US Democrats Accidentally Publish Whistleblowers' Email Addresses 352
iluvcapra writes "The US House Judiciary Committee recently emailed all of its potential whistleblowers information about how it was restructuring its whistleblower program. Unfortunately for its sources, it emailed them this information with their addresses in the "To:" field (and not the Bcc: field) It also cc:'d this email to the Vice President.
I'd like to think think this is some sort of ingenious subterfuge, but I'm doubtful."
If I was blowing whistles... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why didn't the person just go the Anonymous Coward route?
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I'd surely use a free, disposable email account.
I agree, and I'd probably use tor to connect to it.
This type of e-mail behavior is so common. I give my e-mail address to a trusted friend assuming I'll get e-mail from one person to ONE person, but no, let the mass openly addressed forwarding begin. Even worse, the recipients do a "reply all" and start having a conversation in my inbox. When I write to the trusted friend and gently try to explain the pitfalls of mass address sharing or how to use BCC, they invariably respond with a "huh?", or get al
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I'm receiving all sorts of what should be privileged information, and I have informed him of this to just be told 'stop reading my email!' and various threats.
What do you do?!
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I've gotten a few e-mails I wasn't sure what to do with, including mail from some dude's dad about their vacation.
I'm almost ready to get a domain name and run my own e-mail, just so there's no more of this crap.
Re:If I was choosing friends... (Score:3, Insightful)
If they willing buy me beer and discuss technology, politics, and women, I may not call them friend but I would certainly give them my gmail address!
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Nobody can be trusted in everything. Nor is everyone competent in everything.
I do get impatient/annoyed/angry with stupidity and ignorance, but it's malice and dishonesty I find hard to accept in a friend.
So, even dogs could be my friends as long as they're not too malicious or dishonest (stealing a dog treat and pretending not to have done so is tolerable
Anyway on the subject of competence and trust
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Tor has significant weaknesses [wikipedia.org], especially in the face of government resources. You'd be better off using (or at least combining tor with the use of) public wifi access from a workstation that is ideally not linked to you. Obviously, the security of public wifi access is another issue. Unfortunately, true anonymous communications are a bit of a technical hurdle to the average would-be whistleblower.
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I think the article states that that was not an option.
Using a free disposable e-mail account would of course be a good idea, but the committee has all the real names in a file somewhere and who knows what dumb-ass things they are doing with it.
I'm quite sure that some of the people involved don't have a clue about setting up e-mail AT ALL on their own. They use their government provided e-mail capabilities because unless they have gotten a friend, r
All your email are belong to us (Score:5, Funny)
Who's fault is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why exactly do we have to make an IT gaff, even as massive as this one, partisan? Do we know who's staffers actually sent out the email? You do understand that the Judiciary committee does have Republican members right? Beyond the fact that Republicans don't seem to do inquiries into the Bush Administration, it's not like this wouldn't have happened if Republicans were in charge of the judiciary committee.
That said, this is absolutely unacceptable.
Re:Who's fault is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, the headline is reasonable.
This was a Democratic initiative, and possibly quite a good one until this.
The Democrats are in charge. Yes, there are Republican staffers, but are you going to suggest the Majority staffers said to the Republicans "We want a long weekend, you guys take over sending out these emails."
That would make the Democrats lazy, reckless and negligent as well as stupid.
Admittedly it would still leave us wondering if the Republicans were stupid or malicious. (I know, many would say both).
Holmwood
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Since he's not in charge of this one, you guys change your tune to "Leave the poor democrat in charge of this fiasco alone."
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Quite obviously on purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Quite obviously on purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
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2001-2007 = A comedy of errors (Score:2)
The VP cc: is likely the result of a prank (Score:4, Interesting)
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Think: a blubbering Chunk from The Goonies talking about shooting a man in the face.
Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Or so my tin-foil hat wearing buddy told me.
