jcl

The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009 discussed by Connelly is one of the previous generation of health care bills. The Baucus bill is the America's Healthy Future Act of 2009. Also, Connelly appears to be a twit. Third Amendment right to privacy. Heh.

Interesting tidbit a little further down: I wasn't aware of the budget reconciliation rules. The House rules are uninteresting but the Senate rules...

Uh huh. The funny thing about crazy people is that they often think they're perfectly sane.

Yay! Joe Wilson! I wish we could talk about Joe Wilson all the time! He's soooo much more interesting than health care reform!

Freepers are the creationists of political science. And biology. The first spectrum he presents is nonsensical because he interprets leftness and rightness as measures of tyrannicalness and because he omits ideologies that don't fit into that interpretation, such as (left and right) anarchism. The second spectrum is just a summary of how conservative libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives view the standard political spectrum. Communism has its own political spectrum. At one extreme you have authoritarian communists like Stalin and at the other you have anarchist communists like Kr

Political spectra (circular or otherwise) are essentially functions that map ideologies onto points on a line. I can't think of any way to map communism and fascism near each other. On the capitalism-communism and authoritarian-communitarianism-individualism spectra I think communism wraps around to Christian conservatism or Christian democracy and on the authoritarian-anarchism spectrum it wraps around to libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism. I have no idea what fascism might wrap around to.

Because of the South Carolina part, I assume.

I think Barney Frank voting present is a bigger story. McDermott voting no is interesting too. Good job working in Bush, by the way.

Me too. And if the covers broke I'd disassemble the disks.

The term seems to be beltway jargon. It's not part of the czars' official titles. Most of the czars are diplomats, administrators, undersecretaries, and other civil servants. We know they can do. The rest seem to be advisers or assistants to the President or other officials. We don't exactly know what they can do but it wouldn't be hard to figure it out from their (real) titles.

Forgot about the live CD distros. Knoppix with LXDE and Opera might well work.

You'd need a really lightweight Linux environment. Ubuntu would be waaaay too heavy; the stupid little GNOME taskbar applets alone can eat 50 MiB (in fact, 47 MiB right now on my desktop). Unfortunately, I don't know of any 'user-friendly' distros that would be light enough. Xubuntu might work but I wouldn't bet on it. Windows 2000 is still on extended support and your hardware exceeds the minimum requirements, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the money.

It's not nitpicking. Socialism, social democracy, and liberalism are distinct ideologies. In much of the world they're represented by different political parties. In common usage in the US, socialist is a derogatory term for a person on the left. It has no real definition. It's barely even a word. The comparisons of Obama to Hitler might be partly tit-for-tat for the comparisons of Bush to Hitler.

What Americans* call "socialism" is closer to social democracy but probably to the right (that is, toward capitalism and classical liberalism) of standard social democracy. It's nowhere near real socialism. Obama is probably a plain old liberal but it's hard to tell at this point. * Socialist excepted, of course.

I don't think it's that strange. He isn't proposing changing the animal cruelty laws or granting animals additional rights, and while it would be unusual to give everyone standing to sue it wouldn't be unprecedented: I believe California allows third parties to sue employers for violations of state labor laws. Yeah, I don't understand why they chose that quote. We already regulate the use animals in everything.

The real story here is that someone managed to find an American socialist. I thought they were an urban myth.

I'm really tired of the American people being shocked by the mundane. Obama being a secret Muslim Trotskyist terrorist from Kenya who's planning to personally murder every senior citizen in the country would be shocking.0 Obama having leftists in his administration is not shocking. It's not even interesting. He's a farking Democrat. Who'd you expect to him to appoint, Pat Buchanan?1 0 And hilarious. I'd consider voting for him in 2012. 1 Throw in Buchanan and Obama's got my vote.

Gitmo is a bit small for a concentration camp. It's about the size of county jail. Regardless, the improvement was that we didn't have concentration camps for Americans. The Sedition Act of 1918 made disloyal speech a federal crime.

Congress investigating questions of constitutionality. Sneer.

Not as much as usual. At least we didn't have concentration camps this time. (Reason #721 for the US to avoid wars: not having concentration camps represents a marked improvement in wartime domestic policy.)

It's stimulating the contractors and the hardware and software suppliers. If the city's site is accurate, ridership is increasing anyway. If the system is underutilized, increasing ridership shouldn't significantly increase costs. Yay, free money.

That doesn't seem too unreasonable. 75 GPS units, comms, computers, software, mapping, training, marketing, etc.

The script is named eeeasy-scripts.sh. I assume that it changed in the April release and the article wasn't updated.

Ping uses one small packet, so, yeah, if it's related to the size of transfer that probably won't trigger it. One thing you might try: in Firefox browse to about:config and set network.http.keep-alive to false (you can use the filter field to find it quickly). That will (or should) force Firefox to use a fresh connection for each request instead of reusing connections. You might also reduce network.http.max-connections-per-server to 1. If that reduces or eliminates the partial page loads, it's likely that it is the size of the transfers that's the problem. (But wait, you say, I would still be

That is an excellent question that deserves an answer. I suggest that we immediately repeal the 22nd Amendment and reëlect Bill. Please? Possibly. The problem is that "all relevant data" could include the data moving across the networks (to detect and analyze attacks, for example) and "any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access" could include all privacy and security laws except the Fourth Amendment. (Fun question: if the President ordered the Secretary not to monitor a network, would that be considered a 'rule or policy restricting access' that the Secretary co