In order to take advantage of it, you must sign-up in a Microsoft store (of which there are a grand total of 26 across the entire United States) for a 2-year subscription to the Xbox Live Gold service at $15 a month. With an upfront hardware cost of $99, this might not seem to bad of a deal when the same bundle would cost $299.99 (plus applicable sales tax) at video game retailer GameStop ($284 shipped at Amazon), however, here’s where you’re going to eat the cost: while you save as much as $200 up-front (before other charges) on hardware, you’re going to inevitably end up paying more over the duration of your 2-year agreement than you had if you’d decided otherwise. Currently, Microsoft charges $60 a month at retail for a year-long subscription to Xbox Live Gold. You’ll find those subscriptions for even less at online retailers such as Amazon and NewEgg.

By purchasing the hardware at $99 and locking yourself into a 2-year service agreement with Microsoft, you will pay $15 a month for Xbox Live Gold. This totals out to $360 for 2 years of the same Xbox Live Gold service other persons potentially paid less than $100 for. Add-on the cost of the hardware and you’ve just paid $460 plus tax to own the Xbox 360 for two years (before games, accessories, and other associated cost are accounted for). This doesn’t even account for the hefty early termination fee you can expect to pay should you choose to terminate your service before hand. However, by purchasing an Xbox 360 and 2 years worth of Xbox Live Gold subscriptions from a retailer such as Amazon, you’d pay $380.12 total (before games, accessories, and other cost). You’ll save upwards of $80 over the long term by purchasing everything up-front as opposed to going with Microsoft’s subsidized “deal”.

Microsoft missed the mark by a wide-margin with this one. The fact that it is offered in Microsoft stores only severely limits the reach of this deal; and the supposed “…additional streaming content from cable providers or sports package providers” has turned out to be non-existent. Microsoft will need to go back to the drawing board on how it markets to consumers should it wish for them to treat their consoles subscriptions like a cable or phone bill.

“The Judge obviously has no idea what he’s dealing with, because the verdict of this expensive court battle can be easily undone,” said The Pirate Bay to file-sharing news outlet TorrentFreak. After the blocks, The Pirate Bay saw a massive increase in traffic with each incident to the point that it even laughed each one off. Indeed, not even 24 hours later, The Pirate Bay saw an increase of over 12 million more users than average since the public announcement of the blockade. This comes despite Virgin Media having already restricted access to the website. The Pirate Bay joked that they should probably write a thank-you letter to the BPI, but, at the same time, wondered if there were ulterior motives to the block rather than simply combating anti-piracy.

As was seen in the Belgian block of The Pirate Bay, the court only required the restriction of 11 domains belonging to The Pirate Bay from the DNS servers of Belgium ISPs. Simply creating a new domain bypassed the scope of the blockade and rendered it effectively moot. Indeed, The Pirate Bay registered their .se domain only months ago in order to avoid a potential domain seizure by the USA. In the case of Italy, a massive traffic drop to TPB was observed, but there is certainly no shortage of alternative torrent trackers available to persons who do not wish to use a VPN or Proxy to bypass the blockage (as is necessary in the Netherlands who completely blocked the IP – an action UK ISPs are reportedly going to be taking). Reportedly, usage of VPN services has seen a surge since the ruling came down. This, of course, does not stop media interest groups from keeping the pressure on in more and more nations to censor and prosecute The Pirate Bay in spite of its founders having already been sentenced to incarceration (The Pirate Bay was sold and transferred to Reservella in 2009).

So as more and more nations continue to attempt to censor websites, accused of alleged copyright infringement, across the internet, the level of futility shown continues to increase exponentially in direct proportion to the number of websites upon which censorship is attempted. A few years ago, when another popular torrent site by the name of Demonoid.ph packed up shop and left Canada after their Canadian hosting provider received legal threats from the CRIA. Demonoid would return a few months later, more popular than ever, and (with a new domain to avoid domain seizure by the US. Their new domain would later become the most popular site with a .me TLD; and that is still in spite of a ban placed on IP ranges originating from China and Taiwan due to incessant denial of service attacks. Currently, the site appears to be hosting out of the Ukraine.

