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Undecided
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Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.
I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
Neil deGrasse Tyson – Stupid Design
Vote Early – A State-by-State Guide
If you live in CA, CO, FL, IL, IN, IA, MI, MN, , MO, NV, NH, NJ, NM, NY, NC, OH, TX, VA, WA or WI you can vote TODAY. Here is how you do it. Vote up to end this election before it starts.
Voting early will be a huge factor in our success this November. There are many important reasons to vote early. If you’re ambivalent toward voting early, I hope that I can change your mind with a few reasons that voting early is so important.
- By voting early you help out yourself. There will be no need for inordinate amounts of stress if something goes wrong on election day. Car trouble? Lost wallet? Extra work? Well, if you’ve voted early it’s no worse than any other day. And, you avoid the long lines (and oh, will they be long)! This also frees up your time on election day if you must work/pick up the kids/anything at all.
- By voting early you help other people out. Every election year democrats are forced to go to court to keep voting places open because lines are long and there just never seem to be enough poll workers. Or the republicans seem to have devoted too few resources to large democratic counties. By voting early, you can alleviate some of the strain on your polling place.
- You can help the campaign out. If you vote early, you can spend election day volunteering (if you have the time). Making calls to GOTV, driving people to polling places, being a poll worker, etc.. Your work on election day will have a huge return on investment.
- It’s a lot harder for corrupt politicians to magic your vote away.
Dutch court orders Google to reveal Gmail user
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Google Netherlands has agreed to hand over the IP addresses of a Gmail user in an alleged spy case.
The CEO of Dutch internet incubator company iMerge suspected that a former disgruntled employee, who also acted as a system administrator, had secretly created an auto-forward rule in one of the company’s mail servers. Several mails, including business conversations and a romantic discourse which led to a divorce, were forwarded to a Gmail address.
Because Gmail doesn’t reveal someone’s IP address in outgoing mail headers, iMerge couldn’t take legal action against the former employee.
Google initially declined to provide iMerge with requested IP addresses on the grounds that “disclosing the user’s identity violated rulings on the balance between freedom of expression and a person’s right to his reputation.”
However, a Dutch court believed the offence was serious enough and forced Google to reveal all the log files it had on the account. Immediately after the ruling, Google provided the required data, including a list of IP addresses.
McCain Supporters With More Courage than their Candidate
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Well this is refreshing. After weeks of witnessing vile behavior and rhetoric go unchallenged at McCain rallied it was beyond reassuring to see McCain supporters doing the right thing at a rally.
Aegon sluit gebruik steunfonds niet uit
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Verzekeraar Aegon sluit niet uit gebruik te zullen maken van het steunfonds van de Nederlandse staat.
“Zoals gezegd bestuderen we of en onder welke voorwaarden het voor Aegon gunstig zou kunnen uitpakken”, aldus een woordvoerder van het Haagse concern.
De zegsman benadrukte dat Aegon geen liquiditeitsproblemen heeft. “Aegon voldoet aan de kapitaaleisen”.
Oke, dus “vooralsnog” hebben jullie het niet nodig?
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Colin Powell To Have Role In Obama Administration Says Obama
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olin Powell will have a role as a top presidential adviser in an Obama administration, the Democratic White House hopeful said Monday.
“He will have a role as one of my advisers,” Barack Obama said on NBC’s “Today” in an interview aired Monday, a day after Powell, a four-star general and President Bush’s former secretary of state, endorsed him.
“Whether he wants to take a formal role, whether that’s a good fit for him, is something we’d have to discuss,” Obama said.
[..]
In the NBC interview, Obama said Powell did not give him a heads-up before he crossed party lines and endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate on the network’s “Meet the Press” a day earlier.
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Cartoon
UK.gov says: Regulate the internet
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Answering questions from the floor at the Royal Television Society conference in London last month, Minister for Truth Andy Burnham said:
“The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.”
The idea that the internet was “beyond legal reach” and a “space where governments can’t go” was no longer the case.
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According to Andy Burnham, the introduction of a ratings system for internet content would not be “over-burdensome”. We have asked the Ministry of Truth (aka Department for Culture, Media and Sport) on several occasions how such a system might work and how its Minister’s view that such regulation would be easy to implement could be squared with general consensus that it would be unworkable. Or, as one expert put it: “bonkers”. We asked again last week.
The Ministry did not feel they could elucidate further. A spokesperson explained that as the UK Council for Child Safety on the Internet had only just been set up, and would be making recommendations about regulating the internet in due course, “it wouldn’t be helpful or appropriate for us to speculate about what those recommendations might be”.
