Think about it. If he'd been caught in bed with a male pig, you'd be saying, "He never specifically denounced sex with *male* livestock!"
First off, let's be clear: I think that Bennett was an idiot with respect to the "War on Drugs" - which was one in a chain of "wars" whose only effect has been to tighten the screws on the liberties of Americans. I further think that Bennett was an idiot to be gambling at all: it is, after all, the entertainment for people who are really bad at math.
Now, to your specific point: you seem to be suggesting that gambling is a vice in the way that other things Bennett has condemned are vices. But that's just not so. Just for starters, Bennett is opposed to abortion and sodomite sex (and any sex outside of marriage) not because he considers them vices; he considers them to be immoral. He is opposed to drug use for the same reason. If he does not consider gambling to be immoral, then he cannot be said even to be breaking his (apparent) personal rule of opposing things that are immoral.
Really, though. This is completely silly. You (and many others) have a bizarre notion of what hypocrisy actually is. Hypocrisy is *not* the act of doing some "bad" thing or other while saying that people shouldn't do bad things. It's the act of doing some *specific* thing that you have *specifically* condemned as "bad". Thus, when Newt Gingrich condemned Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs, he was being a grotesque and hideous hypocrite: because he was doing the exact same thing at the very time he was criticizing Bill.
But what Bill Bennett has done is not, not,not "hypocrisy" because he has not publicly condemned gambling. He was a fool. In the past I had no particular degree of trust in the man, simply because he is perfectly willing to throw civil liberties on the ash heap of history for the sake of a so-called "war" on drugs that can never be won. I trust him even less now, simply because he has made himself look so foolish.
You don't have to like Bennett. I don't like him. But let's be fair and honest in the criticisms we level at people.
So if I go around the country decrying sexism, racism, and gay-ism (?) and demanding tolerance for everyone, but then turn out to be a raging anti-semite, I'm not a hypocrite either? "After all, I never explicitly said it was bad to hate jews".
First, a point of clarification: is it your intent to suggest that Bennett is anti-semitic? The folks at the Jewish Post of New York beg to differ.
But, speaking more broadly: your argument contains its own contradiction: demanding tolerance for everyone... Yes, a man who demands tolerance for all and yet is a closet anti-semite is certainly a hypocrite. But your argument fails to hit its target. In the first place, as I've noted, Bennett does not appear to have a history of preaching against gambling - so he is not doing something that he himself has condemned.
But if we take your words in the best sense possible, perhaps you mean to suggest that gambling is in the same category with some other things that Bennett has condemned? I would dispute that. Would you care to present an example? The simple act of condemning a series of evils while at the same time participating in an activity that some other folks consider to be evil does not in itself make one a hypocrite. It's just silly to say so. If you don't like the man, fine. But call him names that actually have some justification.
Since his own proclamations of morality necessarily involve the invasion of the private lives of others...
Balderdash. "Proclamations of morality" require nothing of the sort. I can stand on the street corner today and denounce the evils of "demon rum" (not that I think alcohol is evil - this is an example) and my doing so in no way invades the privacy of anyone. Your freedom to booze it up is in no way impacted by my street preaching. Telling you (or someone else) that their behavior is evil in no way "invades" anyone's privacy.
Perhaps what you are referring to is not a "proclamation of morality" but some policy position or other that Bennett took? Let's have an example from you.
Bill Bennet cannot credibly author a "Book of Virtues" in adult and children's editions, make $25,000 a speech daily, and then point out that most people gamble...
In fairness to Mr. Bennett, it has been reported that he has never gone on record as declaring that gambling is immoral. Thus, strictly speaking he is not a hypocrite.
Nevertheless, he doesn't come off looking very good over this, that's for sure.
I read your linked articles but all I saw was "maybe", "could", "might have been". All three of these articles are clearly supposition and speculation. One of the articles stated that un-named associates of Lewinsky SAID she said she said. That's pretty weak "evidence".
And this paragraph of yours is pretty intellectually dishonest, friend. I'm disappointed.
Since you obviously didn't read at least the third one very well, I'll refresh your memory:
"William Ginsburg, Lewinskyâ(TM)s lawyer, briefly visited Starrâ(TM)s offices this morning in a renewed effort to cut a deal for the 24-year-old, who had told a friend on secretly recorded tapes that she had a sexual relationship with Clinton and that the president later tried to persuade her to lie about it."
Um. Excuse me, but that "friend" (and let's all grant that Tripp wasn't a marvelous friend; but then, neither was Monica, who tried to get Tripp to lie for her under oath) was Linda Tripp. She had the evidence. This isn't exactly "my best friend's brother's cousin's ex-girlfriend's Mom heard from her next door neighbor that Monica's college roomie claimed that..." This is one of the two participants in the conversation, friend, with a tape to back it up.
And how about this:
"Sources also told the Times that Lewinsky claims that Clinton told her she could testify that her visits to the White House were to see his secretary and that she could avoid testifying by being in New York City."
Now, unless you'd care to argue that Jayson Blair syndrome was infecting the NYT as early as 5 years ago, you're going to have to deal with the fact that it's not Rush Limbaugh saying this. It's not Matt Drudge citing unnamed sources (although he was proved correct, wasn't he?). It's that bastion of liberal authority, the New York Times. Unnamed sources are a fact of political life in this country. That fact in no way makes their use illegitimate; if it did, Nixon need not have resigned.
It was the Republicans, through their agent Linda Tripp,Would you care to substantiate this balderdash that Linda Tripp was a "Republican agent", or would you care to rephrase that? Or are you engaging in the "supposition and speculation" that you just condemned?;-) Inquiring minds want to know;-)
who escalated a consensual relationship between Lewinsky and Clinton and basically caused the whole mess.
What do you mean "escalated"? She didn't bribe Monica to blab. She didn't coerce her. In point of fact, Monica attempted to bribe Tripp when it became known that Tripp would be called to testify.
