George Bush leads us into the world of Kafka.

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Too right! a good example here in Britain is the Thought Police's term for speed cameras: 'safety cameras', though they have very little to do with safety and a much more accurate moniker would be 'money cameras'.

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If people get used to calling them 'safety-cameras', however, they will tend to think they're there for their own good, rather than the establishment's.

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While I agree that the terminology used is technically a spin, it is also true that driving at higher speeds is less safe than driving at lower speeds.Consequently, if the use of these cameras make more people obey the speed limit, there will be fewer accidents and loss of life.

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"Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends! Well I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!"
- Ned Flanders"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

What's not specfic? The presidential elections in both 2000 and 2004 were shams.The 2000 election was decided by the Supreme Court, absent any Constitutional authority for them to do so. All the conservative justices voted for Bush; all the liberal justices voted for Gore. It was 5-4.After an unoffical full statewide recount, it was determined that Gore would have been the winner had the Supreme Court not halted the recount. Under almost every scenario, Gore is the winner of the Florida election:And that doesn't even begin to cover the tens of thousands of Flordia democrats who were illegally denied the opportunity to vote because they were falsely recorded as having been convicted of felonies - some records even had dates of felony convictions from the future.2004 was an outright fraud. The discrepancies between the exit polling and the actual votes have never been adequately explained. Explanations of mere error fall flat - such an explanation has the burden of explaining why well over 90% of the "errors", nationwide, favored Bush over Kerry. That's not something they've ever even bothered to address.Edited by AdminJar, : fix wide graphic

I think the difference between the exit poles and the voting can be very easily explained.Page not found | Acceptable Use Policy

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Consequently, if the use of these cameras make more people obey the speed limit, there will be fewer accidents and loss of life.

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while risking getting off-topic I must say this is one of the greatest myths propagated by the anti-speed lobby, a.k.a 'Traffic safety' lobby (another great spin for a feel-good name).Speed may compound the effects of an accident but it very rarely by itself contributes to its cause.Excessively low speed limits are just another way of exercising control over minute details of people's lives while reinforcing the Big Brother mentality that it's all for our own good.

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"In life, you have to face that some days you'll be the pigeon and some days you'll be the statue."

and then you have the people who drive under the speed limit. It's much better to follow the speed of traffic (in denver, that's anywhere from 90 to 15 mph) then stick to the speed limit. Granted, at 15 mph, that's due to gridlock. Any yahoo dumb enough to drive 55mph (the speed limit) while the rest of us are doing 80-90, well, . . .

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Confirms my view that only an idiot would ever use electronic voting machines of any sort - they are just too vunerable to attack.Call me a luddite but I like marking a cross on a ballot paper with a pencil like we do over here.

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Oops! Wrong Planet

Even though I didn't vote for Labour (remember we don't vote for the Prime Minister directly) the sad truth at the last election was that the opposition parties were still unelectable. No matter what people thought of Iraq, sleeze, the suppression of civil liberties and so on the alternatives were perceived to be worse.The Tories might have rebuilt themselves enough by the time of the next election. The Liberal Democrats will still be completely unelectable.

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Oops! Wrong Planet

Okay, no offense but how does that get Brits off the same charge that Americans are stuck with?1) There was plenty of time between the bad things that were done, and the election, for ordinary citizens to change the nature of their parties. How many MPs (or other officials) quit in protest of Blair's floundering? Isn't it true that if the people rose up and demanded change they could have gotten Blair out and someone else in... even if it was simply as a new choice for PM from within his party?2) The same in 1 is true for America, and just as in the UK it didn't happen here and so both turned out the same. Some on the liberal side did not see the dems as offering any real reform from 2000 (or a difference from Bush), and many Reps (though upset with Iraq and/or the suppression of civil liberties) could not reform their own party but did not see any better alternatives. McCain is a great example of that as he keeps leading mini charges to change his party from within and clearly dislikes many things which have happened, but in the 2004 election closed ranks with his own party because he saw no better alternative.No offense to everyone from outside the US, but it really looks like most people around the world are letting their govt's slip the leash and so share equal responsibility for what has happened. It is easy to point fingers at Bush and the Americans, but without the help of other nations Bush would not have been capable of doing what he did, and the American people are just as responsible for Bush as other citizens are responsible for their representatives.Indeed even Blair (and the UK) is not just a dual partner in blame. It took more than two to turn an Iraqi tango into the majorclusterf**k it is.The only people I am aware of who got active and did their job were the people of Spain, with perhaps a nod toward France and Belgium who had rational govt's in place beforehand and tried to hold Bush back.

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holmes {in temp decloak from lurker mode}
"What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away." (D.Bros)

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Okay, no offense but how does that get Brits off the same charge that Americans are stuck with?

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we get off the charge because who we (Brits) vote for doesn't make a difference. We could have voted in a stuffed dodo as prime minister instead of Blair and it wouldn't matter. The war in Iraq, Bush's policies , etc would have happened in exactly the same way they already have.It's because the British prime minister holds as much sway as a US state governor (or even less in the case of Florida and Texas) as far as US policy goes.You (Yanks) on the other hand do make a difference. You could have stopped all this (war / civil liberties clampdown / et al) but you didn't.

