I suppose in your world, you know Hamilton's heart and what he wrote was just to placate the others. I on the other hand, go by what they put on pen and paper as that is all we have to go by.
No, you cherry pick one quote out of a very large speech, take it out of context, and completely misrepresent it because you're just dishonest.
And for god's sake, get an actual education on the writers of the Constitution beyond fetishizing just one or two men.
The problem with you right wing boobs is simple: you don't read a goddamn thing, except for the quotes you can strip from the back of the dust jacket of the latest hate screed from Gingrich or Palin or Beck.
Alexander Hamilton was a STRONG FEDERALIST - leader of the Federalist Party in fact, against the Democratic-Republican party of Jefferson. His accomplishments, among other things, include the creation of the national bank and federal agencies to oversee the collection of tariffs. He also negotiated the Jay Treaty to accomplish a lasting peace with Britain and avoid the economic collapse of going to war against one's largest trade partner. Jefferson meanwhile was a warmongering fool who, after spending too much time and drinking too much wine with the French, felt that another war with the British was in order.
The quote that you took out of context above was intended, not to say that the federal government should be weak, but to mollify those like Benjamin Franklin who felt that the government created from the constitution would be so strong that it would eliminate state governments entirely and reduce the entire nation to a mere collection of House districts.
But this is the entire problem with having this sort of debate; the side whipping out quotes left and right doesn't know the context of what they are quoting, they don't understand the history, and they're uninterested in actually learning about it, because that might run the risk of encountering information and facts that are directly contradictory to their distorted, bizarre, uneducated worldview.
You spend a lot of time on Jefferson and Madison; the quote from Franklin really is inappropriate in its entirety given that it was written long before the Constitution, as part of a letter to delegates advocating secession, and tarring British loyalists as "giving up liberty" for the "security" of the British empire. Jefferson was off in France and had absolutely shit-all to do with the writing of the Constitution. Madison, meanwhile, is MUCH more in favor of centralized government than you give him credit for; the bulk of his writings (which come from the Federalist, not the ANTI-Federalist) are a defense of vesting power in a centralized, federal government and not a call to strip the federal government of power and simply re-create the old Articles of Confederacy.
But, since you've proven only an ability to pull quotations out of context and absolutely zero understanding of the process in which the Constitution let me clue you in: the basics of it, including the separation of powers, were the production of the Virginia delegation led by Edmund Randolph. The bicameral legislature was pulled from British tradition, while the idea of power-against-power as checks and balances came heavily from the philosophical writings of John Locke. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were heavy proponents of "proportional only" representation in both houses, and were ruled down by the smaller states before the compromise of the Senate/House division. William Paterson, a STRONG federalist, proposed the competing unicameral "two representatives per state" option that eventually became the Senate. Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the preamble, was also a strong federalist who had roundly decried the antisocial behavior of the states towards each other under the Articles - he had previously been a congressional representative during the Articles, but was defeated for reelection when anti-federalism became popular in New York.
First of all, the percentage that doesn't pay any income tax is about 46%, not 51%.
Actually, it's lower than that.
Throw in payroll taxes (ss/medicare) and the percentage without a tax burden drops to somewhere in the mid-20s.
Throw in the deduction for state income or sales taxes, and the percentage "not paying income tax" to some form of government winds up at right about the unemployment numbers.
But then again, why actually use relevant numbers when you can have a Big Fat Lie to claim that the poor "aren't paying their fair share" while millionaires and billionaires hide their income in offshore accounts and stock-option tricks that involve taking "loans" using as collateral tied-up stock portfolios designed to not actually pay taxes?
Not surprising considering that you know you're lying.
How predictable that you'd say that, because "oh that has to be a lie" is the primary mental defense of you when confronted with any evidence that things are not how you think they are. But I'm not lying.
Maybe you've never experienced someone harassing your friends over politics, maybe you've been lucky to be insulated from the dirty tricks that go on... but this is the real world, and in the real world, your "friends" of the Republican Party and Tea Party are a bunch of racist assholes who will go after someone just for having a foreign-sounding last name and harass them at their workplace and try to get them fired from their job if they go into the primary against the "party favorite" candidate who's part of the drunken racist shithead good-ol-boys network that hasn't changed since their daddies and granddaddies were the local KKK leadership.
So in conclusion... yes. You may not know it, you may be in denial - hell I KNOW you are in denial - but congratulations, you're a fucking racist.
He's asked that nobody bring up publicity for him personally any more, because his place of business got harassing phone calls about "the mexican" after an email campaign from the local Republican front groups. So I'm withholding that. I hope you understand.
What position was he running for?
I said it in my initial post: state senate.
How did he do in his race?
He lost the primary to an opponent who went to a lot of trouble running the "don't let the mexican into the race" whisper and email campaign. I'll point out: my friend agrees with most of the "republican principles" that you do, which is why he was running in the first place. Unlike most Republicans, he's willing to sit down, hash out differences, agree to disagree if necessary, and do so politely. I guess that qualified him as a "wimpy illegal" as far as the Tea Partiers are concerned.
How many people were shouting racist epithets? Did anyone object to it? What date was the event?
This'd be in the primaries for 2010.
How many people were shouting racist epithets? Did anyone object to it?
If anyone was objecting, aside from his friends and family in attendance, you couldn't hear them over the majority of the crowd. And the only "objection" from the Republican Party folks on stage was the moderator coming up to the podium and saying "ok folks, let 'im speak, he came here to speak and he's a candidate, let 'im speak so he'll go away."
blah blah blah bullshit bullshit "no true scotsman" more bullshit...
Provide a slew of photos of the racism of Tea Partiers, and they'll claim it was "doctored." Provide video, and they'll claim it was "edited" or "produced." Provide more video from other angles, and they'll claim it was "infiltrators" or "agitators."
Get 'em into the bar where they're holding the weekly meeting, give 'em a few beers, and watch the racism fly. I've seen it too many times. I'm not calling you a liar about the things you claim you've experienced, but if you claim your experience is any more representative than my own, then you're just lying.
So please, answer my questions, provide some proof other than anecdotes or manufactured racism from leftist "Crash the Tea Party" types, and then we can talk. Otherwise I find it difficult to believe you.
One of the questions, I answered in my initial post unprompted, which proves you lack reading comprehension skills. Some of the questions, I am not going to answer because I have been asked by my friend - who has given up on politics and also now on the Republicans after dealing with the racist bullshit they spewed in the primary race - not to spread information that would result in some asshole like you googling it and calling to harass him at work.
And I have no trouble understanding that you "find it difficult" to believe me. After all, your worldview and self-worth depends on not finding out that you've hitched your wagon to a platform and party with an incredibly strong racist streak, which means even when you're watching it in plain sight, you're more than willing to dismiss it as "isolated", or "infiltrators", or a hundred other excuses.
Well, I'm down in the south. You know, where the Republican base is, with the "southern strategy" that you people haven't given up since Nixon came up with it.
I don't know what you're seeing in your neck of the woods. But I can go with what I've seen time and again, and I can go with what I've seen reported on time and again. And I can go by what I get from the local mailings, and robocalls, and emails from the local Republican party and "Tea Party" politicians.
Racism is strong down here. It's only gotten stronger since the election of Obama, and anyone who thinks that there isn't a very, very heavy segment of the Republican base right now who are opposing Obama primarily because they have a racial thing going on, well, they're not paying attention.
This isn't an isolated event. At the rallies down here, the "speakers" regularly get up and hurl invective at anyone who speaks a foreign language. They regularly insinuate that anyone of latino descent is "un-american", is "refusing to assimilate", or is connected to organized crime and drugs merely because of their skin color or racial makeup. There's a major problem with unequal treatment of people by race when it comes to the police, too - not in my state, but in a relevant news story, there's the race-based cop shakedowns of Tenaha, Texas. What most people don't realize is that in the American south, this kind of stuff is considered par for the course - a news story about it isn't "oh my god this is out of place", it's "these guys got a little too greedy and got caught." And then there are instances like this.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Tea Partiers, when they think there's a camera on them, insist that much of their platform is about "smaller government", or "law and order", or other high-minded principles. When you get them off camera, when you get them talking freely with a couple beers, then it's a different story. THEN, you find out that the "smaller government" means "too many people with dark skin living in poverty get food stamps or government assistance, how dare they come here, they should just go back to mexico" or that "law and order" means "I don't want those dark skinned spanish speaking people living in my neighborhood or sending a kid to the local schools, and if one of their kids asks my daughter for a date I'm getting out the shotgun." And the sad part is, all I have to do to hear them go on like this is show up at the local bar where they hold their "Tea Party meetup" events, keep my mouth shut and ears open, and drink a beer while they rant to each other.
the founders envisioned a LIMITED central government who's role was kept at a minimum. Defending the country, ensuring peace and unimpeded economic traffic between the states (the infamous "commerce clause") and providing for jurisprudence over country-wide legal issues. that was it.
What you're forgetting is the WHY. They envisioned keeping things "local" where possible; more to the point, they wanted things kept to their definition of "local" in what could easily done in a week's travel. None of the original 13 colonies took more than a week to ride on horse from one end to the other, and some took significantly less.
Fast-forward to today. You can hop on a jet, and cross the country in hours. You can road-trip it in less than a week. Riding hard and trading driving shifts, you can road-trip New York to Los Angeles on the freeways in 1 day 21 hours (so assume maybe 2 and a half days to add in gas stops, pit stops, and food breaks). Communication speeds are even faster; you can get real-time communication with an amazing amount of the world over phone or internet at any time, infrastructure-wise.
The reason for the clauses of the constitution concerning interstate commerce and interstate relations grew, not because the government power was growing, but because the nation - communication and travel wise - simply "became smaller." The founding fathers would have taken an area like Texas and forcibly broken it up into multiple states, because they would never have seen it as viable to have one big "Texas State" with that much land mass - but even between 1776 and 1845, communication and travel technologies had made it viable to allow Texas to enter as a state without being broken up.
