"There is a large percentage of the population that feels that what they here from the major networks is filtered through the sieve of the liberal/progressive agenda."
Fox News is a major network. Rupert Murdoch, News Corp and Fox are a gigantic global media empire that is unabashedly right wing. The "liberal" networks usually try to maintain a pretense of neutrality whether true or not. Murdoch is blatant about his political bias and it shows in his networks, newspapers, etc.
Fox News is the #1 cable network by a wide margin now. You are whipping a dead horse. You might have had a case before 9/11 and before Fox News came to dominate cable news. At this point the liberal bias has been thoroughly countered and there is a distinct chance the balance has tipped right in the U.S. media, especially when its seen alongside a government currently dominated by the right.
I'd appreciate it if you would all declare or maybe admit victory in crushing the liberal media bias and stop sawing on it. Sure there is still some at places like CBS but it more than compensated for by Fox.
Our media doesn't need to swing any further to the right than it already is. It IS dangerous to the republic and the world because the right has a great tendency to tilt to extremism, demonize everyone they disagree with and is really, really fond of solving disputes by killing people.
A right wing talk show host explained the phenomena pretty well a day or two ago. Right wing radio/TV portray everything as black and white, liberal media tends to be shades of gray. Unfortunately combative black and white is more interesting and holds an audience better, especially a poorly informed audience who is just listing to have their preconceptions confirmed on a daily basis.
The right wing has also become way more adept at demonizing the democrats and liberals and this again makes for good entertainment, and holds an audience better. The Clintons were mauled for 8 years, and still are, and in the end the worst thing they nailed them for was an affair between consenting adults and lieing about it. Bush/Cheney has lied their way through their entire first term about stuff that matters, stuff that killed people, and it slides right off their teflon coating because liberals suck at demonizing and mauling right wing politicians.
Maybe its just a fact of life you have to kind of vicious to be successful in political talk radio and TV and the right wing are good at vicious. Liberals actually tend to want to explore the issues, think things out, see if there might be a peaceful and diplomatic way to solve a conflict. The right wing has everything predetermined in a little guide to every issue, they never need to revise it, and there is one conflict resolution technique, intimidation, saber rattling ending in Shock and Awe. Shock and Awe again makes for good radio and TV. Its exciting, entertaining and makes people feel good when their giant military crushes a 3rd world country like a bug.
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"Kerry doesn't promise this result AT ALL."
Uh, actually Kerry promises pretty much the exact same result. You'd be hard pressed to find any actual difference between Bush and Kerry on Iraq moving forward. Fact is the U.S. broke it and the U.S. is stuck there for the duration no matter who is President. Kerry will try to get the Europeans in, but they aren't stupid enough to get involved in a quagmire, so that is kind of a moot point. Kerry wants to add a couple divisions to the Army and will probably end up increasing troop strength in Iraq.
" But even if we ARE being "robber barons", we're making Iraq and Afghanistan a fuck load better then they were."
Whether Afghanistan is better or worse you can debate. The Taliban were pretty bad, it was Al Qaida's base so taking them down was the right response to 9/11. One thing speaks against Afghanistan being a better place. The Taliban have been replaced with war lords and drug trafficers for the most part. Its not really a Democracy outside Kabul, its still a bunch of fiefdoms. The really bad thing about Afghanistan is its opium production is exploding and all the heroin is going to do a world of hurt to the rest of the world. Bush Propaganda aside the Taliban actually did aggressively fight the Opium trade because drugs are completely forbidden in the Muslim faith, and its the new Afghanistan that is dealing drugs to the world. Its also not like Karzai won in a great exercise in Democracy. He won because he had a U.S. helicopter to fly him to each tribal chief and he had buckets of U.S. money to promise them in return for them telling their people to vote for him. They don't have TV or for the most part roads so you dont actually campaign like you would in a Democracy outside Kabul. It was impossible for the other candidates to campaign in most of the country without getting killed, and they didn't have buckets of U.S dollars to buy the tribal chiefs. So American's hand picked puppet won, yipppeeee let Democracy reign.
As for Democracy in Iraq why don't you wait until their is some before you count your chickens. Allawi is another hand picked American puppet. He's worked for the CIA and British intelligence for a couple decades. He used to work for Saddam's secret service and in particular helped dispose of Saddam's enemies and critics in Europe before he and Saddam had a falling out and Saddam tried to have him ax murdered. He is deep down a thug just like Saddam. There are already numerous anecdotes of him abusing prisoners in the new Iraq. I'd also like to wait and see how these elections go. I'm wagering the U.S. and Allawi are going to do everything in their power stack the deck and insure Allawi wins. If you actually have a real democratic election the Shia fundamentalists are going to win and you will end up with a state looking more like Iran than America. I'll be real interested in seeing what America does if they implement real "Democracy" and then don't like who the answer they get.
And yes Saddam was a thug and a dictator. Maybe its a plus he's gone, but the Baathists did keep order in Iraq, a challenge in a country that is as fragmented as it is, and people did have jobs. Now most people are unemployed, the whole country has been looted, the infrastructure is in near collapse and its an extraordinarily dangerous place to live thanks to bombings, kidnappings and assassination, and of course American occupation troops are constantly harrassing everyone with checkpoints, bombing urban areas, killing civilians alongside insurgents, torturing and humiliating prisoners, and breaking down doors at night arresting people. Not sure most Iraqi's would consider the occupation to be an improvement over life under Saddam. All in all you have to be pretty gullible or think I'm gullible to believe they are "a fuck load better then they were".
They are different, not better. Maybe they could have been better but for the incompetence of the Bush administration. They promised they would be better but they didn't actually do any of things necessary to make them better.
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Heh.
No I just was asking if you could tell me some good reasons why you think Bush is making you safer. I tried to list some though I didn't do a very good job. I was hoping you could help me out.
Your reply suggest you can't. You don't seem to know how he is actually make you safer. You are just working on this blind faith he is making you safer, because him and Dick tell you they are, though you don't seem to actually know how. They also tell us that if we elect Kerry we and our children will almost surely die though thats probably not true either.
Is it because his speeches and rhetoric make you feel safe. Well I hate to break it to you but most of his speeches are written for him by talented speech writers and Cheney, Rove and Card craft the substance of those more than George W. does. If you want to see the real George W. thinking and speaking you saw it in the debates, when he was getting ticked off, saying ummm a lot and grasping for words. When he wasn't groping for words it was because he was repeating precrafted talking points written for him by his staff.
If its not his speeches and rhetoric what actions has he taken that make you think you are safer? This is a pretty basic question. If you can't answer then I'm inclined to think you don't actually have a good reason for voting for him. I'm afraid that is the case for most people who are voting for Little George(thats his mom's nickname for him by the way).
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"that an enemy was acting in a way that apparently fit the start of a nuclear war"
Your post is very impressive but its so full of holes its silly.
No nuclear power is going to start a nuclear war by attacking the World Trade Center with hijacked airlines. The Trade center has nothing to do with U.S. command and control, it is entirely a political/economic/terror target. For your story to be even remotely plausible they would have had to start with the White House and the Pentagon.
If it was a precursor to a nuclear attack they would have moved the President instantaneously instead of let him read My Pet Goat for 5-10 minutes or whatever it was.
If it was a decapitation strike I'm pretty sure your mystery attacker would have attacked Washington when the President was in the Washington. It wasn't secret he was reading My Pet Goat on the other side of the country. Why try a decapitation strike when the head wasn't in Washington(though maybe Cheney was in Washington and is really in charge).
The President is Commander In Chief. He orders the military and the Secret Service not the other way around. If he had balls he would have headed straight to Washington or New York. As it was he just looked like he was running and hiding.
And of course Al Quaida wouldn't have been using civilian airliners as weapons if they had nukes, no one would. They would have slipped a nuke into Washington and New York on a truck or ship, while the President was there and really decapitated. As soon as the second airliner hit the trade center it was pretty obvious it was a terrorist attack.
Please try to make up something remotely plausible next time.
"I can't imagine a situation occuring where a militant group could ever have any hope of overthrowing the US government, or even affecting any kind of change."
I should add all governments want their people to think exactly like you do. You see you just said a U.S. government could do something completely horrible to the American people, like concentration camps, and there is "no hope" of stopping them.
The reality is there is always hope. Governments are a balance act. As long as the government maintains a balance there is peace and people lead normal lives. ANY government in ANY nation can tip the balance far enough that enough people will get fed up and decide that things are bad enough that its better to put their "normal lives" on the line to effect change.
Obviously America isn't even close to this point yet, and it may never reach it. Even if it does the American people may just live with it and learn to like it especially since most American's are on the sheep side like you are.
But it is a simple fact there is nothing stopping an unscrupulous group of individuals from seizing and holding power in America. Our constitution was a good effort to prevent it but the Founding Fathers were the first to admit it wouldn't stop tyrants from usurping power if the American people were unwilling to defend their democracy from enemies within. Nixon was one such tyrant and the system stopped him. If Kennedy's assassinaton was a coup the system failed to stop it. There is nothing precluding another following in these footsteps who are better at ruthless. If you read their family history you will find the Bush/Walker family have ruthless and unscrupulous in their veins.
"where a militant group could ever have any hope of overthrowing the US government, or even affecting any kind of change."
Uh, it happens all the time in various places around the world at various times in history. I wasn't talking about a small militant group. I'm talking about a large percentage of the American people getting fed up with a completely corrupt government, especially if its become obvious they are holding power by undemocratic means, for example stealing elections. I wasn't talking about a time when America is still Democracy. It is barely one now and it will be even less of one after you see the calamity next Tuesday and the weeks that follow if the election is as close, and as fraud filled, as it appears it will be. You are going to see two groups of people try to seize power by any means necessary and the will of the American people isn't going to have anything to do with it in the end.
What I'm referring to nearly happened in the 1960's and early '70's thanks to Vietnam and Watergate. The government reacted just in time and got out of Vietnam, ended the draft, ran Nixon out of office, and the Church commission reined in an out of control CIA and FBI. If the government has stayed the course on Vietnam and Nixon and held on to power you would have seen exactly what I'm talking about, the momentum was already there.
