Are they now officially an also-ran? Has the whole concept failed to be usefully implemented commercially, or will it be another Lisp--elegant, beautiful, and largely unused because it's kind of weird?
Barksdale, where they landed, is in fact where bombing missions in the Middle East are staged out of. Politerati can't decide whether this was a real leak by a concerned officer who wanted people to know that the U.S. was staging nukes for Iran; or a deliberate leak by the Bush Administration so that Iran would know.
So a rational, analytical nerd who sees vast suffering caused by circumstances and accidents of birth, and thinks that it can be addressed effectively through marginal collective action like taxes paying for health care for all is, what, deluded? Wrong?
Nice strawman about the left. How about a more charitable explanation? Many leftists see what can be accomplished with a little communal spirit and the desire to not see others suffer because of circumstances beyond their control or accidents of birth, and think that in the richest, most advanced society on Earth, we can address that effectively.
There is something to what you say, though: those who have want to keep it for themselves; those who don't want others to give it to them. Nerds and economic success put them into the 'keep it for themselves' category, which is intuitively straightforward.
Nerds are people who are very capable in their nerd-field, which for nerds tends to be several things that all foster personal independence. Thus, the most intuitively appealing political ideology is one that grants them the most freedom/least regulation.
It's not that people aren't interested in simple, axiomatic political systems, it's that those systems fail to deliver things that people intuitively (and rightly or wrongly) thing should be part of their political system, like government-provided health care, welfare, unemployment insurance, and regulation of obviously bad corporate actors.
Intuitively, the most obvious breaking point of any libertarian system is that one's only recourse is to sue a bad actor. Most people think that polluters, food providers who use poisonous ingredients, corporate stock swindlers and the like can and should be dealt with by the government and a strong regulatory system. They'll complain about burdensome regulation in the next breath, but when an Enron happens, they'll still scream for oversight.
I replied to your comment directly in another post. My comment to which you're replying was in response to a poster who said that the Congressional Democrats have done nothing to end the war; I pointed out that they don't have the majority needed in Congress to force anything to happen to end the war, and Congressional Republicans are preventing them from doing so because they don't want the Dems to look effective, to prevent them from going into the 2008 elections saying "you wanted the war to end; we ended it."
The problem is the Republicans filibustering in the Senate. Without 60 votes there, the Democrats can't win a vote for cloture, which moves the bill from committee to the Senate for an up or down vote. To get a bill through the Senate they have to make a deal with Republicans, who won't allow a timetable bill to go through. They're not allowing much of anything to go through, either, because they want to prevent the Democrats from looking effective.
I'm saying that if they couldn't break a veto but could beat a filibuster, they would go on the offensive. Bush can thump his chest all he wants on national TV, but the public has turned against him, and if the Democrats in Congress could point to a tough bill and say "the only thing standing between you and Johnny coming home is Bush's veto", they'd win the PR war, especially heading into the 2008 elections. It would look good to the moderates and independents who want to see something done that signals the Iraq war is coming to some sort of an end, and as a bonus to the Dems, save them from having to actually figure a way out of the mess.
So you admit that American citizens were being tapped? Lawyers, no less, who have a legally privileged relationship with the person on the other end of the phone.
It seems like a good time to remind you that the NSA admitted that it can't distinguish, in its tapping mechanism, between domestic and international calls. So effectively, the NSA was listening to all of a law firm's phone traffic, no matter who they were talking to.
And all that says to you is "Bah! More Bush-bashing!"?
By purging the Justice Department, I was thinking of all the Kyle Sampsons and Monica Goodlings still in place. Part of Rove's strategy for a permanent majority was to stack the civil service with loyal Republicans started young.
No, I'm not okay with any of it, but I recognize that the difference between the executive doing it and not doing it has little to do with which party is in power, and less to do with the laws. Governments always do things they shouldn't, for good reasons or bad. What's especially scary about Bush is the institutionalization of torture and warrantless wiretapping and indefinite-detention-by-executive-order. When black ops are black, governments fear disclosure and publicity, and that has a suppressive effect that limits what and how much they can do.
