Many years ago I was working on a project where five or so large bureaucratic tech companies teamed together to bid on a NASA project. The project had lots of moving parts, and within a week or two we found that we had more than 40 hours a week of scheduled meetings. It turned out to be very liberating, because it was obvious to everybody that if everybody went to all the meetings then nobody would get any work done. So you showed up for the 8am status meeting to know what was going on for the day, and were expected to blow off any meetings you didn't really need to be at. The 8am wasn't strictly a standup, but there weren't enough chairs in the biggest room so half the people ended up standing, and it usually only lasted about 10-15 minutes.
Religious bigotry is just as offensive when so-called liberals do it - you may not always be as vehement about it as right-wingers are, but you're also supposed to know better than they do, and be better people than they are.
Also, your insults show that you really weren't paying attention during the '00s. Religious right-wingers didn't take over the party, neocons and machine politicians like Rove and Norquist did, and they pushed all the religious conservatives' big well-marked buttons to get them to become politically active right-wingers, just as they pushed all the buttons of the anti-debt folks (after Bush was done tripling the national debt and leaving Obama with a huge deficit, a couple of wars, and a broken financial industry to bail out.) They were at some risk of losing them in the 2005-2007 time frame, and if you read moderate-liberal sources like The Huffington Post, you'd have seen articles about how the religious conservatives were starting to notice that the political right-wingers had been using them, getting votes, and not giving anything significant back.
During the Tea Party / Anti-KenyanMuslimFurriner-Obama Election period, the Republican machine was able to give them something to come back to that didn't feel quite like the same old politicians using them, and the current election campaign has been mostly about the machine telling the right-wingers that their job was to get Republicans re-elected, not to actually influence policy, so they should shut up and vote for Romney now because none of the actual right-wingers are electable.
In In case you haven''t paid attention to the Republican Party over the last dozen years, they've got a lot of tightly organized talking points that the party leaders push out through all the different media and craziness groups - Anti-tax, pro-war, anti-gay, Obama's-a-socialist, anti-deficit if the Democrats are in office, don't-worry-about-deficits-we-have-higher-priorities if Republicans are in office, etc. Some of these are core values that the party leaders really care about, and others are tactical positions that are useful for getting different groups of voters involved. The finance folks don't really care about gay marriage, but they'll go along on that because it brings in religious conservative voters who show up at polls and rallies and donate money.
Anti-science is a tactical position; anti-climate change is a core message from their corporate sponsors. Bashing evolution makes it easier to bash climate change science, as well as bringing in religious conservative voters, and gets the rabble in the habit of believing talking points their leaders hand them, but the party leadership doesn't really care about evolution - they care very very much about not having Congress make laws about climate change that would affect Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Agribusiness. And they don't care if it means destroying science education in schools for a generation as long as their bottom line is protected for a while; the kids who are going to be scientists can learn evolution in college.
I don't know about Ireland, but most European and Commonwealth ballots are much simpler than US ones - you're voting for a member of parliament, and maybe a provincial and city council member, and polling places don't need to be very large. Shakrai's New York State example had about 500 ballots cast in his polling place, which would be like sorting ten decks of playing cards if there's just one candidate. Split the work among a couple of people, and you're done in 15 minutes, trivial to audit, and you've typically got at least one poll worker from each of the 3-10 parties running. If there are three levels of government on the ballot, it still doesn't take long.
And yes, New York's ballots are a lot more complicated, and here in California we've typically got 5-10 ballot questions or bond referenda in addition to the candidates. I prefer optical scanners to most of the technologies out there, but the old-fashioned lever machines were usually pretty reliable.
After the US 2000 Bush-Gore election, the US Republicans convinced a lot of governments to buy new fancy electronic voting machines, including Ireland. The US models included a "Default to Republican" feature, which worked just fine when they tested it over here. The problem is that it means something different over in Ireland....
Ok, the main reason "Why?" is that it was a present from my wife, and it's 128MB from back when that was a typical size for a USB memory stick. It was geeky and cute. You could fit a small Linux distro on it if you wanted, though I mainly just used it to move files around (and open boxes), and if you need to fly on an airplane, the memory stick part pops out so you can carry it without the knife body. And even today, I very seldom use data files bigger than 128MB (except for music, ISOs, and mailboxes), so it's useful for carrying things around. (OTOH, 4GB memory sticks are getting to be too small for a lot of things, since Outlook mailboxes are bloated and collections of music are much larger than individual tunes or albums.)