There have, however, been sites which have been successfully shut down such as the now-defunct, private, torrent tracker Oink’s Pink Palace (commonly referred to as OiNK), an invitation-only tracker dedicated to music. The shutdown of Oink, and seizure of its servers, was heavily covered by international news media, and referred to as “Operation Ark Royal” by Interpol (who was operating in conjunction with the IFPI, BPI, and various other media organizations) after a 2-year investigation into the site’s operations. The IFPI and BPI celebrated the shutdown while the Dutch and British Pirate Parties questioned the circumstances (especially those allowing the representatives of the alleged aggrieved parties being allowed to directly participate in the investigation). The effects of the shutdown, however, would not be felt for long as not one, but two new private torrent trackers (both invitation-only) dedicated to music would open their doors in direct response to the closure of OiNK: Waffles.fm, and What.cd. Further more, Alan Ellis, the operator of OiNK, walked free on charges of conspiracy to defraud stemming from illegal file-sharing. Several other defendants would face relatively small fines and/or community service, while the case against one was dropped entirely by the Crown Prosecution Service.

This ship will very likely continue to sail, despite all attempts to bring her down.

It has become more than clear over the better part of the past decade that shutting down sites or seizing domains does not solve the problem. The current business model obviously does not work and should be re-evaluated on all sides, because short of implementing measures similar to the Great Firewall of China (and even that hasn’t been entirely effective) or shutting down the internet entirely, these operations will continue to operate successfully through current and newer technologies. That said, we will close out this series of articles with a quote from EFF founding member John Gilmore, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Notable points cited by Judge Brown included the fact that multiple users often share a single internet connection (and the associated IP address), and that Wi-Fi (especially unsecured and undersecured access points / routers) further adds another facet to the equation (such as an outside party piggybacking on the connection).

In other news, The Pirate Bay, which recently was blocked in the United Kingdom, is enjoying the Streisand Effect; seeing a spike in traffic to the point of setting a new daily traffic record. More on this in Part 3 of our series of articles on the futility in blocking a website.

Continuing on from the last paragraph of yesterday’s article – USA Law Enforcement agencies have worked with other nations to seize servers hosted internationally as recently exemplified in the seizure of servers belonging to the now defunct, popular, file-hosting service MegaUpload (pending litigation at the time of this publication). MegaUpload was shutdown by the FBI after the unsealing of a 72-page Federal Indictment handed down by a grand jury in Virginia which concurrently resulted in the arrest and charging of seven individuals – an action which, coupled with other shutdowns by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, and the DHS, such as the 2007 shutdown of a site which sold modchips, raised queries as to the necessity of controversial legislation such as SOPA and PIPA.

Such legislation is resultant from political pressure from Industry Groups on the US Government, and subsequently from the US Government onto other countries, such as that seen in that push for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Countries such as Spain and Canada have also been subject to pressure from Industry groups such as the RIAA who dubbed them as so-called “Piracy Havens”. Canada has also been subject to pressure from the US governemnt. In example, The US Trade Representative, Monday, published the annual “Special 301 Report”. This report details the state of intellectual property rights worldwide pertaining to American trading partners. According to Ars Technica, Perennial contenders Russia and China made the top spots on the listing while Argentina, India and Canada were noted as being on the “priority watch list”, a listing which Canada has “enjoyed” time-and-time again. The International Intellectual Property Alliance even went so far as to state that “no other country is farther behind the curve in combating copyright infringement in cyberspace.” Then there’s a certain document leak from this time last year to consider. This is despite observations that Canada’s copyright laws are tougher than the USA’s, and the recent passing of Spain’s Snide Law.

These measures are easily achieved by IP holders who argue that they lose millions and billions of sales and lost jobs to piracy online whilst simultaneously arguing that these pirates rake in millions in ill-gotten profits – a claim which many a study has been commissioned to support. Opponents, however, argue that this is no more than a straw man with little factual basis. It has been noted that organizations such as the RIAA have expended millions more in lawsuits against internet pirates than they’ve gained by a wide-margin. Despite this, organizations continue to exert pressure on nations to act against these sites which leads us to incidents such as the now-infamous May 31, 2006 server raid of The Pirate Bay which led to the prosecution of its facilitators. There’s also the cases of litigation against indexing sites such as TorrentSpy, isoHunt, and others whom were sued by the MPAA for “abusing technology to facilitate infringement of copyrighted works,” leading to the shutdown of TorrentSpy and many other sites. Such has led to things such as the “You can click, but you can’t hide” campaign, and the “Downloading Films is Illegal” campaign, both from the MPAA; and all reminiscent of the “Don’t Copy That Floppy” and “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaigns from the Software Industry and RIAA respectively.

