I'm watching the show too... "cache" is a bit of a misnomer, I mean, pretty much every chunk of data in Slash is cached, but basically we just post stories n minutes ahead of time. During that time (for n < 20) they are visible to subscribers -- and then they go live for the rest of the world whenever we've scheduled them to.
"Trillion"? NASA's entire budget, from its creation through 1961 (when Americans first reached space), was $7.3 billion in 1996 dollars. The entire Mercury program cost $1.5 billion.
Which includes a little bit of the research that made today's feat possible.
I love private industry. I think today is an interesting beginning.
Finally private industry has shown it can rocket a man 62 miles straight up and stay there for a couple of minutes! Congratulations! Now all it has to do is send someone to, you know, orbit the globe, and it will have caught up with government-sponsored space flight a third of a century ago.
We blocked the W3C because their script sucks. Back in May, their validator nailed us for 6,000 hits in a short time, which earned it a nice place on our no-access list. Sites with big pipes shouldn't run scripts that act as DoS enablers; c'mon people, a max number of hits per unit time please.
If someone from the W3C cares enough, they can write the email address that they get on the resulting page and tell us that their script is smarter now.
The pundits said Gore won. The public decided Bush won-
You didn't even read my comment before hitting reply, did you?
As I wrote: "the five 'instant polls' of viewers after the debate gave Gore the win by an average of 9.6%."
You have the facts exactly backwards. This is precisely the problem: the media has put a false impression in most people's minds (including yours). Go read the dailyhowler.com links in my original comment.
The Wired piece helps perpetuate a myth: that in 2000, after the first Bush-Gore debate, it was the GOP that changed the perception from "Gore won" to "Bush won":
After the first debate, Gore advisers thought he had handily won. But a few hours later, the Bush campaign was able to change that perception by disseminating press releases on its websites, through faxes and in e-mails.
Gore's advisers thought he won because he did win. As the Daily Howler points out, the five "instant polls" of viewers after the debate gave Gore the win by an average of 9.6% -- a huge margin, especially considering more Bush supporters were watching.
And that perception did change in the hours and days to come, until finally the American people were browbeaten into believing that Bush had won. But one can't blame GOP press releases and emails. The fault lies squarely on the media, as the Daily Howler has been demonstrating all week.
Whether you think our media has a conservative bias or not, it's indisputable that it let Bush get away with murder after that first debate, refusing to do even basic fact-checking on his blatant errors, and it crucified Gore, mostly by focusing on absurdities and trivia like the color of his suit or his body language. Let's put the blame where blame is due.
Could you explain how you think it is a "lie" that illiteracy in this country has declined every decade since 1870? I went to the webpage you linked and it didn't say anything about this.
Except that it was private society that deemed that blacks should not be allowed to read, and later that they should not be taught to read with the same vigor that whites were. There may have been laws passed to help with that, but they were secondary to the evil will of the private citizenry. It was the government that fought a war which freed blacks from slavery, and (much later) it was the government that mandated that they be provided with effective schools.
But if you want to include everyone, feel free -- the numbers look much worse for your point of view when you do. The decline in illiteracy is far steeper.
"Ever since the inception of government schooling in the 19th century under Horace Mann,
the US has been on a downward trend in literacy, numeracy and science learning. Sometimes that trend is briefly halted, but it always continues. To the extent that there might be some mild upheaval, it seems to me that the more quickly we exit the downward spiral, the shorter the climb back up will be."
That is exactly backwards. It is a complete lie.
I confess I have no idea how one would obtain accurate readings on "numeracy," since the very concept was only popularized perhaps 30 years ago. Nor can I fathom how he could characterize "science learning" today as worse than in the days before Darwin, continental drift, and modern astronomy. (I assume Mr. Badnarik is in favor of private schooling, though our private schools mostly ignore or outright contradict Darwin, arguably the most important scientist of the past 250 years. An understanding of biological evolution is critical to epidemiology and genetics, two fields of research that in the years to come I hope will not be hampered by the growing trend of religious schooling.)
But though those claims are perhaps unprovable, his claim about literacy is outright false. It took me about 30 seconds to find this page using Google: Literacy from 1870 to 1979: Illiteracy.
(For those who want to look the numbers up themselves, U-Virginia has a Historical Census Browser. The stats on literacy start in 1870.)
