He willfully divulged classified American Intelligence, not for a higher purpose such as stopping an immoral war, but to just hurt America, and his release of information materially aided two foreign governments, one the USSR. He also committed conspiracy. That is irrelevant since the statute of limitations has run out, but there is no statute of limitations for treason, and this his was a public confession.
And he always seems to be whinning about Fonda. this is what is known as Moral relativism, something the right has always claimed only happens on the left, but it seems that it just travelled over to the other side of the political bipolarity with the people who always played that immoral game, trotskyites and new lefties.
Horowitz is a typical Contemporary Conservative, who thinks responsibility is for everybody but themselves.
His rationalisation for political polarity switch is classic. Well past the time that anybody in their right mind still considered to Black Panthers to be political, after it had become public knowledge that they had become an ongoing criminal enterprise, Horowitz got a friend of his a job with them. The friend was murdered, but David, being what he's always been, a neoposeur, refused to accept personal responsibility in this death, and instead blames the "left", how lame, how positively dialectic of the Maoist.
But if you want to talk about strange attractions:
General Taguba's Non-Classified Part of his Abu Ghraib abuse report given to the Senate listed the following abuses, amongst many others:
the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:
Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
In addition, several detainees also described the following acts of abuse, which under the circumstances, I find credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses:
Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
Threatening male detainees with rape;
Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
Yet after this testimony had been given, Senator Inhofe (R-OK) stated on the Senate Floor, for the record:
"I -- well, first of all, I regret I wasn't here on Friday. I was unable to be here. But maybe it's better that I wasn't, because as I watched the -- this outrage, this outrage everyone seems to have about the treatment of these prisoners, I was, I have to say -- and I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment."
So with the new marriage law vote set for June 6, contemplate this bit of republicanism; it is a horrible sin for two guys to fall in love and play each others butt bongos, but the Republican Senators are so down with the use of sodomy with a foreign object as a interrogatory methodology that they allow Inhofe's ugly remarks to be served from their collective website.
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"CIA worked in tandem with Pak to create Taliban", India Times, March 7, 2001, (Just World Campaign archive)
From LA Times Paid Archives:
Behind a dusty gray wall in the military district here works an organization with secret knowledge that could spell success or doom for U.S. military operations against Osama bin Laden and his ally, the Taliban.
Mysterious and powerful, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency has been called a state within a state. It has been the largely hidden hand in Afghan politics for more than two decades, working with the CIA to defeat occupying Soviet forces and then, on its own, funneling arms and advice to help the Taliban movement become Afghanistan's master in 1996.
John Daniszewski and Tyler Marshall, "Victory Could Hinge On Islamabad's Spy Agency", Los Angeles Times, October 30 2001 (Paid Archives)
Christian Science Momitor - Original URL still active
If Afghanistan is the birthplace of this jihad, Peshawar is its staging ground. This dusty city of intrigue just east of the Khyber Pass is where many of today's Muslims came to pick up both the Koran and the Kalashnikov. Bin Laden and Zawahiri met here. Hasan Ali and Zam Amputan both studied at schools here funded by Saudi money.
When the Soviets attacked Afghanistan in December 1979, the initial prognosis in the West was that the native population lacked the unity to resist. It was felt that the proud ethnic groups in the country would never unify enough to drive out the communists. The answer, agreed to in Washington, the Middle East, and Pakistan was - Islam. The creation of the mujahideen warriors was the result - fighters that would come from around the Muslim world and take up arms in the name of a holy war.
The project succeeded quite well. A "pipeline" of weapons, warriors, and networks of engaged mullahs was established from the Middle East through Peshawar, Pakistan - and into Afghanistan. Money from the Middle East and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - funneled through the Pakistan Interservices Agency (ISI) - was used to buy food, clothing, supplies, weapons, and intelligence. Local madrassahs became ideological training grounds for those who were termed by everyone from President Carter to President Reagan as "freedom fighters."
Along with the new fervor to fight the Soviet infidels, a new set of insights and pan-Islamic ideals developed, capturing the hearts and minds of young Muslims, along with a powerful new interpretation of an old Islamic idea - jihad. Later, after the war, the Afghan Arabs would take their battle-tested skills and sharp-edged ideology home to Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Philippines, Kenya, and the United States. "Scratch an Islamic militant group today and you find Afghan Arabs behind it," says a Jakarta-based diplomat.
Robert Marquand, "The tenets of terror: A special report on the ideology of jihad and the rise of Islamic militancy", Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 2001
Care to Proffer Counter Citations? I am awaiting them...
DETROIT - An indictment charging 19 individuals with operating a global racketeering conspiracy was unsealed in federal district court today, announced United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Stephen J. Murphy. The indictment alleges that portions of the profits made from the illegal enterprise were given to Hizballah, a foreign terrorist organization. Nine of the individuals were arrested this morning.
[. ..]
An indictment is only a charge and is not evidence of guilt. A defendant is entitled to a fair trial in which it will be the government's burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
This is evidence of nothing, given this administration's miserable failures at securing terror convictions using due process of law, and their reprehensible practise of inhumane detainment of humans who have not been properly convicted in an equitable judicial process, in blatant violation of the 4th, 5th, 8th and 13th Amendments to the US Constitution.
The trials of Sami al-Arian and Sami al-Hussayen immediately stand out:
"The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume."
Thomas Jefferson - Letter to A.H. Rowan - September 26, 1798 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Definitive Edition" Albert Ellery Bergh, Editor (1907) - Chapter 10 pg 61
"Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The parties who may be arrested, may be charged instantly with a well-defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on less probable testimony, in those than in other emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the government, for damages. Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law, have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treason, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual, and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension."
Thomas Jefferson - Letter to James Madison - July 31, 1788 ibid - Chapter 7 pg 97, 98
The White House has given details of 10 major terror plots that President Bush says have been foiled by the US and its allies since the 11 September attacks.
Mr Bush cited the disrupted plans in a speech, designed to boost support for the so-called war on terror.
[. ..]
But the sketchy details provided by the White House make it hard to assess how serious or advanced the plans were.
I would be remiss not taking a free shot at Contemporary Conservatives' bare butts, attired in full dress uniform hospital gowns, when they come into my line of sight.
As Slashdotters reparse the Forbes article, not one seems to realise just why they used term "intellectual property". Could it possibly be that as a publisher, they are intent upon making copyrights interchangeable with patent protection?
Conservatives often rally around the concept of "original intent". Nothing could be more absurd than to posit that Contemporary Conservatives actually practise what they preach.
