The AG's job regarding legal advice is to provide it in response to requests from state institutions. In this case, I believe, nobody asked him - he just decided that it was in his political interest to create the opinion from his reading of the laws.
Actually, he was asked, so you stand corrected. In fact, several universities asked the question, and it would not surprise me to find that the entire thing was orchestrated in order to produce fodder some pure political theatre. Of course, Cuccinelli can never say who asked the question: he's acting as attorney for the universities, which are protected by client privilege.
Is the US really a superpower still? It's definitely declining. Looking at history I think it's delusional arrogance to believe the US has found the "perfect" government. Especially when you consider the US being such a young construct, which definitely has yet to stand the test of time.
Well, the US does have the longest standing Constitution of any nation. I think that says a whole lot about the effectiveness of our chosen form of government.
But that's why judges and juries are given discretion in sentencing. "Assault" can be prosecuted and sentence in a wide range of ways, and they motivations of the attacker can always be considered. You don't need new laws to decide that one incidence of "beating up" should result in a week in jail and another several years.
Hate crime laws are just a way of dividing people into various identity groups so that they focus on the privileges and protections for their own "group", distracted from the work of the "political class" which is to always gain more money and power for itself, at the expense of all others.
Religion is a behavior, it's not something should be regulated like race and other innate attributes.
I mean we don't want special legislation protecting people who are homo- or xenophobic.
But religious practice is explicitly protected by the Constitution, right there in the first amendment.
But then so is just about any behavior, as there is nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to regulate interpersonal behavior at all. The SCOTUS has affirmed this principle by ruling that states' archaic "sodomy" laws were unconstitutional.
So, in point of fact, gay behavior is protected as a right of the people. Saying that gay people need special treatment is something else altogether. After all, they are the only ones on any list of enumerated "protected classes" that have never been denied the right to vote.
He's also the asshole that told all the public universities in Virginia they could no longer have policies of non-discrimination towards gays.
Stay classy.
Not exactly. Several of the colleges asked him for an opinion about their policy. And he told them that since the General Assembly had declined to add "sexual orientation" to the list of Virginia's "protected classes", that they could not provide special protections for that class by themselves.
The governor later clarified the issue by stating "Discrimination based on factors such as one’s sexual orientation or parental status violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. Therefore, discrimination against enumerated classes of persons set forth in the Virginia Human Rights Act or discrimination against any class of persons without a rational basis is prohibited,"
You ask a lawyer for an opinion on the law, he's going to give you a legal opinion, not some tripe based on emotional biases.
What about when exporting or interoperability is a feature in the original version, and the function is quietly disabled in an automatic update to the software that changes the data format at the same time significant features are added ?
Yea, I know. All that fine-print legalize is really a pain to try to dig through. Hardly worth it at all. Just click "Agree" and move on.
OK, so no one can ever fire you. When can't you come up with an excuse to lock the equipment and walk off?
Software vendors do this all the time.
In the form of locking your data (and not providing any way for you to export it to an interoperable file format)
This is actually old news. The companies that install and manage the red light cameras have always encouraged the municipalities to shorten the yellow lights. In fact, I can remember seeing studies that showed that the cameras did not even pay for themselves unless the yellow lights were shortened.
The oldest article I could find from a quick search was this 2 year old article about a few cities caught in the act of shortening the lights to improve revenues.
That's how we were able to stop red light cameras from being implemented here in Virginia. These "shorter yellow light" studies, along with studies that showed that the implementation of cameras usually increased accidents at intersections, cowed the local legislators to abandon their plans, even after lobbying the state legislators to allow them to install them.
Here's what to watch for: In a political environment where Republicans have been completely unified in opposition by every single act of President Obama, there will suddenly be wide bi-partisan support for ACTA. It will be sloughed off by the media as an aberration, and you'll hear how "It must be a good treaty since there's bi-partisan support".
Yes, people complain all the time about "partisan bickering" - but at least when they are busy fighting each other they aren't causing more problems. It's when both parties agree that the rest of us are in the most danger.
Government is broken. It enacts regulation it will not enforce. It's regulatory bodies are toothless in the face of lobbying dollars.
