If the machines are in heavily Democratic minority precincts like Miami/Dade and Broward I think using negative numbers to count votes is the preferred methodology. I'm sure Florida's governor approved, what's his name again?
"Your crocodile tears for the soldiers dead aren't convincing."
My tears are genuine. The president's and vice president's tears for them are of obviously of the crocodile variety.
"I think you'll find that most of those soldiers died believing in what they did."
I think you'll find most soldiers don't have any say in the matter and you have no clue what they think. Any soldiers who criticizes the war and is caught at it gets nailed.
Most soldiers, like most of the nation, bought the big lie that Iraq had WMD's and Saddam was going to be lighting off nukes in America cities or spraying them with Anthrax from UAV's. Of course the only Anthrax attack against America was apparently launched by right wing Americans. The only country shopping nukes around the world was Pakistan.
As the recent election results indicate most American's are dumb, especially the evangelical, rural variety.
And of course Americans were told repeatedly by their government that Saddam was behind 9/11. I assure you many of the soldiers have realized that they were lied to by now on that score and some of them have actually said it on camera which takes guts. When they went in they though they were avenging 9/11 now they know better.
Iraq is a bloody mess, a mess they get to live in indefinitely because thanks to stop loss they cant get out of the military if they want to. Meanwhile Bush/Cheney get to live in safety, comfort, influence and affluence in Washington.
"A free, prosperous Iraq is beneficial to the US as an ally."
As soon as Iraq is free or prosperous we can get together and I'll tell you how right you and Bush/Cheney were. Hint, don't hold your breath. Doctors without borders pulled out yesterday because Iraq is too dangerous and they specialize in working in the most dangerous places. Hungary is pulling out, Poland(don't forget Poland) is pulling out.
There is a big uptick in infectious diseases because most of the country no longer has safe water and raw sewage is mostly being dumped on the ground and in the rivers. The charity groups trying to rebuild the sewage systems are also pulling out. There were 150 aid groups in Iraq right after the war. Its no down to 50 and most of those are now down to only Iraqi employees.
We gave billions to Bush to rebuild Iraq, they didn't spend any of it, except what they put in Halliburtons pocket to rebuild the oil fields. Charity's tried to fix the most basic like water and sewage but they are failing and being forced to leave.
In face of daily civilian casualties and rising epidemics most Iraqi hospitals can't do anything to help them. They have great doctors and nurses they just don't have any medical supplies because the roads are to dangerous to distribute them.
I hate to break it to but the U.S. can't get Iraq back out of the stone age it was bombed and looted in to, its been a year and a half, and its getting worse not better. The U.S. solution level Fallujah and Sadr City, innocent civilians included.
"Certainly, an Iraq without Saddam is better than an Iraq with Saddam and most soldiers understand that."
As hard as it is to say that is pretty obviously not the case in reality. Saddam was a despot but he maintained order, most people had jobs, the basic infrastructure of the country worked. Political freedom is great and all but it doesn't count for much if people's daily lives are horrible and they are much worse after Saddam.
And of course Iraqi's don't really have political freedom either. Allawi is a former Saddam enforcer, he is a thug, he is a U.S./British puppet and its a near certainty the U.S. will make sure the elections are in fact not fair so he holds power. If the elections were fair and open the Shia majority would elect a fundamentalist Shia regime, throw out the U.S. and align with Iraq. And the U.S. wont let that happen, so much for the freedom angle.
This one was almost as good as the one where he was joking about not being able to find the WMD's. 1100 Americans are dead and thousands more are maimed for life looking for those WMD's. Wonder if they (would of) thought it was funny.
I really dug all the jokes in his press conference today, he's reaching across the aisle to everyone who "shares" his goals, which means he isn't reaching across the aisle, its still his way or the highway. His take on the election, it gave him political capital and he is going to "spend it". It was one long giving the finger to everyone who didn't vote for him. So the uniting the country and healing the wounds thing didn't last 24 hours.
He just cant stop being the pompous ass he's been all his life and now thanks to the shear stupidity of every bible thumper in the country he actually thinks he knows what he's doing.
What can you expect when you make a worthless, dumb, spoiled, alcoholic the most powerful person on the planet?
I'll go with Ann Richards take on him. He was born on third base and he thinks he hit a triple.
On cnn.com as of Thursday evening, still only 99% of precincts reporting:
Second. Kerry, 55,780,781.
Sooo, wrong again..... dumbass. What did you do compare a partial count for Kerry against the final count for Reagan. Pretty shoddy for journalism for a hot shot reporter.
Just imagine how many votes the Democrats would have gotten if they'd run candidates that didn't suck.
"an armed and forceful expulsion of Clinton out of power."
So lets change it to this:
"a forceful expulsion of Clinton out of power."
This is exactly what the Republicans were attempting year after year after year. So they weren't using guns. If they had succeeded and if they had managed to nail Gore at the same time they could have siezed power without firing a shot and it would have been better since it would have been less messy than an armed coup or assissinating him.
Its kind of amazing. I could see them trying to overthrow Clinton if he was a left wing extremist. He wasn't he was a conservative Democrat and centrist. Now, by contrast, we have a right wing extremist running the country and he has zero accountability and no one has hounded him at all (other than he had to chat with the 9/11 commision, not under oath, with Cheney holding his hand).
Here is more than you probably want to know about the sad history of Haiti.
As for his departure from Haiti its a he said, he said situation and you wont be able prove it either way. Not sure it matters. The rebels were U.S. backed too so either he was fleeing a U.S. backed coup or the U.S. kidnapped him and threw him on an airplane to the armpit of Africa to get rid of him without killing him.
Again you can't prove it but the U.S. right has hated Aristide forever, Jesse Helms hated him and called him a psychopath based on nothing more than a false CIA charge he'd had mental treatment in Montreal. Clinton was the one that backed him and that just made the right hate him even more so as soon as Bush came to town he was doomed.
The Helm's proteges that were handling Haiti for George W. during his overthrow have a reputation for toppling governments the right doesn't like, Noriega and Reich in particular. If you don't recognize the names they ran the Contra war against Nicaragua for Reagan and Noriega is now running the American occupation of Iraq. Noriega tends to only be in places where America's right wing is trying to or just has executed a regime change. He is a one cold blooded SOB who only knows the politics of force and violence.
"As opposed to the federal government doing it..."
Don't think I'd argue letting the government do it would be bad but most of the worse of the overruns you are ranting about would be due to coporations too, they'd just working as contractors instead of subsidized independents. Some agencies like NASA are a tiny corp of civil servants who mostly dole out money to contractors.
There is just a little hypocrisy when the New Republican party rants about their sacred free enterprise and free markets, and then at every opportunity they massively intervene in those markets and make winners out of their friends using huge tax payer subsidies which is basicly what the Medicare "Reform" bill was and the energy bill will be if it ever passes.
Conservatives like to rant about the Federal bureaucracy but conveniently choose to overlook that many of the Federal governments problems and costs come from corporations feeding at the contractor trough and using an array of tactics to maximize their profits and loot the treasury.
If you even hint at cutting back on the billions going to Lockheed, Boeing, Halliburton(KBR), etc. in government contracts, conservatives are going to be leading the mob against you.
There really isn't a major party whose mantra is small government and cutting spending any more. Both major parties have an equal love wasting tax money they just use two different methodologies.
This assumes you don't have a breech in the helium system and pump oxygen over them instead. Granted its not supposed to happen but most disasters result from something thats not supposed to happen.
"If a pebble is chipped or cracked, its cycled out"
In an ideal world yes, but there is a period when its going to be sitting in the reactor chipped or cracked and if that happened to coincide with a time when the coolant system is breached it may burn and potentially explode. It is a worse case scenario but most disasters are.
Don't get me wrong they are probably the way to go, since coal plants are really bad in normal operation. I just hate to see engineers who try to con everyone that something is %100 safe.
"It is only recently that the nuclear industry produces more electricity than it uses."
Kind if doubt that is true. They've always produced abundant electricity. The only down side is the cost and difficulty of building them, disposing of the waste, and the safety and weapons proliferation concerns.
"they would never disturb the oil industry "
We are talking about the coal and gas industries being disturbed here not oil, though its the same difference with the Bush administration since they love them just as much. Oil only gets disturbed if you use the abundant electricity for electric cars, to replace fuel oil heating or to make Hydrogen to fuel cars which is a whole new and optional stage.
I think the plan is for Pebble Bed Reactors to not have containment buildings either though I assume you are refering to more traditional designs you are advocating. They are supposed to be convection cooled and modular/mobile and the 5 foot thick concrete containment building runs counter to the design goals unless they've revised it lately. They aren't supposed to need containment buildings though the fact they dont leaves less margin for error.
Here is a source with some known down sides to Pebble beds I posted last time we debated this and it does discuss the manufacturing and shielding in some depth. Since there have been Pebble manufacturing problems in the past so its not like it can't happen.
There has been an accident with a pebble bed reactor at Hamm-Uentrop West in 1986 in which pebbles were damaged and radiation released.
Chernobyl = giant pile of graphite Pebble bed = giant pile of graphite
I know its packaged completely differently but in the fabled worst case scenario a pebble bed could turn in to a burning pile of graphite just like Chernobyl.
"What's a non-nuclear chain reaction?"
One pebble in the bed fails for some reason and it catches fire or explodes, The explosion damages the pebbles next to it and they catch fire and explode and eventually you have a burning pile of graphite again. Again its probably a worse case scenario and may not even be possible but I prefer to ponder those since the people who are advocating something often try to avoid thinking about the worst case scenario.
Three Mile island just got lucky, Chernobyl thanks a bad and risky design and absence of luck didn't. Please lets not pretend like Three Mile Island was a no problem, little glitch. It was an out of control accident for days and nobody knew how it would end.
It was a radioactive wasteland inside the containment building. There were all kinds of unanticipated events that if they had gone slightly differently could have compromised the containment building. If memory serves one of the biggest was a gigantic hydrogen bubble that formed inside the reactor. If something cracked and oxygen reached it there would have been a gigantic explosion.
Actually the pebble bed reactors everyone is advocating lately are massively dependent on charcoal(graphite). Its just packaged differently from Chernobyl. Their is a ceramic shield around it that is in theory suppose to insure that it doesn't catch fire and burn furiously. The only question is what happens if there is a manufacturing defect in the shielding or its damaged by mishandling. If one does catch fire or explode and damage the pebbles around it and so on it is quite possible it could look like Chernobyl.
Joking aside the Bush administration and Republican control of Congress does in fact completely determine the economics of this.
In particular you have zero chance of federalizing energy production, nuclear or otherwise. The Republicans use the term socialism for this and that is a dirty word in their dictionary.
If you were going to pursue this in the current political climate you would have to do it by giving giant interest free loans, tax breaks etc. to giant energy corporations like GE/Westinghouse to do it for you. Basically what this means is our tax dollars are used to capitalize it and absorb most of the risk, the corporations rake in all the profits, assuming you could profitably build a nuclear power plant today. If you are lucky they might eventually pay back the loans unless Bush/Cheney give them a wink and a nudge and just lets them keep it.
Assuming you are willing to go for tax payers giving huge subsidies to giant corporations to do this then you would have to delve in to the Machiavellian maneuvering that would happen between various forces in the Bush administration, big coal, big oil and big nuke corporations. If you were to try it its certainly possible big coal and big oil would win since it would completely threaten their cash flow. Its anybody's guess if big nuke companies could win this fight or if you could convince big coal and oil companies to jump in nukes by giving them giant buckets of free tax dollars. You just have to follow TV ads to see the coal lobby is engaged in a massive campaign to convince everyone coal can be made clean and power America forever. It can be made cleaner with work and money but last I heard there was no way to get read of the massive carbon dioxide output and that translates straight in to Greenhouse effect.
I haven't hear much about it lately but the Bush administration did have a big initiative to develop Hydrogen powered cars in a state of the union a year or two ago. It would be interesting if it actually went anywhere or it was a sham and didn't have a snowballs chance in hell of threatening big oils monopoly on transportation fuel.
A hurdle is old reactor designs have become prohibitively expensive thanks to the environmental and safety hurdles. Most places don't want them in their back yard since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
You can argue that there are safer, newer more economical designs now, at least the people advocating them say they are, but that remains to be proven.
Someone will start screaming pebble bed reactors at this point. Well maybe pebble bed reactors are safer but its not a certainty. Their key risk is they have large quantities of graphite in them. If you recall Chernobyl was the disaster it was partially thanks to graphite because in the event of an accident and enough heat graphite burns furiously. The pebbles have ceramic shielding to prevent the graphite from burning but there is a suspicion that manufacturing defects or mishandling might compromise the shielding and open up the chance a pebble would burn and explode. If it did it could damage the pebbles around it and start a non nuclear chain reaction.
Of course, you would also have to actually bring on line a viable place to dump all the waste. Maybe Yucca mountain is it, maybe it isn't. Last time we debated this on/. I was skeptical though people made a pretty good case that it can be put into glass or ceramic bricks that would be long term inert. The only thing you need to be careful about is that you don't let it accidentally achieve a critical mass or overheat. Then the only down side is trucking large quantities of high level waste from the plants to Yucca mountain.
And of course in the age or perpetual terrorism, nuclear power plants and high level waste are tempting targets.
"In this election, close to half of all voting Americans voted against Bush."
Lets see most of the people who didn't vote for Bush DID vote to nominate Kerry as the Democratic candidate. Sorry but you completely fucked up right there so we are up to about 90% of Americans are completely clueless when it comes to politics and electing people who don't suck. Maybe it would help if American's had a slight clue about basic history, geography, politics, foreign affairs instead of voting "Gay Marriage Bad, Bombs Good, Ugh".
I hate to break it to you but the fact 48% of Americans voted against Bush counts for exactly nothing at this point, in fact now the Republicans think they have a mandate and are full steam ahead. Bush is still in charge, his party still completely controls the government even more so now, they are hell bent on an inflicting an extremist agenda at home and world domination abroad and most of the rest of the world doesn't have anything to say about it unless they start forming a new alliance to counter it.
So what is the 48% who voted against Bush going to do now besides sit on your hands for another 4 years and hope you dont elect screw up again next time? If Bush wasn't an extremist nutcase it would be different but when you are paying taxes to fund him, putting sons and daughters in the military to fight his wars, looking the other way when he locks people up without due process, doing nothing as he strips your civil liberties, and cheer him on when he pushes the rest of the world around, that 48% is just as much to blame as the people that voted for Bush.
"You want the world to get along better? Start with your own attitude first."
Hate to break it to you but me ditching my bad attitude towards America and Americans isn't going to fix America even a teensy bit. You are just doing what Americans and their leaders always do these days.... its not our fault.....waaaaaa......we aren't responsible....waaaaaaa......its everybody else's fault..... waaaaaaaa.
It would obviously be better to just have a paper trail and randomly select machines for manual recounts of the paper trail against the electronic results the machine reported instead of all this hit or miss testing. As long as you throuroughly and randomly sample all machines you would probably always catch rigging.
But failing that and for this time around with no paper trail, especially in Florida, I think you would have better luck catching fraud on electronic voting machines after the fact if you figure out a way to checksum the software on all the machines independent of the vendor supplied hardware and software and make sure they all had the same binaries and OS. Then dump a binary off one and turn it over to a talented reverse engineering hacker. Let him disassemble the whole thing and then walk through every instruction and figure out what the machine was actually doing. The obviously most interesting things would be date time checks looking for election day, code flipping a percentage of votes from one to the other and so on, code massaging or altering the tallied votes before or in the process of reporting them, etc.
Working from source code is easier but I doubt you will have very high confidence that the source you get is going to actually match whats in the machines unless you can repeat the build exactly, checksum it and match the checksum to whats actually in the machine.
Of course at this point you can't really have much confidence that someone hasn't already replaced the binaries that were in the machines on election day unless they have been rigorously secured.
If you don't find anything on the vorting machines then you need to start looking at how the counts are read off the machines and transfered to the home office which appears to be what BlackBox is doing. Then you need to establish how secure the server in the home office are and what the software on it is doing. I would think this isn't the most vulnerable part of the system. I'm pretty sure the precincts must manually check their results with what is actually recorded in the central office to certify the election.
The really vulnerable part of the system is the voting machine itself if it lacks a paper trail. If the voting machines are sending the results directly to the home office via network or modem that would be bad and incredibly vulnerable to compromise so I hope instead there is a team of precinct workers who read the results off the machines with multiple independent observers watching and then they can be manually verified from then on.
"I see, so it's the Israeli lobby in the U.S. that pressures the government to support Israel, not the Jewish lobby. Of course. You're not blaming the jews for anything."
Correct. You are learning. There are lots of people in the Friends of Isreal lobby and the Neocons who aren't Jewish and I disagree with them just as much. Once again you are just saying I can't criticize Israel or the Necons because there are Jews among them so if I criticize Israel or the Neocons I am antisemitic. I don't give a rats ass about the religion involved here. I only care about the politics.
Why is it OK to criticize Islamic or Christian dominated groups and your not anti Islamic or anit Christian. Why? Its called a double standard thats why.
Once again you have nailed it on the head why the neocons and the Friends of Israel lobby and Israel can get away with murder. As soon as anyone criticizes any of them its because you are antisemitic. There isn't even any consideration that I'm criticizing them because I think their policies are completely wrong.
Its a little hard to piece together but I think a bunch of counties in Ohio were going to use paperless electronic voting, someone challenged it and they had to try to retrofit paper trails. One after another counties decided they didn't have time to retrofit and switched back to the old voting system, often punch cards and chads.
I think a couple counties did press ahead with electronic voting with hastily retrofitted paper trails. Its probably a stretch to blame Ohio on on evoting though you would have to look close at the few counties that actually did use it and especially if they have paper trails recount them.
Florida on the other hand made massive use of paperless evoting in some really big, heavily democratic counties like Broward and Miami-Dade. You will be hard pressed to find a more obviously corrupt election team than Jeb Bush's so if you want to try to nail evoting fraud I'd look there.
Good luck. I wager the only good way to catch it is to get some first class hackers, reverse engineers dissassmbling all the binaries involved assuming you can lay your hands on the binaries that were actually. Unfortunately Florida wasn't close enough they are likely to get close scrutiny which suggest if you are going to rig an election rig it big enough so its not close but not completely out of whack with the polls.
"The problem was that pre-election polling in states like Ohio made some people, like Zogby, pretty damned sure Ohio was a gimme for Kerry. But they were wrong. And the exit polling showed that."
Uh, no you are wrong. The early EXIT polling showed Kerry with a wide lead. They were leaking to the Internet, the Kerry camp was dancing in the aisles, the Bush camp was in the dumps and the networks had major problems calling early states like Virginia and North Carolina, because the exit polls showed them to close to call. When the actual poll numbers started rolling in they were so far in disagreement with the exit polls the network predictions were tied in a not.
In the middle of the evening the Fox team, Kristol in particular, was about to break out crying because, based on the exit polls, it was clear Bush was losing. Then they devolved in to hours worth of bashing the exit polls as completely wrong every five minutes, and Republican big wigs like Melman and Racicot were chiming in. Now after its over everyone says the exit polls exactly matched the results. Go figure.
So we have these options:
A. All the Bush voters voted late in the day so the early exit polls favored Kerry but in the end they swung to Bush
B. The polling models were bad early on and they were "fixed" later in the day. Question is were they right when they were showing Kerry winning or after they were fixed and showed Bush winning.
C. The election was rigged, the early exit polls were accurate while the returns were falsified. In order to cover up the discrepancy the networks fudged the exit polls late in the day so they matched the real(falsified) numbers. Of course if they did that there was no reason to do the exit poll in the first place.
The U.S. does it all the time though they usually topple the guys government first or in the process. Maybe the instant they arrest him they just say he is obviously no longer a head of state.
Manuel Noriega is still rotting in a Federal prison. The story of his unprecedented trial of a head of state on drug trafficking charges.
Saddam is of course sitting in an Iraqi jail under U.S. authority.
The U.S. pretty much grabbed the president of Haiti and put him on a plane to Africa, against his will, while he was still Haiti's President while U.S. backed rebels were closing in on him. Its most books it might be called kidnapping a sovereign head of state.
I don't remember the exact sequencing but I think war crimes charges were laid against Milsoevic while he was still Serbia's head of state.
It is kind of sweet being America since you can have a double standard on everything.
Forgot one key point, I wasn't blaming the Jews. I was blaming the "state" of Israel and the Friends of Israel lobby. Big, big difference. Of course thats why U.S. politicians have to lick Israel's boots. If anyone criticizes the "state" of Israel people like you shoot back that they are being antisemitic. You see it is impossible to criticize Israel without being made out to be a Nazi or a Muslim extremist.
Thats why they Israel gets all those blank checks they so richly don't deserve. Its a sweet con.
You only need Federal constitutional amendments and the house to make these universal. As long as the Supreme court is stacked all the conservative states have to do is pass state constitutional amendments and for the Supreme court to uphold them. 11 states already did it yesterday to ban gay marriage, one of them went so far as to outlaw all civil rights for gay partners.
I'm pretty sure the right wing states will be cool with leaving New York and California liberal as long as they can turn back the clock in their states to the 1950's.
America does ANYTHING Israel wants, including massive infusions of money, weapons and constant political support. You cant be elected to office in the U.S. unless you lick Israel's boots. All of the last round of Presidential and VP candidates fell all over themselves saying they would do ANYTHING for Isreal. Howard Dean had the nerve to say America should treat Israel and Palastine with even handedness and he was knocked from front runner to out of the race immediately thereafter.
Unfortunately the fact the U.S. gives Israel blank checks is precisely why most of the 1 billion strong Muslim world hates America's guts.
"The checks and balances in the system were designed expressly to avoid the evils of majority rule"
The only two checks and balances left now are a tenuous balance in the Supreme Court which IS going to collapse in the next four years when George W. gets to form a right wing court with 1 or 2 new appointments. When that happens there is a good chance that in conservative states abortion gets outlawed, sodomy(homosexuality) will be illegal again and prayer/religion returns to public schools.
The Republicans only need to acquire a handful more seats in the Senate in 2006 and considering the extent to which they are steamrolling the Democrats it is well within their reach, though I haven't looked to see the dynamics of which seats are up in 2006.
If that happens the last of your checks and balances IS GONE.
The founding fathers did their best to try to preclude a tyrannical government gaining power but they knew quite well they might eventually fail and it appear now they probably will. The one thing they couldn't prevent was the American people welcoming it with open arms at the ballot box.
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If the machines are in heavily Democratic minority precincts like Miami/Dade and Broward I think using negative numbers to count votes is the preferred methodology. I'm sure Florida's governor approved, what's his name again?
"Your crocodile tears for the soldiers dead aren't convincing."
My tears are genuine. The president's and vice president's tears for them are of obviously of the crocodile variety.
"I think you'll find that most of those soldiers died believing in what they did."
I think you'll find most soldiers don't have any say in the matter and you have no clue what they think. Any soldiers who criticizes the war and is caught at it gets nailed.
Most soldiers, like most of the nation, bought the big lie that Iraq had WMD's and Saddam was going to be lighting off nukes in America cities or spraying them with Anthrax from UAV's. Of course the only Anthrax attack against America was apparently launched by right wing Americans. The only country shopping nukes around the world was Pakistan.
As the recent election results indicate most American's are dumb, especially the evangelical, rural variety.
And of course Americans were told repeatedly by their government that Saddam was behind 9/11. I assure you many of the soldiers have realized that they were lied to by now on that score and some of them have actually said it on camera which takes guts. When they went in they though they were avenging 9/11 now they know better.
Iraq is a bloody mess, a mess they get to live in indefinitely because thanks to stop loss they cant get out of the military if they want to. Meanwhile Bush/Cheney get to live in safety, comfort, influence and affluence in Washington.
"A free, prosperous Iraq is beneficial to the US as an ally."
As soon as Iraq is free or prosperous we can get together and I'll tell you how right you and Bush/Cheney were. Hint, don't hold your breath. Doctors without borders pulled out yesterday because Iraq is too dangerous and they specialize in working in the most dangerous places. Hungary is pulling out, Poland(don't forget Poland) is pulling out.
There is a big uptick in infectious diseases because most of the country no longer has safe water and raw sewage is mostly being dumped on the ground and in the rivers. The charity groups trying to rebuild the sewage systems are also pulling out. There were 150 aid groups in Iraq right after the war. Its no down to 50 and most of those are now down to only Iraqi employees.
We gave billions to Bush to rebuild Iraq, they didn't spend any of it, except what they put in Halliburtons pocket to rebuild the oil fields. Charity's tried to fix the most basic like water and sewage but they are failing and being forced to leave.
In face of daily civilian casualties and rising epidemics most Iraqi hospitals can't do anything to help them. They have great doctors and nurses they just don't have any medical supplies because the roads are to dangerous to distribute them.
I hate to break it to but the U.S. can't get Iraq back out of the stone age it was bombed and looted in to, its been a year and a half, and its getting worse not better. The U.S. solution level Fallujah and Sadr City, innocent civilians included.
"Certainly, an Iraq without Saddam is better than an Iraq with Saddam and most soldiers understand that."
As hard as it is to say that is pretty obviously not the case in reality. Saddam was a despot but he maintained order, most people had jobs, the basic infrastructure of the country worked. Political freedom is great and all but it doesn't count for much if people's daily lives are horrible and they are much worse after Saddam.
And of course Iraqi's don't really have political freedom either. Allawi is a former Saddam enforcer, he is a thug, he is a U.S./British puppet and its a near certainty the U.S. will make sure the elections are in fact not fair so he holds power. If the elections were fair and open the Shia majority would elect a fundamentalist Shia regime, throw out the U.S. and align with Iraq. And the U.S. wont let that happen, so much for the freedom angle.
Now why did we invade Iraq again?
"They aren't asking for YOU
Much truth is said in gest.
This one was almost as good as the one where he was joking about not being able to find the WMD's. 1100 Americans are dead and thousands more are maimed for life looking for those WMD's. Wonder if they (would of) thought it was funny.
I really dug all the jokes in his press conference today, he's reaching across the aisle to everyone who "shares" his goals, which means he isn't reaching across the aisle, its still his way or the highway. His take on the election, it gave him political capital and he is going to "spend it". It was one long giving the finger to everyone who didn't vote for him. So the uniting the country and healing the wounds thing didn't last 24 hours.
He just cant stop being the pompous ass he's been all his life and now thanks to the shear stupidity of every bible thumper in the country he actually thinks he knows what he's doing.
What can you expect when you make a worthless, dumb, spoiled, alcoholic the most powerful person on the planet?
I'll go with Ann Richards take on him. He was born on third base and he thinks he hit a triple.
On cnn.com as of Thursday evening, still only 99% of precincts reporting:
Second. Kerry, 55,780,781.
Sooo, wrong again..... dumbass. What did you do compare a partial count for Kerry against the final count for Reagan. Pretty shoddy for journalism for a hot shot reporter.
Just imagine how many votes the Democrats would have gotten if they'd run candidates that didn't suck.
In the way you wording it you are correct:
"an armed and forceful expulsion of Clinton out of power."
So lets change it to this:
"a forceful expulsion of Clinton out of power."
This is exactly what the Republicans were attempting year after year after year. So they weren't using guns. If they had succeeded and if they had managed to nail Gore at the same time they could have siezed power without firing a shot and it would have been better since it would have been less messy than an armed coup or assissinating him.
Its kind of amazing. I could see them trying to overthrow Clinton if he was a left wing extremist. He wasn't he was a conservative Democrat and centrist. Now, by contrast, we have a right wing extremist running the country and he has zero accountability and no one has hounded him at all (other than he had to chat with the 9/11 commision, not under oath, with Cheney holding his hand).
Here is more than you probably want to know about the sad history of Haiti.
As for his departure from Haiti its a he said, he said situation and you wont be able prove it either way. Not sure it matters. The rebels were U.S. backed too so either he was fleeing a U.S. backed coup or the U.S. kidnapped him and threw him on an airplane to the armpit of Africa to get rid of him without killing him.
Again you can't prove it but the U.S. right has hated Aristide forever, Jesse Helms hated him and called him a psychopath based on nothing more than a false CIA charge he'd had mental treatment in Montreal. Clinton was the one that backed him and that just made the right hate him even more so as soon as Bush came to town he was doomed.