Originalise This MFs!:
"Monoplies tho' in certain cases useful ought to be granted with caution, and guarded with strictness agst abuse. The Constitution of the U. S. has limited them to two cases, the authors of Books, and of useful inventions, in both which they are considered as a compensation for a benefit actually gained to the community as a purchase of property which the owner might otherwise withold from public use. There can be no just objection to a temporary monopoly in these cases but it ought to be temporary, because under that limitation a sufficient recompence and encouragement may be given. The limitation is particularly proper in the case of inventions, because they grow so much out of preceding ones that there is the less merit in the authors and because for the same reason, the discovery might be expected in a short time from other hands.
[. ..]
In all cases of monopoly, not excepting those specified in favor of authors & inventors, it would be well to reserve to the State, a right to terminate the monopoly by paying a specified and reasonable sum. This would guard against the public discontents resulting from the exorbitant gains of individuals, and from the inconvenient restrictions combined with them. This view of the subject suggested, the clause in the bill relating to J. Rumsey in the Virga Legislature in the year 178_ providing that the State might cancel his privilege by paying him ten thousand dollars and to secure him agst the possibility of a payment in depreciated medium, then a prevalent apprehension, it was proposed that the sum should be paid in metal & that of a specified weight & fineness."
"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It' would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself ; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He wh
An outrageously deceptive headline by CNN. Didn't anybody read the damn article?
Report reveals number of secret FBI subpoenas
Disclosure mandated as part of Patriot Act renewal
Associated Press - Friday, April 28, 2006 CNN
The first two paragraphs read:
The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval, the Justice Department said Friday.
It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge's approval or a grand jury subpoena.
What is posited is the UnAmerican idea that a National Security Letter issued in direct contradiction to the Fourth Amendment's dictates can somehow justifiably termed a "warrant"
This is what it should mean to you and any other real American.
It is reprehensible that the citizenry remains complacent and the acquiescent in the face of tyrannical acts by an exectuive branch so arrogant,
incompetent and derelict that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11, 2001, happened while they were tasked with duty upon the Nation's watchtower, and their first act, after Mr. Bush quit circling Kansas in Air Force One, was to violate their solemnly sworn duty to defend and uphold the Constitution. Just how many ways does the term Miserable Failure apply to GW Bush and his Administration?
The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution is in clear and plain language. We do not need nine old magniloquent asses who openly display their fetish for black satin moo moos to augur the Constitution's entrails in an effort to divine its original intent:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Was your Education in English so dismal that you fail to undertand the meaning of "shall not be violated". Can you not understand that an executive fiat does not fit within the strictures of "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation"? To Define a National Security Letter a warrant is itself an act violative of the US Constitution.
All legitimacy to govern America is grounded within the Contstitution. Governmental acts which are patently in opposition to the US Constitution are tyrannical acts by unlawful wielders of political power.
There is no terror exception, and the Bush Administration has time and time again shown itself to be derisive of the Constitution, antithetical to the Dreamntime America, and afraid of the Law of the land.
A president, "whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People."
Now, why doesn't someone prove one more time just how far from grace Contemporary Conservatism has fallen into the sepsis of situationalism, and laughably toss up the lame ad hominem attack that I am a lefty. If my standing to resist obvious tyranny in defense of liberty is of and by itself proof I am a lefty, then I am indeed correct regarding the American Conservatives' absolute lack of personal honour.
If you valiantly defended the Constitution's Virtue
from Reno's wanton advances upon it;
why did you turn into splayed legged slatterns
when General JohnBoy came a courtin' at freedom's back door?
"...while speech supporting terrorist activities would be protected"
Are you aware of the post 911 prosecution of Saudi Arabian Computer Science doctoral student at the University of Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen?
One of the charges was that on a website he managed were four vehemently anti American fatwahs by Mullahs advocating violent acts, but it turned out that of of the government's primary "terrorism experts" admitted he had published the very same speeches on his site.
"The four fatwas...which were posted in Arabic on the Alasr.ws Web site, have been dubbed the 'core of the case' against Al-Hussayen by attorneys on both sides. Prosecutors say they show that the University of Idaho graduate student knew he was helping terrorists by working on Web sites, while the defense says they show nothing more than religious and political debate protected by the First Amendment. They also say the fatwas don't represent Al-Hussayen's views; each was written by a different Islamic cleric."
The prosecution was brought under the Patriot Bill's expansion of the definition of "material support of terrorism"
Law enforcement used the Patriot Act, the sweeping anti-terrorism law hurriedly passed in October 2001, to get around some of those hurdles. Al-Hussayen was charged under a clause that expanded the definition of "material support" to include those who provide "expert advice or assistance" to terrorists' cause. He was the first person ever to be charged under that provision, which Congress has considered expanding.
The contention was that al-Hussayen used his expert skills as Webmaster, so that made him a terrorist.
Even more frightening, was the post trial statement by Terry Derden, the prosecuting US attorney, who seemed to admit the charges were an illegitimate use of prosecutorial power, and that John Ascroft had encouraged it:
"'I don't think anybody ever thought the case was airtight,' he said. 'The attorney general asked us to go out and disrupt terrorism and material support wherever it occurred. We were unsuccessful in the terrorism charges, but ultimately we thought we were successful in disrupting what was going on.'"
They went after a Saudi grad student, in America with a valid student visa, for show, claiming that his tending a website for an Islamic Charity, which has never been charged in the US was material support of terrorism. al-Hussayen rotted in jail for well over a year awaiting charges without bail.
How many constitutional violations can you spot in this prosecution?
Fortunately, an Idaho jury aquitted on the terrorism charges.
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." --Thomas Paine
The Dreamtime America is being strangled by an administration so arrogant, ignorant and derelict, that they failed to perform a primary duty: defending America, on September 11, 2001, and whose first response to the 911 attacks, was the dishonourable breaking of their solemn oaths to uphold and defend the constitution, by covertly abrogating the fourth amendment, and engage in unabridged warrantless spying upon the American Citizenry.
It also should be taken as another data point for a premise of mine: that contemporary conservatism has been jacked and is afllicted with a preponderance of moral relativism. Insulin as a mitigator for diabetes has been used for a very long time, and is not a patented med. There are some concerns because insulin and growth hormone are derived from animal cells, but testing of the manufactured product would suffice in assuring its purity.
This is antithetical to a true free market economy, and is nothing more than crony capitalism.
Even if it is allowed, insulin treatment of diatbetes may soon become obsolete.
On the other side though, Hatch is certainly no friend of open and free markets, or a limited government, even if he pretends to be. A major element of Utah's economy is the 'food supplement' manufacturers, whose existing plant would be well situated to take advantage of generic insulin production. In the late 80s Hatch came to speak to a Las Vegas group of Libertarians. This was before the L.P. had been right-sided and was still fairly pure. Hatch tried to portray himself as a libertarian because of his adamant dissent against having food supplements regulated by the FDA. Many of us got to the microphone after his pitch and ripped him a new one, over the draconian mandatory sentencing guidelines, and immensely increased prison sentences for users of drugs defined as illicit by the US government. which were to a very large degree his handiwork.