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Who's got the list? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who's got the list? (Score:5, Informative)
FTFA:
Clearly Bush is behind this ! (Score:2, Funny)
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No, no, no! That's not how you do it! (Score:5, Funny)
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I love your handle: a nice mix of the brutal and subtle, but all conveying power. I think it's one of the top three all-time scary names, along with "Dick Armey" and "Rod Johnson".
In other news... (Score:2)
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Proof of concept (Score:2)
Regardless of party they are just a thundering herd of dumbass!
Shift the blame (Score:5, Informative)
I call bullshit on the source of the error. By implicating the technology as the source of the error, the Justice Department is failing to address the real cause -- human error and incompetence in the Justice Department. This single statement alone reinforces the point of the original investigation -- the politicizing of the Justice Department.
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It's not exactly obvious that when you use the "To" field instead of the "Bcc" field the e-mails of everyone on the "To" list is published to everyone else.
"inadvertently disclosed" - It wasn't deliberate.
I don't see where the bullshit is. Would you prefer "We fucked up, our bad. But in our defense what gives with all the e-mails being sent to everyone else if you don't use this "Bcc" field? Seriously what the hell is "Bcc" anyway? D
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They got the task given to someone using Outlook who has probably only sent brief emails between themselves and other staffers one recipient at a time. If they are relatively new to large email distributions their mindset maybe that it is like a paper mailout where a separate email is automatically sent to each individual address on the list. I've seen older secretaries in law firms who are masters at paper filing, shorthand and typing but for whom the intricacies of email are totally bey
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CC = Carbon Copy = "send the email to this person as well" (with an old-fashioned memo, you'd actually make a carbon copy of it to do this)
BCC = Blind Carbon Copy = "send the email to this person, but don't reveal their address to the To or CC list"
To and CC are functionally identical, they're just an artificial distinction between who directly receives the email and who indirectly receives it. For instance, "send a copy of that task to me, but CC my boss so he knows I wo
Re:Shift the blame (Score:5, Informative)
And since some retard went to the HJC page and registered as a whistleblower using Dick Cheney's public email address at whitehouse.gov, which the HJC did not notice and remove, he got included in the CC.
"The politicization of the Justice Department" refers to all the maneuvering to get political partisans in top DOJ positions who are willing to influence elections with carefully timed prosecutions and selective prosecutions at least partially based on party affiliation. Things like that are true hallmarks of fascism in a way that simple human error and technical incompetence are not.
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Gee, did that technological error happen twice? It sounds like someone tried to activate Microsoft Outlook's 'Recall' feature afterwards, which is only intended for MS Exchange networks (And even on Exchange, recall rarely works).
Compounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the "to:" field, according to a reci
It almost makes you sorry for the politicians (Score:5, Insightful)
So imagine you're some legislator guy who graduated from law school back in the day when lawyers never touched a keyboard because people might think they were a lowly paralegal. You're a damn good lawyer, and at least try to be as good a politician as you can and still be a successful one. You actually know a great deal about things like the Internet, but in general, high level terms. You are well up on its legal, economic, sociological and even philosophical implications. You just don't know a damned thing about how it works, although unlike Sen. Stevens you are smart enough not to venture an opinion.
So, you hand this message to an aide, "get this to all the whistleblowers on our list." The aide has exactly the same background as you, although he has a bit more practical skill at things like making PowerPoint presentations. The order goes down the line through a sequence of people with similar backgrounds and aspirations but increasingly less experience and seniority, until it reaches somebody with so little experience and seniority he actually has to do the typing.
That is the person who has to make the right information security decision.
Contrast this with the executive branch. The executive branch has something at its disposal called a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are notoriously slow at getting things done, because their primary function is to preserve an institutional memory of every mistake that has ever been made and is worth remembering. They do make new mistakes of course, but provided you apply the appropriate feedback, they will remember that mistake and adapt to avoid it in the future. In minor cases they will adjust by simply engraving additions to the relevant procedures they follow. Given severe feedback, they respond by sprouting entirely new organs and body parts whose function is to stop the rest of its body from doing that thing again.