(Further Reading)

Individual file-traders have also been prosecuted. This includes the infamous Capitol v. Thomas case (which was notable for being the very first copyright infringement based on file-sharing suit to be brought to trial by jury as opposed to electing to pay a settlement which most individuals opt for) in which defendant Jammie Thomas-Rasset refused to pay the $5,000 settlement offered by EMI (the parent company of Capitol Records). She was later found liable for infringement and ordered to pay $222,000. She sought re-trial where she was once again offered an option to settle for $25,000; however, she did not and was found by a jury to be liable once more to the tune of $1,920,000 ($80,000 per song) – an amount which was later reduced by a judge to $54,000. The recording labels refused to accept this amount and sought retrial based on the amount of the judgement – an action that led to a jury awarding $1,500,000 to the labels. A judge, once again, lowered the amount to $54,000. The labels have indicated that they plan to retry for a larger amount.

There is also the case of Sony BMG Music Entertainment et al. v. Tenenbaum in which, in 2003, Joel Tenenbaum (then, a 20 year old student of Goucher College in Maryland) received an infringement notification offering a settlement for $3500. Joel, explaining his financial situation as a student, offered $500 as payment. This offer, however, was rejected. In 2007, five record labels (Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Bros. Records, Arista Records, UMG Recordings (also representing Interscope Records), and Virgin Records America) filed suit jointly against Joel Tenenbaum. The case would go to trial in July 2009 to the tune of a $4,500,000 lawsuit, but not before the court (presided over by Judge Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court in Boston) would dismiss Tenenbaum’s claims of Abuse of Process against the plantiffs, excluded his expert witnesses, denied a motion to exclude evidence from MediaSentry, excluded Jurors who had previously used social networks to obtain music, and ruled that Tenenbaum could not argue a fair use defense. This led to Tenenbaum being found liable of copyright infringement and the labels were awarded, by a jury, the amount of $675,000. Charles R. Nesson, council to Tenenbaum and a Harvard Law professor claimed the trial had been unfair as his client could not be judged by a jury of his peers. In the judge’s ruling, however, Nesson was chided for presenting a “chaotically bad defense” – a sentiment echoed by many of his peers. The next year, Judge Gertner reduced the judgement amount to $67,500 – a ruling which both parties immediately appealed to the First Circuit Court which would go on to reinstate the original judgement owed and remand the case back to District Court. Tenenbaum later petitioned for a rehearing before the First Circuit, however, that hearing was denied.

There have also been cases (such as those surrounding the 2008 film The Hurt Locker) in which large amounts of groups have been sued in so-called “John Doe cases“. Much of these cases are based around the idea that a “download equals a lost sale” or that just making something available on line is equal to copyright infringement (even if no exchange of data occurs), a theory which has been refuted by many observers and left more than one judge less-than amused. Indeed, even one of the world’s largest video game publishers and developers, Electronic Arts, has admitted that pirated copies of games do not equal lost sales. “[People] need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale,” said Mariam Sughayer, a representative from EA’s corporate communications department. This sentiment was re-echoed by independent recording artist Jonathan Coulton who tweeted, “Any other musicians out there notice that ever since they shut down MegaUpload, the money has just been POURING in?” He’s not the only one. Studies have shown that artists don’t believe piracy hurts them financially. In addition, The Swiss Government (whose Supreme Court has already rendered it effectively impossible to sue anyone in Switzerland by ruling that tracking companies (such as the aforementioned and now defunct MediaSentry) are not allowed to log IP addresses) also commissioned a study finding that unauthorized downloading does not result in a loss of sales nor a loss of revenue for the entertainment industry.

So how does this all tie-together? We’ll explore that, and wrap this all up in Part 3.

