True - there is no way to check for this. However, there are a few things that point directly to astroturfing: * a recently created account * an account with two comments, where the first is this one here * a complete, 100% support of a crazy idea that benefits exactly one entity, and has massive drawbacks for pretty much everyone else. * the misuse of common words such as fair * argument gets hitched to popular talking points where a connection does not exist (it will create US jobs)
Yeah, this is astroturfing in progress. Doesn't mean the argument presented is invalid - the process is actually the other way around: the scope of the invalid argument indicates astroturfing. What it does mean is that MS is going after this law with a vengeance, and that there are attempts to manipulate public opinion in secret. Something to keep in mind while reading about what the "public opinion" is.
And Google is standing by their principles, and won't pull the app unless its actually illegal.
I fully expect this app to soon be made illegal by legislators "thinking of the children" and "tough on crime", along with another round of cries of "Google is evil" and "Google's monopoly should be broken up" by harebrained analysts and commentators. .
I was going to mod this up but decided to respond instead*. The Physicians for Social Responsibility has a tagline of "United States Affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War". Which raises serious questions about their credibility.
Sooo..... being against nuclear war means that you suddenly cannot possibly put together a cogent and reasonable analysis of the risks in a nuclear reactor? Why do you think that?
See, the problem with this sort of bullshit commentary is that you can dismiss everything and everyone as being "tainted", and therefore unreliable. Not only does everyone have by definition a certain amount of bias, but anyone can be accused of harboring some secret agenda, without them having any chance at disproving it. This makes it trivial for anyone to stop discussion by invoking the mantra of "they're not credible because they have an agenda" and directly leads to the current political situation in the US, where every asshole is entitled to creating their own facts - because, hey, everyone's biased anyway, and we're just making sure that the alternative is being put out into the open.
So unless you have an actual rebuttal for the analysis done by PSR, please, kindly, STFU. You're actively destroying the discussion.
2 reasons, one abstract, one practical. Abstract: arguing that something is bad and should not be done is a lot harder when you engage in the same behavior. Practical: once an organization engages in an illegal behavior in one place, it becomes nearly impossible to prevent that behavior from leaking over into other places. Condoning bribing in foreign countries pretty much guarantees that bribes will be paid locally, just through foreign intermediaries. And I also challenge your assertion that there are many countries with useful markets where everything gets done with bribes. All societies understand that flat out bribes are only useful for people able to afford them, and there are prohibitions on them in one way or another. Some neato exceptions: Somalia, Zimbabwe - countries where the rule of law has broken down, and where even local people know that the place is a shithole.
Bribes are an artificial barrier to entry into a market. As a result, they are by definition a drag on the efficiency of a market. Furthermore, because of how bribes work, barriers to entry can be made arbitrarily high, resulting in the richest players in a market being able to extract monopoly rents without having to compete for customers.
You want me to go over basic free market theory again? I can't believe there's even a question why bribes are a bad idea. Next, someone will ask whether ice is cold, and whether water should be wet.
Anybody who didn't see this coming when ISPs started merging/partnering with content providers is an utter fucking moron, or paid off by said conglomerates. It is this type of corporate behavior happening along side politicians' babble about ISP competition and service quality that makes me want to take a bat to Washington, DC. And no, the Tea Party isn't the one to help me with that.
To some extent, I don't care about IPTV. It's just the same old inconvenient TV delivered via a different mechanism. I also don't care about a landline, especially not one that's essentially VOIP masquerading as traditional POTS. But I might be interested in upping my bandwidth cap by 100 GB. And I'm sure that ATT execs made the same calculation.
No, but notice that the cap for their integrated U-verse service is significantly higher. I'm sure that wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that they're trying to push their integrated TV/Phone/Internet service as much as possible.
Can you read? The question was whether the US is a republic or a monarchy, not whether the US is a republic or a democracy. If you'd crack open any dictionary, you'd know that a) Franklin is correct, b) a democracy has little to do with a republic, and a state can be both, neither or just one of them.
The ignorance displayed in this story is astounding. One, you're arguing that the morphing has not occurred, when immediately afterwards, you argue that there was an original meaning (which requires a later meaning). Two, no one but historians and paleolinguists care what the meaning of a word 3000 years ago was. The discussion is what a democracy means right now, and any fucking dictionary will tell you that. Have you opened one recently?
