Finally, we agree on something; the NSA is entirely out of control, the Homeland Security Department is an abomination, and everybody involved ought to be in Leavenworth.
But it's Emperor Obama himself who has overseen the worst of the abuses.
The IRS intimidation tactics? Obama SAID he would audit his enemies. Even Nixon never did that. The Attorney General is equally complicit; Obama appointed Eric Holder for a reason, and the reason is "Do what I say!" (It's long been known that the easiest way to commit the perfect crime is to be the guy in charge of the investigation.)
Yes, this is generally the way it works; unless there is a severability clause in a contract or law, finding one element to be unconstitutional renders the whole thing unconstitutional.
But we haven't had a constitutional government in a LONG time, and the pinheads under the capitol dome have gotten used to making things up as they go along.
Joining Yet Again blathers: "Sorry, what? Are you claiming that your representatives didn't have the full text of primary legislation available, or that secondary legislation is left to the executive (which is standard for all lawmaking)?"
I agree that this SHOULD be standard, and that Obama His Imperial Self PROMISED would be standard, but in this case, no, the text of the legislation was NOT available to the legislators. Other than Nancy Pelosi, who couldn't have read it in the short time it was available. That's why she said, and I quote, "You have to pass this to find out what's in it.".
Please note that the "right-wingers" got into congress by BEING ELECTED, by voters who support what they're doing. And even the left-wingers who are trying to bankrupt the country weren't elected by much more than 52% of whatever minor fraction of the population turned out to vote.
I realize that SlashDot is predominantly peopled by lefties who believe that the Federal Government SHOULD exercise the sorts of imperial power by decree that Barack Obama is doing - but the population of the American people is split pretty much right down the middle on this.
Obama is trying mightily to make everybody feel the pain of his displeasure - but that's not how a representative republic works.
No, I'm quite certain that he was born in Hawai'i; if there were any person in the WORLD who could have proved otherwise, that person would have been Hillary Clinton.
Like most restaurants, one DRIVES to it.(If you'd ever been there - or bothered to look at the linked article's photo - you'd have seen that.) There's no on-site parking; parking is on the public SF streets. Yes, there's a stairway down to the beach, but the front door faces a city street. It's been a while since I was there, so I don't recall if there are Federal Marshalls as lifeguards, but I suspect not. It would cost the government NOTHING to leave the place alone. It costs them a great deal to barry-cade off all the unattended parks, beaches, forests, monuments, etc.
Barack Obama is a spiteful, insecure, NASTY little man. His most common legal tactic, during a tough election, is to have his legal goons unseal divorce records about his enemies, or his enemies' friends. His typical expression of gazing into the camera with his middle finger raised along his cheek; well, that sort of tells you everything you need to know about him.
Yes, the Federal government is entirely screwed up - and has been for 100 years.
Our Constitution provides for a LIMITED Federal government with CAREFULLY DEFINED powers; Article 1, Section 8 has eighteen "Enumerated Powers" of the Federal government. The 9th and 10th Amendments, part of the Bill of Rights, says "AND THATS ALL!!!" All other powers are reserved to the people, or the States.
It really started getting screwed up with the 17th Amendment, providing with direct election of Senators. The House is supposed to represent the PEOPLE; the Senate represents the STATES. (The States have their own governmental structures.)
In the current Federal government, probably 2/3 of all Federal spending has precisely zero Constitutional authority, and should be eliminated. There's no constitutional authority for national parks or "federal lands", for example. California, for example, is severely impacted by the closure of national parks and forests, which shouldn't be controlled by the Feds. I've suggested elsewhere that Jerry Brown ought to "de-nationalize" all federal parks and forests, and take them over for the State of California. He won't DO it, of course, but it would permanently resolve THIS problem.
The Department of Education should be abolished, for example; it wastes billions of dollars, and schools are far WORSE than they were 50 years ago. States - or better, cities - should manage their own educational systems. The states that screw this up will suffer; states that do this well will prosper. California, for example, is close to the top of the heap in spending, but close to the bottom in educational outcomes.
