My guess is this is most likely what happened. They probably asked for overly broad authorization using something else as the reasoning for it, and Obama didn't question it.
Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
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GasBandit
Staff member
Implying Fortune is an actual news source.
From your own article:
But you're right, Issa isn't mentioned once...there's about 20 other mentions in there as well, that's just the one most related to Watkins' claim.
Seriously, @GasBandit, for someone who likes to argue... A LOT, how could you miss that?
Selective reading.
GasBandit
Staff member
I felt the more pertinent point was the impugning of the point based on source material, and didn't really bother with what was, after all, a nitpick.
Selective reading against my own rhetorical favor?
(I will admit that sometimes I do leave stuff out/weaken my own case just for the sake of prolonging an argument but this is not one of those times).
Fair enough, I mostly threw in that last bit as a joke.
GasBandit
Staff member
I'm trying (and not having much luck) to find a picture of Ivor "Jest ye not Madame" Big'un to post in response to this.[DOUBLEPOST=1383167733,1383167290][/DOUBLEPOST]Fine, had to make it myself.Fair enough, I mostly threw in that last bit as a joke.
Yeesh my bad on that one. I hadn't read the article for awhile so I just ctrl Fed it and "Issa" got nothing.
That's kinda really awesome. We're almost there. Two more generations and society will be wondering why there was ever a reason that gay people weren't considered equal.
GasBandit
Staff member
That soundcloud embed is jerking my browser around, so I can't :/
Greenpeace activist wants out.
How I guess this will play out is that the Russian authorities will go thourgh the motions, after which she will be pardoned and sent home with a warning never to come back. At which point she'll be hailed a hero by Greenpeace, and will go back to her old tricks, having learned nothing.
I must say I'm having a hard time sympathising with her situation. She came from a very tolerant and lenient place, and had a rude run-in with the real world where actions have consequences. Now she's in over her head, and wants mommy.The Sydney Morning Herald said:
How I guess this will play out is that the Russian authorities will go thourgh the motions, after which she will be pardoned and sent home with a warning never to come back. At which point she'll be hailed a hero by Greenpeace, and will go back to her old tricks, having learned nothing.
Possibly it was, and they dropped it and replaced it with charges of hooliganism. And Putin commented early on after the event that it obviously was not a case of real piracy.
I don't know how Russian law defines piracy. But if it goes something along the lines of "boarding a maritime vessel at sea in an attempt to unlawfully gain control of it" or some such, I can see how Greenpeace activities might occasionally be somewhat in the same ballpark.
GasBandit
Staff member
It's fucking Russia, of course it is. Still lands her ass in the gulag till her digits freeze off. This is the same flavor of stupid as "hiking" in Iran/North Korea. You want challenging terrain? Go to west Colorado. At least there, you won't run into corrupt anti-western regimes and James Bond villains. You want to protest drilling? Maybe do it from a little bit more safety than trying to board a Russian vessel.
That's...really weird. At home, the embed shows up/works just fine. At work, it isn't. So I don't know if there's some sort of session cookie at work or whether there's a browser limitation. Either way, the link to the ... ahem, "interview" is right here.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
We might be about to witness the death of the internet as we know it - it looks like the DC Circuit court is going to rule in favor of the telcoms and end net neutrality. It was nice annoying you guys.
Fuck.
I mean, it's possible that another service will rise to replace it, or that the Internet itself will be segregated into slices (sort of like the breakup of AT&T way back when), but I'm not particularly sanguine about the possibility. VPNs won't be the answer, either, since the telecoms can easily just say, "Slow any traffic we can't decrypt to a crawl." Dark fiber may be the only alternative, and there really isn't anyone with enough money to take that over except possible Apple or Google, and I'm not sure how they would decide to run their own private network.
Ugh.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
“Bin Laden has won, they confiscated my honey.” – Richard Dawkins, after having his honey jar confiscated at airport security.
Good. I hate to say it, but I want this to happen, so that these ISPs can get sued for anti-competitive practices. Many of these ISPs have blatant conflicts of interest and I think the only way we're going to get to a utility status of bandwidth is to have something drastic take place.
This really sounds like the only result of the ruling. All it's going to take is for a class action suit of a couple hundred websites going up against Comcast to nip this shit in the bud.
GasBandit
Staff member
You have to have seats to lose them.
And people say that voting third party doesn't make a difference!
Of course. Enemy of my enemy and all that. Recently had a smallish scandal here because pictures of a frontman of the center-right nationalist party surfaced - 12 years ago, when he wasn't active in national politics, he gave a speech to a bunch of people who fought on the Eastern Front (note for the non-historically inclined: the Germans in WWII had a spot of trouble with the Russians, so the Belgian government and the Catholic Church were used to pressure simple minded folks to go over there and "defend the West against communism". When they got back, they were considered collaborators and many were imprisoned, many of them lost their civil rights etc. Some were definitely would-be nazis, most were of the "too simple to realise the priest wasn't speaking the word of God" peasant variety), trying to convince them to return to the non-extremist right.
The people who released the pictures? A group so far beyond extreme right even our political parties who've been convicted for racism and bigotry think they're "wrong", since they still use the Swastika as their badge. They got these pictures to a liberal politician who was all too happy to use them to damage the center-right politician.
The headline is long, but it says it all.
Don't Appear to Be Clenching Your Buttocks When Pulled Over For Not Coming to a Complete Stop or Be Tortured by Doctors: America, This is Your War on Drugs
Sure, his rights were (probably) violated, but hey! Free colonoscopy! Thanks, Orosco! (and Chavez, and Hernandez).
--Patrick
Don't Appear to Be Clenching Your Buttocks When Pulled Over For Not Coming to a Complete Stop or Be Tortured by Doctors: America, This is Your War on Drugs
Sure, his rights were (probably) violated, but hey! Free colonoscopy! Thanks, Orosco! (and Chavez, and Hernandez).
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
We spend $500 per second on this ridiculous "War on Drugs." All to little-to-no avail. With countless instances of rights being violated and non-dangerous "criminals" being put in prison where they are reforged into dangerous criminals. It's long past time to re-acknowledge the lessons we learned 80 years ago during prohibition and call the darn thing off.