His association with and contributions from certain Utah-based software companies should not be forgotten when contemplating his antiMicrosoft statements. Some of which have been downright Utarded:
"Microsoft is engaging in unlawful predatory practices that go well beyond the scope of fair competition."
"With every day, we are coming to live and to work in an increasingly networked, technology-driven world. There is little question that Microsoft, which now controls the PC software market, is seeking to extend its desktop monopoly in effect to control these other technologies and, to a large extent, the network itself."
I won't lay into Waxman right now, mostly because I believe that the danger to liberty is from the holders of power, and presently, that ain't the Democrats. Waxman has also been vocal about the horrible wastage of money by the CPA. An issue that has recently resurfaced. Expect a renewed round of Senate investigation of the Oil for Food scandal if it heats up, in an attempt to obsucre the issue of 8+ billion dollars unaccounted for in just over a year that the CPA ran things. Hell that makes Saddam look like a piker since his skim took over a decade, but since it wasn't covered by the US media the first time around, there's a good chance it won't be covered well this time either.
That what got me off of my butt, although I'd like to say it was the occassional memory paging faults that were getting thrown now and then at inopportune moments, the truth is that I'd put up with that, and figured out some of the issues by staring at debug output for a few months, it was the price cut of the AMD dual core 64s that got me moving.
With th eCPU and the 2 gigs of RAM, I am in multitasking heaven, even the bit of compiling I've done so far hasn't strained it.
With HP, i was already comfortable with their factory boxes. Over many years now, I've become the friend to call when the home PC starts acting up. The majority of time, the problems have been system file deletion or corruption, and i've found that HPs were the easiest to fix because of their recovery cds.
Now they throw the backup onto the machine and don't give full recovery discs. I'm thinking that this was an MS idea in an effort to keep the number of bootleg OSes down.
I also have a bit of negative energy directed towards HPs recent past, and the trialware bundle was lame; i would have been happier without some of it. I tried out the 60 day symantic security suite, it seems pretty hands off and trouble free, but after 30 days began to nag with a pop-up reminder of my need to purchase a subscription, and it irritated me this early into the trial.
I had grown weary of my main box, and looked around online and in local newspapers. I went with an HP package AMD dual core 4200, an doubled the base RAM to 2Gig.
My last box was a self-built from graymarket vendors at a local computer fleamarket. At that time it seemed like the best bang for what I was prepared to spend, but started out with a MoBo that was running at its peak. The HP, with the extra memory, and when all of the rebates come back, will end up costing me a touch over $900. Look around, and price just CPU, memory sticks and board, even on sale, and remember, mine came with a 17' LCD monitor, a good Radeon video card with 256MB on it, 2 DVD dribves, one a writer, and pther niceties built.
Whenever I get around to setting up a dual boot, it looks like AMD and HP are going to make that a cakewalk too.
It's nice not sweating RAM usage. The other night I was updating some webpages realtime with my main web editor, checking out a new localized WAMP build, and tweaking some graphics with Photoshop all at the same time. I didn't even notice when the antivirus prog fired up and scanned in the background.
I'm pretty much content with my new comp, the main downside for me is having to pick through the system and registry hives, to weed out the unwanted trialware which came preinstalled.
It is of little import whether an increase in the mean global temperatures is caused by man made greenhouse gases, natural cyclical events, or a combination of the two. What matters is that the Earth is indeed warming up. Few still argue that it is not.
Within the variation of possible temperatures which could occur on Earth, there is a very small subset of temperature in which human life is possible, which is within a slightly larger subset of temperatures necessary for sustaining higher life forms. It is in the best interests of the future, if we take take the issue of climate change seriously, and there is little harm if we over compensate for the warming trend.
Often, the Contemporary Conservatives and their crony capitalist financial supporters, have attempted to portray greenies, environmental issues and solutions, as being anti-free market, and socialistic. If you believe that our current economic system is a free-market, you are being neoconnived. Corporations receive favorable legislation from the politicians whom they aided financially to get elected. This is quid quo pro protectionism, it is the rapine and defilement of Adam Smith. It is not a free and open process.
The fact that many of the previously proffered plans to mitigate greenhouse gases tilt leftwards in the political bipolarity is that the left-sided have been the ones to seek solutions, while libertarian and true free market conservative policy wonks have not directed their thoughts towards free market solutions.
Neither side of our binary challenged polity has honestly looked at what should have been a bright beacon leading the way: the example of BP, lead by their CEO, Sir John Browne.
"There are real environmental challenges, including climate change, which are unproven but where there is mounting evidence of serious problems.
Denial is the wrong response. But so too is despair, because there are many things we can do.
Technology is moving on, and so thanks to globalization is the spread of knowledge. There is no place better than Stanford to understand the potential of technical progress and the momentum for change which can be created when you link the drive of business with path-breaking scientific research.
That Ink has been at the heart of economic and social progress for the last three hundred years.
The continuing progress of technology and knowledge means that we don't have to accept a trade off between economic growth and a clean environment.
Denial and despair both represent a triumph of pessimism. The reality is that people want both growth and a clean environment -- and the challenge for governments and companies is to give them that choice.
And I believe we can. It is possible to reduce emissions, to change the fuel mix, to improve air quality. But it will only happen if we believe it is possible."
In 1997, Browne stunned his alma mater, Stanford Graduate School of Business, when he stated that he was going to make BP green:
Browne established a goal of reducing British Petroleum's carbon dioxide output 10 percent by 2010, a reduction of 30 million tons per year. British Petroleum met this goal of 10 percent reduction in 2002. Browne committed British Petroleum to producing cleaner fuels and cleaning up its production waste. The company improved the efficiency of its turbines and cut down on the flaring of gas at its drilling sites. Browne said that British Petroleum should monitor its carbon dioxide emissions, expand solar energy activities, and support research into causes of global warming. British Petroleum spent $160 million building solar panel plants in California and Spain and $40 million on research into solar power. Browne began having British Petroleum plan
Wonderful group you share your opinion with regarding Crichton
It is sad how many people actually believe that Crichton writes with a foundation of solid scientific evidence. It is obscene the manner in which distorted facts get bootstrapped into the datastream by faux public policy organizations.
It is pitiful that the State of Oklahoma offered compelling anecdotal evidence indicating the fallaciousness of intelligent design when they elected Jimmy Inhofe to the Senate.
