Since when is 3 degrees C a few tenths? And really, the issue isn't environmental damage, per se, it's environmental change that we're worried about. Although environmental change will certainly cause damage in many discrete ways. But if you don't think the melting of the polar ice caps is going to have a substantial effect, you're deluding yourself.
And I don't know how you can say that CO2 is not harmful to the environment in any way. That is simply not true, no matter what some guy who founded Greenpeace says. Increased CO2 in the oceans is causing ocean acidification, which is damaging many types of ocean life, particularly coral reefs.
You have Family Guy's history slightly wrong. The letter writing campaign didn't get the show put back on the air or prompt them to syndicate the show.
Rather, Fox sold the syndication rights to Cartoon Network for a song because they thought it was worthless. About the same time as Adult Swim started airing the episodes, they also released the first season on DVD. Then, not only did Family Guy destroy in the ratings on Adult Swim, but the DVD became the best-selling television DVD set ever. That's when they realized there was money to be made and ordered new episodes.
But it was only after they started making money on the show that they brought it back. Compare that with other cancelled Fox shows like Firefly, Arrested Development, Greg the Bunny, etc. where there was a large cult following and dedicated fans, but not that much money to be made.
Likely it will be cracked and on the torrent sites before the May 3 release date, so your point doesn't really make sense. Even US-ians are still going to have to wait to play the game legally. It's not like 3 days is a long time period to wait.
Remember there are actual people in marketing and distribution that have to do real work in order to get the game into stores and promote it properly. Not every game is Halo. A simultaneous worldwide release sounds good on paper, but it adds a lot of complications. If you care that much about the game that you have to play it *immediately* then you should probably give them some money.
What about the credit and health care reforms? Not saying that big business didn't have a huge role in crafting that legislation, but it's hardly keeping with the status quo.
And it was pretty obvious even on the campaign trail that he was going to be a "big business" type of president. The guy raised a huge amount of money, and even his stated campaign views were pretty obviously in favor of corporate interests (which makes the calls of socialism even more ridiculous).
Re:I agree with some of what he says
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And let's not all forget that no matter what we think of his views, rational, empirical skepticism is not only welcome but necessary to the scientific process. Glad to see there are climate change skeptics that are still aware of the necessity of the scientific process.
I still have little doubt that he's going to be proved incorrect. It's pretty obvious at this point that the earth is warming at a significant rate.
A capitalist is someone who makes most of their income from interest. Capitalism is the lending of money for profit, it is not the free market. You can have a free market without capitalism. Just using capital does not make you a capitalist, hell, communists still use capital.
No, no, and no. Capitalism is not the lending of money for profit. Capitalism is the economic system where the means of production are controlled by private individuals who are motivated by profit. Under a true communist system, production is controlled entirely by the state. That is is the difference between communism and capitalism. It has nothing to do with lending.
I'm also very interested to discover how you can have a free market under communism since a free market is, by definition, a market without interference or regulation by the state.
Well, you are free to hang out with anyone you want to but maybe it's time to return the corporation to its roots, when the purpose of a corporation wasn't "maximize profit for the shareholders regardless of legal or ethical implications" but rather to provide a product or service that would be beneficial to the community.
You have a quite rosy view of history if you think this is really true. The first modern corporation was the Dutch East India Company, followed by the other mercantilist companies like the East India Company. None of which were very ethical in the means by which they made a profit.
Then you can look at the 19th and early 20th centuries at the railroad companies, Standard Oil, steel and coal companies breaking strikes and forcing their employees to basically act as indentured servants.
Corporations have always acted unethically in order to maximize profits.
You're creating a false dichotomy between capitalist and entrepreneurs. Capitalist does not mean the same thing as banker, or loan shark. You can directly invest money and still be a capitalist.
For example, say I have managed to save $150,000 of my wages. I use that money to start my own consulting company. Over time, my company grows to be worth several million dollars. Certainly I'm an entrepreneur, but am I not also a capitalist? I've used capital to create a business, and created a significant profit for myself with no usury or lending involved.