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"In life, you have to face that some days you'll be the pigeon and some days you'll be the statue."

What aggressive action did the US do to any Arab or Muslim nation to justify the Khobar towers, World Trade Center towers, the USS Cole, etc? As for your 'civilian attacks' that's about as simple as asking whether or not the IRA was comprised of innocent civilians. I assume, as well, you realize that the UK is in Iraq as well. Do you implicate yourself with your blanket statements?

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"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -Theodore Roosevelt

Bush used your guy's made-up rationalizations to send us to war. Without the "confirmations" so willingly supplied by Blair over there, there's no way Bush would have been able to sell the war here. Sure we did. We voted against Bush in both elections. He lost both elections.But he's still the president. What else were we supposed to do? Kill him?

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It's because the British prime minister holds as much sway as a US state governor (or even less in the case of Florida and Texas) as far as US policy goes.

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And the British military is under the direct control of the U.S. Department of Defense? That no matter who the British voted for, the US president would have flown into London and forced him at gun point to sign the orders to mobilize the British forces?I don't think people are talking about how much control Britain has over the situation. I think people are talking about how much control Britain has over their own contributions to the situation, and whether one can say that the British are on some sort of moral higher ground than the American.

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

The problem is the US is always damned if they do, damned if they don't in the eyes of the world. If the US tries to stop terrorism, they are perpetually seen as violating someones rights no matter how by the book they are, and if they stop trying to protect the citizens because they aren't PC enough, then they are just a bunch of lazy low lifes who didn't do their job.America, just like any other nation, has every concievable right to protect itself against any enemy, foreign or domestic. The irony is that Germany and the UK have been monitering its own citizens much longer than the US ever has, yet, not a word of dismay or such a backlash as is seen in the US-- this coming from people who overtly or covertly support Communist ideals! I couldn't help but notice the blatant irony. My life is exactly the same as its ever been. What have you lost in the process? Is the FBI harrasing you? Do people break into your house to collect your urine? Is your phone being tapped? Are you being followed by unmanned drones in the sky? Are your books being flagged at the public library? What specific grievances do you have to address? That's because the general public who is against this, one, doesn't even understand what the Patriot Act is, and two, are under the conspiratorial delusion that people are watching them and listening to them all the time. Its so ridiculous that I scarecly can put it into words. The only reason they would start looking at any of us is if we made certain key strokes. After sending the information, the NSA would recieve a "hit," where they started monitering our convo. After about 10 minutes they'd realize that we were just having a conversation and they would stop monitering it. You think the NSA or the CIA can really moniter 300 million of its own citizens and listen to threats coming from all over the world?Here's the thing: The people who think they are being watched either are because they are into some bad stuff or they have delusions of granduer and think that they are really special and that the gov't really cares whether or not they masturbate. The US or ANY nation does not begin to spy on its citizens without some sort of reason to do so. Its the same as the police have always done. They are going to start an investigation on someone without some sort of reason to be watching them in the first place.

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"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -Theodore Roosevelt

Crash and Chiro have already made appropriate responses but let me take a puff at your house of cards... 1) Without foreign support the Iraq War would have been practically impossible. It certainly required some semblance of a credible alliance, support for Bush's outrageous claims (which was your country's aub), and actual assistance for military operations. That other nations went along with Bush is how these things got done.2) The US does not dictate the policies of other nations, yours in specific. So all the above mentioned items were, and continue to be the result of your public allowing your gov't to get away with bad policy decisions. If your country supported the war and put troops there, how on earth could it be the result of American voters?3) Even if I were to accept that the rest of the world could not physically stop Bush from trying to do what he wanted, that he was deadset and would have gone ahead without help, other nations could certainly have TRIED to stop Bush from succeeding. Its a bit of convenient cowardice (to my mind) to berate another nation's activities and yet not vote a pair of balls into office for your own so as to STOP wrongs being commited. Its like a bunch of immediate witnesses to a crime (who stood around doing nothing) accusing the family of the criminal for not doing more at home to stop him.4) For all the talk of Bush's civil liberties clampdowns, you are aware that there are worse state's of civil liberties within European nations? I can't speak for the UK, but I find it ironic when some freedom gets put in jeopardy for Americans, and they bash Bush for doing so, when they don't have such freedoms in the first place.

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holmes {in temp decloak from lurker mode}
"What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away." (D.Bros)

The fact of the matter is that we don't know, and neither do you. The "Patriot Act" (my stomach turns at having to call it that) not only authorizes secret searches, it also prohibits anyone from telling the subject of the search, upon pain of prosecution.However, the more important point is that, even if it never directly impacts me in the least, I still protest against the violation of the civil rights of others. It's not less wrong because it doesn't affect me. And the fact that you only care about whether your rights are violated is disgusting. If you only motivated by your own self interest, consider this: Ignorance truly is bliss.If you are at all interested in the truth, read this for a list of people who had a well-founded belief that they are or were subject to illegal searches under the "Patriot Act."

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin