Andy9o8

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Posts posted by Andy9o8

  1. Quote

    Happens to every one of the national candidates if you look deep enough.

    The key is getting so many signatures the fraudulent ones don't matter.



    Exactly. I've handled a number of election law cases over the years, enough to be quite familiar with the process. Practically every hotly-contested election, at every level (right down to dog-catcher), involves candidates' challenging the signatures on each other's nominating petitions. The key is to get about double the minimum number of sigs you need, so that when some inevitably get stricken on challenge (and some always do), you're still left with enough valid ones to stay on the ballot. Plus, there are a number of other administrative "I's" to dot and "T's" to cross - it's all there in black & white; you just have to be diligent - and they have to be done right; you can't screw it up, and election courts rarely give you a pass if you do. Really, it's just like any other kind of due diligence. If your organization's not up to that task, well... that's on you.

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    So;
    1. Go to foxnews.com
    2. in the comments section link to a song your partner owns.
    3. Your partner demands foxnews.com be delisted.



    Then we can do the same with all the *other* news channels, along with moveon, thinkprogress, dkos, dem underground and the other Soros affiliates.


    I don't think he was suggesting that; rather, he was using that as an illustrative example of the danger of SOPA: it has the potential for abuse that would greatly endanger the internet freedom of expression rights of everyone of every stripe.

    (ETA: OK, he clarified that while I was typing this. :P)

    And with that proposition, I would agree: before long, every website would be at risk of de facto sabotage by anyone with a hostile agenda.

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    Interesting. It was a tough issue to be sure. Frankly I don't know why they weren't shot for desertion. People might think that is harsh but desertion is desertion; these were active duty soldiers. Can you imagine if an active duty US soldier left his post to take sides in a war the US was declared neutral in?



    Like the Flying Tigers that went off to fight against the Japanese invasion of China?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers



    That was a US-run clandestine operation organized and recruited under express sanction by the President. After said recruitment by the US operatives, and with the approval of the President if they were active or reserve duty, the pilots technically became employees of a private military contractor. Thus, there was no UA, AWOL or desertion; and technically, there was no service in the military of a foreign nation.

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    I can understand the Irish not liking Britain back then. But what the heck did the people in power think would become of Ireland if Hitler was successful in conquering Britain?


    Probably looked a lot like the devil and the deep blue sea to many. At least the facists were Catholic. I'm sure many Irish felt (not without grounds) that they would be able to appeal to Rome for terms.



    Agreed. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The Irish were fresh on the tail end of hundreds of years of enmity toward the British; it was a blood feud that ran deep into the marrow and, in part, defined their very being.

    Even to this day: There's a (truly) Irish pub/restaurant near where I live. Great selection of Irish food (is that an oxymoron?) on the menu, great Irish beers, illegals with brogues working back in the kitchen; the whole 9 yards. They have live Irish folk bands performing, and the songs that get the greatest gusto from all assembled are the ones that sing about "blowing the English all to hell".

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    Has there ever been a President without baggage? .... We live in reality, everyone has skeletons in their closet.



    Ike didn't have much baggage. His whatever-it-was relationship with Kay Summersby never saw the public light of day back then, and it would have stayed that way. Everyone loved him; and had it not been for the 22nd Amendment, he'd have probably been re-elected in 1960.

    What baggage did Gerry Ford have? None that I can think of, until he served in office. Then he was painted by the nation's exhaustion over Nixon and Watergate, plus a (not very deserved) reputation for intellectual and physical clumsiness.

    Jimmy Carter's personal background was pretty clean; not much mud could have been slung at him in 1976, prior to his service as President.

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    tea party appears to be doing well. i don't know why they don't pull away from the republicans thus making the republican party the center right party?



    The very short answer is: for the same reason national 3rd parties have virtually never been viable in the history of the US: the deck is hopelessly stacked in favor of the permanent exclusivity of the 2 major parties. Been tried, several times, on both sides; always failed.

    Teddy Roosevelt & th Bull Moose Party?

    Also, Perot stood a decent chance to win, until he started to flake out.



    Those examples just demonstrate my point: that third PARTIES (not just the occasional once-off individual CANDIDATE) never get any lasting, viable traction nationally. TR's candidacy was a once-off, made semi-viable only because he was a former president. All he managed to do was suck-away enough votes from incumbent Taft that Taft lost his reelection bid. The Bull Moose "party" was simply the vehicle of TR's personal vanity; and when TR's political viability died, that "party" vaporized.

    In 1948, Strom Thurmond's "Dixiecrat" candidacy was a once-off; but the Dixiecrats didn't survive as a 3rd party. Instead, they (the Southern wing of the Dem party) grudgingly re-entered the Democratic party's formal ranks, with some of them starting to go over to GOP with Goldwater in '64, and most of the rest of them shifting to GOP with Nixon in '68; and they remain in GOP to this day, largely as social-issues conservatives.

    George Wallace's 1968 campaign was really a once-off, with a base and agenda similar to Thurmond's in '48. The votes his candidacy peeled off were almost exclusively social conservatives, and that came within a whisker of costing Nixon the election. Wallace never established a lasting, viable national 3rd party.

    John Anderson's 1980 3rd party candidacy had no lasting 3rd-party effect.

    Ross Perot in 1988 was less of a "3rd party candidate" than he was a "3rd candidate". He had enough of his own money to purchase a bit of personal, once-off electoral viability; but what lasting 3rd party structure survived his candidacy? Nothing.