Would you not consider someone that starts a bank an entrepreneur? Or how about some of the most successful capitalists like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates? Are they not entrepreneurs, simply because their companies are now worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Or because they received capital from outside sources to help grow their companies?
And just as a general "smell test," how many entrepreneurs are there that don't consider themselves capitalists? Very few, I would imagine.
And thanks to Taco and/. we can all hear you bitch about how you hate your friends. How is that any different?
We're all a little narcissistic. It's human nature. If you don't care what they're posting, either don't read it or remove them from your friends list.
You need to study some political science and law. Right is a tricky word in law, and nailing it down to a simple definition is not easy. What you are talking about are natural rights. They are universal, self-evident, and unalienable, as you quoted from the Declaration of Independence. They are not granted by the government and they cannot be taken away or changed.
This differs from legal rights. Legal rights are rights bestowed by the government *to* the people and are highly dependent upon culture and legal traditions. Education is a right in this country, but under your idea it would not be. Police service, fire service, medical service (even before the new health care bill medical service was guaranteed in our country, albeit in a very strange and wasteful way), all of these things are legal rights but not natural rights.
All of these things are paid for by taxes, which by your account is akin to stealing. Well it's not stealing. We live in a prosperous society, and the burden for the services we expect our government to provide are is shared by all of us by paying taxes.
You are angry because you disagree politically with the purpose of the health care bill. You are trying to discredit the bill by claiming that this is a rights issue. It's not. No one is going to take your kidney and give it to someone else. That is not what the right to health care means, and you know it.
It really sucks, and I can empathize with your feelings (although not your views) but that's what happens in a democracy. You may be perfectly legitimate in your opinions, but this bill in no way abuses the rights of Americans. You're just mad because your side lost.
This will happen eventually I imagine, but right now ABC has to focus mainly on supporting their affiliates. That's where the majority of their revenue comes from. If they allowed Netflix to air shows 24 hours after the broadcast the affiliates would feel that they are being undercut.
What I said is fact, and nothing in your reply did anything to contradict any of it.
Actually what you said is not fact. This is what you said.
Afghanistan (and Iraq) had absolutely nothing to do with anything about 9/11 other than being places we could bomb the hell out of without compromising our petroleum supplies.
Which is most certainly not a fact. Your post then goes on to address all the issues you have with the conduct and purpose of the war, which is an entirely different subject, one that I was intentionally not addressing in my reply.
I stand by my statement. You were either exaggerating or don't understand what you're talking about. The Taliban government of Afghanistan sheltered al Qaeda and was directly involved in facilitating 9/11 and other attacks. For you to claim otherwise is ridiculous.
Afghanistan (and Iraq) had absolutely nothing to do with anything about 9/11 other than being places we could bomb the hell out of without compromising our petroleum supplies.
And before you start spouting any of that "but Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan" silliness, they're in a score of other countries too, most notably Saudi Arabia, where the attacks actually came from.
That's just ridiculous. Either you're intentionally exaggerating for effect or you have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
Al Qaeda has roots in militant extremist organizations from Saudi Arabia and other countries (there are a lot of connections to Egyptian groups through al-Zawahiri as a prime example) but the group was truly born in Afghanistan from the mujahedin movement during the Afghan-Soviet war. This is where Osama bin Laden first became a significant player in regional and world politics, and it is where he came into contact with most of the people that would become the leaders of al Qaeda.
You have to remember that al Qaeda were already wanted men in the mid to late 1990s. It's true that their members are from all over the Middle East and they have sympathizers around the world, but Afghanistan (and tribal Pakistan) was the only place where they were beyond the reach of US diplomacy. Even Sudan had bent to US pressure and forced bin Laden to leave. The Taliban were the only government willing to shelter and provid a safe haven for al Qaeda to organize and train for attacks around the world, including the 9/11 attacks. And the Taliban were fully complicit in the attacks. They knew al-Qaeda was planning terrorist attacks on the West and they supported them.