Because it misses the point that there are more forms of democracy than just direct. There is no comparison to be made between a republic and a democracy, because the words do not apply to the same topic.
The fact of the matter is the United States is a republic all of our founding documents say so. God sakes can you imagine what a pain being a true democracy would be imagine if everyone had to vote on every law.... we would have the shortest set of law books on the planet because no one would agree on anything except no taxes and free government services.
You ignorant moron, a direct democracy is different from a representative democracy, and a republic is only tangentially related to a democracy. I find it fascinating that the US is legislating itself into a third world status because its legislators make up shit like this and the population believes it, because it makes them feel good.
In the Pahrump Valley Times profile, Coyner says he dreamed of attending an Ivy league school like Harvard and that he wanted to become a hedge fund trader.
Wow. A lying, cheating, bastard dreams of being a hedge fund trader. I'm sure that the guild of hedge fund traders will bar him preemptively from joining them, thereby preventing everyone's pristine reputation as ethical and trustworthy human beings from being sullied by association.
If you're smart enough to have billions of dollars to build & operate a drilling rig as an individual, then you're also smart enough to spend $500 to purchase the liability protection that incorporation gives you.
The regulations simply need to state that "the entity which fucks up pays big fines." If you happen to be operating as an unincorporated individual, then you pay big fines yourself. If you're smart enough to structure & operate your business as a corporation[...], then the corporation pays your fines, and your personal assets (not *corporate* assets) are safe.
And yet, you are somehow still arguing that being incorporated makes no difference to what happens to someone who breaks the law or fails some regulatory test.
The problem is that breaking of the law is defined by the paper. Being an illegal immigrant is defined by not having papers. Otherwise, do you know how easy it would be to accuse someone of being an illegal alien? "Sorry, we couldn't find your identification papers back at HQ, please come with us."
You have two choices: you open yourself up to arbitrarily being labeled an illegal immigrant by government officials, or you open yourself up having to ID yourself at specific points.
An ID card is there to protect you, not to protect the government.
Just out of curiosity. If you don't have an ID, how does anyone know that you're a citizen of this country? If you are never required to produce it, how would anyone distinguish you from an illegal alien? ESP?
I am not claiming that regulation of corporations is unnecessary or undesirable, however, the regulations should apply to the activity, not the entity performing the activity - if you want to regulate deep-water drilling, to use your example, then the regulations should be exactly the same on me if I'm an individual with deep pockets, or a corporation with deep pockets.
But they aren't. Let's assume for a second that it is actually possible to operate a deep-water drill without incorporating (it really isn't). If I do that, any fine that is the result of my operation of the deep-water drill will hit all my personal belongings. I can lose everything, and be out on the street. Wages can be garnished for eternity. However, if I did incorporate, and the activity in question does not require the corporate veil to be pierced (look it up - it's a very specific term), then the only thing that happens is that the corporate assets can be seized. But all my personal property is still intact.
Well, maybe I should expand a little bit. Let's take a very real example: the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Normally, if I perform an action that kills someone, I'm responsible, unless I did it in self-defense. Involuntary man-slaughter might be involuntary, but it still lands me in the slammer. Compare that to what happened in the gulf explosion. People died, nothing happened to anybody. The most that did happen to a person was that the CEO of BP had to step down. The issue here is that because there is no requirement to track decisions or activities on an individual level, it becomes impossible to figure who was actually responsible for the disaster. It always, always, devolves into an issue of he-said, she-said. I can give you another example: pollution. I can dump my canister of used motor oil in the river, and if someone catches me, I'm out a significant chunk of money. But if I am employed by a company and do this, I might get fired, but I won't get fined. The corporation will get fined. Make the company big enough, and I might not even get fired, because no one knows whether it was me or Bob who dumped the oil.
Because people can band together in the legal construct of corporations, individual responsibilities for activities carried out under the banner of the corporation get diluted to the point of being null. This creates immense freedom for individuals to act in manners that are not accessible to individual people, or people in single-person corporations.
And what Maxume said is right - corporations are legal constructs. As a result, the laws they are subject to can and have to be tailored to maximize the overall benefit to society.
Oh, wow. Someone figured that when searching for a string of letters, displaying stock information when that string matches a stock symbol indicates hard coding of said result. Color me shocked. And there I thought that the semantic information available in the Internet about CSCO would always lead to a stock ticker. Not only that, it would lead to the daily stock ticker. The same for all the other specific information that is displayed from search results.
