Obama administration new measures

[quote]Service outage apology email from the USA
Dec 3, 2008 at 1:15 PM

Dear World:

The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of liberty
and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage.

The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has
been located, and the parts responsible for it were replaced Tuesday
night, November 4. Early tests of the newly-installed equipment indicate
that it is functioning correctly, and we expect it to be fully
functional by mid-January.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look
forward to resuming full service – and hopefully even to improving it
in years to come.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,

The USA[/quote]

HG

[quote=“lbksig”][quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]
I’m curious, how are you, aside from the rhettoric, any different to a good old fashioned pro-Soviet thug?

The real issue here is these people have never been tried. They have been detained, shipped half way across the world without a trial or any recourse to independent legal advice, just like the golden days of the gulags. Why is it so difficult for you people to see a problem here? Is it the glaring lack of a fundamental education, or is it indoctrination?

HG[/quote]

The first difference is that the Soviets sent their own citizens to the gulags. That’s a minor, but important, distinction to make. These guys weren’t ever citizens of the US.

The problem here is that President Bush tried to make a new category for these detainees so that they could be interoggated indefinitely. That came back to bite him in he ass because you have to do something with these guys eventually. You can’t keep them locked up forever, and as time went by, their intelligence potential went to 0.

Under the Geneva convention, the detainees picked up in Afghanistan, who are not the Al Qaeda guys charged with 9/11, should have been tried in a military courtroom. The Al Qaeda guys are a different situation because from what I’ve read, they can’t be tried by the military for what they did on 9/11 and before due to there not a declared state of conflict. The men picked up in Afghanistan shouldn’t be granted POW status because they don’t follow the requirements to be POW’s in a fight between two belligerents.

[quote=“ICRC”]Who should be recognized as belligerents combatants and non-combatants
Art. 9. The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:

  1. That they be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
  2. That they have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
  3. That they carry arms openly; and
  4. That they conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
  In countries where militia constitute the army, or form part of it, they are included under the denomination ' army '.[/quote]

By not following numbers 2, the men picked up shouldn’t be granted POW status. They weren’t wearing distinctive uniforms that distinguished them from civilians. They also shouldn’t have had some silly “enemy combatant” status made up for them. They should have been treated as the Geneva Convention and Hague protocols allow, i.e. as “francs-tireurs”, saboteurs and spies are treated. When captured, they are tried by a military tribunal using military rules and then punished accordingly. That is what the courts determined in the Hostages Trial in 1947.

The underlying issue is that none of them should be given civilian trials, or held this long without a military trial. They should have been quickly tried, convicted and sentenced, or repatriated back to their country of origin as applicable. If we don’t want to give them expensive trials, then when captured they should be summarily executed as provided for under the Geneva convention and Hague protocols, not detained at tax payer expense indefinitely without a trial.[/quote]

That’s an excellent post.

On openness:

[quote=“BBC”]
Mr Obama’s new media team is letting search engines index almost everything on the site.

By contrast, after eight years of government the Bush administration was stopping huge swathes of data from being searchable.

The move is part of President Obama’s larger push to make the US government more open and transparent.

[b]Many websites limit what search engines can index by use of what is known as a robots.txt file.

The robots.txt file the Bush administration set up for Whitehouse.gov ran to almost 2377 lines and limited the way search engines could log the data found on the site.

On the first day of the Obama administration the robots.txt file shrunk to two lines allowing, for the moment, search sites to index everything it contains. [/b][/quote]

I assume that much (all?) of what was on the website has been wiped, so having that file shrunk to nothing isn’t all that impressive. I wonder if a searchable archive of the Bush admin version… and all of the 2377 blocks… will be made available. I wonder how long that file will be in 8 years.

You’d have to be a complete idiot to put data on a public server and expect people to respect robots.txt Actually, come to think of it you’d have to be almost a complete idiot to think that robots.txt is anything to do with openess.

Consider. If you wanted to cover up a conspiracy, you don’t put the file on a public web server and add

Disallow /Conspiracy/NeoConsDid911/SecretUSPaymentsToMossadAgents.html 

to your robots.txt. The problem is that anyone can read robots.txt, cut’n’paste the files listed into a browser and see what they contain. If you used robots.txt like this you’d give your enemies a handy list of your evil plans. Outside of bad movies, people involved in conspiracies don’t as a rule explain those conspiracies to their enemies, let alone the public. That’s sort of the point to a conspiracy.

The best way to keep things secret is to not put the file on the public server in the first place. If some insider does it, you remove the file and send the DHS goon squad to kill a) the people that downloaded it b) the insider that leaked it.

Still it’s typical of the BBC that they miss this point completely. Arts graduate scum.

PEBO paying off his campaign debts quickly.

Who’s talking about conspiracy? This is about the proposition that people have a right to know.

[quote=“KingZog”]You’d have to be a complete idiot to put data on a public server and expect people to respect robots.txt
[/quote]

The web spider libraries I’ve used in the past respect robots.txt by default. Also, the major players in the indexing industry do respect robots.txt. So no, one is not a complete idiot to put data on a public server and expect people to respect robots.txt.

