Well, that's it. If they're that incompetent, I'm just not going to give the IRS any more of my money.

That'll teach 'em.

"Discretionary spending" is a misnomer. Except for the pay of certain few federal officials (federal judges, and perhaps a handful of others), which cannot be decreased during their time in office, it's all discretionary. It's in the Constitution; you can look it up.

When people speak of "non-discretionary" spending, they're referring to the spending done to keep promises of previous generations of politicians, spending which is normally done on auto-pilot. The default is to keep those promises, no matter how outmoded, unwise, unconstitutional or even mathematically impossible.

Everything else is "discretionary spending".

Speaking of all federal spending, not so-called "discretionary spending", is a more useful number, in terms of the future of the republic.

For flinging partisan mud at politicians, past and present, not so much.

Last I heard, being shot or beaten by a cop for no good reason, and then dying at the scene or later of your injuries isn't included in the statistics, at least in the US. Not as murder (obviously) nor as suspicious death at the hands of police nor non-suspicious death at the hands of police or anything. Not tracked in the stats, period.

Specifically, not something the FBI keeps track of, last I heard.

Maybe if I had RTFA I would know. And maybe not.

"There are people who insist that they can hear the difference between [the old good stuff and the new crappy stuff]", and could win a metric crap ton by demonstrating this ability in double-blind tests, in a wagering situation.

But they're just too modest (or it's just too inconvenient) for them to do so.

Maybe the CEO of Sony could get fired after a lone site displays to its visitors a nastygram about Sony's behavior, which produces a media frenzy?

Or is that an inappropriate use of this tactic, since actual people are actually harmed (a little) by what appears to be actual unlawful behavior of the company, in this case?

One reason Jehovah's Witnesses spend so much time knocking on doors is so they won't spend it on other things that might expose them to ideas and information that could lead them to question their faith.

Or so I've heard.

That may occasionally backfire, if the person on the other side of the door engages them in thoughtful conversation. Or not.

Besides, who has the time? An observant Jew on a Saturday, I suppose.

Come to think of it, the guy who told me he had done that was Jewish.

Did Obama change his mind? Hard to say, given his occupation. Lying and being disingenuous is a normal part of the job. Who knows what he really believes about this, if anything?

Did he change his public position? Yeah.

Is one of those changes more important than the other? I'd have to say, no.

What matters is what a person actually does. IMO. YMMV.

Depending on the game plan -- bootstrap from 18th century technology, or plant a clone of Earth society hauled out of storage lockers, or something else -- there's also the question of what to pack. And what the ancestors of the eventual colonists are to do while traveling.

Maybe they farm, if they're going to travel awake. And practice identifying and smelting ores, and turning trees into houses and waterwheels. Stuff like that. They'll need a lot of room. (And a way to turn metals into imitation ores.) All the while reminding the next generation that they'll need the knowledge in those books to make telegraphs and dynamos, and to refine silicon spice genes. Stuff like that. (See Heinlein's "Orphans in the Sky"/"Universe", and the New Beginnings chapters of "Time Enough for Love")

Or maybe they do something else while traveling awake.

If they travel asleep or frozen, they just need to know how to operate whatever supplies they bring along, when they come to and unpack: Conestoga wagons full of seeds and surrounded by livestock, city-in-a-box robo-kits, whatever.

Remember what happened to the first expedition to Mars, in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land? It ended badly. Classified-beyond-top-secret-out-of-embarrassment badly.

Of course, that was fiction.

Still, Heinlein's track record is fairly good.

Yeah, I've grown tired of that prompting for my real name, too.

It's also rather hard to find features you don't use much, such as logging out. When I'm away from home, like at the library, I want to do that. I really really want to.

When the clock is about to run out, I don't want to have to try the Google main page, Google Alerts, my YouTube home page, Google Crochet and such to find the inconspicuous part of the obscure page where this is possible.

Yeah, I know it's not that hard a thing to remember, once you know it. But why should we have to remember it? And what about the first time we need to know it, when there's nothing to remember yet?

Grrr!

Ima gonna steal this. A lot.

"Terrorist Act" is a lot better way to say it than "Patriot Act" or "P.A.T.R.I.O.T Act" or "so-called Patriot Act".