McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama 1171
Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.
New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear one definition of insanity is repeating the same action while expecting a different result each time. How many times have we thrown our votes away on the major party candidates only to get the same old status quo, regardless of the promises made? It's high time we the people just say no to the corrupt two party system. It's time we got off our lazy asses and learn about the alternatives available outside the corporate-approved "choice" spoon-fed to us by Big Media. Oh sure, probably we'll get either McCain or Obama this time, but if enough people vote outside the box it will encourage others to do the same. Maybe we can even take back our government at some point. But it'll never happen by voting for one of the two "approved" candidates. We need a new meme -- don't throw your vote away. Don't waste your vote on the Republicrats!
Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Funny)
I personally favor the Fingerlicans...
...although, the Tastycrats do make a good point about that titanium tax...
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, everyone's gonna end up voting for the Brain Slug Party... again.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Funny)
ALL HAIL PRESIDENT HYPNOTOAD.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:4, Insightful)
I couldn't care less about that. I specify the lower case 'l' to distiguish myself from the party that denies the existence of market failures and coercive business deals.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, the libertarian rants on Slashdot typically center around how the weak should be left to die as they are nothing but parasites on the strong, which is not all that dissimilar from the justification Nazis gave for the Holocaust and their other atrocities, so I can see why people might confuse these two.
"I'd rather see you all dead from hunger or disease than pay taxes" might be a honest political view, but it isn't going to win you any votes :).
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:4, Funny)
You want to join our wanking group yourself as well? Please do, everyone is welcome .. Just ask for it and someone will give you a helping hand.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:4, Insightful)
Libertarians are a lot more honest about being selfish wankers.
Not all libertarians are Randroids, and we're not all interested in hoarding our wealth. What most libertarians I know have been most concerned about is having choice when it comes to how their money is spent. Why should my money go to farm subsidies, corporate welfare, or the War in Iraq when I'd prefer to give it to cancer research, the children's hospital, or invest it in a space exploration firm? That might be selfish, but greed is worse. Greedy people want to take other people's money and spend it on their own goals rather than the goals of the people they took it from.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but at least they lie about it.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Interesting)
If there is anything un-american in the political landscape of the USA, it's the fake two party democracy that is essentially a single party dictatorship in disguise.
I don't live in the US. I live in Europe. From our point of view, you have two parties that are so similar we can't even really tell the difference. Our position is usually closer to the democrats, since we tend to be quite a bit more "left" on the political spectrum than the average US person, and the dems aren't "so far right" in most of their positions. Oh, don't get me wrong, from our point of view, one is a moderate right wing party, the other is a harcore right wing party. But then, we're not really into the "strong leader" idea. We had some bad encounters with that.
Many people here seriously don't see the point in voting. Maybe because we're also not really used to the idea of parties having corporate sponsors. To us, it seems you're voting on what cartel is to rule the US. Political viewpoints come secondary. So if you want the media industry and computer industry to rule, go Dem, if you want military and oil to call the shots, vote Rep.
That's basically how it looks from beyond the pond.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. It's moreso simply a party centered on freedom. Put in enough basic laws to keep society running at a reasonable level (ie, theft, rape, murder are illegal) and besides that have the government butt the hell out of our lives.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats want to enforce their morals on us. Changing the party just changes the moral code.
For the Republicans, it's "immoral" to do drugs, engage in prostitution, generally speak against the Bible or do anything non-Christian, etc.
For the Democrats, it's "immoral" to own a gun, or to not open your wallet and support every other person in the country financially.
It's actually kinda ironic that you'd call me a "selfish republican", because the Democrat idea of social services IS one of the mroe tolerable ideas I have - the Republicans are far more annoying with their holier than thou attitude. That said, the Democrats still are generally anti-gun, and still tend to rear their ugly heads when it comes to things like banning video games and such (that spans both parties, but that just means both are guilty rather than canceling anything out).
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:4, Informative)
...for certain definitions of "freedom", perhaps.
The original libertarians [blackened.net] were based around freedom. But a party that upholds an economic system based on government policies that concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a minority, backs a funny sort of "freedom".
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Insightful)
So wait, that would be different from the current state of things how exactly?
I'm quite serious. Please, enlighten us as to why the current system isn't screwing over anyone who isn't already rich? Do you get a 7%-10% raise every year? No? Then you're not even keeping up with true inflation. And don't throw CPI at me, that doesn't include food and fuel costs and is not representative of actual inflation.
Anyone seen the M3 money report that gives the total increase of dollars in circulation? No? Oh that's right, that's because it was so horrifying that they (the Federal Reserve) stopped releasing that information.
At least the Libertarian party supports the Constitution. Show me a D or R who actually does.