They also never considered what the march of the industrial revolution would do. Sure, they never considered the idea of something like the EPA - but they were DUMPING THEIR SHIT OUT THE WINDOW INTO THE STREETS; Thomas Crapper's company didn't start mass producing flush toilets until the 1880s. They never considered the need for something like the EPA and environmental regulations, because they never considered the idea of a factory dumping so much toxic waste into a river or down into the groundwater reservoir that the water became beyond-undrinkable and beyond-unlivable.
I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. The founding fathers envisioned "limited government" based on scale of communications. As time has marched forward, communications and travel technology have changed, industrial technology has changed, and the sheer mobility of humanity has changed, the federal government has had to take a more active role simply because the states are, by virtue of being "so close together" and interacting so frequently, in conflict more and more and more and more.
You don't believe me? Think about this: what happens if we leave environmental regulations to the states? Chances are, Illinois or Minnesota passes something really fucking lax, and the next thing you know Missouri and Louisiana are up in arms because the Mississippi and their drinking and irrigation water is being fouled.
Sorry, but the evidence of my own eyes and ears when visiting Tea Party events - and no, I was not there to "infiltrate", but to find out if what I had been seeing was truly representative of the movement - showed me precisely how racist these people are. A local buddy of mine with a latino-sounding name (actually of Spanish descent, as in his father is from Spain) was roundly booed and got shouts of "go back to Mexico" from this filth merely for showing up - and he was there because he's a registered Republican candidate for the state senate and was trying to get votes for the primary!
At the time, they were NOT certain what was present, because Saddam was deliberately not cooperating. So we had three theories. We had the theory (which turned out to be correct) that there wasn't anything left and Saddam was just blustering. We had the theory, which the US had, that Saddam's weapons program had gone underground into storage or hidden operation. And we had the theory, proposed by the Weenie French, that we shouldn't attack Iraq because Saddam would use WMD's to retaliate.
Oh, and let's not forget that the UN high mucky-mucks, particularly those like Hans Blix and ElBaradei, were already under heavy suspicion related to Kofi Annan and the oil-for-food scandal and all the bribery Saddam's regime was tossing around from it.
Aren't the democrats just as uncompromising and extreme?
The short version? No.
Obama offered them a jobs bill that was 98% copy-and-paste from previous Republican jobs bills. The Republicans shouted it down because 2% compromise, along with having to share the credit for passing a jobs bill with "the n*gg*r from kenya", was too much for the Racist Republican Base to stand.
Spoken like someone without the first clue of what the Constitution and its construction were really all about. You remind me of people like this.
The problem is that no amount of "oversight" will ever be enough because you are essentially asking the government to police itself. You simply cannot separate the oversight body from the rest of the government without creating a quasi-police state with a bunch of unelected people having "oversight" over the elected ones. That sounds very much like Tyranny to me.
Which is essentially what happened to the US under the "Articles of Confederation": 13 tyrannical states that proceeded to act like spoiled brats, impose taxes/tariffs on each other, harass each other's citizens, and so on with no legal recourse for resolving the disputes between states because the Federal government lacked any enforcement power. The solution was a STRONG federal government, with equally-powerful legislative and executive branches able to contradict each other and a judiciary with final-say veto power but who were limited to stepping in ONLY in the event of a conflict filed by affected parties (citizens or governmental bodies).
But please, go back to imagining what you think the constitution says, rather than paying attention to what it ACTUALLY says and what ACTUALLY happened and what the Founding Fathers ACTUALLY wrote and said on the matter. It'll make you feel better in your ignorance.
Frum was hawkish on Iraq, because the evidence on Iraq was sound (at least, sound enough if you fell for Saddam's bluster, a point which has been lost on the "no blood for oil" crowd: Saddam was desperately trying to prop up the illusion that he had a WMD program for fear that the Saudis or Iranians would decide he'd outlived his usefulness and come in to take Iraq from him themselves). I didn't agree fully on Iraq, but I can look at the evidence that was on hand, the way Saddam had blustered for decades about his weaponry, the fact that he'd actually gassed portions of his own populace, and I can see where they were coming from at least.
But Frum's always been a rather moderate Republican otherwise. If you read the article fully, he goes over a lot of the policy positions that even GWB took that are now considered "heresy" in Tea Party circles.
It's a hard truth. Ronald Reagan famously quipped, when asked about his political party change, that "I didn't leave the Democratic party, the party left me." In their rush towards reactionary fascism over the past 4-5 years, the Republicans today have done the same to more than half their number.
That's what they were supposed to do. The committee's mandate was to look at both where taxes could be raised, and spending cut.