Note that Google has the good sense of prominently and directly linking to a host of other financial services when displaying the Google Finance link.
Now if you had some evidence that Google is hardcoding anything in its actual search results, we'd have something. In the meantime, this is nothing but someone stating the patently obvious.
1: You don't have to be anti-competitive to be a monopoly. You just have to be significantly larger than your nearest rival.
Wrong. A monopoly exists when one provider has enough market share to control access to the goods or services in questions. Merely owning 100% of a specific market means nothing if customers can instantly switch to someone else if they so desire.
Drastically undercutting your opponents prices in a new market by leveraging profits from a different market to support it can be seen as anti-competitive. Many for profit vendors see google pushing open source products as this.
Correct. However, when said open source products are pushed by corporations and people who offer nothing else, it is hard to argue that Google is engaging in anti-competitive behavior. In this case, it is more like the other corporations are so far behind the curve that they can't compete with new business models. That's being super-competitive, not anti-competitive (please forgive the buzzword).
People working in corporations have MORE freedoms than those not working in one. One tasty bit is that unless it can be proven that a single individual broke a very specific law, individuals are NOT held responsible for things that were done in the name of corporation. Another one is that only assets held in the name of the corporation can be seized in case a corporation did something wrong, or is going bankrupt. This means that an individual acting on behalf of a corporation has more freedoms and less risks than someone who isn't. This needs to be balanced.
It seems you, the blogger and the Justice Department missed the entirely more insidious, but far more realistic way that Comcast is going to control what content is being accessed: user-based billing. Start with a plan for - oh, $20. Everything is accessible at full speed. Make it something juicy like 20 mbit per second. Then add user-based billing, and a soft cap at 50 GB. And finally, the coup-de-grace: the cap limit does not apply to Comcast owned and operated sites, but applies to Netflix, Youtube, etc.
What do you get? Everyone's surfing along happily for the first week, and then bam! - the download cap hits. Suddenly, that cap free site for Comcast shows looks mighty good. And Netflix might as well serve video at 320x240 resolution in a 56 kbit/sec stream, because that's all they'll ever be able to show anymore to Comcast users.
It's beautiful, isn't it? Comcast doesn't do a single thing to its traffic. The entire Internet is accessible. It's not even throttled. But the users will, en masse, flock to its sites and desert anything that's not on the basic, cap-free plan. And thanks to the monopolies and duopolies that Comcast enjoys, many end-users won't even have the option to switch to something better.
We're fucked. We've left the best times of the Internet behind us.
They might as well have declared that the internet is a cesspool of crime, or that populated areas are cesspools of crime.
But they didn't. I'm starting to think that there's a semi-concerted effort going to put Craigslist out of business. First, there was the brouhaha over Craigslist's adult section, which came about because people complained that the personals section was basically a front for adult services. This resulted in much gnashing of teeth, big proclamations by various government and non-government entities that Craigslist was knowingly profiting from the sexual trafficking of minors. Now we get this hyperbolic hackjob of an article that essentially says that Craigslist is a front for criminal gangs.
Really? I'm guessing that there are two groups of people who won't stop before Craigslist just shuts down: corporations whose business model has been completely shot to pieces by Craigslist (any classified ad network), and people who think that it's satanic when two people communicate with each other without either the government or a large corporation listening in.
How can it be wrong for the army to do the same commonsense action?
Since when is the Army like a corporation? Do you really want to apply the same standards to Army behavior that we apply (or rather, don't apply) to corporations?
It might not be ethical, but how is this different than organizations that lobby congress? This seems blown up. Would it be ok if instead of being called "Psy-Ops" they were called "Public Relations?"
Wait, when did PR and lobbying tactics become role models of proper behavior? Was there a memo that said "PR agencies have stopped lying and lobbyists are no longer the used car salesmen of politics"? The army is supposed to protect the US, its laws and Mom's Apple Pie. If the army is resorting to the same tricks as lobbyists and PR henchmen, what makes you think that they are still about Freedom, The Pursuit of Happiness and Baseball?
Yes, it is outrageous behavior, because we all bitch about the underhanded tactics marketers and lobbyists use to sell their wares. They don't suddenly become OK because the Army is using them.