If there's an unnecessary handicapped spot, able-bodied people have to walk at most one parking place farther (usually less.) But during the times of day when it's not very busy, the average able-bodied person already gets to walk less, because the parking lot's not very full, so they already win. And while the original article was about New Zealanders, we're Americans, and making us get extra exercise walking in from the parking lot is about the best National Health Care we're going to get.
I used to work in an office building that had been converted from a retail store. The parking lot was designed for retail, which was great - the worst space in the lot was still better than the best spaces in our main location. It had four handicapped spaces, and maybe once a month we'd have somebody park in one of them; my officemate joked that since he was deaf, he needed a handicapped space. So we had to walk 10 feet farther; no big deal.
But for retail use, that would have been about right, given the size of the store.
The standard fire department protocol for dealing with a car that's parked in a fire lane if they get there and there's a fire is to break the windows and run the hose through the car, or else push it out of the way with a fire truck and then break the windows.
That's the advantage of using a cane - it's too hard to bash somebody's tail lights with a wheelchair...
Ok, I've never actually done that. And I don't use canes very often, just ever few years when I've broken a foot or toe or trashed my knee. On the other hand, the van I owned after college had a big jagged rusty gash along the side from when the previous owner had sideswiped something, and it's amazing how close you can park it to another car, even when they thought that by parking across two spaces they'd keep anybody else from parking near enough to scratch their car.
It doesn't always work, because sometimes somebody's given it a password other than "password" or "passw0rd" or "Passw0rd", and sometimes I want my actual name on an account, but for the most part the worst case is that somebody will start writing letters to the editor of the New York Times or Podunk Gazette with my name on them, or my Yahoo account will get spam advertising sales in zip codes other than 90210.
The party followers' beliefs are fairly different, and the Republican right-wing machine has spent a decade or two getting their followers to be polarized and antagonistic, and getting their politicians to believe that Winning is the only value that really matters, and Following The Party Line is how you Win, and that the details can be filled in to match the needs of current events and/or the party's corporate sponsors ("Drill, Baby, Drill!" "Don't Increase Taxes on Job Creators!")
That's relatively independent of what the politicians do in office.
It used to be that "The Republicans are like the Tories, and the Democrats are also like the Tories." (Since then the Republicans have tried to move farther right, and Maggie Thatcher may not be badass enough for them.)
Back in the early 00's, George Lakoff (cog-sci professor at Berkeley) put out a short book called "Don't Think of an Elephant", about the framing tools that the Republican Party was using and how they get people to commit to one side or the other, and to view events and ideas the way the Fox News and similar PR machines want people to. There's a radical difference in how people in the different parties feel, and what they want, that's pretty much independent of what the politicians have been doing in office (and that's part of why both liberals and conservatives are annoyed at Obama, and why Republicans didn't complain when Bush tripled the Federal debt.)
The Republicans have been going for the gut instinct for over a decade, polarizing and radicalizing their voter base. The Democrats didn't do that much - most of them already disliked Bush and Cheney, but radical aggressive antagonism isn't a Democrat or Liberal value, and inspiring speech-making about shared values and Hopey Changey Stuff and organizing communities to bring about the greater good is. (Too bad Candidate Obama got replaced by President Obama after about a month in office:-)
The Rove/Norquist machine that brought Dubya Bush to power has always been aggressively polarizing. You're either with them or you're an anti-American pinko liberal socialist commie community-organizer-lover, and they got a lot of Republicans to buy in to it and a lot of politically inactive right-wingers to get active or at least to watch Fox News and throw popcorn at the TV set when Democrats' pictures are on. The fact that the ideology isn't philosophically based, adjusts to whatever's useful for creating partisan antagonism this week, and contains lots of messages from their corporate sponsors ("Drill, Baby, Drill!") doesn't mean it's not ideological or divisive. Look at the attacks on Nancy Pelosi - the fundamental reason for attacking her was that she was the lead Democrat in the House, even though she wouldn't have been elected Speaker if she'd been a radical.
And yes, both major parties believe in favoritism to big banks, deficit spending, the military-industrial complex, the drug war and the prison system that profits from it, and an increasingly invasive surveillance state, but that doesn't mean that "moderate" candidates agree with that - it means that "compromise" candidates do.