Does that mean the Afghanistan war was necessary? I certainly don't know the answer to that, and neither do you. But you obviously need to bone up on your history before you can make a persuasive argument, because what you're saying is nonsense. I would suggest Steve Coll's Ghost Wars as a good starting point.
Anyone that thinks CNN has a left-leaning bias is giving them too much credit. MSNBC has a left-leaning bias. Fox has a right-leaning bias. The only thing CNN is biased towards is cultural outrage (ie Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck's old show), kidnappings, and murders.
Now, pay close attention to those numbers and see if you can tell me what happened in those years. It wasn't the president, because both Clinton and Bush had roughly 6 years of boom and 2 years of bust. Maybe it's congress. Hmmm. Let's see. In 1995 Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House when Republicans took it over. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi became SotH when D's took over the House. Those years also seem to be the exact same years the economy started to boom or bust. Coincidence? Evidently you think so.
That is an incredibly simplistic way to view things. If Republicans deserve a lot of credit for the boom times of the 90's, don't they also deserve blame for the recession of the early 80's? Don't they also deserve blame for the tech crash of the early 2000's?
Wake the fuck up. This is not a partisan issue. Congress write a law deciding how fast the economy is going to grow. Events are mostly out of the control of government. And painting it in such simplistic Republican v. Democratic language is ridiculous.
Good post, but I would object to a couple points. The Taliban didn't rise because world powers chose to ignore Afghanistan. Quite the opposite. Most of the Taliban leaders were educated in madrassas located in Pakistan, and are heavily influenced by Saudi religious tenets (Wahhabism). Bin Laden is a Saudi (although disowned by his native government), and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was facilitated by Saudi and Pakistani intelligence. The Taliban most likely would not have taken power outside of Kandahar and the surrounding provinces without foreign aid. They might not have been able to take Kandahar itself.
The Soviets left and the US basically ignored Afghanistan during the 90's, but there has never been a time that foreign powers didn't control Afghani politics. At least for the last couple hundred years.
We did have boots on the ground in Afghanistan in the late 80's early 90's. That didn't stop the Taliban from taking over. We had boots on the ground in the 90's after the first World Trade Center bombing. But due to bureaucratic nonsense between the FBI and CIA, the CIA didn't even connect Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda with the attack until years later. Legally, the CIA and the FBI could not trade information, and for the most part they followed that law. But the intelligence was there.
We knew that radicals in Afghanistan/Pakistan were being trained to conduct jihad. We knew that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were militant Islamic organizations with a desire to strike out internationally. But there was an assumption that they were not a significant threat to the United States. We thought they were training to attack India, or even Israel or Saudi Arabia.
The problems in the intelligence community that facilitated 9/11 are largely bureaucratic. After the Soviets left Afghanistan, the State Department and the CIA battled over which Afghan faction to support. They also competed with the Pakistani and Saudi intelligence agencies and private individuals/organizations such as bin Laden. The Bush and Clinton administration put almost no emphasis on foreign policy in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan, and so the lower level bureaucrats were often working against each other. Clinton focused very little on intelligence operations at all. The Soviet-Afghan war showed that if it was a priority, intelligence agencies could have a great deal of influence in Afghanistan. But after the Soviets left, nobody really cared about Afghanistan. Our focus in the region during the 90's was on nuclear containment, not terrorism.
And the real focus of the Church Committee was intelligence operations *inside* the United States. The CIA has pretty much operated with the same level of impunity they had before the 1970's. Sure there is more regulation and oversight, but history has shown that illegal activity in the CIA is easily hidden under layers of bureaucracy and secrecy. Like directing billions of dollars in aid to the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the 1980's and early 90's, the Iran-Contra affair etc. We actually attempted to assassinate bin Laden and senior officials of Al Qaeda during the Clinton administration. The SAD had a team ready to go in and capture or kill bin Laden, but were prevented from going due to political circumstances surrounding the 1999 Pakistani coup d'etat. To argue that the CIA doesn't have enough direct influence is pretty disingenuous.