The FCC is toothless to regulate dominating, price-fixing, anti-consumer telecom companies(AT&T, Verizon and Qwest, I'm talking about you.)
It's actually worse than that. Most Federal regulatory bodies are, in fact, controlled by large corporations, and are used not to regulate corporate activity, but to impose barriers to competition for those corporations, and regulate activities such that consumers are more dependent upon those corporations and the government institutions controlled by them.
The FCC, then, is there to protect media giants from competition from pirate radio. The FDA is there to protect corporate food giants from small farmers, and the Fed is there to protect Wall Street from competition by small business.
All while spending the entire country so far into debt that there is no way out.
I think "trust in government" would be some psychotically misplaced trust at this point.
It's still a free country, regardless of you and your compatriots' effort to change that.
You are confused. He wasn't threatening you. That's how you and your compatriots work. "You do what I say or I'll attack you" is the standard conservative view. The "liberal" view is "you do what I expect you to do or I'll think less of you."
I think I'm pretty far from anything like a "standard conservative" - in fact I consider myself a classic liberal. But I didn't consider it a threat, just a misplaced directive (from my "betters"?). Insulting nonetheless.
You're right about his view, although I would describe it more as "I don't like what you say, so I'll assume you are stupid and ask you to shut up." And you're probably right that I should have left it alone. It's not the first time I've been baited by simple insults that don't even attempt to make a point. It probably had more to do with being marked a "Troll" for pointing out that the US Constitution preserves most powers for the states and the people.
I guess that idea is history now. I suppose Bush was right when he said "It's just a goddamn piece of paper."
I suggest you take a remedial reading class, then attend law school (I already have, class of 1992).
So you are an admitted liar and thief.
You too need to stop commenting on a subject you know little to nothing about.
Nope. It's still a free country, regardless of you and your compatriots' effort to change that. And you don't know what I know, but you have the obvious I won't argue with you anymore, since you have the know-it-all attitude that the rest of your profession has, when your only real claim to knowledge is how to lie without having any.
No it doesn't say anything about serving government purposes. It does however say something about the general welfare of the people.
It doesn't say that, either. The phrase you're referring to talks about spending powers to provide for the "General Welfare of the United States". Nowhere does it provide for welfare for the people.
No where in the Constitution does it state that the government can do whatever it wants as long as it serves some nebulous "government purpose.".
There is over 100 years of case law that says otherwise. I recommend to stop commenting on a subject you know little to nothing about.
Wow. The "it says whatever we say it says" big government despots are really out in full force today.
I suggest you read up a little bit on some of that case law. While the SCOTUS has supported some of the power grabs of the federal government over the years, it has also invalidated quite a few of them. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I'm hoping that they will allow the people to keep enough of their freedoms to keep tyranny from becoming more prevalent.
That said, there is certainly never been a case before the SCOTUS where they claimed that the Feds could create new powers for itself that weren't granted by the Constitution. They may have stretched some of the powers way beyond the original intention, but that's a far cry from claiming that any so-called "government purpose" is completely withing the bounds of the Federal government's authority.
Martin Luther King is turning in his grave because of your post.
Aknowledging race is not the same as being a racist. Equality is not the same as being colorblind.
Its time to move past tolerance and colorblindness and start imbracing the multitude of culutures that make up this country.
Sounds to me like you just want to call it something else.
"Racism does not have a good track record. It has been tried for a long time. You would think by now we would want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management."
- Thomas Sowell
No where in the Constitution does it state that the government can do whatever it wants as long as it serves some nebulous "government purpose.".
What it does state, quite clearly, is that power belongs in the hands of the people, and they have granted the government a few, limited, enumerated duties. Anything else they want to do, they have to ask the People first, and an overwhelming majority of them have to agree to it.
"Medicare is already guaranteed to be unable to pay its obligations in just a short time and this bill guarantees it will run out of money even sooner."
Come on, man, how naive are you? "The CBO also expects the bill to reduce the annual growth in Medicare expenditures by 1.4 percentage points per year, Democrats say, and extend Medicare's solvency by at least 9 years."
