I really doubt that this is the first non-safely related law that has ever been enforce by the police on local business without warrents.

code enforcement is nothing new, and it covers ordinary laws as well as safety.

I hate to see the government doing the RIAA's bidding as much as the next guy, but is this really any different than what the law has been for the last 60+ years? Give me a break.

There is nothing new from a civil liberties standpoint about this law. I don't particularly like this law or anything else with RIAA fingerprints, but the reaction to it here is just absurd.

I wonder how the summary somehow left out that these warrentless searches are of commercial disc replication plants.

I would assume that all commercial buildings are subject to warrentless searches to enforce various safety and workplace laws...

Anyway, I don't support any degradation of the 4th amendment, but I don't appreciate the deceptive manipulation of large numbers of people who can be counted on to not read the fucking article either.

The Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act (H.R. 2766), (S. 1215) - dubbed the FRAC Act - was introduced to both houses of the 111th United States Congress on June 9, 2009, and aims to repeal the exemption for hydraulic fracturing in the Safe Drinking Water Act. It would require the energy industry to disclose the chemicals it mixes with the water and sand it pumps underground in the hydraulic fracturing process (also known as fracking), information that has largely been protected as trade secrets. Controversy surrounds the practice of hydraulic fracturing as a threat to drinking water supplies.[1] The gas industry opposes the legislation.[2]

The House bill was introduced by representatives Diana DeGette, D-Colo., Maurice Hinchey D-N.Y., and Jared Polis, D-Colo.

The Senate version was introduced by senators Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

citation provided

I wonder if the same Republicans that exempted fracking from the clean air and clean water act blocked this bill...

Natural gas fracking is specifically exempted from the clean air act and clean water act.

We can thank George W Bush and Republican majority for that...

Please don't forget which political party enacted a law which legalizes the poisoning of neighborhoods and entire regions.

Almost nobody owns mineral rights beneath their own home. Since your neighbors or the person who owns your neighbors' mineral rights can still pollute your air and water, you can't even stop natural gas fracking from occurring in your neighborhood.

Natural gas fracking often lowers property values. Since polluted wastelands aren't unappealing to most people you can count on your home losing value when your neighbors consent to fracking.

Who are you supposed to sue and for what when natural gas drilling ruins your home's value? Has anyone even successful sued over home value loss due to drilling? Your neighbor who consented to it? The corporation who is following every law and regulation?

We need regulation to protect people from corporations whose only interest is profit. Otherwise people are given bottled water as a legal settlement for the wholesale pollution and destruction of their land and air.

That's a very interesting link.

It's particularly interesting that social security revenue doesn't count against the deficit.

It's particularly interesting because social security is seen as one of the programs that contributes most signficantly to our long term deficit. Unless something is done about it. Like raising taxes..

Anyways, that was an interesting read, but doesnt match up with the way debt and deficit is even being discussed to day.

Even though Medicare and Medicaid are specially funded, through payroll tax, we still count them as part of the deficit. So why wouldn't they count towards the surplus?

I mean, aside from denying a great President his signature achievement to distract from the fact that the Republican party single-handedly exploded the deficit with tax cuts, unfunded wars, and an unfunded cronyish expansion of the government.

You are such a fucking moron.

It's people like you that are causing the decline of the USA.

You deny reality and build an alternate reality to support your terrible ideas.

Then you tell people that they are mis-informed, when it is you who are either mis-informed or misinforming people about import budget deficit facts.

Bill Clinton had a real budget surplus in 1999 as this article from September of 2000 documents.

I wonder if the people who lied to you about the Clinton surplus are as dumb and naive as you are.

It was balanced with accounting tricks, on the back of a speculative stock boom. You might remember all that dotcom stuff? It wasn't real.

The dot com bubble gave us the internet era.

Some of he 1990s companies failed, but better companies have taken their place while revolutionizing the whole world.

I worked for a failed startup that failed, but was in an industry that aonther company won. My hats are off to LinkedIn.

Now I work for a top tier interactive ad agency. Its obvious how I got where I am. The internet revolution.

The 90's had a bubble of bad companies, but an even bigger bubble of great ideas and software. That legacy continues to lead the country in job creation and pay, while proving that late 90s skeptics would just have to wait a few more years for the internet to change everything.

The last President that balanced a budget was Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

It would have been possible to balance the budget if not for the tax increases that Clinton and the Democrats passed over massive Republican opposition. Budget cutting compromises with Republicans also helped balance the budget. Thoughtful compromise is necessary. Republicans never compromise.

Who did you vote for in the last election?

"Both parties are stupid" is a very common way of distracting idiots, keeping them from voting for the politicians who really are fighting for their future.

If you didn't vote in the last two elections, you are an idiot. If you voted republican, then please stop voting to for the party that regularly threatens to shut down the government or default on the debt if we don't pay their ransom.

By setting the browser to enable plug-ins on demand, unwanted flash ads appear as clickable boxes, and and flash object in a page can be loaded by clicking it.

Since nobody is likely to rewrite the whole internet to exclude flash (espeically since there are old browsers that practically require flash) it's really nice to be able to have flash when you need it.

I've used flash many times on my phone, and my only complaint is that the phone can be a bit wonky about registering clicks. But this happens with 'clever' html too.

Pro-tip: if your web browser is acting weird (not registering clicks etc..), tip your phone into landscape mode and then back again. You'd be surprised how reliably that fixes weird flash and html problems.

The unemployment rate climbed since the democrats took control in 2006, and has grown even higher since Obama took office. What the hell is your definition of 'recovery'?

Great job simply omitting the 13 straight months of private sector job growth we have had since Obama finally managed to turn the economy around.

What recovery? The one that is occuring right now.

Jeez...

If your not going to get basic facts about our current economic situation right I'm not going to bother refuting your revisionist history (which seems to view the President as not particularly important).

All I'm going to say is that if you vote Republican, you are voting for deregulation. Still. After poor regulation (over many laws and executive orders) killed the economy.

Please don't vote Republican. At least let us recover from the Bush recession first.

One piece of legislation didn't take down the economy. A culture of deregulation did. At some point, politicians could have intervened to fix their mistake. But they didn't, because Republicans ran the show, and wrote the laws.

Look man, the numbers don't lie.

A decade of Democratic rule - economic success

A decade of Republican rule - economic disaster

A few more years of Democrats - economic recovery

If you still don't know who to vote for, I'm afraid I can't help you.

sigh...

Fine. Could you let me know what policies these were?

Irresponsible deregulation of the financial industry. Republicans are still pushing this disastrous policy.

Guess who had just taken control of congress just a year earlier? Correct, Democrats were now 'in charge'. And the unemployment rate took off like a race car while they controlled things.

Except that Democrats couldn't have possibly caused as much damage in 2 years (with a republican president) as the Republicans did in the 6 preceding years. So you could say it, but it wouldn't be true, so you better say it on Fox "News" if you want to get away with such blatant BS.

Trying to pin down what party did what to something as complicated as our economy is a silly, futile exercise.

those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Americans are terrible at learning from history so we managed to vote back in the same idiots who tanked our economy in the first place.

Fighting against this depressing level of stupidity may be futile, but if like me you don't want the country to repeat the same mistakes, it's necessary.

What happened as Bush was leaving office?

Only a total retard wouldn't notice the massive recession that Republican policies directly caused.

Republicans were thrown out of office for the massive recession they caused.

Unfortunately people are so damn stupid that they voted back in the same idiots that pushed the country off an economic cliff.