Unfortunately, the Republicans are currently held hostage by the retard wing of the Republican Party, the Tea Tards, who are gung-ho on the "Grover Norquist Pledge" to never raise taxes on anyone who has enough money to donate to the Republican party and their various slush funds. Nevermind the fact that taxes on the rich are lower than they've been since the Truman administration. The end result is that the committee was going to fail, because the "party line" of the Republicans has grown under the "leadersship" of talk radio zealots like Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh to be "no compromise, no sensible solutions, our-taliban-way-or-anarchy."
David Frum said it best: the Republicans have completely lost touch with reality. I encourage you to read the whole thing, he makes a lot of sense and it explains quite well how insane the Republican party has gotten.
Except that there aren't going to be 6000 "common words" as the base. You're going to see the same inanity as current passwords, you're going to see dictionary file attacks using an actual kiddy dictionary with 1000 words or less. This will break through most passwords. You're going to see users allowed to create their own password, which means "jebusisgodone" and "onelittlefishyswim" followed "jebusisgodtwo" and "twolittlefishyswim" and so on and so forth.
"Bitwise", it sounds secure, until you realize it can trivially be attacked on the token level rather than the bit level.
No, the problem is that under the "obviousness" and overbroadness standards, 99% of the patents of the past 20 years probably should not have been granted, but the patent office is overwhelmed and incompetent in equal measure.
In the starting days of the automobile, the horse farmers and buggy whip manufacturers managed to come up with all sorts of insane fucking laws. For instance, these. In a few states, you had to have a flagman walk in front of your car (yes WALK) waving a flag and beeping a horn to "warn" drivers of horse-drawn carriages that one of these crazy horseless contraptions was coming through.
Eventually, good sense prevailed, and the buggy whip manufacturers fell to their proper place in history... but some of these crazy stupid laws remain on the books, just unenforced.
Likewise, we'll probably see the same thing happen here. "Piracy", as the MafiAA goons tell it, is killing their ability to rip off artists of money. Sooner or later, the artists will find a way to make money that doesn't involve the goons and the illegal MafiAA price-fixing monopolies. It's already starting to happen. "Piracy" is also, thanks to fucked up copyright laws, becoming the only way to preserve our digital history; in the meantime, plenty has been lost, such as software for the Cray-1 that wasn't preserved and that can't be run on other platforms. The Apple II/e library is preserved only because "pirates" have preserved most of it and crafted emulation for it. Similar for most of the early Commodore computers, the Atari lines... DosBox almost REQUIRES that you have "pirate" software that ran on 5 1/4" disk in order to run it (e.g. "copy the disk") for some of the oldest stuff it runs, but modern computers don't even have the connections required to attach an actual 5 1/4" disk even if you could find media that hasn't succumbed to bit-rot.
It's impossible to say that copyright is meaningful when so much of "copyrighted" products today is covered by a law that lasts 100x longer than the expected platform lifespan. That's just ridiculous on the face of it and deliberately breaks the contract between copyright holders and society, which is that the copyrighted work WILL enter the public domain as repayment to the public for the grant of LIMITED duration monopoly.
It's a good working theory. I wonder if we'd also see a measurable difference in pristine air as opposed to polluted air, similar to the dielectric difference between pure and impure (read: soapy, salty, etc) water?
Anything created by lawyers, is not created for the public good. It is created deliberately confusing and inscrutable to further the goal of making more bullshit work for the leeches known as lawyers.
There's an old saying that goes "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Lawyers have taken this to its logical extreme: they have made the law so byzantine, so inscrutable, that it's impossible to understand what the fuck the law SAYS without consulting a lawyer. Therefore, ignorance is the norm, and the lawyers prosper despite not contributing one single fucking good to the economy.
In some ways, I'm sad it didn't work out. The AMD chips for the time were a LOT better anyways. Even today, unless you're on the bleeding-fucking-edge $900/chip range, AMD is better bang for your buck. If Intel hadn't been able to force companies to be "Intel chip" with 3rd party motherboards for decent RAM, we might have seen AMD actually break the Intel beige-box monopoly.
No kidding. It's less that they need faster animation rendering, than that they need better stories.
Learn from your competition - don't crank out crap just because it'll "sell", make sure you're on the right track to make something good every time. Pixar hasn't had a dud yet, and they freely admit to taking a number of their stories back to formula because someone said "hey this doesn't seem to be working" rather than pushing ahead with something crappy.
Oh, one other thing: STOP it with the "must end with a dance number" bullshit. Megamind was actually really good most of the way through, but they missed a few obvious gags towards the end and then they totally dropped the ball by throwing a needless dance sequence in and ruining the ending.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose in your world, you know Hamilton's heart and what he wrote was just to placate the others. I on the other hand, go by what they put on pen and paper as that is all we have to go by.
No, you cherry pick one quote out of a very large speech, take it out of context, and completely misrepresent it because you're just dishonest.
See my response to the other person above.
And for god's sake, get an actual education on the writers of the Constitution beyond fetishizing just one or two men.
The problem with you right wing boobs is simple: you don't read a goddamn thing, except for the quotes you can strip from the back of the dust jacket of the latest hate screed from Gingrich or Palin or Beck.
