I agree there's no completely solid binding precedent on the subject, but is there really any doubt how it would come out? The Supreme Court has more than hinted on many occasions that if it ever came up, they would adopt an expansive view, at least as regards those born on U.S. soil. For example, they have cited positively to the New York decision of Lynch vs. Clarke (1844) on several occasions, which concluded:
Suppose a person should be elected president who was native born, but of alien parents; could there be any reasonable doubt that he was eligible under the Constitution? I think not. The position would be decisive in his favor, that by the rule of the common law, in force when the Constitution was adopted, he is a citizen.
Of course JFK would say that, he was a politician looking for votes. Tax cuts when there are deficits are popular, but fiscally irresponsible, so presidents like to make up economically illiterate excuses for why they support them. JFK was no exception on that issue.
It's not a very good theory, though. And the U.S. doesn't spend much at all, if you compare it to other strong Western economies. Germany, for example, spends about 15% more of GDP than the U.S. does, and is doing very well.
In any case, what I'm curious about is, if he's a numbers guy who believes in honestly examining budget items and making a real effort to balance our accounts, where was that in his Congressional votes? He voted in favor of Medicare Part D, which caused a huge increase in the cost of Medicare. He voted in favor of about $800 billion in war spending, which will come out to around $2 trillion when you add in interest payments on that $800 billion, and the cost of veterans' care/benefits for the returning soldiers over the next 50 years.
In theory government revenues don't need to be a linear function of tax rates, but in normal ranges they typically are. If you raised the top rate from 33% to 99%, you wouldn't see a tripling of revenue, but if you raised it from 33% to 34%, likely you would get more revenue; and if you lowered it to 32%, likely you would get less revenue. The Laffer Curve is not empirically supported, if that's what you're thinking of.
And, in general, I don't think lowering revenue when you already have a deficit problem is a good way to go. If we're running surpluses, then sure, cut taxes; but we aren't.
I'm tempted to say that these kinds of articles aren't where Wikipedia works best. Articles where the majority of the editors are partisans, rather than scholars or knowledgeable enthusiasts, tend to attract a lot of heat and not as much improvement (I made the mistake once of trying to edit something that was in the Israel-Palestine crossfire).
On the other hand, it's quite possible that Wikipedia has the least bad coverage. It's Paul Ryan article is contentious, edited by partisans on both sides, and may or may not end up in a great state, but every other summary of Ryan I've been able to find so far is worse. Most are either pure attack pieces, or pure hagiographies.
Come on, this part of the summary sounds like something I'd expect to find in email or blog-comment spam:
The time is ripe as of now for the sale of the domain names as it has caught the attention of many on and off the web. The traffic that Demonoid used to attract was huge and internet marketers would definitely want to bank on this.
These kinds of stories are often intended as marketing disguised as news stories (news is 'domain for sale', real purpose is to advertise 'domain for sale'), but usually it's not this blatant!
While he's one of 'em, I'd say he was a Democrat in the same sense that Susan Collins was a Republican: historical reasons that had long since gotten out of sync with shifts in party politics. Ain't nothing very liberal about Ernest Hollings, who was more of an Old South, Trent Lott type.
One option to foster that kind of environment within a large company is to actually set up a physically separate reporting structure, a sort of startup within a large company. That can fail too, but it's sometimes worked. Microsoft themselves had some success doing that with the original Windows NT team.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure what the deal is. I wonder if it originated with the Orthodox Jewish approach of writing "God" as "G-d", which was based on a sort of superstition against writing out the full word, even if it was obvious what the word was.
In older English texts that want to censor such things, they seem to do a better job actually censoring the words so that they're removed entirely, replaced with just a mention that there was a swear, like "the man responded with an interjection not printable in a magazine of this type". That seems like the way to go if you're truly offended by them.
I'm not sure I would rank "they take down online petitions hosted on whitehouse.gov" very high in the annals of tyranny. There are a lot of things to dislike about the U.S. government besides that one!
True, but that's a very short period, and Eisenhower only managed to get to the Presidency because he was a war hero, and becoming a war-hero has always been a way to jump rank into the aristocracy, even in the old English aristocracy.
That's where I don't see a campaign angle here. Do you think Romney is going to run an anti-TSA ad? It's more likely he'd try to paint Obama as "soft on terrorism" by running an ad accusing Obama of not being hardline enough on security in some area.
That's simply not correct. The biggest legislative proponent of the TSA bill that eventually passed was Don Young (R-AK), and Bush strongly supported it throughout; he didn't "cave in" at the end. Its expansion into ever-more-intrusive measures was strongly supported and overseen by first Tom Ridge (Republican, former Governor of Pennsylvania) as head of DHS, and then by Michael Chertoff (Bush's 2nd DHS head). Chertoff, post-Bush-administration, is now closely connected with Rapiscan Systems, the backscatter X-Ray company.