But we're going to suffer the consequences of a century of expansive, expensive Federal government that has grown far beyond its legal limits. Either the United States of America must return at least somewhat to its roots, or we'll develop the new Federal Empire that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want.
There's also a chain of privately managed campgrounds; again, NO Federal employees. They've been ordered to close - even though they've stayed open in previous "shutdowns".
“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”
The "Cliff House" restaurant in San Francisco is a privately owned and operated restaurant which is built on Federal land. It has no Federal employees. They _PAY RENT_ to the Feds.
Budgets..... Aye, THERE'S the rub. By the Constitution, all bills appropriating money from the treasury of the United States MUST originate in the House. The Senate can propose amendments, which then go back to the House for their approval. The President is, officially, "out of the loop" for budgets.
In reality, most presidents in the last 100 years have proposed their own budgets, and an obliging Representative then introduces "his" budget, and then it's off to the races. In this case, Obama has never proposed a budget, the Dem house didn't bother, and Harry Reid has blocked any GOP-submitted budget since the Dems lost the House in 2010.
That's how Obamacare got so badly screwed up to begin with. The House proposed the original version of Obamacare, larded up with every leftists' wildest dreams; the Senate was supposed to revise it to make it work. Then Teddy Kennedy went to his eternal reward, Scott Brown was elected to the Senate, and the Dems lost their filibuster-proof majority - and their only option was either to pass the House bill (which EVERYBODY KNEW WAS CRAP) without changes, or watch the Republican minority filibuster their changes to death. They passed it, with Nancy Pelosi's timeless line "You'll have to pass the bill to see what's in it!".
Now we're seeing, and a LOT of people are having buyers remorse.
I was going to respond "President Obama has NEVER signed a budget", but other people have already made the point for me. The object of "cut spending" would suggest that the NPS should lock the gates and go home. But that's not what they're doing - they are (under Presidential direction!) doing ANYTHING THEY CAN to spite the American people, in an attempt to prod the populace into demanding quick action. When Nixon did that, few reporters called him on it. Now, the entire "press" is Obama supporters and will do or say anything to support "The One". But with this internet thingie and cell phones and Twitter, the "media" has lost their exclusive control of the "news".
And Obama's warnings of doom about the debt ceiling and our impending default - that isn't so clear, either. The Treasury is getting plenty of money, MORE than enough to pay all the debts that are due; bond payments and the like. The problem is that they're spending it even FASTER. So when we ram into the debt ceiling at Mach 3, somebody at the Fed will need to make a choice - make the bond payments and screw all the welfare recipients, pensioners, Michelle's vacation partners and Federal employees and NOT default, or default and give the money to other people. Or, keep borrowing and break the debt ceiling.
Defaulting or breaking the debt ceiling would both be impeachable offenses, but I suspect that he'd rather default and collapse the economy EVEN FASTER than he has been doing for the past 4 years.
I'm lucky; I'm old and probably won't need to worry about surviving the civil war that is coming. Because it IS coming.
Oh, one other tidbit; the Washington Post is ENTIRELY in Obama's pocket. He probably wrote that piece. It doesn't enhance your credibility to be quoting it.
It's quite simple; Obama wants to WASTE as much money as he can, to teach all of us rebellious scum the penalty for "lese majeste". It is not, quite yet, legal for him to have us drawn and quartered for daring to question the Emperor, but he's working on it.
The National Park Service alone is running up enormous bills just for the rental of his Barry-cades that they're using to block access to open fields. Or to privately owned restaurants. The NPS Barry-caded the turn-around circle outside of Mount Vernon. (They tried to close Mount Vernon itself, but the government doesn't own that!) They're Barry-cading "scenic lookouts" in the Blue Ridge mountains. I'm sure the NPS has no use whatsoever for the money that the Cliff House in San Francisco pays for rent....