I guess we all knew this sort of stuff was happening, but to see the actual reports with photos and all is horrifying.
Kudos to wikileaks for having the balls to actually cover the war like the mainstream media should have been doing from the start. Every single person in our country is complicit in these crimes. If you haven't actually looked at the raw documents, please do so. It's your duty as a citizen to see what is done in our name.
I voted for Bush in '04. I've never been so ashamed of anything that I've done, and like most people I've done some pretty shameful things. If you're an American citizen, please go out and vote in the upcoming elections. Unfortunately the scumbag politicians will never get what they truly deserve, but we can throw every single one of these lying, murdering motherfuckers out of office.
In the US the federal government is required by the constitution to provide postal service, so unless the constitution is amended the postal service will always be socialized.
I moved a lot growing up and I had to show proof of vaccination for every grade school, high school, and university that I attended as far back as I can remember. But for each there was an exemption for people who were morally opposed to vaccinations. The parents (or the student if they were 18) just had to sign a waiver.
This is not a partisan issue. Murdoch isn't worse than Sulzberger because he's conservative and Sulzberger is liberal. Murdoch is worse than Sulzberger because he doesn't care about journalism. Not one little bit.
Other than the various business news organizations News Corp. owns (also probably a lot of local papers which I'm not familiar with) most of his newspapers and TV channels are complete tabloid trash. Fox News devotes 7 hours a day to news (even being generous and counting Shephard Smith and Matt Braier as completely non-editorial) and 17 hours to opinion, which on Fox means a carefully selected batch of stories that reinforce a hard conservative viewpoint served with an extra helping of indignity and anger. Just because he's talking about current events does not make Bill O'Reilly a journalist. And how often does the New York Post or The Sun break a significant news story that has nothing to do with sports or entertainment?
Murdoch is certainly the more successful businessman. But he actively manipulates the popular dialog in order to achieve his own political gains, and he does this all over the world. As soon as you have evidence of a Sulzberger-run news organization manipulating or avoiding a story because it might affect The New York Times Company's bottom line, then you will have a legitimate comparison.
No, I'm sorry, but that's just not true. There is no other cable channel as blatantly partisan as Fox News. MSNBC may seem similar because Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann's shows are liberal counterparts to Fox's primetime shows, but Joe Scarborough certainly isn't a liberal and they give him three hours a day. Ed Schultz isn't a liberal either, he's more of a center-right populist in the mold of Lou Dobbs. What liberal or centrist has a show on Fox? All their pundits are not just conservative, but hard conservatives. Socially, fiscally, politically, they simply do not present liberal points of view on their network.
I'd say CNN is very similar to Fox in the way they present their news (ie they have very little of it) but its programming focuses more on soft news and doesn't feature politics as heavily. And I think the networks are fairly non-partisan. There are often conservative or liberal biases but the programming is more traditional. It seems like individuals have more control, whereas Fox has company-wide talking points and management can really promote a single story or point of view. PBS and NPR certainly are liberal, but they are just a loose group of individual stations. That business and organizational model is non-partisan almost by default.
That's really the part that distinguishes Fox from the other channels. They have strong relationships with the Republican party at a very high level, and they can and do control the information that people see in order to promote Republican political objectives. The fact that Fox News viewers are more likely to have fewer sources for their news amplifies this effect. No other channel compares.
The only thing on TV that is a left-leaning version of Fox is MSNBC's primetime programming and Bill Maher's show on HBO. And there certainly isn't anything compared to Fox's talk radio empire. Air America tried, but it sucked so bad that it died an early death.
Yes, that is precisely the problem. Fox News consists almost entirely of talking heads and op-eds with a very conservative bias, yet they present themselves as a source of objective, non-biased news. Hell, they even admitted that they are not journalists in a court case a few years ago.
You don't see the same complaints about the Wall Street Journal or The Weekly Standard, which also have heavy conservative biases and are published by News Corp. That's because they actually have some credibility and don't just print random sensationalist headlines or nonsensical ranting by professional blowhards.