And exactly how is it Linda Tripp's fault that Bill Clinton and his hired thugs suborned perjury? Did she make them do that? And exactly how is it Tripp's fault that Clinton lied under oath? I suppose that Linda Tripp persuaded the US Supreme Court to disbar Clinton? I suppose that the Arkansas Bar suspended Clinton's law license over sex?
No way. The simple fact is that Clinton lied under oath. He committed a felony. He suborned perjury - another felony.
And wasn't Newt a lying holier-than-thou hypocrite during all the time he was condeming Clinton for his amoral affair?
Yes, he was completely disgusting. I fully agree. But you're changing the subject. The subject is not "officials with sexual peccadilloes", but rather "Bill Clinton is a felon who was impeached and should have been thrown out of office."
Oh, he fessed up to his own affair and illegitmate child, but only AFTER he was caught - I don't give many points for that.
But the lying hypocrite also resigned when he was caught - something that Slick Willie didn't have the integrity to do.
Now, by way of summary: The Arkansas Bar suspended Clinton's license. The Supreme Court disbarred him entirely. Is it your view that they did this because Clinton had an extramarital affair? If so, why have their not been a raft of suspensions and disbarments over the y
Pretty tangential though. Ms. Lewinsky pretty actively pursued Bill by flashing him her undergarments, etc. That sounds a lot different than the usual "If you want that promotion..." sexual harassment.
Not that I would be too surprised if there were such incidents (other than the stupidity factor), but the burden is on the accuser.
Agreed on both counts. And IIRC I think I carefully avoided saying that the Lewinsky fling constituted sexual harassment. I don't see how it could, since it was consensual. My point was to demonstrate how the Paula Jones team would use Lewinsky to prove their case against Bill. Part of the game in our screwed up legal system is that the defendant must be portrayed as the second coming of Satan himself. Bill was and is a lying sleazebag, and he should have been thrown out of office over the felonies he committed (as anyone of any party ought to be), but he's not evil incarnate.
Btw, this is the most civil disagreement I've ever had on/. We'll probably be kicked off soon.
LOL
A lot more disagreements would be civil if people stopped substituting ad hominem name-calling for actual arguments (with or without name-calling;-)
Lying about intelligence isn't a felony but perhaps it ought to be.
Lying about an adulterous relationship isn't a felony, either. But lying about it under oath surely is a felony. It's called "perjury". Trying to get others to lie under oath is a felony too. It's called "suborning perjury". Both of these felonies were committed by Clinton.
On the other hand, to my knowledge no one at the Bush White House has lied under oath about the intelligence data, so lying about it wouldn't quite be a felony. Additionally, it's really tremendously easy for us (that would include me) to be suspicious about the intelligence data, since of course the only way that it will ever be discussed is going to be in executive session in a Senate committee hearing. So of course, it's tremendously easy for the Bush administration's critics - and that too would include me - to criticize them, because the White House can't show us what classified information that they have (if in fact there is any).
Lastly, you are the umpteenth person to commit two or three errors in this thread.
First, you falsely assume that I am a Republican.
Second, you falsely assume that I am a Bush supporter.
Thirdly, and perhaps most damagingly, you fallaciously attempt to change the subject from Clinton's crimes to the (so far only alleged) crimes of George Jr. Let me ask you, as a representative of Bill's defenders: do you have so little faith in Bill's "innocence" that you have to change the subject like this to try and talk about something else instead? Wouldn't it be easier to just admit that he was a perjurer, and that he suborned perjury, and that he really deserved to be thrown out of office for that - the abject failures of the Senate GOP "leadership" notwithstanding? Wouldn't doing so be a lot less embarrassing than trying to rehabilitate an all-but-convicted felon?
Perhaps here would be a good place to point out that while he wasn't impeached, Bill's behavior wasn't entirely unpunished: he was disbarred from the Supreme Court of the US, and his law license was suspended for 5 years. Read all about it here. Now, I ask you: considering that Billy agreed to the Arkansas suspension, should we really pretend that he was innocent?
Fourthly and finally, you have also fallaciously resorted to various ad hominems in your efforts to rehabilitate the perjurer Bill Clinton: you have attacked me (falsely, as it turns out, since I'm not a Republican) and you have attacked Republicans, as though doing so in any way justifies the corrupt acts of Bill Clinton. "Everybody does it" is an argument best left for little kids and adolescents.
I'll try and be as plain as possible: I believe that the war in Iraq was an unjust, immoral, and unconstitutional war, in that it was a) a war of aggression and not self-defense, and b) a war against a "foe" that had never represented a credible threat to the US, and c) a war that was never declared by the US Congress - the only body that may, under the Constitution, declare war. There. Your ad hominem against me was fallacious, and (as I've now demonstrated) also completely false.
Now, if you want to participate in the discussion, please feel free! But please don't evade the present issue, which is Clinton's behavior.
I suppose yours is an honest misunderstanding: You posted in an off-topic thread as though we were discussing something on-topic. By the time of your post, we had long since left behind any discussion of TIA or Bruce Sterling, focusing instead on the question of Clinton's various crimes in the Lewinsky matter. Thus, in our admittedly off-topic discussion, your (strictly speaking) on-topic post was really off-topic. In the future, please avoid going off-topic by going on-topic.;-)
Surprise! I'm not a Republican, and I didn't vote for Bush, and I opposed the war in Iraq (both times - oh, and I also opposed Bill's Excellent Adventure in Serbia. How about you?), and I reject as specious the ludicrous grounds for war that were presented to the American people (all three times, although George Sr. had an actual act of aggression - albeit perhaps one that his administration tacitly encouraged - to add to his case for a Big Oil war).
Of course, none of this - including your post, by the way - has a thing to do with Clinton's behavior, which is what I was addressing. Perhaps you'd care to post something that's related to the off-topic topic I was discussing?;-)
So: as a matter of extraordinary coincidence, Clinton resorted to shortlived attempts at getting bin Laden, and he just "happened" to do so immediately following his various "bimbo eruptions" sufficiently frequently so as to naturally induce the American public to "erroneously" conclude that the two were related?