Slashdot Mirror
True - there is no way to check for this. However, there are a few things that point directly to astroturfing:
* a recently created account
* an account with two comments, where the first is this one here
* a complete, 100% support of a crazy idea that benefits exactly one entity, and has massive drawbacks for pretty much everyone else.
* the misuse of common words such as fair
* argument gets hitched to popular talking points where a connection does not exist (it will create US jobs)
Yeah, this is astroturfing in progress. Doesn't mean the argument presented is invalid - the process is actually the other way around: the scope of the invalid argument indicates astroturfing. What it does mean is that MS is going after this law with a vengeance, and that there are attempts to manipulate public opinion in secret. Something to keep in mind while reading about what the "public opinion" is.
And Google is standing by their principles, and won't pull the app unless its actually illegal.
I fully expect this app to soon be made illegal by legislators "thinking of the children" and "tough on crime", along with another round of cries of "Google is evil" and "Google's monopoly should be broken up" by harebrained analysts and commentators. .
I was going to mod this up but decided to respond instead*. The Physicians for Social Responsibility has a tagline of "United States Affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War". Which raises serious questions about their credibility.
Sooo..... being against nuclear war means that you suddenly cannot possibly put together a cogent and reasonable analysis of the risks in a nuclear reactor? Why do you think that?
See, the problem with this sort of bullshit commentary is that you can dismiss everything and everyone as being "tainted", and therefore unreliable. Not only does everyone have by definition a certain amount of bias, but anyone can be accused of harboring some secret agenda, without them having any chance at disproving it. This makes it trivial for anyone to stop discussion by invoking the mantra of "they're not credible because they have an agenda" and directly leads to the current political situation in the US, where every asshole is entitled to creating their own facts - because, hey, everyone's biased anyway, and we're just making sure that the alternative is being put out into the open.
So unless you have an actual rebuttal for the analysis done by PSR, please, kindly, STFU. You're actively destroying the discussion.
2 reasons, one abstract, one practical.
Abstract: arguing that something is bad and should not be done is a lot harder when you engage in the same behavior.
Practical: once an organization engages in an illegal behavior in one place, it becomes nearly impossible to prevent that behavior from leaking over into other places. Condoning bribing in foreign countries pretty much guarantees that bribes will be paid locally, just through foreign intermediaries.
And I also challenge your assertion that there are many countries with useful markets where everything gets done with bribes. All societies understand that flat out bribes are only useful for people able to afford them, and there are prohibitions on them in one way or another. Some neato exceptions: Somalia, Zimbabwe - countries where the rule of law has broken down, and where even local people know that the place is a shithole.
Bribes are an artificial barrier to entry into a market. As a result, they are by definition a drag on the efficiency of a market. Furthermore, because of how bribes work, barriers to entry can be made arbitrarily high, resulting in the richest players in a market being able to extract monopoly rents without having to compete for customers.
You want me to go over basic free market theory again? I can't believe there's even a question why bribes are a bad idea. Next, someone will ask whether ice is cold, and whether water should be wet.
Anybody who didn't see this coming when ISPs started merging/partnering with content providers is an utter fucking moron, or paid off by said conglomerates. It is this type of corporate behavior happening along side politicians' babble about ISP competition and service quality that makes me want to take a bat to Washington, DC. And no, the Tea Party isn't the one to help me with that.
To some extent, I don't care about IPTV. It's just the same old inconvenient TV delivered via a different mechanism. I also don't care about a landline, especially not one that's essentially VOIP masquerading as traditional POTS. But I might be interested in upping my bandwidth cap by 100 GB. And I'm sure that ATT execs made the same calculation.
No, but notice that the cap for their integrated U-verse service is significantly higher. I'm sure that wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that they're trying to push their integrated TV/Phone/Internet service as much as possible.
Can you read? The question was whether the US is a republic or a monarchy, not whether the US is a republic or a democracy. If you'd crack open any dictionary, you'd know that a) Franklin is correct, b) a democracy has little to do with a republic, and a state can be both, neither or just one of them.
The ignorance displayed in this story is astounding. One, you're arguing that the morphing has not occurred, when immediately afterwards, you argue that there was an original meaning (which requires a later meaning). Two, no one but historians and paleolinguists care what the meaning of a word 3000 years ago was. The discussion is what a democracy means right now, and any fucking dictionary will tell you that. Have you opened one recently?