Well whether or not the original tea partiers were crazy, that's what the movement is now. These are the people who are actually running for office and winning elections (only primaries so far, but still). Christine O'Donnell, for instance, is the Republican nominee for Senator from Delaware this year. She is a died-in-the-wool neo-con who wants to teach creationism in public schools, thinks that masturbation is a sin, opposes abortion even in cases of incest and rape, and thinks that homosexuals have psychological problems.
Even if these aren't "true" tea-partiers, that is what the movement is. Angry, reactionary, and regressive. And we know from past performance how sincere Republican candidates are about limited government.
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Since when is 3 degrees C a few tenths? And really, the issue isn't environmental damage, per se, it's environmental change that we're worried about. Although environmental change will certainly cause damage in many discrete ways. But if you don't think the melting of the polar ice caps is going to have a substantial effect, you're deluding yourself.
And I don't know how you can say that CO2 is not harmful to the environment in any way. That is simply not true, no matter what some guy who founded Greenpeace says. Increased CO2 in the oceans is causing ocean acidification, which is damaging many types of ocean life, particularly coral reefs.
You have Family Guy's history slightly wrong. The letter writing campaign didn't get the show put back on the air or prompt them to syndicate the show.
Rather, Fox sold the syndication rights to Cartoon Network for a song because they thought it was worthless. About the same time as Adult Swim started airing the episodes, they also released the first season on DVD. Then, not only did Family Guy destroy in the ratings on Adult Swim, but the DVD became the best-selling television DVD set ever. That's when they realized there was money to be made and ordered new episodes.
But it was only after they started making money on the show that they brought it back. Compare that with other cancelled Fox shows like Firefly, Arrested Development, Greg the Bunny, etc. where there was a large cult following and dedicated fans, but not that much money to be made.
Likely it will be cracked and on the torrent sites before the May 3 release date, so your point doesn't really make sense. Even US-ians are still going to have to wait to play the game legally. It's not like 3 days is a long time period to wait.
Remember there are actual people in marketing and distribution that have to do real work in order to get the game into stores and promote it properly. Not every game is Halo. A simultaneous worldwide release sounds good on paper, but it adds a lot of complications. If you care that much about the game that you have to play it *immediately* then you should probably give them some money.
What about the credit and health care reforms? Not saying that big business didn't have a huge role in crafting that legislation, but it's hardly keeping with the status quo.
And it was pretty obvious even on the campaign trail that he was going to be a "big business" type of president. The guy raised a huge amount of money, and even his stated campaign views were pretty obviously in favor of corporate interests (which makes the calls of socialism even more ridiculous).
And let's not all forget that no matter what we think of his views, rational, empirical skepticism is not only welcome but necessary to the scientific process. Glad to see there are climate change skeptics that are still aware of the necessity of the scientific process.
I still have little doubt that he's going to be proved incorrect. It's pretty obvious at this point that the earth is warming at a significant rate.
No, no, and no. Capitalism is not the lending of money for profit. Capitalism is the economic system where the means of production are controlled by private individuals who are motivated by profit. Under a true communist system, production is controlled entirely by the state. That is is the difference between communism and capitalism. It has nothing to do with lending.
I'm also very interested to discover how you can have a free market under communism since a free market is, by definition, a market without interference or regulation by the state.
Nobody knows for sure how it started, but this myth actually has pretty deep roots.
You have a quite rosy view of history if you think this is really true. The first modern corporation was the Dutch East India Company, followed by the other mercantilist companies like the East India Company. None of which were very ethical in the means by which they made a profit.
Then you can look at the 19th and early 20th centuries at the railroad companies, Standard Oil, steel and coal companies breaking strikes and forcing their employees to basically act as indentured servants.
Corporations have always acted unethically in order to maximize profits.
You're creating a false dichotomy between capitalist and entrepreneurs. Capitalist does not mean the same thing as banker, or loan shark. You can directly invest money and still be a capitalist.
