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Americans... what are your views on.... (pg. 6)
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| Galapidate |
| This should really be in the political forum, but anyway, he's a complete dumbass. I'm glad to see in a Newsweek poll that Kerry is ahead of him. |
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| SpecialEd |
I just don't like George W. Bush as a person.
He's a ing spoiled brat, had his daddy wipe his ass all these years to get him where he is now. How the hell do we follow a guy like that? I know cheney made most of Bush's administration, and practically runs the white-house because Bush is an uneducated idiot when it comes to civil affairs. Just by the way his dumb face looks you can tell he doesn't have the intellect to lead this country on his own without being told what to do.
| quote: | Originally posted by Nalin
you have to remember that you're asking a bunch of kiddies that have never known true discomfort, never witnessed horrors or had to live under disgustingly cruel conditions with nothing to look forward to, never seen a loved one die right in front of them, always had their stomachs full, etc. in essance if you're looking for people to agree with you that bush should have his throat slit but only after being dipped head first in cow manuer (which any person that doesn't have their brainwashed/ignorant head in their selfish ass can see), you're wasting your time.
it always disgusts me how stupid people chose to be because they live all snug and cozy. this forum is for discussing things that dont matter like why tiesto sucks, or what dj you know for a fact uses drugs, or any variety of girl problems like feminine odours, not for serious issues with people that largely don't care as long as they're confy. |
Do the people of these 3rd-world countries elect bush, or do the citizens of our spoiled nation do? Right.
I can't say we have people dying on the streets or anything crude like that. But we have our share of unfortunate people, who suffer from social discomfort because of the image of the typical, wealthy american.
A Brooklyn native african-american leader, Dennis Ledell?(not sure) once said "The white man made the black man what it is today. Our people can't get out of poverty because of the white man's image of a get quick rich life. Forcing our brothers to commit acts against the law to achieve their idea of an american dream."
He's true in a sense, our idea of being economically rich surpasses the ideal of having social riches. Everyone would like to be economically stable, but they suffer from the idea of their current deficient state and never look ahead, only thinking of the present. That's what makes people rich, working for the future and not the present. |
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| Orbax |
| quote: | Originally posted by DaveSZ
I guess you can probably buy your way out of the draft then.
There's another famous individual who did the same during Vietnam, but I cannot quite put my finger on his name...
I do know his daddy was an honerable war hero though.
;) |
The only reason im not in the military is because I dont want to do boot camp. Id be proud to serve my country in whatever capacity possible ;) |
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| DaveSZ |
President Bush, if given the chance, will appoint religious extremists like John Ashcroft to the US Supreme Court.
What has Ashcroft been up too lately?
He's further to the right than his own conservative Missouri birthplace:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/ba...-home-headlines
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Administration wages war on pornography
Obscenity: For the first time in 10 years, the U.S. government is spending millions to file charges across the country.
By Laura Sullivan
Sun National Staff
Originally published April 6, 2004
WASHINGTON - Lam Nguyen's job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other "computer forensic specialists" like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department's operation to rid the world of porn.
In this field office in Washington, 32 prosecutors, investigators and a handful of FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.
Department officials say they will send "ripples" through an industry that has proliferated on the Internet and grown into an estimated $10 billion-a-year colossus profiting Fortune 500 corporations such as Comcast, which offers hard-core movies on a pay-per-view channel.
The Justice Department recently hired Bruce Taylor, who was instrumental in a handful of convictions obtained over the past year and unsuccessfully represented the state in a 1981 case, Larry Flynt vs. Ohio.
Flynt, who recently opened a Hustler nightclub in Baltimore, says everyone in the business is wary, making sure their taxes are paid and the "talent" is over 18. He says he's ready for a rematch, especially with Taylor.
"Everyone's concerned," Flynt said in an interview. "We deal in plain old vanilla sex. Nothing really outrageous. But who knows, they may want a big target like myself."
A recent episode of Showtime's Family Business, a reality show about Adam Glasser, an adult film director and entrepreneur in California, had him worrying about shipping his material to states more apt to prosecute. It also featured him organizing a pornographic Internet telethon to raise money for targets of prosecution.
Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the division in charge of obscenity prosecutions at the Justice Department, says officials are trying to send a message and halt an industry they see as growing increasingly "lawless."
"We want to do everything we can to deter this conduct" by producers and consumers, Oosterbaan said. "Nothing is off the table as far as content."
Money and friends
It is unclear, though, just how the American public and major corporations that make money from pornography will accept the perspective of the Justice Department and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Any move against mainstream pornography could affect large telephone companies offering broadband Internet service or the dozens of national credit card companies providing payment services to pornographic Web sites.
Cable television, meanwhile, which has found late-night lineups with "adult programming" highly profitable, is unlikely to budge, and such companies have powerful friends.
Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, which offers "hard-core" porn on the Hot Network channel (at $11.99 per film in Baltimore), was co-chair of Philadelphia 2000, the host committee that brought the Republican National Convention to Philadelphia. In February, the Bush campaign honored Comcast President Stephen Burke with "Ranger" status, for agreeing to raise at least $200,000 for the president's re-election effort. Comcast's executive vice president, David Cohen, has close ties to Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Tim Fitzpatrick, the spokesman for Comcast at its corporate headquarters in Philadelphia, declined to comment on the cable network's adult programming. But officials at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which Roberts used to chair, said adult programming is legal, relies on subscription services for access and has been upheld by the courts for years.
"Good luck turning back that clock," said Paul Rodriguez, a spokesman for the association.
Ashcroft vs. consent
In a speech in 2002, Ashcroft made it clear that the Justice Department intends to try. He said pornography "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."
Given the millions of dollars Americans are spending each month on adult cable television, Internet sites and magazines and videos, many may see themselves not as victims but as consumers, with an expectation of rights, choices and privacy.
Ashcroft, a religious man who does not drink alcohol or caffeine, smoke, gamble or dance, and has fought unrelenting criticism that he has trod roughshod on civil liberties in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is taking on the porn industry at a time when many experts say Americans are wary about government intrusion into their lives.
The Bush administration is eager to shore up its conservative base with this issue. Ashcroft held private meetings with conservative groups a year and a half ago to assure them that anti-porn efforts are a priority.
But administration critics and First Amendment rights attorneys warn that the initiative could smack of Big Brother, and that targeting such a broad range of readily available materials could backfire.
"They are miscalculating the pulse of the community," said attorney Paul Cambria, who has gone head to head with Taylor in cases dating to the 1970s.
"I think a lot of adults would say this is not what they had in mind, spending millions of dollars and the time of the courts and FBI agents and postal inspectors and prosecutors investigating what consenting adults are doing and watching."
The law itself rests on the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Miller vs. California, which held that something is "obscene" only if an average person applying contemporary community standards finds it patently offensive. But until now, it hasn't been prosecuted at the federal level for more than 10 years.
Since the last time he faced Taylor, Flynt's empire has grown into a multimillion-dollar corporation with a large, almost conservative-looking headquarters in California, where he and executives in dark suits oversee the company's dozens of men's clubs, sex stores and more than 30 magazines.
"He's basically crusaded against everything I've fought for for the past 30 years," Flynt said. "This is for consenting adults. They have the right to view what they want to in the privacy of their own home. And even if they don't enjoy these materials, they still don't want to be looking over their neighbors' shoulders."
Cases and results
Taylor, who has been involved in the prosecution of more than 700 pornography cases since the 1970s, including at the Justice Department in the late 1980s and early '90s, declined to be interviewed. But he did talk to reporters for the PBS program Frontline in 2001, when he was president of the National Law Center for Children and Families, an anti-porn group.
"Just about everything on the Internet and almost everything in the video stores and everything in the adult bookstores is still prosecutable illegal obscenity," he said.
"Some of the cable versions of porno movies are prosecutable. Once it becomes obvious that this really is a federal felony instead of just a form of entertainment or investment, then legitimate companies, to stay legitimate, are going to have to distance themselves from it."
The Justice Department pursued obscenity cases vigorously in the 1970s and '80s, prosecuting not necessarily the worst offenders in terms of extreme material, but those it viewed as most responsible for pornography's proliferation.
Oosterbaan said the department is employing much the same strategy this time, targeting not only some of the most egregious hard-core porn but also more conventional material, in an effort "to be as effective as possible."
"I can't possibly put it all away," he said. "Results are what we want."
The strategy in the 1980s resulted in a lot of extreme pornography - dealing in urination, violence or bestiality - going underground. Today, with the Internet, international producers and a substantial market, industry officials say there is no underground.
Obscenity cases came to a standstill under Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's attorney general, who focused on child pornography, which is considered child abuse and comes under different criminal statutes. The ensuing years saw an explosion of porn, so much so that critics say that Americans' tolerance for sexually explicit material rivals that of Europeans.
That tolerance could prove to be the obscenity division's biggest obstacle. Americans are used to seeing sex, experts say, in the movies, in their e-mail inboxes and on popular cable shows such as HBO's Sex and the City. There is no real gauge of just how obscene a jury will find pornographic material.
The majority of defendants indicted in federal courts over the past year have taken plea agreements when faced with the weight and resources of the Justice Department. More than 50 other federal investigations are under way.
In 2001, though, one interesting case emerged from St. Charles County, Mo., the heart of Ashcroft's conservative Missouri base. First Amendment lawyer Cambria defended a video store there against state charges that it was renting two obscene videotapes that depicted group sex, anal sex and sex with objects.
