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A few sites are starting to get a story about how the "Domestic Terror Task Force" is being ressurected. '"But now, as the nature of the threat we face evolves to including the possibility of individual radicalization via the Internet, it is critical that we return our focus to potential extremists here at home," Holder said in the video broadcast.'
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Domestic Terror Task Force is Back!
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I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you.
-- Vance Petree, Virginia Power
(Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 04 2014, @05:08PM
Sorry, but you're wrong about Gerald Ford. You're right about all the others: the people voted for them, but the people did not vote for Ford, not really. He just inherited Nixon's spot when Nixon resigned. Worse, he wasn't even elected Vice-President (like LBJ was when he inherited JFK's position after his assassination): he was appointed to that spot after Spiro Agnew resigned. Ford has the dubious distinction of being the only President never elected by anyone, not the people and not the Electoral College.
Interestingly, Ford seems to have been one of our better Presidents in modern times. He finally got us out of Vietnam, and had an amnesty program for draft dodgers. He seems to have been much less corrupt and inept than any other modern President I can think of. Maybe we should pick all our Presidents the way he was chosen, because our current method doesn't seem to be working very well, and instead giving us horrible presidents like Bush and Obama.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Wednesday June 04 2014, @05:26PM
I think we should just draw names out of a really, really big hat.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday June 04 2014, @10:12PM
That would be far better than our current system of selecting the best liar.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 04 2014, @06:18PM
I blame Ford for pardoning Richard Nixon, thus codifying the idea that, as Tricky Dick said, "when the president does it, it is not illegal".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 04 2014, @06:27PM
From Wikipedia:
"After Ford left the White House in 1977, the former President privately justified his pardon of Nixon by carrying in his wallet a portion of the text of Burdick v. United States, a 1915 U.S. Supreme Court decision which stated that a pardon indicated a presumption of guilt, and that acceptance of a pardon was tantamount to a confession of that guilt. In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award to Ford for his pardon of Nixon. In presenting the award to Ford, Senator Ted Kennedy said that he had initially been opposed to the pardon of Nixon, but later stated that history had proved Ford to have made the correct decision."
It was obviously very controversial, and you could argue it both ways. It does appear that it may partly have been done as a way to get Nixon to leave office quickly so the country could move on, rather than having him stick around and go through an impeachment process that would take a lot of time and cripple the country for a period of time, just like what happened when Clinton was impeached for the Lewinsky scandal: that took a whole year as I recall, a year during which almost nothing got done. Ford was probably trying to avoid that, and it worked; he moved on to other matters right away during his short Presidency. Yeah, it kinda sucks, but Nixon now has a legacy of one word: "Watergate".
(Score: 1) by Angry Jesus on Wednesday June 04 2014, @11:41PM
Yeah, I've come to see it more like that wallstreet bailout than protecting the guilty. He had to choose between punishing the guilty plus a whole lot of collateral damage or letting the guilty go in order to save everyone else.
In the case of the bailout thought, I think now that the crisis is past and the risk of collateral damage is greatly reduced, we ought to be going after those guys with any legal options still available to us.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 05 2014, @02:42PM
The problem with the bailout, as I see it, is that it was a terribly way to do it. They gave the banks bailouts on the banks' terms. They should have had huge strings attached, a requirement that executives step down, something. Or they could have had the government seize control of the banks temporarily, and then break them up; I'm pretty sure that's been done before, if not here then in some other western nations. It wasn't a binary option. The Democrats instead just did what the banks told them to.
And you're right, they haven't bothered even exercising the remaining legal options in going after those guys. Another Democrat failure. And liberals keep telling me I should vote for these guys, as if that's going to change things.
(Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Thursday June 05 2014, @04:17PM
Geithner argues that it was politically infeasible to put more strings on the bailout -- putting the blame on congress. I don't know if it is true, but he seems pretty aware of how unfair the bailout was.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 04 2014, @09:28PM
Well, that would be the Fox so-called News version (lamestream media).
The Howard Zinn version would note that the USA got its ass kicked by some little pajama-wearing dudes who wanted the latest batch of imperialists out of their country.
The writing was on the wall starting in 1968. [wikipedia.org]
In the end, there was such a mad scramble to get out of there that very expensive stuff [baltimorepostexaminer.com] was getting shoved into the ocean. [e-torch.org]
Events in 1970 showed that the US imperialists had no qualms about murdering American children inside the borders of USA. [wikipedia.org]
...and it didn't matter to the Military-Industrial Complex that many of the dead and wounded children weren't even part of the protest and were just "collateral damage".
Real people, however, were extremely pissed.
The zeal for an illegal military occupation on the other side of the globe had waned years before.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 05 2014, @02:24PM
That's not entirely true: Richard Nixon did send an apology to the family of Bill Schroeder, a ROTC cadet killed by the National Guard on his way to class that day. Which in some ways is even more telling, because nobody apologized to the families of anyone else hit in that protest. They apparently felt bad for him because he was soon going to be a part of the Military-Industrial complex, so killing him was reducing their war readiness a bit.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 05 2014, @02:47PM
That's all well and good, but Ford wasn't President (or VP) in 1970 when Kent State happened, and it was under his watch that the war finally ended. The previous Presidents refused to pull out.