostile work environment is.
2. Any member of a protected class can claim discrimination. Any individual at all can claim that you are fostering a hostile work environment, for nearly any reason. Due to the expansion of the definition of hostile work environment by the courts, they are likely to win.
Bottom line: when you are at work, talk only about work, and keep it professional.
I think too many people dwell on the word nigger which in and of itself has no power outside what people give it. Also, according to the definitions I was raised with, nigger doesn't really mean black, but a type of person who does certain things.
I'm sure you're not a racist, and your have a lot of friends that are black, too.
*rolls eyes*
If I had a nickel for every time a heard some white privileged racist prick...
"Redefine the word" my ass. I'm sure the majority of the country has a very good idea what that word means, and it does not agree with your definition. There are other, better words out there to describe what you mean. Refusal to use them is at best lazy, and at worst offensive and juvenile, if only because you know it is offensive to others. Defending its use makes you offensive and juvenile. You are like a child who won't give up a toy, even though there are dozens of others at hand that are just as good. Those of us with intellects that progressed passed junior high realize that the word only has the power we give it. All words only have the power we give them, idiot. The power we have given that word is substantial and hateful, and your defense of its use makes you a dick.
By the way, where I was raised "dick" means "amusing person who refuses to give up bad habits", so you see, you shouldn't be offended. We've redefined the word. Didn't you hear?
That said, Hillary's health plan is better, for the primary reason that people without health insurance still get treatment. The only way non-universal health care will work is if medical providers can refuse treatment - which is currently against the law, and with good reason.
Say I run a hospital, and one of the treatments I offer, once I figure out costs and profits, should cost $100. I'm going to treat five people a month.
However, of those five, one will not have insurance, so I know I will not get paid. So what do I do? I raise the price to $125. I still get the same money as if all 5 paid. The difference is that I have just made the insured patients pay for the uninsured.
There are only two ways to fix this. Universal health care is the only one we can live with.
My choices for broadband are Charter or AT&T. I despise AT&T's business practices, and yet I will pay them whatever they ask for - I'd sooner do without internet all together than be a Charter customer again.
A year or two ago, our internet access stopped working. Over the course of three weeks, I spent 12 hours on the phone with Charter support. During those calls I was told: they had deleted my MAC address from the database, that they had no record of me ever being a Charter customer (despite the cable boxes in my living room), that they had no record of me having internet access, and that I was stealing cable.
Finally, I got fed up, and called AT&T, got DSL and Dish. Once everything was working, I packed up all of Charter's equipment, brought it down to a local office, and told them to shut me off. This was a Saturday.
On Monday, my Dish stops working. I call up the Dish people; they come out around 10 days later to tell me that Charter had disconnected my satellite and had put a terminator on the line.
Fuck Charter. Fuck them in the neck with a donkey cock. They are the worst of the worst of companies (believe it or not, this is the short version - the long version is worse). If they actually had to compete, instead of having a monopoly, they would have been out of business years ago - and I would have bought some of their assets so I could set them on fire.
You are badly mistaken. Here is what it takes to copyright something:
Copyright 2008, OSDN Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
This post is now copyrighted, and the copyright is assigned to Slashdot's parent company. That's all it takes.
Defending copyright is another story. You have to prove the work is yours. One common trick is to mail yourself a copy of the work via certified mail, and then never open it. The certified mail proves the date, and the fact that it was you who mailed it proves it was your work.
Is it fair for the hundreds of thousands of people who work at Exxon to pay for the foolishness of that captain who ran aground up in Alaska?
Damn right. Those "hundreds of thousands" made a ton of money before that incident. You share in the success, and you share in the failures. Everyone together.
Is it fair for the thousands of hard working folks at GM or Ford to pay when some drunk drives a car into a tree?
Um, what?
Is it fair when the hundreds of hard working rock and roll stars (hah) lose their retirement because some decides to "share" the music with hundreds of thousands of their closest friends?
What does this have to do with punitive damages?
This is a problem for the typical slashdot poster. Corporations are made of people too and juries routinely come down hard on corporations. That's celebrated here because the jury is hanging some big, faceless machine. But there the corporation is made up of people and all of those fines at Exxon came out of the retirement fund of thousands of people.
