NightSerf

This just in: http://www.knoxnew s.com/news/2008/oc t/10/legislative-p anel-palin-abused- authority/ (20 hrs ago | post #17)

Palin's obvious shortcomings are that she is shallow, incurious, and intellectually lazy. She is power-hungry, petty, and vengeful. She is selfish, self-centered, and utterly devoid of the quintessential qualities that are required for the level of responsibility that she seeks: benevolence and wisdom. I will leave the merits of the case for abuse of power to those who are responsible for investigating it. Impeding that investigation so that it will not influence an election of this magnitude should give pause to anyone who remembers or has studied the times of Nixon and Agnew. (20 hrs ago | post #16)

The secrecy and delay on the investigations into Palin's alleged abuses is reminiscent of the delaying tactics that the Nixon administration erected as the 1972 election approached. It worked, and Nixon endured some of the most miserable years ever spent in the White House before he finally resigned, his one small comfort being that Agnew suffered more and gave up sooner than he. Frankly, I hope Palin is innocent. I like her even if I don't think she's qualified to be Vice President. But the foot-dragging looks like a desperate attempt to hide the truth from the electorate until it's too late for it to put the final seal of doom onto the McCain candidacy. Even if I favored McCain enough to overlook Palin's other obvious shortcomings, I could never vote for any ticket with such a shadow hanging over it after having endured the Watergate years. I find it hard to understand how anyone else could. (22 hrs ago | post #14)

Police: 1 dead after multiple shots fired at Tenn. mall; suspec...

Your post has been cross-posted across a number of Topix forums. Which state are you asking about? (Yesterday | post #3)

As far as I can make out from the reports, most of which are too biased to be reliable, ACORN's main failures have to do with the selection, training, and oversight of the people they send out to register new voters. Their pay must be based on how many registrations they list, because there are reports of making lists up out of thin air or from telephone books. Since there are no actual voters who will show up at the polls, that kind of activity, while fraudulent, won't change what happens at the polls on election day. The second problem is with incentives to register motivating people to do so as many times as possible, but I doubt that those people will vote even once either, so again the fraudulent registrations are unlikely to result in voter fraud at the polls. At any rate, none of this is being done at Obama's behest or with his approval or even knowledge, so any assertions that he is involved in ACORN's misdeeds are pure fabrications and certainly no reason to change one's vote one way or the other. As far as the race for the White House goes, it's a non-issue. (Yesterday | post #10)

In order to have freedom of the press, you have to have a press, and we should all bless Gutenberg for getting the ball rolling. It probably wasn't long after his invention, though, that someone first noted that freedom of the press belongs to the one who owns the press, and Topix owns this one. The First Amendment protects publishers from government censorship within reasonable limits; it does not guarantee that our letters to the editors will be published at all, much less without modification, by those same publishers. Topix publishes these forums, and our posts are analogous to those letters. We don't own this press. We all have "the freedom to speak freely without censorship or limitation"-- in our living rooms. Even in the public square, we are prohibited from inciting to riot or spreading dangerous panic, nor are we permitted to spread vicious lies about other people. It all boils down to the nature of rights. Many, including our founding Fathers, believe that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. I don't hold to that theory. I contend that rights are granted, not inherent, that we (grudgingly) grant to others the rights that we wish for ourselves and that when a large enough majority are willing to do this, we encode those rights into our legal frameworks. A right is a legal reality, not a theological one. As such, rights vary as our changing perceptions of them are reflected in the laws that we create and modify. In the course of the last century or so in America, they have mostly grown and advanced; that has no always been so. With greater freedoms come correspondingly greater excesses and abuses, and from time to time the resentment that this causes brings about reversals, and we humans rarely return to a center or moderate our tendencies to oppress one another. So we have Stalinist purges, Nazi excesses, Spanish Inquisitions, and McCarthy era censorship. But not here, not yet. The Topix Terms of Service put very reasonable limits on what we can write here. Even the exhortation to be polite is only suggestive. There are no wartime censors at work here, only overworked administrators who really don't have time to sweat the small stuff. It's all good. Enjoy it. (Yesterday | post #25)

Trolls come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and not all are bad. It depends on what we're trolling for and what we use as bait. I used this poll to get a useful conversation going and especially enjoyed the response I got from Southern Sister. The typical troll elicits angry responses to begin an animated discussion. I prefer more thoughtful discourse, so my approach is different. But the goal is the same: to fill the soul-quenching voids in space, time, thought, and spirit. Most trolls choose their bait and set their lines to bring out the worst in people. I seek the best. Not all trolls are bad. (Yesterday | post #16)

I also left out plagiarism and spam. I didn't want to complicate it too much. Just the biggies. Dan's complaints and our friend in Madison got me to thinking that we don't all have the same ideas about what's okay to post and what's not. I thought a separate thread to discuss the issue might be useful. (Yesterday | post #5)

The purpose of this poll is to see how much agreement there is in this forum with the Topix Terms of Service (ToS). As usual, I do ask that each person vote only once so that the results reflect our opinion with some degree of accuracy. Than ks for participating. (Yesterday | post #3)

'Soul Man' Sam Moore tells Obama to stop using his song

You're right about the song, R4W and mbd, but unless he signed them away Moore would hold the copyright to his recording of the song. He probably did, though--that was the usual practice in those days. The recording companies held the rights to their recordings with a contractual obligation to forward royalties to the artists. And it's likely that those rights have been bought and sold a time or two since then. But my reading is that he asked tho Obama campaign to stop using it as a courtesy, which they did. Would that more people here exercised a measure of courtesy. (Yesterday | post #32)

Legislator's son denies hacking Palin e-mail

Actually, the Associated Press has a staff of writers who write the reports that go out "on the wire," and they are rarely credited by name. It is quite comomon to see breaking news reports credited simply to the AP. (Thursday | post #4)

Topix Editor

Delete the post or the thread?

Oops--"title OR the first post." (Thursday | post #9)

Topix Editor

Delete the post or the thread?

One more comment before I let this go: I've seen a number of user initiated threads allowed to "live" when either the title of the first post was a serious ToS violation. It's my opinion that Topix should have a policy of deleting whole threads in these instances, not just the first post. (Thursday | post #8)

IRS: Tenn. retirees, vets may lose economic stimulus checks

Unless I misunderstand the story, no efforts are being made to deny vets or retirees their stimulus payments--it's their own inaction that's doing that. The purpose of the article is to remind them that the deadline for filing a return to receive the payment is approaching so that they won't miss out. (Thursday | post #5)