The literacy of every segment of the U.S. population except the foreign-born has grown in every year (except the estimation of 1950, which is likely a statistical blip). It's not a question of the trend briefly halting: the trend is relentlessly toward higher and higher literacy rates.
Probably the most reliable indicator of literacy is that of the white population (since including segments of society largely removed from educational opportunities would bias the numbers). The percentage of illiterate white persons 14 years of age or older was as follows:
The nice thing about HTML is that attributes and tags that your browser doesn't recognize, it has to ignore. The ones you mention do serve a purpose: to make Slash look nice and be usable on many browsers, possibly including yours.
I thought we nailed all the unencoded ampersands, though, I'll check that out. Eventually:)
The commercial professionals who are lending a hand are the Peter and Shane I mentioned earlier. Peter started work on an XHTML theme earlier this year and has made some great progress. If you're interested in joining the fun, drop by the IRC channel, #slash on irc.slashnet.org, I'm sure they would welcome patches. Peter's code is the strict-600 module available via anonymous cvs at strict.openflows.org:/var/lib/cvs if you'd like to check it out. As I said, sooner or later we hope to take the steps to incorporate that work into the core Slash code, so if you're interested in contributing to Slashdot, joining our little community and contributing patches would be a great way to help.
Presumably because w3.org has an ill-behaved script that triggered our self-defense scripts at some point in the past. If they published the IP they used in some obvious location I'd be happy to unblock it. But I couldn't find it in their FAQ or anything.
The conspiracy theories are fun to read though... hey, I said we emitted HTML 3.2... I never said it was valid:)
OK so this is the thread where everyone complains about Slashdot's HTML, bring it on!
For the record...
Slashdot does emit code to an HTML standard, it just happens to be HTML 3.2. That's a standard. Call it "outdated" if you like but if it works, it works, right? Isn't that the point of standards, you don't have to change them every time something new comes along?
We're hoping to move to XHTML in the future (sometime within the next year, for sure, I hope) but like everything else it goes on our priority list based on resource-cost and benefit. There are bugs that need to be squashed, meaningful features to be added, and performance improvements we need to put into place that come first.
Honestly XHTML will probably just save us a little bandwidth and make the site look a little prettier, but only the hardcore readers will notice the difference, at least if we do it right. The only real long-term benefit will be to us coders -- it should let us rip out kludgy old code, but of course that's almost as tedious as writing it in the first place, so it's a mixed win.
Yes, it's a mozilla bug, not a Slash code bug. They've known about it for a year, but it's fixed now, yay.
No, it doesn't help that someone else took a static rendering of our homepage and converted it to CSS. That's a fun experiment but of course it's very different to change the code to emit HTML to a different standard.
A shout out to Peter and Shane here for working on the XHTML theme:)
OK, resume flaming us and our sucky HTML, Offtopics all around!:)
The trouble is that it's hard to compare national production to a family's wages. I agree that the $110,000/year comparison is off-base, but I'm not sure how to fix it.
One basis for comparison is that of the U.S.'s $11 trillion economy, only about $2 trillion is reasonably available for a budget, since it is politically impossible (and of course unwise) to tax, say, 50% of the nation's production. So the analogy might be a family with $110,000 income that has to spend $90,000 of that on nondiscretionary expenditures: let's say mortgage, taxes, food, insurance, and so on. That's pretty much impossible for that income level; anyone at $110,000 has a lot more than $20,000 worth of discretionary spending, so people will have a hard time imagining it.
Statistically, what household income level has about $20,000 in discretionary spending? Or maybe I'm looking for what household income level has $8,500 discretionary income, which I guess would be proportional to the fed's discretionary spending. Hmmm... or am I looking for total fed revenue minus nondiscretionary spending, which I would guess at about $4,000 for a household?
Maybe a household earning $40,000 a year would have about $4,000 in discretionary income. And how would that family look at a $74,000 accumulated debt? Would that family think it wise to not only spend that $4,000 on new stuff instead of paying down their debt, but then also rack up an extra $4,000 in debt every year?
Maybe if there was a way to tell this story in numbers that were proportional to household discretionary income? As GDP and governmental tax revenue grew, that could be understood as a household getting promotions and better jobs. The war debt from 1945 could be seen as a major household expenditure that was paid down until 1955, and then stayed manageable because of the "promotions" that the country kept getting (the American miracle of increasing productivity). It lasted right up until Reagan, at which point the country started spending much faster than its wage-earners got "promotions"...