Before the current Right-wing machine took over the Republican party (people like Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, and the neocons), there used to be moderate Republicans, nicer than Nixon and farther left than Barry Goldwater. People like my mom, who care about good government, want fiscal responsibility but aren't scared of taxation if it goes to worthwhile programs, think that you shouldn't start wars just to keep defense contractors in business, and think that the job of religion in politics should be to tell politicians to be honest and to care about the poor. They've pretty much all been kicked out of the party, and she didn't vote for either Dubya Bush or his father, and she was really annoyed when Christine "Not A Witch" O'Donnell beat moderate Mike Castle for the Republican nomination in Delaware.
The most traditional Republican presidential candidate at the moment is Jon Huntsman. He's too far right for me, and too far right to really call a moderate, but he's not part of the right-wing crazy machine, and thinks that the fact that evolution and climate change are real is more important than what voting blocks they attract or what corporate donors would be affected by laws about them (which is to say, "he doesn't have a chance of getting the nomination.") Ron Paul's not far-right, but he's a radical, not a moderate. Romney's relatively moderate, but he's doing deals with the machine, and if you look at the current Republican debating process, it's really a circus designed to convince the right-wing voters that they'll have to pick Romney to beat Obama. (Donald Trump was the comedy warm-up act, and Gingrich is the biggest of the clowns, as well as being personally opportunistic, but a lot of the process was Perry replacing Bachmann and still being an obvious non-starter.)
Will Americans Elect end up attracting more Republicans than Democrats? Probably not, but at least it's an interesting experiment in politics, and it might end up being as influential as Joe Trippi's online organizing for Howard Dean, which led the way for Obama's broad-based campaign. Alternatively, it could end up like a mirror to Ross Perot's campaign, which attracted enough Republicans to give Bill Clinton the election, and then fizzled out because Perot wouldn't let go of it and let it grow into a bottom-up party.
Yes, if you go up to Juarez or some other border town, start flashing around lots of cash, and tell people you're trying to get into the wholesale import/export business, there are many people who will consider you to be a target and others who will consider you to be DEA bait because nobody'd be that stupid otherwise.
But the Maya region is the far other end of the country, there's very little gang activity, and the Zapatista rebellion has been quiet for years as well. Sure, there are pickpockets and corrupt cops*, so you'll have to think about which pocket to carry your cash in (:-), but basically you'll be fine. Chichen Itza is stunning, and you want to go there, as well as Tulum or some of the sites farther south. Merida and some of the other colonial towns are really cool, though I'd recommend not planning a trip for mid-summer (too hot) or hurricane season. Cancun has endless supplies of beaches, margaritas, and tourist traps if you want that kind of vacation, but there's also some Mexican or Mayan culture around there if you look for it.
* ( A friend of mine went there back in the late 90s, and drove into Merida about 4am. The bad part of having cops pull him over to extort a bribe was having to pay them $40; the good part was having them give him a lights-blinking escort through town because it was easier than explaining the directions to his hotel.)
Obviously they're supporting counterfeiting, so the first step is to confiscate their domain name using the (not yet passed) SOPA, and they can figure out about firing some intern props clerk later.
A decade ago, I had a Chinese coworker whose parents lived in Shanghai. They were on the upside of their housing bubble back then, and the general belief was that land and houses were the only things you could invest in that really held their value. They didn't have much of a stock market of their own, there was a lot of new money around, and the population's still growing and moving to the big cities, and as they guy said about land, "They ain't making any more of that stuff". By now, they're starting to slump, but the prices are so high it's cheaper to buy in the US.
Same sort of thing happened with Japanese investors in Hawaii in the 80s-90s, as they were going through their bubble years back home.
It's not just corporations supporting SOPA - it's also a number of unions and union-like organizations. Some of them are less surprising (AFTRA and other actors' and musicians' groups), but I wouldn't have expected the IBEW to be one of the bad guys.
There are website owners who are for SOPA. Most of them are big corporations, and they're not in the market segment that's using GoDaddy for their DNS service.
Yes, it's a dirty trick. But really, if you're going to a site politician-name.com, the ".com" part tells you it's a business - so Newt would only need that site if his services are for sale:-) Of course, if they are, it's a trademark violation for the Democrats to be offering to sell you Newt's services...