  8. Quote

    tea party appears to be doing well. i don't know why they don't pull away from the republicans thus making the republican party the center right party?



    The very short answer is: for the same reason national 3rd parties have virtually never been viable in the history of the US: the deck is hopelessly stacked in favor of the permanent exclusivity of the 2 major parties. Been tried, several times, on both sides; always failed.

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    But for Cain to think the sexual harassment suit wasn't going to come out was idiotic.



    Agreed. Much like John Edwards carrying-on with a girlfriend while under the microscope of a national campaign. What on Earth could he have been thinking??

    The answer, of course, is that he wasn't thinking. And we know the cause, don't we? What Eve did to Adam; what Delilah did to Sampson; what Wallis Simpson did to Edward VIII. Women are evil and dangerous.

    I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
    - J. Robert Oppenheimer

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    If you think the dirt-digging on Cain was not done by Gingrich and Romney supporters (and/or operatives), you're naive.



    As I recall, the story broke (and broke, and broke, and broke) on Politico, which has correspondents working with/at MSNBC.



    All reporters have sources; usually confidential sources with an ax to grind. Politics, especially election politics, is all about getting ahead by fucking the other guy.

  12. OK, so even leaving out combat RW & smackin' the door of Mr. Douglas on a no-show speed star exit - Anyone can have a hard landing, even on a solo. In my book, making a parachute jump without a helmet is roughly equivalent to riding a motorcycle without a helmet: more power to you, but pardon me if I cringe while you do it.

  13. Look, I'm no fan of what they're doing to Assange over this (and you know the general tenor of my posting history); but from a standpoint of criminal law, whether/how much damage resulted from Manning's actions is far more a sentencing issue than it is a guilt-or-innocence issue. At least that's how I would view it if I was a neutral, impartial judge presiding over the criminal case.

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    I was referring to that strange creole that is usually seen only in courtrooms and cable tv & software user agreements.



    Well, at least that's a jargon that has common acceptance, and comprehension, among a given sub-group. It's not a self-invented "language of one" like Jodie Foster's character in Nell.

  19. Quote

    Research Droid GPS issues and you'll find plenty. I have a Droid Charge and one of the primary reasons for selecting it was the mapping and navigating abilities.. I now find myself having to wait up to 15-20 minutes for the damn thing the figure out where it is ...



    That's interesting to hear; thanks.

    Anyone else?

  20. Steve, I almost weighed-in to respond to BB's post #19, but I decided that it was directed to you, so I'd sit back and let you reply first. FWIW (if anything), you responded to each point virtually identically to how I would have.

    To BB: I mean you no disrespect; you certainly have the right to have the personal faith that you do. But belief in the supernatural, in any form, by any semantic description, is what it is: pure faith. Please do not conflab it with science.

    Humans tend to believe in the supernatural (no matter how it's labeled or rationalized) partly because the species' brain seems to be hard-wired to do so, and partly because a presumption of the existence of the supernatural is part of the social environment that indoctrinates virtually all children (even those raised by atheist parents) in their psychologically most formative and impressionable years; and that indoctrination tends to have a lasting effect into adulthood, and transcends even some peoples' advanced educations, so that, as adults, even though they're comfortable no longer believing in Santa Claus, they still maintain some religious or quasi-religious ("spiritual"? what's in a name?) belief in some form of supernatural. That is the reason, with all due respect, why some people with advanced educations (even in the hard sciences) are able to reconcile their educations with their personal religious beliefs.

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    Please hire an editor or a ghost-writer. Nobody expects perfect spelling or grammar; but this is at least the 3rd or 4th post of yours that I've had to read, and then re-read, to understand even half of whatever the hell you seem to be talking about. Either that, or you're drunk-posting. Several other people have already told you this.



    This from a lawyer! :S


    And I occasionally drunk post! Which I'll admit is fun. (Though it did get me banned from SC once. :D)

  22. We're close to buying, and while it's a tight race between iPhone & Droid (BB is out of the running), I'm starting to lean toward Droid. The reason is that people who've used GPS on both iPhone and Droid tell me that the Droid GPS is notably superior. To me, that's an important selling point.

    Here are 3 articles that come down in favor of Droid in the GPS department. (It's a representative sample; I haven't found any articles, so far, that authoritatively prefer the iPhone for GPS in competition with the Droid).

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/185350/droid_vs_iphone_smartphone_gps_shootout.html

    http://www.geeksugar.com/Droid-vs-iPhone-Which-Has-Better-GPS-7017344

    http://dotcomconfessions.com/from-our-team/iphone-vs-android-gps


    What say you all?

  23. Please hire an editor or a ghost-writer. Nobody expects perfect spelling or grammar; but this is at least the 3rd or 4th post of yours that I've had to read, and then re-read, to understand even half of whatever the hell you seem to be talking about. Either that, or you're drunk-posting. Several other people have already told you this.

  24. Quote

    I kinda have a feeling that people will be whining to you soon on how you should've tagged that link NSFW since it contains pictures of human genitalia which is considered in some places to cause societal collapse amongst other bad things.



    Not so much a cause of societal collapse, but, like it or not, a firing offense at some (many) workplaces if you view such material on your work computer, or on work premises, even if you didn't realize what you were clicking on until it was too late. So - hypothetically speaking, of course - failing to mark photographs of nudity "NSFW", thereby potentially endangering someone's job, is more than just a discourtesy, it's being an inconsiderate asshole. Sorry for whining.