This is not the first time that any entity of any nationality has attempted to censor The Pirate Bay. BREIN, a dutch media interest group, has argued in court since 2010 that The Pirate Bay should be shut down. A Dutch Court, however, saw differently and ruled that there was no evidence to support that the majority of ISP users in the Netherlands were using the site to engage in piracy. After further pressure from BREIN, and even the United States government to an extent, much to the chagrin of the two largest ISPs in the Netherlands (Ziggo and XS4ALL), a Dutch court ruled in January 2012 that all access to the Pirate Bay must be blocked by the two Dutch ISPs. BREIN, since then, has pushed for even more Dutch ISPs to be required to censor The Pirate Bay. However, as of April 2012, according to a research study by the University of Amsterdam, the censoring of The Pirate Bay in the Netherlands resulted in no impact on the number of pirates. Furthermore, it was found that there was no reduction in the number of pirates.

“The claim that The Pirate Bay blockade by Ziggo and XS4ALL leads to a decrease of copyright infringement by their subscribers via BitTorrent transfers must be rejected. There is no significant effect of this measure,” they stated. “Ziggo and XS4ALL subscribers who use BitTorrent apparently found different routes other than ‘The Pirate Bay’ to share files, and remain active as seeders to upload files to others.”

It is perhaps this notation which is the most striking of all resulting conclusions from this study. There are multiple ways for people to bypass ISP blocking which The Pirate Bay itself and other sites are already advising (potential) end-users upon in response to the UK Court’s ruling.

Yesterday, TIME’s Matt Peckham penned an article fathoming whether the United States would be soon to follow. The truth is, however, that the United States has been attempting to censor websites, including The Pirate Bay, for quite some time with mixed results. The primary methods the USA has gone with to restrict access to websites include domain seizures, particularly of the .com, .org, and .net top-level domains (TLDs) which are respectively administered by VeriSign and Public Interest Registry within the jurisdiction of the US government, and server seizure of domestically hosted entities. More on this will be discussed in the upcoming Part 2.

Source: NPR via Ars Technica

I spent five hours on the phone last night calling voters in Ohio to organize and work against the passage of SB 5 which would strip public service employees of their rights collective bargaining. Tucked into SB 5 is this language:

Sec. 3101.01 of S.B. 5: … A marriage may only be entered into by one man and one woman. Any marriage between persons of the same sex is against the strong public policy of this state. Any marriage between persons of the same sex shall have no legal force or effect in this state and, if attempted to be entered into in this state, is void ab initio and shall not be recognized by this state. The recognition or extension by the state of the specific statutory benefits of a legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is against the strong public policy of this state. Any public act, record or judicial proceeding of this state, as defined in section 9.82 of the Revised Code, that extends the specific statutory benefits of legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is void.

Inside Walker’s Wisconsin “Budget Repair Bill” is language that would, advocates say, “… hand Governor Walker and his administration broad powers to rewrite the state’s public health programs, including BadgerCare and even SeniorCare, with virtually no public input.

Under the bill, proposed changes to the programs would need to be reviewed only by the Legislature’s Republican-controlled budget committee, a significant shortcut compared to the normal legislative process and public vetting required.
Walker’s Department of Health Services could unilaterally change state laws dealing with the programs, which affect more than a million state residents from infants to the elderly and include a spectrum of BadgerCare plans, FamilyCare, and SeniorCare.

Last weekend several public health advocates were reeling at the magnitude and the speed of the proposed changes and at what they signify for the state’s BadgerCare system, which only a year ago was touted nationally as a model for how to increase health coverage for the poor and middle class.”

Read more at:   http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/health_med_fit/vital_signs/article_979fd798-385c-11e0-b233-001cc4c03286.html

These budget battles being pushed by the GOP across the Mid-West are thinly veiled assaults on public sector unions, women, gays, and the poor. Get ready for the coming battles.

Filling in for that other vast repository of intellect, Sean Hannity, the other night, Carlson asserted, “as a Christian,” that Michael Vick should have been executed for his crimes related to the dog fighting ring he operated in Virginia.

I’m an animal lover. I’ve had dogs and cats for almost all of my live and I know the gut wrenching sorrow for the loss that inevitably comes when they pass on. I have no apologies for Vick or his actions which caused him to be convicted and incarcerated. He broke the law, lied about it and was punished. He paid his societal debt and now has the opportunity to move on with his life.

Living in the “Inner city” of early 1990′s Washington, DC, (though I currently live in the same house I would no longer describe it as “inner city”), I was unfortunately able to experience first hand the “culture” of dogfighting.