That's based on NO "doc fix", which drops Medicare's payments by 20%, which means doctors STOP taking Medicare payments. Of course they are going to pass the "doc fix", expanding costs. There will be *some* new money because the have added new Medicare taxes and payroll deductions, no way it will last 9 years, not when they are adding 3-6 million NEW medicaid people.
" It then takes that $500 billion and spends it on subsidies while claiming the $500 billion as debt reduction."
"According to Ryan, there's about $124 billion in double-counted money in the bill. Assuming his math is correct (and no one I talked to said it wasn't), that's a fair critique. What isn't fair is to suggest that this is about the health-care bill. This is how the government does its accounting."
How is that a "debunking"? It's still an accounting trick that means they are hiding the costs.
As some others pointed out already: it is not illegal to own a gun. You have to go through an established process to get them because GUNS ARE DANGEROUS.
I really don't know where this comes from. I see mostly lies in all the mainstream media, but I didn't start seeing it until a few years ago, because I took most of it at face-value. But then I started noticing how news items that I was familiar with were reported really... wrong. I assumed at first that the journalists were just being sloppy, or misunderstanding everything going on, or whatever.
But as I became more involved with things that the media reported about, I began to see that it was very common. They seem to just want to report what they want to, staying close enough to some truth, or quoting people that really don't have enough visibility to get the corrections seen, so they aren't questioned in their lies.
This isn't just a Fox News or Murdoch phenomenon. It's ALL of them. The local news paper and news stations lie and distort their reporting on local stories too. You just never see it unless you really have the details yourself beforehand. Once the media outlets put their "spin" on it, that becomes the view of the event, no matter how myopic the view may be.
I would suggest that you get involved in some events that get reported on, or get to know people that are quoted or mentioned in the news and media, then look for how the events / people are reported. You would be shocked at the lies.
... However, you will find that those figures vary widely based on factor W - WHO is being charged for the service. And the people doing that are not the consumers, but the providers and the insurance companies.
Well that was exactly my point. And when it's government-controlled, it will become a system of charging the maximum allowed for everything, and non-covered services will simply be unavailable to all (except congress, of course).
In short, I think that your story (like those of most conservatives) are fantasies,... I would be willing to pay a few dollars a month more if it ensured that you received mental health care to bring an end to your delusions.
Cute. I'm not a conservative, I'm a classic liberal. And your comments just demonstrate that it's actually your OWN viewpoint that is myopic.
Of course, a cheaper treatment would be to stop watching Fox News.
Except that I hardly ever watch Fox news, and in fact some of my view on the matter you call "fantasy" came from NPR and my own research from other sources you would consider quite credible.
I'm sorry that your view of people that you don't agree with is so skewed that you actually think that they all must be dumb and mislead. The world is not black and white like you seem to think it is, and Team D is not full of altruistic white hats battling the villainous Team R for the good of the poor. Politicians all act from self-interest, but you may never be able to see that for yourself.
You're missing the part about how a privately-run system must continue to turn a profit in order to stay in business. You know, the stuff that's left over after costs have been accounted for. By contrast, a government-run single-payer system has no profit requirement. That's money that can be better spent, say, by paying your staff better, or, hey, by not taking it in the first place!
I suspect your response has to do, again, with insurance costs rather the health care costs, which are the root of the problem.
First, putting government in charge of making payments for care doesn't take out the profitable businesses and doctors providing those services. It just makes it easier to defraud the payer. In fact, it provides the profit-makers even LESS incentive to control costs, because they will just either charge what they want, or the maximum charge allowed.
Plus, governments DO have a profit requirement! They just don't call it that, they give it different names like "bureaucracy", "fraud", "tribute", "earmarks", "special interest tax credits", "overhead", "no-bid contracts", and various other names.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather correct you:
The AG's job regarding legal advice is to provide it in response to requests from state institutions. In this case, I believe, nobody asked him - he just decided that it was in his political interest to create the opinion from his reading of the laws.
Actually, he was asked, so you stand corrected. In fact, several universities asked the question, and it would not surprise me to find that the entire thing was orchestrated in order to produce fodder some pure political theatre. Of course, Cuccinelli can never say who asked the question: he's acting as attorney for the universities, which are protected by client privilege.