The voting system needs to change before there will be real political change, until then people will still just vote for the lesser evil to keep the greater evil out of office, when really we should be voting all the evils off the ballot.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Interesting)
To temper this a little bit, let me try to inform on the assumption that dems see gun ownership as "immoral". We do not find gun ownership immoral (while unaffiliated, I almost always vote democrat). I'm also an NRA member, and I have enough guns to arm my entire neighborhood, twice over.
For most of us left-leaners, guns are seen as tools of war or tools of crime or tools of getting something to eat. Most left-leaners have no problem with gun ownership, but also believe that there's a certain level of responsiblity (and regulation) that makes them safer to have around if one -=must=- have one around. Interestingly, in conversations with my right-leaning friends who keep and shoot guns, they also point out that a concealed carrry license doesn't require any safety training or demonstration of competence, whereas we require that for cars and motorcycles. The colorful part is that people die from poor operation of cars and motorbikes all the time, so there's a seperate argument as to whether training and testing have much effect, ... but I digress.
Left-leaners basically don't want to see guns used in crimes, and the thought is that if you make guns hard to get, or restrict which guns can be acquired based on meaningful background checks or licensing/registration schemes, the likelihood of having these guns being used in crimes is diminished. Our friends on the right love to point out that criminals don't follow the rules, and therefore the restrictions only fall on the law-abiding. True enough. Yet, if a bank robber gets one sentence if he robs a bank with a fist and an angry look, most lefties believe that he should be charged with two crimes if he robs a bank with a gun, and three crimes if it's a gun that has not been legally acquired.
I concede that most of these controversies tend to flow to envisioning "what if" scenarios, but I believe it is unfair to state that democrats think owning guns are immoral. Democrats want to see criminals who use guns punished to the fullest extent, and to reduce the numbers of guns used in crimes. That last sentence is not forcing morality on anyone. Everyone can agree on those two things, even the gun-nuts. Where people differ is on how you accomplish those two things, and that's a very good dialogue to have.
Lots of democrats own guns, but most of them choose to not associate themselves with the NRA, and choose to not justify their ownership by way of the 2nd amendment. They're pretty much silent on the topic, unless you get them talking about hunting. For my part, I am an NRA member because we stand for the training, gun education (operations, safety) and gun rights education. In general, I do not support the candidates that the NRA suggests I support,... unless they're democrats, that is.
OT: That's completely false and misleading. (Score:5, Informative)
Ugh. No. You're so wrong I don't know where to start.
Slavery is anathema to libertarian ideology, because it allows one person to impinge on the rights of another. That's a fundamentally Bad Thing; in fact the whole point of libertarianism is the maximization of personal freedom, up to the point where your freedom to do something starts impinging on someone else's.
Basically you've constructed a straw man and then proceeded to tear it down; congratulations. It's a good argument except that it has nothing to do with any actual libertarians that I've ever met, nor the positions of either the Libertarian party [lp.org] or the other similar state-level parties [lpnh.org].
If you want to criticize libertarian theory, that's fine -- there are many valid critiques of it. But saying that it advocates or legitimizes slavery is just false and stupid, and a great way of advertising your own ignorance.
Re:OT: That's completely false and misleading. (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought he was more pointing out that by getting rid of certain laws, you'd be letting those with money do whatever the hell they wanted, which would result in the unwashed masses being treated kind of like slaves. I don't think he meant actual slaves, more like extremely cheap labour. I'm not going to say whether I think that would happen or not because I haven't looked into libertarianism, I'm just trying to point out what you seem to have overlooked.
Re:OT: That's completely false and misleading. (Score:5, Insightful)
THAT'S your objection to libertarianism?! That someone might head a vast conspiracy to destroy your life?
You may want to invest in some tinfoil, my friend.
Besides, there are still social services available in a libertarian society. They're just provided by charity rather than government. And as organizations such as The Salvation Army and Goodwill show, it is quite possible to run such charities as non-governmental private organizations.
Re:OT: That's completely false and misleading. (Score:5, Insightful)
Governments wield a lot of power. Take them out of the picture, and economics will self-organize to another group having a lot of power, if only by virtue that they make a lot of money and continue to make more until the point that they wield enough economic power to be de-facto government organizations
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Interesting)
As evidenced in, say, Somalia. I know Somalia's not a great model (it's missing the "enough basic laws" part), but it's not irrelevant.
I'm a big-government libertarian, which I know is inherently contradictory. I like the ideals of freedom, but in practice you always end up with so much market failure due to externalities, information asymmetries, etc., that a nice layer of medium cost bureaucratic inefficiency is actually a desirable thing.
Lies about Libertarianism (Score:5, Insightful)
You would certainly be able to indenture yourself, if you choose to — to anyone, who would want such a thing from you.