Cambria won, convincing a jury of 12 women, all between the ages of 40 and 60, that the tapes had educational value and helped reduce inhibitions. They reached the verdict in less than three hours.
The department's most closely watched case involves "extreme" porn producer Rob Zicari and his North Hollywood company Extreme Associates. The prolific Zicari is charged with selling five allegedly obscene videotapes, which he now markets as the "Federal Five," that depict simulated rapes and murder.
Almost reveling in the charges, Zicari's Web site says, "The most controversial company in porn today! Guess what? Controversy ... sells!"
The case hangs on a strategic move by the Justice Department that could make or break hundreds of future cases. Instead of bringing charges in Hollywood, where Zicari easily defeated a local obscenity ordinance recently in a jury trial, department officials ordered his tapes from Pittsburgh, Pa., and charged him there, hoping for a jury pool less porn-friendly.
Industry lawyers and top executives contend that the courts should rule that because the tapes were ordered on the Internet, the "community standard" demanded by the law should be the standard of the whole community of the World Wide Web.
The Internet is filled with ample evidence of even more hard-core or offensive material from abroad, they say, and someone in Pittsburgh should not be able to determine what someone in Hollywood can order.
Either way, Nguyen, father of a 2-year-old girl, and his co-workers spend their days scouring the Internet for the most obscene material, following leads sent in by citizens and tracking pornographers operating under different names. The job wears on them all, day after day, so much so that the obscenity division has recently set up in-house counseling for them to talk about what they're seeing and how it is affecting them.
"This stuff isn't the easiest to deal with," Nguyen said recently while at his computer. "But I think we're going after the bad guys and we're making a difference, and that's what makes it worthwhile."
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Actually it's not a matter of simple left/right, but it's more a matter of authoritarianism.
Many of the more ardent fundamentalists like Ashcroft do have fascist tendencies (they belive in imposing their will upon others with force, and free will be damned). |
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| DaveSZ |
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Senate approves police searches and seizures without warrants. Compiled by Dana Davis
The United States Congress is on the verge of passing a Republican sponsored bill that would eradicate the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Article IV of the Bill of Rights states,
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
In addition, this bill extends its authority to impede upon the First Amendment Right of "Freedom of Speech."
The Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, "To provide for the punishment of methamphetamine laboratory operators, provide additional resources to combat methamphetamine production, trafficking, and abuse in the United States, and for other purposes," has already passed through the Senate and was being deliberated by the House of Representatives as of press time.
In effect, what the provision does is empower the Federal Government, State Government and local law enforcement agencies, to enter private property - homes, businesses, automobiles, etc. for any "criminal searches" without a warrant and without any legal obligation to inform the private property owner that a search and seizure was conducted until months later, if at all. If the bill becomes law, then it would grant the Federal Government power to obtain "intangible" evidence -- hard-drive data, photographs or copies made of any documents or family or personal belongings, diaries, etc. - without ever having to inform the owner that their property was searched.
If physical evidence was taken then the government could wait up to 90 days later, before having to notify the owner that a secret search of their property ever occurred.
David Kopel, director of research for the Independence Institute, a Colorado think tank focusing on Constitutional issues, said the bill was aimed especially at computer hard drives, which could be copied in an owner' absence and examined without the owner's knowledge.
The Senate's version of the bill (S. 486) was sponsored by Senator John Ashcroft (R-Missouri). The House Bill (H.R. 2987) was sponsored by U.S. Representative Chris Cannon (R-Utah).
It's primary initiative is to increase criminal penalties for the sale, production and distribution of methamphetamines, appropriate funds to crack down on "meth labs" where the drug is processed, and fund methamphetamine treatment programs. However, tucked away deep inside the legal jargon of the bill are two provisions which go far beyond the realm of methamphetamine anti-proliferation or even the war on drugs. One measure pertains to police search and seizure, while the other attempts to dictate Internet communication.
Under present law, a property owner must be notified immediately of any possession seized in a criminal search, but the "Notice and Clarification" section of the methamphetamine bill (S. section 301, H.R. section 6) amends U.S. Code by stating, "Section 3103a of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: `With respect to any issuance under this section or any other provision of law (including section 3117 and any rule), any notice required, or that may be required, to be given may be delayed pursuant to the standards, terms, and conditions set forth in section 2705, unless otherwise expressly provided by statute.'
A source within the Senate Judiciary committee, speaking on condition of anonymity, admitted that the language in the search and seizure provision "slipped by everybody" in the Senate.
"(Hatch and the Justice Department) buried it deep in the bill, and nobody noticed until the thing had already passed."
