Hear hear. Stop stuffing your bills with crap and be straight with the populace, for once. Anyone whose congressperson isn't, on either side of the aisle, should vote against them.
Of course, I'm not sure many members of Congress can count higher than about 400. "The vote on H.R. 21576 is called to order." "What?!"
Way to make it personal, asshole. I'm a college student so I can get away with charging 20 bucks an hour undercutting everyone else (high gas prices and an outdated website, you see; the website does no selling for me) and it's still a reasonable amount of money considering my expenses -- and I'm really good at what I do, if my continued referrals mean anything.
Discarding the politics of personal destruction and returning to the issues, it's silly of you to assert that only Democrats have dissonance within their ranks. There are many varied viewpoints in the Republican party, from the wacky (and IMO quite stupid) Creationists to the pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage Giuliani conservatives to the corrupt idiots like Ted Stevens who I'm happy to see go. People like me consider the Ted Stevenses and the Arlen Specters and the Olympia Snowes (the latter two of which supported this pork-laden stimulus package in the Senate) to be, as you say, wolves in sheeps' clothing.
And unfortunately, Barack was pitched to us as a messenger from fairy land sent to save us all, that he would magically make everything better. He can't even instill his own purported values of transparency, freedom of information and clean government in his own party members despite his sweeping election. There is no hope for them; indeed, I think they've started to rub off on him -- there are no pork or earmarks in the stimulus bill, but there are special spending projects and shovel-ready construction projects and countless other Democrat special projects that just can't wait to garner Democrat votes with government dollars.
I agree wholeheartedly. I hope that the 2006 and 2008 elections are a wake-up call that conservative principles WORK and are popular -- the Republican party shouldn't be Democrats Lite, it wins voters by offering something more.
I think you think I'm more of a troll than I actually am...
I'm not old enough to have bitched about all of those things, and certainly there are both good intentions and good results, as many of those reforms can fall under the common-sense category (especially lead in gasoline...), but for every common-sense reform I can point at three that just resulted in wasted time and tax dollars, or caused severe market repercussions elsewhere.
Usually the problem with those negative examples is that someone freaked out about something (global cooling! global warming! global climate change! financial crisis!) and decided that SOMETHING needed to be done NOW. They then came up with a half-baked short-term solution to that problem and put it into place and continued living their lives. That's exactly what I classify this as: a half-baked short-term solution that won't do anything in the long run.
Take for example a great examples of way that private industry can help the environment: Wal-Mart reducing fuel consumption on their trucks: not only does this save Wal-Mart lots of money in fuel costs, but it drives innovation in truck and vehicle design and helps to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If they then sell this technology to other companies similarly interested in both reduced costs and increased fuel economy, the effect will be much more substantial -- and require not a taxpayer penny -- than this silly regulation and the certification process it will surely produce.
While I agree that government intervention by default isn't bad, in most cases it turns out to be, especially when Saving the Planet(tm) is involved. Just look at the farce that is ethanol...
Your point about energy subsidies is taken and two responses come to mind:
1. Forcibly reducing consumption will not necessarily reduce the actual amounts of the subsidies, because I think population growth will level out the relatively minute energy savings garnered by producing more energy-efficient TVs. Certainly the amount of money the government puts in per energy dollar will not change.
2. My position on government intervention is consistent: the energy subsidies themselves are stupid and should be dismantled as well, allowing the market to build clean and efficient nuclear power plants and work towards technological solutions for a cleaner, power-efficient future without propping up worthless old technologies and inefficient and impractical ones like solar and wind with subsidies.
The government usually goes in with good intentions... and comes out stifling technological development (because companies default to laziness and accept the free government dime), and corrupt and/or inefficient to boot. If people want greener TVs, the market will make them available -- just look at the Toyota Prius, which Toyota can't churn out fast enough!
I work for a non-profit over the summer, and we do extensive expense tracking. Every dime spent must be accounted for, because as a 501(c)3 charity we are audited every year.
I assume this is the case with Mozilla -- not that they were singled out for auditing, but that they're a 501(c)3 so they're automatically audited to ensure 501(c)3 compliance.