This becomes far more feasible if the soldiers in the military become disaffected with their chain of command which can easily happen if they spend enough years pulling occupation duty in Iraq or elsewhere, killing civilians, being targets for insurgents and being lied to by their chain of command. A quagmire like this in Afghanistan and what it did to their military was a key contributor to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Fighting insurgencies and occupation duty is a great way to destroy an army's morale and produce a bunch of angry Veterans pushing for change.
Another place you can look for precedent are many of the countries in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R where one popular uprising after another threw out one tyrannical government after another, governments with big militaries and thouroughly ruthless police forces. Discovery Times is running a good documentary on the attempted coup against Gorbachev, and the popular uprising that stood down the military, especially since most of the rank and file soldiers were backing the people and not the corrupt generals.
I'm also not talking about America of today. if you read the original post I was talking about a theoretical America down the road if the new Republican party continues to drift off the deep end for another four years, and especially if there is another terrorist attack equal to or of a larger scale than 9/11 they can use to justify another massive round of power seizing. Again you like most people who've responded to that post glossed over the fact I pitched a real, all new third party movement as the first choice, and rebellion only if the entrenched powers try to prevent the American people from regaining real control of their government, which is unlikely with the bankruptcy of the two major parties.
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"Resistance to Tyrants is obedience to God"
Woooohooooo. I like that. This means if I resist Bush/Cheney I am sitting on the right hand of God. Who knew. I imagine Jefferson was talking about King George instead of Little George but I assure you if Jefferson and the rest of the Founding Fathers saw the monster that is today's Federal government, and especially the new Republican party, Paul Revere would on the ride, they would be penning a new set of documents declaring their independence from the tyrants in Washington, and the minutemen would be warming up their muskets.
"But Bush has the guts to take out tyrants. The Taliban and Saddam's Ba'athists have no right to rule as they did. As the Strong, I think the US has a certain amount of obligation to the Weak to help them out of oppression. Pick them up and stand them on their own two feet."
So using this rationale how exactly do you draw the line and stop at Afghanistan and Iraq. If freeing the weak and oppressed had anything to do with it why aren't we rushing in and taking down:
- Sudan, engaging in genocide in Darfur - Saudi Arabia, they are nearly identical to the Taliban in oppression, torture, treatment of women, public beheadings, etc. and of course thats were most of the 9/11 hijackers came from and it is still the dominant funding source for global Islamic terrorists. - Myanmar, a really ruthless military junta - Egypt, another ruthless Arab dictatorship - China, they are still the worlds biggest dictatorship ya know, even if we don't mention it now that we are trying to make a buck and exploiting the cheap labor. They've changed economically and are more open but in reality their fundamental political structure hasn't actually changed since the days when America was reviling them. - Pakistan, another ruthless Muslim dictatorship, they are harboring terrorists, in fact their tribal region is Al Qaida's home base and has been since the CIA and Reagan trained, armed and funded them in the 1980's and they actually have done very little to even inconvenience Al Qaida there and of course they were actually running a supermarket for nuclear weapons technology and helped kick start those programs in North Korea, Iran and who knows where else. The ring was busted up maybe, but the ringleader in Pakistan was given a full and instant pardon and is free as a bird.
You see I think you fell for some Bush propaganda here if you think all this is about freeing the oppressed little ragheads and guiding our little brown brothers to democracy. Its possible even George W. fell for this bullshit. It is the only reason left for Iraq he can still use that hasn't been disproved since reasons 1. WMD and 2. ties to 9/11 all proved to be complete bullshit.
I can assure you Dick Cheney and the Neocons certainly aren't doing it to free the weak and oppresssed and they are the ones really pulling the strings. Its impossible to guess why they took down Iraq but the leading guesses are:
- To get rid of one of Israel's biggest threats in the region and the U.S. is now at the point its politicians are completely under the control of the Friends of Israel lobby. (Iran and Syria are next on the list to be taken down since they are the next most threatening countries to Israel) - The U.S. needed new military bases in the region from which they could project power and control over the worlds biggest oil fields, especially in the near future when oil gets short which is an era just now beginning. America's bases in Saudi Arabia weren't suitable since the House of Saud put to many strings on using them to threaten the region (the puppet government in Iraq should let the U.S. do what it wants with its 14 new, big permanent military bases in Iraq). In particular they can be used to threaten or invade Iran and Syria. In 2005 Iran has a nuclear power plant going on line and the U.S. and Israel will I assure you take it out before it goes online and that will provoke a new middle east crisis. - It was a fringe bene
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Just curious why do you think that?
The only ones I can think of:
- The Bush administration has locked up hundreds or more likely thousands of people, mostly Muslims, without access to lawyers, family or due process for long periods. I suppose there is a chance there are a handful of terrorists among them though they've destroyed the lives of the vast majority who are probably innocent or least haven't been proven guilty which is how our constitution is supposed to work. - The Bush administration did take down Afghanistan but its pretty much a given any President would have done that. The Bush administration unfortunately did a really half assed job in Afghanistan, mostly using proxy armies and scattering the Taliban and Al Qaida not capturing or killing them. They in fact have largely abandoned most of Afghanistan back to warlords, opium traffickers, the Taliban and Al Qaida. In case you didn't know the U.S. mostly controls Kabul and a couple big military bases. They do send out patrols but the insurgents either melt away or attack them. Pretty much nobody has done anything to deny Pakistan's tribal areas to Al Qaida and that is where they've been based since the CIA and Ronald Reagan helped fund, arm, and train them in the 1980's. - The Bush administration is apparently making liberal use of torture both directly and using third party countries, and is routinely hiding prisoners from the International Red Cross. It may well be they have wrung important information that has helped them fight terrorism. Of course conventional wisdom is most of the information you get from torture is garbage and people just tell you want you want to hear (maybe thats why we've had so many bogus alerts about terrorists wanting to bomb just about everything). And of course by endorsing torture the U.S. has become a pariah to the eyes of the world and has abandoned any moral high ground it might have had. - By invading Iraq the Bush administration has obviously created a honey pot for terrorists and insurgents. There are certainly a lot of them kept busy trying to kill soldiers and truck drivers in Iraq so maybe they don't have time to attack you. Maybe the U.S. military is killing a lot of them too, but its hard to tell, since the U.S. military counts everyone they kill as a terrorist when they are often innocent civilians, women and children. The problem is by invading and occupying an Arab country and killing a lot of women and children (you don't see that much on American news but they are on Arab networks everyday) the Bush administration is almost certainly breeding terrorists much faster than its getting rid of them. They are certainly insuring more moderate Arabs support the extremists when they see what the U.S. is doing to Arabs(like in Abu Graib). Everytime you kill a women or a child in Iraq you insure the survivors among their friends and family develop a desire to kill Americans.
One thing that obviously speaks against Bush making you "safe from terrorists".
- 9/11 happened on the Bush administrations watch. That means they already failed you once in a huge way. They have a track record, as they like to say about Kerry, and its not good.
You could argue it wasn't their fault but:
- George was handed a security briefing in August 2001 with a title that warned of exactly what happened a month later. What did he do about, apparently nothing, he didn't even delegate it to his staff to follow up on. He was on vacation in Texas and basically failed miserable to do his job - Its been established people on John Ashcroft staff were repeatedly warning of a possible terrorism threat. He told them to shut the hell up, didn't want to hear it, and was in fact slashing DOJ funding for antiterrorism. Lord knows there were all kinds of danger signals coming in from the field about terrorists in American flight schools that were ignored.
And then there is the track record of what George W. did while America was being attacked.
You probably need to add a date/time check so that you only do this on election day when no one is testing the machines to see if they report correctly. Of course you would hope anyone testing these machines would set the date/time to the election day so they would catch this.
The Carter Foundation attempted to verify an all evoting election in the recent referendum to recall Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Here is an article by Jennifer McCoy who led the effort. Whether you like or dislike the Carter Foundation or Chavez it is kind of interesting piece on trying to verify evoting, and some of the problems they had. Of course Venezuela's machines all had printers and a paper trail, versus U.S. where any attempt to recount or audit the election is futile on all electronic machines with no paper trail. Kind of makes you wonder when Chavez, who the Bush administration brands a dictator and a thug who steals elections, has a paper trail on their electronic voting machines and the U.S. for the most part doesn't. Sure does make it easier to steal the U.S. election though Chavez wasn't entirely open his election to be fair.
Please list some major people in the major parties pushing this idea. I don't recall ever hearing it mentioned in the mainstream media. Don't recall it ever being mentioned anywhere but here and a few websites.
I have pretty high confidence the two parties have zero incentive to allow this to go anywhere. Why should they. They have a lock on power between them and they have zero incentive to let anyone else sit at the table. They have a way easier life fighting each other than they do each other and some wildcard 3rd party with fresh ideas. If they wanted 3rd parties the Dems for example wouldn't be using a legal sledgehammer to crush Ralph Nadar.
The second obvious problem is you have to get a constitutional amendment. Problem with getting a constitutional amendment is you have to get all the small states to support it. Its in the best interest of small states to not support it. The electoral college gives them a disproportionally strong say in the Presidency. If you switch to popular voting California, New York, Texas and a few other states completely dominate the process.
"and presumably a lot of people's lives"
I didn't say that. I said propsed a real 3rd party movement coordinated via the Internet like the Deaniacs would be the first choice. It only goes to rebellion if the established parties and powers, are using unconstitutional means to hold power. For example if the Democrats are using the courts to crush 3rd party candidates like Nader or the Republicans are using electronic voting or voter intimidation to steal elections like they have been known to do in places like Florida and Georgia.
If the established parties and powers that be are already doing violence to our Constitution and democracy with the presumption they can get away with it, its is our duty as citizens to stop them. You sitting there thinking you are going to change anything with a "instant runoff" which will never make it in to the constition anyway is kind of naive. Not sure I want to sit around waiting for it.