Is the US really a superpower still? It's definitely declining. Looking at history I think it's delusional arrogance to believe the US has found the "perfect" government. Especially when you consider the US being such a young construct, which definitely has yet to stand the test of time.
Well, the US does have the longest standing Constitution of any nation. I think that says a whole lot about the effectiveness of our chosen form of government.
How long did it stand?
But that's why judges and juries are given discretion in sentencing. "Assault" can be prosecuted and sentence in a wide range of ways, and they motivations of the attacker can always be considered. You don't need new laws to decide that one incidence of "beating up" should result in a week in jail and another several years.
Hate crime laws are just a way of dividing people into various identity groups so that they focus on the privileges and protections for their own "group", distracted from the work of the "political class" which is to always gain more money and power for itself, at the expense of all others.
Religion is a behavior, it's not something should be regulated like race and other innate attributes. I mean we don't want special legislation protecting people who are homo- or xenophobic.
But religious practice is explicitly protected by the Constitution, right there in the first amendment.
But then so is just about any behavior, as there is nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to regulate interpersonal behavior at all. The SCOTUS has affirmed this principle by ruling that states' archaic "sodomy" laws were unconstitutional.
So, in point of fact, gay behavior is protected as a right of the people. Saying that gay people need special treatment is something else altogether. After all, they are the only ones on any list of enumerated "protected classes" that have never been denied the right to vote.
He's also the asshole that told all the public universities in Virginia they could no longer have policies of non-discrimination towards gays.
Stay classy.
Not exactly. Several of the colleges asked him for an opinion about their policy. And he told them that since the General Assembly had declined to add "sexual orientation" to the list of Virginia's "protected classes", that they could not provide special protections for that class by themselves.
The governor later clarified the issue by stating "Discrimination based on factors such as one’s sexual orientation or parental status violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. Therefore, discrimination against enumerated classes of persons set forth in the Virginia Human Rights Act or discrimination against any class of persons without a rational basis is prohibited,"
You ask a lawyer for an opinion on the law, he's going to give you a legal opinion, not some tripe based on emotional biases.
They can only do that when you agree to it.
Oh?
What about when exporting or interoperability is a feature in the original version, and the function is quietly disabled in an automatic update to the software that changes the data format at the same time significant features are added ?
Yea, I know. All that fine-print legalize is really a pain to try to dig through. Hardly worth it at all. Just click "Agree" and move on.
OK, so no one can ever fire you. When can't you come up with an excuse to lock the equipment and walk off?
Software vendors do this all the time. In the form of locking your data (and not providing any way for you to export it to an interoperable file format)
They can only do that when you agree to it.
Wish I had mod points.
Wake up and smell the coffee, you already live there. Get off your high horse, this had nothing to do with morals.
"... just following orders?"
Looks like it's time for /. to add a "PoliceState" section. I suggest a boot stamp as the icon.
This is actually old news. The companies that install and manage the red light cameras have always encouraged the municipalities to shorten the yellow lights. In fact, I can remember seeing studies that showed that the cameras did not even pay for themselves unless the yellow lights were shortened.
The oldest article I could find from a quick search was this 2 year old article about a few cities caught in the act of shortening the lights to improve revenues.
That's how we were able to stop red light cameras from being implemented here in Virginia. These "shorter yellow light" studies, along with studies that showed that the implementation of cameras usually increased accidents at intersections, cowed the local legislators to abandon their plans, even after lobbying the state legislators to allow them to install them.
Here's what to watch for: In a political environment where Republicans have been completely unified in opposition by every single act of President Obama, there will suddenly be wide bi-partisan support for ACTA. It will be sloughed off by the media as an aberration, and you'll hear how "It must be a good treaty since there's bi-partisan support".
Yes, people complain all the time about "partisan bickering" - but at least when they are busy fighting each other they aren't causing more problems. It's when both parties agree that the rest of us are in the most danger.
Government is broken. It enacts regulation it will not enforce. It's regulatory bodies are toothless in the face of lobbying dollars.