The Helm's proteges that were handling Haiti for George W. during his overthrow have a reputation for toppling governments the right doesn't like, Noriega and Reich in particular. If you don't recognize the names they ran the Contra war against Nicaragua for Reagan and Noriega is now running the American occupation of Iraq. Noriega tends to only be in places where America's right wing is trying to or just has executed a regime change. He is a one cold blooded SOB who only knows the politics of force and violence.
"As opposed to the federal government doing it..."
Don't think I'd argue letting the government do it would be bad but most of the worse of the overruns you are ranting about would be due to coporations too, they'd just working as contractors instead of subsidized independents. Some agencies like NASA are a tiny corp of civil servants who mostly dole out money to contractors.
There is just a little hypocrisy when the New Republican party rants about their sacred free enterprise and free markets, and then at every opportunity they massively intervene in those markets and make winners out of their friends using huge tax payer subsidies which is basicly what the Medicare "Reform" bill was and the energy bill will be if it ever passes.
Conservatives like to rant about the Federal bureaucracy but conveniently choose to overlook that many of the Federal governments problems and costs come from corporations feeding at the contractor trough and using an array of tactics to maximize their profits and loot the treasury.
If you even hint at cutting back on the billions going to Lockheed, Boeing, Halliburton(KBR), etc. in government contracts, conservatives are going to be leading the mob against you.
There really isn't a major party whose mantra is small government and cutting spending any more. Both major parties have an equal love wasting tax money they just use two different methodologies.
This assumes you don't have a breech in the helium system and pump oxygen over them instead. Granted its not supposed to happen but most disasters result from something thats not supposed to happen.
"If a pebble is chipped or cracked, its cycled out"
In an ideal world yes, but there is a period when its going to be sitting in the reactor chipped or cracked and if that happened to coincide with a time when the coolant system is breached it may burn and potentially explode. It is a worse case scenario but most disasters are.
Don't get me wrong they are probably the way to go, since coal plants are really bad in normal operation. I just hate to see engineers who try to con everyone that something is %100 safe.
"It is only recently that the nuclear industry produces more electricity than it uses."
Kind if doubt that is true. They've always produced abundant electricity. The only down side is the cost and difficulty of building them, disposing of the waste, and the safety and weapons proliferation concerns.
"they would never disturb the oil industry "
We are talking about the coal and gas industries being disturbed here not oil, though its the same difference with the Bush administration since they love them just as much. Oil only gets disturbed if you use the abundant electricity for electric cars, to replace fuel oil heating or to make Hydrogen to fuel cars which is a whole new and optional stage.
I think the plan is for Pebble Bed Reactors to not have containment buildings either though I assume you are refering to more traditional designs you are advocating. They are supposed to be convection cooled and modular/mobile and the 5 foot thick concrete containment building runs counter to the design goals unless they've revised it lately. They aren't supposed to need containment buildings though the fact they dont leaves less margin for error.
Here is a source with some known down sides to Pebble beds I posted last time we debated this and it does discuss the manufacturing and shielding in some depth. Since there have been Pebble manufacturing problems in the past so its not like it can't happen.
There has been an accident with a pebble bed reactor at Hamm-Uentrop West in 1986 in which pebbles were damaged and radiation released.
"I don't get the reference to Chernobyl, though."
Chernobyl = giant pile of graphite
Pebble bed = giant pile of graphite
I know its packaged completely differently but in the fabled worst case scenario a pebble bed could turn in to a burning pile of graphite just like Chernobyl.
"What's a non-nuclear chain reaction?"
One pebble in the bed fails for some reason and it catches fire or explodes, The explosion damages the pebbles next to it and they catch fire and explode and eventually you have a burning pile of graphite again. Again its probably a worse case scenario and may not even be possible but I prefer to ponder those since the people who are advocating something often try to avoid thinking about the worst case scenario.
Three Mile island just got lucky, Chernobyl thanks a bad and risky design and absence of luck didn't. Please lets not pretend like Three Mile Island was a no problem, little glitch. It was an out of control accident for days and nobody knew how it would end.
It was a radioactive wasteland inside the containment building. There were all kinds of unanticipated events that if they had gone slightly differently could have compromised the containment building. If memory serves one of the biggest was a gigantic hydrogen bubble that formed inside the reactor. If something cracked and oxygen reached it there would have been a gigantic explosion.
Actually the pebble bed reactors everyone is advocating lately are massively dependent on charcoal(graphite). Its just packaged differently from Chernobyl. Their is a ceramic shield around it that is in theory suppose to insure that it doesn't catch fire and burn furiously. The only question is what happens if there is a manufacturing defect in the shielding or its damaged by mishandling. If one does catch fire or explode and damage the pebbles around it and so on it is quite possible it could look like Chernobyl.
Joking aside the Bush administration and Republican control of Congress does in fact completely determine the economics of this.
/. I was skeptical though people made a pretty good case that it can be put into glass or ceramic bricks that would be long term inert. The only thing you need to be careful about is that you don't let it accidentally achieve a critical mass or overheat. Then the only down side is trucking large quantities of high level waste from the plants to Yucca mountain.
In particular you have zero chance of federalizing energy production, nuclear or otherwise. The Republicans use the term socialism for this and that is a dirty word in their dictionary.
If you were going to pursue this in the current political climate you would have to do it by giving giant interest free loans, tax breaks etc. to giant energy corporations like GE/Westinghouse to do it for you. Basically what this means is our tax dollars are used to capitalize it and absorb most of the risk, the corporations rake in all the profits, assuming you could profitably build a nuclear power plant today. If you are lucky they might eventually pay back the loans unless Bush/Cheney give them a wink and a nudge and just lets them keep it.