Under Bush, the scope of torture and surveillance and arbitrary executive power was massively expanded, and had they succeeded in legitimizing those things, they would have been expanded further still. I think that a Democratic president will reject those things for pragmatic political reasons; but I hope a Democratic president will reject those things because it'll have the effect of beating back the tide of bloodthirstiness and 'do anything to win' in the war on terror.
I suspect that when President Clinton looks at the PR value of passing a bill saying 'shut down Guantanamo, restore FISA, purge the Justice Department and no political operatives in the West Wing', adds to it the diplomatic value, and weighs it against the quality of intelligence gained by torture, it'll be a no-brainer. I'm sure the executive will still do what it's always done, it just won't try to do it the macho pseudo-legitimacy the Bush Administration tried to do it with.
One of the genius aspects of democracies is that switching administrations gives the country the ability to do a 180 when it needs to. The value of the U.S. doing a 180 (or appearing to) after the Bush Administration is pretty damn high.
The Democrats in Congress are hamstrung by their bare majority in the Senate. Nancy Pelosi has passed all the bills in the House that she said she would--she's actually been surprisingly effective. But Reid can't get anything passed in the Senate because the Republicans are filibustering everything, so the matching bill doesn't show up in committee. The investigative committees are currently the only place where Democrats have real power.
The Republicans in Congress have one goal--prevent the Democrats from looking effective to hurt them going into the 2008 elections. Unfortunately, they're doing a good job of it. The Democrats need 60 seats in 2008 to have a filibuster-proof majority (meaning that they can win a vote on cloture). Here's hoping they get it so that somebody can get something done, at least.
Not one person? What about those Washington lawyers who were accidentally delivered a phone log of themselves being tapped? You know, the ones in the ACLU suit?
I predict that a Democratic president will very publicly repudiate the powers the Bush Administration has claimed--it's the only PR defense against the Republicans crying "hypocrisy" . I doubt it'll make much difference in the actual operations of the executive (what, the NSA and CIA weren't tapping American's phone lines without a warrant before 9/11?), but what the Bush Administration did was try to legalize those powers, and that's what they're getting hammered for.
This is the (predictable) problem with the./ summary--it gets a few facts right, and misses the point entirely.
The Bush Administration has to respond--that's all. An argument that the ACLU has no goddamned right to see what they're requesting is a response. The judge might rule against the Bush Administration, but that just means years more of the Justice Department's stonewalling that they perfected during the Padilla and Moussaoui fiascos.
In fairness to Congressional Democrats, they may have titular control of Congress, and control of the committees (which grants broad investigative powers that they're using), they're hamstrung by their bare majority in the Senate. The House has passed all of Nancy Pelosi's bills that she promised, only to see them get filibustered in the Senate (meaning that the Senate equivalent bill that gets rationalized in committee with the House bill never gets passed). The Republicans in the Senate have one strategy: prevent the Democrats from looking effective in Congress, and the makeup of the Senate (with Bush's veto behind it) makes that all too easy.
If the Democrats had a veto-proof majority in the Senate (66 seats), they would surely send a bill to Bush tying funding for the Iraq war directly to a withdrawal date--they would love for the withdrawal and the subsequent bloodbath to happen while Bush is president so they can call it "Bush's war", and blame him solely for everything that went wrong. They would also look strong, standing up to a president and carrying out the people's (poll-driven) will. As it is, a Democratic president is going to have to wiggle out of Iraq, and will share some of the blame for how badly it goes and the subsequent mess.
If they had a filibuster proof majority (60 seats) they'd send even harsher bills to Bush, knowing they'd be vetoed, but making the Democrats look tough and effective and blaming Bush for rejecting the clear expression of the people's will via Congress.