Because it misses the point that there are more forms of democracy than just direct. There is no comparison to be made between a republic and a democracy, because the words do not apply to the same topic.
The fact of the matter is the United States is a republic all of our founding documents say so. God sakes can you imagine what a pain being a true democracy would be imagine if everyone had to vote on every law.... we would have the shortest set of law books on the planet because no one would agree on anything except no taxes and free government services.
You ignorant moron, a direct democracy is different from a representative democracy, and a republic is only tangentially related to a democracy. I find it fascinating that the US is legislating itself into a third world status because its legislators make up shit like this and the population believes it, because it makes them feel good.
In the Pahrump Valley Times profile, Coyner says he dreamed of attending an Ivy league school like Harvard and that he wanted to become a hedge fund trader.
Wow. A lying, cheating, bastard dreams of being a hedge fund trader. I'm sure that the guild of hedge fund traders will bar him preemptively from joining them, thereby preventing everyone's pristine reputation as ethical and trustworthy human beings from being sullied by association.
If you're smart enough to have billions of dollars to build & operate a drilling rig as an individual, then you're also smart enough to spend $500 to purchase the liability protection that incorporation gives you.
The regulations simply need to state that "the entity which fucks up pays big fines." If you happen to be operating as an unincorporated individual, then you pay big fines yourself. If you're smart enough to structure & operate your business as a corporation[...], then the corporation pays your fines, and your personal assets (not *corporate* assets) are safe.
And yet, you are somehow still arguing that being incorporated makes no difference to what happens to someone who breaks the law or fails some regulatory test.
The problem is that breaking of the law is defined by the paper. Being an illegal immigrant is defined by not having papers. Otherwise, do you know how easy it would be to accuse someone of being an illegal alien? "Sorry, we couldn't find your identification papers back at HQ, please come with us."
You have two choices: you open yourself up to arbitrarily being labeled an illegal immigrant by government officials, or you open yourself up having to ID yourself at specific points.
An ID card is there to protect you, not to protect the government.
Just out of curiosity. If you don't have an ID, how does anyone know that you're a citizen of this country? If you are never required to produce it, how would anyone distinguish you from an illegal alien? ESP?
I am not claiming that regulation of corporations is unnecessary or undesirable, however, the regulations should apply to the activity, not the entity performing the activity - if you want to regulate deep-water drilling, to use your example, then the regulations should be exactly the same on me if I'm an individual with deep pockets, or a corporation with deep pockets.
But they aren't. Let's assume for a second that it is actually possible to operate a deep-water drill without incorporating (it really isn't). If I do that, any fine that is the result of my operation of the deep-water drill will hit all my personal belongings. I can lose everything, and be out on the street. Wages can be garnished for eternity. However, if I did incorporate, and the activity in question does not require the corporate veil to be pierced (look it up - it's a very specific term), then the only thing that happens is that the corporate assets can be seized. But all my personal property is still intact.
And that's an enormous freedom.
Well, maybe I should expand a little bit. Let's take a very real example: the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Normally, if I perform an action that kills someone, I'm responsible, unless I did it in self-defense. Involuntary man-slaughter might be involuntary, but it still lands me in the slammer. Compare that to what happened in the gulf explosion. People died, nothing happened to anybody. The most that did happen to a person was that the CEO of BP had to step down. The issue here is that because there is no requirement to track decisions or activities on an individual level, it becomes impossible to figure who was actually responsible for the disaster. It always, always, devolves into an issue of he-said, she-said. I can give you another example: pollution. I can dump my canister of used motor oil in the river, and if someone catches me, I'm out a significant chunk of money. But if I am employed by a company and do this, I might get fired, but I won't get fined. The corporation will get fined. Make the company big enough, and I might not even get fired, because no one knows whether it was me or Bob who dumped the oil.
Because people can band together in the legal construct of corporations, individual responsibilities for activities carried out under the banner of the corporation get diluted to the point of being null. This creates immense freedom for individuals to act in manners that are not accessible to individual people, or people in single-person corporations.
And what Maxume said is right - corporations are legal constructs. As a result, the laws they are subject to can and have to be tailored to maximize the overall benefit to society.
Oh, wow. Someone figured that when searching for a string of letters, displaying stock information when that string matches a stock symbol indicates hard coding of said result. Color me shocked. And there I thought that the semantic information available in the Internet about CSCO would always lead to a stock ticker. Not only that, it would lead to the daily stock ticker. The same for all the other specific information that is displayed from search results.
