Thanks to the 'Citizens United' decision, there's nothing non-US-citizens and indeed completely foreign entities from contributing to certain campaigns, nevermind voting on a blog. The Saudis can legally pay for campaign ads now. What a wonderful time to be alive....

Friending you for having the patience to write that out. All true, of course.

Fuel is free. Capital and maintenance costs are something that another power plant would have, in addition to fuel costs.

I think this is a pretty good indication that the general public would like faster access to the internet, despite the telcos' claiming that people are pretty satisfied. I for one welcome our multiplexing digital overlords, and would like to remind them that I'm not interested in cloud services until I get at least 2 9s of at least 10Mbps connectivity with overall uptime of 4 9s or so.

I think this is unconstitutional only if most other laws in this country are. I happen to disagree with the SCOTUS on a number of issues, not that they care. Thing is, the rest of the unconstitutional laws aren't going to get declared unconstitutional so why should we pick on this one to invalidate, unless we can replace it with single-payer or at least a public option? Let's invalidate the laws that actually hurt people first, and then if we can make it down the list to this one it can go too.

The rationale that it's a tax that is credited to you if you decide to buy insurance is hardly unprecedented, and under current interpretation of the law not unconstitutional. Since legally the opinion of the SCOTUS is the only one that matters I don't see this getting overturned.

SuperKendall, you are seriously out of touch with reality. From a Liberals perspective, meaningful health care means you provide health care to all, the resulting quality of which is quite good because it encourages preventative medicine which is orders of magnitude cheaper than emergency medicine, and because administrative, advertising (ha!), pharmaceutical and actuarial costs are drastically reduced.

You can name names - it was Lieberman, mostly.

What do you expect from a company called "Doubelclick"? I bet Googel tampers with their search results too.

You're a right-wing troll, but you're right. He's the Great Capitulator.

Wait, why do they punish sick days if they eat into your vacation days? That makes no sense.

Shut up!

I'm with you. If the ads had been less intrusive, less annoying and less manipulative earlier in my life I might not mind them so much. But as is I think I've been ruined for life on advertising. Now I have not the slightest compunction about blocking them and avoiding them and screwing the advertisers if at all possible.

What really bothers me is the way they're starting to substitute for culture. In school and now at work people discuss their favorite advertisements as must as their favorite music, books or movies. The advertisements take snippets of dialogue, memes, actions and such and present them in a way that strips them of any relevance or meaning. It's adding noise to the common discourse, and that more than anything else about them pisses me off. The larger the population gets that harder it gets for people to keep up with each other. Advertising just acts as white noise or active misinformation that makes society less functional.

tl;dr: fuck ads

The only Republicans who believe that are the same ones who find peekaboo fascinating and confounding. If that includes any in office, and there may be a few I'll admit, then we've slipped more than even I thought. I doubt that's the case though. It would be strange, even for them, to be hung up on something that was banned 25 years ago. Out of curiosity, where did you get that notion?

So where's the case against the people who hacked the CRU climate researchers' email? The ones who leaked their email to attempt to make major legislation go their way?

There was a recent article in the New York Times that said one of the first things to go with dementia and Alzheimer's is in fact the ability to manage money: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/health/healthspecial/31finances.html