And this is the problem with your typical "I get my news from Fox" conservative. Either a corporation is a legal entity under the law or it is not. Corporations get to lobby, give to political campaigns, and shield their employees from liability because of that standing. You can't treat them like they are a single entity when it is convenient (i.e. profitable), and scream they are "made up of people, too" when it suits your purpose. And your definition of "coming down hard" is a bit ill informed, I feel. I've never heard of a damage judgment that wasn't well within the corporation's ability to pay, and still turn a profit for the year.
Personally, I think the world would be a much better place if when a corporation broke the law somebody has to go to fucking jail, but in the meantime, you can't have it both ways. The only way we have to punish a corporation when they break the law is through financial penalty, and the punishment must scale by the corporation's ability to pay. Otherwise, they would be completely lawless.
Is it against our constitution? I see press reports of big corporations getting smacked down with punative damages all of the time. They cry and whine just like this woman. But the little guy usually cheers because it's a big corporation getting smacked. But the penalty is often much larger than the damages.
Those large damage awards are for punitive damages. They are supposed to punish the offending party. The financial punishment has to be scaled by the ability of the offending party to pay. If you have gross revenues of 2 billion GBP, like EMI had last year, then a 100 million GBP judgment against you is less than 5% of your gross income. Conversely, Jamie just got slapped with a judgment worth several times her gross income. Which is fair?
Yes. You can't publish libel, regardless if you're the author or not. Why would copyright or trademark laws be any different?
It's part of the "value" you contribute to society as a publisher that you check facts, authorship, etc. Any jackass can run a printing mill, or website.
Bullshit. You are talking out of your ass.
This took all of 3 seconds to find. Granted, may be Penn. specific, but I would be stunned not to find similar laws in other localities. Quote:
Newspaper Liability Under the UTPCPL
The provisions of the Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law shall not apply to any owner, publisher, printer, agent, or employee of a newspaper or other publication, periodical or circular, who, in good faith and without knowledge of the falsity or deceptive character thereof, publishes, causes to be published or takes part in the publication of such advertisement. (73 P.S. Â201-3)
If Google didn't remove the Ad-word association when asked, that's one thing. Otherwise, I can't see how they are in violation of American law, and if they are in violation of Australian law, I'm amazed papers stay in business there. Something else is going on.
Whatever happened to hiring someone who was inexperienced, but still sharp, and developing that person?
Simple. Let's say you hire someone with promise, train then, and let them get a few years experience. Three years later, that experience is worth tens of thousands more in the marketplace than you originally hired the person in at. Companies don't just say "hey, it's been three years, time to give you a 30% raise". Instead, the person goes to another company for the increase. Therefore, companies see that behavior as subsidizing the training for the competition, ignoring the fact that replacing the person that just left will cost more than giving them the raise in the first place.
Re:Biggest myths of all have been around for ages.
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 1
So, what you're saying is, the really reasonable religious believers are actually the ones who are lying-by-ommission about what they believe just to look cooler than the dirty hippies?
Yeah, how very reasonable and intelligent of them. I can't imagine why on Earth people think religion is for the small-minded...us atheists don't get a lot of help from you so-called reasonable moderates.
You don't help yourselves much either.
Re:Biggest myths of all have been around for ages.
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Oh, please, let me continue:
2) I really, really wish it was true.
Is there any other argument for religion left behind? Wait, I forgot, there is that grilled cheese sandwich with Virgin Mary in it. Great.
OK, I've been trolled. I can't believe I am about to do this on Slashdot.
Not everyone who professes to be religious believes in a white robed deity sitting on a cloud chucking thunderbolts. To a logical person, the concept of an anthropomorphic divinity is laughable - if you attribute truly "godlike" qualities to the divine (i.e. God is infinite), things like gender really become kinda silly. (However, I will grant that it certainly makes it easier to conceptualize and discuss - a fiction that people use to make lives easier, much like physicists can use algebra based equations (F = ma) rather than the calculus based ones which are more correct).
The problem is, what the hell language do you use to describe such a thing? You can call it "energy", or the "Force", but that gets you lumped in with the crystal wavers that are often more flaky than your traditional religious types. So you say God, knowing full well that 99% of the people who hear you don't have a clue what you really mean.
So I ask you - does someone who believes in an infinite, unifying principle beyond our current understanding sound to you like a cultist or a scientist?
Don't be so quick to dismiss those who profess to be religious. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds of the last thousand years fall into that category.
I'm opposed to it. not on any technical grounds, or any dogmatic or spiritual bollocks, just because I do NOT trust private companies with this stuff, nor do I trust them to handle GM food responsibly either. If we had decades of perfect safety records on existing reactors, combined with absolute transparency on what goes wrong and who is to blame and what happened if something does fail, then maybe I'd be convinced that this is a technology that you can trust private companies, or for that matter, the government, to use safely.
Which sounds very reasonable, until you realize that the worst case scenario with a reactor (say, a Chernobyl style accident) happens every year with conventional technology. We would have to have a Chernobyl event annually to compete with the death and destruction caused by the coal industry.
The fact is that if you are serious about trying to solve our energy problems, there is ONE and ONLY ONE option available which does not require a technological breakthrough - and that is nuclear power.
AT&T still has the second line support. You just have to know how to get to it. Here is a conversation I had with them recently:
Me: I need the IP addresses of your DNS servers.
Tier 1: You have a dynamic IP address, it will change every time.
Me: I understand that. I am not insterested in my IP address. I need the IP addresses of your DNS servers.
Tier 1: Sir, when your modem connects to us, it automatically grants you an IP address.
(repeat for a few minutes)
Me: Ma'am, I'm an IT professional. If you don't understand my question, please connect me with Tier 2 support, they should be able to answer me in under 30 seconds.
(on hold)
Tier 2: Sorry about that sir, here are the addresses, and we will go back and make sure Tier 1 has them in their knowledge base.
AT&T Tier 2 support has always been excellent in my experience. You just have to know how to get to them.
And, in case you've forgotten, it was the USA who bailed YOU out of WWII, not the other way around
You have been trolled, a now so have I:
Do not forget that it was the French that bailed US out of our revolutionary war. Without France, the United States would not exist, and that is a fact.
Pardon me for being a bit naive here, but if a warrant was issued for your arrest because you missed the court date, why didn't the police follow through on it?
I vaguely remember seeing something in the news a while back saying that P. Diddy was picked up by police because he got a couple of parking tickets while he was visiting some state out east (I don't remember where, exactly). He didn't pay them, so the next time he visited that area, the police showed up immediately to arrest him.
Assuming that you hadn't moved since being notified of the court date, the police had your address on file for the arrest warrant, so all they had to do was just show up at your house. Why didn't they bother?
More than likely because they had better things to do. I'm sure if I lived out in the sticks, eventually they would have come for me - but in a major metro area, they likely count on the fact that people who get in trouble with the law are likely to run across the cops again, and the warrant will show up at that time. Diddy got popped because of the publicity.
I fixed the problem by hiring a lawyer. I learned the hard way once before - if this happens to you, and you show up to pay your ticket, they will book you and put you in jail. If you hire a lawyer, the lawyer will negotiate a settlement, and you just pay the extra fine. The extra $50 to $100 you pay for a lawyer for minor stuff like this is almost always worth it.
I can verify...moreover, I can tell you exactly what they are looking for: they are running an FBI check to see if you have ever been arrested for fraud.
I work for a brokerage, and underwent the same process. When I was hired, there was actually a warrant out for my arrest (ran a stop sign, missed my court date). I disclosed it, was politely told to fix it, and was hired without problem.
Arrests are not an issue. I doubt even felonies are an issue, if you disclose them and they are not related to financial fraud. They are simply doing due diligence to make sure they aren't hiring a Mitnick.
Re:Another organization that wants to be above the
on
ICANN Wants Immunity
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· Score: 0
The United States want TOTAL control of where you go, what you can do, etc. They're going to use 9/11 to get anything and everything it wants in terms of our liberties. And the fact of the matter is that it simply doesn't have the right to do that. Not only does it not have the right to be that intrusive on it's own citizens, it sure as HELL doesn't have that right to be that intrusive on citizens of other countries!
