I said nothing about the motivations of the Guardian owners. It isn't even relevant to the point.
The point was that the OP didn't like the Guardian criticizing Craigslist because the Guardian was a leftist rag (in his - and perhaps many people's - opinion), thus ignoring the point of the Guardian article that Craig's stated purpose for building Craigslist was "community building", which doesn't seem to have been all that successful outside of the Bay Area and seems to have taken a backseat to the revenue.
Also, I tend to read the Guardian mostly for the movie news while I'm doing my laundry - and the occasional muckracking article about the assholes running this country. Beyond that, I have no axe to grind for the Guardian or the SF Weekly. So yelling at me about the quality of the Guardian is not relevant. All I said was the Guardian has been around a lot longer than Craigslist and it has actual content rather than ads.
You're confused, but perhaps I wasn't completely clear.
Criagslist is obviously intending to charge for more types of ads than they're doing now.
Their stated goal is to reduce the redundant posting of ads.
This occurs in the computer services section, which is the only section I'm concerned about.
The problem is the entire setup. People post multiple times because the setup forces your ad off the front page within hours, while at the same time you're not supposed to post multiple times or actually more than once a week.
This renders the entire concept ineffective from the point of view of the advertiser, because most users will not browse several pages of ads to find what they want - unless they're like me and really determined.
The other problem is that the result of this is that a Craigslist tech support ad is almost worthless if you're not on the first or second page of results - even if the reader selects only San Francisco ads. This means that no matter WHAT they charge for the ad OR what YOU charge for your service, the odds are the ad will not be cost-effective.
So if Craigslist charges for tech support ads, the result will be that only a handful of people - or none, depending on whether ANYBODY perceives the ads as cost-effective - will run ads there. Some people presumably will be able to absorb even poorly performing advertising into their overall ad budget and will keep running their ads despite the low performance. Most will not.
Among other things, this means that most of the startups like me won't be able to afford to put ads there. For me, this will probably be a wash since I'm getting so little response now anyway. I would be better off building up my Web site and posting references to it elsewhere on Craigslist and on other sites.
It just seems to be that if the site were redesigned to allow ads to be displayed more easily for a longer period of time, there would less spamming, less multiple posting, and less frenzy. Charging for the ads just brings in a few more bucks for Craigslist and doesn't solve any of the problems for the ad posters.
As for the effect on the classifieds, you have to distinguish between the services classifieds and the for sale classifieds. Craiglist is clearly a good place to go to find things for sale. It's there that it has wiped out the regular newspaper classifieds. It's just not as effective for a small business trying to advertise a service.
If you read the Guardian article, he recognizes that Craigslist is a marvel of capitalism. He says several times that while he isn't happy with that, it's definitely a legitimate way to go, and the local papers could have done this themselves at any time in the last few years. They screwed up, and Craig got the business.
That said, his main problem is that Craig's notion of "community building" while riding on the backs of classified ads is mostly bullshit.
This is excessively critical of the Bay Guardian - probably because the poster is a Republican idiot. He's relying on the probability that a lot of/. readers aren't local and don't read it.
While the Guardian is definitely "left" or "progressive" or whatever bozo political term you prefer, the fact of the matter is the Guardian has been around a hell of a lot longer than Craigslist and has far better content.
While I thought the criticism in the article was a bit heavy-handed on Craig, this current issue of charging for their ineffective ads (ineffective from the service sellers point of view, at least) tends to support the criticism that in the end, Craig is only interested in the money, and all the "community building" talk is so much bullshit (or perhaps I should say "Billshit" since he seems to have borrowed the propaganda from Gates.)
The problem with Craigslist, as everyone who posts there knows, is that your post rolls off the front page in a matter of a few hours, but you are supposed to only post once every seven days (not that anyone does this - everyone posts at least daily and many post multiple times a day.) You're also only supposed to post in your immediate neighborhood. Right - like the people within five or ten blocks of you are going to be enough to support your business - especially in a town like San Francisco where a "neighborhood" is barely ten blocks, if that.
As everyone knows, very few people look beyond the first page or two of Google search results, and very few people look beyond the first page or two of Craigslist search results.
The only calls I've ever gotten from my ads - and that has been a grand total of TWO - were within an hour of being posted while they were still on the first page. The rest of the time, my ads are completely worthless. This is the dirty little secret of Craigslist.