I believe that the Republicans will spend every moment of the next Democratic presidency screeching about any use of executive privilege at all; I believe that the Republicans who know the details of the powers the Bush Administration have grabbed, will at every possible opportunity accuse the Democratic president of misusing those powers.
I think that the Democratic president will make a very public showing of repudiating and rescinding these powers because that's the only PR defense against Republican charges of using the same powers that they complained about when Bush was doing it. And I don't think it'll make much difference at all in how the executive has historically operated.
One of the things that makes so little sense about the Bush Administration is that everything it's done, and had done by executive agencies, probably could have been done without the bald assertion of the theory of the unitary executive. I mean, do you really believe that under Reagan and LBJ that nobody suffered "extraordinary rendition"? That the NSA and the CIA weren't tapping American phones without a warrant? (Look up the Church Commission.)
What's gotten Bush in so much trouble is trying to officially extend the powers of the presidency by setting precedents: telling Congress they have no right to actual oversight; using signing statements to expressly override the purpose of legislation; scorched earth legal tactics to avoid turning over documents or accepting judicial rulings.
When history writes the story of the Bush Administration, it won't be the story of Guantanamo and the FISA court. It'll be the story of how a group of Texas Republicans tried to turn the presidency in a kingship.
The immediate problem is that, with this ruling, Novell stands to collect a lot of money from SCO... by some accounts, double their cash on hand. They effectively own SCO, and between them and IBM, will probably take the company, its products, and its cash during the bankruptcy proceedings. Darl will be given a tin cup with which to entice the residents of Salt Lake City to charity.
Oh please. A bunch of./ comments counts, at best, as anecdotal evidence, and not even that much since you can't assume anyone actually thinks what they post, pseudo-anonymously, to a message board known far better for throughtless comments than RTFAing or doing research.
There's plenty to be outraged about in this world without foaming at the mouth for trolls.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they now officially an also-ran? Has the whole concept failed to be usefully implemented commercially, or will it be another Lisp--elegant, beautiful, and largely unused because it's kind of weird?
Barksdale, where they landed, is in fact where bombing missions in the Middle East are staged out of. Politerati can't decide whether this was a real leak by a concerned officer who wanted people to know that the U.S. was staging nukes for Iran; or a deliberate leak by the Bush Administration so that Iran would know.
That's quite a tongue-bath they give Elron.
Whoops, my bad. Still, Religious Tolerance is a Co$ front site? Since when?
According to the folks at Religious Tolerance, the grandparent is correct. AFAIK, they're a credible, independent source on these things.
So a rational, analytical nerd who sees vast suffering caused by circumstances and accidents of birth, and thinks that it can be addressed effectively through marginal collective action like taxes paying for health care for all is, what, deluded? Wrong?
Nice strawman about the left. How about a more charitable explanation? Many leftists see what can be accomplished with a little communal spirit and the desire to not see others suffer because of circumstances beyond their control or accidents of birth, and think that in the richest, most advanced society on Earth, we can address that effectively.
There is something to what you say, though: those who have want to keep it for themselves; those who don't want others to give it to them. Nerds and economic success put them into the 'keep it for themselves' category, which is intuitively straightforward.
Nerds are people who are very capable in their nerd-field, which for nerds tends to be several things that all foster personal independence. Thus, the most intuitively appealing political ideology is one that grants them the most freedom/least regulation.
If that were true, they wouldn't be libertarians. C'mon, back to the gold standard?
It's not that people aren't interested in simple, axiomatic political systems, it's that those systems fail to deliver things that people intuitively (and rightly or wrongly) thing should be part of their political system, like government-provided health care, welfare, unemployment insurance, and regulation of obviously bad corporate actors.
Intuitively, the most obvious breaking point of any libertarian system is that one's only recourse is to sue a bad actor. Most people think that polluters, food providers who use poisonous ingredients, corporate stock swindlers and the like can and should be dealt with by the government and a strong regulatory system. They'll complain about burdensome regulation in the next breath, but when an Enron happens, they'll still scream for oversight.