Calm down, chicken little. The winds have changed, you can smell it. Nancy Pelosi is in Damascus right now (which is really pissing off Bush) - essentially stating that if the Bush administration won't start using diplomacy in the Middle East, the Democrats will (which almost everyone expects will take both branches of government in 18 months). Bush was handed two stinging defeats from SCOTUS this week - which demonstrated that previously right leaning judges have swung left in response to Bush putting rabid conservatives on the court. Bush is also demanding military funding bills out of Congress - which is yawning in response. Same with the AG scandal - Bush is demanding a rushed schedule, Congress is ignoring him. The PATRIOT act is under attack. The FBI as well, for abusing the PATRIOT act. The good news just seems to keep coming.:)
It is a different country now than it was just a few months ago. The pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction. If we can manage not to have another terrorist attack on US soil in the next year and a half, expect some real change out of Washington.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why there is no profit in retail gasoline. Some places (Quicktrip) even sell it at a loss.
You do not understand the stock market.
Stocks were invented to provide an easier way for individuals to make money. Instead of starting and running a business, they can buy stock in someone else's, without doing any of the work. That's why they call it a stock market.
You also don't seem to understand why this isn't a big deal. The only time an executive can exploit this rule is by canceling a sale arranged long in advance. They know that the stock is under-valued, and therefore decide to hold their shares to sell them at a later date.
What message has this communicated to the markets? That the stock is going up. People make money. Nobody gets hurt. You can argue if you like whether or not it is a good thing that people who are rich enough to be that in tune with the market get richer, but I think that people making money by virtue of paying attention isn't all that bad. There isn't anything unethical here.
It wasn't Churchill; it was a Frenchman, François Guisot (1787-1874).
My favorite quote along these lines:
In the end, conservatives always lose. If they didn't, we would still be living in caves.
I just got out of harassment class today at my employer, and I have two points:
1. Sexual harassment is not illegal. Fostering a hostile work environment is.
2. Any member of a protected class can claim discrimination. Any individual at all can claim that you are fostering a hostile work environment, for nearly any reason. Due to the expansion of the definition of hostile work environment by the courts, they are likely to win.
Bottom line: when you are at work, talk only about work, and keep it professional.
I'm sure you're not a racist, and your have a lot of friends that are black, too.
*rolls eyes*
If I had a nickel for every time a heard some white privileged racist prick...
"Redefine the word" my ass. I'm sure the majority of the country has a very good idea what that word means, and it does not agree with your definition. There are other, better words out there to describe what you mean. Refusal to use them is at best lazy, and at worst offensive and juvenile, if only because you know it is offensive to others. Defending its use makes you offensive and juvenile. You are like a child who won't give up a toy, even though there are dozens of others at hand that are just as good. Those of us with intellects that progressed passed junior high realize that the word only has the power we give it. All words only have the power we give them, idiot. The power we have given that word is substantial and hateful, and your defense of its use makes you a dick.
By the way, where I was raised "dick" means "amusing person who refuses to give up bad habits", so you see, you shouldn't be offended. We've redefined the word. Didn't you hear?
That said, Hillary's health plan is better, for the primary reason that people without health insurance still get treatment. The only way non-universal health care will work is if medical providers can refuse treatment - which is currently against the law, and with good reason.
Say I run a hospital, and one of the treatments I offer, once I figure out costs and profits, should cost $100. I'm going to treat five people a month.
However, of those five, one will not have insurance, so I know I will not get paid. So what do I do? I raise the price to $125. I still get the same money as if all 5 paid. The difference is that I have just made the insured patients pay for the uninsured.
There are only two ways to fix this. Universal health care is the only one we can live with.
A year or two ago, our internet access stopped working. Over the course of three weeks, I spent 12 hours on the phone with Charter support. During those calls I was told: they had deleted my MAC address from the database, that they had no record of me ever being a Charter customer (despite the cable boxes in my living room), that they had no record of me having internet access, and that I was stealing cable.
Finally, I got fed up, and called AT&T, got DSL and Dish. Once everything was working, I packed up all of Charter's equipment, brought it down to a local office, and told them to shut me off. This was a Saturday.