So having consensual sex is evidence that you have attempted to coerce sex?
No. Consensual sex with a subordinate is evidence that the gentleman (or lady, as the case may be) has a history of seeking and/or engaging in sexual conduct with subordinates, and therefore provides support to an allegation that said gentleman or lady has sexually harassed (i.e., has attempted to get sex from) another subordinate. It is not sufficient evidence by itself, but it is supplementary. Wouldn't you agree?
The Lewinsky affair was completely consensual by both parties - it had nothing to do with P. Jones, really!
The single difference is that Jones told Clinton to zip it, and Lewinsky didn't. If you're attempting to make the case - as the Jones lawyers would have had to do - that Clinton has a history of and a propensity for indulging in sexual relations with subordinates, then the Lewinsky affair is entirely relevant. Let's be honest: if a man is accused of harassing his secretary, and he has a history of pursuing sex with subordinates, is that history not relevant? Of course it is!
If my memory serves me, one of Clinton's staff called Lowensky and asked what she was going to say. That is a stretch for "suborning perjury" even for a Clinton hater.
I'm sure that more than one staffer called her - Currie, the secretary, did (in order to get back gifts). But that's not all.
Tell me, O ye of little faith, is it such a stretch now?
What's more, the fact that Clinton's goons (Jordan and then-UN Ambassador Nolan Richardson) were trying to get the airhead Lewinsky jobs for which she could never otherwise qualify raised yet another issue of obstruction of justice.
Please, friend. Don't embarrass yourself by attempting to defend Clinton over this. What he did was indefensible, and you know it. He should have been thrown out of office.
How can you claim when Democratic Presidents break a law, they should be impeached, but when Republican Presidents break the law, it should be overlooked?
Please indicate for a watching world exactly where I suggested this. You're blowing smoke, bub.
The very closest you can get to this is my suggestion that neither a Democrat-controlled Congress nor a Democrat-controlled media (with one GOP President's scalp on its belt already) bothered to pursue the idea that Reagan himself was guilty of any crime. Period. This is entirely different from saying that "Reagan committed a crime, but it should be overlooked" (as you preposterously and baselessly allege that I have done). Why would I say that anyway, since I've already admitted that I don't really know much about Iran-Contra????
Now, since you have gone to the trouble to make ridiculous assumptions and/or draw silly conclusions about my views on the behavior of GOP presidents: I didn't vote for either Bush. I didn't vote for Dole. I happen to think that both wars against Iraq were morally bankrupt, being about oil more than anything else. However, it should also be said that Congress gave Bush Jr. the authority to act last November, and that there were a lot of Democrats voting in favor of doing so. Constitutionally, the Congress should have issued a declaration of war, so technically the whole thing was a legal farce. But Congress was more than willing to abdicate its responsibility, and Bush was more than willing to let them do so, and nobody complained to the courts (and they probably would not have stopped it either).
Long and short: Criminals in the White House should be impeached and thrown out of office, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. I've never said otherwise, and I defy you to prove otherwise.
But really, all this is just a smoke screen, evading the issue in my admittedly off-topic post which was a reply to an off-topic post by Catbeller. You are attempting to move the argument here from a discussion of the impeachable offenses committed by Clinton - which Catbeller denied were in fact impeachable. You apparently would rather discuss the impeachable offenses of Republicans. Or, possibly, you would rather discuss my personal views of the impeachable offenses of Republicans. But to bring up either of these in a discussion of Clinton's felonious behavior (do you really want a felon as the chief law enforcement officer in this country? Just so long as he's a Democrat, or the felony involved sex, it's okay? Is that what you would have us believe?) is really to ignore what I said.
You can take potshots at me if you want, friend, but no one reading this discussion is going to think much of that as a defense of Clinton.
Do you really believe the framers of the Constitution and the Congress (1970's) created the Special Prosecutors office to go after Presidents who lie about getting blowjobs?
Friend, you are evading the issue. The issue has nothing to do with the content of the lie, as despicable as it is for a married man to be a serial philanderer (oh, btw: yes, I *was* equally outraged when news of Newt's hypocrisy came to light, and I'm ever so glad that he is gone: and please note that however despicable Newt's treatment of his wife was, he was Clinton's moral superior in this: he didn't lie about it under oath, and he resigned from office). The issue is threefold: that Clinton deliberately misled a grand jury while under oath, and that he suborned perjury, and that he committed these crimes as a) an attorney, who knows better, and b) as the President, who is the ultimate law enforcement official under our form of government.
What Clinton did was a felony, sir. We could at this point go off on a long tangent about how he exacerbated his crimes by going on TV to lie to the entire country about it, and about how he bombed foreign nations in a transparent attempt to divert the public's attention from his behavior, and then we'd begin to get just the smallest idea that maybe a President's lies under oath add up to more than being "about sex".
Where were you hypocrite when Reagan's cronies were subverting the Constitution? Where was your sense of moral outrage then? Or your so-called integrity?
In the first place, this is irrelevant to the present discussion. You are attempting to divert our attention from the (off-topic) topic, which is the moral turpitude and felonious behavior of President Clinton. If you care to discuss that, I'm all ears.
In the second place: a) as others suggested might be the case, I really was too young to understand Iran Contra. I still don't. b) Even if we grant for the sake of argument that Iran Contra was as bad as the Democrat-controlled Congress and its shills in the media would have us believe, to my knowledge no one ever credibly suggested that Reagan was guilty of anything (cf. Nixon for the media's total willingness to pillory a GOP President if possible). c) As you might guess from my revulsion at Newt, I'm not a Republican, so to attempt to pin the "hypocrite" label on me is going to be rather more difficult than pointing at various idiotic GOP boondoggles. In my opinion there is maybe one member of Congress who isn't a liar: Ron Paul, who takes his oath of office seriously enough to actually ask of every piece of legislation whether it is Constitutional or not (hint: the answer is almost always "No" these days).