I replied to your comment directly in another post. My comment to which you're replying was in response to a poster who said that the Congressional Democrats have done nothing to end the war; I pointed out that they don't have the majority needed in Congress to force anything to happen to end the war, and Congressional Republicans are preventing them from doing so because they don't want the Dems to look effective, to prevent them from going into the 2008 elections saying "you wanted the war to end; we ended it."
The problem is the Republicans filibustering in the Senate. Without 60 votes there, the Democrats can't win a vote for cloture, which moves the bill from committee to the Senate for an up or down vote. To get a bill through the Senate they have to make a deal with Republicans, who won't allow a timetable bill to go through. They're not allowing much of anything to go through, either, because they want to prevent the Democrats from looking effective.
I'm saying that if they couldn't break a veto but could beat a filibuster, they would go on the offensive. Bush can thump his chest all he wants on national TV, but the public has turned against him, and if the Democrats in Congress could point to a tough bill and say "the only thing standing between you and Johnny coming home is Bush's veto", they'd win the PR war, especially heading into the 2008 elections. It would look good to the moderates and independents who want to see something done that signals the Iraq war is coming to some sort of an end, and as a bonus to the Dems, save them from having to actually figure a way out of the mess.
So you admit that American citizens were being tapped? Lawyers, no less, who have a legally privileged relationship with the person on the other end of the phone.
It seems like a good time to remind you that the NSA admitted that it can't distinguish, in its tapping mechanism, between domestic and international calls. So effectively, the NSA was listening to all of a law firm's phone traffic, no matter who they were talking to.
And all that says to you is "Bah! More Bush-bashing!"?
By purging the Justice Department, I was thinking of all the Kyle Sampsons and Monica Goodlings still in place. Part of Rove's strategy for a permanent majority was to stack the civil service with loyal Republicans started young.
No, I'm not okay with any of it, but I recognize that the difference between the executive doing it and not doing it has little to do with which party is in power, and less to do with the laws. Governments always do things they shouldn't, for good reasons or bad. What's especially scary about Bush is the institutionalization of torture and warrantless wiretapping and indefinite-detention-by-executive-order. When black ops are black, governments fear disclosure and publicity, and that has a suppressive effect that limits what and how much they can do.
Under Bush, the scope of torture and surveillance and arbitrary executive power was massively expanded, and had they succeeded in legitimizing those things, they would have been expanded further still. I think that a Democratic president will reject those things for pragmatic political reasons; but I hope a Democratic president will reject those things because it'll have the effect of beating back the tide of bloodthirstiness and 'do anything to win' in the war on terror.
I suspect that when President Clinton looks at the PR value of passing a bill saying 'shut down Guantanamo, restore FISA, purge the Justice Department and no political operatives in the West Wing', adds to it the diplomatic value, and weighs it against the quality of intelligence gained by torture, it'll be a no-brainer. I'm sure the executive will still do what it's always done, it just won't try to do it the macho pseudo-legitimacy the Bush Administration tried to do it with.
One of the genius aspects of democracies is that switching administrations gives the country the ability to do a 180 when it needs to. The value of the U.S. doing a 180 (or appearing to) after the Bush Administration is pretty damn high.
The Democrats in Congress are hamstrung by their bare majority in the Senate. Nancy Pelosi has passed all the bills in the House that she said she would--she's actually been surprisingly effective. But Reid can't get anything passed in the Senate because the Republicans are filibustering everything, so the matching bill doesn't show up in committee. The investigative committees are currently the only place where Democrats have real power.
The Republicans in Congress have one goal--prevent the Democrats from looking effective to hurt them going into the 2008 elections. Unfortunately, they're doing a good job of it. The Democrats need 60 seats in 2008 to have a filibuster-proof majority (meaning that they can win a vote on cloture). Here's hoping they get it so that somebody can get something done, at least.
Not one person? What about those Washington lawyers who were accidentally delivered a phone log of themselves being tapped? You know, the ones in the ACLU suit?