Alexander Hamilton was a STRONG FEDERALIST - leader of the Federalist Party in fact, against the Democratic-Republican party of Jefferson. His accomplishments, among other things, include the creation of the national bank and federal agencies to oversee the collection of tariffs. He also negotiated the Jay Treaty to accomplish a lasting peace with Britain and avoid the economic collapse of going to war against one's largest trade partner. Jefferson meanwhile was a warmongering fool who, after spending too much time and drinking too much wine with the French, felt that another war with the British was in order.
The quote that you took out of context above was intended, not to say that the federal government should be weak, but to mollify those like Benjamin Franklin who felt that the government created from the constitution would be so strong that it would eliminate state governments entirely and reduce the entire nation to a mere collection of House districts.
But this is the entire problem with having this sort of debate; the side whipping out quotes left and right doesn't know the context of what they are quoting, they don't understand the history, and they're uninterested in actually learning about it, because that might run the risk of encountering information and facts that are directly contradictory to their distorted, bizarre, uneducated worldview.
You spend a lot of time on Jefferson and Madison; the quote from Franklin really is inappropriate in its entirety given that it was written long before the Constitution, as part of a letter to delegates advocating secession, and tarring British loyalists as "giving up liberty" for the "security" of the British empire. Jefferson was off in France and had absolutely shit-all to do with the writing of the Constitution. Madison, meanwhile, is MUCH more in favor of centralized government than you give him credit for; the bulk of his writings (which come from the Federalist, not the ANTI-Federalist) are a defense of vesting power in a centralized, federal government and not a call to strip the federal government of power and simply re-create the old Articles of Confederacy.
But, since you've proven only an ability to pull quotations out of context and absolutely zero understanding of the process in which the Constitution let me clue you in: the basics of it, including the separation of powers, were the production of the Virginia delegation led by Edmund Randolph. The bicameral legislature was pulled from British tradition, while the idea of power-against-power as checks and balances came heavily from the philosophical writings of John Locke. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were heavy proponents of "proportional only" representation in both houses, and were ruled down by the smaller states before the compromise of the Senate/House division. William Paterson, a STRONG federalist, proposed the competing unicameral "two representatives per state" option that eventually became the Senate. Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the preamble, was also a strong federalist who had roundly decried the antisocial behavior of the states towards each other under the Articles - he had previously been a congressional representative during the Articles, but was defeated for reelection when anti-federalism became popular in New York.
When you want to look over the creation of the Constitution, you need to look at the writings of those who were actually there. You've misquoted James Madison, you've barely done justice to Ben Franklin (who was almost a freaking anarchist, as evidenced by his speech from the final day of the convention), and your other "founding fathers" weren't even participants in its creation.
In short: it is you, sir, who is uneducated, ill-informed, and completely wrong about the Constitution.
First of all, the percentage that doesn't pay any income tax is about 46%, not 51%.
Actually, it's lower than that.
Throw in payroll taxes (ss/medicare) and the percentage without a tax burden drops to somewhere in the mid-20s.
Throw in the deduction for state income or sales taxes, and the percentage "not paying income tax" to some form of government winds up at right about the unemployment numbers.
But then again, why actually use relevant numbers when you can have a Big Fat Lie to claim that the poor "aren't paying their fair share" while millionaires and billionaires hide their income in offshore accounts and stock-option tricks that involve taking "loans" using as collateral tied-up stock portfolios designed to not actually pay taxes?
Not surprising considering that you know you're lying.
How predictable that you'd say that, because "oh that has to be a lie" is the primary mental defense of you when confronted with any evidence that things are not how you think they are. But I'm not lying.
Maybe you've never experienced someone harassing your friends over politics, maybe you've been lucky to be insulated from the dirty tricks that go on... but this is the real world, and in the real world, your "friends" of the Republican Party and Tea Party are a bunch of racist assholes who will go after someone just for having a foreign-sounding last name and harass them at their workplace and try to get them fired from their job if they go into the primary against the "party favorite" candidate who's part of the drunken racist shithead good-ol-boys network that hasn't changed since their daddies and granddaddies were the local KKK leadership.
So in conclusion... yes. You may not know it, you may be in denial - hell I KNOW you are in denial - but congratulations, you're a fucking racist.
Who was your friend?
He's asked that nobody bring up publicity for him personally any more, because his place of business got harassing phone calls about "the mexican" after an email campaign from the local Republican front groups. So I'm withholding that. I hope you understand.
What position was he running for?
I said it in my initial post: state senate.
How did he do in his race?
He lost the primary to an opponent who went to a lot of trouble running the "don't let the mexican into the race" whisper and email campaign. I'll point out: my friend agrees with most of the "republican principles" that you do, which is why he was running in the first place. Unlike most Republicans, he's willing to sit down, hash out differences, agree to disagree if necessary, and do so politely. I guess that qualified him as a "wimpy illegal" as far as the Tea Partiers are concerned.
How many people were shouting racist epithets? Did anyone object to it?
What date was the event?
This'd be in the primaries for 2010.