Serfdom (and the outright slavery) disappeared, not because of laws or regulations, but because it was inefficient. Re-read your Marx-volume. As the means of production evolve, the uninterested slaves' labor falls further and further behind in value — despite being cheaper — than that of motivated free workers.
So stop this "slavery" fear-mongering, and smears. For decades the country's policy-makers have been moving away from Libertarianism [lp.org] despite most Americans being in the Libertarian [theadvocates.org] corner of the politics. The results, to name the most obvious are:
And all you can say against that is nonsense like: "Libertarians want to bring back slavery"?.. Pathetic...
Freedom to be a slave isn't freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it a valid criticism that if you're free to "voluntarily" indenture yourself, you're also open to being coerced? If someone says "be my slave and tell everyone it's voluntary, or I'll kill your family," what will you do?
Whereas currently, if the government sees that you're not getting proper wages for your work, it's taken out of your hands. You don't have the right to give up your rights - they're "inalienable."
Sometimes taking away certain freedoms actually protect others. If I travel abroad with an aid organization, and they have a policy to never negotiate with terrorists, and I'm kidnapped, my supervisors don't have the freedom to negotiate. On the other hand, this policy will probably prevent many kidnappings, increasing the actual freedom of life and limb for our staff.
Re:Lies about Libertarianism (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you can't do that in any country right now. Most countries have a constitution and laws preventing such a thing. Way to display your ignorance.
As you are so ignorant, I feel it necessary to point out that I don't mean actual slavery so much as complete economic subjugation of the poor, which is something the rich have always worked towards and continue to work towards. And you libertards are the useful idiots who spread their propaganda.
Slavery is not as prevalent today because of the hard work and sacrifice of so many rights activists around the world, not because of market forces. And it does exist, especially in places with more libertarian policies than the US. Millions of people around the world are enslaved right now. Your lack of knowledge and callous disregard for enslaved peoples world wide is simply shocking.
It is certainly economically feasible to have a work force that has no other options but to work for you at whatever level of compensation you decide upon. It is quite feasible to use economic force to keep a population dependent on you. It is absolutely feasible to create monopoly and monopsony through economic means.
In libertopia, If I own the land you live on, I can say 'you may only travel on designated parts of my land.' I can legally imprison you, decide who can sell things to you, and decide who you can sell things to.
You can't leave, because that would be trespassing. Anyone wanting to sell to you would have to trespass. And that is quite profitable for the land owners, now isn't it.
Please try to refute my actual arguments rather than straw men, and please refrain from posting false information, and perhaps I won't have to repeat myself.
Re:Lies about Libertarianism (Score:5, Informative)
Legal trespass has many exceptions
For instance, it's not trespass if a surveyor is going through your land. And it's not trespass if you're not home and your neighbors come on your property to fight a fire.
Many rules have exceptions. Advocating the Libertarian position doesn't mean that you'd throw common sense out of the window, on the contrary.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then Obama flip-flopped on FISA and voted for a bill containing telecom immunity.
You know, I still don't get the huge deal with the telecom immunity. Yes the telecoms should be punished, at least as a preventative measure so that in the future companies think twice before following illegal government orders. And yet, the truly guilty party are the government officials who made those orders. Why are we so intend to lynch their stooges when the masterminds are getting away scot-free? Are we just settling because we know they're above the law? Isn't there a bit of a double standard here?
Just try thinking of it from the company's point of view. The government orders them to hand over records. The government obviously shows a disdain for the constitution and considers anyone who stands in their way to be terrorist accomplices. What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:4, Insightful)
^ it should be obvious that "hand over records" should be replace with "wiretap people".
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just try thinking of it from the company's point of view. The government orders them to hand over records. The government obviously shows a disdain for the constitution and considers anyone who stands in their way to be terrorist accomplices. What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
Congratulations, you have just outlined very concisely why fascism worked. Because everyone made that calculations for themselves, came up with the answer that compliance is the only rational choice, and complied with a system they knew to be evil.
Well, almost everyone. The rest got killed or exiled by people who were "just following orders".
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the past tense?
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Informative)
Qwest said "no".
Qwest actually said, "This is not what a warrant looks like; come back when you have a real warrant."
It was pretty much the most impressive piece of corporate ballsiness I can recall in recent history.
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Qwest's legal problems predate the NSA's request. (Score:5, Insightful)
Qwest's legal problems predate the NSA's circulating access requests to the telcos in the Fall of 2001.
The insider case that Nacchio, Qwest's CEO, claims he's being punished for, goes back to the dot-com bust when Qwest execs realized they weren't going to hit revenue projections. They started dumping stock and fraudulently shifting revenue [latimes.com] to cover up the shortfall. Again, this all happened prior to the NSA asking for data.