So now they intend to charge for the dubious privilege of getting somebody to read your ad. Fat chance. This will be the end of Craigslist. Numerous people offering tech support services will no longer advertise simply because the return on the ad investment will be too small to justify paying for the ad. It's that simple. In the end, of the couple hundred tech support people advertising on Craigslist now, maybe a couple dozen will remain.
Then the service ads page will be only one page and maybe it will work. Apparently the only way to generate any business is to be the only company able to afford to run an ad...
Somehow I don't think this is what Craigslist was intended to be.
It's also interesting that I read today in one of the SF weekly papers a criticism that Craig, despite his rhetoric about "building communities", basically has done nothing to do that in the over 100 cities his operation is in. Instead, Craigslist has basically wiped out the classified ad sections of newspapers in every community it operates in. While this is not a bad thing per se, the end result, as the paper points out, is that none of the revenue remains in the community. When asked about this, Craig's only response was "I only go where people want me."
Craigslist has now made up my mind for me. It's worthless advertising there for the PC tech support business at least. Besides the saturation advertising of the two or three hundred people doing this work in the city, and the multiple posts, now they want to charge.
Forget it. I'll do it the hard way - promote my Web site and resort to direct mail.
Indeed. The whole issue wouldn't exist if there hadn't been questionable monopoliesy created by the state for the last hundred years.
It's always the same. People want some service they don't want to pay for, so they let the state do it for them. The state of course hands the job to whoever paid THEM enough bribe money. The monopoly sets up, bleeds everybody dry, then the same people who wanted the state to set up the monopoly in the first place complain they being bled dry. So they ask the state to break up the monopoly, which merely creates a a bunch of "mini-monopolies" which actually aggravates the situation - until the same people then ask the state to allow them all to merge back into one or two major monopolies.
Get rid of the state in the first place and you CAN'T HAVE a monopoly. There is no such thing as a "natural" monopoly which can't be competed with in some other way. The only true monopoly is one coerced by the state.
If you aren't willing to get rid of the state, at least stop asking it to do things you don't want to pay for - because you WILL end up paying for it one way or the other.
I think that's what Cringely was talking about a month ago when he ran articles about the Google "data center in a box" and the "Google Box". Google will dump network data centers all over the country, tie in to the fiber, sell you a box (or boxes) for $x that connect all your PCs and media appliances into their network.
Bye-bye SBC DSL, Comcast cable, etc. Your PC, your TV, everything runs through Google.
As long as they have enough fiber anyway, which is questionable. Also questionable is how the last mile gets wired into Google without the telcos going along. And the telcos are already complaining that Google is making all the money, so it's unlikely they'll just sell Google the access over their lines without gouging Google.
Unless, of course, Google can figure out how to go wireless all over the country.
The problem is, I don't see any of this happening in less than several years, and by that time, we'll all be paying $100/month to the telcos to download the next Linux distro since we won't be allowed to download anything bigger than an email message without "tiered" pricing and RIAA (and NSA) snooping to boot.
It was a noble effort, but failed miserably as all such constraints on states - other than those from the barrel of a gun - or other technology - must inevitably fail.
after going through yet another marathon spyware cleaning yesterday and today.
Goddam Spystrike and a dozen or two other trojans...
The Spystrike bitch is just that - people everywhere, according to various spyware Web sites, are having one hell of a time getting rid of that one. New variants every other day and almost no antispyware or antivirus vendor is up to speed on it yet; estimates are it's infecting 2,500 PCs an hour. Rides in on various conventional trojans, then is extremely hard to get rid of without specific knowledge of how - and even then.
I had to use a special removal tool, plus a-squared, Ewido, SpybotS&D, spywareblaster, Windows antispyware, a repair install, SFC, and one hell of a lot of reboots to get rid of this fucker.
Somebody find the fuckwads who put this one out - I got something for their asses - and Bill's.
OTOH, I made some money out of it, so maybe I love those guys...
how open source is at threat for problems with patents.
Microsoft builds up its patent portfolio and it still can't prevent itself from having to make product patches affecting its customers due to its pervssive "theft" of "intellectual property".
