People can be replaced, but then you've got at a maximum about 4 years. Our country has been gripped in "antiterrorism fever." the next administration is unlikely to do any major gear changing. Even some of the next Democratic hopefuls said they'd stay in Iraq.

If Bush were more eloquent when speaking extemporaneously his approval rating would probably have stayed incredibly high all this time. His problem is that it's just too easy to take shots at him.

Funny side comment: The CIA director was just appointed. When explaining about it Bush used the exact same words he used to usher in the last CIA director whom he just ousted.

see, i don't think the US is still in that grip anymore. Bush's approval rating is down to 29%. i think the only one still blowing that horn is, well, Bush--and people seem to be getting tired of the tune. there are certainly a lot of Dems pushing for continuing the "War on Terror", but there are a growing number who are against it. as far as Bush's problems go, his main problem is that his mind is as small as his britches. just to be clear, i'm not calling Bush dumb--i'm calling him small-minded and petty, and there is ample evidence to back up this claim.

I don't know about you, but here's my idea of 7h3 funny

I'll argue that the corruption of the bureaucracy is more significant. It is the bureaucracy that the ordinary citizen deals with every day.

The only place where Bush has an approval rating of 39% is in liberals fantasies and their faulty statistics.

I guess I wonder down the line how much info of what you do in your private time would impact your ...say...work situation more so than it does now.

For example, what if at some point, someone decides, oh, going to strip clubs, or having Pr0n in your home, on your comp, whatever, makes you illegible for certain jobs? (I mean 'regular' Pr0n, not the stuff that's already generally illegal). Or in the case of phone related stuff, you get called into your office one day and informed, well the Feds told us the other day you were involved in some rather naughty phone-sex while at home with your girlfriend who was also in her home, and we don't think that's appropriate for this sorta work.

Note that Republicans have an approval rate of 76%, as opposed to 6% for Democrats. Note the lack of statistics on the proportions of the sample population thereof.

We can therefor deduct that the sample was biased towards Democrats, given that Bush won the previous election with a clear majority, implying that at worst, Republicans are equal to Democrats throughout the population.

As an aside, while many Dems may support staying in Iraq, that's not the same as initially invading Iraq (or Iran). Staying in Iraq is cleaning up someone else's mess, and it needs to be done, now that the mess has been made.

the 29% figure came from here, if you're curious. while it is certainly true that the Harris Poll shows a mild but consistent anti-Bush bias, it's not like all the other polls out there are showing anything different. even Fox's polls, which show a consistent pro-Bush bias, only have him at 35%.

Repube-licker, DemonCrat,

I'm the guy with the entree.

What would be a much more interesting poll would be one of the 71% +/- that do not approve of Bush to see why. More than likely Gas over $3/gallon is much higher than NSA collecting phone calling records. Further when it is estimated that somewhere between 8 and 12 percent of the US Population actually understands American Politics, I place very little value in any popular opinion poll conducted in the US on Politics. Sure or political system is a mess, but I'd still rather have it than anybody elses. I also get really sick of people in the US trying to change the US to mimic other systems, if you like country x, y, or z's system so much better there is no US law preventing you from leaving. Sure I'd like the goverment to be smaller, more trustworthy, more efficient, and less invasive but it isn't going to happen overnight if it happens at all. Above all else political idealists make me nervous be they from the left or right.

I have no problem with a Democratic Republic.

I have a problem with OUR Democratic Republic.

The Republicans are a conglomerate of religious nutjobs with loud mouths, and self-serving business partners who care more about what's lining their pocket than the facade of "doing it for the good of the country".

The Democrats haven't had a useful forerunner since Bill finished his two terms. I voted for Kerry simply because he wasn't Bush.

yeah. and the anti-Bush is shaping up to be Hillary, unless Al Gore decides to get back on the campaign trail. man, that'd be nice.

I'm trying to remember this correctly:

Republican: Big business, small(er) Government control

Democrat: More Government control, keep businesses in check (or some such thing).

The Bush Administration pretty much threw THAT out the window.

This explains why the Democrats couldn't pull a decent presidential candidate out of their arses back in '04.

Yeah they've gone a long way down since the Kennedy days when the party roles were pretty much reversed. 1994 is widely believed (at least among Political Science geeks like myself) to be the beginning point of an American Political re-alignment where the parties, philosophies, major issues and enduring majorities shift. There have been about 5 since the country's founding in 1787. Some signs that one is underway: Shift of Control of the US House in 1994 and the regional shift from Democrat to Republican of the South. The US is struggling to find a direction since the Cold War ended and every group under the sun is looking for their time to shine. Additionally as the lone Superpower the World political scene shifts dramatically as well, in to a short term period of peace, prosperity, and relative unity that degenerates fairly quickly in to an unstable multi-polar system as differences and rivalrys star to split old alliances and developing powers jocky for position in a new international political order. This almost always ends up in a major war, followed by a reversion to a much more stable bi-pole system like the Cold War.

Big difference between the two administrations: Control of Congress. Reagan couldn't have shrunk the size of goverment by more than a few hundred people becasue of the civil service laws. Reagan had a hostile congress that didn't work with him to cut spending or goverment, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deal proved that. Right now the GOP has control of both houses and the executive, and has since 2000. They have no excuses for failing to deliver a reduced in size and scope Federal Goverment. Unfortunately the other option won't even promise to try so we as citizens just get stuck paying the bill for an ever growing goverment.

The SR timeline and history really does a pretty good job of capturing the combination of inefficiency, corruption, lethargy, ineptness, and apathy that exists in the US and subsequent UCAS goverments. Most of it is fairly believeable, a few exaggerations and a little creative liscense is evident, but necessary for the game. They do a good job showing the clash between politicians in power for personal reasons vs. wild eyed idealists pretty well also. Not sure if the authors of those sections and adventures read this board, but if you are a writer and worked on the politics sections of SR kudos for putting together a plausible political mess even if it isn't a likely one.

The joys of NSAT&T

Other than pointing out that the FBI should be the ones working this program, I have to say that it can fairly easily be defeated with the cycling of prepaid sim cards and the cycling of cellular devices. (paid in cash, as I doubt they haven’t had a chat with Chase as well). Considering this, I feel the program to be both invasive and a waist of time and resources. When you add the plethora of encryption and embedding tools available for digital communications the prognoses is even worse.

What this will do however is bring a backlash on the President. As much as republicans and democrats oppose each other, the fighting between the congressional and executive branches is even worse. Just look at how many republicans are protesting the search of Jefferson's offices, and he was a democrat. I wouldn’t be too surprised if a republican coalition was formed to impeach the president before the midterm elections, if such an action was determined to be the most efficient way of getting re-elected.

Nah, Bush won't come close to being impeached.

Too much here to respond to, so I'm just going to focus on the biggest astonishment:

Okay, here's a slightly different viewpoint.
1, My first task working for my current employer was to maintain a server that held a database. This database tracked all the atm and check card useage from Mountain Time zone to the Atlantic Ocean for this particular company. No mean feat keeping that db up and running.
2, We had a system that poured through the data finding your pattern, it remembered that pattern and then watched all subsequent transactions to see how they compared. If you usually buy a coffe& donut and "Jimbo's Rest Stop" and filled your tank every monday morning, we knew that on any given monday morning, you've either been there, left there or haven't finished filling your tank yet. So if we suddenly say a big screen tv purchase 4 states away within x minutes of your usual habitual purchase and no gas in between, good possibility you might not have made the transaction. So the card was blocked and the customer was called.

This is incredibly similair to what the government is doing with the phone records. They know who is paying for the line being used and being called, how long you spoke, how often you call and when you usually call. If they want a transcript of the conversation, most phone companies can and do provide that information upon receipt of a subpoena. The system might have the capacity to use a real-time filter for key words such as those that get our usual sweeps from Homeland Security. If that capability exists then it also flags the record for additional followup.

Now, it will take a long time of just builing patterns before this system is useful. Roughly 6mo to a yr before the second generation model can be built, then the accuracy improves by around 40% (what we saw with our first specific model build) and then you get diminishing results with each subsequent model built as there is only so much room to improve.

What I am guessing they will do with the information is take known aliases of terrorist operatives on foreign soil as provided by intelligence and trace any calls from them to the US citizens. From those initial contacts they will build a network of interaction, X talks to Y, Z and W, but W only talks to Z. Etc. from there they will guide further investigations, subpoena suspect recordings and financial records, etc.