I'm not talking about the Bush faithful here. I'm talking about everyone else. When you are talking about the Bush faithful many of them are evangelicals. They believe Jim and Tammy Fay Baker, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggert and Oral Roberts. Their gullible suckers, PT Barnum had them pegged, they'll believe anything. Nothing to do but write them off until someone in their family is killed in Iraq or they lose their job then maybe they will wake up. They can try to blame everything on Clinton and the Dems but 4 years later it doesn't work, especially when the Republicans completely control the government. Clinton was working against a Republican house and gridlocked ruled. When it comes to the current budget deficit the blame falls squarely and unavoidably on the Republicans.
If the Bush blind faithful continue to dominate America not much you can do but move out of America and hope and pray they stay away from wherever you end up immigrating to and hope the rest of the world joins together to Stop America. I wager if the world sees another four years like the last four America is going to be a very lonely country in the world community.
But I'm pretty sure half or more of America isn't in the blind faithful camp, the blind faithful are just really loud so you think there are a lot of them. Nearly half the country has already turned on Bush and the Republicans. I'm pretty sure more would turn on them were it not for the fact that Kerry and the Dems are so bad. A lot of people are in the AnybodyButBush camp but I'm pretty sure there are plenty of Republicans in the AB(Kerry) and ABD(emocrats) rock and a hard place.
"In order for them to change their minds, they would have to PERSONALLY SUFFER SOME LOSS. Other than that, it all happens to "bad" people who are a danger to the "good" people like them."
Thank you for supporting my whole point. People are PERSONALLY SUFFERING SOME LOSS. They are losing friends and family in Iraq everyday or having them come home maimed.
They or their friends and family are losing jobs everyday to outsourcing and are being pushed down the economic ladder. The employment rate is a joke. It just stops counting the long term unemployed when their benefits stop, and doesn't count those being pushed down the economic ladder at all. You have to produce a lot of jobs each month just to stay even in the U.S. and the Bush administration is still sitting on a net job loss. Of the jobs they do create a third are consistently government jobs which are also a lie.
I'm just speculating if Bush gets another term and he is either not worried about getting reelected, there is another attack to use as an excuse, or he decides to declare a state of emergency and stay in power indefinitely he and his cronies will go so far off the deep end that it will start producing enough suffering and loss that there will be a backlash. Again all they have to do is get in a little deeper military, see the volunteer army dry up, and have to restart the draft and that will be the beginning of the end just like it was in the '60's.
"I think it is unlikely they will attack another country until they have pulled enough troops out of Iraq to do it with an al volunteer army."
But thats the rub, they are having zero luck pulling troops out of Iraq and are desperately sucking the British further in and will probably add 20,000 more right after the election(whichever party wins). To control Iraq they have to contest, conquer and occupy places like Fallujah and Sadr City. They don't have the troops to control Iraq now when they are leaving these places largely uncontested. They will have to have a lot more troops to occupy them and they have to occupy them if they have any chance of controlling the insurgency(though I dont think they have any chance of controlling it at this point since they've already alienated to many Iraqi's and that is the lifes blood of insurgency, alienated nationalists).
I wish I had a reference but I heard on the news recently that something like 40% of the Iraqi Army/police recruits were either incompetent or obviously untrustworthy. So the coalition fired them, but gave them a big lump sum payoff to keep them fed and off the streets for a while.
Its really hard to build an indigenous army/police force in a country with an insurgency in full bloom. Its trivial for the insurgents to massively infiltrate it and turn it against the U.S. and its puppet government.
If the U.S. can't build a trustworthy Iraqi security force and there is zero chance of getting other nations to commit to a quagmire, the U.S. is stuck maintaining or increasing its troop commitment. They can't do it much longer with a volunteer army. First they need more volunteers and people are already increasingly reluctant to volunteer for the Army or Marines since they know it will mean multiple tours in Iraq and a high and increasing chance of getting killed or maimed. The volunteer army works in peace time with great benefits, and it works with a popular, defend the homeland, patriotic war. It doesn't work with a quagmire where volunteers are killed and maimed everyday. For that you need draftees, preferably poor minority draftees, which is why you need a Vietnam era system where all the rich white boys and girls have an easy out from the draft(like Bush/Cheney/Clinton used).
"but it's also possible that we will continue our descent into an authoratarian state at an accelerated speed."
Let me make my point another way.
If the Democrats gain power we will continue the authoritarian slide, though perhaps more gradually.
If the Republicans hold power we will continue the authoritarian slide, faster. They are so arrogant they don't even try to hide they are doing it. They just ratchet up the politics of fear to compensate.
The big plus with having the new Republicans doing it is they are really ham handed about it. They go way to fast and way to far, they piss LOTS of people off, including people in their old libertarian base, so they have alerted a lot of people on both sides of the spectrum that is going on and its bad and it will get worse and that something needs to be done about it.
The Democrats on the other hand do all the same things more slowly and subtly. There are plenty of people on the right that see it and get mad when the Dems do it but not many on the left. There is a much lower chance of a reaction.
I'm saying if the authoritarian slide is inevitable from both parties its better to have the one that is really ham handed and going really fast do it because they are much more likely to provoke a reaction.
"He said the site may see no reason to distribute content to people who will not be voting next week."
There are lots of American expats who live outside the U.S. and do vote though they are passing or have passed the window to do it successfully and of course there is the whole overseas military.
Anyone in the military abroad who can try this though Pentagon supplied Internet to see if they can access it. Not sure if all the foreign DOD Internet gets routed through foreign ISP's or the DOD has their own entire independent network based on.mil.
If they are blocking it for our brave men and women overseas that would be kind of a slap in the face, though I wager they aren't. It is till kind of a slap to expats.
Of course as I recall the DOD has made at least two efforts to get the military and expats voting electronically through the Internet though I never heard if they actually pulled it off for this election.
If any of these votes are routed through the Pentagon its not very important to let those expats and soldiers see political websites since their votes have already been decided for them by a computer sitting in the Pentagon.
"They also have Libertarian, Green, Independant and many other choices."
They have no chance of winning so they aren't a viable option so its a "wasted vote" so no one will vote for them. Most of them aren't even consistently on the ballot in many states, especially thanks the barriers the two major parties throw at them, and especially thanks to the lawsuits the Dems are using to outright attack and obstruct Nader's candidacy. This is blatantly antidemocratic and another indicator the two major parties are colluding to control the country and to deny people choice or democracy.
It is unfortunately a cart/horse chicken/egg thing. Third parties have no chance because they have no chance, so unless they get a candidate with huge name recognition who isn't far enough out on the fringe to be dismissed by the media and the people they never become viable. Since Anderson and Perot the two parties have become even more entrenched and better at killing third parties so the odds get higher against them every cycle. Again there would have to be a massive and sudden movement to a 3rd party like the one the Deaniacs attempted, except this time completely cutting the ties to both parties, to break the barrier.
As I originally suggested the chances of a viable third party springing up, that is viable, increases if the people in power go further off the deep end and really alienate a big block of middle Americans.
The obvious problem with everything he said is he didn't actually say how he would fix it. He just reeled of all the sound bites against it he learned from Howard Dean and the ACLU.
Well all that crap was in there when he voted for it. If he had a problem with them he should have done something about it then. Instead he voted for it because everyone in Congress was afraid they would be branded as unpatriotic if they didn't vote for it so they abandoned their oath to uphold the constitution out of political convenience/necessity.
If a theoretical President Kerry and Dem Congress actually try to fix it and the Republicans start a blitz that changing it is unpatriotic and weak on terrorism, and if they change it you and your children will surely die, and the polls show it working, I assure you Kerry and company wont fix it they will probably make it worse. They have a record of caving on it once which means they will again.
As for that coordinating between the FBI and CIA it sounds good post 9/11 but in the long view it is very bad. Last time the CIA meddled in domestic affairs they were being used to manipulate elections and terrorize political opponents of the people in power. The CIA in particular is extremely fond of manipulating elections to get a desirable outcome and if the doors are opened to them to meddle in the U.S. all kinds of bad things will happen. All kinds of bad things did happen which is why that wall was put there in the first place in the 70's by Church and company though unfortunately everyone has forgotten about all that badness 30+ years later.
Fact is there was PLENTY of tips that 9/11 was coming and it was pure incompetence and indifference in the Bush administration, DOJ and the FBI that let 9/11 happen. Bush was to busy vacationing in Texas the month before to pay attention to the briefing that said Bin Laden was planing an attack in the U.S. with airplanes. Ashcroft told people warning him about a terrorist threat to shut the hell up and was busy slashing antiterrorism funding.
We DON'T need to sign away our civil liberties to protect America. We need to get rid of the incompetent people who didn't have their eye on the ball. You can't reward incompetence by giving incompetent people even more power unless you want really powerful incompetent people.
If you read one of my other posts I gave a list of things that will precipitate a Master Reset. "Just invading another country or two" might not do it but the U.S. can't launch another war with an all volunteer army, and may not even be able to continue the ones they've already started without it.
So they may have to reinstate the draft. When you reinstate the draft you hit a whole lot of wild eyed young people where they live. They will wake up one morning after an all nighter partying, to a letter from Uncle Sam, and realize politics does matter especially when they are about to get shipped to Iraq, against their will, to drive a truck down a highway full of people trying to kill them.
Another obvious source for a Master Reset is for a continuing stream of people to be laid off as their jobs are moved to China and India so they end up with declining, sometimes precipitously declining incomes. You push people from middle class affluence in to poverty they wake up really fast.
He was a prosecutor only after he lost his first bid for a congressional seat, I think this around 1972 almost right out of Vietnam. He was following almost precisely JFK's footsteps but JFK won his congressional in 1946 while Kerry lost and it set his political career, and JFK emulation, way back which is when he did the prosecutor stint. If he had had his way he would have gone straight in to Congress like JFK, whose life he pretty much ripped off wholesale.
Here is the The Globe on his forgotten middle years.
I guess we can agree to disagree on what qualifies as real work. Prosecutors, especially "top" prosecuters, are political jobs, its a job lawyer/politicians do until an office they want opens up. Its not a job he would have done if his early political career hadn't flopped.
"That is, with the minor exception of the average American voter. D'oh."
Not sure the average American voter is as bad as everyone thinks. They've been painted in to a corner election after election being forced to choose between bad and worse.