Problem applies to child porn equally. So it's no solution to pursue child porn. Child porn is like drugs - as long as there's a market, you'll have the crime. Get rid of the underlying reason for the market, it dries up. The real problem, of course, is that you can't ever get rid of the underlying reason - at least, not as long as society relegates the solutions to the state and the law.
Much of what is prosecuted as "child porn" isn't even child porn in the sense everybody assumes, i.e., actual child "abuse". Much of it is simply pictures of naked kids, none of which has been established as encouraging actual child abuse by the CUSTOMERS, as opposed to the producers. And in this case, it sounds like a customer was convicted as being a producer - which is nothing to the purpose.
Usenet newsgroups have tons of pictures of young "models", many of which are probably underage depending on what state or country you're in - argueably ogling Emma Watson of the Potter movies is "child porn" since she will be legal in England at sixteen this or next year (and she IS being ogled by a lot of people including me).
Arresting people who are the consumers is the same bad concept as arresting drug users - it can't work because there are unlimited number of them and it replenishes. It's strictly a mechanism to criminalize people for their desires, which is a standard government trick to control the population. The excuse is always that the behavior has "negative social effects" which cost the "society" or certain individuals money or health or security or whatever and therefore it must be controlled. This argument is almost always incorrect and could be applied to almost any behavior. In other words, it ends up being an excuse for "anything not mandatory is prohibited."
Concentrating on finding the people who actually abuse children to produce porn would be a more effective use of resources at the very least. But that's not the state's purpose.
If he burned for backup (meaning only one or two copies and he kept the CDs), then he's obviously not a producer or distributor. If he burned to give to others, then it would make sense to say he's "distributinng", if not "producing." Just looking at the definition of the word "make" is simply stupid when it comes to digital data.
Irrelevant, anyway. Child porn is a non-issue. Child abuse is another matter. Come up with a program to stop child abuse, you don't have a child porn issue any more.
Anybody who thinks the phrase "Bush and Gonzales" means only those two people and no one else - when it obviously includes cretins like yourself - is, well, a cretin.
If you'd READ the article instead of jerking off, you'd see yet one more cogent explanation of why Bush's actions are utterly illegal.
There literally is no issue on this. He violated the law much worse than Clinton ever did (well, at least as far as the MonicaGate scandal went - Clinton did worse than that, of course) - and I supported impeaching Clinton for being a lying sack of shit. Bush is infinitely worse.
The problem is, the government is being run by the oil companies (and other associated scumbags with money.)
You DO remember that Bush is from a Texas oil family, right?
Dream on, that the government is EVER going to push us off oil (absent a fucking revolution in this country - which will probably end up like most revolutions, i.e., badly.)
It's worse than that - Bush and the rest of his crime family have told us the phoney "War on Terror" will go on for DECADES.
This is the essence of the state: "You do everything we tell you and give us everything you have and we'll protect you from the bad guys inside and outside our borders - and if there aren't any bad guys, we'll make some."
Just read an article last night that pointed out that Hamas was SUPPORTED by the Israelis in the early days because they wanted to splinter the Fatah organization. Just like we supported the Islamists in Afghanistan because we wanted to splinter the Soviet Union.
The CIA HANDED Iran plans for a nuclear bomb trigger. The cover story was, "Well, it has a flaw in it which will set back their program". The Russian scientist who handed it over noted the flaw in a note to the Iranians because he KNEW they would see it anyway - which means the CIA knew it too.
None of this is accidental or a result of incompetence. It is the essence of the state.
That should be rephrased as "people who are too dumb fucking pig witless to know what goverment is, who therefore vote it in every election, support the notion of all-powerful governments."
And the figure is a lot higher than 63% - because most of those opposing Bush are Democrats and would accept the exact same actions if done by a Democratic President.
Well, it's irrelevant anyway. This country is history and won't have any significant power in twenty to fifty years anyway. It's over for the US. It has been passed by in the march of history and has been in decline now for several decades. History will mark the 1960's and Vietnam as the point when the country went into decline. Nothing can reverse it now.
Bush is doing history's work - implementing the end of empire while under the confused notion that he is working for empire. In that sense, we probably should support him.
Naah - why make it easy for the fucktard? Impeach his ass!