Guess what folks, the data has been collected for decades by the phone companies. They use it for marketing strategies. It gets stolen all the time. If you want to be pissed at the poor rich boy who needs his ears pinned back, then you're going to be no matter what he does. He could hand every one of us a piece of bin Laden and you'd still be mad because it didn't happen sooner, or because an earthworm got killed in the crossfire.
Just don't pre-criticize him and his administration for losing data they haven't lost yet when the folks that turned it over have lost it more times than any of us would care to imagine. Can it be lost, sure. Is it likely, no more so than you losing your wallet. If you're going to criticize the government for potentially losing your information and thus you wish to negate them having that information, I guess you shouldn't have an ID, a check card, a credit card, cash, a birth certificate, a social security card, a bill with your name and address on it, a birthmark, a distinguishing tattoo, a nickname, a cell phone, a PDA, a laptop, a home computer, a set of keys, a bus locker combination ot any thing else that might contain vital data about you and your habits because you are more likely to be robbed ot simply misplace that same data than the folks working with the government.
The only reason we hear about large companies losing this stuff is because it's news, it sensationalism, it's big. We never hear about the thousands of morons who write their PIN on their checkcard and hand it to their date so she can get some cash to buy beer. Seriously, I hear about 10 calls like that every day from walking around on the floor.

Just for the record, I've been "criticizing" Bush and his Administration since he was inaugurated.

And by "criticizing", I mean keeping tabs of every rational reason to believe that the man is a blazing eye-dee-ten-T.

EDIT: And I'm overlooking his gratuitously bad command of the English language.

That's your right, I support that. But there are some who, as my dad would put it, "Bitch if they were hung with a new rope."

I would call that a very good reason to bitch. Doubly so because of the grammar

~J

You snipped the info after that, how we only hear about it because it's not joe schmoe.

The idiot at the VA's office broke regs and made the CD, bad on him. He should be flogged and hung up in the streets for the veterans to spit on him as they walk by.

Is it G-W's fault that some moron broke regs, nope, not one iota.
The Executive branch didn't lose the VA data, the VA lost the VA data. Bush is no more responsible for it's loss than you are, unless you secretly are the idiot from the VA.

why the data was lost has no bearing on the fact that it was lost. i'm not blaming Bush for losing it, and i'm not even all that concerned about the phone records themselves. what worries me is that Bush isn't going to stop there. look at his pattern of behavior and tell me you think it will stop with call records.

I agree with motorfirebox (at least I'm sure that's who mfb is) on the point of the BA's pattern.

I do NOT ignore caps!!!

indeed. my point isn't that Bush lost the records, it's that the data being collected on Bush's orders isn't secure.

and, yeah. mfb = motorfirebox.

For those who thing ubiquitous monitoring cures all ills, consider that the Madrid train bombers communicated by e-mail without sending a single one to each other. They just wrote messages, saved them in the Draft box, and the others would long in with the shared password to read them, respond, flame, whatever.

Now I guess if the NSA had a backdoor into every ISP so that could read every e-mail you draft and don't send as well as save, they might be able to - if they are really lucky, employ a tremendous amount of manpower and processes, get the full cooperation of the ISPs, don't get bogged down busting gamers for made-up bullshit and don't get caught first - then maybe they can work. Otherwise they're just wasting their time, and like mfb said, furthering endangering our lives by not actually focusing on actual threats.

The problem isn't that the data was stolen. The problem is how the data is commonly used. Most specificly, how the social security number is commonly used. f you look at a Social Security card you'll notice that it clearly states that it is not a form of identification. Unfortunatly, everyone treats it as such. It is the use of the SSN as a ubiquitious universal identification number that permits and encourages identity theft.
Without universal idenitfication the problem of identity theft would be reduced from a finiancially destructive experience to a social annoyance and actuall mometary damages to creditors would be greatly reduced since they would be forced to use more accurate and more reliable means to track and identify clients.


The fact that the government is getting more involved in tracking individuals is a bit concerning. Ever watch MacGuyver? There are several episodes of MacGuyver n which Mac has to go undercover in East Germany for some reason or another. In these episodes there are always villianous East German police officers who ask MacGuyver and his allies for their "papers", their identification. And, of course, if the IDs were perfectly in order then someone was going to be arrested.

This attitude was "show me your papers" attitude, accurate or not, was use to heavily villify the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Back then, a police officier asking for someone's ID was tantamount to executing a political prisioner without trial in many American eyes. We were willing to commitmtual mass suicide through gobal nucleat anniliation to save ourselves from that hell if push came to shove.

I really miss the Cold War; I miss the time when we all loved The Bomb for its ability to protect us from Socialism.