It's simple..... no, it's quite a COMPLEX case of spite and hate for all Americans. If I wasn't quite certain that he'd been born in Hawaii, I might start believing the Birther claims that he was born elsewhere!
My question is, if Obamacare survives and if there's a miracle and it actually works, what prevents the NEXT Emperor-Wannabe from closing all the hospitals during the next budget crisis?
"The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) has not yet ratified its 2000 definition of the ocean as being south of 60S.". So there are still only four. But my original comment " Unless somebody found a new one after I graduated from high school in the 60's...." still applies.
Oceans have typically been defined by some geographic constraints. So while we TALK about the "South Pacific" and the "North Pacific", only the equator separates the two; it's the same ocean. There are no physical separations to a "Southern Ocean"; just the stroke of some bureaucratic pen to say that at 59.9 degrees south, it's one thing but at 60 degrees south it's something else.
Most of southern Louisiana is nothing more than river silt to begin with; the "land" in the bayou was dirt in Illinois and Iowa a thousand years ago, washed downstream by the annual floods in the Mississippi.
The "widespread protests" were for the anniversary of 9/11. I seem to recall that there were a number of violent protests and a few hundred dead. But we have always been at war with East Asia, so the record of this has been disappeared.
Scores of deaths? There were the four dead Americans, and a few dozen dead terrorists in the courtyard. SEALS don't go down easily, and these two took an honor guard to Valhalla with them. It wasn't QUITE the "Grave of the Hundred Head", but close.
One major quibble. As the Earth travels in its path around the Sun, the line of sunrise is the "front", and the line of sunset is the "back". You'll see more and brighter meteors from 2AM to dawn than you will between sunset and midnight. So if your schedule permits, rather than staying up late, get up early to look for meteors.
When driving, bugs hit the front windshield quite often. But bugs hardly ever splatter themselves on the BACK window. Same principle.
The Perseid meteors are going at about 125,000 miles per hour, while the Earth is moving at about 66,000 MPH. You'll sometimes see meteors that will catch up from behind, but the bright ones will be head-on.
The original article's premise was "The US military may be vulnerable to a cyber-attack, perhaps vaguely similar to the one depicted in Battlestar:Galactica." I was replying to a comment saying, in effect, "we learned how to navigate by the stars at NROTC, so we don't really NEED our fancy GPS systems." I'm saying "Celestial navigation is a great fallback navigation method for when everything else goes to hell, but it takes continuous practice that I don't think people are getting these days."
DO they still teach cel nav any more? I don't know. But with the LORAN and OMEGA systems closed or closing, being able to find your way back to land might be a handy skill to know, if somebody manages to launch a few tons of 1" polycarbonate cubes into a reverse-trajectory low-Earth orbit.
The point is, we DO depend on our electronics, and our military would be crippled if somebody hacked or degraded our electronic communications and navigational systems. Is some knockout cyborg dame going to seduce our only scientist and sink our fleets with gremlins? No, B:G is a fictional and EXTREME case. The fact that science fiction is often extreme and overwrought doesn't mean that the crux of the problem is itself fictional.
Yes, and I used to TEACH celestial navigation at the USAF navigator school. Which is now closed.
GPS is too easy, too inexpensive, and too accurate, so NOBODY actually uses celestial navigation any more. But cel nav requires practice, and it is a "Use It Or Lose It!" skill.
Slashdot Mirror
There's this handy website called "Google". Or DuckDuckGo.com. Pick one. Do your own research; perhaps you'll learn something.
Finally, we agree on something; the NSA is entirely out of control, the Homeland Security Department is an abomination, and everybody involved ought to be in Leavenworth.
But it's Emperor Obama himself who has overseen the worst of the abuses.
The IRS intimidation tactics? Obama SAID he would audit his enemies. Even Nixon never did that. The Attorney General is equally complicit; Obama appointed Eric Holder for a reason, and the reason is "Do what I say!" (It's long been known that the easiest way to commit the perfect crime is to be the guy in charge of the investigation.)