"The Secret Searches measure is so outrageous that it would have no chance of being enacted as a bill on its own, when subjected to public scrutiny and debate," Kopel asserted. "So instead, the DOJ has nestled the Secret Search item deep inside a long bill dealing with methamphetamines."
Jeanne Lapatto, spokesperson for the Senate Judiciary Committee and its chairman, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said she was unaware of the specific provisions in question, but defended the goals of the bill. "This is a bipartisan bill," Lapatto said. "During hearings, no one had any problems with the overall goal of the bill, which is curbing the horrible problem of methamphetamines."
Another approach the bill takes to "curbing" methamphetamine usage is by making it a crime to create a hypertext link on the Internet to any site that "directly or indirectly advertises" drug paraphernalia, or distributes information about the processing or purchase of drugs (S. section 203, H.R. section 3). Under the provisions of the act, an Internet service provider, who is notified by a district attorney or representative of the Drug Enforcement Agency, that one of their hosted sites is in violation, would be required to remove the site within 48 hours or face federal criminal penalties.
On top of that, another provision of the bill would make it punishable by up to ten years in prison, "To teach or demonstrate. or to distribute by any means of information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture of a controlled substance."
U.S. Representative Bob Barr (R-Georgia), member of the House Judiciary Committee, is leading the fight against this bill in the House. Barr asserts that the search and seizure provisions of the bill, "Have nothing to do with methamphetamines," and he believes that had the search and seizure provision been introduced as a separate bill, its chances for passage, "Would be very, very problematic."
"These are not minor changes," Barr added. "These are substantive and far-reaching changes to the criminal law on search and seizure. It's unconscionable that someone would try to sneak these provisions into an unrelated bill."
A spokesperson for the Justice Department, which supports the provisions, declined to comment directly, but did release a recent letter from Assistant Attorney General Robert Ruben to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Illinois).
In his letter, Ruben praised the bill for providing, "Important and necessary tools for deterring the spread of methamphetamine manufacturing and abuse in our nation."
Speaking on behalf of House sponsor, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), legislative director Chris MacKay said the no-notice provision was necessary for, "Police to perform their job effectively."
According to MacKay, the provision was designed to allow police to search with minimum risk to their safety and without suspects destroying evidence before they arrive, adding, "Anything we can do to win the war on drugs is worth doing."
Tribune Combined Report, using with permission, amongst other sources, information compiled and written by Justin Torres of CNSNews.com and David Kopel of the Independence Institute.
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| DaveSZ |
| quote: | Originally posted by Orbax
The only reason im not in the military is because I dont want to do boot camp. Id be proud to serve my country in whatever capacity possible ;) |
Orbinox I'm sorry, that comment I made was out of line.
I would also, but not for an unjust war sold to the public on lies and misleading statements. |
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| Spartan |
Something not too many people know is the Bush administration created a fake news report which was broadcasted on 33 different local news networks. They had a fake reporter "Kate Ryan" who doesn't even exist give a biased positive report on Bush's new medicare plan. This sounds like something straight out of 1984. I will definitely not be voting for this liar and consider him to be one of the worst leaders we've ever had.
On a side note, I also DESPISE Ashcroft. A few years ago he ordered a blanket placed over a nude female statue in D.C. That did not go over too well here in Virginia, as we have a naked woman as the centerpiece of our State Flag. Also I think Ashcroft's handling of the Auther Andersen situation was awful. He destroyed 80,000 jobs in the middle of an economic resession just because one partner in Texas ed up the Enron deal. They put all the blame and media attention on Arthur Andersen when less than 1 percent of the company was involved in the whole mess. Is it also just a coincidence that Enron was a huge contributer to the Republican party while AA wasn't? Get rid of Bush and have Ashcroft go with him.:whip: |
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| SpecialEd |
The hottest thing to happen for the Anti-Bush campaign-
http://www.myspace.com/2794891.usr
couple of friends of mine hating bush.. Ever get into a conversation with them about it, and they'll get pretty intense. Hot + intelligent + T & A = deadly. |
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| DaveSZ |
Bush doesn't want you to see this picture:
:( |
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| 3xx3r7 |
| quote: | Originally posted by DaveSZ
Bush doesn't want you to see this picture:
:( |
Do you really think he would even care if he sees this? :rolleyes: |
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| Tranceporter99 |
| quote: | Originally posted by blazed it
compared to almost 3 million lost jobs this is a chump change figure. |
no its not, it wasnt hios fault.....9/11 ring a bell. it completely screwed our economy, hes done the best anyone could have done to bring those jobs back, and he has. It has little to do with him losing them, but them getting brought back is his administrations credit. |
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| Tranceporter99 |
| quote: | Originally posted by 3xx3r7
Do you really think he would even care if he sees this? :rolleyes: |
yes, its not like hes a bad person. everyone would care if they saw that picture, its a horriable site |
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