I doubt Palin would have appointed herself. First off, that's probably against the law, or Governor Murkowski would have done it to himself a few years ago rather than appoint his daughter Lisa to the seat. Since then she has won reelection on her own merits.
More importantly, though, if you look into Ms. Palin's history a bit you'll find that her whole campaign for Governor was pretty much based on running against the extremely corrupt Republican machine in Alaska.
Appointing herself to the seat would cause her to lose all credibility on that issue with people like me, with whom it's a major selling point.:)
Yeah -- essentially what this result means is that those Alaskans who cast their vote for Stevens would rather vote for a shamelessly corrupt convicted felon than for a Democrat.
Most of the time, I'm with 'em.;)
(though, to be fair, he would have probably resigned and been replaced with a better candidate by appointment or special election, had he won.)
We've already killed Diablo in Diablo 1. Then, in Diablo II, we killed him AGAIN, and killed his brothers and scores of underling bosses.
Are we now killing him a THIRD time, along with his brothers, cousins, college roommate, and that guy he talked to at the bus stop last week? How does Evil(tm) finance its operation and pay its underling bosses? More importantly, how many computer mice must the forces of Good(tm) sacrifice to stop this nonsense?!
You have, sadly, a very good point about over-litigation which brings to light one of my other pet peeves, frivolous lawsuits. Judging by the assertion in r_jensen11's comment, this might very well have been one of those situations where wealthy parents who have lawyers already on retainer for other reasons may very well sue rather than suck up the fact that they're parenting failures.
Reminds me of this NYT article on some George Washington University students who trapped their administration busting parties and had a great time at it as well!
This would seem to aid one of my longtime complaints; namely, that many schools at all levels of education spend far too much money on administrators and not enough on teachers... If they have time to be nosing around students' lives on Facebook, they probably don't have enough real administrative work to do.
The bill even includes an entire section on how any actions the DHS takes "shall not violate" civil rights and civil liberties, and requiring an auditing mechanism of those actions:
`SEC. 899F. PROTECTING CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES WHILE PREVENTING IDEOLOGICALLY-BASED VIOLENCE AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM.
`(a) In General- The Department of Homeland Security's efforts to prevent ideologically-based violence and homegrown terrorism as described herein shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.
`(b) Commitment to Racial Neutrality- The Secretary shall ensure that the activities and operations of the entities created by this subtitle are in compliance with the Department of Homeland Security's commitment to racial neutrality issued in an Department-wide Memorandum on June 1, 2004.
`(c) Auditing Mechanism- The Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer of the Department of Homeland Security will develop and implement an auditing mechanism to ensure that compliance with this subtitle does not result in a disproportionate impact, without a rational basis, on any particular race, ethnicity, or religion and include within its annual report to Congress required under section 705.'.
The reason why Spitzer and this group are suing the government is that the Feds have established pollution control standards and Spitzer wants them made more restrictive. I am normally in favor of states' rights, but the issue in question here is more of a standards debate for me -- were each state given the ability to mandate their own efficiency requirements for cars, the result would be a broad range of such standards and car companies would have to meet the most efficient denominator, with a drastic (skyward) impact on the price of cars. The federal government sets the national standard, and now you don't have the purchasing power of 4 million Oregonians determining that the rest of us have to pay a premium for a super-efficient hybrid car we can't afford.
The single biggest problem I have with this bogus lawsuit is this: it's the government suing the government, with all the included lawyer fees. Let the tax dollars fly. With a lawsuit at this level, as well, those fees will not be trifling, and who will pay them but the lowly taxpayer. Residents of the states filing suit are taxed twice on this -- first by their states for their legal fees, and second by the federal government for its defense. Those of us living in states who aren't signed on only get to pay for a lawsuit we disagree with once at the federal level.
Residents of these states who support this: the proper way to get the EPA to change its guidelines is to have your federal legislators introduce legislation to change those guidelines. Then, those politicians get to convince a majority of their house of the legislature to sign on, which is absolutely necessary for a change with such a huge impact as changing EPA efficiency requirements. This underhanded lawsuit crap is the same tactic that generates so much scorn for SCO, the MAFIAA and other legal trolls -- why is it now okay?
One of the purposes of the Attorney General's office is to protect the rights of the consumer. The rights of the consumer are NOT being trampled in this situation. Everybody in America has the opportunity to buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle. The government's purpose in the matter should be to establish a baseline of efficiency on which people who can afford it, and innovation by car companies, can improve.
If you read through his prior postings you'll find him to be very reasonable, and back up his arguments with fact -- hardly conditions you'd find when posting "sycophantic apologies for power and authoritarianism." It is possible to have cautioned, informed and well-reasoned viewpoints as a conservative, you know.
I'm a fellow Madison resident (once referred to as "politically to the left of Moscow") and a conservative. This is how we try to end up when, surrounded by some of the most angry far-left people in the country, we defend our convictions.
As a conservative, and an IT employee to boot, I resent your post.
I know plenty of conservatives who know what they're talking about, are well-educated and eloquent. Some are even of other ethnicities, like my Hispanic self, and most are not particularly wealthy.
By the same token, living in Madison, Wisconsin, I have met plenty of left-wing folks who are completely and utterly insane, closed-minded, and outright stupid. I've also met plenty of right-wing folks who are completely and utterly insane, closed-minded and outright stupid. It's silly to generalize one group as smart and the other as stupid, or one as crazy and the other as sane. There are idiots and smart people, whack jobs and reasonable folks on all ends of the political spectrum.
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Hear hear. Stop stuffing your bills with crap and be straight with the populace, for once. Anyone whose congressperson isn't, on either side of the aisle, should vote against them.
Of course, I'm not sure many members of Congress can count higher than about 400. "The vote on H.R. 21576 is called to order." "What?!"
Yeah. Content that was never voted on in the original bills AND that has nothing to do with the eventual purpose of the bill. What a stupid system..
Way to make it personal, asshole. I'm a college student so I can get away with charging 20 bucks an hour undercutting everyone else (high gas prices and an outdated website, you see; the website does no selling for me) and it's still a reasonable amount of money considering my expenses -- and I'm really good at what I do, if my continued referrals mean anything.
Discarding the politics of personal destruction and returning to the issues, it's silly of you to assert that only Democrats have dissonance within their ranks. There are many varied viewpoints in the Republican party, from the wacky (and IMO quite stupid) Creationists to the pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage Giuliani conservatives to the corrupt idiots like Ted Stevens who I'm happy to see go. People like me consider the Ted Stevenses and the Arlen Specters and the Olympia Snowes (the latter two of which supported this pork-laden stimulus package in the Senate) to be, as you say, wolves in sheeps' clothing.
And unfortunately, Barack was pitched to us as a messenger from fairy land sent to save us all, that he would magically make everything better. He can't even instill his own purported values of transparency, freedom of information and clean government in his own party members despite his sweeping election. There is no hope for them; indeed, I think they've started to rub off on him -- there are no pork or earmarks in the stimulus bill, but there are special spending projects and shovel-ready construction projects and countless other Democrat special projects that just can't wait to garner Democrat votes with government dollars.
I agree wholeheartedly. I hope that the 2006 and 2008 elections are a wake-up call that conservative principles WORK and are popular -- the Republican party shouldn't be Democrats Lite, it wins voters by offering something more.
Democrats NEVER hide unnecessary spending or unrelated projects in omnibus spending bills. They're for responsible government, remember?
Change! Transparency!
As a longtime Charter customer in Wisconsin, yes, the DSL service (particularly TDS) is both more reliable and not capping its service.
Looks like the perfect time to switch to DSL...
I think you think I'm more of a troll than I actually am...
I'm not old enough to have bitched about all of those things, and certainly there are both good intentions and good results, as many of those reforms can fall under the common-sense category (especially lead in gasoline...), but for every common-sense reform I can point at three that just resulted in wasted time and tax dollars, or caused severe market repercussions elsewhere.