Yes, this is generally the way it works; unless there is a severability clause in a contract or law, finding one element to be unconstitutional renders the whole thing unconstitutional.
But we haven't had a constitutional government in a LONG time, and the pinheads under the capitol dome have gotten used to making things up as they go along.
Joining Yet Again blathers: "Sorry, what? Are you claiming that your representatives didn't have the full text of primary legislation available, or that secondary legislation is left to the executive (which is standard for all lawmaking)?"
I agree that this SHOULD be standard, and that Obama His Imperial Self PROMISED would be standard, but in this case, no, the text of the legislation was NOT available to the legislators. Other than Nancy Pelosi, who couldn't have read it in the short time it was available. That's why she said, and I quote, "You have to pass this to find out what's in it.".
Please note that the "right-wingers" got into congress by BEING ELECTED, by voters who support what they're doing. And even the left-wingers who are trying to bankrupt the country weren't elected by much more than 52% of whatever minor fraction of the population turned out to vote.
I realize that SlashDot is predominantly peopled by lefties who believe that the Federal Government SHOULD exercise the sorts of imperial power by decree that Barack Obama is doing - but the population of the American people is split pretty much right down the middle on this.
Obama is trying mightily to make everybody feel the pain of his displeasure - but that's not how a representative republic works.
No, I'm quite certain that he was born in Hawai'i; if there were any person in the WORLD who could have proved otherwise, that person would have been Hillary Clinton.
Like most restaurants, one DRIVES to it.(If you'd ever been there - or bothered to look at the linked article's photo - you'd have seen that.) There's no on-site parking; parking is on the public SF streets. Yes, there's a stairway down to the beach, but the front door faces a city street. It's been a while since I was there, so I don't recall if there are Federal Marshalls as lifeguards, but I suspect not. It would cost the government NOTHING to leave the place alone. It costs them a great deal to barry-cade off all the unattended parks, beaches, forests, monuments, etc.
Barack Obama is a spiteful, insecure, NASTY little man. His most common legal tactic, during a tough election, is to have his legal goons unseal divorce records about his enemies, or his enemies' friends. His typical expression of gazing into the camera with his middle finger raised along his cheek; well, that sort of tells you everything you need to know about him.
Yes, the Federal government is entirely screwed up - and has been for 100 years.
Our Constitution provides for a LIMITED Federal government with CAREFULLY DEFINED powers; Article 1, Section 8 has eighteen "Enumerated Powers" of the Federal government. The 9th and 10th Amendments, part of the Bill of Rights, says "AND THATS ALL!!!" All other powers are reserved to the people, or the States.
It really started getting screwed up with the 17th Amendment, providing with direct election of Senators. The House is supposed to represent the PEOPLE; the Senate represents the STATES. (The States have their own governmental structures.)
In the current Federal government, probably 2/3 of all Federal spending has precisely zero Constitutional authority, and should be eliminated. There's no constitutional authority for national parks or "federal lands", for example. California, for example, is severely impacted by the closure of national parks and forests, which shouldn't be controlled by the Feds. I've suggested elsewhere that Jerry Brown ought to "de-nationalize" all federal parks and forests, and take them over for the State of California. He won't DO it, of course, but it would permanently resolve THIS problem.
The Department of Education should be abolished, for example; it wastes billions of dollars, and schools are far WORSE than they were 50 years ago. States - or better, cities - should manage their own educational systems. The states that screw this up will suffer; states that do this well will prosper. California, for example, is close to the top of the heap in spending, but close to the bottom in educational outcomes.
But we're going to suffer the consequences of a century of expansive, expensive Federal government that has grown far beyond its legal limits. Either the United States of America must return at least somewhat to its roots, or we'll develop the new Federal Empire that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want.
Vote accordingly.