The company has a history of engaging in illegal activity. In 2001, they paid an additional $350,000 fine on top of the June, 2000 $1.5 million fine [bizjournals.com] they paid the FCC for slamming users. The slamming complaints started in the 90's.
Nacchio's blowing smoke by playing the role of NSA's victim.
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Informative)
In Qwest's case, they said "no" and got fucked out of government contracts worth millions. Classified government contracts, too, so they couldn't directly tell their stockholders where all the fucking money went.
No wonder the other three went along.
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not American, so I don't know all that much about the whole thing. However, isn't part of the complaint against telecom immunity due to the fact that it may sabotage any effort to investigate and prosecute government officials?
You don't want the stooges to have immunity because you want to be able to apply pressure so they incriminate their masters.
A vote for POTUS is for far more than a POTUS (Score:4, Informative)
When you vote for president, you get far more than a president.
Behind the POTUS candidate comes a legion of people who will set the policy and tone of the nation for years to come. Supreme Court justices, Cabinet members, hundreds of others at every level of government.
Dont forget what happened at NASA, the EPA, the Justice Department, DHS, etc. All hit the headlines the last few years with major scandals brought on by POTUS-appointed bureaucrats.
Point being, presidential elections arent about single issues or a single candidate, but a change in national leadership for all issues at all levels. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and vote for the party most closely aligned with the future you desire. Any party will bring in some crazies, its unavoidable.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:4, Funny)
WTF? Cynthia McKinney is running for President too? Damn, between her and Bob Barr us Georgians sure blew our "nutjob running for President" quota out of the water!
Re:it could be worse.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depressing situation isn't it? Conservatism made the Republican Party an actual party rather than the me-tooism of the 40s and 50s. They win the House and Senate for the first time in forty years while running on an unapologetically conservative platform. Bush wins while running as some weird bleeding heart conservative.
So what do we get?
Vast increase in federal spending!
Vast increase in federal power!
They morphed into a me-too-but-more party.
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Numbers? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pretty sure that federal revenue goes up when taxes are cut.
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
And everyone else is pretty sure you're stupid.
Funny how that works when you believe something there's no evidence for, and has never been any evidence of.
Re:Numbers? (Score:4, Informative)
The Heritage Foundation? You're joking, right?
Not that the linked graph isn't a brilliant piece of research, but let's be honest about the climate we're in. If I told you that the Center for American Progress [americanprogress.org] disagrees, would you care? Would you even take it seriously?
To be fair, your graph is based on data from the CBO, which was already Democrat-controlled when the report was released. On the other hand, it's without context. That is, how have domestic income tax receipts decreased in the same period?
Moreover, if you'll recall, we've experienced a general economic recovery since that time -- until relatively recently -- which may or may not be due to the tax cuts. (I think we can guess where each other's intuitions lie here.) There's no obvious reason to take the correlation between tax cuts and corporate income tax receipts as a causal indicator. Plenty of other options abound.
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
That must explain why the national deficit has skyrocketed under GWB.
It's my understanding that tax cuts really do increase revenue, but I'm not insistent on either position. The big problem with GWB is that he never met a government program he didn't like. Say the tax cuts raised revenue 5% for sake of illustration. You can't then increase spending by 25% and then wonder why you're losing ground.
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
It's my understanding that tax cuts really do increase revenue,
The late, great Steve Kangas takes that myth on with statistics [huppi.com].
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
The theory is based on the Laffer curve [wikipedia.org]. At a 0% tax rate, revenue will obviously be zero. At some arbitrarily high tax rate (100%? 1000%? 100,000%?), there's such a strong disincentive to earn money that revenue will also be zero. Given two zero crossings, you have an optimizable function of tax rate vs. revenue.
In short, some groups of intelligent people think that the tax rate is higher than the optimal value, and other intelligent people think it's lower than it should be. It's not inherently idiotic to imagine how tax cuts could in fact increase revenue.
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
You're being the idiot. Taxes are a balancing act. Move them too high and you stop consumption which then lowers overall revenue. People like to feel like they are getting value when they buy something. If you tax it so much that value is no longer noticed people quit buying things. If you lower them, then people can (and will) buy more stuff which increases revenue. It's not a hard concept to understand, and there are numbers to prove it.
Your analogy doesn't work. A better one is a company that sells some cool widget for $100. At $100 only 10 people buy it and make the company $1000. The widget is really cool and people want it, but they don't see the value at $100. So the company lowers the price to $10 and now sells 1,000 of the widgets and make the company $10,000. OMG, how did they make more money selling the widget for less??? Maybe they should give it away make infinite amounts of money. I know this is tough logic to follow, but sheesh...
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Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't argue that spending is out of control and something that should be slowed down a lot, but I have an issue with the tax cuts on the 'rich'*. The only places that taxes can be cut is on the rich* b/c they are the only ones paying taxes! From here [ustreas.gov]:
So when we cut taxes who else do you want to cut them on? Or are you talking more about income redistribution. The whole take money from those who have it and hand it out to those who don't?