So, in the executive branch, the order goes down the chain of command, but with two differences. The least experienced person probably has a manual which contains a procedure to do these things, a procedure that has provisions for avoiding disclosure of distribution list recipients. Secondly, if the mistake contemplated is grave enough, the work flow is designed so that once a task is complete, it doesn't simply go out the door. It is passed up through multiple layers of review until it reaches somebody senior enough to authorize that. His job is not to check that the proper procedure has been followed; that has been taken care of at a level below him but above the person doing the work. This guy's job is to use his experience in determining whether the standard procedure has failed in its purpose.
When the next administration comes in, and all the people "at the top" of the organizational chart are changed, and all of the political philosophies have been duly stood on their head, the procedure, work flow, and personal memory have all been retained intact. Of course it makes it completely impossible for those politicians to implement the policies they've promised as quickly as they've promised.
It is entirely possible that the bureaucracy has neither a procedure nor a work flow nor a person to prevent any particular problem. But if the problem is sufficiently serious, it will immediately sprout all three features. If you lay aside your well earned dislike of the thing, bureaucracy is actually remarkably quick and effective at adapting to avoid routine mistakes, provided (and this is important) that it is actually ordered to do something about them.
About the only problem a bureaucracy can't quickly adjust to is not getting something fast done or cheaply enough. Fixing that problem requires paring down work flows and streamlining procedures and cutting staff (particularly middle management), which are the very things that embody the institutional memory that is their reason for existence. It is probable that some institutional memory is lost as minor changes are made, which is why bure
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Now if you are considering all of the federal agencies (Labor, HHS, State and so on) simply extensions of the White House staff your assertion would be correct, but that is hardly an accurate representation of how our government works.
Congressional staffs as a whole are huge with respect to the White House. I think the a
I am not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
One day I get an email FROM: The President of the Company thanking me for my help in the past year.
The TO: field also had the emails of EVERYONE else who had apparently participated.
Some of the email addresses were work emails or similar with things like: john.smith@example.com
Not difficult to figure out who they were.
After replying and tearing the President a new one, I got a polite email back saying there had been an "error" and they apologized.
"They would never intentionally disclose my personal information."
So I replied again and said that if this was not intentional then it was incompetence and if it was incompetence what plans did they have for ensuring this would not happen again?
If I happened to "accidently" disclose what products I was testing would I be able to use the same excuse? Or would I get sued?
I got no answer to that one.
Similar story, but with 5000 Addresses... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anybody can join, you get a newsletter and you get asked to contribute so that they can afford to send volunteer speakers around to various conferences or on speaking tours to talk about the pointlessness and active harm they saw the "drug war" causing when they were part of it.
Well and good, but they were clearly amateurs at first with the Internet side; the first newsletters were plain text and HTML expertise came slowly. And on November 15, 2006, they sent an E-mail to 5000 addresses with all of them in the TO: line, blowing out the capacity of my webmail service at least to even process it properly; about 3000 of the addresses wound up in the text of the E-mail itself.
Just for grins, I spent about half an hour cutting and pasting the list into a file, and using simple Unix text tools to organize them into a nice sorted text database, revealing how many of them were outright duplicates, how many were obviously for the same guy at two addresses, did a few simple stats on locations and agencies.
I thought of sending them the benefits of my work, so they could clean out the dupes, but decided they'd probably (a) not be pleased and (b) weren't smart enough to use the help anyway.
A good number of people gave addresses that didn't reveal their name outright, others were fully named, along with the government service they worked for, after the "@". I'm sure a number of them were uncomfortable with the thought of their boss or chief knowing they were not solidly behind department policy. Many would not have been law enforcement types, just rank & file citizens like myself - but also not comfortable with the idea of it getting out they were part of an organization that many bosses would tend to assume was joined by stoners. (As opposed to civil libertarians, certainly MY only reason for joining!)