Assuming you are willing to go for tax payers giving huge subsidies to giant corporations to do this then you would have to delve in to the Machiavellian maneuvering that would happen between various forces in the Bush administration, big coal, big oil and big nuke corporations. If you were to try it its certainly possible big coal and big oil would win since it would completely threaten their cash flow. Its anybody's guess if big nuke companies could win this fight or if you could convince big coal and oil companies to jump in nukes by giving them giant buckets of free tax dollars. You just have to follow TV ads to see the coal lobby is engaged in a massive campaign to convince everyone coal can be made clean and power America forever. It can be made cleaner with work and money but last I heard there was no way to get read of the massive carbon dioxide output and that translates straight in to Greenhouse effect.
I haven't hear much about it lately but the Bush administration did have a big initiative to develop Hydrogen powered cars in a state of the union a year or two ago. It would be interesting if it actually went anywhere or it was a sham and didn't have a snowballs chance in hell of threatening big oils monopoly on transportation fuel.
A hurdle is old reactor designs have become prohibitively expensive thanks to the environmental and safety hurdles. Most places don't want them in their back yard since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
You can argue that there are safer, newer more economical designs now, at least the people advocating them say they are, but that remains to be proven.
Someone will start screaming pebble bed reactors at this point. Well maybe pebble bed reactors are safer but its not a certainty. Their key risk is they have large quantities of graphite in them. If you recall Chernobyl was the disaster it was partially thanks to graphite because in the event of an accident and enough heat graphite burns furiously. The pebbles have ceramic shielding to prevent the graphite from burning but there is a suspicion that manufacturing defects or mishandling might compromise the shielding and open up the chance a pebble would burn and explode. If it did it could damage the pebbles around it and start a non nuclear chain reaction.
Of course, you would also have to actually bring on line a viable place to dump all the waste. Maybe Yucca mountain is it, maybe it isn't. Last time we debated this on
And of course in the age or perpetual terrorism, nuclear power plants and high level waste are tempting targets.
"In this election, close to half of all voting Americans voted against Bush."
.... its not our fault .....waaaaaa ......we aren't responsible ....waaaaaaa ......its everybody else's fault ..... waaaaaaaa.
Lets see most of the people who didn't vote for Bush DID vote to nominate Kerry as the Democratic candidate. Sorry but you completely fucked up right there so we are up to about 90% of Americans are completely clueless when it comes to politics and electing people who don't suck. Maybe it would help if American's had a slight clue about basic history, geography, politics, foreign affairs instead of voting "Gay Marriage Bad, Bombs Good, Ugh".
I hate to break it to you but the fact 48% of Americans voted against Bush counts for exactly nothing at this point, in fact now the Republicans think they have a mandate and are full steam ahead. Bush is still in charge, his party still completely controls the government even more so now, they are hell bent on an inflicting an extremist agenda at home and world domination abroad and most of the rest of the world doesn't have anything to say about it unless they start forming a new alliance to counter it.
So what is the 48% who voted against Bush going to do now besides sit on your hands for another 4 years and hope you dont elect screw up again next time? If Bush wasn't an extremist nutcase it would be different but when you are paying taxes to fund him, putting sons and daughters in the military to fight his wars, looking the other way when he locks people up without due process, doing nothing as he strips your civil liberties, and cheer him on when he pushes the rest of the world around, that 48% is just as much to blame as the people that voted for Bush.
"You want the world to get along better? Start with your own attitude first."
Hate to break it to you but me ditching my bad attitude towards America and Americans isn't going to fix America even a teensy bit. You are just doing what Americans and their leaders always do these days
It would obviously be better to just have a paper trail and randomly select machines for manual recounts of the paper trail against the electronic results the machine reported instead of all this hit or miss testing. As long as you throuroughly and randomly sample all machines you would probably always catch rigging.
But failing that and for this time around with no paper trail, especially in Florida, I think you would have better luck catching fraud on electronic voting machines after the fact if you figure out a way to checksum the software on all the machines independent of the vendor supplied hardware and software and make sure they all had the same binaries and OS. Then dump a binary off one and turn it over to a talented reverse engineering hacker. Let him disassemble the whole thing and then walk through every instruction and figure out what the machine was actually doing. The obviously most interesting things would be date time checks looking for election day, code flipping a percentage of votes from one to the other and so on, code massaging or altering the tallied votes before or in the process of reporting them, etc.
Working from source code is easier but I doubt you will have very high confidence that the source you get is going to actually match whats in the machines unless you can repeat the build exactly, checksum it and match the checksum to whats actually in the machine.
Of course at this point you can't really have much confidence that someone hasn't already replaced the binaries that were in the machines on election day unless they have been rigorously secured.
If you don't find anything on the vorting machines then you need to start looking at how the counts are read off the machines and transfered to the home office which appears to be what BlackBox is doing. Then you need to establish how secure the server in the home office are and what the software on it is doing. I would think this isn't the most vulnerable part of the system. I'm pretty sure the precincts must manually check their results with what is actually recorded in the central office to certify the election.
The really vulnerable part of the system is the voting machine itself if it lacks a paper trail. If the voting machines are sending the results directly to the home office via network or modem that would be bad and incredibly vulnerable to compromise so I hope instead there is a team of precinct workers who read the results off the machines with multiple independent observers watching and then they can be manually verified from then on.
"I see, so it's the Israeli lobby in the U.S. that pressures the government to support Israel, not the Jewish lobby. Of course. You're not blaming the jews for anything."
Correct. You are learning. There are lots of people in the Friends of Isreal lobby and the Neocons who aren't Jewish and I disagree with them just as much. Once again you are just saying I can't criticize Israel or the Necons because there are Jews among them so if I criticize Israel or the Neocons I am antisemitic. I don't give a rats ass about the religion involved here. I only care about the politics.