Wait for the hearing, my ass. Impeach this fucktard NOW and THEN we can file charges against him and have a hearing before the Supreme Court and not before (unless the ACLU case is sped up so we don't have to wait another two years and let this asshole completely destroy the country.)
In three to six months, the fucking Israelis are going to bomb Iran with US help and the biggest military disaster in the US history is going to assist the (currently limping) US economy to evaporate. You'll be paying $20/gallon at the pump due to this moron.
And for your fucking information, everybody on the planet except Bush and Gonzales has concluded he broke the law. If you listen to some Justice Department toady to come to your conclusions, you're an idiot.
As for Americans, they're too fucking stupid to know whether any of this shit is useful in "fighting terrorism" (which it isn't, as any two-year-old SHOULD be able to comprehend). All they can do is shit a brick when somebody waves the word "threat" on a flag and bow down to the nearest alpha male - which unfortunately happens to be the current dry-drunk, corrupt, Christian fanatic. Jesus Baron von Christ, Ayatollah Khamenei has more common sense than our dipshit!
This asshole is what the concept of impeachment was introduced FOR. Use it!
Given the oxymoron of "intellectual property", it is only a matter of time until ANY form of non-paid-for possession of ANYTHING not made of a physical material (and probably a lot that is, such as CDs and ANY form of paper) is illegal.
This is human nature. Nobody gets nothing for free from you because that would mean they're right and you're wrong and if you're wrong, you're dead and that can't be allowed - so you're right and that means nobody gets nothing from you for any reason except being bled through the nose.
Which is why you monkeys are heading for the dustbin of evolutionary history. Another twenty - fifty years (if not sooner by your own hand) and you're out of here and good fucking riddance.
As Bill Burroughs said once, "Can't wait to see weeds growing through empty streets. May not have to wait long..."
Slashdot Mirror
I said nothing about the motivations of the Guardian owners. It isn't even relevant to the point.
The point was that the OP didn't like the Guardian criticizing Craigslist because the Guardian was a leftist rag (in his - and perhaps many people's - opinion), thus ignoring the point of the Guardian article that Craig's stated purpose for building Craigslist was "community building", which doesn't seem to have been all that successful outside of the Bay Area and seems to have taken a backseat to the revenue.
Also, I tend to read the Guardian mostly for the movie news while I'm doing my laundry - and the occasional muckracking article about the assholes running this country. Beyond that, I have no axe to grind for the Guardian or the SF Weekly. So yelling at me about the quality of the Guardian is not relevant. All I said was the Guardian has been around a lot longer than Craigslist and it has actual content rather than ads.
In other words, it's not "my" newspaper.
So fuck you very much for your comment.
You're confused, but perhaps I wasn't completely clear.
Criagslist is obviously intending to charge for more types of ads than they're doing now.
Their stated goal is to reduce the redundant posting of ads.
This occurs in the computer services section, which is the only section I'm concerned about.
The problem is the entire setup. People post multiple times because the setup forces your ad off the front page within hours, while at the same time you're not supposed to post multiple times or actually more than once a week.
This renders the entire concept ineffective from the point of view of the advertiser, because most users will not browse several pages of ads to find what they want - unless they're like me and really determined.
The other problem is that the result of this is that a Craigslist tech support ad is almost worthless if you're not on the first or second page of results - even if the reader selects only San Francisco ads. This means that no matter WHAT they charge for the ad OR what YOU charge for your service, the odds are the ad will not be cost-effective.
So if Craigslist charges for tech support ads, the result will be that only a handful of people - or none, depending on whether ANYBODY perceives the ads as cost-effective - will run ads there. Some people presumably will be able to absorb even poorly performing advertising into their overall ad budget and will keep running their ads despite the low performance. Most will not.
Among other things, this means that most of the startups like me won't be able to afford to put ads there. For me, this will probably be a wash since I'm getting so little response now anyway. I would be better off building up my Web site and posting references to it elsewhere on Craigslist and on other sites.
It just seems to be that if the site were redesigned to allow ads to be displayed more easily for a longer period of time, there would less spamming, less multiple posting, and less frenzy. Charging for the ads just brings in a few more bucks for Craigslist and doesn't solve any of the problems for the ad posters.