The poll I want to see is:
- Who are you voting for Kerry, Bush, Nader etc. - Are you voting for this candidate because you want to or because you hate the other candidates more - Who would be your preferred candidate for President if its not the one you are voting for(i.e. McCain, Dean, Venture, Hillary, Perot, etc). - Would you vote for a 3rd party if it had a chance to win, or do you avoid voting for a 3rd party because they cant win.
I wager its a poll the parties and the media don't want you to see since it would reflect the true level of disillusionment with the two major parties.
But then too the right in particular has been heavily indoctrinated by talk radio, Fox, etc so maybe they do actually like Bush. I'm pretty sure there is overwhelming indifference to Kerry among those voting for him thanks to ABB syndrome.
"Those that have not woken up yet are not going to wake up."
Well maybe but I've seen a steady stream of Republicans and conservative papers who are fed up with Bush and Co. with the Orlando paper being one getting a lot of press lately since they just endorsed Kerry and haven't endorsed a Dem since LBJ who was of course running against another right wing extremist Barry Goldwater. The implication being:
Barry Goldwater = George W. Bush.
I'm pretty sure half of America is thoroughly awake now, is energized against Bush and Co., unfortunately the only option they have is Kerry and a candidate that bad really de-energizes people.
The reason Americans don't look awake is they are short on options for expressing how fed up they are getting, again thanks to the fact the Democrats and Republican dominate political life.
Here are some things that should further energize America very soon.
- The DOD will increase troop strength in Iraq by 20,000-40,000 right after the election, either extending tours of duty which will enrage most enlisted people and reservists, or of course they will have to restart the draft. Restarting the draft will energize America against the government like it did in the '60's. There is also likely to be a series of bloody urban battles in Fallujah and elsewhere that are going to kill a lot of civilians and American soldiers. This is going to happen if Kerry or Bush wins. - Another 75 billion will be earmarked for Iraq and Afghanistan pushing the price tag to 220+ billion. Remember the false Republican and media outrage about Kerry said the war was costing 200 billion, well its going to be way more than that and there is no end in sight. Again this will happen if Kerry or Bush wins since I doubt Kerry is going to rally Europe to take over the quagmire in Iraq. - Iran is going to be in the sights of the neocons(Isreal lovers) next year and there will be another WMD based, preemptive war, propaganda campaign, especially since Iran's nuclear reactor comes on line next year. Iran knows they have to get a bomb to prevent the U.S./Israel from taking them down next and in the rush to get a bomb the U.S./Israel will be forced to start another preemptive strike or war launched from those 14 bases in Iraq. If it goes to a full scale war and occupation again this will require a draft and further drain America's coffers. - Outsourcing and antilabor policies will continue to push an ever rising number of American's in to poverty, declining incomes and no health insurance. I assure you if they keep hitting working people in the pocketbook people will get fed up. Americans have been so complacent because as long as they were making a good living they didn't care about much else. Take away the living standard and....
Its long running historical fact that if things turn bad for people they do eventually revolt in one way or another, hopefully it will be a peaceful revolt through an Internet organized third party, kinds of like what the Deaniacs tried but more broadly based, in 2006 and 2008. But if the two major parties, seeing their power threatened, obstruct a peaceful revolution, which they probably will, then they are placing themselves against our Constitution, which says nothing about Republicans and Democrats having a stranglehold on power. At that point they both deserve to have the plug pulled on them by whatever means necessary.
This has been done to an extent before, with the Progressives, Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose party in the early 20th century so there is precedent. The only problem with Bull Moose was it split the Republican party and not the Dems so the Dems took power under Wilson and it fizzled. A new third party needs to split more than a third off of both parties so it puts both out of power. That split should probably take in all the people in the middle who are fed up with the direction both parties have gone, though I could see the true libertarians and progressives(Bull Moosers) in the Republican pa
"In that case, you're also likely to be someone for whom there's no doubt that Kerry will be at least a marginal improvement."
I'm pretty sure Kerry will be bad, different bad, and the calculus of badness is pretty hard so I'm not sure I'd be so bold as to say Kerry will be a "marginal improvement", I'd just stick with they are both going to be inevitably bad. What do you expect when you have two spoiled rich kids, Yale grads, Skull and Bonesmen, elite of the elites, never done an honest days work in their lives.
Though I should qualify there is a big plus in having different parties controlling the White House and Congress because grid lock is a big plus when both major parties have gone insane and are completely corrupt, since it slows them down, they can't make major policy changes and are confined to colluding to hand out the massive pork to their friends. Gridlock is kind of like a straight jacket for the criminally insane. So if the Republicans hold Congress, having Kerry in the White House would probably be a marginal improvement and vice versa.
Me I'm taking the long view so I think it would be best if Bush/Cheney win, the Republicans get 60 seats in the Senate, build their lead on the House, and get the Supreme Court stacked early in the next term. It would be especially good if the election looks really tainted, rigged and stolen.
Why you ask? Have I gone insane? Well no, you see I'm pretty sure the Republicans will tilt in to an insane binge of right wing extremism in the next term if they hold power and especially if there is another terrorist attack to use an excuse. In fact I'm willing to bet they will stage their own attack if Al Qaida doesn't oblige, like the Anthrax letters. Terrorist attacks are pure gold when you are trying to seize power.
Why is this good? Because things might get so bad it might wake up sane Americans that their government is no longer of the people, by the people or for the people, and it doesn't really matter which party has power because they are both screwing the people. If Kerry were to win people might say, whew, glad thats over, and not realize Kerry and the Dems are screwing them pretty much the same as Bush and the Republicans, just with a different style.
Maybe, just maybe, if things gets really bad people will wake up and unite to do whatever it takes to take their government back, either peacefully through a real third party, or if it appears the Republicans are stealing the elections using as much force as is necessary, something which I'm pretty sure all the founding fathers would bless. The founding fathers knew and feared tyrannical government and they thouroughly expected one would eventually seize power in America despite their best efforts in the Constitution to prevent it and we are pretty close.
The U.S. is in desperate need of a renewal of its Democracy and ping ponging between really bad Republicans and really bad Democrats is precluding that rebirth. America needs a Master Reset and a reboot to clear a corrupted system.
"I like how you say "real conservatives" are disgusted by what Bush/Cheney are doing, then later call them right-wing extremists."
Not sure I follow your point. "Real conservatives" tend to be libertarians and not right wing extremists. Extremists in general tend to take something that is at heart good and twist it so you can't recognize and make it dangerous and undesirable. Take for example Islamic extremists and Christian extremists both of whom take something that is at heart positive and turn it negative, twisted and intolerant.
"and that is why the republicans have gotten so far ahead."
The Republicans have their power because talk radio, FoxNews, 9/11 and a general confluence of events have made it fashionable and trendy for Americans to be right wing fanatics again. The Republican's have also become VERY good at milking the politics of fear to build that coalition. Remember the rhetoric, keep the Republicans in office or you and your children will surely die. 9/11 is the best thing that ever happened to the Republican party, they know it and they are milking it to the hilt and will in perpetuity unless Americans wake up to the con.
"The Republicans are traditionally the US's conservative party, in favor of (generally) keeping things as they are."
Thats a ridiculous simplification of reality and is ancient history thanks to the likes of Tom Delay, George W. and a pack of really dangerous neocons (Wolfowitz, Perl, Feith, etc).
The Republicans are no longer even remotely conservative. True conservatives are in fact getting fed up with the new Republican party, they just dont have any place to go. They are also being replaced as the Republican base by evangelicals, rascist Southerners who bailed on the Democrats when LBJ pushed civil rights, rural Americans and Fox News watchers who amazingly just don't get how dangerous, corrupt and dishonest the Bush administration really is (and of course Kerry is so pathetic Bush does almost look good by comparison).
Real conservatives are aghast at the massive spending and deficits the new Republicans are running. They only fiscal policy they like are tax cuts for the rich but they want those to be paid for by slashing spending, not massive borrowing.
The so called Medicare "reform" act was a gigantic transfer of money from tax payers to the health care and drug mega corps. Real conservatives hate that.
Launching wars like the one in Iraq which have nothing to do with defending America, and engaging in nation building there, are also anathema to conservatives.
Its a reason why a number of conservative newspapers are either endorsing Kerry or endorsing Bush only very reluctantly because they see Kerry as worse. The conservative paper in Orlando is endorsing a Democrat for the first time in 40 years. The last time they did that was LBJ because Goldwater was an off the deep end right wing extremist just like Bush/Cheney.
But, the fact is on most key areas the Republicans and Democrats are becoming nearly indistinguishable. They are both owned by corporations and lobbyists which means they are the ones that really make most policy decisions and it doesn't really matter that much which party is in power.
The two parties have a stock set of issues that they use to divide the American people, abortion, gays, tax the rich or tax the poor, and con us in to thinking we have a choice. But, once you get past those inflammatory issues they are really both about taxing ordinary working people in to the ground, spreading pork to their friends and slowly stripping us of all of our civil liberties, which is again all anathema to true conservatives.
Not argueing that doing research on sustainable resources isn't useful. I'm just skeptical NASA will ever get even close to building a space ship that will get out of LEO where any such research could be applied. This is way down the list of things NASA needs to do to get to Mars.
I imagine an arguement could be made that it may in fact consume far more weight and space trying to farm in a spaceship where every pound and cubic foot is precious, and you are in a completely closed environment, than it would to fill it with "snack packs" and dump the shit. I imagine it would also be a lot more beneficial to focus on propulsion technology to reduce the transit time so astronauts aren't spending "three years in space". That much time in space will permanently waste human beings unless they are in artificial gravity. I imagine this is also the usual stupid round trip scenario. They would be way better served focusing on a fast one way trip with permanent colonists and focusing on farming technology for the surface of Mars, where it counts, and where they can build bigger greenhouses and where the minute emissions of plants is less of an issue than it would be on a completely closed system space ship.
Maybe if the submission actually had a pointer to a paper with their results it would be possible to judge if this had real long term value. As it is the article was vacuous and it wasn't worth posting it on slashdot since they guy mostly rambled about how cool it was to be around people glueing tiles on the Space Shuttle which is mostly what the manned space program does these days, rather than explaining the value of the work they did.