The prime cause of giant budget deficits is a plunge in the federal government's tax take, which fell from 20.9 percent of G.D.P. in fiscal 2000 to a projected 15.7 percent this year, the lowest share since 1950. About 45 percent of this plunge can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts. The rest reflects the end of the stock market bubble, the still-depressed economy and -- probably -- growing tax sheltering and evasion.
(Note: much of the reason the economy is taking so long to recover is, obviously, the war in Iraq, and the fact that Bush's tax cuts were back-loaded, having most of their effect in the years to come, not in the three years we just lived through.)
And you simply have no idea what you're talking about re "massively increased spending." Go look up what the annual increases in discretionary spending were under Clinton and under Bush. Even Cato calls it "The Republican Spending Explosion."
This is why I wish Child's Pay had been allowed to air during the Super Bowl. I think most Americans, Republican and Democrat, are honest and honorable enough that we don't want to stick our children with the bill for what we are enjoying today.
But most Americans don't have a clue what is going on. I saw a billboard last night that said, "Remember, it's your money" -- and it was an ad for Bush-Cheney! The administration that insisted tax cuts were the prescription for times of plenty, for times of recession, for times of peace and times of war, has now seen the unwanted side-effects: a languid recovery, and a trillion dollars added to the debt. A budget surplus, the first in modern times, converted instantly to massive deficit.
Sometimes I wonder if there isn't a way to start talking about the debt as the balance on our nation's credit card. Maybe if we put overspending into terms that the average consumer could understand, and stuck to those terms, people could finally start to get it. This country produces $11 trillion of wealth every year, and, through our government, we are $7.4 trillion in debt. Maybe if we start comparing the government to a family that's making $110,000 a year, but is $74,000 in debt, we could have a real national debate about government spending. The question is not whether "it's your money," but whether, being $74,000 in debt, it's a good idea for you to get a brand-new credit card and go rack up another $4,000 on it every year -- as Bush and the Republican Congress are now doing.
Especially when massive, unavoidable costs are just over the horizon.
Grover Norquist has declared his goal of drowning the government in a bathtub, and his way of doing it is to spend it into oblivion. The Republican Party has sold out the country by signing on with this brand of destruction. What it's going to yield is not prosperity and limited government, but anarchy and -- very possibly, in the decades to come -- the end of America as an economically powerful beacon of freedom. When our children are serfs for the wealthy who have bought up the country, when the old are baking to death because we can't afford to buy them air conditioners, when the poor and the sick die alone because we can't provide them with basic health care, when the unregulated food makes us sick and the unregulated drugs are a crapshoot, when half the country will never be able to retire and will be forced to work at McDonald's and Wal-Mart until their bodies fail, I hope people remember the name of Grover Norquist, and who it was that put his theories into practice. One percent of this country will always enjoy all the best things in life, but everyone else will be wondering what it was like before our government was drowned, and if those folks back in the '90s and '00s knew how good they had it.
It's perfectly reasonable for Bush not to show up for May through September as long as he showed up for 28 days total.
Perhaps that's true now, I don't know. But according to the linked Boston Globe story:
Although the records of Bush's service in 1973 are contradictory, some of them suggest that he did a flurry of drills in 1973 in Houston -- a weekend in April and then 38 days of training crammed into May, June, and July. But Lechliter, the retired colonel, concluded after reviewing National Guard regulations that Bush should not have received credit -- or pay -- for many of those days either. The regulations, Lechliter and others said, required that any scheduled drills that Bush missed be made up either within 15 days before or 30 days after the date of the drill.
I think you misread. The new information shows that Bush was missing from an active alert mission on Oct. 6, 1927. And as that linked story says, "The records show his last flight was in April 1972, which is consistent with pay records indicating Bush had a lapse of duty between April and October of that year." I think you also misunderstand what's being debated. His trip to the dentist in January 1973 doesn't prove that he performed required drills between April and October of 1972.
Furthermore, when you hint that it was OK for him to miss drills, it suggests you didn't read today's Boston Globe story:
Lawrence J. Korb... said Bush could have been ordered to active duty for missing more than 10 percent of his required drills in any given year. Bush, according to the records, fell shy of that obligation in two successive fiscal years.