As for the effect on the classifieds, you have to distinguish between the services classifieds and the for sale classifieds. Craiglist is clearly a good place to go to find things for sale. It's there that it has wiped out the regular newspaper classifieds. It's just not as effective for a small business trying to advertise a service.
Taco says you now owe him $125.
If you read the Guardian article, he recognizes that Craigslist is a marvel of capitalism. He says several times that while he isn't happy with that, it's definitely a legitimate way to go, and the local papers could have done this themselves at any time in the last few years. They screwed up, and Craig got the business.
That said, his main problem is that Craig's notion of "community building" while riding on the backs of classified ads is mostly bullshit.
It's hard to argue against his point.
This is excessively critical of the Bay Guardian - probably because the poster is a Republican idiot. He's relying on the probability that a lot of
While the Guardian is definitely "left" or "progressive" or whatever bozo political term you prefer, the fact of the matter is the Guardian has been around a hell of a lot longer than Craigslist and has far better content.
While I thought the criticism in the article was a bit heavy-handed on Craig, this current issue of charging for their ineffective ads (ineffective from the service sellers point of view, at least) tends to support the criticism that in the end, Craig is only interested in the money, and all the "community building" talk is so much bullshit (or perhaps I should say "Billshit" since he seems to have borrowed the propaganda from Gates.)
Charge for your mistakes.
The problem with Craigslist, as everyone who posts there knows, is that your post rolls off the front page in a matter of a few hours, but you are supposed to only post once every seven days (not that anyone does this - everyone posts at least daily and many post multiple times a day.) You're also only supposed to post in your immediate neighborhood. Right - like the people within five or ten blocks of you are going to be enough to support your business - especially in a town like San Francisco where a "neighborhood" is barely ten blocks, if that.
As everyone knows, very few people look beyond the first page or two of Google search results, and very few people look beyond the first page or two of Craigslist search results.
The only calls I've ever gotten from my ads - and that has been a grand total of TWO - were within an hour of being posted while they were still on the first page. The rest of the time, my ads are completely worthless. This is the dirty little secret of Craigslist.
So now they intend to charge for the dubious privilege of getting somebody to read your ad. Fat chance. This will be the end of Craigslist. Numerous people offering tech support services will no longer advertise simply because the return on the ad investment will be too small to justify paying for the ad. It's that simple. In the end, of the couple hundred tech support people advertising on Craigslist now, maybe a couple dozen will remain.
Then the service ads page will be only one page and maybe it will work. Apparently the only way to generate any business is to be the only company able to afford to run an ad...
Somehow I don't think this is what Craigslist was intended to be.
It's also interesting that I read today in one of the SF weekly papers a criticism that Craig, despite his rhetoric about "building communities", basically has done nothing to do that in the over 100 cities his operation is in. Instead, Craigslist has basically wiped out the classified ad sections of newspapers in every community it operates in. While this is not a bad thing per se, the end result, as the paper points out, is that none of the revenue remains in the community. When asked about this, Craig's only response was "I only go where people want me."
Craigslist has now made up my mind for me. It's worthless advertising there for the PC tech support business at least. Besides the saturation advertising of the two or three hundred people doing this work in the city, and the multiple posts, now they want to charge.
Forget it. I'll do it the hard way - promote my Web site and resort to direct mail.
Indeed. The whole issue wouldn't exist if there hadn't been questionable monopoliesy created by the state for the last hundred years.
It's always the same. People want some service they don't want to pay for, so they let the state do it for them. The state of course hands the job to whoever paid THEM enough bribe money. The monopoly sets up, bleeds everybody dry, then the same people who wanted the state to set up the monopoly in the first place complain they being bled dry. So they ask the state to break up the monopoly, which merely creates a a bunch of "mini-monopolies" which actually aggravates the situation - until the same people then ask the state to allow them all to merge back into one or two major monopolies.
Get rid of the state in the first place and you CAN'T HAVE a monopoly. There is no such thing as a "natural" monopoly which can't be competed with in some other way. The only true monopoly is one coerced by the state.
If you aren't willing to get rid of the state, at least stop asking it to do things you don't want to pay for - because you WILL end up paying for it one way or the other.
I think that's what Cringely was talking about a month ago when he ran articles about the Google "data center in a box" and the "Google Box". Google will dump network data centers all over the country, tie in to the fiber, sell you a box (or boxes) for $x that connect all your PCs and media appliances into their network.