Slashdot Mirror
"There is a large percentage of the population that feels that what they here from the major networks is filtered through the sieve of the liberal/progressive agenda."
Fox News is a major network. Rupert Murdoch, News Corp and Fox are a gigantic global media empire that is unabashedly right wing. The "liberal" networks usually try to maintain a pretense of neutrality whether true or not. Murdoch is blatant about his political bias and it shows in his networks, newspapers, etc.
Fox News is the #1 cable network by a wide margin now. You are whipping a dead horse. You might have had a case before 9/11 and before Fox News came to dominate cable news. At this point the liberal bias has been thoroughly countered and there is a distinct chance the balance has tipped right in the U.S. media, especially when its seen alongside a government currently dominated by the right.
I'd appreciate it if you would all declare or maybe admit victory in crushing the liberal media bias and stop sawing on it. Sure there is still some at places like CBS but it more than compensated for by Fox.
Our media doesn't need to swing any further to the right than it already is. It IS dangerous to the republic and the world because the right has a great tendency to tilt to extremism, demonize everyone they disagree with and is really, really fond of solving disputes by killing people.
A right wing talk show host explained the phenomena pretty well a day or two ago. Right wing radio/TV portray everything as black and white, liberal media tends to be shades of gray. Unfortunately combative black and white is more interesting and holds an audience better, especially a poorly informed audience who is just listing to have their preconceptions confirmed on a daily basis.
The right wing has also become way more adept at demonizing the democrats and liberals and this again makes for good entertainment, and holds an audience better. The Clintons were mauled for 8 years, and still are, and in the end the worst thing they nailed them for was an affair between consenting adults and lieing about it. Bush/Cheney has lied their way through their entire first term about stuff that matters, stuff that killed people, and it slides right off their teflon coating because liberals suck at demonizing and mauling right wing politicians.
Maybe its just a fact of life you have to kind of vicious to be successful in political talk radio and TV and the right wing are good at vicious. Liberals actually tend to want to explore the issues, think things out, see if there might be a peaceful and diplomatic way to solve a conflict. The right wing has everything predetermined in a little guide to every issue, they never need to revise it, and there is one conflict resolution technique, intimidation, saber rattling ending in Shock and Awe. Shock and Awe again makes for good radio and TV. Its exciting, entertaining and makes people feel good when their giant military crushes a 3rd world country like a bug.
"Kerry doesn't promise this result AT ALL."
Uh, actually Kerry promises pretty much the exact same result. You'd be hard pressed to find any actual difference between Bush and Kerry on Iraq moving forward. Fact is the U.S. broke it and the U.S. is stuck there for the duration no matter who is President. Kerry will try to get the Europeans in, but they aren't stupid enough to get involved in a quagmire, so that is kind of a moot point. Kerry wants to add a couple divisions to the Army and will probably end up increasing troop strength in Iraq.
" But even if we ARE being "robber barons", we're making Iraq and Afghanistan a fuck load better then they were."
Whether Afghanistan is better or worse you can debate. The Taliban were pretty bad, it was Al Qaida's base so taking them down was the right response to 9/11. One thing speaks against Afghanistan being a better place. The Taliban have been replaced with war lords and drug trafficers for the most part. Its not really a Democracy outside Kabul, its still a bunch of fiefdoms. The really bad thing about Afghanistan is its opium production is exploding and all the heroin is going to do a world of hurt to the rest of the world. Bush Propaganda aside the Taliban actually did aggressively fight the Opium trade because drugs are completely forbidden in the Muslim faith, and its the new Afghanistan that is dealing drugs to the world. Its also not like Karzai won in a great exercise in Democracy. He won because he had a U.S. helicopter to fly him to each tribal chief and he had buckets of U.S. money to promise them in return for them telling their people to vote for him. They don't have TV or for the most part roads so you dont actually campaign like you would in a Democracy outside Kabul. It was impossible for the other candidates to campaign in most of the country without getting killed, and they didn't have buckets of U.S dollars to buy the tribal chiefs. So American's hand picked puppet won, yipppeeee let Democracy reign.
As for Democracy in Iraq why don't you wait until their is some before you count your chickens. Allawi is another hand picked American puppet. He's worked for the CIA and British intelligence for a couple decades. He used to work for Saddam's secret service and in particular helped dispose of Saddam's enemies and critics in Europe before he and Saddam had a falling out and Saddam tried to have him ax murdered. He is deep down a thug just like Saddam. There are already numerous anecdotes of him abusing prisoners in the new Iraq. I'd also like to wait and see how these elections go. I'm wagering the U.S. and Allawi are going to do everything in their power stack the deck and insure Allawi wins. If you actually have a real democratic election the Shia fundamentalists are going to win and you will end up with a state looking more like Iran than America. I'll be real interested in seeing what America does if they implement real "Democracy" and then don't like who the answer they get.
And yes Saddam was a thug and a dictator. Maybe its a plus he's gone, but the Baathists did keep order in Iraq, a challenge in a country that is as fragmented as it is, and people did have jobs. Now most people are unemployed, the whole country has been looted, the infrastructure is in near collapse and its an extraordinarily dangerous place to live thanks to bombings, kidnappings and assassination, and of course American occupation troops are constantly harrassing everyone with checkpoints, bombing urban areas, killing civilians alongside insurgents, torturing and humiliating prisoners, and breaking down doors at night arresting people. Not sure most Iraqi's would consider the occupation to be an improvement over life under Saddam. All in all you have to be pretty gullible or think I'm gullible to believe they are "a fuck load better then they were".
They are different, not better. Maybe they could have been better but for the incompetence of the Bush administration. They promised they would be better but they didn't actually do any of things necessary to make them better.
Heh.
No I just was asking if you could tell me some good reasons why you think Bush is making you safer. I tried to list some though I didn't do a very good job. I was hoping you could help me out.
Your reply suggest you can't. You don't seem to know how he is actually make you safer. You are just working on this blind faith he is making you safer, because him and Dick tell you they are, though you don't seem to actually know how. They also tell us that if we elect Kerry we and our children will almost surely die though thats probably not true either.
Is it because his speeches and rhetoric make you feel safe. Well I hate to break it to you but most of his speeches are written for him by talented speech writers and Cheney, Rove and Card craft the substance of those more than George W. does. If you want to see the real George W. thinking and speaking you saw it in the debates, when he was getting ticked off, saying ummm a lot and grasping for words. When he wasn't groping for words it was because he was repeating precrafted talking points written for him by his staff.
If its not his speeches and rhetoric what actions has he taken that make you think you are safer? This is a pretty basic question. If you can't answer then I'm inclined to think you don't actually have a good reason for voting for him. I'm afraid that is the case for most people who are voting for Little George(thats his mom's nickname for him by the way).
"that an enemy was acting in a way that apparently fit the start of a nuclear war"
Your post is very impressive but its so full of holes its silly.
No nuclear power is going to start a nuclear war by attacking the World Trade Center with hijacked airlines. The Trade center has nothing to do with U.S. command and control, it is entirely a political/economic/terror target. For your story to be even remotely plausible they would have had to start with the White House and the Pentagon.
If it was a precursor to a nuclear attack they would have moved the President instantaneously instead of let him read My Pet Goat for 5-10 minutes or whatever it was.
If it was a decapitation strike I'm pretty sure your mystery attacker would have attacked Washington when the President was in the Washington. It wasn't secret he was reading My Pet Goat on the other side of the country. Why try a decapitation strike when the head wasn't in Washington(though maybe Cheney was in Washington and is really in charge).
The President is Commander In Chief. He orders the military and the Secret Service not the other way around. If he had balls he would have headed straight to Washington or New York. As it was he just looked like he was running and hiding.
And of course Al Quaida wouldn't have been using civilian airliners as weapons if they had nukes, no one would. They would have slipped a nuke into Washington and New York on a truck or ship, while the President was there and really decapitated. As soon as the second airliner hit the trade center it was pretty obvious it was a terrorist attack.
Please try to make up something remotely plausible next time.
"I can't imagine a situation occuring where a militant group could ever have any hope of overthrowing the US government, or even affecting any kind of change."
I should add all governments want their people to think exactly like you do. You see you just said a U.S. government could do something completely horrible to the American people, like concentration camps, and there is "no hope" of stopping them.
The reality is there is always hope. Governments are a balance act. As long as the government maintains a balance there is peace and people lead normal lives. ANY government in ANY nation can tip the balance far enough that enough people will get fed up and decide that things are bad enough that its better to put their "normal lives" on the line to effect change.
Obviously America isn't even close to this point yet, and it may never reach it. Even if it does the American people may just live with it and learn to like it especially since most American's are on the sheep side like you are.
But it is a simple fact there is nothing stopping an unscrupulous group of individuals from seizing and holding power in America. Our constitution was a good effort to prevent it but the Founding Fathers were the first to admit it wouldn't stop tyrants from usurping power if the American people were unwilling to defend their democracy from enemies within. Nixon was one such tyrant and the system stopped him. If Kennedy's assassinaton was a coup the system failed to stop it. There is nothing precluding another following in these footsteps who are better at ruthless. If you read their family history you will find the Bush/Walker family have ruthless and unscrupulous in their veins.
"where a militant group could ever have any hope of overthrowing the US government, or even affecting any kind of change."
Uh, it happens all the time in various places around the world at various times in history. I wasn't talking about a small militant group. I'm talking about a large percentage of the American people getting fed up with a completely corrupt government, especially if its become obvious they are holding power by undemocratic means, for example stealing elections. I wasn't talking about a time when America is still Democracy. It is barely one now and it will be even less of one after you see the calamity next Tuesday and the weeks that follow if the election is as close, and as fraud filled, as it appears it will be. You are going to see two groups of people try to seize power by any means necessary and the will of the American people isn't going to have anything to do with it in the end.
What I'm referring to nearly happened in the 1960's and early '70's thanks to Vietnam and Watergate. The government reacted just in time and got out of Vietnam, ended the draft, ran Nixon out of office, and the Church commission reined in an out of control CIA and FBI. If the government has stayed the course on Vietnam and Nixon and held on to power you would have seen exactly what I'm talking about, the momentum was already there.