Note that Google has the good sense of prominently and directly linking to a host of other financial services when displaying the Google Finance link.
Now if you had some evidence that Google is hardcoding anything in its actual search results, we'd have something. In the meantime, this is nothing but someone stating the patently obvious.
1: You don't have to be anti-competitive to be a monopoly. You just have to be significantly larger than your nearest rival.
Wrong. A monopoly exists when one provider has enough market share to control access to the goods or services in questions. Merely owning 100% of a specific market means nothing if customers can instantly switch to someone else if they so desire.
Drastically undercutting your opponents prices in a new market by leveraging profits from a different market to support it can be seen as anti-competitive. Many for profit vendors see google pushing open source products as this.
Correct. However, when said open source products are pushed by corporations and people who offer nothing else, it is hard to argue that Google is engaging in anti-competitive behavior. In this case, it is more like the other corporations are so far behind the curve that they can't compete with new business models. That's being super-competitive, not anti-competitive (please forgive the buzzword).
People working in corporations have MORE freedoms than those not working in one. One tasty bit is that unless it can be proven that a single individual broke a very specific law, individuals are NOT held responsible for things that were done in the name of corporation. Another one is that only assets held in the name of the corporation can be seized in case a corporation did something wrong, or is going bankrupt. This means that an individual acting on behalf of a corporation has more freedoms and less risks than someone who isn't. This needs to be balanced.
It seems you, the blogger and the Justice Department missed the entirely more insidious, but far more realistic way that Comcast is going to control what content is being accessed: user-based billing. Start with a plan for - oh, $20. Everything is accessible at full speed. Make it something juicy like 20 mbit per second. Then add user-based billing, and a soft cap at 50 GB. And finally, the coup-de-grace: the cap limit does not apply to Comcast owned and operated sites, but applies to Netflix, Youtube, etc.
What do you get? Everyone's surfing along happily for the first week, and then bam! - the download cap hits. Suddenly, that cap free site for Comcast shows looks mighty good. And Netflix might as well serve video at 320x240 resolution in a 56 kbit/sec stream, because that's all they'll ever be able to show anymore to Comcast users.
It's beautiful, isn't it? Comcast doesn't do a single thing to its traffic. The entire Internet is accessible. It's not even throttled. But the users will, en masse, flock to its sites and desert anything that's not on the basic, cap-free plan. And thanks to the monopolies and duopolies that Comcast enjoys, many end-users won't even have the option to switch to something better.
We're fucked. We've left the best times of the Internet behind us.
They might as well have declared that the internet is a cesspool of crime, or that populated areas are cesspools of crime.
But they didn't. I'm starting to think that there's a semi-concerted effort going to put Craigslist out of business. First, there was the brouhaha over Craigslist's adult section, which came about because people complained that the personals section was basically a front for adult services. This resulted in much gnashing of teeth, big proclamations by various government and non-government entities that Craigslist was knowingly profiting from the sexual trafficking of minors. Now we get this hyperbolic hackjob of an article that essentially says that Craigslist is a front for criminal gangs.
Really? I'm guessing that there are two groups of people who won't stop before Craigslist just shuts down: corporations whose business model has been completely shot to pieces by Craigslist (any classified ad network), and people who think that it's satanic when two people communicate with each other without either the government or a large corporation listening in.
How can it be wrong for the army to do the same commonsense action?
Since when is the Army like a corporation? Do you really want to apply the same standards to Army behavior that we apply (or rather, don't apply) to corporations?
Holy crap you guys are scary.
It might not be ethical, but how is this different than organizations that lobby congress? This seems blown up. Would it be ok if instead of being called "Psy-Ops" they were called "Public Relations?"
Wait, when did PR and lobbying tactics become role models of proper behavior? Was there a memo that said "PR agencies have stopped lying and lobbyists are no longer the used car salesmen of politics"?
The army is supposed to protect the US, its laws and Mom's Apple Pie. If the army is resorting to the same tricks as lobbyists and PR henchmen, what makes you think that they are still about Freedom, The Pursuit of Happiness and Baseball?
Yes, it is outrageous behavior, because we all bitch about the underhanded tactics marketers and lobbyists use to sell their wares. They don't suddenly become OK because the Army is using them.