Why is it OK to criticize Islamic or Christian dominated groups and your not anti Islamic or anit Christian. Why? Its called a double standard thats why.
Once again you have nailed it on the head why the neocons and the Friends of Israel lobby and Israel can get away with murder. As soon as anyone criticizes any of them its because you are antisemitic. There isn't even any consideration that I'm criticizing them because I think their policies are completely wrong.
Again its a sweet con. Gratz.
Its a little hard to piece together but I think a bunch of counties in Ohio were going to use paperless electronic voting, someone challenged it and they had to try to retrofit paper trails. One after another counties decided they didn't have time to retrofit and switched back to the old voting system, often punch cards and chads.
I think a couple counties did press ahead with electronic voting with hastily retrofitted paper trails. Its probably a stretch to blame Ohio on on evoting though you would have to look close at the few counties that actually did use it and especially if they have paper trails recount them.
Florida on the other hand made massive use of paperless evoting in some really big, heavily democratic counties like Broward and Miami-Dade. You will be hard pressed to find a more obviously corrupt election team than Jeb Bush's so if you want to try to nail evoting fraud I'd look there.
Good luck. I wager the only good way to catch it is to get some first class hackers, reverse engineers dissassmbling all the binaries involved assuming you can lay your hands on the binaries that were actually. Unfortunately Florida wasn't close enough they are likely to get close scrutiny which suggest if you are going to rig an election rig it big enough so its not close but not completely out of whack with the polls.
"The problem was that pre-election polling in states like Ohio made some people, like Zogby, pretty damned sure Ohio was a gimme for Kerry. But they were wrong. And the exit polling showed that."
Uh, no you are wrong. The early EXIT polling showed Kerry with a wide lead. They were leaking to the Internet, the Kerry camp was dancing in the aisles, the Bush camp was in the dumps and the networks had major problems calling early states like Virginia and North Carolina, because the exit polls showed them to close to call. When the actual poll numbers started rolling in they were so far in disagreement with the exit polls the network predictions were tied in a not.
In the middle of the evening the Fox team, Kristol in particular, was about to break out crying because, based on the exit polls, it was clear Bush was losing. Then they devolved in to hours worth of bashing the exit polls as completely wrong every five minutes, and Republican big wigs like Melman and Racicot were chiming in. Now after its over everyone says the exit polls exactly matched the results. Go figure.
So we have these options:
A. All the Bush voters voted late in the day so the early exit polls favored Kerry but in the end they swung to Bush
B. The polling models were bad early on and they were "fixed" later in the day. Question is were they right when they were showing Kerry winning or after they were fixed and showed Bush winning.
C. The election was rigged, the early exit polls were accurate while the returns were falsified. In order to cover up the discrepancy the networks fudged the exit polls late in the day so they matched the real(falsified) numbers. Of course if they did that there was no reason to do the exit poll in the first place.
The U.S. does it all the time though they usually topple the guys government first or in the process. Maybe the instant they arrest him they just say he is obviously no longer a head of state.
Manuel Noriega is still rotting in a Federal prison. The story of his unprecedented trial of a head of state on drug trafficking charges.
Saddam is of course sitting in an Iraqi jail under U.S. authority.
The U.S. pretty much grabbed the president of Haiti and put him on a plane to Africa, against his will, while he was still Haiti's President while U.S. backed rebels were closing in on him. Its most books it might be called kidnapping a sovereign head of state.
I don't remember the exact sequencing but I think war crimes charges were laid against Milsoevic while he was still Serbia's head of state.
It is kind of sweet being America since you can have a double standard on everything.
Forgot one key point, I wasn't blaming the Jews. I was blaming the "state" of Israel and the Friends of Israel lobby. Big, big difference. Of course thats why U.S. politicians have to lick Israel's boots. If anyone criticizes the "state" of Israel people like you shoot back that they are being antisemitic. You see it is impossible to criticize Israel without being made out to be a Nazi or a Muslim extremist.
Thats why they Israel gets all those blank checks they so richly don't deserve. Its a sweet con.
You only need Federal constitutional amendments and the house to make these universal. As long as the Supreme court is stacked all the conservative states have to do is pass state constitutional amendments and for the Supreme court to uphold them. 11 states already did it yesterday to ban gay marriage, one of them went so far as to outlaw all civil rights for gay partners.
I'm pretty sure the right wing states will be cool with leaving New York and California liberal as long as they can turn back the clock in their states to the 1950's.
Heh. You call it blame passing, I call it stating the obvious.
Duh.
America does ANYTHING Israel wants, including massive infusions of money, weapons and constant political support. You cant be elected to office in the U.S. unless you lick Israel's boots. All of the last round of Presidential and VP candidates fell all over themselves saying they would do ANYTHING for Isreal. Howard Dean had the nerve to say America should treat Israel and Palastine with even handedness and he was knocked from front runner to out of the race immediately thereafter.
Unfortunately the fact the U.S. gives Israel blank checks is precisely why most of the 1 billion strong Muslim world hates America's guts.
"The checks and balances in the system were designed expressly to avoid the evils of majority rule"
The only two checks and balances left now are a tenuous balance in the Supreme Court which IS going to collapse in the next four years when George W. gets to form a right wing court with 1 or 2 new appointments. When that happens there is a good chance that in conservative states abortion gets outlawed, sodomy(homosexuality) will be illegal again and prayer/religion returns to public schools.
The Republicans only need to acquire a handful more seats in the Senate in 2006 and considering the extent to which they are steamrolling the Democrats it is well within their reach, though I haven't looked to see the dynamics of which seats are up in 2006.
If that happens the last of your checks and balances IS GONE.
The founding fathers did their best to try to preclude a tyrannical government gaining power but they knew quite well they might eventually fail and it appear now they probably will. The one thing they couldn't prevent was the American people welcoming it with open arms at the ballot box.