There's also a chain of privately managed campgrounds; again, NO Federal employees. They've been ordered to close - even though they've stayed open in previous "shutdowns".
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/10/02/shutdown-white-house-ordering-privately-run-privately-funded-parks-to-close/
“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/3/pruden-the-cheap-tricks-of-the-game/
The "Cliff House" restaurant in San Francisco is a privately owned and operated restaurant which is built on Federal land. It has no Federal employees. They _PAY RENT_ to the Feds.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/10/03/sf-shutdown-theater/
Budgets..... Aye, THERE'S the rub. By the Constitution, all bills appropriating money from the treasury of the United States MUST originate in the House. The Senate can propose amendments, which then go back to the House for their approval. The President is, officially, "out of the loop" for budgets.
In reality, most presidents in the last 100 years have proposed their own budgets, and an obliging Representative then introduces "his" budget, and then it's off to the races. In this case, Obama has never proposed a budget, the Dem house didn't bother, and Harry Reid has blocked any GOP-submitted budget since the Dems lost the House in 2010.
That's how Obamacare got so badly screwed up to begin with. The House proposed the original version of Obamacare, larded up with every leftists' wildest dreams; the Senate was supposed to revise it to make it work. Then Teddy Kennedy went to his eternal reward, Scott Brown was elected to the Senate, and the Dems lost their filibuster-proof majority - and their only option was either to pass the House bill (which EVERYBODY KNEW WAS CRAP) without changes, or watch the Republican minority filibuster their changes to death. They passed it, with Nancy Pelosi's timeless line "You'll have to pass the bill to see what's in it!".
Now we're seeing, and a LOT of people are having buyers remorse.
I was going to respond "President Obama has NEVER signed a budget", but other people have already made the point for me. The object of "cut spending" would suggest that the NPS should lock the gates and go home. But that's not what they're doing - they are (under Presidential direction!) doing ANYTHING THEY CAN to spite the American people, in an attempt to prod the populace into demanding quick action. When Nixon did that, few reporters called him on it. Now, the entire "press" is Obama supporters and will do or say anything to support "The One". But with this internet thingie and cell phones and Twitter, the "media" has lost their exclusive control of the "news".
And Obama's warnings of doom about the debt ceiling and our impending default - that isn't so clear, either. The Treasury is getting plenty of money, MORE than enough to pay all the debts that are due; bond payments and the like. The problem is that they're spending it even FASTER. So when we ram into the debt ceiling at Mach 3, somebody at the Fed will need to make a choice - make the bond payments and screw all the welfare recipients, pensioners, Michelle's vacation partners and Federal employees and NOT default, or default and give the money to other people. Or, keep borrowing and break the debt ceiling.
Defaulting or breaking the debt ceiling would both be impeachable offenses, but I suspect that he'd rather default and collapse the economy EVEN FASTER than he has been doing for the past 4 years.
I'm lucky; I'm old and probably won't need to worry about surviving the civil war that is coming. Because it IS coming.
Oh, one other tidbit; the Washington Post is ENTIRELY in Obama's pocket. He probably wrote that piece. It doesn't enhance your credibility to be quoting it.
It's quite simple; Obama wants to WASTE as much money as he can, to teach all of us rebellious scum the penalty for "lese majeste". It is not, quite yet, legal for him to have us drawn and quartered for daring to question the Emperor, but he's working on it.
The National Park Service alone is running up enormous bills just for the rental of his Barry-cades that they're using to block access to open fields. Or to privately owned restaurants. The NPS Barry-caded the turn-around circle outside of Mount Vernon. (They tried to close Mount Vernon itself, but the government doesn't own that!) They're Barry-cading "scenic lookouts" in the Blue Ridge mountains. I'm sure the NPS has no use whatsoever for the money that the Cliff House in San Francisco pays for rent....