Bye-bye SBC DSL, Comcast cable, etc. Your PC, your TV, everything runs through Google.
As long as they have enough fiber anyway, which is questionable. Also questionable is how the last mile gets wired into Google without the telcos going along. And the telcos are already complaining that Google is making all the money, so it's unlikely they'll just sell Google the access over their lines without gouging Google.
Unless, of course, Google can figure out how to go wireless all over the country.
The problem is, I don't see any of this happening in less than several years, and by that time, we'll all be paying $100/month to the telcos to download the next Linux distro since we won't be allowed to download anything bigger than an email message without "tiered" pricing and RIAA (and NSA) snooping to boot.
Give anything to the state, they'll use it to kill you with.
If we're lucky, they'll train a new version to follow USPS postmen around and then maybe we'll actually get some mail delivered in less than a week.
It was a noble effort, but failed miserably as all such constraints on states - other than those from the barrel of a gun - or other technology - must inevitably fail.
The IRS figures my income by watching random insect movements.
That's how I figure my income as well.
Law by definition is about contraints and coercion.
It has nothing whatever to do with freedom - never has, never will.
Get a clue.
after going through yet another marathon spyware cleaning yesterday and today.
Goddam Spystrike and a dozen or two other trojans...
The Spystrike bitch is just that - people everywhere, according to various spyware Web sites, are having one hell of a time getting rid of that one. New variants every other day and almost no antispyware or antivirus vendor is up to speed on it yet; estimates are it's infecting 2,500 PCs an hour. Rides in on various conventional trojans, then is extremely hard to get rid of without specific knowledge of how - and even then.
I had to use a special removal tool, plus a-squared, Ewido, SpybotS&D, spywareblaster, Windows antispyware, a repair install, SFC, and one hell of a lot of reboots to get rid of this fucker.
Somebody find the fuckwads who put this one out - I got something for their asses - and Bill's.
OTOH, I made some money out of it, so maybe I love those guys...
how open source is at threat for problems with patents.
Microsoft builds up its patent portfolio and it still can't prevent itself from having to make product patches affecting its customers due to its pervssive "theft" of "intellectual property".
Problem applies to child porn equally. So it's no solution to pursue child porn. Child porn is like drugs - as long as there's a market, you'll have the crime. Get rid of the underlying reason for the market, it dries up. The real problem, of course, is that you can't ever get rid of the underlying reason - at least, not as long as society relegates the solutions to the state and the law.
Much of what is prosecuted as "child porn" isn't even child porn in the sense everybody assumes, i.e., actual child "abuse". Much of it is simply pictures of naked kids, none of which has been established as encouraging actual child abuse by the CUSTOMERS, as opposed to the producers. And in this case, it sounds like a customer was convicted as being a producer - which is nothing to the purpose.
Usenet newsgroups have tons of pictures of young "models", many of which are probably underage depending on what state or country you're in - argueably ogling Emma Watson of the Potter movies is "child porn" since she will be legal in England at sixteen this or next year (and she IS being ogled by a lot of people including me).
Arresting people who are the consumers is the same bad concept as arresting drug users - it can't work because there are unlimited number of them and it replenishes. It's strictly a mechanism to criminalize people for their desires, which is a standard government trick to control the population. The excuse is always that the behavior has "negative social effects" which cost the "society" or certain individuals money or health or security or whatever and therefore it must be controlled. This argument is almost always incorrect and could be applied to almost any behavior. In other words, it ends up being an excuse for "anything not mandatory is prohibited."
Concentrating on finding the people who actually abuse children to produce porn would be a more effective use of resources at the very least. But that's not the state's purpose.
If he burned for backup (meaning only one or two copies and he kept the CDs), then he's obviously not a producer or distributor. If he burned to give to others, then it would make sense to say he's "distributinng", if not "producing." Just looking at the definition of the word "make" is simply stupid when it comes to digital data.
Irrelevant, anyway. Child porn is a non-issue. Child abuse is another matter. Come up with a program to stop child abuse, you don't have a child porn issue any more.
Haven't killed anybody - yet...
Not for lack of wanting to, though.
I got better things to do.