For example, say I have managed to save $150,000 of my wages. I use that money to start my own consulting company. Over time, my company grows to be worth several million dollars. Certainly I'm an entrepreneur, but am I not also a capitalist? I've used capital to create a business, and created a significant profit for myself with no usury or lending involved.
Would you not consider someone that starts a bank an entrepreneur? Or how about some of the most successful capitalists like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates? Are they not entrepreneurs, simply because their companies are now worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Or because they received capital from outside sources to help grow their companies?
And just as a general "smell test," how many entrepreneurs are there that don't consider themselves capitalists? Very few, I would imagine.
And thanks to Taco and /. we can all hear you bitch about how you hate your friends. How is that any different?
We're all a little narcissistic. It's human nature. If you don't care what they're posting, either don't read it or remove them from your friends list.
Problem solved.
You need to study some political science and law. Right is a tricky word in law, and nailing it down to a simple definition is not easy. What you are talking about are natural rights. They are universal, self-evident, and unalienable, as you quoted from the Declaration of Independence. They are not granted by the government and they cannot be taken away or changed.
This differs from legal rights. Legal rights are rights bestowed by the government *to* the people and are highly dependent upon culture and legal traditions. Education is a right in this country, but under your idea it would not be. Police service, fire service, medical service (even before the new health care bill medical service was guaranteed in our country, albeit in a very strange and wasteful way), all of these things are legal rights but not natural rights.
All of these things are paid for by taxes, which by your account is akin to stealing. Well it's not stealing. We live in a prosperous society, and the burden for the services we expect our government to provide are is shared by all of us by paying taxes.
You are angry because you disagree politically with the purpose of the health care bill. You are trying to discredit the bill by claiming that this is a rights issue. It's not. No one is going to take your kidney and give it to someone else. That is not what the right to health care means, and you know it.
It really sucks, and I can empathize with your feelings (although not your views) but that's what happens in a democracy. You may be perfectly legitimate in your opinions, but this bill in no way abuses the rights of Americans. You're just mad because your side lost.
This will happen eventually I imagine, but right now ABC has to focus mainly on supporting their affiliates. That's where the majority of their revenue comes from. If they allowed Netflix to air shows 24 hours after the broadcast the affiliates would feel that they are being undercut.
Actually what you said is not fact. This is what you said.
Which is most certainly not a fact. Your post then goes on to address all the issues you have with the conduct and purpose of the war, which is an entirely different subject, one that I was intentionally not addressing in my reply.
I stand by my statement. You were either exaggerating or don't understand what you're talking about. The Taliban government of Afghanistan sheltered al Qaeda and was directly involved in facilitating 9/11 and other attacks. For you to claim otherwise is ridiculous.
That's just ridiculous. Either you're intentionally exaggerating for effect or you have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
Al Qaeda has roots in militant extremist organizations from Saudi Arabia and other countries (there are a lot of connections to Egyptian groups through al-Zawahiri as a prime example) but the group was truly born in Afghanistan from the mujahedin movement during the Afghan-Soviet war. This is where Osama bin Laden first became a significant player in regional and world politics, and it is where he came into contact with most of the people that would become the leaders of al Qaeda.
You have to remember that al Qaeda were already wanted men in the mid to late 1990s. It's true that their members are from all over the Middle East and they have sympathizers around the world, but Afghanistan (and tribal Pakistan) was the only place where they were beyond the reach of US diplomacy. Even Sudan had bent to US pressure and forced bin Laden to leave. The Taliban were the only government willing to shelter and provid a safe haven for al Qaeda to organize and train for attacks around the world, including the 9/11 attacks. And the Taliban were fully complicit in the attacks. They knew al-Qaeda was planning terrorist attacks on the West and they supported them.
Does that mean the Afghanistan war was necessary? I certainly don't know the answer to that, and neither do you. But you obviously need to bone up on your history before you can make a persuasive argument, because what you're saying is nonsense. I would suggest Steve Coll's Ghost Wars as a good starting point.