The last speaker of the hearing was David B. Sandalow, The Brookings Institute's Environmental Scholar, who had previously published a harsh critique of Crichton's environmental views in January, 2006. The Brookings Institute's synopsis of it reads:
"How do people learn about global warming?
That--more than the merits of any scientific argument--is the most interesting question posed by Michael Crichton's State of Fear.
The plot of Crichton's 14th novel is notable mainly for its nuttiness--an MIT professor fights a wellfunded network of eco-terrorists trying to kill thousands by creating spectacular "natural" disasters. But Crichton uses his book as a vehicle for making two substantive arguments. In light of Crichton's high profile and ability to command media attention, these arguments deserve scrutiny.
First, Crichton argues, the scientific evidence for global warming is weak. Crichton rejects many of the conclusions reached by the National Academy of Sciences and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--for example, he does not believe that global temperature increases in recent decades are most likely the result of human activities. In challenging the scientific consensus, Crichton rehashes points familiar to those who follow such issues. These points are unpersuasive, as explained below.
Second, Crichton argues that concern about global warming is best understood as a fad. In particular, he argues that many people concerned about global warming follow a herd mentality, failing critically to examine the data. Crichton is especially harsh in his portrayal of other members of the Hollywood elite, though his critique extends more broadly to the news media, intelligentsia and general public. This argument is more interesting and provocative, though ultimately unpersuasive as well."
Inhofe himself is compelling evidence of American Conservatism's continuing decline. The Sourcewatch Article about Inhofe states that:
On April 28, 2004, Inhofe was honored by the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy -[*]
The Annapolis Center actively argues against the idea that global warming is the result of burning fossil fuels. They also advocate increased logging for better forest health and question rising mercury levels among other things. The Annapolis Center is funded primarily by the National Association of Manufacturers. The Center's founder and COO, Richard Seibert was a former
In the big picture, an individual's personal porn preferences is not the problem.
The problem is that all legitimate American governmental power flows directly from the Constitution, and all elected Federal Politicians, as well as all appointed Federal judges have solemnly sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Amendments to the Constitution:
Article IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Article V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Article VI: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Do you need any help understanding the original intent of the following phrases?
shall not be violated
No person
In all criminal prosecutions
Have Americans' ability to understand simple English degraded to the point that nine old verbose fetishises for black satin moo moos must augur the Constitution's entrails to divine what was meant?
The government was precluded from equivocating on sworn warrants; Jury trials; public - a)presentment of prosecutorial charges, and b)trial; right to challenge witnesses and evidence; right to competent and dedicated representative to aid in defense, and lastly, most importantly, habeas corpus. This is what has been lost. This is why you should care.
There is no "terror" exception. These rights are universal, and bar the government's actions against citizen and non-citizen alike. They were explicitly placed in the possession of humans, not the state. Any governmental representative who takes these rights is participating in an illegitimate tyranny. The abject owardice and lack of faith in the American system is implicit in persons advocating acts which degrade these rights.
A president, "whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People".
This is what matters. The Dreamtime America is fading away.
I'm neither a mozilla adept nor evangelical, and I cannot address your concerns about lusers the whole world over, but there are ways to keep your own box reasonably secure.
An xpi file is only a zipped archive. Rename one to zip and try it, if your zip program doesn't recognize the extension.
What is inside the compressed xpi archive will differ from extension to extension, but many of the files are 'human readable'. (rdf, js, manifest, xul, etc...)
Where you may need another program to read the xpi archive's files are the *.jar files, which are sometimes a part of an extension's archive, but they are also archives, which most compression program can handle, and they too are usually archives of 'human readable' files.
It takes a bit of work, but hey, it is after all, your box, not mine.
be wary of extensions which are in conjuction with a specific internet site, unless you trust the site before loading up the extension
use a program which monitors and lists your net connections now and then
In a bit of opposition to the second recommendation above, I use and have been happy with a few of MR Tech's Mozilla Extensions, especially the local install extension.
The Mr Tech website also has a public board for mozilla-based extensions.
Also, check out available bookmarklets for functionality you are looking for, and avoid extensions if a bookmarklet does the trick. A few possible places for applicable bookmarklets are, one, two, three and four.
You may be interested in Nuke anything enhanced. It adds an right-click option to remove chosen content, but for loaded flash content, because of the way it steals the right-click content menu on focus, you need to learn the right-click sweet spot trick which is best for you. I've found two methods that work best for me, depending on the layout. One is to right-click just outside of where the right-click content menu gets jacked, the other is to highlight an area with the start/end embed code tags included, but that is sometimes tricky.
I also used this extension on my previous, RAM challenged box, and it gave me no grief.
Alternately, peruse the Squarefree bookmarklet section, ZAP. Some nice features to eliminate annoyances, which do not require piling on extensions within the program itself.
WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration will not release long-delayed guidelines specifically for the production of generic versions of insulin and human growth hormone, according to an agency letter.
The guidelines, in draft form since 2002, would help manufacturers seeking to produce generic versions of insulin and human growth hormone. It is estimated that $3.5 billion is spent on the two drugs each year; introduction of those lower-cost versions could reduce that total by hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is why the specious and laughable propositons that the right-side of the political bipolarity is 'libertarian' or 'pro-freemarket' need to be aggressively debated.
The infrastructure of the net was to a very large degree subsidized at the expense of all, but using a corrupted free-market argument, this public resource will be privatized; simply handed over to public corporations, without the government even receiving the cost of its creation in renumeration.
The reference to Gore is related exactly to what in regards to this post?
Contemptible Contemporary Conservatives offer nothing of value in current political discussion. They debate with non sequitur logic and ad hominem attack. They expose the sad truth that their morality was stunted at the age of twelve with their rationales for egregious actions:
"but..but..but..mommy... BillyJeff did it first"
and America grows nostalgic for those days when our president's lies were only about sex and stained blue dresses...
Intelligence officials had serious concerns about turning loose an army of amateurs on a warehouse full of raw documents that include hearsay, disinformation and forgery. Mr. Negroponte's office attached a disclaimer to the documents, only a few of which have been translated into English, saying the government did not vouch for their authenticity.
Ever since Nixon was run out of the White House, the GOP has searched for the perfect Republican President. Reagan came close, but his perfection was the result of organic processes. Mr. Bush epitomizes the Republican ideal. With GW, all denials seem quite plausible.
You wouldn't be refering to Petey Hoekstra, who just last July participated in a secret Parisian ménage à trois with Congressman Curt '007' Weldon, and an agent of known prevaricator, and conman to the reagancomics, Manucher Ghorbanifar?