Some in the GOP have slowly started waking up to the fact that they passed a bunch of stupid things in the post-9/11 era (Patriot Act, DHS, etc.), but at the time they were the ones pushing it, and very few (except maybe Ron Paul) opposed it.
Given that online petitions are notoriously ineffective, I wonder why they'd bother. Let the thing get to 25,000, and issue a generic, mostly content-free response about balancing safety and the War on Terror with civil liberties and whatever. I doubt it'd be particularly politically damaging either way, since this is one issue where the Obama administration is more or less in line with the GOP opposition, which created the TSA in the first place, and whose law-and-order branch still strongly supports it.
I strongly agree with that view. There is a lot of emphasis on getting vote counts correct, when there is substantial evidence that various misunderstandings or divergence in information can have a much bigger effect on elections than the quite small amount of voter fraud. It's not at all unusual on a given issue for 20-40% of the population (sometimes more!) to have factually incorrect views of an issue: not just disagreeing on policy, or being wrong on a politically-charged or subjective question, but just having the wrong information to start with. With those kinds of error rates, hand-wringing over "hanging chads" and such is like trying to get your measurement error down to +/-0.001% in a scientific experiment where your methodology is suspect and you're not quite sure what the material involved actually is. Yeah, you'll get a precise measurement, but of what?
I don't mean to imply at all that it's not an environmental problem, just that it's not a picturesque one consisting of a giant island of floating plastic milk jugs and lawn furniture. In some ways the reality is worse, because at least in principle you could clean up macroscopic waste (though it'd be very hard), but it's basically impossible to filter flecks of plastic from the ocean.
The businessmen I know doing all-Excel (and in one case, all-Lotus!) tend to be older, but afaict they haven't had any troubles with audits. They just have their stuff configured to print out hardcopy records that look the same way they'd look if you did everything by hand in the traditional way, e.g. reams of monthly double-entry ledgers, and store them in a fire-proof filing cabinet. Then if they get audited, the paper records are what they show as the canonical documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree there's no completely solid binding precedent on the subject, but is there really any doubt how it would come out? The Supreme Court has more than hinted on many occasions that if it ever came up, they would adopt an expansive view, at least as regards those born on U.S. soil. For example, they have cited positively to the New York decision of Lynch vs. Clarke (1844) on several occasions, which concluded:
Of course JFK would say that, he was a politician looking for votes. Tax cuts when there are deficits are popular, but fiscally irresponsible, so presidents like to make up economically illiterate excuses for why they support them. JFK was no exception on that issue.
It's not a very good theory, though. And the U.S. doesn't spend much at all, if you compare it to other strong Western economies. Germany, for example, spends about 15% more of GDP than the U.S. does, and is doing very well.
In any case, what I'm curious about is, if he's a numbers guy who believes in honestly examining budget items and making a real effort to balance our accounts, where was that in his Congressional votes? He voted in favor of Medicare Part D, which caused a huge increase in the cost of Medicare. He voted in favor of about $800 billion in war spending, which will come out to around $2 trillion when you add in interest payments on that $800 billion, and the cost of veterans' care/benefits for the returning soldiers over the next 50 years.
In theory government revenues don't need to be a linear function of tax rates, but in normal ranges they typically are. If you raised the top rate from 33% to 99%, you wouldn't see a tripling of revenue, but if you raised it from 33% to 34%, likely you would get more revenue; and if you lowered it to 32%, likely you would get less revenue. The Laffer Curve is not empirically supported, if that's what you're thinking of.
And, in general, I don't think lowering revenue when you already have a deficit problem is a good way to go. If we're running surpluses, then sure, cut taxes; but we aren't.
If he were really interested in the deficit, what are all those tax-cut proposals doing in there?
You're really trying to give Ward Cunningham an aneurysm with that spelling of "wiki", aren't you.
I'm tempted to say that these kinds of articles aren't where Wikipedia works best. Articles where the majority of the editors are partisans, rather than scholars or knowledgeable enthusiasts, tend to attract a lot of heat and not as much improvement (I made the mistake once of trying to edit something that was in the Israel-Palestine crossfire).
On the other hand, it's quite possible that Wikipedia has the least bad coverage. It's Paul Ryan article is contentious, edited by partisans on both sides, and may or may not end up in a great state, but every other summary of Ryan I've been able to find so far is worse. Most are either pure attack pieces, or pure hagiographies.