Slashdot Mirror
Many years ago I was working on a project where five or so large bureaucratic tech companies teamed together to bid on a NASA project. The project had lots of moving parts, and within a week or two we found that we had more than 40 hours a week of scheduled meetings. It turned out to be very liberating, because it was obvious to everybody that if everybody went to all the meetings then nobody would get any work done. So you showed up for the 8am status meeting to know what was going on for the day, and were expected to blow off any meetings you didn't really need to be at. The 8am wasn't strictly a standup, but there weren't enough chairs in the biggest room so half the people ended up standing, and it usually only lasted about 10-15 minutes.
Of course it's ok to be talking against both sides of the issue - Newt always does!
Religious bigotry is just as offensive when so-called liberals do it - you may not always be as vehement about it as right-wingers are, but you're also supposed to know better than they do, and be better people than they are.
Also, your insults show that you really weren't paying attention during the '00s. Religious right-wingers didn't take over the party, neocons and machine politicians like Rove and Norquist did, and they pushed all the religious conservatives' big well-marked buttons to get them to become politically active right-wingers, just as they pushed all the buttons of the anti-debt folks (after Bush was done tripling the national debt and leaving Obama with a huge deficit, a couple of wars, and a broken financial industry to bail out.) They were at some risk of losing them in the 2005-2007 time frame, and if you read moderate-liberal sources like The Huffington Post, you'd have seen articles about how the religious conservatives were starting to notice that the political right-wingers had been using them, getting votes, and not giving anything significant back.
During the Tea Party / Anti-KenyanMuslimFurriner-Obama Election period, the Republican machine was able to give them something to come back to that didn't feel quite like the same old politicians using them, and the current election campaign has been mostly about the machine telling the right-wingers that their job was to get Republicans re-elected, not to actually influence policy, so they should shut up and vote for Romney now because none of the actual right-wingers are electable.
xbmc.org is another open-source competitor to MythTV, Tivo, etc. Apparently was originally for XBoxes but has spread beyond that.
And it'll really only fit in your pocket if you're using a small memory stick instead of a hard drive...*
...
(*No, really, there were no double-entendres intended when I wrote that, but they just wrote themselves anyway.....)
In In case you haven''t paid attention to the Republican Party over the last dozen years, they've got a lot of tightly organized talking points that the party leaders push out through all the different media and craziness groups - Anti-tax, pro-war, anti-gay, Obama's-a-socialist, anti-deficit if the Democrats are in office, don't-worry-about-deficits-we-have-higher-priorities if Republicans are in office, etc. Some of these are core values that the party leaders really care about, and others are tactical positions that are useful for getting different groups of voters involved. The finance folks don't really care about gay marriage, but they'll go along on that because it brings in religious conservative voters who show up at polls and rallies and donate money.
Anti-science is a tactical position; anti-climate change is a core message from their corporate sponsors. Bashing evolution makes it easier to bash climate change science, as well as bringing in religious conservative voters, and gets the rabble in the habit of believing talking points their leaders hand them, but the party leadership doesn't really care about evolution - they care very very much about not having Congress make laws about climate change that would affect Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Agribusiness. And they don't care if it means destroying science education in schools for a generation as long as their bottom line is protected for a while; the kids who are going to be scientists can learn evolution in college.
I don't know about Ireland, but most European and Commonwealth ballots are much simpler than US ones - you're voting for a member of parliament, and maybe a provincial and city council member, and polling places don't need to be very large. Shakrai's New York State example had about 500 ballots cast in his polling place, which would be like sorting ten decks of playing cards if there's just one candidate. Split the work among a couple of people, and you're done in 15 minutes, trivial to audit, and you've typically got at least one poll worker from each of the 3-10 parties running. If there are three levels of government on the ballot, it still doesn't take long.
And yes, New York's ballots are a lot more complicated, and here in California we've typically got 5-10 ballot questions or bond referenda in addition to the candidates. I prefer optical scanners to most of the technologies out there, but the old-fashioned lever machines were usually pretty reliable.
After the US 2000 Bush-Gore election, the US Republicans convinced a lot of governments to buy new fancy electronic voting machines, including Ireland. The US models included a "Default to Republican" feature, which worked just fine when they tested it over here. The problem is that it means something different over in Ireland....
Ok, the main reason "Why?" is that it was a present from my wife, and it's 128MB from back when that was a typical size for a USB memory stick. It was geeky and cute. You could fit a small Linux distro on it if you wanted, though I mainly just used it to move files around (and open boxes), and if you need to fly on an airplane, the memory stick part pops out so you can carry it without the knife body. And even today, I very seldom use data files bigger than 128MB (except for music, ISOs, and mailboxes), so it's useful for carrying things around. (OTOH, 4GB memory sticks are getting to be too small for a lot of things, since Outlook mailboxes are bloated and collections of music are much larger than individual tunes or albums.)