* what defines 'rich'?
Re:it could be worse.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now all we need is a cable channel called MTV to start playing music videos for the first time, and we will be all set.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Funny)
I knew it: Quantum physics and statistics are insanity.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
You cut off your nose despite your face.
No, you cut off your nose to spite your face.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Am I the only person who clicked on the link (hyperlink behind "Vote McCain in 2008". It takes you to McCain food services. It was a joke, folks.
Re:New Meme (Score:4, Funny)
Brings back memories of the "Dole for Bananas" bumper stickers.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
At the end, the author closes with the line "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Obama is just another politician"- one of the most popular right-wing attacks on Obama.
Take a look at the picture, again: http://blog.wired.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/15/mccain_obama_versionaista.jpg [wired.com]
That's not some sort of scrub or replacing a sentence that made him look bad or backing down from a strong position. It's an outright replacement of an older quote with a newer one. If anything, it makes Obama's Iraq policy even clearer.
At the bottom, it also shows there are two links that have been added as well.
If there is some sort of "just another politician" type of coverup of an older policy going on at Obama's site, it's certainly not in the picture given in the article; and this makes me think that this is just whining: "He updated his page instead of leaving it static from January to November? HOW DARE HE?!"
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, the typical whining of someone who thinks their extremist minority opinion should have the same chance at ruling his fellow citizens as the more centrist, moderate majority opinion... which chance it would have, if he actually went to the trouble of convincing a majority of his fellow citizens to support it, instead of demanding that they accept it even though they don't support it.
Take the Greens, for example: If the Greens were able to convince a majority of the electorates in even as few as six or seven states, they'd be well on their way to achieving the Presidency.
As it is, the Greens have yet to convince the majority of the electorate in even one state. So why should they get any play at all on the national stage? Wake me up when one of your other parties has a strong faction in their state legislature, a Congressman or two, and maybe a Senator. Then we'll talk.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, you're trying to be cute, but if you roll the die a thousand times hoping that NEXT TIME it'll wash your dishes instead of providing the information on one of the die's faces, you've touched upon what the GP is talking about.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Why not pencil in Powell as a candidate on the ballet?!
Because he was complicit in misleading the public into the Iraq war.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Until we change our voting system to something like Instant Runoff voting, the large parties will never be beaten because voting for a 3rd party really is throwing away your vote.
No, it really isn't. This is an infuriating bit of misinformation that needs to stop. The only thing that is throwing away your vote is not voting. Any vote, any vote at all, is not throwing your vote away. Period. More importantly, the only thing that keeps third parties from gaining power in this country is thinking like yours. We should get a different voting system, but barring that, people need to wake the fuck up and realize they're only shooting themselves in the foot by voting for "not that guy". Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
Really? Really? I've been listening to this tired meme for the past three elections. "Oh, Bush and Gore are just the same guy with a different name. Vote Nader." "Oh, Bush and Kerry are the same guy with a different name. Vote Badnarik." It wasn't true then and it isn't now. Really, if you can't see that there actually are substantative differences between the two front-runners, you're not paying any attention.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you're the one not paying attention if you don't see the striking similarities, which erase any differences that there might be. Let's recap: Obama voted for the FISA bill. In doing so, he showed that, as far as he's concerned, the rule of law applies in this country only when it's convenient. So, on one hand, we have McCain, who supports immunity (i.e., does not respect the rule of law we strive for). On the other hand, we have Obama, who claims to not support immunity, but really does support it as evidenced by his actions. So he, too, does not respect the rule of law. Not to mention the fact that both of them think that it's a good idea to wiretap people just on suspicions they might be a terrorists, and all the horrible precedent that sets.
Both the candidates this year are completely worthless. If you can't see that, you're blind.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad to see that two candidates eventually agreeing on a single bill makes them practically the same person.
Man, I agree that the FISA thing was a bad decision, but don't turn into a one-issue voter.
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Re:New Meme (Score:4, Interesting)
That doesn't give us more choice, because the choices are filtered for us by the media and the parties before most of us get a say.
We need a final election system that is made to work with multiple candidates so that there should be no reason for somebody to vote against their preferred candidate out of fear that there second (or third) preferred candidate will fail to eliminate defeat their least preferred candidate. If we have this electoral system, we could have 5 or six candidates from each party and another dozen from other parties or as independents.
After that, if we still decide we want a primary system, it needs to be a party-less primary, so that nobody is eliminated from contention without the say-so of the entire electorate. The only purpose of the primary should weed out individuals that the majority of the electorate consider clearly out of the running.