Anyone that thinks CNN has a left-leaning bias is giving them too much credit. MSNBC has a left-leaning bias. Fox has a right-leaning bias. The only thing CNN is biased towards is cultural outrage (ie Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck's old show), kidnappings, and murders.
That is an incredibly simplistic way to view things. If Republicans deserve a lot of credit for the boom times of the 90's, don't they also deserve blame for the recession of the early 80's? Don't they also deserve blame for the tech crash of the early 2000's?
Wake the fuck up. This is not a partisan issue. Congress write a law deciding how fast the economy is going to grow. Events are mostly out of the control of government. And painting it in such simplistic Republican v. Democratic language is ridiculous.
Good post, but I would object to a couple points. The Taliban didn't rise because world powers chose to ignore Afghanistan. Quite the opposite. Most of the Taliban leaders were educated in madrassas located in Pakistan, and are heavily influenced by Saudi religious tenets (Wahhabism). Bin Laden is a Saudi (although disowned by his native government), and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was facilitated by Saudi and Pakistani intelligence. The Taliban most likely would not have taken power outside of Kandahar and the surrounding provinces without foreign aid. They might not have been able to take Kandahar itself.
The Soviets left and the US basically ignored Afghanistan during the 90's, but there has never been a time that foreign powers didn't control Afghani politics. At least for the last couple hundred years.
We did have boots on the ground in Afghanistan in the late 80's early 90's. That didn't stop the Taliban from taking over. We had boots on the ground in the 90's after the first World Trade Center bombing. But due to bureaucratic nonsense between the FBI and CIA, the CIA didn't even connect Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda with the attack until years later. Legally, the CIA and the FBI could not trade information, and for the most part they followed that law. But the intelligence was there.
We knew that radicals in Afghanistan/Pakistan were being trained to conduct jihad. We knew that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were militant Islamic organizations with a desire to strike out internationally. But there was an assumption that they were not a significant threat to the United States. We thought they were training to attack India, or even Israel or Saudi Arabia.
The problems in the intelligence community that facilitated 9/11 are largely bureaucratic. After the Soviets left Afghanistan, the State Department and the CIA battled over which Afghan faction to support. They also competed with the Pakistani and Saudi intelligence agencies and private individuals/organizations such as bin Laden. The Bush and Clinton administration put almost no emphasis on foreign policy in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan, and so the lower level bureaucrats were often working against each other. Clinton focused very little on intelligence operations at all. The Soviet-Afghan war showed that if it was a priority, intelligence agencies could have a great deal of influence in Afghanistan. But after the Soviets left, nobody really cared about Afghanistan. Our focus in the region during the 90's was on nuclear containment, not terrorism.
And the real focus of the Church Committee was intelligence operations *inside* the United States. The CIA has pretty much operated with the same level of impunity they had before the 1970's. Sure there is more regulation and oversight, but history has shown that illegal activity in the CIA is easily hidden under layers of bureaucracy and secrecy. Like directing billions of dollars in aid to the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the 1980's and early 90's, the Iran-Contra affair etc. We actually attempted to assassinate bin Laden and senior officials of Al Qaeda during the Clinton administration. The SAD had a team ready to go in and capture or kill bin Laden, but were prevented from going due to political circumstances surrounding the 1999 Pakistani coup d'etat. To argue that the CIA doesn't have enough direct influence is pretty disingenuous.
I guess we all knew this sort of stuff was happening, but to see the actual reports with photos and all is horrifying.
Kudos to wikileaks for having the balls to actually cover the war like the mainstream media should have been doing from the start. Every single person in our country is complicit in these crimes. If you haven't actually looked at the raw documents, please do so. It's your duty as a citizen to see what is done in our name.
I voted for Bush in '04. I've never been so ashamed of anything that I've done, and like most people I've done some pretty shameful things. If you're an American citizen, please go out and vote in the upcoming elections. Unfortunately the scumbag politicians will never get what they truly deserve, but we can throw every single one of these lying, murdering motherfuckers out of office.