Usually the problem with those negative examples is that someone freaked out about something (global cooling! global warming! global climate change! financial crisis!) and decided that SOMETHING needed to be done NOW. They then came up with a half-baked short-term solution to that problem and put it into place and continued living their lives. That's exactly what I classify this as: a half-baked short-term solution that won't do anything in the long run.
Take for example a great examples of way that private industry can help the environment: Wal-Mart reducing fuel consumption on their trucks: not only does this save Wal-Mart lots of money in fuel costs, but it drives innovation in truck and vehicle design and helps to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If they then sell this technology to other companies similarly interested in both reduced costs and increased fuel economy, the effect will be much more substantial -- and require not a taxpayer penny -- than this silly regulation and the certification process it will surely produce.
While I agree that government intervention by default isn't bad, in most cases it turns out to be, especially when Saving the Planet(tm) is involved. Just look at the farce that is ethanol...
Your point about energy subsidies is taken and two responses come to mind:
1. Forcibly reducing consumption will not necessarily reduce the actual amounts of the subsidies, because I think population growth will level out the relatively minute energy savings garnered by producing more energy-efficient TVs. Certainly the amount of money the government puts in per energy dollar will not change.
2. My position on government intervention is consistent: the energy subsidies themselves are stupid and should be dismantled as well, allowing the market to build clean and efficient nuclear power plants and work towards technological solutions for a cleaner, power-efficient future without propping up worthless old technologies and inefficient and impractical ones like solar and wind with subsidies.
The government usually goes in with good intentions... and comes out stifling technological development (because companies default to laziness and accept the free government dime), and corrupt and/or inefficient to boot. If people want greener TVs, the market will make them available -- just look at the Toyota Prius, which Toyota can't churn out fast enough!
Great, more government intervention in both the market and our lives; the net result will just be less choice and higher prices for TVs everywhere.
I work for a non-profit over the summer, and we do extensive expense tracking. Every dime spent must be accounted for, because as a 501(c)3 charity we are audited every year.
I assume this is the case with Mozilla -- not that they were singled out for auditing, but that they're a 501(c)3 so they're automatically audited to ensure 501(c)3 compliance.
I doubt Palin would have appointed herself. First off, that's probably against the law, or Governor Murkowski would have done it to himself a few years ago rather than appoint his daughter Lisa to the seat. Since then she has won reelection on her own merits.
More importantly, though, if you look into Ms. Palin's history a bit you'll find that her whole campaign for Governor was pretty much based on running against the extremely corrupt Republican machine in Alaska.
Appointing herself to the seat would cause her to lose all credibility on that issue with people like me, with whom it's a major selling point. :)
Yeah -- essentially what this result means is that those Alaskans who cast their vote for Stevens would rather vote for a shamelessly corrupt convicted felon than for a Democrat.
Most of the time, I'm with 'em. ;)
(though, to be fair, he would have probably resigned and been replaced with a better candidate by appointment or special election, had he won.)
Conservatives have NOT been in control of the USA for the last eight years..
We've already killed Diablo in Diablo 1. Then, in Diablo II, we killed him AGAIN, and killed his brothers and scores of underling bosses.
Are we now killing him a THIRD time, along with his brothers, cousins, college roommate, and that guy he talked to at the bus stop last week? How does Evil(tm) finance its operation and pay its underling bosses? More importantly, how many computer mice must the forces of Good(tm) sacrifice to stop this nonsense?!
Your Windows license paid for the research that produced this tool. Why should they let those penniless open-source hippies use it?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for openness, but can you really blame them?
You have, sadly, a very good point about over-litigation which brings to light one of my other pet peeves, frivolous lawsuits. Judging by the assertion in r_jensen11's comment, this might very well have been one of those situations where wealthy parents who have lawyers already on retainer for other reasons may very well sue rather than suck up the fact that they're parenting failures.
Reminds me of this NYT article on some George Washington University students who trapped their administration busting parties and had a great time at it as well!
This would seem to aid one of my longtime complaints; namely, that many schools at all levels of education spend far too much money on administrators and not enough on teachers... If they have time to be nosing around students' lives on Facebook, they probably don't have enough real administrative work to do.