This would eliminate the current one side against the other conflict that we have. All candidates would struggle to appeal to the broad middle, by trying to piece together policies that appeal to all people instead of one half of the country or the other, who may only be interested in a couple of issues of one party or the other.
If done for the members of Congress, you could also end up with 3-5 parties who each have different focuses on different issues. The members of each party would then examine the issues out of their focus, and side with or against a party that had a focus on that issue, and make for a much more fluid Congress. For instance, there might be a party that focuses just on adhering the Constitution and strict adherence to it, which might side with the Republicans on certain issues and with the Democrats on others. You might have a party that only focuses on issues concerning parents (education, crime) and another that focuses on elderly issues (medical expenses, Social Security, etc.).
This would reduce the venom in our public discourse, because some popular policies that are currently blocked by our current 50-50 split would probably find more support if there were more than just two parties, who sometimes take a bad policy stance just to keep a minority happy.
Unfortunately, we'll probably never get it approved, because the electorate doesn't understand the need, and the parties in power won't want it.
Vote Third or Fourth Party (Score:5, Interesting)
As a fellow Brit, it's almost ontopic to reply here :p
I wrote a JE [slashdot.org] a while back, asking people to vote third or fourth party, even if they could "make do" with one of the "main" parties. The interesting thing is that reasons to do so do not rely upon faith!
A number a years back, I did some campaigning for the Liberal Democrats; I no longer consider myself to be party political, but their campaign techniques were interesting. The most interesting was the "reverse squeeze". The way that that works is that the Lib Dems would go after either Labour or the Tories, whichever had the fewest votes in the seat. Once their support went down, the numbers voting for the other team would come down in roughly equal numbers.
In other words, one vote fewer for one of the main parties implies approximately one fewer votes for the other one. Because voters can sense the political equilibrium, your own decision to deny the main parties your vote for a better personal choice is essentially costless! Better still, your vote is amplified (although they might instead choose to vote for another small party).
Not only is your change of vote essentially costless, but also you get to send a signal both to voters and to your future representative. The voters get to see a change in the support of your chosen party which is bigger than the signal would have been if cast for one of the main ones. Your representive receives a signal as to how best to win your vote the next time around.
The only reasons not to vote for a smaller party are if you are better represented by one of the main parties, or else if you think that competition is a harmful force in politics, and would rather give a clearer "mandate" to the winner. American voters seem to act like this, with later voters preferring to strengthen the early vote, and it can even make a kind of sense if a "strong nation" is more important to you than democracy.
The flip side to the last observation is that if you're in the US, vote early. Others will then copy your vote, so in a sense, you get to "vote early, vote often".
The Goods (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the goods from TFA:
The Friday, July 11 version of the page says:
"at great cost our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006."
The Monday, July 14 version spidered by Versionista says:
"Our troops have heroically helped reduce civilian casualties in Iraq to early 2006 levels. This is a testament to our military's hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and enormous sacrifice by our troops and military families."
Re:The Goods (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah it only took him months to realize what everyone else knew back in May. Now that all the surge troops are out of Iraq he has no choice but to change his position.
Also it's not just that he's changing position, it's that he's rewriting history to sound like he never argued the surge would have the opposite effect it actually has. His entire campaign is one of emphasizing judgment to compensate for his lack of experience, but this and other examples (wright, rezko, ayers, ethanol, chicago housing projects) seriously bring his judgment into question.
Re:The Goods (Score:5, Insightful)
So he updated his policy position when the facts changed?
Republicans are just recording that it changed. Why are people so upset they are recording the differences between what Obama used to say and what he says now?
Who are you trying to fool? (Score:4, Informative)
This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks.
Are you kidding? The Republicans have been embarrassingly behind the times when it comes to IT stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole spider/diff issue came from some college Intern with initiative, working on his own.
Normally I'd say something positive to balance my post out, but this election is look god-awful for both parties. I just don't give a damn.
Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:5, Informative)
"The Republicans" didn't do a damn thing that I'd call special or a new trick--they simply used an existing tool (and no, its not diff or any other command-line tool):
Versionista monitors Web sites that you specify for edits. Our Web-based service records every change, clearly highlighting added or deleted words and sentences.
Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because for the first time in 40 years there is a contender who isn't a rich old white guy. For the first time EVER there is a real contender who isn't white.
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian
If you think superficial factors make him a better candidate for president, then you're every bit as damned stupid as the racists who think that they automatically make him worse. Most of us recognize that the color of his skin is irrelevant. We judge him by his merits as a candidate. Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr., would have said, we judge him not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. And I, personally, have judged him by his worth as a candidate, and found him no different than any other politician. A lot of talk, nothing to back it up. Just look at the damn FISA bill if you want evidence. If that doesn't convince you that Obama is the same breed, just with a different skin tone, nothing will.