It's simple ..... no, it's quite a COMPLEX case of spite and hate for all Americans. If I wasn't quite certain that he'd been born in Hawaii, I might start believing the Birther claims that he was born elsewhere!
My question is, if Obamacare survives and if there's a miracle and it actually works, what prevents the NEXT Emperor-Wannabe from closing all the hospitals during the next budget crisis?
"The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) has not yet ratified its 2000 definition of the ocean as being south of 60S.". So there are still only four. But my original comment " Unless somebody found a new one after I graduated from high school in the 60's...." still applies.
Oceans have typically been defined by some geographic constraints. So while we TALK about the "South Pacific" and the "North Pacific", only the equator separates the two; it's the same ocean. There are no physical separations to a "Southern Ocean"; just the stroke of some bureaucratic pen to say that at 59.9 degrees south, it's one thing but at 60 degrees south it's something else.
Does that mean that Uranus has not "cleared its orbit" of other objects? (That being one of the IAU's criteria for planet-hood)
Ummmm...... Four. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. Unless somebody found a new one after I graduated from high school in the 60's.....
Most of southern Louisiana is nothing more than river silt to begin with; the "land" in the bayou was dirt in Illinois and Iowa a thousand years ago, washed downstream by the annual floods in the Mississippi.
Somebody mod this up. This is an OLD joke, but it's still funny!
Electric cars run on COAL-fired power plants.
And the worst-case max sea level rise is less than a meter in the next century. Probably less than a tenth of that, and MOST probably nothing at all.
Some people have taken the Gore-bait hook, line and sinker!
The "widespread protests" were for the anniversary of 9/11. I seem to recall that there were a number of violent protests and a few hundred dead. But we have always been at war with East Asia, so the record of this has been disappeared.
Scores of deaths? There were the four dead Americans, and a few dozen dead terrorists in the courtyard. SEALS don't go down easily, and these two took an honor guard to Valhalla with them. It wasn't QUITE the "Grave of the Hundred Head", but close.
One major quibble. As the Earth travels in its path around the Sun, the line of sunrise is the "front", and the line of sunset is the "back". You'll see more and brighter meteors from 2AM to dawn than you will between sunset and midnight. So if your schedule permits, rather than staying up late, get up early to look for meteors.
When driving, bugs hit the front windshield quite often. But bugs hardly ever splatter themselves on the BACK window. Same principle.
The Perseid meteors are going at about 125,000 miles per hour, while the Earth is moving at about 66,000 MPH. You'll sometimes see meteors that will catch up from behind, but the bright ones will be head-on.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458134548/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0
Here's a Kickstarter project to do just that...
For UN bureaucrats, suppressing dissent and feedback is a feature, not a bug.
The original article's premise was "The US military may be vulnerable to a cyber-attack, perhaps vaguely similar to the one depicted in Battlestar:Galactica." I was replying to a comment saying, in effect, "we learned how to navigate by the stars at NROTC, so we don't really NEED our fancy GPS systems." I'm saying "Celestial navigation is a great fallback navigation method for when everything else goes to hell, but it takes continuous practice that I don't think people are getting these days."
DO they still teach cel nav any more? I don't know. But with the LORAN and OMEGA systems closed or closing, being able to find your way back to land might be a handy skill to know, if somebody manages to launch a few tons of 1" polycarbonate cubes into a reverse-trajectory low-Earth orbit.
The point is, we DO depend on our electronics, and our military would be crippled if somebody hacked or degraded our electronic communications and navigational systems. Is some knockout cyborg dame going to seduce our only scientist and sink our fleets with gremlins? No, B:G is a fictional and EXTREME case. The fact that science fiction is often extreme and overwrought doesn't mean that the crux of the problem is itself fictional.
Yes, and I used to TEACH celestial navigation at the USAF navigator school. Which is now closed.
GPS is too easy, too inexpensive, and too accurate, so NOBODY actually uses celestial navigation any more. But cel nav requires practice, and it is a "Use It Or Lose It!" skill.