How many people were shouting racist epithets? Did anyone object to it?
If anyone was objecting, aside from his friends and family in attendance, you couldn't hear them over the majority of the crowd. And the only "objection" from the Republican Party folks on stage was the moderator coming up to the podium and saying "ok folks, let 'im speak, he came here to speak and he's a candidate, let 'im speak so he'll go away."
blah blah blah bullshit bullshit "no true scotsman" more bullshit...
Provide a slew of photos of the racism of Tea Partiers, and they'll claim it was "doctored."
Provide video, and they'll claim it was "edited" or "produced."
Provide more video from other angles, and they'll claim it was "infiltrators" or "agitators."
Get 'em into the bar where they're holding the weekly meeting, give 'em a few beers, and watch the racism fly. I've seen it too many times. I'm not calling you a liar about the things you claim you've experienced, but if you claim your experience is any more representative than my own, then you're just lying.
So please, answer my questions, provide some proof other than anecdotes or manufactured racism from leftist "Crash the Tea Party" types, and then we can talk. Otherwise I find it difficult to believe you.
One of the questions, I answered in my initial post unprompted, which proves you lack reading comprehension skills. Some of the questions, I am not going to answer because I have been asked by my friend - who has given up on politics and also now on the Republicans after dealing with the racist bullshit they spewed in the primary race - not to spread information that would result in some asshole like you googling it and calling to harass him at work.
And I have no trouble understanding that you "find it difficult" to believe me. After all, your worldview and self-worth depends on not finding out that you've hitched your wagon to a platform and party with an incredibly strong racist streak, which means even when you're watching it in plain sight, you're more than willing to dismiss it as "isolated", or "infiltrators", or a hundred other excuses.
Well, I'm down in the south. You know, where the Republican base is, with the "southern strategy" that you people haven't given up since Nixon came up with it.
I don't know what you're seeing in your neck of the woods. But I can go with what I've seen time and again, and I can go with what I've seen reported on time and again. And I can go by what I get from the local mailings, and robocalls, and emails from the local Republican party and "Tea Party" politicians.
Racism is strong down here. It's only gotten stronger since the election of Obama, and anyone who thinks that there isn't a very, very heavy segment of the Republican base right now who are opposing Obama primarily because they have a racial thing going on, well, they're not paying attention.
This isn't an isolated event. At the rallies down here, the "speakers" regularly get up and hurl invective at anyone who speaks a foreign language. They regularly insinuate that anyone of latino descent is "un-american", is "refusing to assimilate", or is connected to organized crime and drugs merely because of their skin color or racial makeup. There's a major problem with unequal treatment of people by race when it comes to the police, too - not in my state, but in a relevant news story, there's the race-based cop shakedowns of Tenaha, Texas. What most people don't realize is that in the American south, this kind of stuff is considered par for the course - a news story about it isn't "oh my god this is out of place", it's "these guys got a little too greedy and got caught." And then there are instances like this.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Tea Partiers, when they think there's a camera on them, insist that much of their platform is about "smaller government", or "law and order", or other high-minded principles. When you get them off camera, when you get them talking freely with a couple beers, then it's a different story. THEN, you find out that the "smaller government" means "too many people with dark skin living in poverty get food stamps or government assistance, how dare they come here, they should just go back to mexico" or that "law and order" means "I don't want those dark skinned spanish speaking people living in my neighborhood or sending a kid to the local schools, and if one of their kids asks my daughter for a date I'm getting out the shotgun." And the sad part is, all I have to do to hear them go on like this is show up at the local bar where they hold their "Tea Party meetup" events, keep my mouth shut and ears open, and drink a beer while they rant to each other.
the founders envisioned a LIMITED central government who's role was kept at a minimum. Defending the country, ensuring peace and unimpeded economic traffic between the states (the infamous "commerce clause") and providing for jurisprudence over country-wide legal issues. that was it.
What you're forgetting is the WHY. They envisioned keeping things "local" where possible; more to the point, they wanted things kept to their definition of "local" in what could easily done in a week's travel. None of the original 13 colonies took more than a week to ride on horse from one end to the other, and some took significantly less.
Fast-forward to today. You can hop on a jet, and cross the country in hours. You can road-trip it in less than a week. Riding hard and trading driving shifts, you can road-trip New York to Los Angeles on the freeways in 1 day 21 hours (so assume maybe 2 and a half days to add in gas stops, pit stops, and food breaks). Communication speeds are even faster; you can get real-time communication with an amazing amount of the world over phone or internet at any time, infrastructure-wise.
The reason for the clauses of the constitution concerning interstate commerce and interstate relations grew, not because the government power was growing, but because the nation - communication and travel wise - simply "became smaller." The founding fathers would have taken an area like Texas and forcibly broken it up into multiple states, because they would never have seen it as viable to have one big "Texas State" with that much land mass - but even between 1776 and 1845, communication and travel technologies had made it viable to allow Texas to enter as a state without being broken up.