In other words, Ministerial speculation is okay, but speculating about speculation is not. The Reg took up the challenge and with the help of a pencil and the back of an envelope came to some startling conclusions.
Youtube puts up approximately 10 hours – or 600 minutes – of new content every minute. Classifying that material would take 600 people watching 24 hours a day. Assuming that individuals could function productively for six hours, YouTube has just gained an additional 2,400 employees.
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Hate You Can Believe In
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“Hi, I was just calling to let you all know that Barack Obama needs to get hung. He’s a fucking nigger, and he’s a piece of shit. You guys are fraudulent, and you need to go to hell. All the niggers on oak trees. They’re gonna get all hung honeys, they’re gonna get assassinated, they’re gonna get killed.”
‘Socialist,’ ‘Muslim’ — Ugly reception for Obama
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Obama arrived at the barbecue joint around 12:30 p.m., where an older and majority white clientele of several dozen were eating lunch after church services. Many patrons applauded as he walked into the diner, but Diane Fanning, 54, began yelling “Socialist, socialist, socialist — get out of here!”
Obama did not look directly at her, as she was across the diner, but it was loud enough that he most likely heard her.
The gentleman next to Fanning, Lenox Bramble, 76, flashed an angry look at her. “Be civil, be courteous,” he admonished her. Another woman, Cecilia Hayslip, 61, yelled back at Fanning (per Reuters), “At least he’s not a warmonger!”
Bramble told Reuters’ pooler that he wasn’t voting for Obama because he didn’t think he had enough experience. Bramble’s wife, Kit, 75, said after meeting Obama, “He was very nice,” but added she’d been a conservative Republican since Barry Goldwater’s era and said she wouldn’t vote for Obama.
Fanning said she’d heard that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had endorsed Obama but said that “Colin Powell is a RINO, R-I-N-O, Republican In Name Only.”
Later, Obama came to the long table where Fanning and other members of a local First Presbyterian church were gathered. He held out his hand to her and asked, “How are you, ma’am?” but she declined to shake his hand.
Fanning asked Obama about a North American union, and Obama responded: “Well, you know, I am opposed to it if it were happening. But it doesn’t seem to be actually be happening. The truth of the matter is there is no plans. I’ve talked to a lot of people, including folks down in Texas. There’s no plan to create a common government between Mexico, U.S. and Canada. That’s just not … that’s just not happening. I know some people have been hearing rumors about it. But as far as I can tell, that’s just not something that’s happening. We would never give up our sovereignty in that way. Any other questions?
In an interview, Fanning said, “I still think he’s a closet Muslim.”
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There’s Oil in those ‘RR’s!
Sit!
Race to the Bottom
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If you’re thinking to yourself that there’s little more than two weeks before election day and Obama has a solid lead in the polls, don’t be so sure.
Yes, it looks good for the Democrats. But you need to play close attention to the McCain campaign’s final weeks’ strategy under and just above the radar. McCain’s final strategy relies on two pillars. The first is aggressively playing to voters’ fears of electing a black president. Make no mistake: not just his campaign in a general sense, but McCain himself and his top handful of advisers, are banking on the residual racism in a changing America to get them over the finish line. The second is an aggressive use of innuendo to convince casual voters that Obama is in league with Islamic terrorists bent on killing Americans.
Many people have asked whether enough Americans really care any more about the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. The answer? It doesn’t matter. For the McCain campaign, Bill Ayers has nothing to do with 60s radicalism. Ayers is nothing more than a tool that permits McCain, Palin and all their surrogates to use the noun “terrorist” in polite company in the same sentence as “Obama,” over and over and over again. It allows them to cobble together a ‘respectable’ version of those Obama smear emails they can push in commercials and robocalls and surrogate talking points every hour of every day.
Stripped down to its components McCain’s message to voters is this: “Don’t forget. He’s definitely black. And he may be a terrorist.” That’s the message.
The End of Bailout Transparency Already?
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When the Treasury Department’s bailout czar provided an update this week on the government’s $700 billion plan to rescue troubled financial institutions, he vowed that it would be an “open and transparent program with appropriate oversight.”
So look at what they release:
Callie Shell – Obama
I loved that he cleaned up after himself before leaving an ice cream shop in Wapello, Iowa. He didn’t have to. The event was over and the press had left. He is used to taking care of things himself and I think this is one of the qualities that makes Obama different from so many other political candidates I’ve encountered. Nov. 7, 2007.
Wow. America wins. America really wins. Thank you, smart McCain supporters.
Thankfully, there aren’t too many of those, because smart people support Obama.
This is great to see. It would be even better if I believed that they would have done the same had the camera not been there.