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Tuesday, January 28, 2003 |
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State of the Union Stream of Consciousness Government spending increases matching salary growth in workers is a good thing. I'm curious what Congress will cut in order to pay for the permanence of the 2004 and 2006 tax cuts. $400 billion dollars toward Medicare in a decade is a serious chunk of cash. Medical liability reforms are an intriguing idea. Dude, can we please go more than one line between applause breaks? 1.2bil in fuel cell research cash is a nice touch. Fuel cells, if done cheaply, sure make the Middle East irrelevant. $450mil for mentoring... $600mil for drug/addiction treatment Partial Birth Abortion ban: Excellent. Cloning ban: Excellent. Bush's words on AIDS were damn good. Back it up, now, Georgie. Bring it home. Emergency AIDS relief in Africa. $15bil over 5 years to help turn the tide. Not bad. I like to see him talk tough on Al Qaeda. FBI, CIA and DHS to create a threat center...what will that cost? We will not tolerate violence in the affairs of men. I like that line. Shrub's discussion on the will of the free, the might of America to prevent the rule of the tyrant is an interesting one. Can that be turned against us? "The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others." That could have been from Katz, Int'l Politics 221. Iraq Time. Iraq said it would disarm in 1991. Iraq has not done so. Sanctions didn't work. Cruise Missiles didn't work. Isolation didn't work. Iraq should be showing us what they have, and destroy them. Nothing like this has happened. The UN concluded in 1999 that Iraq had enough Anthrax to kill millions. It's unaccounted for. The UN concluded that Iraq had botulin. It's unaccounted for. Nerve gas? could kill millions, unaccounted for them. 29,984 prohibited weapons are missing that could deliver any of the previous. Saddam has much to hide. He's not disarming. He's deceiving. Saddam aids and protects Al Qaeda. He could provide Al Qaeda with these weapons. Imagine the 9/11 terror with biologics, nukes. We must do our part to make sure that does not happen.
The day Saddam goes is the day Iraq is liberated. Remove him and it all goes away. The world has waited 12 years. The US will not accept a longer wait. The UN to meet on 5 February. They will hear from Secretary Powell on what we've got. If Saddam doesn't cooperate, we'll go in there ourselves. |
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CocoaFoaf 0.1 Dan Hon has just released CocoaFoaf. Go Dan! 6:11:12 PM comment [] 
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Amen! Gotta Love John McCain. 5:44:06 PM comment []
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A good thought. Adam says it best. My brother's on the Louisiana right now. I don't relish the idea of war, but if we find ourselves so embroiled, we have to support our troops, both enlisted men and women and the office corps. 4:43:40 PM comment []
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Not looking at the whole picture. Jamie talks about CAFE standards today and spouts some truly good arguments, except for the fact that he ignores the big picture. He says: "it [CAFE standard increases] encourages automakers to discontinue larger, safer passenger cars in favor of lighter, smaller cars that are frequently made of plastic" and I suppose, in some demented way, he's right. That being said, he ignores the fact that there are real incentives to making Sport Utes right now. The primary one is that they sell well. Really well, actually. One interesting thing about Sport Utes right now is that they're tax deductible. You can write off a whole crapload of your taxes if you bought a sport utility this year. So, it's in Ford, Chevy, Dodge, and every other manufacturer's best interest to make sport utilities. But this isn't about tax deductions, it's about oil, really. CAFE standards require the industry to be responsible, or at least, more so, about gasoline consumption. While we're not going to end up fully self-sufficient, I relish the idea of telling Saudi Arabia to go screw itself, and as long we've got millions of cars that suck down gasoline like I suck down Diet Coke on the day after some heavy drinking, we really can't do that.
So the answer is, at least until we can drill in ANWR, or harvest the oil in the Canadian Oil Sands (this is coming), to cut down on our independence by making the auto industry work hard for the foreign policy goals. It's not about nanny states, Jamie, it's about being able to tell the saudi princes to politely choke on their wang. |
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From the Taste of Your Own Medicine Files... Microsoft, dumb mofos that they are, apparently ignored their own patch warnings and were hard hit by the SQL slammer, according to the New York Times this morning. This begs the question, is Microsoft at all serious about security, either internally or externally? Or do they want to exploit the bug-fearing public into new releases that are supposedly "more secure" than the current ones? I'm going to go with the latter, with MS trying to get us to buy into their DRM standard.
No Thanks, MS. I think I'll go with Apple's Unix core instead of Windows LockDown, or whatever they want to call their new, likely just as buggy and twice as rigid, version of Windoze. |
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The Blogofascist Strikes Again... Jamie, Jamie, Jamie...
First of all, you don't need to tell us you're delinking someone. You just go and do it. But if you want to make a show of it, tell us why. |
Last update: 6/28/03; 9:48:31 PM .
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