There's this idiotic attitude that is starting to pervade our society, where people figure that because a group of people was oppressed in the past, now they should get special regard. That's every bit as immoral and insulting as oppressing them in the first place! Judge them as the person they are, not as the color of their skin, whether positively or negatively.
Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:5, Insightful)
We should judge a candidate by their positions not their race. As far as I can tell in this regard Obama is 'just another democrat'. After listening to one of his speaches I discovered that (1) he is a very good rhetorician (that can be a good or bad thing), (2) he talks a lot about 'change' but never says from what to what, and (3) the few positions that he actually stated where just standard democratic positions.
I would be willing to stand corrected, but on the issues Obama looks like any other democrat. He talks slick, but that is about it.
Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:4, Insightful)
ad hominem -everyone who doesn't see this astonishing departure is blind
straw man -noone said that it would take a "35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian" to impress them
bandwagon -5 billion brown people can't be wrong
Racial, cultural, and class issues don't really bring much to the table. Obama has already gone back on a campaign promise before even being elected (voting for FISA, not supporting a filibuster). His voting record is far from a giant divergence from the status quo. I think slashdotters are being realistic.
Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, you are one arrogant piece of shit aren't you?
Definitely a Republican.
Ahh, making elitist judgement calls as to the character of another without examining someone in depth. Definitely a Democrat.
New Tricks? (Score:4, Insightful)
muahaha, gotcha... (Score:5, Funny)
So through the course of our research we've found that you've modified some of the sections on your policy positions...
*coughs (and that you have twenty times the traffic we do)
Re:muahaha, gotcha... (Score:5, Funny)
So through the course of our research we've found that you've modified some of the sections on your policy positions...
*coughs (and that you have twenty times the traffic we do)
How else do you expect people to keep up with all of those policy position changes?
robots.txt? Goldmine! (Score:5, Informative)
robots.txt is idiotic in this context, except to steer spiders away from forms that shouldn't be submitted or triggering infinite loops. Suppose you find something like:
Don't you think that's going to be the first place to look? Again, robots.txt is to avoiding causing site meltdowns or stupid behavior. It's not to hide information.
Mmmhmm (Score:4, Insightful)
No doubt Mr. "Vote McCain in 2008!" is looking to score some points [johnmccain.com] with this one.
I'm not saying everything posted here has to be neutral by any means, but geez, this is pretty transparent.
Re:Mmmhmm (Score:4, Funny)
I hear that if you accumulate ten McCain Points, you can trade them in for a liver spot.
Why is updating your policy positions bad again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is changing what you have to say a bad thing? If you have a different set of facts or a change in thought, why is it bad to change your opinions?
And are the edits that the Obama campaign making really significant? I had a look at the differences highlighted in the linked Wired article, and they didn't really look like a significant change in substance.
So fucking what? Are we really this stupid in our politics that it's now a game of crying "flip-flopper" when you just say more or less the same thing, maybe with a different emphasis?
Re:Why is updating your policy positions bad again (Score:4, Insightful)
Hello, where have you been the last 7 years ? Changing what you say makes you a flip-flopper. Real men stay the course.
Re:Why is updating your policy positions bad again (Score:4, Funny)
Or to put it another way:
"I may be a fucking moron, but at least I'm consistantly a fucking moron".
Re:Why is updating your policy positions bad again (Score:5, Informative)
John McCain has had his share of flip flops [rawstory.com], as document in this Keith Olbermann clip. It's pretty hilarious because the clip ends by reading a statement from McCain that his viewpoints are evolving, and then noting that McCain was for evolution, and now against evolution. It is pretty well done.
Re:Why is updating your policy positions bad again (Score:5, Insightful)
New words scare people. Just a couple weeks ago, Obama said in a press conference that he'd be willing to "refine" his Iraq policy during his visit there, and a combination of the media and the McCain campaign jumped all over him for "flip-flopping" on Iraq. They were pretending that he had said that he was going to change his stance on the war, and so he had to give a second press conference later that day to emphasize that he had said nothing of the sort.
The media is trying to have a repeat of 2004 by painting the Democrat as a flip-flopper, when he has only waffled, as all politicians do. Even Obama's worst flip-flop, on the FISA legislation, wasn't a complete reversal: though he voted the final bill, he still voted to strip the immunity provision. He said that he thought the bill had more good than bad in it, and while we might disagree, that's just a matter of priority, not of position.
Meanwhile, McCain directly contradicts himself time and time again, and he has so far gotten off scot-free. We don't have a liberal media or a conservative media, we have a sensationalist media that caters to the lowest common denominator by trying to place the candidates into a pre-defined mold that has existed for the better part of three decades.