"Only Nixon could go to China", and only 50-something narcotics cops can speak out against the drug war without automatically falling under suspicion of being on drugs.
I haven't donated LEAP any money yet, though I've received a few letters; I'm only slowly coming to the belief that they are bright enough to pound sand.
Doy (Score:2)
slashdot blames... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=341919&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=21139759 [slashdot.org]
PLEASE WITHDRAW E-MAIL (Score:2)
If only I had a list of all the email addresses used to submit to this form...
the proper term... (Score:2)
Let's see the full headers (Score:2)
Anyone have the full headers from this e-mail? It would be interesting to see the details of who sent it.
who says it was accidental? (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember years ago when I worked on the recall campaign for an infamous governor (who is currently in prison) - we tried to oust him from office and had to collect 10% of the voting public's signatures on petition in order to force a recall election. The governor laughed at the recall effort going on television saying, "I do not think these signatures are legitimate. I plan to look over each and every name of whoever signed these petitions just to check" *wink* *wink* This kind of subtle intimidation of activists and people who take a stand against wrongdoing is nothing new. I wouldn't be surprised if the exposure of the whistleblowers was intentional.
Re:Could be worse (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Incompetence, or
2) Malice.
We're screwed.
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Re:Could be worse (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Could be worse (Score:5, Funny)
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People are expected to just give you money.
Re:Could be worse (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Incompetence, or
2) Malice.
We're screwed.
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However, maybe it's the technology, e-mail is not exactly a communication system designed with high level security in mind. I've made the mistake, twice now in my lifetime, of hitting "reply" when I meant
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No shit! Although... I wonder. While it's tempting to say that if the Democrats were so stupid as to have fucked this up, perhaps it's indicative of their overall incompetence and it's no wonder they haven't been able to stop, or even limit, the Iraq war, get SCHIP passed or any number of their bills.
To be honest I've become convinced that the reason the Democrats can't do anything is because they're more focused on making the Republicans look bad than they are about making themselves look good, to say nothing about actually accomplishing anything. And the Republicans, at this point, don't care. They've already alienated everyone who's going to care; what remains of their base is more likely to take up arms against the government than vote Democrat.
The current failure of SCHIP is representative of this
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Man -- that's great. I just wish there was a way to make the democrats look dirtier in it cause they're both pigs slinging the mud they're both wallowing in at each other, perhaps something like: Dems and Repubs, mud wrestling pigs.
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So here are our options:
1) Incompetence, or
2) Malice.
We're screwed.
I really wish I could mod this (+1, Amusing At First But Gradually Becoming Horribly Depressing As You Realize The Implications).
Part 3 of Slashdot History will talk about how they were going to add that category, but they figured the selectbox would be wider than the 640x480 resolution screen that some people still used back when Slashdot started. it was either drop that category or use 6pt font, and the font won. other dropped categories include:
+1, I Have Points To Burn And Nothing Else On This Thread Is Worth a Damn
+1, It's At Score 4 Now, I Might As Well Top It Off
-1, It's The First Thing Posted, It Can't Possibly Be Inte
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Re:Could be worse (Score:4, Interesting)
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For example,
Hanlon's Razor (Score:2)
Alas, you will have to discover some other law to name unto yourself.
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But one may wonder - can it get worse? Well... Jeb Bush [wikipedia.org] may be appointed... Since George W isn't eligible for a third period.
Or shall we wait a few years and see either Jenna or Barbara Bush [wikipedia.org] become elected? Then it's really a family affair and it may be time to renam
Re:Could be worse (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it wasn't malice that caused this to be a mess -- it was incompetence.
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"Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there.... How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there?.... I think to have American military forces en
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And current vice presidents back when they weren't in power.