In the US the federal government is required by the constitution to provide postal service, so unless the constitution is amended the postal service will always be socialized.
I moved a lot growing up and I had to show proof of vaccination for every grade school, high school, and university that I attended as far back as I can remember. But for each there was an exemption for people who were morally opposed to vaccinations. The parents (or the student if they were 18) just had to sign a waiver.
This is not a partisan issue. Murdoch isn't worse than Sulzberger because he's conservative and Sulzberger is liberal. Murdoch is worse than Sulzberger because he doesn't care about journalism. Not one little bit.
Other than the various business news organizations News Corp. owns (also probably a lot of local papers which I'm not familiar with) most of his newspapers and TV channels are complete tabloid trash. Fox News devotes 7 hours a day to news (even being generous and counting Shephard Smith and Matt Braier as completely non-editorial) and 17 hours to opinion, which on Fox means a carefully selected batch of stories that reinforce a hard conservative viewpoint served with an extra helping of indignity and anger. Just because he's talking about current events does not make Bill O'Reilly a journalist. And how often does the New York Post or The Sun break a significant news story that has nothing to do with sports or entertainment?
Murdoch is certainly the more successful businessman. But he actively manipulates the popular dialog in order to achieve his own political gains, and he does this all over the world. As soon as you have evidence of a Sulzberger-run news organization manipulating or avoiding a story because it might affect The New York Times Company's bottom line, then you will have a legitimate comparison.
No, I'm sorry, but that's just not true. There is no other cable channel as blatantly partisan as Fox News. MSNBC may seem similar because Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann's shows are liberal counterparts to Fox's primetime shows, but Joe Scarborough certainly isn't a liberal and they give him three hours a day. Ed Schultz isn't a liberal either, he's more of a center-right populist in the mold of Lou Dobbs. What liberal or centrist has a show on Fox? All their pundits are not just conservative, but hard conservatives. Socially, fiscally, politically, they simply do not present liberal points of view on their network.
I'd say CNN is very similar to Fox in the way they present their news (ie they have very little of it) but its programming focuses more on soft news and doesn't feature politics as heavily. And I think the networks are fairly non-partisan. There are often conservative or liberal biases but the programming is more traditional. It seems like individuals have more control, whereas Fox has company-wide talking points and management can really promote a single story or point of view. PBS and NPR certainly are liberal, but they are just a loose group of individual stations. That business and organizational model is non-partisan almost by default.
That's really the part that distinguishes Fox from the other channels. They have strong relationships with the Republican party at a very high level, and they can and do control the information that people see in order to promote Republican political objectives. The fact that Fox News viewers are more likely to have fewer sources for their news amplifies this effect. No other channel compares.
The only thing on TV that is a left-leaning version of Fox is MSNBC's primetime programming and Bill Maher's show on HBO. And there certainly isn't anything compared to Fox's talk radio empire. Air America tried, but it sucked so bad that it died an early death.
Yes, that is precisely the problem. Fox News consists almost entirely of talking heads and op-eds with a very conservative bias, yet they present themselves as a source of objective, non-biased news. Hell, they even admitted that they are not journalists in a court case a few years ago.
You don't see the same complaints about the Wall Street Journal or The Weekly Standard, which also have heavy conservative biases and are published by News Corp. That's because they actually have some credibility and don't just print random sensationalist headlines or nonsensical ranting by professional blowhards.
Well whether or not the original tea partiers were crazy, that's what the movement is now. These are the people who are actually running for office and winning elections (only primaries so far, but still). Christine O'Donnell, for instance, is the Republican nominee for Senator from Delaware this year. She is a died-in-the-wool neo-con who wants to teach creationism in public schools, thinks that masturbation is a sin, opposes abortion even in cases of incest and rape, and thinks that homosexuals have psychological problems.
Even if these aren't "true" tea-partiers, that is what the movement is. Angry, reactionary, and regressive. And we know from past performance how sincere Republican candidates are about limited government.