They also never considered what the march of the industrial revolution would do. Sure, they never considered the idea of something like the EPA - but they were DUMPING THEIR SHIT OUT THE WINDOW INTO THE STREETS; Thomas Crapper's company didn't start mass producing flush toilets until the 1880s. They never considered the need for something like the EPA and environmental regulations, because they never considered the idea of a factory dumping so much toxic waste into a river or down into the groundwater reservoir that the water became beyond-undrinkable and beyond-unlivable.
I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. The founding fathers envisioned "limited government" based on scale of communications. As time has marched forward, communications and travel technology have changed, industrial technology has changed, and the sheer mobility of humanity has changed, the federal government has had to take a more active role simply because the states are, by virtue of being "so close together" and interacting so frequently, in conflict more and more and more and more.
You don't believe me? Think about this: what happens if we leave environmental regulations to the states? Chances are, Illinois or Minnesota passes something really fucking lax, and the next thing you know Missouri and Louisiana are up in arms because the Mississippi and their drinking and irrigation water is being fouled.
Sorry, but the evidence of my own eyes and ears when visiting Tea Party events - and no, I was not there to "infiltrate", but to find out if what I had been seeing was truly representative of the movement - showed me precisely how racist these people are. A local buddy of mine with a latino-sounding name (actually of Spanish descent, as in his father is from Spain) was roundly booed and got shouts of "go back to Mexico" from this filth merely for showing up - and he was there because he's a registered Republican candidate for the state senate and was trying to get votes for the primary!
Shhh. You're confusing Republicans with math. Didn't you know that math is just really socialism?
Let's take your points as they are:
Hans Blix:
- Iraq was impeding his mission deliberately.
- Iraq was playing cat and mouse games.
- Report to UN on Janurary 27th, 2003: "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it."
ElBaradei:
- was relying on Iraq themselves to provide evidence.
- report to the UN from ElBaradei was that Iraq was withholding evidence and materials, that their Dec. 7, 2002 document dump “did not provide any new information relevant to certain questions that have been outstanding since 1998."
At the time, they were NOT certain what was present, because Saddam was deliberately not cooperating. So we had three theories. We had the theory (which turned out to be correct) that there wasn't anything left and Saddam was just blustering. We had the theory, which the US had, that Saddam's weapons program had gone underground into storage or hidden operation. And we had the theory, proposed by the Weenie French, that we shouldn't attack Iraq because Saddam would use WMD's to retaliate.
Oh, and let's not forget that the UN high mucky-mucks, particularly those like Hans Blix and ElBaradei, were already under heavy suspicion related to Kofi Annan and the oil-for-food scandal and all the bribery Saddam's regime was tossing around from it.
Aren't the democrats just as uncompromising and extreme?
The short version? No.
Obama offered them a jobs bill that was 98% copy-and-paste from previous Republican jobs bills. The Republicans shouted it down because 2% compromise, along with having to share the credit for passing a jobs bill with "the n*gg*r from kenya", was too much for the Racist Republican Base to stand.
Spoken like someone without the first clue of what the Constitution and its construction were really all about. You remind me of people like this.
The problem is that no amount of "oversight" will ever be enough because you are essentially asking the government to police itself. You simply cannot separate the oversight body from the rest of the government without creating a quasi-police state with a bunch of unelected people having "oversight" over the elected ones. That sounds very much like Tyranny to me.
Which is essentially what happened to the US under the "Articles of Confederation": 13 tyrannical states that proceeded to act like spoiled brats, impose taxes/tariffs on each other, harass each other's citizens, and so on with no legal recourse for resolving the disputes between states because the Federal government lacked any enforcement power. The solution was a STRONG federal government, with equally-powerful legislative and executive branches able to contradict each other and a judiciary with final-say veto power but who were limited to stepping in ONLY in the event of a conflict filed by affected parties (citizens or governmental bodies).
But please, go back to imagining what you think the constitution says, rather than paying attention to what it ACTUALLY says and what ACTUALLY happened and what the Founding Fathers ACTUALLY wrote and said on the matter. It'll make you feel better in your ignorance.
Except that those signs and events aren't a lie...
Frum was hawkish on Iraq, because the evidence on Iraq was sound (at least, sound enough if you fell for Saddam's bluster, a point which has been lost on the "no blood for oil" crowd: Saddam was desperately trying to prop up the illusion that he had a WMD program for fear that the Saudis or Iranians would decide he'd outlived his usefulness and come in to take Iraq from him themselves). I didn't agree fully on Iraq, but I can look at the evidence that was on hand, the way Saddam had blustered for decades about his weaponry, the fact that he'd actually gassed portions of his own populace, and I can see where they were coming from at least.
But Frum's always been a rather moderate Republican otherwise. If you read the article fully, he goes over a lot of the policy positions that even GWB took that are now considered "heresy" in Tea Party circles.
It's a hard truth. Ronald Reagan famously quipped, when asked about his political party change, that "I didn't leave the Democratic party, the party left me." In their rush towards reactionary fascism over the past 4-5 years, the Republicans today have done the same to more than half their number.