Now, please address what I said, instead of changing the subject.
Impeachment is not a conviction. This confusion of terms was intentional by Clinton's enemies, and has infected the body politic.
As a card-carrying member of the mythical "vast right-wing conspiracy", I can safely say that I have never heard this one. In point of fact, most right-wingers are thoroughly outraged by the moral spinelessness demonstrated by not only the GOP leaders of the Senate at the time, but also by the so-called "conscience" of the Senate on the left side, Joe Lieberman, in failing to actually convict Clinton. We know very well that Clinton wasn't convicted, thanks. We're disgusted to the core over it. But that also doesn't change the fact that Slick Willie was the first President to be impeached in over a century (and only the second one at that).
Clinton was accused of shading the truth
...which is morally inconsistent with the oath taken: to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". But that wasn't the whole story, and you know it: he was also guilty, guilty, guilty of suborning perjury, which is also a felony. This from a lawyer, who I think it's safe to assume can hardly be said to be have been acting in ignorance.
The pieces of work from Starr's office told the judge that Lewinsky's affair with Clinton was pertinent to the Jones deposition. It wasn't.
Do you really believe this nonsense, or are you making it up as you go along? Clinton was accused of sexual harassment of a subordinate in the Paula Jones case - a charge that he denied. "Ironically" enough, he was also guilty of conducting an affair with another subordinate - Lewinsky. If you can't see the obvious relevance of the Lewinsky matter to the Jones case, you really ought to take off those mud-colored glasses.
A blow job from an intern is more impeachable than the ideologically based murder of tens of thousands, and the theft of a country.
That seems to have been true even during Clinton's morally corrupt regime. Or have you forgotten about the bombings of Serbia? And Clinton's wag-the-dog bombings of Iraq? And his bombings of Sudan?
Yes, but that really wasn't my point. My main point (expressed in the rest of my post) was that if this thing gets to a jury, it may not matter whether wrong-doing actually occurred or not: a jury is not all that likely to be possessed of the discretion and good judgment to understand that there is a difference between an identical paragraph in two books, and an identical function in two separate operating systems. The jury will almost certainly lack the technical sophistication to understand the difference.
I have actually been involved in a lawsuit that involved claims over source code (I was one of two principal coders of the app in question).
In that case, we were accused (in part) of stealing code from an application that was used in the same industry but which not only looked drastically different (hence we could not have even "stolen" look-and-feel), and not only lacked substantial functionality in comparison to our app, but was also first released after our app was in production.
What happened?
We "lost", simply because my employer ran out of money to fight what was unquestionably a preposterous and baseless suit.
But let's look at SCO's claims about "copied code" from the viewpoint of lawyers and likely jurors. They are *not* going to understand the intricacies of kernel code. They are not going to get it when anyone says "Well, the code is the same because it does the same thing." I know this is true, of course, and it's perfectly reasonable: but a jury will try to wrap its heads around this problem by comparing it to things that they *do* understand. So they will compare it to copying books, or movies, or poetry, or something.
Now, if you or I saw a paragraph in a John Grisham book that was identical to a paragraph in a Michael Crichton book, what would we conclude? We would conclude that the paragraph was "obviously" copied.
Given the types of juries that lawyers like to find for themselves (namely, "drooling idiots", all too often), what are the odds that a jury in the United States will really care about learning or understanding the intricacies of programming? What are the odds that they will understand that it's entirely possible for source code to look the same in places when it performs the same function - even if it's written by two different people?
Personally, I wonder whether it might not be better for SCO to be crushed long before this ever gets to a trial. Juries in this country simply cannot be trusted.
The seargent said we could catch 'em by surprise
If we didn't open fire till we looked 'em in the eyes.
Actually, the lyrics for those two lines are these:
Old Hick'ry said we could take 'em by surprise If we didn't fire our muskets 'till we looked 'em in the eyes...
And then continues:
We held our fire till we see'd their faces well Then we opened up our squirrel guns and really gave 'em - Well, We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin'...
Generation capacity would be a measure of how much electricity a utility can produce. That is a completely different idea from how much electricity there is available for purchase by customers.
For instance, for many years my electricty was provided by a co-op. They produced no electricity at all: generation capacity was zero. However, they did purchase electricity from other producers, and then re-sell it to us.
The point is that generation capacity is not the sole source of electricity that is available for customers to purchase.
And getting back to the main point: none of this changes the facts that a) the utilities in California were not able to raise prices that they charged to consumers, and that b) price controls like this always lead to shortages.
Lastly, it's rubbish to pretend that in a truly open, free, and deregulated market, any single producer would be stupid enough to price himself out of the market by raising his prices to the sky. If the state had kept its greasy mitts out of it from the very beginning, there would have been no energy crisis because there would be a healthy free market for electricity in California. The fact that there wasn't, and probably isn't, is an indictment of regulatory meddling and not of the free market.
One of us is misunderstanding the other, and I don't know which one of us it is.
First of all, a price-control-generated shortage is not characterized by high capacity. It's characterized by having nothing available to sell: merchants become either unwilling (because they lose too much) and/or unable (because they don't have the money to pay for inventory) to stock their shelves. There could be a zillion potential customers at the artificially low price, but there is nothing for them to buy.
Translating that to the California situation: I'm not surprised if they were never near capacity, because price controls wouldn't mean you'd have high load: there would be a shortage of electricity available for customers to buy. The merchant has empty shelves under price controls; the electric utility has empty wires, so to speak.
The rolling california blackouts are the perfect case for the advocacy of Utility Regulation
First off, let me say that I agree in one respect: if one or more companies are given a monopoly for providing electricity, then they must be regulated.
Having said that, what we saw in California's gray-outs was not a consequence of deregulation. It was a consequence of a preposterous regulatory policy. IIRC, the California utilities were explicitly forbidden from raising the rates that they charged to customers in order to cover the rising prices that they were facing.
This is nothing but price controls, and price ceilings will virtually always guarantee the creation of shortages.