Microsoft is no match for the dread pirate Elaine Roberts!
The bill even includes an entire section on how any actions the DHS takes "shall not violate" civil rights and civil liberties, and requiring an auditing mechanism of those actions:
`SEC. 899F. PROTECTING CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES WHILE PREVENTING IDEOLOGICALLY-BASED VIOLENCE AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM.
`(a) In General- The Department of Homeland Security's efforts to prevent ideologically-based violence and homegrown terrorism as described herein shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.
`(b) Commitment to Racial Neutrality- The Secretary shall ensure that the activities and operations of the entities created by this subtitle are in compliance with the Department of Homeland Security's commitment to racial neutrality issued in an Department-wide Memorandum on June 1, 2004.
`(c) Auditing Mechanism- The Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer of the Department of Homeland Security will develop and implement an auditing mechanism to ensure that compliance with this subtitle does not result in a disproportionate impact, without a rational basis, on any particular race, ethnicity, or religion and include within its annual report to Congress required under section 705.'.
The reason why Spitzer and this group are suing the government is that the Feds have established pollution control standards and Spitzer wants them made more restrictive. I am normally in favor of states' rights, but the issue in question here is more of a standards debate for me -- were each state given the ability to mandate their own efficiency requirements for cars, the result would be a broad range of such standards and car companies would have to meet the most efficient denominator, with a drastic (skyward) impact on the price of cars. The federal government sets the national standard, and now you don't have the purchasing power of 4 million Oregonians determining that the rest of us have to pay a premium for a super-efficient hybrid car we can't afford.
The single biggest problem I have with this bogus lawsuit is this: it's the government suing the government, with all the included lawyer fees. Let the tax dollars fly. With a lawsuit at this level, as well, those fees will not be trifling, and who will pay them but the lowly taxpayer. Residents of the states filing suit are taxed twice on this -- first by their states for their legal fees, and second by the federal government for its defense. Those of us living in states who aren't signed on only get to pay for a lawsuit we disagree with once at the federal level.
Residents of these states who support this: the proper way to get the EPA to change its guidelines is to have your federal legislators introduce legislation to change those guidelines. Then, those politicians get to convince a majority of their house of the legislature to sign on, which is absolutely necessary for a change with such a huge impact as changing EPA efficiency requirements. This underhanded lawsuit crap is the same tactic that generates so much scorn for SCO, the MAFIAA and other legal trolls -- why is it now okay?
One of the purposes of the Attorney General's office is to protect the rights of the consumer. The rights of the consumer are NOT being trampled in this situation. Everybody in America has the opportunity to buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle. The government's purpose in the matter should be to establish a baseline of efficiency on which people who can afford it, and innovation by car companies, can improve.
If you read through his prior postings you'll find him to be very reasonable, and back up his arguments with fact -- hardly conditions you'd find when posting "sycophantic apologies for power and authoritarianism." It is possible to have cautioned, informed and well-reasoned viewpoints as a conservative, you know.
I'm a fellow Madison resident (once referred to as "politically to the left of Moscow") and a conservative. This is how we try to end up when, surrounded by some of the most angry far-left people in the country, we defend our convictions.
As a conservative, and an IT employee to boot, I resent your post.
I know plenty of conservatives who know what they're talking about, are well-educated and eloquent. Some are even of other ethnicities, like my Hispanic self, and most are not particularly wealthy.
By the same token, living in Madison, Wisconsin, I have met plenty of left-wing folks who are completely and utterly insane, closed-minded, and outright stupid. I've also met plenty of right-wing folks who are completely and utterly insane, closed-minded and outright stupid. It's silly to generalize one group as smart and the other as stupid, or one as crazy and the other as sane. There are idiots and smart people, whack jobs and reasonable folks on all ends of the political spectrum.
They're infringing on my patent for an accelerated patent review system. I filed it just a few minutes ago through their accelerated process!
With this many Death Stars around, the Rebellion doesn't stand a chance! **evil cackle**