I predict that a Democratic president will very publicly repudiate the powers the Bush Administration has claimed--it's the only PR defense against the Republicans crying "hypocrisy" . I doubt it'll make much difference in the actual operations of the executive (what, the NSA and CIA weren't tapping American's phone lines without a warrant before 9/11?), but what the Bush Administration did was try to legalize those powers, and that's what they're getting hammered for.
This is the (predictable) problem with the ./ summary--it gets a few facts right, and misses the point entirely.
The Bush Administration has to respond--that's all. An argument that the ACLU has no goddamned right to see what they're requesting is a response. The judge might rule against the Bush Administration, but that just means years more of the Justice Department's stonewalling that they perfected during the Padilla and Moussaoui fiascos.
In fairness to Congressional Democrats, they may have titular control of Congress, and control of the committees (which grants broad investigative powers that they're using), they're hamstrung by their bare majority in the Senate. The House has passed all of Nancy Pelosi's bills that she promised, only to see them get filibustered in the Senate (meaning that the Senate equivalent bill that gets rationalized in committee with the House bill never gets passed). The Republicans in the Senate have one strategy: prevent the Democrats from looking effective in Congress, and the makeup of the Senate (with Bush's veto behind it) makes that all too easy.
If the Democrats had a veto-proof majority in the Senate (66 seats), they would surely send a bill to Bush tying funding for the Iraq war directly to a withdrawal date--they would love for the withdrawal and the subsequent bloodbath to happen while Bush is president so they can call it "Bush's war", and blame him solely for everything that went wrong. They would also look strong, standing up to a president and carrying out the people's (poll-driven) will. As it is, a Democratic president is going to have to wiggle out of Iraq, and will share some of the blame for how badly it goes and the subsequent mess.
If they had a filibuster proof majority (60 seats) they'd send even harsher bills to Bush, knowing they'd be vetoed, but making the Democrats look tough and effective and blaming Bush for rejecting the clear expression of the people's will via Congress.
I believe that the Republicans will spend every moment of the next Democratic presidency screeching about any use of executive privilege at all; I believe that the Republicans who know the details of the powers the Bush Administration have grabbed, will at every possible opportunity accuse the Democratic president of misusing those powers.
I think that the Democratic president will make a very public showing of repudiating and rescinding these powers because that's the only PR defense against Republican charges of using the same powers that they complained about when Bush was doing it. And I don't think it'll make much difference at all in how the executive has historically operated.
One of the things that makes so little sense about the Bush Administration is that everything it's done, and had done by executive agencies, probably could have been done without the bald assertion of the theory of the unitary executive. I mean, do you really believe that under Reagan and LBJ that nobody suffered "extraordinary rendition"? That the NSA and the CIA weren't tapping American phones without a warrant? (Look up the Church Commission.)
What's gotten Bush in so much trouble is trying to officially extend the powers of the presidency by setting precedents: telling Congress they have no right to actual oversight; using signing statements to expressly override the purpose of legislation; scorched earth legal tactics to avoid turning over documents or accepting judicial rulings.
When history writes the story of the Bush Administration, it won't be the story of Guantanamo and the FISA court. It'll be the story of how a group of Texas Republicans tried to turn the presidency in a kingship.
The immediate problem is that, with this ruling, Novell stands to collect a lot of money from SCO... by some accounts, double their cash on hand. They effectively own SCO, and between them and IBM, will probably take the company, its products, and its cash during the bankruptcy proceedings. Darl will be given a tin cup with which to entice the residents of Salt Lake City to charity.
Do you think the radiation from a nuke comes close to the daily bombardment of the earth by the sun, that's normally handled by the magnetosphere?
Oh please. A bunch of ./ comments counts, at best, as anecdotal evidence, and not even that much since you can't assume anyone actually thinks what they post, pseudo-anonymously, to a message board known far better for throughtless comments than RTFAing or doing research.
There's plenty to be outraged about in this world without foaming at the mouth for trolls.