That's what they were supposed to do. The committee's mandate was to look at both where taxes could be raised, and spending cut.
Unfortunately, the Republicans are currently held hostage by the retard wing of the Republican Party, the Tea Tards, who are gung-ho on the "Grover Norquist Pledge" to never raise taxes on anyone who has enough money to donate to the Republican party and their various slush funds. Nevermind the fact that taxes on the rich are lower than they've been since the Truman administration. The end result is that the committee was going to fail, because the "party line" of the Republicans has grown under the "leadersship" of talk radio zealots like Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh to be "no compromise, no sensible solutions, our-taliban-way-or-anarchy."
David Frum said it best: the Republicans have completely lost touch with reality. I encourage you to read the whole thing, he makes a lot of sense and it explains quite well how insane the Republican party has gotten.
...4...5.
That's the kind of password an idiot would have on his town's water control system!
Except that there aren't going to be 6000 "common words" as the base. You're going to see the same inanity as current passwords, you're going to see dictionary file attacks using an actual kiddy dictionary with 1000 words or less. This will break through most passwords. You're going to see users allowed to create their own password, which means "jebusisgodone" and "onelittlefishyswim" followed "jebusisgodtwo" and "twolittlefishyswim" and so on and so forth.
"Bitwise", it sounds secure, until you realize it can trivially be attacked on the token level rather than the bit level.
No, the problem is that under the "obviousness" and overbroadness standards, 99% of the patents of the past 20 years probably should not have been granted, but the patent office is overwhelmed and incompetent in equal measure.
Welcome to the real world.
In the starting days of the automobile, the horse farmers and buggy whip manufacturers managed to come up with all sorts of insane fucking laws. For instance, these. In a few states, you had to have a flagman walk in front of your car (yes WALK) waving a flag and beeping a horn to "warn" drivers of horse-drawn carriages that one of these crazy horseless contraptions was coming through.
Eventually, good sense prevailed, and the buggy whip manufacturers fell to their proper place in history... but some of these crazy stupid laws remain on the books, just unenforced.
Likewise, we'll probably see the same thing happen here. "Piracy", as the MafiAA goons tell it, is killing their ability to rip off artists of money. Sooner or later, the artists will find a way to make money that doesn't involve the goons and the illegal MafiAA price-fixing monopolies. It's already starting to happen. "Piracy" is also, thanks to fucked up copyright laws, becoming the only way to preserve our digital history; in the meantime, plenty has been lost, such as software for the Cray-1 that wasn't preserved and that can't be run on other platforms. The Apple II/e library is preserved only because "pirates" have preserved most of it and crafted emulation for it. Similar for most of the early Commodore computers, the Atari lines... DosBox almost REQUIRES that you have "pirate" software that ran on 5 1/4" disk in order to run it (e.g. "copy the disk") for some of the oldest stuff it runs, but modern computers don't even have the connections required to attach an actual 5 1/4" disk even if you could find media that hasn't succumbed to bit-rot.
It's impossible to say that copyright is meaningful when so much of "copyrighted" products today is covered by a law that lasts 100x longer than the expected platform lifespan. That's just ridiculous on the face of it and deliberately breaks the contract between copyright holders and society, which is that the copyrighted work WILL enter the public domain as repayment to the public for the grant of LIMITED duration monopoly.
It's a good working theory. I wonder if we'd also see a measurable difference in pristine air as opposed to polluted air, similar to the dielectric difference between pure and impure (read: soapy, salty, etc) water?
No kidding.
Anything created by lawyers, is not created for the public good. It is created deliberately confusing and inscrutable to further the goal of making more bullshit work for the leeches known as lawyers.
There's an old saying that goes "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Lawyers have taken this to its logical extreme: they have made the law so byzantine, so inscrutable, that it's impossible to understand what the fuck the law SAYS without consulting a lawyer. Therefore, ignorance is the norm, and the lawyers prosper despite not contributing one single fucking good to the economy.
In some ways, I'm sad it didn't work out. The AMD chips for the time were a LOT better anyways. Even today, unless you're on the bleeding-fucking-edge $900/chip range, AMD is better bang for your buck. If Intel hadn't been able to force companies to be "Intel chip" with 3rd party motherboards for decent RAM, we might have seen AMD actually break the Intel beige-box monopoly.
No kidding. It's less that they need faster animation rendering, than that they need better stories.
Learn from your competition - don't crank out crap just because it'll "sell", make sure you're on the right track to make something good every time. Pixar hasn't had a dud yet, and they freely admit to taking a number of their stories back to formula because someone said "hey this doesn't seem to be working" rather than pushing ahead with something crappy.
Oh, one other thing: STOP it with the "must end with a dance number" bullshit. Megamind was actually really good most of the way through, but they missed a few obvious gags towards the end and then they totally dropped the ball by throwing a needless dance sequence in and ruining the ending.
And this kind of fucking bullshit is why mathematical algorithms should not fucking be patentable. EVER.