Pit bulls (a generic term, to be sure), seemed to be the breed of choice of many of the young and not so young folks in the ‘hood. My next door neighbor, Mike, was a young cop whose pet was a rescued pit bull named Joshua, the most mild mannered good natured dog you’d ever want to meet. However, I was always very wary around the dog – the reputation of the breed notwithstanding.
One afternoon my neighbor and I were sitting on his steps with Joshua when a guy with a pit walked up and engaged in conversation. After a short while he asked, “Do you want let these guys go at it for a bit?” My neighbor said, “No, I don’t fight my dog.” The guy asked, “Why not?”

“Because I love my dog.”

That was it. The guy walked away clearly confused.

In early 2003 my wife took our dog out for his morning “constitutional” but within a couple of minutes I heard this horrible screaming and yelping outside. I immediately ran out to see a woman hustling away around the corner while my wife and dog (a dachshund) were sprawled, battered, bruised and bleeding on the sidewalk.

My wife, who only had superficial injuries, and I took our punctured and bleeding pet to the vet and then stopped at the local precinct to report the attack and file a complaint. However, the police were not interested in taking our complaint and wanted to know why we hadn’t called the police earlier. I raised some noise but the culprit was never apprehended. It turns out the woman saw my wife walking the dog and loosed her dog off its leash and the dog responded according to its training and conditioning. It attacked.

The perspective that moved that woman to commit such a heinous act may be endemic in the dog fighting culture… a culture that Vick evidently embraced during his formative years.
Unlike the characters in Jack London’s “White Fang” Vick was brought to justice for his actions. He went to prison, forfeited a tremendous sum of money and lost two years of his athletic prime; a fitting and proper sentence. However, after paying his debt to society why should a person like Carlson with an undeserved platform for influence be clamoring for more punishment including preventing him from making a living in his chosen profession and calling for his execution?

I believe in second chances and Vick seems bent on embracing his opportunity. This is not a position I come to recently, I wrote an article supporting second chances for offenders nearly ten years ago. It doesn’t matter if that person regains the right to vote, gain employment or qualify for the Pro Bowl.

I knew the answer but I didn’t start this blog to be another partisan ranter, I started to help my writing chops as I entered grad school for Public Communication. I should have graduated by now but I still haven’t submitted a thesis for as I tell people, “life got in the way.” In September 2008, my mother-in-law’s health declined so rapidly we took her out of her assisted living facility. We thought it best she pass away among family. Her doctors told us she had at most three months so we gathered the children and grandchildren home to say good bye to grandma… she passed February 1, 2010.

But it was right about August ’09 that I truly began to feel totally burnt out. By that time the health care reform debate was in full froth and ugliness ruled the day. My thesis would not be ready by the end of my studies and I would not be able to submit it until December.

What got in my way wasn’t “life” so much as “lack of passion.” When I gave up my anger I believe I lost my passion for writing.

What was fueling my anger? The right-wing of the nation’s politics. Don’t get me wrong, the far-left fringe drive me nuts, too! The knuckleheads in Black Bloc always take the spotlight off the protest and turn it on to themselves.

What really irks me is the fact that the nation seems ot have lost sight of what all this is supposed to be mean. Listening to my Dad and his buds while I was growing up taught me a very valuable lesson. These men had actually lived the majority of their lives under the specter of racism and Jim Crow and nearly all were WWII veterans. To a man they were patriots. They had taken the worse this nation could dish out to them and in return they gave their blood and bodies to save the country and the world and to demonstrate their respect for self and love of country.

They voted in elections, paid their taxes and wondered what else white folks wanted from them. The answer to that question didn’t matter, these black, negro and colored men considered themselves above all to be Americans.

So where are the American patriots today? The Tea Party? Oh yeah, what do they stand for? Give me mine and the hell with everyone else. Forget racism that’s much too narrow a strait to sail through. No, today’s American doesn’t give a damn unless one question is answered first above all else; “What’s in it for me?”

“He promised us everything, saying he would turn the country around, and he did nothing the first year,” Peggy says. “He piddled around when he had 60 votes. He could have pushed through the health care bill but spent months haggling on it because he wanted to bring some Republicans on board. He was trying too hard to compromise when he didn’t need the Republicans and they were never going to like him. Any idiot could see that.”

Yep, that is some fantastic logic. Because he campaigned on changing the culture and getting elected representatives to work together, Independents are p.o.’d that he didn’t grind the GOP into the dust, the way the GOP would have done if roles were reversed. So because he tried to live up to his campaign ideals he must be neutered for not playing business as usual. Meanwhile the GOP are calling him the cruelest dictator since Pol Pot.