We have unequivocal proof... (Score:5, Funny)
Silly article writer (Score:4, Insightful)
The article concludes:
This is like comparing two drafts of James Joyce's Ulysses, noting that changes were made, and concluding, "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Joyce is just another writer." Keeping in mind that as it happens Obama is also a talented, best-selling author, we should be surprised that he prepares more than on draft, or releases more than one edition of his work?
In other news, the detection of edits in the latest kernel release prompted a clever Wired hack to print, "If nothing, the changes simply reflect that Torvalds is just another coder."
McCain trying to hide his flip-flopping (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Obama is editing his web site and fine-tuning his message. BFD. That's what web sites are for. I don't see anything greatly inconsistent in what Obama is doing.
What is really going on is that McCain has a lousy record: he has been flip-flopping on positions and has a lot of history that he needs to hide from. This is a huge problem for the Republican party establishment, who probably would have preferred any candidate other than McCain.
So, what does McCain do? He tries to go on the offensive so that he can say "well, it's OK if I flip-flop because the other guy edits his web site, too".
Don't let McCain get away with this bullshit. McCain is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of both conservative Republicans and moderates in terms of his actual positions and record.
robots.txt (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The first one could be read as bashing the military (bad bad bad), the second one can't.
Re:worked ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody knows that if you're fighting an asymmetric war, you make your moves at the time when you can strike and minimize your losses, and you wait patiently at all other times. Anyone who thinks the violence against US targets isn't going to go back up as soon as the surge ends OR it becomes clear by observing US political and military statements and operations that the "surge" is permanent, is kidding themselves.
I'd also like to point out that it is very unfair and biased to measure violence "in the form of attacks, and the number of US casualties in Iraq" - what about Iraqi causalities? Civilian casualties? Shouldn't those be at least as important, if not more important, now that it's clear the war isn't being fought for WMDs?
Re:http://www.barackobama.com/robots.txt (Score:5, Funny)
Re:http://www.barackobama.com/robots.txt (Score:4, Informative)
Robots.txt only exists if you want to direct the search engine spider/robot in some regard. If you just want the search engine spider/robot to do what it does naturally (crawl and file information away), then you don't need to have a robots.txt at all. I think the editor was concerned that it would be unethical for the McCain campaign to create a crawler that ignores robots.txt. So McCain's campaign's savvy was only "clever" if it wasn't cheating (by ignoring robots.txt). In this case, as you mention, there was no robots.txt, which means McCain had no need to cheat. And of course that is the case--certainly Obama wants his campaign website to be searchable by Google.
Re:http://www.barackobama.com/robots.txt (Score:4, Informative)
So McCain's campaign's savvy was only "clever" if it wasn't cheating (by ignoring robots.txt).
Actually , his campaign was just using versionista.com; they're the clever ones, and McCain's campaign is just using their service like anyone else could.
Re:How can you say Republicans are "old dogs" (Score:5, Insightful)
Who came up with the Marshall Plan again ?
Good point. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who came up with the Marshall Plan again
Democrats did, and here's the thing. Most of the "Reagan Republicans" and their intellectual descendants fondly remember when Democrats actually did embark on big visions and big crusade to try and make the world a place for free trade, free from tyranny. That old, old conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party is basically a small minority.
What really happened is that Democrats completely lost their nerve after Viet Nam. Instead of looking at the war, and saying that they made some mistakes in its execution, and in fact, had actually started to turn things around once Westmoreland was replaced by Abrams, they have instead enshrined an ethic that lacks any sort of faith in the very government to do anything other than redistribute wealth.
I mean, Democrats are to be forever saluted for what they did from the 1940s through the 1960s. A lot of their ideas didn't work, but some did, and, we got the victory in World War II, built a national infrastructure that we've been living off of for 50 years, and put a man on the moon. They built a framework to stand against Soviet aggression and deftly avoided a world war without undermining American resolve. But, today's Democrats tend to reject a lot of that. Back in the 1960s, the Democrats who wanted NASA cut to pay for the poor were squelched, now they run the show. Today, the very idea of going to the moon, let alone mars, is considered to be just a handout, when it really, it is a project that harnesses the finest minds of the country towards a peaceful, momentus, national goal.
I would be willing to bet that if, in fact, a more muscular foreign policy candidate, one who really could articulate the American vision of free trade through Pax Americana, expansively, in the way that FDR and his ideological descendant, Reagan could, I would certainly support them, and, in fact, just about every Republican I know -would-. But instead today's Democratic party is consumed with identity politics and redistribution, sorta trying to divvying up the spoils but without the old Dems that still saw a need to get spoils to divvy.
Unfortunately though, through a catastrophe of party rules, Dems have a process that continually nominates the candidate who kowtows to a group of people that are in the minority. Republicans have a similar problem too, but, they at least have the sense to tend to set aside other policy differences so long as the free trade expansionist vision stands.