The FCC is toothless to regulate dominating, price-fixing, anti-consumer telecom companies(AT&T, Verizon and Qwest, I'm talking about you.)
It's actually worse than that. Most Federal regulatory bodies are, in fact, controlled by large corporations, and are used not to regulate corporate activity, but to impose barriers to competition for those corporations, and regulate activities such that consumers are more dependent upon those corporations and the government institutions controlled by them.
The FCC, then, is there to protect media giants from competition from pirate radio. The FDA is there to protect corporate food giants from small farmers, and the Fed is there to protect Wall Street from competition by small business.
All while spending the entire country so far into debt that there is no way out.
I think "trust in government" would be some psychotically misplaced trust at this point.
It's still a free country, regardless of you and your compatriots' effort to change that.
You are confused. He wasn't threatening you. That's how you and your compatriots work. "You do what I say or I'll attack you" is the standard conservative view. The "liberal" view is "you do what I expect you to do or I'll think less of you."
I think I'm pretty far from anything like a "standard conservative" - in fact I consider myself a classic liberal. But I didn't consider it a threat, just a misplaced directive (from my "betters"?). Insulting nonetheless.
You're right about his view, although I would describe it more as "I don't like what you say, so I'll assume you are stupid and ask you to shut up." And you're probably right that I should have left it alone. It's not the first time I've been baited by simple insults that don't even attempt to make a point. It probably had more to do with being marked a "Troll" for pointing out that the US Constitution preserves most powers for the states and the people.
I guess that idea is history now. I suppose Bush was right when he said "It's just a goddamn piece of paper."
I suggest you take a remedial reading class, then attend law school (I already have, class of 1992).
So you are an admitted liar and thief.
You too need to stop commenting on a subject you know little to nothing about.
Nope. It's still a free country, regardless of you and your compatriots' effort to change that. And you don't know what I know, but you have the obvious I won't argue with you anymore, since you have the know-it-all attitude that the rest of your profession has, when your only real claim to knowledge is how to lie without having any.
No it doesn't say anything about serving government purposes. It does however say something about the general welfare of the people.
It doesn't say that, either. The phrase you're referring to talks about spending powers to provide for the "General Welfare of the United States". Nowhere does it provide for welfare for the people.
No where in the Constitution does it state that the government can do whatever it wants as long as it serves some nebulous "government purpose.".
There is over 100 years of case law that says otherwise. I recommend to stop commenting on a subject you know little to nothing about.
Wow. The "it says whatever we say it says" big government despots are really out in full force today.
I suggest you read up a little bit on some of that case law. While the SCOTUS has supported some of the power grabs of the federal government over the years, it has also invalidated quite a few of them. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I'm hoping that they will allow the people to keep enough of their freedoms to keep tyranny from becoming more prevalent.
That said, there is certainly never been a case before the SCOTUS where they claimed that the Feds could create new powers for itself that weren't granted by the Constitution. They may have stretched some of the powers way beyond the original intention, but that's a far cry from claiming that any so-called "government purpose" is completely withing the bounds of the Federal government's authority.
Martin Luther King is turning in his grave because of your post. Aknowledging race is not the same as being a racist. Equality is not the same as being colorblind. Its time to move past tolerance and colorblindness and start imbracing the multitude of culutures that make up this country.
Sounds to me like you just want to call it something else.
"Racism does not have a good track record. It has been tried for a long time. You would think by now we would want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management." - Thomas Sowell
You're reading it wrong.
No where in the Constitution does it state that the government can do whatever it wants as long as it serves some nebulous "government purpose.".
What it does state, quite clearly, is that power belongs in the hands of the people, and they have granted the government a few, limited, enumerated duties. Anything else they want to do, they have to ask the People first, and an overwhelming majority of them have to agree to it.
Will Your Answers To the Census Stay Private?
No.
--- Captain Obvious
"Medicare is already guaranteed to be unable to pay its obligations in just a short time and this bill guarantees it will run out of money even sooner."
.
That is not true. The bill actually extend's the expected life-span of Medicare by 9 years. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000691-503544.html.