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Neither Korea, Vietnam nor Iraq/Afghanistan have had definite goals other than "Stop the spread of Communism/Terorism" and we all know how well those went.
If only the government was bright enough to leave and merely state "If we have to, we will do it again", I think the message would be clear enough. But this is a "joke" that sadly is costing many
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No, your options are between a douche and a turd [wikipedia.org].
At least the campaign signs would be somewhat entertaining.
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Its either the most despicable action I've witnessed by anyone from this government in the past, oh, several weeks, OR its a really smart way to let them all know in one shot that Cheney already knows who they are and is on to them and its time to get lost in the system. Anyone that wasn't on the list may still be under the radar.
Read Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse, it will help teach you how this government works.
I can see it in the distance, considerable damage has
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There is no benefit to letting the whistleblowers know that Cheney *might* be aware of who they are. It is better for Cheney to keep his awareness quiet and let the tips keep flowing in like insider information. He can then take whatever surreptitious actions are necessary.
This echoes the actions of a thousand incompetent secretaries I've seen who have been asked to send a confidential email out to a list of people by a manag
Re:Both the Dems and the Reps... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why are they evil? What is it about their day-to-day thinking and mentality that makes them evil? What evil deeds have they done? If you can answer it, how are these "evil" organisations lingering in a democratic system with decent freedom of (political) speech? How much of them is undeniably evil, and how much is just decisions you don't personally agree with?
Re:Both the Dems and the Reps... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Silly Dem v. Rep posts (Score:3, Insightful)
Trying to play the historical blame game based on political party is a fool's game. Parties aren't stagnant. The Democratic and Republican parties of the 60s and 70s, for instance, have effectively nothing to do with the present day alignments
Very few of you remember that a good portion of what used to be the Democratic party moved to the Republicans during the Reagan years. Prior to the 80s the South was entirely (very conservative) Democrats. They subsequently turned Republican. The people didn't c
Re:Both the Dems and the Reps... (Score:5, Insightful)
Organized political party (Score:5, Funny)
Will Rogers; "No. I'm a Democrat."
Re:Both the Dems and the Reps... (Score:5, Informative)
From the ACLU:
Rendition was the practice of extraditing non-U.S. citizens to their countries of origin for interrogation. It was a questionable policy and one of Clinton's gravest policy mistakes IMHO, but nothing like extraordinary rendition which expands the program to exporting anyone we feel like to any destination country we think will torture them sufficiently.
The controversy arose when it became clear that we were exporting prisoners of war to Syria, Egypt and anyone else that was willing to wield a cattle-prod in our name. As someone who grew up liberal but has become increasingly conservative as I grow older, I find the defense of this practice by Republicans who don't want to break ranks with the President to be abhorrent. This is a violation of what the Republican party used to stand for, and Bush et al. should be jettisoned from the party for it. Not everything that a Republican administration does should be beyond the reproach of the party.
Re:Both the Dems and the Reps... (Score:5, Interesting)
This does not absolve the present junta of any of its misdeeds, however. But it does refute your point.
Rolling Thunder... (Score:2)
That era saw more abuses of federal power than Bush ever could contemplate. LBJ's government was in the full swing of building up FBI files on all manner of subversives
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He also left an anti-terrorism strategy that was ignored by Bush and company until 9/11.
I don't like Clinton, but at least blame him for the things he actually did.
Infiltration, "dirty tricks", etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
And more than the war:
- The draft was really a social-planning operation, trying to stave off a depression when the boomers graduated high-school and hit the unskilled job market by "channeling" them into government-preferred carreer paths with the threat of conscription if they didn't go on to full-time higher education and/or get work in particular jobs that carried deferment
Re:Both the Dems and the Reps... (Score:5, Interesting)
But you see, doing nothing (at least, doing nothing very visible to the public) was the correct response to the first WTC incident, and would have been a better response to the second. Haven't you noticed how much more crap everyday life is, this time around? That's the effects of the crazy, exaggerated response that you're feeling. The attack itself was just part of an ongoing pattern where the US gets its terrorist attacks (and yes, every country suffers them routinely, and always has) in rarer, larger lumps. It was (in the statistical sense) expected, and need have changed nothing.