During the 2008 campaign, my Mom said to me, “If Obama walked on water they would accuse him of destroying the recreational boating industry!”

I’ve been officially unemployed since 2006, when the company I worked for was bought out by another who promptly moved the HQ and operations to Texas. Since then I have cobbled together different free-lance gigs, utilized my tour guide license to put together a “transportainment” business, (limousine rides combined with capital city tours), provided end of days hospice care for my mother-in-law, rented out her house and I went to grad school. Unfortunately none of these endeavors yielded healthcare coverage.

My wife has multiple sclerosis. ‘Nuff said about my personal reasons for supporting Obama.

So yeah, I voted for Obama. Volunteered, raised money and went door to door to help get out the vote. I too was disappointed with the way the health-care reform action took place, but as a student of history I knew FDR had to scrap universal health-care in order to get the New Deal implemented. I also knew that one of the chief criticisms of FDR was that he tried to “pack the supreme court.” In mentioning that fact about FDR no one ever explains why. Every thing FDR rammed through Congress to help the American people was determined to be “unconstitutional” by the ideologically conservative SCOTUS of the time. FDR made the threat to fundamentally alter the court and they laid off killing his programs. However, those actions had the effect of “putting the brakes” on the economic recovery of the mid 1930s. Depending on one’s point of view, FDR’s programs were saved by the advent of WWII.

Last summer a GOP memo authored by Alex Castellanos and others declared the GOP’s strategy to combat Obama would be to “tap the breaks” to slow down his “socialist” agenda. In other words, every initiative no matter how big or small was to be met by the Republicans with a resounding “Hell no!”

How does one “change the culture” of Washington if the partners in that endeavor essentially stick their fingers in their ears and say, “Lalalalalalala!” to everything?

Many of us on the left wondered why he didn’t just use his majority to power through his agenda? Why waste so much time trying to get the GOP to come along and try and save the nation’s standing in the world?  My question was, “How would not seeking partnership to solve the country’s ills change the culture of DC?”

Simply put, the President was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

So he put the effort and energy into pushing the first major changes to the nation’s healthcare system since Medicare. Folks should remember that the effort to pass Medicare in the 60s was met with EXACTLY the same response from the GOP as the 2009 effort.

Screams of “socialism, socialized medicine, government takeover, creeping totalitarianism” met the Democrats. In 2009, Republican senators declared that stopping healthcare would be Obama’s “Waterloo.”  Where is the “bi-partisanship” in that?

The much vilified “stimulus bill” was fought tooth and nail and in an effort to accommodate the detractors on the right side of the aisle was watered-down. Now economists agree the stimulus wasn’t big enough. Ya think?

We now hear from the right that Obama “promised less than 8% unemployment” by now. So why is the entity that did everything it could to prevent an initiative in the first place now screaming that the President hasn’t done enough?

This nation is getting ready to reward the party that dug us into this hole and then resisted any and all efforts to get out of the hole with the opportunity to finish the job started by Ronald Reagan and nearly completed by President W. And that is the total inversion of the idea of American Exceptionalism, subversion of the American Dream and the total looting of the US Treasury. Over the last thirty years there has been a redistribution of the nation’s wealth UPWARD, and yet the Right continues to scream about Class Warfare. The Class War is over folks and the Ultra Rich have won.

These are the folks who constantly decry the role of government and insist that government is the problem and not the solution to anything as per the orthodoxy of Ronald Reagan. Yet it was the US Government that defeated the Axis in global conflict, re-built the economies of Europe and Japan and placed astronauts on the moon, so why is it that Government is the worst hobble to the US? Because the less government the less PROTECTION for the American people.

The nation knew in 2008 that we deserved better and voted accordingly and now thanks to superior PR tactics and corporate conglomerate media assistance, The GOP once again proves the old canard usually attributed to H.L. Mencken that Americans get the government they deserve. I don’t know if Mencken actually said that, I do know he said, “I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.” The GOP agrees.

They create a mess, the Dems clean it up and the country gives power back to the GOP and as Reagan famously said, “There you go again!”

I think Reagan’s buddy and one of my favorite song stylists ever, put it best. Click here to check out Sinatra.