This becomes far more feasible if the soldiers in the military become disaffected with their chain of command which can easily happen if they spend enough years pulling occupation duty in Iraq or elsewhere, killing civilians, being targets for insurgents and being lied to by their chain of command. A quagmire like this in Afghanistan and what it did to their military was a key contributor to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Fighting insurgencies and occupation duty is a great way to destroy an army's morale and produce a bunch of angry Veterans pushing for change.
Another place you can look for precedent are many of the countries in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R where one popular uprising after another threw out one tyrannical government after another, governments with big militaries and thouroughly ruthless police forces. Discovery Times is running a good documentary on the attempted coup against Gorbachev, and the popular uprising that stood down the military, especially since most of the rank and file soldiers were backing the people and not the corrupt generals.
I'm also not talking about America of today. if you read the original post I was talking about a theoretical America down the road if the new Republican party continues to drift off the deep end for another four years, and especially if there is another terrorist attack equal to or of a larger scale than 9/11 they can use to justify another massive round of power seizing. Again you like most people who've responded to that post glossed over the fact I pitched a real, all new third party movement as the first choice, and rebellion only if the entrenched powers try to prevent the American people from regaining real control of their government, which is unlikely with the bankruptcy of the two major parties.
"Resistance to Tyrants is obedience to God"
Woooohooooo. I like that. This means if I resist Bush/Cheney I am sitting on the right hand of God. Who knew. I imagine Jefferson was talking about King George instead of Little George but I assure you if Jefferson and the rest of the Founding Fathers saw the monster that is today's Federal government, and especially the new Republican party, Paul Revere would on the ride, they would be penning a new set of documents declaring their independence from the tyrants in Washington, and the minutemen would be warming up their muskets.
"But Bush has the guts to take out tyrants. The Taliban and Saddam's Ba'athists have no right to rule as they did. As the Strong, I think the US has a certain amount of obligation to the Weak to help them out of oppression. Pick them up and stand them on their own two feet."
So using this rationale how exactly do you draw the line and stop at Afghanistan and Iraq. If freeing the weak and oppressed had anything to do with it why aren't we rushing in and taking down:
- Sudan, engaging in genocide in Darfur
- Saudi Arabia, they are nearly identical to the Taliban in oppression, torture, treatment of women, public beheadings, etc. and of course thats were most of the 9/11 hijackers came from and it is still the dominant funding source for global Islamic terrorists.
- Myanmar, a really ruthless military junta
- Egypt, another ruthless Arab dictatorship
- China, they are still the worlds biggest dictatorship ya know, even if we don't mention it now that we are trying to make a buck and exploiting the cheap labor. They've changed economically and are more open but in reality their fundamental political structure hasn't actually changed since the days when America was reviling them.
- Pakistan, another ruthless Muslim dictatorship, they are harboring terrorists, in fact their tribal region is Al Qaida's home base and has been since the CIA and Reagan trained, armed and funded them in the 1980's and they actually have done very little to even inconvenience Al Qaida there and of course they were actually running a supermarket for nuclear weapons technology and helped kick start those programs in North Korea, Iran and who knows where else. The ring was busted up maybe, but the ringleader in Pakistan was given a full and instant pardon and is free as a bird.
You see I think you fell for some Bush propaganda here if you think all this is about freeing the oppressed little ragheads and guiding our little brown brothers to democracy. Its possible even George W. fell for this bullshit. It is the only reason left for Iraq he can still use that hasn't been disproved since reasons 1. WMD and 2. ties to 9/11 all proved to be complete bullshit.
I can assure you Dick Cheney and the Neocons certainly aren't doing it to free the weak and oppresssed and they are the ones really pulling the strings. Its impossible to guess why they took down Iraq but the leading guesses are:
- To get rid of one of Israel's biggest threats in the region and the U.S. is now at the point its politicians are completely under the control of the Friends of Israel lobby. (Iran and Syria are next on the list to be taken down since they are the next most threatening countries to Israel)
- The U.S. needed new military bases in the region from which they could project power and control over the worlds biggest oil fields, especially in the near future when oil gets short which is an era just now beginning. America's bases in Saudi Arabia weren't suitable since the House of Saud put to many strings on using them to threaten the region (the puppet government in Iraq should let the U.S. do what it wants with its 14 new, big permanent military bases in Iraq). In particular they can be used to threaten or invade Iran and Syria. In 2005 Iran has a nuclear power plant going on line and the U.S. and Israel will I assure you take it out before it goes online and that will provoke a new middle east crisis.
- It was a fringe bene
Just curious why do you think that?
The only ones I can think of:
- The Bush administration has locked up hundreds or more likely thousands of people, mostly Muslims, without access to lawyers, family or due process for long periods. I suppose there is a chance there are a handful of terrorists among them though they've destroyed the lives of the vast majority who are probably innocent or least haven't been proven guilty which is how our constitution is supposed to work.
- The Bush administration did take down Afghanistan but its pretty much a given any President would have done that. The Bush administration unfortunately did a really half assed job in Afghanistan, mostly using proxy armies and scattering the Taliban and Al Qaida not capturing or killing them. They in fact have largely abandoned most of Afghanistan back to warlords, opium traffickers, the Taliban and Al Qaida. In case you didn't know the U.S. mostly controls Kabul and a couple big military bases. They do send out patrols but the insurgents either melt away or attack them. Pretty much nobody has done anything to deny Pakistan's tribal areas to Al Qaida and that is where they've been based since the CIA and Ronald Reagan helped fund, arm, and train them in the 1980's.
- The Bush administration is apparently making liberal use of torture both directly and using third party countries, and is routinely hiding prisoners from the International Red Cross. It may well be they have wrung important information that has helped them fight terrorism. Of course conventional wisdom is most of the information you get from torture is garbage and people just tell you want you want to hear (maybe thats why we've had so many bogus alerts about terrorists wanting to bomb just about everything). And of course by endorsing torture the U.S. has become a pariah to the eyes of the world and has abandoned any moral high ground it might have had.
- By invading Iraq the Bush administration has obviously created a honey pot for terrorists and insurgents. There are certainly a lot of them kept busy trying to kill soldiers and truck drivers in Iraq so maybe they don't have time to attack you. Maybe the U.S. military is killing a lot of them too, but its hard to tell, since the U.S. military counts everyone they kill as a terrorist when they are often innocent civilians, women and children. The problem is by invading and occupying an Arab country and killing a lot of women and children (you don't see that much on American news but they are on Arab networks everyday) the Bush administration is almost certainly breeding terrorists much faster than its getting rid of them. They are certainly insuring more moderate Arabs support the extremists when they see what the U.S. is doing to Arabs(like in Abu Graib). Everytime you kill a women or a child in Iraq you insure the survivors among their friends and family develop a desire to kill Americans.
One thing that obviously speaks against Bush making you "safe from terrorists".
- 9/11 happened on the Bush administrations watch. That means they already failed you once in a huge way. They have a track record, as they like to say about Kerry, and its not good.
You could argue it wasn't their fault but:
- George was handed a security briefing in August 2001 with a title that warned of exactly what happened a month later. What did he do about, apparently nothing, he didn't even delegate it to his staff to follow up on. He was on vacation in Texas and basically failed miserable to do his job
- Its been established people on John Ashcroft staff were repeatedly warning of a possible terrorism threat. He told them to shut the hell up, didn't want to hear it, and was in fact slashing DOJ funding for antiterrorism. Lord knows there were all kinds of danger signals coming in from the field about terrorists in American flight schools that were ignored.
And then there is the track record of what George W. did while America was being attacked.
- While reading my pet g
You probably need to add a date/time check so that you only do this on election day when no one is testing the machines to see if they report correctly. Of course you would hope anyone testing these machines would set the date/time to the election day so they would catch this.
The Carter Foundation attempted to verify an all evoting election in the recent referendum to recall Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Here is an article by Jennifer McCoy who led the effort. Whether you like or dislike the Carter Foundation or Chavez it is kind of interesting piece on trying to verify evoting, and some of the problems they had. Of course Venezuela's machines all had printers and a paper trail, versus U.S. where any attempt to recount or audit the election is futile on all electronic machines with no paper trail. Kind of makes you wonder when Chavez, who the Bush administration brands a dictator and a thug who steals elections, has a paper trail on their electronic voting machines and the U.S. for the most part doesn't. Sure does make it easier to steal the U.S. election though Chavez wasn't entirely open his election to be fair.
Please list some major people in the major parties pushing this idea. I don't recall ever hearing it mentioned in the mainstream media. Don't recall it ever being mentioned anywhere but here and a few websites.
I have pretty high confidence the two parties have zero incentive to allow this to go anywhere. Why should they. They have a lock on power between them and they have zero incentive to let anyone else sit at the table. They have a way easier life fighting each other than they do each other and some wildcard 3rd party with fresh ideas. If they wanted 3rd parties the Dems for example wouldn't be using a legal sledgehammer to crush Ralph Nadar.
The second obvious problem is you have to get a constitutional amendment. Problem with getting a constitutional amendment is you have to get all the small states to support it. Its in the best interest of small states to not support it. The electoral college gives them a disproportionally strong say in the Presidency. If you switch to popular voting California, New York, Texas and a few other states completely dominate the process.
"and presumably a lot of people's lives"
I didn't say that. I said propsed a real 3rd party movement coordinated via the Internet like the Deaniacs would be the first choice. It only goes to rebellion if the established parties and powers, are using unconstitutional means to hold power. For example if the Democrats are using the courts to crush 3rd party candidates like Nader or the Republicans are using electronic voting or voter intimidation to steal elections like they have been known to do in places like Florida and Georgia.
If the established parties and powers that be are already doing violence to our Constitution and democracy with the presumption they can get away with it, its is our duty as citizens to stop them. You sitting there thinking you are going to change anything with a "instant runoff" which will never make it in to the constition anyway is kind of naive. Not sure I want to sit around waiting for it.
I'm not talking about the Bush faithful here. I'm talking about everyone else. When you are talking about the Bush faithful many of them are evangelicals. They believe Jim and Tammy Fay Baker, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggert and Oral Roberts. Their gullible suckers, PT Barnum had them pegged, they'll believe anything. Nothing to do but write them off until someone in their family is killed in Iraq or they lose their job then maybe they will wake up. They can try to blame everything on Clinton and the Dems but 4 years later it doesn't work, especially when the Republicans completely control the government. Clinton was working against a Republican house and gridlocked ruled. When it comes to the current budget deficit the blame falls squarely and unavoidably on the Republicans.
If the Bush blind faithful continue to dominate America not much you can do but move out of America and hope and pray they stay away from wherever you end up immigrating to and hope the rest of the world joins together to Stop America. I wager if the world sees another four years like the last four America is going to be a very lonely country in the world community.
But I'm pretty sure half or more of America isn't in the blind faithful camp, the blind faithful are just really loud so you think there are a lot of them. Nearly half the country has already turned on Bush and the Republicans. I'm pretty sure more would turn on them were it not for the fact that Kerry and the Dems are so bad. A lot of people are in the AnybodyButBush camp but I'm pretty sure there are plenty of Republicans in the AB(Kerry) and ABD(emocrats) rock and a hard place.
"In order for them to change their minds, they would have to PERSONALLY SUFFER SOME LOSS. Other than that, it all happens to "bad" people who are a danger to the "good" people like them."
Thank you for supporting my whole point. People are PERSONALLY SUFFERING SOME LOSS. They are losing friends and family in Iraq everyday or having them come home maimed.
They or their friends and family are losing jobs everyday to outsourcing and are being pushed down the economic ladder. The employment rate is a joke. It just stops counting the long term unemployed when their benefits stop, and doesn't count those being pushed down the economic ladder at all. You have to produce a lot of jobs each month just to stay even in the U.S. and the Bush administration is still sitting on a net job loss. Of the jobs they do create a third are consistently government jobs which are also a lie.
I'm just speculating if Bush gets another term and he is either not worried about getting reelected, there is another attack to use as an excuse, or he decides to declare a state of emergency and stay in power indefinitely he and his cronies will go so far off the deep end that it will start producing enough suffering and loss that there will be a backlash. Again all they have to do is get in a little deeper military, see the volunteer army dry up, and have to restart the draft and that will be the beginning of the end just like it was in the '60's.
"I think it is unlikely they will attack another country until they have pulled enough troops out of Iraq to do it with an al volunteer army."
But thats the rub, they are having zero luck pulling troops out of Iraq and are desperately sucking the British further in and will probably add 20,000 more right after the election(whichever party wins). To control Iraq they have to contest, conquer and occupy places like Fallujah and Sadr City. They don't have the troops to control Iraq now when they are leaving these places largely uncontested. They will have to have a lot more troops to occupy them and they have to occupy them if they have any chance of controlling the insurgency(though I dont think they have any chance of controlling it at this point since they've already alienated to many Iraqi's and that is the lifes blood of insurgency, alienated nationalists).
I wish I had a reference but I heard on the news recently that something like 40% of the Iraqi Army/police recruits were either incompetent or obviously untrustworthy. So the coalition fired them, but gave them a big lump sum payoff to keep them fed and off the streets for a while.
Its really hard to build an indigenous army/police force in a country with an insurgency in full bloom. Its trivial for the insurgents to massively infiltrate it and turn it against the U.S. and its puppet government.
If the U.S. can't build a trustworthy Iraqi security force and there is zero chance of getting other nations to commit to a quagmire, the U.S. is stuck maintaining or increasing its troop commitment. They can't do it much longer with a volunteer army. First they need more volunteers and people are already increasingly reluctant to volunteer for the Army or Marines since they know it will mean multiple tours in Iraq and a high and increasing chance of getting killed or maimed. The volunteer army works in peace time with great benefits, and it works with a popular, defend the homeland, patriotic war. It doesn't work with a quagmire where volunteers are killed and maimed everyday. For that you need draftees, preferably poor minority draftees, which is why you need a Vietnam era system where all the rich white boys and girls have an easy out from the draft(like Bush/Cheney/Clinton used).
"but it's also possible that we will continue our descent into an authoratarian state at an accelerated speed."
Let me make my point another way.
If the Democrats gain power we will continue the authoritarian slide, though perhaps more gradually.
If the Republicans hold power we will continue the authoritarian slide, faster. They are so arrogant they don't even try to hide they are doing it. They just ratchet up the politics of fear to compensate.
The big plus with having the new Republicans doing it is they are really ham handed about it. They go way to fast and way to far, they piss LOTS of people off, including people in their old libertarian base, so they have alerted a lot of people on both sides of the spectrum that is going on and its bad and it will get worse and that something needs to be done about it.
The Democrats on the other hand do all the same things more slowly and subtly. There are plenty of people on the right that see it and get mad when the Dems do it but not many on the left. There is a much lower chance of a reaction.
I'm saying if the authoritarian slide is inevitable from both parties its better to have the one that is really ham handed and going really fast do it because they are much more likely to provoke a reaction.
"He said the site may see no reason to distribute content to people who will not be voting next week."
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There are lots of American expats who live outside the U.S. and do vote though they are passing or have passed the window to do it successfully and of course there is the whole overseas military.
Anyone in the military abroad who can try this though Pentagon supplied Internet to see if they can access it. Not sure if all the foreign DOD Internet gets routed through foreign ISP's or the DOD has their own entire independent network based on
If they are blocking it for our brave men and women overseas that would be kind of a slap in the face, though I wager they aren't. It is till kind of a slap to expats.
Of course as I recall the DOD has made at least two efforts to get the military and expats voting electronically through the Internet though I never heard if they actually pulled it off for this election.
If any of these votes are routed through the Pentagon its not very important to let those expats and soldiers see political websites since their votes have already been decided for them by a computer sitting in the Pentagon.
"They also have Libertarian, Green, Independant and many other choices."
They have no chance of winning so they aren't a viable option so its a "wasted vote" so no one will vote for them. Most of them aren't even consistently on the ballot in many states, especially thanks the barriers the two major parties throw at them, and especially thanks to the lawsuits the Dems are using to outright attack and obstruct Nader's candidacy. This is blatantly antidemocratic and another indicator the two major parties are colluding to control the country and to deny people choice or democracy.
It is unfortunately a cart/horse chicken/egg thing. Third parties have no chance because they have no chance, so unless they get a candidate with huge name recognition who isn't far enough out on the fringe to be dismissed by the media and the people they never become viable. Since Anderson and Perot the two parties have become even more entrenched and better at killing third parties so the odds get higher against them every cycle. Again there would have to be a massive and sudden movement to a 3rd party like the one the Deaniacs attempted, except this time completely cutting the ties to both parties, to break the barrier.
As I originally suggested the chances of a viable third party springing up, that is viable, increases if the people in power go further off the deep end and really alienate a big block of middle Americans.
The obvious problem with everything he said is he didn't actually say how he would fix it. He just reeled of all the sound bites against it he learned from Howard Dean and the ACLU.
Well all that crap was in there when he voted for it. If he had a problem with them he should have done something about it then. Instead he voted for it because everyone in Congress was afraid they would be branded as unpatriotic if they didn't vote for it so they abandoned their oath to uphold the constitution out of political convenience/necessity.
If a theoretical President Kerry and Dem Congress actually try to fix it and the Republicans start a blitz that changing it is unpatriotic and weak on terrorism, and if they change it you and your children will surely die, and the polls show it working, I assure you Kerry and company wont fix it they will probably make it worse. They have a record of caving on it once which means they will again.
As for that coordinating between the FBI and CIA it sounds good post 9/11 but in the long view it is very bad. Last time the CIA meddled in domestic affairs they were being used to manipulate elections and terrorize political opponents of the people in power. The CIA in particular is extremely fond of manipulating elections to get a desirable outcome and if the doors are opened to them to meddle in the U.S. all kinds of bad things will happen. All kinds of bad things did happen which is why that wall was put there in the first place in the 70's by Church and company though unfortunately everyone has forgotten about all that badness 30+ years later.
Fact is there was PLENTY of tips that 9/11 was coming and it was pure incompetence and indifference in the Bush administration, DOJ and the FBI that let 9/11 happen. Bush was to busy vacationing in Texas the month before to pay attention to the briefing that said Bin Laden was planing an attack in the U.S. with airplanes. Ashcroft told people warning him about a terrorist threat to shut the hell up and was busy slashing antiterrorism funding.
We DON'T need to sign away our civil liberties to protect America. We need to get rid of the incompetent people who didn't have their eye on the ball. You can't reward incompetence by giving incompetent people even more power unless you want really powerful incompetent people.
If you read one of my other posts I gave a list of things that will precipitate a Master Reset. "Just invading another country or two" might not do it but the U.S. can't launch another war with an all volunteer army, and may not even be able to continue the ones they've already started without it.
So they may have to reinstate the draft. When you reinstate the draft you hit a whole lot of wild eyed young people where they live. They will wake up one morning after an all nighter partying, to a letter from Uncle Sam, and realize politics does matter especially when they are about to get shipped to Iraq, against their will, to drive a truck down a highway full of people trying to kill them.
Another obvious source for a Master Reset is for a continuing stream of people to be laid off as their jobs are moved to China and India so they end up with declining, sometimes precipitously declining incomes. You push people from middle class affluence in to poverty they wake up really fast.
He was a prosecutor only after he lost his first bid for a congressional seat, I think this around 1972 almost right out of Vietnam. He was following almost precisely JFK's footsteps but JFK won his congressional in 1946 while Kerry lost and it set his political career, and JFK emulation, way back which is when he did the prosecutor stint. If he had had his way he would have gone straight in to Congress like JFK, whose life he pretty much ripped off wholesale.
Here is the The Globe on his forgotten middle years.
I guess we can agree to disagree on what qualifies as real work. Prosecutors, especially "top" prosecuters, are political jobs, its a job lawyer/politicians do until an office they want opens up. Its not a job he would have done if his early political career hadn't flopped.
"That is, with the minor exception of the average American voter. D'oh."
Not sure the average American voter is as bad as everyone thinks. They've been painted in to a corner election after election being forced to choose between bad and worse.
The poll I want to see is:
- Who are you voting for Kerry, Bush, Nader etc.