Come on, this part of the summary sounds like something I'd expect to find in email or blog-comment spam:
These kinds of stories are often intended as marketing disguised as news stories (news is 'domain for sale', real purpose is to advertise 'domain for sale'), but usually it's not this blatant!
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
The middle class, hoist on its own middle finger?
Intellectual Ventures are true American heroes!
While he's one of 'em, I'd say he was a Democrat in the same sense that Susan Collins was a Republican: historical reasons that had long since gotten out of sync with shifts in party politics. Ain't nothing very liberal about Ernest Hollings, who was more of an Old South, Trent Lott type.
One option to foster that kind of environment within a large company is to actually set up a physically separate reporting structure, a sort of startup within a large company. That can fail too, but it's sometimes worked. Microsoft themselves had some success doing that with the original Windows NT team.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure what the deal is. I wonder if it originated with the Orthodox Jewish approach of writing "God" as "G-d", which was based on a sort of superstition against writing out the full word, even if it was obvious what the word was.
In older English texts that want to censor such things, they seem to do a better job actually censoring the words so that they're removed entirely, replaced with just a mention that there was a swear, like "the man responded with an interjection not printable in a magazine of this type". That seems like the way to go if you're truly offended by them.
If Microsoft doesn't bleep out the 'shit', but Slashdot does (in two different ways?), does this mean MSFT is "hipper" than /. now?
I'm not sure I would rank "they take down online petitions hosted on whitehouse.gov" very high in the annals of tyranny. There are a lot of things to dislike about the U.S. government besides that one!
True, but that's a very short period, and Eisenhower only managed to get to the Presidency because he was a war hero, and becoming a war-hero has always been a way to jump rank into the aristocracy, even in the old English aristocracy.
That's where I don't see a campaign angle here. Do you think Romney is going to run an anti-TSA ad? It's more likely he'd try to paint Obama as "soft on terrorism" by running an ad accusing Obama of not being hardline enough on security in some area.
That's simply not correct. The biggest legislative proponent of the TSA bill that eventually passed was Don Young (R-AK), and Bush strongly supported it throughout; he didn't "cave in" at the end. Its expansion into ever-more-intrusive measures was strongly supported and overseen by first Tom Ridge (Republican, former Governor of Pennsylvania) as head of DHS, and then by Michael Chertoff (Bush's 2nd DHS head). Chertoff, post-Bush-administration, is now closely connected with Rapiscan Systems, the backscatter X-Ray company.
Some in the GOP have slowly started waking up to the fact that they passed a bunch of stupid things in the post-9/11 era (Patriot Act, DHS, etc.), but at the time they were the ones pushing it, and very few (except maybe Ron Paul) opposed it.
Given that online petitions are notoriously ineffective, I wonder why they'd bother. Let the thing get to 25,000, and issue a generic, mostly content-free response about balancing safety and the War on Terror with civil liberties and whatever. I doubt it'd be particularly politically damaging either way, since this is one issue where the Obama administration is more or less in line with the GOP opposition, which created the TSA in the first place, and whose law-and-order branch still strongly supports it.
They're basically copying what YouTube and Twitter are doing, selling a "featured content" slot.
I strongly agree with that view. There is a lot of emphasis on getting vote counts correct, when there is substantial evidence that various misunderstandings or divergence in information can have a much bigger effect on elections than the quite small amount of voter fraud. It's not at all unusual on a given issue for 20-40% of the population (sometimes more!) to have factually incorrect views of an issue: not just disagreeing on policy, or being wrong on a politically-charged or subjective question, but just having the wrong information to start with. With those kinds of error rates, hand-wringing over "hanging chads" and such is like trying to get your measurement error down to +/-0.001% in a scientific experiment where your methodology is suspect and you're not quite sure what the material involved actually is. Yeah, you'll get a precise measurement, but of what?
I don't mean to imply at all that it's not an environmental problem, just that it's not a picturesque one consisting of a giant island of floating plastic milk jugs and lawn furniture. In some ways the reality is worse, because at least in principle you could clean up macroscopic waste (though it'd be very hard), but it's basically impossible to filter flecks of plastic from the ocean.
I like the part where they include a bunch of gratuitous photos of actual ice shelves.
The businessmen I know doing all-Excel (and in one case, all-Lotus!) tend to be older, but afaict they haven't had any troubles with audits. They just have their stuff configured to print out hardcopy records that look the same way they'd look if you did everything by hand in the traditional way, e.g. reams of monthly double-entry ledgers, and store them in a fire-proof filing cabinet. Then if they get audited, the paper records are what they show as the canonical documentation.