House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Rep. Curt Weldon met secretly in Europe last week with an Iranian exile who CIA officials charge has passed worthless or bogus intelligence to the United States, current and former U.S. government officials said.
The Paris meeting appears to be the latest in a string of incidents in which players outside the intelligence community try to affect American foreign policy by highlighting threats that the CIA and other agencies find dubious.
[. ..]
Weldon, R-Pa., claims in a new book that the Iranian exile, whom he calls "Ali," told him of dramatic Iranian-sponsored terrorist plots against the United States.
But the CIA says that it has wasted hundreds of hours checking the claims of Ali - whose real name is Fereidoun Mahdavi - and that they are a mix of fabrications and embellishments of press reports, according to a letter from the CIA to Weldon.
The meeting was disclosed by current and former U.S. officials who requested anonymity because they said they did not want to anger Weldon or Hoekstra.
Mahdavi is a longtime associate of Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar, the officials say. Ghorbanifar, a key figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, has had two CIA "burn notices" issued on him, meaning agency officers are not to deal with him.
The same Hoekstra who was part of the GOP House leadership that greenlighted LtCol Anthony Shaffer's motor mouth?
House Republican leaders approved in advance plans by a military intelligence official to go public with details of a top-secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger.
Army Reserve Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer says the data-mining project identified Mohamed Atta and three of the other September 11 hijackers as members of an al Qaeda cell more than a year before the attacks.
"I spoke personally to Denny Hastert and to Pete Hoekstra," Col. Shaffer said. Mr. Hastert, Illinois Republican, is speaker of the House, and Mr. Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
"I was given assurances by [them] that this was the right thing to do.... I was given assurances we would not suffer any adverse consequences for bringing this to the attention of the public," Col. Shaffer said.
One of the authors of the Washington Post article cited above is Rita Katz, director of the stupidly named "The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE), which seems to be an asinine play on SETI. The SITE website is actually very light on real original content. As I revisited it tonight, I found that they have given citation for their copy and paste of the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003 Report, which is the entire contents of SITE's "terrorism library". A year ago, they did not offer this bit of enlightening data.
This should be enough to question the veracity of the whole story.
Katz obtained a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is speaks Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997. She has both personal and financial issues which could bias her analysis.
Katz is Iraqi born, and her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family emigrated to Israel.
Katz is/was a paid consultant for the law firm, Motley-Rice, which file a 1 trillion dollar lawsuit on behalf of the 911 WTC victims.
Katz is author of the book Terrorist Hunter (HarperCollins, 2003) in which she writes of
infiltrating US-based Arab groups to investigate terrorist connections as a private investigator, and receives a plug for the book in every bio blurb that is published with her articles.
Katz got her terrorism expert start working for Stephen Emerson, who himself has credibility issues.
Katz was also a principle player an an egregious example of of post-911 governmental misuse of prosecutorial powers in the case brought against a Saudi Arabian Computer Science doctoral student at the University of Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen.
Al-Hussayen was charged with giving material support to terrorist, for doing volunteer web mastering of the site of the Islamic Assembly of North America, an organization which the government has never charged. He was also charged with 11 minor visa violations, one being that his student visa didn't allow him to work, and he had received $300 from the Islamic Assembly of North America spread out over his five years of volunteer work for it.
The jury in Idaho acquitted on all three terrorism charges, and 3 of the visa charges, but hung on the remaining 8 visa charges.
The main thrust of the material support charges stemmed from the website Al-Hussayen worked on having published 4 fatwas by 4 radical immans on it. A government expert witness blew holes in that theory when he admitted that he had published the very same speeches on his anti-terrorism website.
When Katz testified, she admitted to the same visa violations that Al-Hussayen was charge with, only she had earned real money in violation of her entry terms.
Katz's testimony ended Friday with questioning about her own visa problems when she entered the United States. Katz testified that as a new immigrant in 1997, she misunderstood work permit requirements related to her visa and was employed, in at least one job and possibly two, before she was legally authorized to work. Under cross-examination, she acknowledged that she detailed those problems in her autobiographical book, in which she expressed disgust for burdensome government re
CATO was once upon a time a libertarian think-tank. Now they are to a very large degree responsible for the reprehensible right-siding of American libertarianism.
Check out their RSS commentary feed. Not one of the ten is about civil liberty. No true libertarian think-tank would simply ignore the recent news regarding warrantless spying on US citizens in their commentary.
CATO posted a incredibly acquiescent acceptance of the 2002 FBI guidelines allowing their agents to monitor Internet sites, libraries, and religious institutions without first showing cause. The author is Roger Pilon, CATO's vice president for legal affairs, a reagancomic, who "held five senior posts in the Reagan administration, including at State and Justice, and was a National Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution".
CATO has shown itself to be afflicted with the same moral relativism as contemporary conservatism, when they unfurled their banner onstage behind the hand-wringing homophobe, and probably most anally retentive US Senator, Rickey Santorum. They haven fallen far from the Libertarian grace that they once basked in. Three of CATO's best foreign policy analysts have departed in the recent past.
Leon Hader is the earliest think-tank criticizer of Neoconservatism I am aware of:
CATO has sold their birthright for a fancy new house within the beltway. In this era of an executive administration, so arrogant, ignorant and incompetent, that the WTC destruction occurred on their watch, which has furthered dishonored itself by callously ignoring Constitutional restrictions, CATO has instead focused upon property rights, social security reform, and slandering the Federal Judiciary, while barely mentioning Republican hypocrisy inherent in the rampant deficit spending, and the increase of governmental invasion of personal liberty in the name of religion.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah this explains why you hold to arrguments without attribution.
David Horowitz is a hypocrital unrepentant self-admitted American traitor.
Read Davey's own confession.
He willfully divulged classified American Intelligence, not for a higher purpose such as stopping an immoral war, but to just hurt America, and his release of information materially aided two foreign governments, one the USSR. He also committed conspiracy. That is irrelevant since the statute of limitations has run out, but there is no statute of limitations for treason, and this his was a public confession.
And he always seems to be whinning about Fonda. this is what is known as Moral relativism, something the right has always claimed only happens on the left, but it seems that it just travelled over to the other side of the political bipolarity with the people who always played that immoral game, trotskyites and new lefties.
Horowitz is a typical Contemporary Conservative, who thinks responsibility is for everybody but themselves.
His rationalisation for political polarity switch is classic. Well past the time that anybody in their right mind still considered to Black Panthers to be political, after it had become public knowledge that they had become an ongoing criminal enterprise, Horowitz got a friend of his a job with them. The friend was murdered, but David, being what he's always been, a neoposeur, refused to accept personal responsibility in this death, and instead blames the "left", how lame, how positively dialectic of the Maoist.