Bush did skip drills from April-October 1972, pretty much everyone agrees. The Bush campaign's response is to point to John Calhoun, who is not a credible witness, and to suggest Bush made them up later. The Bush campaign has basically said that the fact he wasn't dishonorably discharged proves everything was fine. But he didn't make them up according to regulations:
Although the records of Bush's service in 1973 are contradictory, some of them suggest that he did a flurry of drills in 1973 in Houston -- a weekend in April and then 38 days of training crammed into May, June, and July. But Lechliter, the retired colonel, concluded after reviewing National Guard regulations that Bush should not have received credit -- or pay -- for many of those days either. The regulations, Lechliter and others said, required that any scheduled drills that Bush missed be made up either within 15 days before or 30 days after the date of the drill.
The penalty for missing those drills -- like the penalty for walking off the Houston base without permission, and the penalty for (it is starting to appear) going to Cambridge without permission -- was being bounced from the Guard into an involuntary 2 years of active duty in Vietnam. But that never happened. As the Globe says, that suggests his superiors were willing to look the other way:
''It appears that no one wanted to hold him accountable," said retired Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr., who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's director of the Air National Guard.
So, regarding April to October of 1972, you have no dental records, you have no pay stubs, and you have a personal recollection from someone who can't keep his story straight and contradicts the available evidence. On the other hand, nobody else who was there remembers seeing him during that time, including people in his small unit who were actively looking for him, the records show he had to make up the drills he missed during that time (after regulations allowed), and, again, we have "pay records indicating Bush had a lapse of duty between April and October of that year." This isn't rocket science. It's pretty clear he just didn't bother to show up, and his superiors let it slide -- presumably because of his family name.
As of a few minutes ago in this discussion, there have been many people attacking Kerry, a few who attacked Kerry while offering support for Bush, only two who offered any proof that Bush had met his service obligations... and no one who simply provided a factual defense of Bush's record.
Anyone who'd like to walk us through the facts that support Bush, without simultaneously smearing a decorated combat veteran, would be a breath of fresh air.
(The two who linked to this Byron York piece from March, thank you. But (a) that piece is from March and much new information and analysis has come to light since then, little of it favorable for Bush; (b) it admits that the documentation shows Bush simply didn't serve from May to September of 1972, which is the whole point. The one fellow who says he saw Bush during that time, John Calhoun, is less than reliable and the pay stubs contradict him. Apart from that, the best that National Review can do is to quote people who say it's possible Bush was there, but they don't remember seeing him. Faint praise.)
Yes, he misspoke, saying he was Lt. Governor when he did not attain that post until later. Do you seriously think that means his entire recollection is made-up?
And yes, the media exonerated Bush in 1999. Since then, disclosure after disclosure has turned up new evidence. Do you think you will be wiser to ignore new facts of the past five years?
In any case, his interview tonight should be very interesting to watch.
It is a twisted state of affairs that George W. Bush's most avid surrogates are trying to make this election turn on the question of whether Lt. John Kerry was or was not in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968...
It is certain that by this time, the United States had long been making secret incursions across the border...
...the evidence indicates he did cover those 40 miles: He was near (or in?) Cambodia in the morning...
I would think that a man who'd seen combat, in all its ugliness, served honorably, and then returned to civilian life and spoke truth to power about the horrors of war would be less likely to mislead the country into unnecessary war.
Doesn't that seem logical? Isn't that corroborating evidence for the whole tragic arc of the last two years?
Kerry supported giving the President the authority to initiate the war in Iraq. That's not the same as launching the war. When Bush and his campaign say that Kerry "voted to go to war," they are lying.
And yes, Kerry may have to deal with the aftermath of Iraq in the same sticky, deliberate way that Bush will. There's no easy way out; that's why they call it a quagmire. But re-electing Bush gives him four more years to invade more countries unnecessarily. When I read the transcript of John Kerry speaking to the Senate in 1971, I can't help but feel that this man is more to be trusted with our troops than a man who spent the early '70s "boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before."
I'm not a typical liberal, perhaps; I support nuclear power, for one thing. I strongly believe in free markets wherever appropriate; I believe America should pre-emptively root out terrorists; and I'm a free-speech absolutist, which, sadly, separates me from both sides of the modern political spectrum.