If there's an unnecessary handicapped spot, able-bodied people have to walk at most one parking place farther (usually less.) But during the times of day when it's not very busy, the average able-bodied person already gets to walk less, because the parking lot's not very full, so they already win. And while the original article was about New Zealanders, we're Americans, and making us get extra exercise walking in from the parking lot is about the best National Health Care we're going to get.
I used to work in an office building that had been converted from a retail store. The parking lot was designed for retail, which was great - the worst space in the lot was still better than the best spaces in our main location. It had four handicapped spaces, and maybe once a month we'd have somebody park in one of them; my officemate joked that since he was deaf, he needed a handicapped space. So we had to walk 10 feet farther; no big deal.
But for retail use, that would have been about right, given the size of the store.
The standard fire department protocol for dealing with a car that's parked in a fire lane if they get there and there's a fire is to break the windows and run the hose through the car, or else push it out of the way with a fire truck and then break the windows.
That's the advantage of using a cane - it's too hard to bash somebody's tail lights with a wheelchair...
Ok, I've never actually done that. And I don't use canes very often, just ever few years when I've broken a foot or toe or trashed my knee. On the other hand, the van I owned after college had a big jagged rusty gash along the side from when the previous owner had sideswiped something, and it's amazing how close you can park it to another car, even when they thought that by parking across two spaces they'd keep anybody else from parking near enough to scratch their car.
It doesn't always work, because sometimes somebody's given it a password other than "password" or "passw0rd" or "Passw0rd", and sometimes I want my actual name on an account, but for the most part the worst case is that somebody will start writing letters to the editor of the New York Times or Podunk Gazette with my name on them, or my Yahoo account will get spam advertising sales in zip codes other than 90210.
The party followers' beliefs are fairly different, and the Republican right-wing machine has spent a decade or two getting their followers to be polarized and antagonistic, and getting their politicians to believe that Winning is the only value that really matters, and Following The Party Line is how you Win, and that the details can be filled in to match the needs of current events and/or the party's corporate sponsors ("Drill, Baby, Drill!" "Don't Increase Taxes on Job Creators!")
That's relatively independent of what the politicians do in office.
It used to be that "The Republicans are like the Tories, and the Democrats are also like the Tories." (Since then the Republicans have tried to move farther right, and Maggie Thatcher may not be badass enough for them.)
Back in the early 00's, George Lakoff (cog-sci professor at Berkeley) put out a short book called "Don't Think of an Elephant", about the framing tools that the Republican Party was using and how they get people to commit to one side or the other, and to view events and ideas the way the Fox News and similar PR machines want people to. There's a radical difference in how people in the different parties feel, and what they want, that's pretty much independent of what the politicians have been doing in office (and that's part of why both liberals and conservatives are annoyed at Obama, and why Republicans didn't complain when Bush tripled the Federal debt.)
The Republicans have been going for the gut instinct for over a decade, polarizing and radicalizing their voter base. The Democrats didn't do that much - most of them already disliked Bush and Cheney, but radical aggressive antagonism isn't a Democrat or Liberal value, and inspiring speech-making about shared values and Hopey Changey Stuff and organizing communities to bring about the greater good is. (Too bad Candidate Obama got replaced by President Obama after about a month in office :-)
The Rove/Norquist machine that brought Dubya Bush to power has always been aggressively polarizing. You're either with them or you're an anti-American pinko liberal socialist commie community-organizer-lover, and they got a lot of Republicans to buy in to it and a lot of politically inactive right-wingers to get active or at least to watch Fox News and throw popcorn at the TV set when Democrats' pictures are on. The fact that the ideology isn't philosophically based, adjusts to whatever's useful for creating partisan antagonism this week, and contains lots of messages from their corporate sponsors ("Drill, Baby, Drill!") doesn't mean it's not ideological or divisive. Look at the attacks on Nancy Pelosi - the fundamental reason for attacking her was that she was the lead Democrat in the House, even though she wouldn't have been elected Speaker if she'd been a radical.
And yes, both major parties believe in favoritism to big banks, deficit spending, the military-industrial complex, the drug war and the prison system that profits from it, and an increasingly invasive surveillance state, but that doesn't mean that "moderate" candidates agree with that - it means that "compromise" candidates do.