To fight terrorism, you need to avoid instilling fear. Because terrorism is the instilling of systemic fear. I understand that the word was originally coined for the case where the government is doing it, and I'm not sure that isn't what's happening now....
...At this point they are x-raying your shoes and stealing your drinks, to my mind for political gain. They figure that in dangerous times, you will vote for dangerous people. Statistically, the only thing that's measurably dangerous about the 21st century is the state of the environment - and I'm not trying to be a scaremonger myself; it's just that now that a significant portion of the earth's surface is under aggressive active 'management,' it's an obvious recipe for disaster that we are not, in fact, managing it. But it seems like Al Gore is the only person in politics who has figured out how to articulate this effectively as a source of fear, so everyone else is starting wars and x-raying footwear to, as they say, 'scare up the votes.'
At a deeper level, this may all be a reflection of party politics, as a phenomenon. After all, in times of calm, we're less inclined to think in us-versus-them terms, so, logically, we're less inclined to support parties over policies. To get the majority of frankly sensible people to vote for their parties without question, regardless of any unsavoury planks in party platforms, perhaps a level of freaked-out-ness is required. It's a sobering thought.
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And no, IT wasn't a black hole. Starwars and the arms race has realized many accomplishments that you enjoy today. Not to mention that it pretty much freed some people.
And lets look at these facts a little better. Your talking about the republicans being worse then democrats and for some reason are attempting to point to a time when the democrats control congress as an example. Do you realize tha
Re:Both the Dems and the Reps... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with most of your points, I must say that the one of the important things distinguishing us from the barbarians attacking us is that we don't torture, while they do. Incidents like Abu Ghraib and the CIA torture memos undermine that important distinction and begin to lower our society to the same level as our enemies.
Re:Enough with the "they all do it" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
The Dems have controlled the house and senate for a huge majority of that time, who makes laws and spends money? Democratic presidents got us into Vietnam, as for your excuse I suppose if Hillary or Obama win the election (both of whom have said they dont know when they'll get troups out) and things get far worse it will be more Hillaries fault than Bushes? get real..
As for Nixon being over the worst part? " By 1968, the peak of U.S. involvement, there were more than 500,000 troops in the country. During the same two-week period of April that year, 752 U.S. soldiers died, according to a search of records kept by the National Archives."
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who makes laws and spends money?
While I agree with you, your implication that the legislature of the US is solely responsible for the functions of making laws and spending money is incorrect. Law making is a joint responsibility between the legislature and the executive branch. The president often effectively sets the legislative agenda through appeals to the public. Even if one party controls Congress, it can be extremely difficult to override a presidential veto.
As for spending money, that is almost 100% the role of the executive br
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That a fact?
US Servicemen killed Vietnam:
Johnson - 35,751
Nixon - 22,041
(information obtained by five seconds of Googling)
If you're talking about Vietnamese casualties, then you've got secret inside sources in the Vietnamese government.
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And thank God too! (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead we got Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, two of the most ineffectual politicians of all time. My God! Every time Reid opens his mouth, he makes a little man smaller. Pelosi, having failed to install a carer criminal as Whip, finds herself in an ongoing monkey knife fight with Hoyer. Meanwhile Charlie Rangel's prposing that tax rates be raised, as we try to shrug off the economic effects sub-prime lending fiasco. Oh, and troops out of Iraq? No. In fact, the numbers in-country are up.
End result? Completely stalled government, to the point where we don't even have a budget proposal. Better yet, Democrats are looking so imcompetent, they may just lose massively in 2008.
I like it.
The quote you are looking for... (Score:2)
Re:Inconceivable! (Score:4, Funny)