By subjecting the utilities to the open market for the purchase of electricity, while at the same time prohibiting them from engaging in the rational pricing activities required by an open market, the state of California created the perfect conditions for that nightmare to occur.
You can't blame so-called "deregulation" for it. That's as silly as believing that NAFTA creates "free trade". Genuine free trade doesn't need an encyclopedic and baffling legal code to enforce; it simply requires the elimination of tariffs and other burdens upon commerce. By the same token, it's ridiculous to call something "deregulated" if the players can't set their own prices.
Cockroaches can survive almost anything, too, but that doesn't mean I want one as a pet.
Monolithic domes are hideously ugly eyesores, with a Bizarreness Quotient that's off the scale. And I'm talking specifically about the ones in Italy, TX, which is the home for that website. They're massively weird.
It hasn't been proven that global warming is true - far from it, in fact - but research has "strongly suggested" (my term, but certainly fair) that it could be true, so it strikes me that any half-intelligent primate would jump to it and try to avoid the possible crisis instead of jumping up and down and screaming "you haven't proved it yet!"
The problem is that the next question out of everybody's mouth is almost literally always "What is the government going to do about it?" Thus, it is a political problem. And it is particularly stupid to make policy on the basis of pseudo-facts like "global warming" - and it is truly idiotic to make policy based on the complete falsehood that "man is causing it".
Even you have stumbled into the very thing that you're complaining about: you think it's nothing but politics to question the global warming religion, but then in the very next breath you are arguing that we need to "try to avoid the possible crisis" - something which is an intrinsically political question, unless you happen to be advocating street preaching as a means to fight it.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, let's be clear: I think that Bennett was an idiot with respect to the "War on Drugs" - which was one in a chain of "wars" whose only effect has been to tighten the screws on the liberties of Americans. I further think that Bennett was an idiot to be gambling at all: it is, after all, the entertainment for people who are really bad at math.
Now, to your specific point: you seem to be suggesting that gambling is a vice in the way that other things Bennett has condemned are vices. But that's just not so. Just for starters, Bennett is opposed to abortion and sodomite sex (and any sex outside of marriage) not because he considers them vices; he considers them to be immoral. He is opposed to drug use for the same reason. If he does not consider gambling to be immoral, then he cannot be said even to be breaking his (apparent) personal rule of opposing things that are immoral.
Really, though. This is completely silly. You (and many others) have a bizarre notion of what hypocrisy actually is. Hypocrisy is *not* the act of doing some "bad" thing or other while saying that people shouldn't do bad things. It's the act of doing some *specific* thing that you have *specifically* condemned as "bad". Thus, when Newt Gingrich condemned Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs, he was being a grotesque and hideous hypocrite: because he was doing the exact same thing at the very time he was criticizing Bill.
But what Bill Bennett has done is not, not, not "hypocrisy" because he has not publicly condemned gambling. He was a fool. In the past I had no particular degree of trust in the man, simply because he is perfectly willing to throw civil liberties on the ash heap of history for the sake of a so-called "war" on drugs that can never be won. I trust him even less now, simply because he has made himself look so foolish.
You don't have to like Bennett. I don't like him. But let's be fair and honest in the criticisms we level at people.
First, a point of clarification: is it your intent to suggest that Bennett is anti-semitic? The folks at the Jewish Post of New York beg to differ.
But, speaking more broadly: your argument contains its own contradiction: demanding tolerance for everyone... Yes, a man who demands tolerance for all and yet is a closet anti-semite is certainly a hypocrite. But your argument fails to hit its target. In the first place, as I've noted, Bennett does not appear to have a history of preaching against gambling - so he is not doing something that he himself has condemned.
But if we take your words in the best sense possible, perhaps you mean to suggest that gambling is in the same category with some other things that Bennett has condemned? I would dispute that. Would you care to present an example? The simple act of condemning a series of evils while at the same time participating in an activity that some other folks consider to be evil does not in itself make one a hypocrite. It's just silly to say so. If you don't like the man, fine. But call him names that actually have some justification.
Balderdash. "Proclamations of morality" require nothing of the sort. I can stand on the street corner today and denounce the evils of "demon rum" (not that I think alcohol is evil - this is an example) and my doing so in no way invades the privacy of anyone. Your freedom to booze it up is in no way impacted by my street preaching. Telling you (or someone else) that their behavior is evil in no way "invades" anyone's privacy.
Perhaps what you are referring to is not a "proclamation of morality" but some policy position or other that Bennett took? Let's have an example from you.
In fairness to Mr. Bennett, it has been reported that he has never gone on record as declaring that gambling is immoral. Thus, strictly speaking he is not a hypocrite.
Nevertheless, he doesn't come off looking very good over this, that's for sure.
And this paragraph of yours is pretty intellectually dishonest, friend. I'm disappointed.
Since you obviously didn't read at least the third one very well, I'll refresh your memory:
"William Ginsburg, Lewinskyâ(TM)s lawyer, briefly visited Starrâ(TM)s offices this morning in a renewed effort to cut a deal for the 24-year-old, who had told a friend on secretly recorded tapes that she had a sexual relationship with Clinton and that the president later tried to persuade her to lie about it."
Um. Excuse me, but that "friend" (and let's all grant that Tripp wasn't a marvelous friend; but then, neither was Monica, who tried to get Tripp to lie for her under oath) was Linda Tripp. She had the evidence. This isn't exactly "my best friend's brother's cousin's ex-girlfriend's Mom heard from her next door neighbor that Monica's college roomie claimed that..." This is one of the two participants in the conversation, friend, with a tape to back it up.
And how about this:
"Sources also told the Times that Lewinsky claims that Clinton told her she could testify that her visits to the White House were to see his secretary and that she could avoid testifying by being in New York City."
Now, unless you'd care to argue that Jayson Blair syndrome was infecting the NYT as early as 5 years ago, you're going to have to deal with the fact that it's not Rush Limbaugh saying this. It's not Matt Drudge citing unnamed sources (although he was proved correct, wasn't he?). It's that bastion of liberal authority, the New York Times. Unnamed sources are a fact of political life in this country. That fact in no way makes their use illegitimate; if it did, Nixon need not have resigned.