But if you want to talk about strange attractions:
General Taguba's Non-Classified Part of his Abu Ghraib abuse report given to the Senate listed the following abuses, amongst many others:
Yet after this testimony had been given, Senator Inhofe (R-OK) stated on the Senate Floor, for the record:
This reprehensible piece of unAmericanism is still published on the Senate Republicans' Official Website.
So with the new marriage law vote set for June 6, contemplate this bit of republicanism; it is a horrible sin for two guys to fall in love and play each others butt bongos, but the Republican Senators are so down with the use of sodomy with a foreign object as a interrogatory methodology that they allow Inhofe's ugly remarks to be served from their collective website.
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Just a few Pointers: there are Many More
This first cite predates 911:
From LA Times Paid Archives:
Christian Science Momitor - Original URL still active
Care to Proffer Counter Citations? I am awaiting them...
Let the Deconstruction begin!
the news
This is evidence of nothing, given this administration's miserable failures at securing terror convictions using due process of law, and their reprehensible practise of inhumane detainment of humans who have not been properly convicted in an equitable judicial process, in blatant violation of the 4th, 5th, 8th and 13th Amendments to the US Constitution.
The trials of Sami al-Arian and Sami al-Hussayen immediately stand out:
Originalize this:
concrete
"US lists 10 foiled terror plots", BBC News, October 7, 2005
On further analysis:
John Diamond and Toni Locy, "
I would be remiss not taking a free shot at Contemporary Conservatives' bare butts, attired in full dress uniform hospital gowns, when they come into my line of sight.
As Slashdotters reparse the Forbes article, not one seems to realise just why they used term "intellectual property". Could it possibly be that as a publisher, they are intent upon making copyrights interchangeable with patent protection?
Conservatives often rally around the concept of "original intent". Nothing could be more absurd than to posit that Contemporary Conservatives actually practise what they preach.
Originalise This MFs!:
Free Mickey Mouse!
Returned in WC3's Mark-up validation Service: v0.72
An outrageously deceptive headline by CNN. Didn't anybody read the damn article?
Report reveals number of secret FBI subpoenas
Disclosure mandated as part of Patriot Act renewal
Associated Press - Friday, April 28, 2006
CNN
The first two paragraphs read:
What is posited is the UnAmerican idea that a National Security Letter issued in direct contradiction to the Fourth Amendment's dictates can somehow justifiably termed a "warrant"
This is what it should mean to you and any other real American. It is reprehensible that the citizenry remains complacent and the acquiescent in the face of tyrannical acts by an exectuive branch so arrogant, incompetent and derelict that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11, 2001, happened while they were tasked with duty upon the Nation's watchtower, and their first act, after Mr. Bush quit circling Kansas in Air Force One, was to violate their solemnly sworn duty to defend and uphold the Constitution. Just how many ways does the term Miserable Failure apply to GW Bush and his Administration?
The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution is in clear and plain language. We do not need nine old magniloquent asses who openly display their fetish for black satin moo moos to augur the Constitution's entrails in an effort to divine its original intent:
Was your Education in English so dismal that you fail to undertand the meaning of "shall not be violated". Can you not understand that an executive fiat does not fit within the strictures of "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation"? To Define a National Security Letter a warrant is itself an act violative of the US Constitution.
All legitimacy to govern America is grounded within the Contstitution. Governmental acts which are patently in opposition to the US Constitution are tyrannical acts by unlawful wielders of political power.
There is no terror exception, and the Bush Administration has time and time again shown itself to be derisive of the Constitution, antithetical to the Dreamntime America, and afraid of the Law of the land.
A president, " whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People. "
Now, why doesn't someone prove one more time just how far from grace Contemporary Conservatism has fallen into the sepsis of situationalism, and laughably toss up the lame ad hominem attack that I am a lefty. If my standing to resist obvious tyranny in defense of liberty is of and by itself proof I am a lefty, then I am indeed correct regarding the American Conservatives' absolute lack of personal honour.
Are you aware of the post 911 prosecution of Saudi Arabian Computer Science doctoral student at the University of Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen?
One of the charges was that on a website he managed were four vehemently anti American fatwahs by Mullahs advocating violent acts, but it turned out that of of the government's primary "terrorism experts" admitted he had published the very same speeches on his site.
The prosecution was brought under the Patriot Bill's expansion of the definition of "material support of terrorism"
Even more frightening, was the post trial statement by Terry Derden, the prosecuting US attorney, who seemed to admit the charges were an illegitimate use of prosecutorial power, and that John Ascroft had encouraged it:
They went after a Saudi grad student, in America with a valid student visa, for show, claiming that his tending a website for an Islamic Charity, which has never been charged in the US was material support of terrorism. al-Hussayen rotted in jail for well over a year awaiting charges without bail.
How many constitutional violations can you spot in this prosecution?
Fortunately, an Idaho jury aquitted on the terrorism charges.
The Dreamtime America is being strangled by an administration so arrogant, ignorant and derelict, that they failed to perform a primary duty: defending America, on September 11, 2001, and whose first response to the 911 attacks, was the dishonourable breaking of their solemn oaths to uphold and defend the constitution, by covertly abrogating the fourth amendment, and engage in unabridged warrantless spying upon the American Citizenry.
This indicates the the abject c
It also should be taken as another data point for a premise of mine: that contemporary conservatism has been jacked and is afllicted with a preponderance of moral relativism. Insulin as a mitigator for diabetes has been used for a very long time, and is not a patented med. There are some concerns because insulin and growth hormone are derived from animal cells, but testing of the manufactured product would suffice in assuring its purity.
This is antithetical to a true free market economy, and is nothing more than crony capitalism.
Even if it is allowed, insulin treatment of diatbetes may soon become obsolete.
On the other side though, Hatch is certainly no friend of open and free markets, or a limited government, even if he pretends to be. A major element of Utah's economy is the 'food supplement' manufacturers, whose existing plant would be well situated to take advantage of generic insulin production. In the late 80s Hatch came to speak to a Las Vegas group of Libertarians. This was before the L.P. had been right-sided and was still fairly pure. Hatch tried to portray himself as a libertarian because of his adamant dissent against having food supplements regulated by the FDA. Many of us got to the microphone after his pitch and ripped him a new one, over the draconian mandatory sentencing guidelines, and immensely increased prison sentences for users of drugs defined as illicit by the US government. which were to a very large degree his handiwork.