Come on, man, how naive are you? "The CBO also expects the bill to reduce the annual growth in Medicare expenditures by 1.4 percentage points per year, Democrats say, and extend Medicare's solvency by at least 9 years."
That's based on NO "doc fix", which drops Medicare's payments by 20%, which means doctors STOP taking Medicare payments. Of course they are going to pass the "doc fix", expanding costs. There will be *some* new money because the have added new Medicare taxes and payroll deductions, no way it will last 9 years, not when they are adding 3-6 million NEW medicaid people.
" It then takes that $500 billion and spends it on subsidies while claiming the $500 billion as debt reduction."
Also untrue. This is a tired claim that has been debunked again and again. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/paul_ryan_and_the_true_cost_of.html goes through this step by step.
"According to Ryan, there's about $124 billion in double-counted money in the bill. Assuming his math is correct (and no one I talked to said it wasn't), that's a fair critique. What isn't fair is to suggest that this is about the health-care bill. This is how the government does its accounting."
How is that a "debunking"? It's still an accounting trick that means they are hiding the costs.
As some others pointed out already: it is not illegal to own a gun. You have to go through an established process to get them because GUNS ARE DANGEROUS.
No, not at all. In fact, GUNS SAVE LIVES.
It's actually gun control that is dangerous, as history shows.
I really don't know where this comes from. I see mostly lies in all the mainstream media, but I didn't start seeing it until a few years ago, because I took most of it at face-value. But then I started noticing how news items that I was familiar with were reported really ... wrong. I assumed at first that the journalists were just being sloppy, or misunderstanding everything going on, or whatever.
But as I became more involved with things that the media reported about, I began to see that it was very common. They seem to just want to report what they want to, staying close enough to some truth, or quoting people that really don't have enough visibility to get the corrections seen, so they aren't questioned in their lies.
This isn't just a Fox News or Murdoch phenomenon. It's ALL of them. The local news paper and news stations lie and distort their reporting on local stories too. You just never see it unless you really have the details yourself beforehand. Once the media outlets put their "spin" on it, that becomes the view of the event, no matter how myopic the view may be.
I would suggest that you get involved in some events that get reported on, or get to know people that are quoted or mentioned in the news and media, then look for how the events / people are reported. You would be shocked at the lies.
... However, you will find that those figures vary widely based on factor W - WHO is being charged for the service. And the people doing that are not the consumers, but the providers and the insurance companies.
Well that was exactly my point. And when it's government-controlled, it will become a system of charging the maximum allowed for everything, and non-covered services will simply be unavailable to all (except congress, of course).
In short, I think that your story (like those of most conservatives) are fantasies, ... I would be willing to pay a few dollars a month more if it ensured that you received mental health care to bring an end to your delusions.
Cute. I'm not a conservative, I'm a classic liberal. And your comments just demonstrate that it's actually your OWN viewpoint that is myopic.
Of course, a cheaper treatment would be to stop watching Fox News.
Except that I hardly ever watch Fox news, and in fact some of my view on the matter you call "fantasy" came from NPR and my own research from other sources you would consider quite credible.
I'm sorry that your view of people that you don't agree with is so skewed that you actually think that they all must be dumb and mislead. The world is not black and white like you seem to think it is, and Team D is not full of altruistic white hats battling the villainous Team R for the good of the poor. Politicians all act from self-interest, but you may never be able to see that for yourself.
You're missing the part about how a privately-run system must continue to turn a profit in order to stay in business. You know, the stuff that's left over after costs have been accounted for. By contrast, a government-run single-payer system has no profit requirement. That's money that can be better spent, say, by paying your staff better, or, hey, by not taking it in the first place!
I suspect your response has to do, again, with insurance costs rather the health care costs, which are the root of the problem.
First, putting government in charge of making payments for care doesn't take out the profitable businesses and doctors providing those services. It just makes it easier to defraud the payer. In fact, it provides the profit-makers even LESS incentive to control costs, because they will just either charge what they want, or the maximum charge allowed.
Plus, governments DO have a profit requirement! They just don't call it that, they give it different names like "bureaucracy", "fraud", "tribute", "earmarks", "special interest tax credits", "overhead", "no-bid contracts", and various other names.