Hm, maybe we need a Jon Stewart/Daily Show topic...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm watching the show too... "cache" is a bit of a misnomer, I mean, pretty much every chunk of data in Slash is cached, but basically we just post stories n minutes ahead of time. During that time (for n < 20) they are visible to subscribers -- and then they go live for the rest of the world whenever we've scheduled them to.
More informative context is available here.
Which includes a little bit of the research that made today's feat possible.
I love private industry. I think today is an interesting beginning.
Finally private industry has shown it can rocket a man 62 miles straight up and stay there for a couple of minutes! Congratulations! Now all it has to do is send someone to, you know, orbit the globe, and it will have caught up with government-sponsored space flight a third of a century ago.
If someone from the W3C cares enough, they can write the email address that they get on the resulting page and tell us that their script is smarter now.
You didn't even read my comment before hitting reply, did you?
As I wrote: "the five 'instant polls' of viewers after the debate gave Gore the win by an average of 9.6%."
You have the facts exactly backwards. This is precisely the problem: the media has put a false impression in most people's minds (including yours). Go read the dailyhowler.com links in my original comment.
Gore's advisers thought he won because he did win. As the Daily Howler points out, the five "instant polls" of viewers after the debate gave Gore the win by an average of 9.6% -- a huge margin, especially considering more Bush supporters were watching.
And that perception did change in the hours and days to come, until finally the American people were browbeaten into believing that Bush had won. But one can't blame GOP press releases and emails. The fault lies squarely on the media, as the Daily Howler has been demonstrating all week.
Whether you think our media has a conservative bias or not, it's indisputable that it let Bush get away with murder after that first debate, refusing to do even basic fact-checking on his blatant errors, and it crucified Gore, mostly by focusing on absurdities and trivia like the color of his suit or his body language. Let's put the blame where blame is due.
Could you explain how you think it is a "lie" that illiteracy in this country has declined every decade since 1870? I went to the webpage you linked and it didn't say anything about this.
But if you want to include everyone, feel free -- the numbers look much worse for your point of view when you do. The decline in illiteracy is far steeper.
That is exactly backwards. It is a complete lie.
I confess I have no idea how one would obtain accurate readings on "numeracy," since the very concept was only popularized perhaps 30 years ago. Nor can I fathom how he could characterize "science learning" today as worse than in the days before Darwin, continental drift, and modern astronomy. (I assume Mr. Badnarik is in favor of private schooling, though our private schools mostly ignore or outright contradict Darwin, arguably the most important scientist of the past 250 years. An understanding of biological evolution is critical to epidemiology and genetics, two fields of research that in the years to come I hope will not be hampered by the growing trend of religious schooling.)
But though those claims are perhaps unprovable, his claim about literacy is outright false. It took me about 30 seconds to find this page using Google: Literacy from 1870 to 1979: Illiteracy.
(For those who want to look the numbers up themselves, U-Virginia has a Historical Census Browser. The stats on literacy start in 1870.)
The literacy of every segment of the U.S. population except the foreign-born has grown in every year (except the estimation of 1950, which is likely a statistical blip). It's not a question of the trend briefly halting: the trend is relentlessly toward higher and higher literacy rates.
Probably the most reliable indicator of literacy is that of the white population (since including segments of society largely removed from educational opportunities would bias the numbers). The percentage of illiterate white persons 14 years of age or older was as follows:
1870: 11.5%
1880: 9.4%
1890: 7.7%
1900: 6.2%
1910: 5.0%
1920: 4.0%
1930: 3.0%
1920: 2.0%
1947: 1.8%
1952: 1.8%
1959: 1.6%
1969: 0.7%
1979: 0.4%
If he wants to thrash our public schools, Mr. Badnarik will need a different switch.
I thought we nailed all the unencoded ampersands, though, I'll check that out. Eventually :)
The commercial professionals who are lending a hand are the Peter and Shane I mentioned earlier. Peter started work on an XHTML theme earlier this year and has made some great progress. If you're interested in joining the fun, drop by the IRC channel, #slash on irc.slashnet.org, I'm sure they would welcome patches. Peter's code is the strict-600 module available via anonymous cvs at strict.openflows.org:/var/lib/cvs if you'd like to check it out. As I said, sooner or later we hope to take the steps to incorporate that work into the core Slash code, so if you're interested in contributing to Slashdot, joining our little community and contributing patches would be a great way to help.