- Are you voting for this candidate because you want to or because you hate the other candidates more
- Who would be your preferred candidate for President if its not the one you are voting for(i.e. McCain, Dean, Venture, Hillary, Perot, etc).
- Would you vote for a 3rd party if it had a chance to win, or do you avoid voting for a 3rd party because they cant win.
I wager its a poll the parties and the media don't want you to see since it would reflect the true level of disillusionment with the two major parties.
But then too the right in particular has been heavily indoctrinated by talk radio, Fox, etc so maybe they do actually like Bush. I'm pretty sure there is overwhelming indifference to Kerry among those voting for him thanks to ABB syndrome.
"Those that have not woken up yet are not going to wake up."
Well maybe but I've seen a steady stream of Republicans and conservative papers who are fed up with Bush and Co. with the Orlando paper being one getting a lot of press lately since they just endorsed Kerry and haven't endorsed a Dem since LBJ who was of course running against another right wing extremist Barry Goldwater. The implication being:
Barry Goldwater = George W. Bush.
I'm pretty sure half of America is thoroughly awake now, is energized against Bush and Co., unfortunately the only option they have is Kerry and a candidate that bad really de-energizes people.
The reason Americans don't look awake is they are short on options for expressing how fed up they are getting, again thanks to the fact the Democrats and Republican dominate political life.
Here are some things that should further energize America very soon.
- The DOD will increase troop strength in Iraq by 20,000-40,000 right after the election, either extending tours of duty which will enrage most enlisted people and reservists, or of course they will have to restart the draft. Restarting the draft will energize America against the government like it did in the '60's. There is also likely to be a series of bloody urban battles in Fallujah and elsewhere that are going to kill a lot of civilians and American soldiers. This is going to happen if Kerry or Bush wins.
- Another 75 billion will be earmarked for Iraq and Afghanistan pushing the price tag to 220+ billion. Remember the false Republican and media outrage about Kerry said the war was costing 200 billion, well its going to be way more than that and there is no end in sight. Again this will happen if Kerry or Bush wins since I doubt Kerry is going to rally Europe to take over the quagmire in Iraq.
- Iran is going to be in the sights of the neocons(Isreal lovers) next year and there will be another WMD based, preemptive war, propaganda campaign, especially since Iran's nuclear reactor comes on line next year. Iran knows they have to get a bomb to prevent the U.S./Israel from taking them down next and in the rush to get a bomb the U.S./Israel will be forced to start another preemptive strike or war launched from those 14 bases in Iraq. If it goes to a full scale war and occupation again this will require a draft and further drain America's coffers.
- Outsourcing and antilabor policies will continue to push an ever rising number of American's in to poverty, declining incomes and no health insurance. I assure you if they keep hitting working people in the pocketbook people will get fed up. Americans have been so complacent because as long as they were making a good living they didn't care about much else. Take away the living standard and....
Its long running historical fact that if things turn bad for people they do eventually revolt in one way or another, hopefully it will be a peaceful revolt through an Internet organized third party, kinds of like what the Deaniacs tried but more broadly based, in 2006 and 2008. But if the two major parties, seeing their power threatened, obstruct a peaceful revolution, which they probably will, then they are placing themselves against our Constitution, which says nothing about Republicans and Democrats having a stranglehold on power. At that point they both deserve to have the plug pulled on them by whatever means necessary.
This has been done to an extent before, with the Progressives, Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose party in the early 20th century so there is precedent. The only problem with Bull Moose was it split the Republican party and not the Dems so the Dems took power under Wilson and it fizzled. A new third party needs to split more than a third off of both parties so it puts both out of power. That split should probably take in all the people in the middle who are fed up with the direction both parties have gone, though I could see the true libertarians and progressives(Bull Moosers) in the Republican pa
"In that case, you're also likely to be someone for whom there's no doubt that Kerry will be at least a marginal improvement."
I'm pretty sure Kerry will be bad, different bad, and the calculus of badness is pretty hard so I'm not sure I'd be so bold as to say Kerry will be a "marginal improvement", I'd just stick with they are both going to be inevitably bad. What do you expect when you have two spoiled rich kids, Yale grads, Skull and Bonesmen, elite of the elites, never done an honest days work in their lives.
Though I should qualify there is a big plus in having different parties controlling the White House and Congress because grid lock is a big plus when both major parties have gone insane and are completely corrupt, since it slows them down, they can't make major policy changes and are confined to colluding to hand out the massive pork to their friends. Gridlock is kind of like a straight jacket for the criminally insane. So if the Republicans hold Congress, having Kerry in the White House would probably be a marginal improvement and vice versa.
Me I'm taking the long view so I think it would be best if Bush/Cheney win, the Republicans get 60 seats in the Senate, build their lead on the House, and get the Supreme Court stacked early in the next term. It would be especially good if the election looks really tainted, rigged and stolen.
Why you ask? Have I gone insane? Well no, you see I'm pretty sure the Republicans will tilt in to an insane binge of right wing extremism in the next term if they hold power and especially if there is another terrorist attack to use an excuse. In fact I'm willing to bet they will stage their own attack if Al Qaida doesn't oblige, like the Anthrax letters. Terrorist attacks are pure gold when you are trying to seize power.
Why is this good? Because things might get so bad it might wake up sane Americans that their government is no longer of the people, by the people or for the people, and it doesn't really matter which party has power because they are both screwing the people. If Kerry were to win people might say, whew, glad thats over, and not realize Kerry and the Dems are screwing them pretty much the same as Bush and the Republicans, just with a different style.
Maybe, just maybe, if things gets really bad people will wake up and unite to do whatever it takes to take their government back, either peacefully through a real third party, or if it appears the Republicans are stealing the elections using as much force as is necessary, something which I'm pretty sure all the founding fathers would bless. The founding fathers knew and feared tyrannical government and they thouroughly expected one would eventually seize power in America despite their best efforts in the Constitution to prevent it and we are pretty close.
The U.S. is in desperate need of a renewal of its Democracy and ping ponging between really bad Republicans and really bad Democrats is precluding that rebirth. America needs a Master Reset and a reboot to clear a corrupted system.
"I like how you say "real conservatives" are disgusted by what Bush/Cheney are doing, then later call them right-wing extremists."
Not sure I follow your point. "Real conservatives" tend to be libertarians and not right wing extremists. Extremists in general tend to take something that is at heart good and twist it so you can't recognize and make it dangerous and undesirable. Take for example Islamic extremists and Christian extremists both of whom take something that is at heart positive and turn it negative, twisted and intolerant.
"and that is why the republicans have gotten so far ahead."
The Republicans have their power because talk radio, FoxNews, 9/11 and a general confluence of events have made it fashionable and trendy for Americans to be right wing fanatics again. The Republican's have also become VERY good at milking the politics of fear to build that coalition. Remember the rhetoric, keep the Republicans in office or you and your children will surely die. 9/11 is the best thing that ever happened to the Republican party, they know it and they are milking it to the hilt and will in perpetuity unless Americans wake up to the con.
"The Republicans are traditionally the US's conservative party, in favor of (generally) keeping things as they are."
Thats a ridiculous simplification of reality and is ancient history thanks to the likes of Tom Delay, George W. and a pack of really dangerous neocons (Wolfowitz, Perl, Feith, etc).
The Republicans are no longer even remotely conservative. True conservatives are in fact getting fed up with the new Republican party, they just dont have any place to go. They are also being replaced as the Republican base by evangelicals, rascist Southerners who bailed on the Democrats when LBJ pushed civil rights, rural Americans and Fox News watchers who amazingly just don't get how dangerous, corrupt and dishonest the Bush administration really is (and of course Kerry is so pathetic Bush does almost look good by comparison).
Real conservatives are aghast at the massive spending and deficits the new Republicans are running. They only fiscal policy they like are tax cuts for the rich but they want those to be paid for by slashing spending, not massive borrowing.
The so called Medicare "reform" act was a gigantic transfer of money from tax payers to the health care and drug mega corps. Real conservatives hate that.
Launching wars like the one in Iraq which have nothing to do with defending America, and engaging in nation building there, are also anathema to conservatives.
Its a reason why a number of conservative newspapers are either endorsing Kerry or endorsing Bush only very reluctantly because they see Kerry as worse. The conservative paper in Orlando is endorsing a Democrat for the first time in 40 years. The last time they did that was LBJ because Goldwater was an off the deep end right wing extremist just like Bush/Cheney.
But, the fact is on most key areas the Republicans and Democrats are becoming nearly indistinguishable. They are both owned by corporations and lobbyists which means they are the ones that really make most policy decisions and it doesn't really matter that much which party is in power.
The two parties have a stock set of issues that they use to divide the American people, abortion, gays, tax the rich or tax the poor, and con us in to thinking we have a choice. But, once you get past those inflammatory issues they are really both about taxing ordinary working people in to the ground, spreading pork to their friends and slowly stripping us of all of our civil liberties, which is again all anathema to true conservatives.
Not argueing that doing research on sustainable resources isn't useful. I'm just skeptical NASA will ever get even close to building a space ship that will get out of LEO where any such research could be applied. This is way down the list of things NASA needs to do to get to Mars.
I imagine an arguement could be made that it may in fact consume far more weight and space trying to farm in a spaceship where every pound and cubic foot is precious, and you are in a completely closed environment, than it would to fill it with "snack packs" and dump the shit. I imagine it would also be a lot more beneficial to focus on propulsion technology to reduce the transit time so astronauts aren't spending "three years in space". That much time in space will permanently waste human beings unless they are in artificial gravity. I imagine this is also the usual stupid round trip scenario. They would be way better served focusing on a fast one way trip with permanent colonists and focusing on farming technology for the surface of Mars, where it counts, and where they can build bigger greenhouses and where the minute emissions of plants is less of an issue than it would be on a completely closed system space ship.
Maybe if the submission actually had a pointer to a paper with their results it would be possible to judge if this had real long term value. As it is the article was vacuous and it wasn't worth posting it on slashdot since they guy mostly rambled about how cool it was to be around people glueing tiles on the Space Shuttle which is mostly what the manned space program does these days, rather than explaining the value of the work they did.