His association with and contributions from certain Utah-based software companies should not be forgotten when contemplating his antiMicrosoft statements. Some of which have been downright Utarded:
I won't lay into Waxman right now, mostly because I believe that the danger to liberty is from the holders of power, and presently, that ain't the Democrats. Waxman has also been vocal about the horrible wastage of money by the CPA. An issue that has recently resurfaced. Expect a renewed round of Senate investigation of the Oil for Food scandal if it heats up, in an attempt to obsucre the issue of 8+ billion dollars unaccounted for in just over a year that the CPA ran things. Hell that makes Saddam look like a piker since his skim took over a decade, but since it wasn't covered by the US media the first time around, there's a good chance it won't be covered well this time either.
Did you go for the64 bit CPU?
That what got me off of my butt, although I'd like to say it was the occassional memory paging faults that were getting thrown now and then at inopportune moments, the truth is that I'd put up with that, and figured out some of the issues by staring at debug output for a few months, it was the price cut of the AMD dual core 64s that got me moving.
With th eCPU and the 2 gigs of RAM, I am in multitasking heaven, even the bit of compiling I've done so far hasn't strained it.
With HP, i was already comfortable with their factory boxes. Over many years now, I've become the friend to call when the home PC starts acting up. The majority of time, the problems have been system file deletion or corruption, and i've found that HPs were the easiest to fix because of their recovery cds.
Now they throw the backup onto the machine and don't give full recovery discs. I'm thinking that this was an MS idea in an effort to keep the number of bootleg OSes down.
I also have a bit of negative energy directed towards HPs recent past, and the trialware bundle was lame; i would have been happier without some of it. I tried out the 60 day symantic security suite, it seems pretty hands off and trouble free, but after 30 days began to nag with a pop-up reminder of my need to purchase a subscription, and it irritated me this early into the trial.
I had grown weary of my main box, and looked around online and in local newspapers. I went with an HP package AMD dual core 4200, an doubled the base RAM to 2Gig. My last box was a self-built from graymarket vendors at a local computer fleamarket. At that time it seemed like the best bang for what I was prepared to spend, but started out with a MoBo that was running at its peak. The HP, with the extra memory, and when all of the rebates come back, will end up costing me a touch over $900. Look around, and price just CPU, memory sticks and board, even on sale, and remember, mine came with a 17' LCD monitor, a good Radeon video card with 256MB on it, 2 DVD dribves, one a writer, and pther niceties built. Whenever I get around to setting up a dual boot, it looks like AMD and HP are going to make that a cakewalk too. It's nice not sweating RAM usage. The other night I was updating some webpages realtime with my main web editor, checking out a new localized WAMP build, and tweaking some graphics with Photoshop all at the same time. I didn't even notice when the antivirus prog fired up and scanned in the background. I'm pretty much content with my new comp, the main downside for me is having to pick through the system and registry hives, to weed out the unwanted trialware which came preinstalled.
It is of little import whether an increase in the mean global temperatures is caused by man made greenhouse gases, natural cyclical events, or a combination of the two. What matters is that the Earth is indeed warming up. Few still argue that it is not.
Within the variation of possible temperatures which could occur on Earth, there is a very small subset of temperature in which human life is possible, which is within a slightly larger subset of temperatures necessary for sustaining higher life forms. It is in the best interests of the future, if we take take the issue of climate change seriously, and there is little harm if we over compensate for the warming trend.
Often, the Contemporary Conservatives and their crony capitalist financial supporters, have attempted to portray greenies, environmental issues and solutions, as being anti-free market, and socialistic. If you believe that our current economic system is a free-market, you are being neoconnived. Corporations receive favorable legislation from the politicians whom they aided financially to get elected. This is quid quo pro protectionism, it is the rapine and defilement of Adam Smith. It is not a free and open process.
The fact that many of the previously proffered plans to mitigate greenhouse gases tilt leftwards in the political bipolarity is that the left-sided have been the ones to seek solutions, while libertarian and true free market conservative policy wonks have not directed their thoughts towards free market solutions.
Neither side of our binary challenged polity has honestly looked at what should have been a bright beacon leading the way: the example of BP, lead by their CEO, Sir John Browne.
In 1997, Browne stunned his alma mater, Stanford Graduate School of Business, when he stated that he was going to make BP green:
Wonderful group you share your opinion with regarding Crichton
It is sad how many people actually believe that Crichton writes with a foundation of solid scientific evidence. It is obscene the manner in which distorted facts get bootstrapped into the datastream by faux public policy organizations.
It is pitiful that the State of Oklahoma offered compelling anecdotal evidence indicating the fallaciousness of intelligent design when they elected Jimmy Inhofe to the Senate.
Inhofe is to a very large degree responsible for Crichton's elevation into the upper level of global warming debate. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, he held a hearing on September 28, 2005 titled "The Role of Science in Environmental Policy-Making", and gave Crichton top-billing as the first speaker.
The last speaker of the hearing was David B. Sandalow, The Brookings Institute's Environmental Scholar, who had previously published a harsh critique of Crichton's environmental views in January, 2006. The Brookings Institute's synopsis of it reads:
Inhofe himself is compelling evidence of American Conservatism's continuing decline. The Sourcewatch Article about Inhofe states that:
In the big picture, an individual's personal porn preferences is not the problem.
The problem is that all legitimate American governmental power flows directly from the Constitution, and all elected Federal Politicians, as well as all appointed Federal judges have solemnly sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Amendments to the Constitution:
Do you need any help understanding the original intent of the following phrases?
Have Americans' ability to understand simple English degraded to the point that nine old verbose fetishises for black satin moo moos must augur the Constitution's entrails to divine what was meant?
The government was precluded from equivocating on sworn warrants; Jury trials; public - a)presentment of prosecutorial charges, and b)trial; right to challenge witnesses and evidence; right to competent and dedicated representative to aid in defense, and lastly, most importantly, habeas corpus. This is what has been lost. This is why you should care.
There is no "terror" exception. These rights are universal, and bar the government's actions against citizen and non-citizen alike. They were explicitly placed in the possession of humans, not the state. Any governmental representative who takes these rights is participating in an illegitimate tyranny. The abject owardice and lack of faith in the American system is implicit in persons advocating acts which degrade these rights.
A president, "whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People".
This is what matters. The Dreamtime America is fading away.
I'm neither a mozilla adept nor evangelical, and I cannot address your concerns about lusers the whole world over, but there are ways to keep your own box reasonably secure.
An xpi file is only a zipped archive. Rename one to zip and try it, if your zip program doesn't recognize the extension.
What is inside the compressed xpi archive will differ from extension to extension, but many of the files are 'human readable'. (rdf, js, manifest, xul, etc...)
Where you may need another program to read the xpi archive's files are the *.jar files, which are sometimes a part of an extension's archive, but they are also archives, which most compression program can handle, and they too are usually archives of 'human readable' files.
It takes a bit of work, but hey, it is after all, your box, not mine.