Before the current Right-wing machine took over the Republican party (people like Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, and the neocons), there used to be moderate Republicans, nicer than Nixon and farther left than Barry Goldwater. People like my mom, who care about good government, want fiscal responsibility but aren't scared of taxation if it goes to worthwhile programs, think that you shouldn't start wars just to keep defense contractors in business, and think that the job of religion in politics should be to tell politicians to be honest and to care about the poor. They've pretty much all been kicked out of the party, and she didn't vote for either Dubya Bush or his father, and she was really annoyed when Christine "Not A Witch" O'Donnell beat moderate Mike Castle for the Republican nomination in Delaware.
The most traditional Republican presidential candidate at the moment is Jon Huntsman. He's too far right for me, and too far right to really call a moderate, but he's not part of the right-wing crazy machine, and thinks that the fact that evolution and climate change are real is more important than what voting blocks they attract or what corporate donors would be affected by laws about them (which is to say, "he doesn't have a chance of getting the nomination.") Ron Paul's not far-right, but he's a radical, not a moderate. Romney's relatively moderate, but he's doing deals with the machine, and if you look at the current Republican debating process, it's really a circus designed to convince the right-wing voters that they'll have to pick Romney to beat Obama. (Donald Trump was the comedy warm-up act, and Gingrich is the biggest of the clowns, as well as being personally opportunistic, but a lot of the process was Perry replacing Bachmann and still being an obvious non-starter.)
Will Americans Elect end up attracting more Republicans than Democrats? Probably not, but at least it's an interesting experiment in politics, and it might end up being as influential as Joe Trippi's online organizing for Howard Dean, which led the way for Obama's broad-based campaign. Alternatively, it could end up like a mirror to Ross Perot's campaign, which attracted enough Republicans to give Bill Clinton the election, and then fizzled out because Perot wouldn't let go of it and let it grow into a bottom-up party.
Yes, if you go up to Juarez or some other border town, start flashing around lots of cash, and tell people you're trying to get into the wholesale import/export business, there are many people who will consider you to be a target and others who will consider you to be DEA bait because nobody'd be that stupid otherwise.
But the Maya region is the far other end of the country, there's very little gang activity, and the Zapatista rebellion has been quiet for years as well. Sure, there are pickpockets and corrupt cops*, so you'll have to think about which pocket to carry your cash in (:-), but basically you'll be fine. Chichen Itza is stunning, and you want to go there, as well as Tulum or some of the sites farther south. Merida and some of the other colonial towns are really cool, though I'd recommend not planning a trip for mid-summer (too hot) or hurricane season. Cancun has endless supplies of beaches, margaritas, and tourist traps if you want that kind of vacation, but there's also some Mexican or Mayan culture around there if you look for it.
* ( A friend of mine went there back in the late 90s, and drove into Merida about 4am. The bad part of having cops pull him over to extort a bribe was having to pay them $40; the good part was having them give him a lights-blinking escort through town because it was easier than explaining the directions to his hotel.)
Obviously they're supporting counterfeiting, so the first step is to confiscate their domain name using the (not yet passed) SOPA, and they can figure out about firing some intern props clerk later.
Housing prices holding their value? Here? What's he smoking?
A decade ago, I had a Chinese coworker whose parents lived in Shanghai. They were on the upside of their housing bubble back then, and the general belief was that land and houses were the only things you could invest in that really held their value. They didn't have much of a stock market of their own, there was a lot of new money around, and the population's still growing and moving to the big cities, and as they guy said about land, "They ain't making any more of that stuff". By now, they're starting to slump, but the prices are so high it's cheaper to buy in the US.
Same sort of thing happened with Japanese investors in Hawaii in the 80s-90s, as they were going through their bubble years back home.
It's not just corporations supporting SOPA - it's also a number of unions and union-like organizations. Some of them are less surprising (AFTRA and other actors' and musicians' groups), but I wouldn't have expected the IBEW to be one of the bad guys.
There are website owners who are for SOPA. Most of them are big corporations, and they're not in the market segment that's using GoDaddy for their DNS service.
Yes, it's a dirty trick. But really, if you're going to a site politician-name.com, the ".com" part tells you it's a business - so Newt would only need that site if his services are for sale :-) Of course, if they are, it's a trademark violation for the Democrats to be offering to sell you Newt's services...