The conspiracy theories are fun to read though... hey, I said we emitted HTML 3.2... I never said it was valid :)
For the record...
Slashdot does emit code to an HTML standard, it just happens to be HTML 3.2. That's a standard. Call it "outdated" if you like but if it works, it works, right? Isn't that the point of standards, you don't have to change them every time something new comes along?
We're hoping to move to XHTML in the future (sometime within the next year, for sure, I hope) but like everything else it goes on our priority list based on resource-cost and benefit. There are bugs that need to be squashed, meaningful features to be added, and performance improvements we need to put into place that come first.
Honestly XHTML will probably just save us a little bandwidth and make the site look a little prettier, but only the hardcore readers will notice the difference, at least if we do it right. The only real long-term benefit will be to us coders -- it should let us rip out kludgy old code, but of course that's almost as tedious as writing it in the first place, so it's a mixed win.
Yes, it's a mozilla bug, not a Slash code bug. They've known about it for a year, but it's fixed now, yay.
No, it doesn't help that someone else took a static rendering of our homepage and converted it to CSS. That's a fun experiment but of course it's very different to change the code to emit HTML to a different standard.
A shout out to Peter and Shane here for working on the XHTML theme :)
OK, resume flaming us and our sucky HTML, Offtopics all around! :)
One basis for comparison is that of the U.S.'s $11 trillion economy, only about $2 trillion is reasonably available for a budget, since it is politically impossible (and of course unwise) to tax, say, 50% of the nation's production. So the analogy might be a family with $110,000 income that has to spend $90,000 of that on nondiscretionary expenditures: let's say mortgage, taxes, food, insurance, and so on. That's pretty much impossible for that income level; anyone at $110,000 has a lot more than $20,000 worth of discretionary spending, so people will have a hard time imagining it.
Statistically, what household income level has about $20,000 in discretionary spending? Or maybe I'm looking for what household income level has $8,500 discretionary income, which I guess would be proportional to the fed's discretionary spending. Hmmm... or am I looking for total fed revenue minus nondiscretionary spending, which I would guess at about $4,000 for a household?
Maybe a household earning $40,000 a year would have about $4,000 in discretionary income. And how would that family look at a $74,000 accumulated debt? Would that family think it wise to not only spend that $4,000 on new stuff instead of paying down their debt, but then also rack up an extra $4,000 in debt every year?
Maybe if there was a way to tell this story in numbers that were proportional to household discretionary income? As GDP and governmental tax revenue grew, that could be understood as a household getting promotions and better jobs. The war debt from 1945 could be seen as a major household expenditure that was paid down until 1955, and then stayed manageable because of the "promotions" that the country kept getting (the American miracle of increasing productivity). It lasted right up until Reagan, at which point the country started spending much faster than its wage-earners got "promotions"...
(Note: much of the reason the economy is taking so long to recover is, obviously, the war in Iraq, and the fact that Bush's tax cuts were back-loaded, having most of their effect in the years to come, not in the three years we just lived through.)
And you simply have no idea what you're talking about re "massively increased spending." Go look up what the annual increases in discretionary spending were under Clinton and under Bush. Even Cato calls it "The Republican Spending Explosion."
But most Americans don't have a clue what is going on. I saw a billboard last night that said, "Remember, it's your money" -- and it was an ad for Bush-Cheney! The administration that insisted tax cuts were the prescription for times of plenty, for times of recession, for times of peace and times of war, has now seen the unwanted side-effects: a languid recovery, and a trillion dollars added to the debt. A budget surplus, the first in modern times, converted instantly to massive deficit.
Sometimes I wonder if there isn't a way to start talking about the debt as the balance on our nation's credit card. Maybe if we put overspending into terms that the average consumer could understand, and stuck to those terms, people could finally start to get it. This country produces $11 trillion of wealth every year, and, through our government, we are $7.4 trillion in debt. Maybe if we start comparing the government to a family that's making $110,000 a year, but is $74,000 in debt, we could have a real national debate about government spending. The question is not whether "it's your money," but whether, being $74,000 in debt, it's a good idea for you to get a brand-new credit card and go rack up another $4,000 on it every year -- as Bush and the Republican Congress are now doing.