One is a complete idiot if he expects everybody to respect robots.txt at all time. Or if it he thinks that robots.txt cannot be ignored. Or if he thinks that robots.txt is a method to implement data privacy or security or something like that. I’ve had to ignore robots.txt with some of the scraping code I wrote using the web spider libraries I mention above. The web site had a robots.txt which prevented me to do what I wanted to do so I told the web spider library to ignore it.

In general, yes. Although I can think of scenarios where the person believing that should not be labeled “almost a complete idiot”.

[quote=“KingZog”]
Still it’s typical of the BBC that they miss this point completely. Arts graduate scum.[/quote]

Scum? Really?

Well, yeah.

The article is incredibly wrong technically - they essentially say the Bush admin used robots.txt to block access to parts of whitehouse.gov. That doesn’t make any sense and a quick Google search would have told them that.

Actually a quick Google search is probably where they got the story from.

Plus there’s the fairly obvious, almost tribal, political bias here - anything Obama (or any member of the Left Wing tribe) does must be from good, pure motives and anything Bush (or any member of the Right Wing tribe) does must be from evil, impure ones. Actually looking at the comments to the Boing Boing article, it’s unlikely that the Bush admin was using robots.txt in an easily bypassed attempt to block access to information as somone pointed out

I.e. the story is bullshit, it’s probably not even original, they most likely knew it was bullshit. Still it agrees with their political prejudices, who cares about the facts? Or maybe because no one ‘taught them how to use machines’ as Buttercup put it, they just don’t know how to do a Google search. So there’s a slight chance that they’re just really bad journalists rather than actually being dishonest. I kind of doubt that though.

Not that it matters what people think of their journalism or their honesty of course, the BBC is funded by a compulsory license fee. Pay up, or go to jail, even if you ignore their half assed propaganda.

Yeah, I’ll stand by the scum.

Seems like the 1993 “don’t ask don’t tell” policy is in the crosshairs

uk.reuters.com/article/reutersCo … KC20090121

[quote=“Tempo Gain”]Seems like the 1993 “don’t ask don’t tell” policy is in the crosshairs

uk.reuters.com/article/reutersCo … KC20090121[/quote]

I thought “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” allowed gays to serve, just not openly. Previously, gays were not allowed to serve at all.

I hope Obama scraps the anti-gay discrimination in the military outright, allowing gays to serve openly. That would be another Good Thing he could accomplish.

Wow: the good news just keeps on rolling in!

Senate passes wage discrimination bill

Thank you, Democrats!! :bravo:

[color=#0500FF]Change[/color] is good.

[quote=“Tempo Gain”]Seems like the 1993 “don’t ask don’t tell” policy is in the crosshairs

uk.reuters.com/article/reutersCo … KC20090121[/quote]

Yeah it’s on the change.gov website under ‘Civil Rights’ instead of ‘Defense’.

With the current econ issues, POTUS Obama has said he’ll delay taking action on this until 2010, to the chagrin of some GLT advocates.

I understand why he wants to repeal it, but it’s not really up to the POTUS. It’s a congressional law, hence he needs to get Congress to repeal it. I don’t know that it will get repealed, as the link Tempo Gain posted shows, most of the members of the Armed Services don’t really want it changed.

As far as the “discrimination” angle, they should rewrite that line if that’s one of their arguments. They don’t take every patriotic person who wants to join, in fact I want my military to be highly discriminatory. I want them to only take the very best. They do so now in a variety of ways for some historical reasons and some pragmatic reasons.

They have the ASVAB to see if you have the basic mental qualifications necessary to be in the military. They require stringent physical standards, some of which are found here and here. They up until recently were very tough on waivers, until the Army started consistently missing their quarterly recruiting goals. You can’t have done drugs harder than Marijuana or else you are disqualified. If you have tattoos you need to get waivers for them, and if they are gang affiliated you can’t join. If you’re a fat ass you can’t join the American military. For some servicemen, and women, if your BMI is too high, you can be discharged even if you are fit but muscular. They don’t take people who can’t pass basic psych exams to try and prevent more My Lai’s from happening. Etc etc etc.

If we still had a draft you might see DADT revoked more easily. While the military is stretched “thin”, it’s only because we still have a military where the tip of the spear composes about 10% of the total service. It’s also an all volunteer force, save for 1 lone draftee who is a CSM in the army. As this NYT article from two days ago notes, the military is exceeding its recruiting goals. That tends to happen when the economy is in the shitter but it also deflates the argument that we are losing service members and unable to replace them.

The government has spent millions of dollars training people who knew what the policy was going in and chose to break it. I don’t see an advocacy group for the troops who drive drunk when they are kicked out; money was wasted on training them. I also don’t see an advocacy group for the troops who commit fraternization or adultery; money was wasted training them. While it may seem like an extremely unfair thing to ask gay and lesbian soldiers, to deny who they are, the point of the military isn’t to be a fair organization. It’s to fight the enemies who threaten our country. As long as you keep your personal life separate from your work, then you are allowed to serve.