It was the Republicans, through their agent Linda Tripp,Would you care to substantiate this balderdash that Linda Tripp was a "Republican agent", or would you care to rephrase that? Or are you engaging in the "supposition and speculation" that you just condemned? ;-) Inquiring minds want to know ;-)
who escalated a consensual relationship between Lewinsky and Clinton and basically caused the whole mess.
What do you mean "escalated"? She didn't bribe Monica to blab. She didn't coerce her. In point of fact, Monica attempted to bribe Tripp when it became known that Tripp would be called to testify.
And exactly how is it Linda Tripp's fault that Bill Clinton and his hired thugs suborned perjury? Did she make them do that? And exactly how is it Tripp's fault that Clinton lied under oath? I suppose that Linda Tripp persuaded the US Supreme Court to disbar Clinton? I suppose that the Arkansas Bar suspended Clinton's law license over sex?
No way. The simple fact is that Clinton lied under oath. He committed a felony. He suborned perjury - another felony.
And wasn't Newt a lying holier-than-thou hypocrite during all the time he was condeming Clinton for his amoral affair?
Yes, he was completely disgusting. I fully agree. But you're changing the subject. The subject is not "officials with sexual peccadilloes", but rather "Bill Clinton is a felon who was impeached and should have been thrown out of office."
Oh, he fessed up to his own affair and illegitmate child, but only AFTER he was caught - I don't give many points for that.
But the lying hypocrite also resigned when he was caught - something that Slick Willie didn't have the integrity to do.
Now, by way of summary: The Arkansas Bar suspended Clinton's license. The Supreme Court disbarred him entirely. Is it your view that they did this because Clinton had an extramarital affair? If so, why have their not been a raft of suspensions and disbarments over the y
Not that I would be too surprised if there were such incidents (other than the stupidity factor), but the burden is on the accuser.
Agreed on both counts. And IIRC I think I carefully avoided saying that the Lewinsky fling constituted sexual harassment. I don't see how it could, since it was consensual. My point was to demonstrate how the Paula Jones team would use Lewinsky to prove their case against Bill. Part of the game in our screwed up legal system is that the defendant must be portrayed as the second coming of Satan himself. Bill was and is a lying sleazebag, and he should have been thrown out of office over the felonies he committed (as anyone of any party ought to be), but he's not evil incarnate.
Btw, this is the most civil disagreement I've ever had on /. We'll probably be kicked off soon.
LOL
A lot more disagreements would be civil if people stopped substituting ad hominem name-calling for actual arguments (with or without name-calling ;-)
Lying about an adulterous relationship isn't a felony, either. But lying about it under oath surely is a felony. It's called "perjury". Trying to get others to lie under oath is a felony too. It's called "suborning perjury". Both of these felonies were committed by Clinton.
On the other hand, to my knowledge no one at the Bush White House has lied under oath about the intelligence data, so lying about it wouldn't quite be a felony. Additionally, it's really tremendously easy for us (that would include me) to be suspicious about the intelligence data, since of course the only way that it will ever be discussed is going to be in executive session in a Senate committee hearing. So of course, it's tremendously easy for the Bush administration's critics - and that too would include me - to criticize them, because the White House can't show us what classified information that they have (if in fact there is any).
Lastly, you are the umpteenth person to commit two or three errors in this thread.
First, you falsely assume that I am a Republican.
Second, you falsely assume that I am a Bush supporter.
Thirdly, and perhaps most damagingly, you fallaciously attempt to change the subject from Clinton's crimes to the (so far only alleged) crimes of George Jr. Let me ask you, as a representative of Bill's defenders: do you have so little faith in Bill's "innocence" that you have to change the subject like this to try and talk about something else instead? Wouldn't it be easier to just admit that he was a perjurer, and that he suborned perjury, and that he really deserved to be thrown out of office for that - the abject failures of the Senate GOP "leadership" notwithstanding? Wouldn't doing so be a lot less embarrassing than trying to rehabilitate an all-but-convicted felon?
Perhaps here would be a good place to point out that while he wasn't impeached, Bill's behavior wasn't entirely unpunished: he was disbarred from the Supreme Court of the US, and his law license was suspended for 5 years. Read all about it here. Now, I ask you: considering that Billy agreed to the Arkansas suspension, should we really pretend that he was innocent?
Fourthly and finally, you have also fallaciously resorted to various ad hominems in your efforts to rehabilitate the perjurer Bill Clinton: you have attacked me (falsely, as it turns out, since I'm not a Republican) and you have attacked Republicans, as though doing so in any way justifies the corrupt acts of Bill Clinton. "Everybody does it" is an argument best left for little kids and adolescents.
I'll try and be as plain as possible: I believe that the war in Iraq was an unjust, immoral, and unconstitutional war, in that it was a) a war of aggression and not self-defense, and b) a war against a "foe" that had never represented a credible threat to the US, and c) a war that was never declared by the US Congress - the only body that may, under the Constitution, declare war. There. Your ad hominem against me was fallacious, and (as I've now demonstrated) also completely false.
Now, if you want to participate in the discussion, please feel free! But please don't evade the present issue, which is Clinton's behavior.
I suppose yours is an honest misunderstanding: You posted in an off-topic thread as though we were discussing something on-topic. By the time of your post, we had long since left behind any discussion of TIA or Bruce Sterling, focusing instead on the question of Clinton's various crimes in the Lewinsky matter. Thus, in our admittedly off-topic discussion, your (strictly speaking) on-topic post was really off-topic. In the future, please avoid going off-topic by going on-topic. ;-)
Of course, none of this - including your post, by the way - has a thing to do with Clinton's behavior, which is what I was addressing. Perhaps you'd care to post something that's related to the off-topic topic I was discussing? ;-)
Sorry, but I'm not buying what you're selling.