Anybody who thinks the phrase "Bush and Gonzales" means only those two people and no one else - when it obviously includes cretins like yourself - is, well, a cretin.
If you'd READ the article instead of jerking off, you'd see yet one more cogent explanation of why Bush's actions are utterly illegal.
There literally is no issue on this. He violated the law much worse than Clinton ever did (well, at least as far as the MonicaGate scandal went - Clinton did worse than that, of course) - and I supported impeaching Clinton for being a lying sack of shit. Bush is infinitely worse.
I refer you to the following article - moron:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18650
The problem is, the government is being run by the oil companies (and other associated scumbags with money.)
You DO remember that Bush is from a Texas oil family, right?
Dream on, that the government is EVER going to push us off oil (absent a fucking revolution in this country - which will probably end up like most revolutions, i.e., badly.)
It's worse than that - Bush and the rest of his crime family have told us the phoney "War on Terror" will go on for DECADES.
This is the essence of the state: "You do everything we tell you and give us everything you have and we'll protect you from the bad guys inside and outside our borders - and if there aren't any bad guys, we'll make some."
Just read an article last night that pointed out that Hamas was SUPPORTED by the Israelis in the early days because they wanted to splinter the Fatah organization. Just like we supported the Islamists in Afghanistan because we wanted to splinter the Soviet Union.
The CIA HANDED Iran plans for a nuclear bomb trigger. The cover story was, "Well, it has a flaw in it which will set back their program". The Russian scientist who handed it over noted the flaw in a note to the Iranians because he KNEW they would see it anyway - which means the CIA knew it too.
None of this is accidental or a result of incompetence. It is the essence of the state.
It's appropriate that the following post below yours was about how at least fifty percent of Americans are below average intelligence.
You definitely qualify.
That should be rephrased as "people who are too dumb fucking pig witless to know what goverment is, who therefore vote it in every election, support the notion of all-powerful governments."
And the figure is a lot higher than 63% - because most of those opposing Bush are Democrats and would accept the exact same actions if done by a Democratic President.
Well, it's irrelevant anyway. This country is history and won't have any significant power in twenty to fifty years anyway. It's over for the US. It has been passed by in the march of history and has been in decline now for several decades. History will mark the 1960's and Vietnam as the point when the country went into decline. Nothing can reverse it now.
Bush is doing history's work - implementing the end of empire while under the confused notion that he is working for empire. In that sense, we probably should support him.
Naah - why make it easy for the fucktard? Impeach his ass!
Wait for the hearing, my ass. Impeach this fucktard NOW and THEN we can file charges against him and have a hearing before the Supreme Court and not before (unless the ACLU case is sped up so we don't have to wait another two years and let this asshole completely destroy the country.)
In three to six months, the fucking Israelis are going to bomb Iran with US help and the biggest military disaster in the US history is going to assist the (currently limping) US economy to evaporate. You'll be paying $20/gallon at the pump due to this moron.
And for your fucking information, everybody on the planet except Bush and Gonzales has concluded he broke the law. If you listen to some Justice Department toady to come to your conclusions, you're an idiot.
As for Americans, they're too fucking stupid to know whether any of this shit is useful in "fighting terrorism" (which it isn't, as any two-year-old SHOULD be able to comprehend). All they can do is shit a brick when somebody waves the word "threat" on a flag and bow down to the nearest alpha male - which unfortunately happens to be the current dry-drunk, corrupt, Christian fanatic. Jesus Baron von Christ, Ayatollah Khamenei has more common sense than our dipshit!
This asshole is what the concept of impeachment was introduced FOR. Use it!
Given the oxymoron of "intellectual property", it is only a matter of time until ANY form of non-paid-for possession of ANYTHING not made of a physical material (and probably a lot that is, such as CDs and ANY form of paper) is illegal.
This is human nature. Nobody gets nothing for free from you because that would mean they're right and you're wrong and if you're wrong, you're dead and that can't be allowed - so you're right and that means nobody gets nothing from you for any reason except being bled through the nose.
Which is why you monkeys are heading for the dustbin of evolutionary history. Another twenty - fifty years (if not sooner by your own hand) and you're out of here and good fucking riddance.
As Bill Burroughs said once, "Can't wait to see weeds growing through empty streets. May not have to wait long..."