On Monday, my Dish stops working. I call up the Dish people; they come out around 10 days later to tell me that Charter had disconnected my satellite and had put a terminator on the line.
Fuck Charter. Fuck them in the neck with a donkey cock. They are the worst of the worst of companies (believe it or not, this is the short version - the long version is worse). If they actually had to compete, instead of having a monopoly, they would have been out of business years ago - and I would have bought some of their assets so I could set them on fire.
Fuck Charter.
Copyright 2008, OSDN Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
This post is now copyrighted, and the copyright is assigned to Slashdot's parent company. That's all it takes.
Defending copyright is another story. You have to prove the work is yours. One common trick is to mail yourself a copy of the work via certified mail, and then never open it. The certified mail proves the date, and the fact that it was you who mailed it proves it was your work.
It was Neal Stephenson.
Now ask me if I think the CEOs of the RIAA companies should go to jail for racketeering.
Damn right. Those "hundreds of thousands" made a ton of money before that incident. You share in the success, and you share in the failures. Everyone together.
Is it fair for the thousands of hard working folks at GM or Ford to pay when some drunk drives a car into a tree?
Um, what?
Is it fair when the hundreds of hard working rock and roll stars (hah) lose their retirement because some decides to "share" the music with hundreds of thousands of their closest friends?
What does this have to do with punitive damages?
This is a problem for the typical slashdot poster. Corporations are made of people too and juries routinely come down hard on corporations. That's celebrated here because the jury is hanging some big, faceless machine. But there the corporation is made up of people and all of those fines at Exxon came out of the retirement fund of thousands of people.
And this is the problem with your typical "I get my news from Fox" conservative. Either a corporation is a legal entity under the law or it is not. Corporations get to lobby, give to political campaigns, and shield their employees from liability because of that standing. You can't treat them like they are a single entity when it is convenient (i.e. profitable), and scream they are "made up of people, too" when it suits your purpose. And your definition of "coming down hard" is a bit ill informed, I feel. I've never heard of a damage judgment that wasn't well within the corporation's ability to pay, and still turn a profit for the year.
Personally, I think the world would be a much better place if when a corporation broke the law somebody has to go to fucking jail, but in the meantime, you can't have it both ways. The only way we have to punish a corporation when they break the law is through financial penalty, and the punishment must scale by the corporation's ability to pay. Otherwise, they would be completely lawless.
Those large damage awards are for punitive damages. They are supposed to punish the offending party. The financial punishment has to be scaled by the ability of the offending party to pay. If you have gross revenues of 2 billion GBP, like EMI had last year, then a 100 million GBP judgment against you is less than 5% of your gross income. Conversely, Jamie just got slapped with a judgment worth several times her gross income. Which is fair?
It's part of the "value" you contribute to society as a publisher that you check facts, authorship, etc. Any jackass can run a printing mill, or website.
Bullshit. You are talking out of your ass.
This took all of 3 seconds to find. Granted, may be Penn. specific, but I would be stunned not to find similar laws in other localities. Quote:
Newspaper Liability Under the UTPCPL
The provisions of the Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law shall not apply to any owner, publisher, printer, agent, or employee of a newspaper or other publication, periodical or circular, who, in good faith and without knowledge of the falsity or deceptive character thereof, publishes, causes to be published or takes part in the publication of such advertisement. (73 P.S. Â201-3)
If Google didn't remove the Ad-word association when asked, that's one thing. Otherwise, I can't see how they are in violation of American law, and if they are in violation of Australian law, I'm amazed papers stay in business there. Something else is going on.
Simple. Let's say you hire someone with promise, train then, and let them get a few years experience. Three years later, that experience is worth tens of thousands more in the marketplace than you originally hired the person in at. Companies don't just say "hey, it's been three years, time to give you a 30% raise". Instead, the person goes to another company for the increase. Therefore, companies see that behavior as subsidizing the training for the competition, ignoring the fact that replacing the person that just left will cost more than giving them the raise in the first place.
You don't help yourselves much either.
2) I really, really wish it was true.
Is there any other argument for religion left behind? Wait, I forgot, there is that grilled cheese sandwich with Virgin Mary in it. Great.