Especially when massive, unavoidable costs are just over the horizon.
Grover Norquist has declared his goal of drowning the government in a bathtub, and his way of doing it is to spend it into oblivion. The Republican Party has sold out the country by signing on with this brand of destruction. What it's going to yield is not prosperity and limited government, but anarchy and -- very possibly, in the decades to come -- the end of America as an economically powerful beacon of freedom. When our children are serfs for the wealthy who have bought up the country, when the old are baking to death because we can't afford to buy them air conditioners, when the poor and the sick die alone because we can't provide them with basic health care, when the unregulated food makes us sick and the unregulated drugs are a crapshoot, when half the country will never be able to retire and will be forced to work at McDonald's and Wal-Mart until their bodies fail, I hope people remember the name of Grover Norquist, and who it was that put his theories into practice. One percent of this country will always enjoy all the best things in life, but everyone else will be wondering what it was like before our government was drowned, and if those folks back in the '90s and '00s knew how good they had it.
Perhaps that's true now, I don't know. But according to the linked Boston Globe story:
Furthermore, when you hint that it was OK for him to miss drills, it suggests you didn't read today's Boston Globe story:
Bush did skip drills from April-October 1972, pretty much everyone agrees. The Bush campaign's response is to point to John Calhoun, who is not a credible witness, and to suggest Bush made them up later. The Bush campaign has basically said that the fact he wasn't dishonorably discharged proves everything was fine. But he didn't make them up according to regulations:
The penalty for missing those drills -- like the penalty for walking off the Houston base without permission, and the penalty for (it is starting to appear) going to Cambridge without permission -- was being bounced from the Guard into an involuntary 2 years of active duty in Vietnam. But that never happened. As the Globe says, that suggests his superiors were willing to look the other way:
So, regarding April to October of 1972, you have no dental records, you have no pay stubs, and you have a personal recollection from someone who can't keep his story straight and contradicts the available evidence. On the other hand, nobody else who was there remembers seeing him during that time, including people in his small unit who were actively looking for him, the records show he had to make up the drills he missed during that time (after regulations allowed), and, again, we have "pay records indicating Bush had a lapse of duty between April and October of that year." This isn't rocket science. It's pretty clear he just didn't bother to show up, and his superiors let it slide -- presumably because of his family name.
I don't think Clinton ran on a platform of being faithful to his wife, and yet...
Anyone who'd like to walk us through the facts that support Bush, without simultaneously smearing a decorated combat veteran, would be a breath of fresh air.
(The two who linked to this Byron York piece from March, thank you. But (a) that piece is from March and much new information and analysis has come to light since then, little of it favorable for Bush; (b) it admits that the documentation shows Bush simply didn't serve from May to September of 1972, which is the whole point. The one fellow who says he saw Bush during that time, John Calhoun, is less than reliable and the pay stubs contradict him. Apart from that, the best that National Review can do is to quote people who say it's possible Bush was there, but they don't remember seeing him. Faint praise.)
And yes, the media exonerated Bush in 1999. Since then, disclosure after disclosure has turned up new evidence. Do you think you will be wiser to ignore new facts of the past five years?
In any case, his interview tonight should be very interesting to watch.
Holiday in Cambodia, by Fred Kaplan:
Doesn't that seem logical? Isn't that corroborating evidence for the whole tragic arc of the last two years?
Kerry supported giving the President the authority to initiate the war in Iraq. That's not the same as launching the war. When Bush and his campaign say that Kerry "voted to go to war," they are lying.
And yes, Kerry may have to deal with the aftermath of Iraq in the same sticky, deliberate way that Bush will. There's no easy way out; that's why they call it a quagmire. But re-electing Bush gives him four more years to invade more countries unnecessarily. When I read the transcript of John Kerry speaking to the Senate in 1971, I can't help but feel that this man is more to be trusted with our troops than a man who spent the early '70s "boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before."
I'm not a typical liberal, perhaps; I support nuclear power, for one thing. I strongly believe in free markets wherever appropriate; I believe America should pre-emptively root out terrorists; and I'm a free-speech absolutist, which, sadly, separates me from both sides of the modern political spectrum.
Hm, maybe we need a Jon Stewart/Daily Show topic...
Shut up, pudge, you jerk!