No. Consensual sex with a subordinate is evidence that the gentleman (or lady, as the case may be) has a history of seeking and/or engaging in sexual conduct with subordinates, and therefore provides support to an allegation that said gentleman or lady has sexually harassed (i.e., has attempted to get sex from) another subordinate. It is not sufficient evidence by itself, but it is supplementary. Wouldn't you agree?
The single difference is that Jones told Clinton to zip it, and Lewinsky didn't. If you're attempting to make the case - as the Jones lawyers would have had to do - that Clinton has a history of and a propensity for indulging in sexual relations with subordinates, then the Lewinsky affair is entirely relevant. Let's be honest: if a man is accused of harassing his secretary, and he has a history of pursuing sex with subordinates, is that history not relevant? Of course it is!
If my memory serves me, one of Clinton's staff called Lowensky and asked what she was going to say. That is a stretch for "suborning perjury" even for a Clinton hater.
I'm sure that more than one staffer called her - Currie, the secretary, did (in order to get back gifts). But that's not all.
Tell me, O ye of little faith, is it such a stretch now?
What's more, the fact that Clinton's goons (Jordan and then-UN Ambassador Nolan Richardson) were trying to get the airhead Lewinsky jobs for which she could never otherwise qualify raised yet another issue of obstruction of justice.
Please, friend. Don't embarrass yourself by attempting to defend Clinton over this. What he did was indefensible, and you know it. He should have been thrown out of office.
Please indicate for a watching world exactly where I suggested this. You're blowing smoke, bub.
The very closest you can get to this is my suggestion that neither a Democrat-controlled Congress nor a Democrat-controlled media (with one GOP President's scalp on its belt already) bothered to pursue the idea that Reagan himself was guilty of any crime. Period. This is entirely different from saying that "Reagan committed a crime, but it should be overlooked" (as you preposterously and baselessly allege that I have done). Why would I say that anyway, since I've already admitted that I don't really know much about Iran-Contra????
Now, since you have gone to the trouble to make ridiculous assumptions and/or draw silly conclusions about my views on the behavior of GOP presidents: I didn't vote for either Bush. I didn't vote for Dole. I happen to think that both wars against Iraq were morally bankrupt, being about oil more than anything else. However, it should also be said that Congress gave Bush Jr. the authority to act last November, and that there were a lot of Democrats voting in favor of doing so. Constitutionally, the Congress should have issued a declaration of war, so technically the whole thing was a legal farce. But Congress was more than willing to abdicate its responsibility, and Bush was more than willing to let them do so, and nobody complained to the courts (and they probably would not have stopped it either).
Long and short: Criminals in the White House should be impeached and thrown out of office, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. I've never said otherwise, and I defy you to prove otherwise.
But really, all this is just a smoke screen, evading the issue in my admittedly off-topic post which was a reply to an off-topic post by Catbeller. You are attempting to move the argument here from a discussion of the impeachable offenses committed by Clinton - which Catbeller denied were in fact impeachable. You apparently would rather discuss the impeachable offenses of Republicans. Or, possibly, you would rather discuss my personal views of the impeachable offenses of Republicans. But to bring up either of these in a discussion of Clinton's felonious behavior (do you really want a felon as the chief law enforcement officer in this country? Just so long as he's a Democrat, or the felony involved sex, it's okay? Is that what you would have us believe?) is really to ignore what I said.
You can take potshots at me if you want, friend, but no one reading this discussion is going to think much of that as a defense of Clinton.
Friend, you are evading the issue. The issue has nothing to do with the content of the lie, as despicable as it is for a married man to be a serial philanderer (oh, btw: yes, I *was* equally outraged when news of Newt's hypocrisy came to light, and I'm ever so glad that he is gone: and please note that however despicable Newt's treatment of his wife was, he was Clinton's moral superior in this: he didn't lie about it under oath, and he resigned from office). The issue is threefold: that Clinton deliberately misled a grand jury while under oath, and that he suborned perjury, and that he committed these crimes as a) an attorney, who knows better, and b) as the President, who is the ultimate law enforcement official under our form of government.
What Clinton did was a felony, sir. We could at this point go off on a long tangent about how he exacerbated his crimes by going on TV to lie to the entire country about it, and about how he bombed foreign nations in a transparent attempt to divert the public's attention from his behavior, and then we'd begin to get just the smallest idea that maybe a President's lies under oath add up to more than being "about sex".
Where were you hypocrite when Reagan's cronies were subverting the Constitution? Where was your sense of moral outrage then? Or your so-called integrity?
In the first place, this is irrelevant to the present discussion. You are attempting to divert our attention from the (off-topic) topic, which is the moral turpitude and felonious behavior of President Clinton. If you care to discuss that, I'm all ears.
In the second place: a) as others suggested might be the case, I really was too young to understand Iran Contra. I still don't. b) Even if we grant for the sake of argument that Iran Contra was as bad as the Democrat-controlled Congress and its shills in the media would have us believe, to my knowledge no one ever credibly suggested that Reagan was guilty of anything (cf. Nixon for the media's total willingness to pillory a GOP President if possible). c) As you might guess from my revulsion at Newt, I'm not a Republican, so to attempt to pin the "hypocrite" label on me is going to be rather more difficult than pointing at various idiotic GOP boondoggles. In my opinion there is maybe one member of Congress who isn't a liar: Ron Paul, who takes his oath of office seriously enough to actually ask of every piece of legislation whether it is Constitutional or not (hint: the answer is almost always "No" these days).
Now, please address what I said, instead of changing the subject.
As a card-carrying member of the mythical "vast right-wing conspiracy", I can safely say that I have never heard this one. In point of fact, most right-wingers are thoroughly outraged by the moral spinelessness demonstrated by not only the GOP leaders of the Senate at the time, but also by the so-called "conscience" of the Senate on the left side, Joe Lieberman, in failing to actually convict Clinton. We know very well that Clinton wasn't convicted, thanks. We're disgusted to the core over it. But that also doesn't change the fact that Slick Willie was the first President to be impeached in over a century (and only the second one at that).