OK, I've been trolled. I can't believe I am about to do this on Slashdot.
Not everyone who professes to be religious believes in a white robed deity sitting on a cloud chucking thunderbolts. To a logical person, the concept of an anthropomorphic divinity is laughable - if you attribute truly "godlike" qualities to the divine (i.e. God is infinite), things like gender really become kinda silly. (However, I will grant that it certainly makes it easier to conceptualize and discuss - a fiction that people use to make lives easier, much like physicists can use algebra based equations (F = ma) rather than the calculus based ones which are more correct).
The problem is, what the hell language do you use to describe such a thing? You can call it "energy", or the "Force", but that gets you lumped in with the crystal wavers that are often more flaky than your traditional religious types. So you say God, knowing full well that 99% of the people who hear you don't have a clue what you really mean.
So I ask you - does someone who believes in an infinite, unifying principle beyond our current understanding sound to you like a cultist or a scientist?
Don't be so quick to dismiss those who profess to be religious. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds of the last thousand years fall into that category.
Which sounds very reasonable, until you realize that the worst case scenario with a reactor (say, a Chernobyl style accident) happens every year with conventional technology. We would have to have a Chernobyl event annually to compete with the death and destruction caused by the coal industry.
The fact is that if you are serious about trying to solve our energy problems, there is ONE and ONLY ONE option available which does not require a technological breakthrough - and that is nuclear power.
They did - and called it "The United States of America".
Me: I need the IP addresses of your DNS servers.
Tier 1: You have a dynamic IP address, it will change every time.
Me: I understand that. I am not insterested in my IP address. I need the IP addresses of your DNS servers.
Tier 1: Sir, when your modem connects to us, it automatically grants you an IP address.
(repeat for a few minutes)
Me: Ma'am, I'm an IT professional. If you don't understand my question, please connect me with Tier 2 support, they should be able to answer me in under 30 seconds.
(on hold)
Tier 2: Sorry about that sir, here are the addresses, and we will go back and make sure Tier 1 has them in their knowledge base.
AT&T Tier 2 support has always been excellent in my experience. You just have to know how to get to them.
You have been trolled, a now so have I:
Do not forget that it was the French that bailed US out of our revolutionary war. Without France, the United States would not exist, and that is a fact.
...the St. Louis Zoo is better than either one of them, according to Zagat. Free, too.
More than likely because they had better things to do. I'm sure if I lived out in the sticks, eventually they would have come for me - but in a major metro area, they likely count on the fact that people who get in trouble with the law are likely to run across the cops again, and the warrant will show up at that time. Diddy got popped because of the publicity.
I fixed the problem by hiring a lawyer. I learned the hard way once before - if this happens to you, and you show up to pay your ticket, they will book you and put you in jail. If you hire a lawyer, the lawyer will negotiate a settlement, and you just pay the extra fine. The extra $50 to $100 you pay for a lawyer for minor stuff like this is almost always worth it.
I work for a brokerage, and underwent the same process. When I was hired, there was actually a warrant out for my arrest (ran a stop sign, missed my court date). I disclosed it, was politely told to fix it, and was hired without problem.
Arrests are not an issue. I doubt even felonies are an issue, if you disclose them and they are not related to financial fraud. They are simply doing due diligence to make sure they aren't hiring a Mitnick.
...in 20 years MS will invent UNIX.
Calm down, chicken little. The winds have changed, you can smell it. Nancy Pelosi is in Damascus right now (which is really pissing off Bush) - essentially stating that if the Bush administration won't start using diplomacy in the Middle East, the Democrats will (which almost everyone expects will take both branches of government in 18 months). Bush was handed two stinging defeats from SCOTUS this week - which demonstrated that previously right leaning judges have swung left in response to Bush putting rabid conservatives on the court. Bush is also demanding military funding bills out of Congress - which is yawning in response. Same with the AG scandal - Bush is demanding a rushed schedule, Congress is ignoring him. The PATRIOT act is under attack. The FBI as well, for abusing the PATRIOT act. The good news just seems to keep coming. :)
It is a different country now than it was just a few months ago. The pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction. If we can manage not to have another terrorist attack on US soil in the next year and a half, expect some real change out of Washington.