Also, for the security conscious:
In a bit of opposition to the second recommendation above, I use and have been happy with a few of MR Tech's Mozilla Extensions, especially the local install extension.
The Mr Tech website also has a public board for mozilla-based extensions.
Also, check out available bookmarklets for functionality you are looking for, and avoid extensions if a bookmarklet does the trick. A few possible places for applicable bookmarklets are, one, two, three and four.
You may be interested in Nuke anything enhanced. It adds an right-click option to remove chosen content, but for loaded flash content, because of the way it steals the right-click content menu on focus, you need to learn the right-click sweet spot trick which is best for you. I've found two methods that work best for me, depending on the layout. One is to right-click just outside of where the right-click content menu gets jacked, the other is to highlight an area with the start/end embed code tags included, but that is sometimes tricky.
I also used this extension on my previous, RAM challenged box, and it gave me no grief.
Alternately, peruse the Squarefree bookmarklet section, ZAP. Some nice features to eliminate annoyances, which do not require piling on extensions within the program itself.
WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration will not release long-delayed guidelines specifically for the production of generic versions of insulin and human growth hormone, according to an agency letter.
The guidelines, in draft form since 2002, would help manufacturers seeking to produce generic versions of insulin and human growth hormone. It is estimated that $3.5 billion is spent on the two drugs each year; introduction of those lower-cost versions could reduce that total by hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is why the specious and laughable propositons that the right-side of the political bipolarity is 'libertarian' or 'pro-freemarket' need to be aggressively debated.
The infrastructure of the net was to a very large degree subsidized at the expense of all, but using a corrupted free-market argument, this public resource will be privatized; simply handed over to public corporations, without the government even receiving the cost of its creation in renumeration.
Crony capitalism is not a free market.
The reference to Gore is related exactly to what in regards to this post?
Contemptible Contemporary Conservatives offer nothing of value in current political discussion. They debate with non sequitur logic and ad hominem attack. They expose the sad truth that their morality was stunted at the age of twelve with their rationales for egregious actions:
and America grows nostalgic for those days when our president's lies were only about sex and stained blue dresses...
Ever since Nixon was run out of the White House, the GOP has searched for the perfect Republican President. Reagan came close, but his perfection was the result of organic processes. Mr. Bush epitomizes the Republican ideal. With GW, all denials seem quite plausible.
I recall many of the right claiming in '98 that Clinton's attack was 'wagging the dog'
As to why would Saddam posture and pose with the UN inpsectors. It's called bluffing, and was a game he played to maintain power.
You wouldn't be refering to Petey Hoekstra, who just last July participated in a secret Parisian ménage à trois with Congressman Curt '007' Weldon, and an agent of known prevaricator, and conman to the reagancomics, Manucher Ghorbanifar?
The same Hoekstra who was part of the GOP House leadership that greenlighted LtCol Anthony Shaffer's motor mouth?
That's right citizens, move along...nothing to see here...Congressman Hoekstra is on it...
One of the authors of the Washington Post article cited above is Rita Katz, director of the stupidly named "The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE), which seems to be an asinine play on SETI. The SITE website is actually very light on real original content. As I revisited it tonight, I found that they have given citation for their copy and paste of the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003 Report, which is the entire contents of SITE's "terrorism library". A year ago, they did not offer this bit of enlightening data. This should be enough to question the veracity of the whole story.
Katz obtained a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is speaks Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997. She has both personal and financial issues which could bias her analysis.
Katz got her terrorism expert start working for Stephen Emerson, who himself has credibility issues.
Katz was the anonymous source for a 60 Minutes segment that alleged a chicken farm supported terrorism, and for which both CBS and Katz were sued by Gainesville, Georgia based Mar-Jac Poultry Inc., as well as two Virginia-based muslim charity orgs, for libel.
Katz was also a principle player an an egregious example of of post-911 governmental misuse of prosecutorial powers in the case brought against a Saudi Arabian Computer Science doctoral student at the University of Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen.
Al-Hussayen was charged with giving material support to terrorist, for doing volunteer web mastering of the site of the Islamic Assembly of North America, an organization which the government has never charged. He was also charged with 11 minor visa violations, one being that his student visa didn't allow him to work, and he had received $300 from the Islamic Assembly of North America spread out over his five years of volunteer work for it.
The jury in Idaho acquitted on all three terrorism charges, and 3 of the visa charges, but hung on the remaining 8 visa charges.
The main thrust of the material support charges stemmed from the website Al-Hussayen worked on having published 4 fatwas by 4 radical immans on it. A government expert witness blew holes in that theory when he admitted that he had published the very same speeches on his anti-terrorism website.
When Katz testified, she admitted to the same visa violations that Al-Hussayen was charge with, only she had earned real money in violation of her entry terms.
CATO's fervent anti-interventionism is a thing of the past.
CATO was once upon a time a libertarian think-tank. Now they are to a very large degree responsible for the reprehensible right-siding of American libertarianism.
Check out their RSS commentary feed. Not one of the ten is about civil liberty. No true libertarian think-tank would simply ignore the recent news regarding warrantless spying on US citizens in their commentary.
CATO posted a incredibly acquiescent acceptance of the 2002 FBI guidelines allowing their agents to monitor Internet sites, libraries, and religious institutions without first showing cause. The author is Roger Pilon, CATO's vice president for legal affairs, a reagancomic, who "held five senior posts in the Reagan administration, including at State and Justice, and was a National Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution".
CATO has shown itself to be afflicted with the same moral relativism as contemporary conservatism, when they unfurled their banner onstage behind the hand-wringing homophobe, and probably most anally retentive US Senator, Rickey Santorum. They haven fallen far from the Libertarian grace that they once basked in. Three of CATO's best foreign policy analysts have departed in the recent past.
Leon Hader is the earliest think-tank criticizer of Neoconservatism I am aware of:
Charles Pena was always anti-imperialist, whether it emerged from liberals or conservatives:
Ivan Eland was prescient as a CATO old schooler:
Another anti-foreign interventionist, albeit second stringer, Doug Bandow, was recently righteously terminated from CATO, for his less than ethical moonlighting. Now there are just two remaining, Ted Galen Carpenter, and Christopher Preble.
CATO has sold their birthright for a fancy new house within the beltway. In this era of an executive administration, so arrogant, ignorant and incompetent, that the WTC destruction occurred on their watch, which has furthered dishonored itself by callously ignoring Constitutional restrictions, CATO has instead focused upon property rights, social security reform, and slandering the Federal Judiciary, while barely mentioning Republican hypocrisy inherent in the rampant deficit spending, and the increase of governmental invasion of personal liberty in the name of religion.