Clinton was accused of shading the truth
...which is morally inconsistent with the oath taken: to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". But that wasn't the whole story, and you know it: he was also guilty, guilty, guilty of suborning perjury, which is also a felony. This from a lawyer, who I think it's safe to assume can hardly be said to be have been acting in ignorance.
The pieces of work from Starr's office told the judge that Lewinsky's affair with Clinton was pertinent to the Jones deposition. It wasn't.
Do you really believe this nonsense, or are you making it up as you go along? Clinton was accused of sexual harassment of a subordinate in the Paula Jones case - a charge that he denied. "Ironically" enough, he was also guilty of conducting an affair with another subordinate - Lewinsky. If you can't see the obvious relevance of the Lewinsky matter to the Jones case, you really ought to take off those mud-colored glasses.
A blow job from an intern is more impeachable than the ideologically based murder of tens of thousands, and the theft of a country.
That seems to have been true even during Clinton's morally corrupt regime. Or have you forgotten about the bombings of Serbia? And Clinton's wag-the-dog bombings of Iraq? And his bombings of Sudan?
That's the concern I attempted to communicate.
In that case, we were accused (in part) of stealing code from an application that was used in the same industry but which not only looked drastically different (hence we could not have even "stolen" look-and-feel), and not only lacked substantial functionality in comparison to our app, but was also first released after our app was in production.
What happened?
We "lost", simply because my employer ran out of money to fight what was unquestionably a preposterous and baseless suit.
But let's look at SCO's claims about "copied code" from the viewpoint of lawyers and likely jurors. They are *not* going to understand the intricacies of kernel code. They are not going to get it when anyone says "Well, the code is the same because it does the same thing." I know this is true, of course, and it's perfectly reasonable: but a jury will try to wrap its heads around this problem by comparing it to things that they *do* understand. So they will compare it to copying books, or movies, or poetry, or something.
Now, if you or I saw a paragraph in a John Grisham book that was identical to a paragraph in a Michael Crichton book, what would we conclude? We would conclude that the paragraph was "obviously" copied.
Given the types of juries that lawyers like to find for themselves (namely, "drooling idiots", all too often), what are the odds that a jury in the United States will really care about learning or understanding the intricacies of programming? What are the odds that they will understand that it's entirely possible for source code to look the same in places when it performs the same function - even if it's written by two different people?
Personally, I wonder whether it might not be better for SCO to be crushed long before this ever gets to a trial. Juries in this country simply cannot be trusted.
Talking Heads?
If we didn't open fire till we looked 'em in the eyes.
Actually, the lyrics for those two lines are these:
Old Hick'ry said we could take 'em by surprise
If we didn't fire our muskets 'till we looked 'em in the eyes...
And then continues:
We held our fire till we see'd their faces well
Then we opened up our squirrel guns and really gave 'em - Well,
We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin'...
For instance, for many years my electricty was provided by a co-op. They produced no electricity at all: generation capacity was zero. However, they did purchase electricity from other producers, and then re-sell it to us.
The point is that generation capacity is not the sole source of electricity that is available for customers to purchase.
And getting back to the main point: none of this changes the facts that a) the utilities in California were not able to raise prices that they charged to consumers, and that b) price controls like this always lead to shortages.
Lastly, it's rubbish to pretend that in a truly open, free, and deregulated market, any single producer would be stupid enough to price himself out of the market by raising his prices to the sky. If the state had kept its greasy mitts out of it from the very beginning, there would have been no energy crisis because there would be a healthy free market for electricity in California. The fact that there wasn't, and probably isn't, is an indictment of regulatory meddling and not of the free market.
First of all, a price-control-generated shortage is not characterized by high capacity. It's characterized by having nothing available to sell: merchants become either unwilling (because they lose too much) and/or unable (because they don't have the money to pay for inventory) to stock their shelves. There could be a zillion potential customers at the artificially low price, but there is nothing for them to buy.
Translating that to the California situation: I'm not surprised if they were never near capacity, because price controls wouldn't mean you'd have high load: there would be a shortage of electricity available for customers to buy. The merchant has empty shelves under price controls; the electric utility has empty wires, so to speak.
First off, let me say that I agree in one respect: if one or more companies are given a monopoly for providing electricity, then they must be regulated.
Having said that, what we saw in California's gray-outs was not a consequence of deregulation. It was a consequence of a preposterous regulatory policy. IIRC, the California utilities were explicitly forbidden from raising the rates that they charged to customers in order to cover the rising prices that they were facing.
This is nothing but price controls, and price ceilings will virtually always guarantee the creation of shortages.
By subjecting the utilities to the open market for the purchase of electricity, while at the same time prohibiting them from engaging in the rational pricing activities required by an open market, the state of California created the perfect conditions for that nightmare to occur.
You can't blame so-called "deregulation" for it. That's as silly as believing that NAFTA creates "free trade". Genuine free trade doesn't need an encyclopedic and baffling legal code to enforce; it simply requires the elimination of tariffs and other burdens upon commerce. By the same token, it's ridiculous to call something "deregulated" if the players can't set their own prices.
Monolithic domes are hideously ugly eyesores, with a Bizarreness Quotient that's off the scale. And I'm talking specifically about the ones in Italy, TX, which is the home for that website. They're massively weird.
I'll take my chances with the tornado. ;-)
The City on the Edge of Forever.
The problem is that the next question out of everybody's mouth is almost literally always "What is the government going to do about it?" Thus, it is a political problem. And it is particularly stupid to make policy on the basis of pseudo-facts like "global warming" - and it is truly idiotic to make policy based on the complete falsehood that "man is causing it".
Even you have stumbled into the very thing that you're complaining about: you think it's nothing but politics to question the global warming religion, but then in the very next breath you are arguing that we need to "try to avoid the possible crisis" - something which is an intrinsically political question, unless you happen to be advocating street preaching as a means to fight it.