The policy from the founding of our country to WW2 amounted to a dishonorable discharge for sodomy. That’s approximately 150 years give or take. From WW2 to 1993, a period of 50 years, you only got separated from the service. Now gays and lesbians are allowed to serve, as long as they don’t tell. What some activists don’t seem to realize is that when you join the military, you give up a lot of the rights you are fighting to defend. While you are in uniform you don’t get to criticize the CIC, you don’t get the full 4th amendment, you can’t quit your job if you don’t like it, etc etc. It’s part of the job. More than that, these people knew what they were agreeing to when they signed the contract. They agreed to live by the UCMJ.

The one thing I still haven’t seen any research done, when accounting for service members who have been kicked out under the DADT policy, is how close they were to being deployed overseas. It is especially important to in order to support or refute the 300 language experts being kicked out. Were they about to deploy and “came out”? Did they wait until right after they went through the Defense Language Institute at Monterrey CA? The civilian version of that program is 30k a year. Were there any other reasons listed as to why they were discharged?

There needs to be a pressing need for change, more than because a small but vocal advocacy group says so. There are also other things that need to be studied before you make a sweeping change. How do you handle the following?
[ul]
[li]Sexual harassment claims between males in a unit.[/li]
[li]Domestic partnerships.[/li]
[li]Hate crimes[/li]
[li]Fraternization charges between men, or women, of different ranks[/li]
[li]The fact that the military has become less a cross section of society and more heavily a representation of the following groups: Southern Whites, Blacks from the inter-cities, hardcore Evangelical Christians, and predominately Catholic Hispanics. As such, for many people who are religious, homosexuality is a sin.[/li][/ul]

There needs to be planning done for the huge change that this would make on the military. Going about making large changes to the UCMJ and the general culture of the military shouldn’t be taken lightly, especially in the middle of two wars. You need to have a plan on how to deal with the above list of potential problems AND many more that I couldn’t think of but will assuredly arise. POTUS Obama says that no one should be denied the chance to serve because of their sexual orientation, but is he ready if 10, 15 or 20% of the active troops protest over this and don’t reenlist as a result? Can he really expect to replace that many seasoned, experienced troops for a small benefit of repealing DADT?

Obama to reverse abortion policy
:bravo:

The good news keeps coming! Oh lordy lordy!

Oh, you beat me to it. That’s a great one :bravo: . . . and quite the political football.

[quote]President Obama signed an executive order Friday striking down a rule that prohibits U.S. money from funding international family-planning clinics that promote abortion or provide counseling or referrals about abortion services.

The order comes the day after the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States.

It reverses the “Mexico City policy,” initiated by President Reagan in 1984, canceled by President Clinton and reinstated by President George W. Bush in 2001. . .

Reversing the previous administrations’ stance on the policy was one of Clinton’s first acts as president in January 1993 and the very first executive order issued by Bush on January 22, 2001, the 28th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. . . [/quote]
edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01 … .abortion/

lbksig -
Excellent commentary on the background of the “DADT” policy.
Homosexuals(gays) have always been a part of the US, and other countries, military forces. And always will be a part of them. I see no reason that a homosexuals patriotism and dedication to duty should be under anymore, or any less, scrutiny that a heterosexuals patriotism and dedication to duty.
The flap which instituted the DADT policy occurred when certain homosexual groups made it a cause celebre’(sp?) to organize military personnel to “come out openly” in flagrant violation of established UCMJ rules. This was intolerable both under the UCMJ and unit cohesion policies.
This “in your face” outing simply could not be allowed to happen and maintain any semblance of culture required for an effective military grouping. Thus, after study and ‘consultation’ the ‘Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell’ policy was implemented as a compromise.
IMO after a decade or so in the military it is a mistake to not recognize the contribution that homosexuals can make and make any attempt to deny them expressing their patriotism by honorable service to their country. It is also a mistake to think that openly flaunting their sexual status by creating specials rules to accommodate this orientation is going to contribute to the forwarding of the military mission.
Whats the answer?
Serve well and abide by the rules. Anything else is above my pay grade.

Day 3…where’s my pony?

Obama Frees Bush Historical Records
:bravo:

And there are some who claim that Democrats and Republicans are the same! To them I say :p.

[quote=“Chris”]Obama Frees Bush Historical Records
:bravo:[/quote]

As journalist, all I can say is HALLELUJAH!!! HALLELUJAH!!! HALLELUJAH!!! :bravo: :bravo: :bravo:

I think I actually preferred reading IP when Fred Smith was still around. My old ears can’t cope with the shrill squeaks of the kiddies unwrapping presents from Uncle Barack. That’s not meant to imply that he’s any worse than the last guy. But he’s a politician, is all. Why get excited? It’ll just be like when you get a radio-controlled car for Christmas and you’re overjoyed and then you realise that it just has one control and it uses the batteries up in about five minutes. (That really happened to me.)

Politician or not, and I agree with you that Obama is just that and not a totally new kind of political animal, there are some tangible changes occurring. After eight years of pretty strongly right-wing politics, some squealing from the left is not surprising, or unjustified. The car should run for a good long while, it may not race around corners and do back flips, but i don’t think anyone is expecting a communist revolution here :slight_smile: