RTFA: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne…

A scheme to train firefighters in major cities to look out for terrorists has raised fears that their iconic standing in American society could be damaged.

Unlike police, firemen and paramedics do not need warrants to get into homes and other buildings during technical inspections of emergency facilities, making them particularly useful for spotting signs of terrorist planning.

The Homeland Security Department has been secretly testing a pilot scheme in New York in which firefighters are trained to identify suspicious material or behaviour. If successful, the programme will be extended to other large cities.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says that using firemen to gather intelligence is a step toward limiting people’s privacy.

Of course I had to find this in british news.

RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071130/wl_nm/pope_enc…

VATICAN CITY Reuters - Pope Benedict, in an encyclical released on Friday, said atheism was responsible for some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” in history.
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The 75-page “Spe Salvi,” which takes its Latin title from a quote by St Paul in hope we were saved, is an appeal to a pessimistic world to find strength in Christian hope.

That’s funny, I would say religion has been responsible for some of the ‘greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice’.

RTFA: http://escapepod.org/2007/11/22/ep133-other-people…

Which is why she was hoping that the venture capitalist would just leave her alone. He wasn’t a paying customer, he wasn’t a fellow artist - he wanted to buy her, and he was thirty years too late.

“You know, I pitched you guys in 1999. On Sand Hill Road. One of the founding partners. Kleiner, I think. The guy ate a salad all through my slide-deck. When I was done, he wiped his mouth, looked over my shoulder, and told me he didn’t think I’d scale. That was it. He didn’t even pick up my business card. When I looked back as I was going out the door, I saw his sweep it into the trash with the wrapper from his sandwich.”

The VC - young, with the waxy, sweaty look of someone who ate a lot of GM yogurt to try to patch his biochemistry - shook his head. “That wasn’t us. We’re a franchise - based here in LA. I just opened up the Inglewood branch. But I can see how that would have soured you on us. Did you ever get your VC?”

Very cool short science fiction - it’s audio, so you don’t even need to read.

RTFA: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine.

The RepRap project became widely known after a large press coverage in March 2005, though the idea goes back to a paper on the web written by Adrian Bowyer on 2 February 2004.

RepRap will make plastic, ceramic, or metal parts, and is itself made from plastic parts, so it will be able to make copies of itself. It is a three-axis robot that moves several material extruders. These extruders produce fine filaments of their working material with a paste-like consistency. If RepRap were making a plastic cone, it would use its plastic extruder to lay down a quickly-hardening filament of molten plastic, drawing a filled-in disc. It would then raise the plastic extrusion head and draw the next layer (a smaller filled disc) on top of the first, repeating the process until it completed the cone. To make an inverted cone it would also lay down a support material under the overhanging parts. The support would be removed when the cone was complete. Conductors can be intermixed with the plastic to form electronic circuits - in 3D even!

Where can I buy one? Oh, right - RTFA… Fortunately, I subscribe to MAKE magazine.

RTFA: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/11/georgia-poli…

There’s more evidence that the Saakashvili regime in Georgia is using sound weapons against opposition protestors. This English-language footage from Russia Today shows riot police rolling through the streets of Tblisi in pickup trucks, small dishes in hand. A high frequency pulse follows. “Georgian police used an acoustic gun — it’s a non-lethal weapon that disorients people for a period of time,” says one “special weapons expert.”

The best part about non-lethal weapons is that there is no evidence of their illegitimate use.

RTFA: http://www.kmbc.com/news/14587550/detail.html

A 21-year-old man has been accused of using a toad to get high.Clay County sheriff’s deputies said David Theiss, of Kansas City, possessed a Colorado River toad with the intention of using it as a hallucinogenic. Experts said it’s possible to lick the toad’s venom glands to achieve psychedelic effects.

Thank you for making God’s animals illegal. Did you know that a human can be used to murder another human?

RTFA: http://foxnewsporn.com/videos.php

FOX NEWS ALERT: For a limited time, enjoy the video samples from FOX News below, at no additional charge! You can sign up for HOT action at any time.

This is great.

RTFA: http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=6522423&si…

Photographer’s Request for Critique
–Shane Willis
MC Mechanic - Hand Fixing HandA homage to M.C. Escher - VIEW LARGER FOR BEST IMAGE - Comments are
most welcome

Via boingboing, very cool image:

RTFA: http://www.publicintegrity.org/WOWII/database.aspx…

No quote. This is a rundown of the biggest war profiteers who are currently cashing in on the raid of the US Treasury.

RTFA: http://elzr.com/posts/infodesign-challenge

It all started because my 48-year-old mom, blessed her, can’t read small type very well. She has trouble using little calendar cards because the day numerals are so small and last time she complained I paused and empathized with her travail. The problem, it was suddenly obvious, was not only the marketing debris that encroaches upon every poor card but rather the quite wasteful scheme we use for representing a year-the same table with the same thirty-something numbers over and over.

Totally sexy representations of information!

RTFA: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story…

Early episodes of Sesame Street are being released on DVD - with a warning that they are intended for grown-ups and may not suit the needs of today’s preschoolers.
Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times blog The Medium went looking for Big Bird, and found that his neighborhood has essentially been gentrified for a new generation of viewers. “I definitely had dimly remembered that something in the palette of the show was really unnerving - both unnerving and thrilling,” she says. “I watched it from a small town, and it made me think of, you know, ‘New York’s mean streets!’ “

RTFA: http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=127

News Corp. is reporting that firefighters are being asked by the Department of Homeland Security to spy inside people’s homes and businesses while in the line of duty of putting out fires.
The following video is from FOX’s FOX Report, broadcast on November 25, 2007

The firefighters stay on the front lines of our terrorism war.

RTFA: http://techdirt.com/articles/20071120/160338.shtml

Patrick Ross apparently has no shame. For years, at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, he presented ridiculous statement after ridiculous statement about intellectual property. There was the one about how fair use harmed innovation. Then there’s my personal favorite, where he argued that the DMCA shouldn’t be changed because markets shouldn’t be regulated — ignoring the key point that the DMCA, itself, was a regulation that was tremendously distorting the market. After attacking me for suggesting that his viewpoints were influenced by the fact that he was paid to promote the positions of the entertainment industry (when I hadn’t even suggested that), Ross went on to make it official that he was shilling for the entertainment industry, by creating a super-lobbying group that represented all the different big copyright groups under one umbrella: The Copyright Alliance, made up of the MPAA, the RIAA, the BSA, the ESA and others.

Ross’ latest stunt is to demand that all presidential candidates answer his survey of stunningly loaded questions about copyright. The questions are all of the “and have you stopped beating your wife?” variety — even causing the reporters attending Ross’s press conference to make fun of the questions as being ridiculously leading. Of course, the questions are publically available (pdf) for anyone to view. Let’s go through them one by one in order to help the presidential candidates step around the incredibly loaded nature of the questions to do a better job with them. Hopefully, Ross won’t accuse us of a copyright violation in reposting the questions.

* How would you promote the progress of science and creativity, as enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, by upholding and strengthening copyright law and preventing its diminishment?

Read on for more loaded questions with rebuttals.

RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071120/ap_on_go_pr_wh…

WASHINGTON - Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.
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In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were “not involved” in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.

“There was one problem. It was not true,” McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Tuesday. “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

IMPEACH BUSH & CHENEY!

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7102180.stm

Animal rights activists are thought to be the first Britons to be asked to hand over to the police keys to data encrypted on their computers.

The request for the keys is being made under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act RIPA.

Police analysing machines seized during raids on activists homes carried out in May have asked for the keys.

The activists could face jail if they do not comply and snub a further formal request to hand over the keys.

RTFA: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007…

Nuclear power presents the ultimate catch-22 for environmentalists. It doesn’t generate a lot of greenhouse gases, but it does produce long-lasting toxic waste.

No one is more familiar with this tough trade-off than Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace International turned nuclear power booster. He left Greenpeace in the 1980s over ideological differences and now is the co-chairman, along with former EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman, of the Nuclear Energy Institute’s new Clean and Safe Energy Coalition.

Fossil fuels, nuclear power and hydroelectric power generate 99 percent of the electricity in the United States. Fossil fuels are dirty, and hydroelectric power is tapped out. That leaves nuclear power as a leading alternative. As electricity demand continues to increase, and with wind and solar technologies generating less than 1 percent of our country’s electricity, some activists are turning to once anathema energy sources in the war on global warming.

Moore spoke with Wired News about why he thinks nuclear is the clear winner.

Wired News: We don’t want to dwell on the past, but can you describe your conversion from Greenpeace co-founder to nuclear energy promoter? What changed your mind?

Patrick Moore: Going back to the early days in Greenpeace in the 1970s and 1980s, we were totally focused on nuclear war and nuclear testing in the Cold War. We failed to distinguish between the beneficial uses of the technology and the evil uses of the technology.

It became clear to me that there was a logical disconnect. The people who were most concerned about climate change were most opposed to nuclear power. Greenpeace is against fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power. Those three technologies produce over 99 percent of world energy. What kind of a path to a sustainable future is that?

Interesting interview - check out the rest.

RTFA: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,311889,00.html

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - A judge ordered a prominent businessman to pay $8 million to his daughter, who claimed he sexually abused her for decades beginning when she was a preschooler and included a rape the night she was crowned homecoming queen.

Circuit Judge Helen Shores Lee ruled against Fred M. Blackmon of Montgomery, a vice president with Merrill Lynch & Co., in a civil lawsuit filed by Louise Plott.

Blackmon’s attorneys argued unsuccessfully that many of Plott’s claims were too wild to believe and unsupported by evidence. Among other things, she alleged that Blackmon repeatedly took her to orgies at a hotel as a young girl, once mailed her a dismembered thumb and a fetus, and forced her to participate in the stabbing death of a young man…

Documents filed by the defense show Plott’s mother, Bess Blackmon, and four siblings denied during testimony that they saw signs of abuse, but one of her sisters also described the allegations as “complicated.” Plott claimed two of her brothers were forced as children to join in the sexual assaults by their father, an allegation both brothers denied.

Blackmon testified during the trial that he no longer loved Plott because of what he said were false allegations. He said he quit giving Plott an $8,000-a-month “allowance” after she contacted attorneys in January 2006 about a lawsuit.

I don’t see how this guy was convicted when his two sons, who he supposedly also abused, denied the allegations.

RTFA: http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,221151…

…In fact, the religious doomsday cult had taken up residence in a remote underground cave. They had decided to barricade themselves inside until May 2008 - the date when their spiritual leader told them the world was going to end.

Today, authorities were attempting to talk to cult members by bellowing through a ventilation shaft cut into the cave’s roof. So far, however, the members - who include 25 adults and four children, one of them a 16-month-old baby - have refused to emerge.

“They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out and are threatening to blow themselves up. They threaten to detonate a gas tank,” an official in the local prosecutor’s office said. “They say they are fine. They tell us to go away,” another added…

Izvestiya newspaper yesterday reported that Kuznetsov suffered from schizophrenia and that in the last few months he had been sleeping in a coffin.

RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071115/ap_on_re_us/br…

LAKEPORT, Calif. - Three young black men break into a white man’s home in rural Northern California. The homeowner shoots two of them to death - but it’s the surviving black man who is charged with murder.

The head of the san francisco NAACP had this to say:

“This man had no business killing these boys,” Brown said. “They were shot in the back. They had fled.”

I strongly disagree, later in the story it says:

Edmonds’ stepson, Dale Lafferty, suffered brain damage from the baseball bat beating he took during the melee. The 19-year-old lives in a rehabilitation center and can no longer feed himself…

Hughes’ mother, San Francisco schoolteacher Judy Hughes, said she believes the group didn’t intend to rob the family, just buy marijuana. She called the case against her son a “legal lynching.”

Oh they didn’t intend to rob the family… they just wanted to buy marijuana at 4am and beat Dale Lafferty with a baseball bat. I don’t think Hughes deserves to be tried for murder, but he definitely belongs in jail for assault and possibly attempted murder.

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7096819….

The biofuels bonanza will crash unless producers can guarantee their crops have been produced responsibly, the UN’s environment agency chief has said.

Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said there was an urgent need for standards to make sure rainforests weren’t being destroyed.

Biofuel makers also had to show their products did not produce more CO2 than they negated, he told BBC News.

Critics say biofuels will lead to food shortages and destroy rainforests.

They point to the destruction of Indonesia’s peat swamps as an example of biofuel folly.

The swamps are one the richest stores of carbon on the planet and they are being burned to produce palm oil.

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7096814.stm

ccording to the Arab News newspaper, the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago.

Seven men from the majority Sunni community were found guilty of the rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from just under a year to five years.

But the victim was also punished for violating Saudi Arabia’s laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man.

On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence.

The rapists also had their prison terms doubled. But the sentences are still low considering they could have faced the death penalty.

The Arab News quoted an official as saying the judges had decided to punish the girl for trying to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.

The victim’s lawyer was suspended from the case, has had his licence to work confiscated, and faces a disciplinary session.

Fuck cultural relativism, this is evil.

RTFA: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/e…

Lisi’s inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says “I think our universe is this beautiful shape.”

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi sounds like an interesting guy… snowboarding in the winter, surfing in the summer, and somewhere in between developing the theory of everything.

RTFA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bland-Allison_Act

The Bland-Allison Act of 1878 was a United States federal law enacted in response to the Fourth Coinage Act (called by opponents “the Crime of 1873″) demonetizing silver. Representative Richard P. Bland of Missouri and Senator William Allison of Iowa co-authored a bill that would re-allow the coinage of silver. It had the following provisions:

The U.S. Treasury would purchase quantities of bullion valued between $2 million and $4 million per month.
The silver would be purchased at market prices, not at a predetermined ratio tied to the value of gold.
The silver would be used to make coins at ratio of 16:1 to gold. In other words, 16 ounces of silver would be equivalent to one ounce of gold, regardless of the metals’ respective market values.

This compromise was part of a struggle between the silver and bimetal-standard groups and the gold standard forces who tried to repeal it altogether. Rutherford B. Hayes, who was influenced by industrial and banking interests, vetoed this act because he did not agree with the inflation that it would cause. [citation needed] Congress overrode the veto.
However, the Hayes administration blunted the impact of the law. The Treasury Department never actually bought more than the $2 million minimum amount[citation needed] and never circulated the silver dollars. The Bland-Allison Act was replaced in 1890 by the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.
Gold remained the larger feature between both legislations. The term “limping bimetallism” has been used to describe this program.

The consequence of this, along with legislation that “responded,” was to cause the depletion of the US Federal gold reserves. It is clear how this legislation would inevitably lead to gold/silver arbitrage against the value of gold.

It all culminated with the Panic of 1893:

People attempted to redeem silver notes for gold; ultimately the statutory limit for the minimum amount of gold in federal reserves was reached and U.S. notes could no longer be successfully redeemed for gold. The investments during the time of the Panic were heavily financed through bond issues with high interest payments. The National Cordage Company (the most actively traded stock at the time) went into receivership as a result of its bankers calling their loans in response to rumors regarding the NCC’s financial distress.

A series of bank failures followed, and the price of silver fell. The Northern Pacific Railway, the Union Pacific Railroad and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad all failed. This was followed by the bankruptcy of many other companies; in total over 15,000 companies and 500 banks failed (many in the west). About 20%-25% of the workforce was unemployed at the Panic’s peak.

By 1900, McKinley had moved the country to the gold standard, and in 1913, Wilson created the Federal Reserve. In the early 1970s, Nixon would renege on the terms of the Bretton Woods system (created at the close of World War II to regularize global economic systems around the exchange of gold), when he eliminated the gold backing of US currency (also known as the Nixon Shock).

The 1973 Oil Crisis, which is inextricably tied to the Nixon Shock, had the following effects on global monetary systems:

On August 15, 1971, the United States pulled out of the Bretton Woods system in the so called Nixon shock. The result was a depreciation of the value of the US dollar against many other currencies. Since oil was priced in dollars this meant that oil producers were receiving less “real” income for the same price. In the years after 1971, OPEC was slow to readjust prices to reflect this depreciation. From 1947-1967 the price of oil in U.S. dollars had risen by less than two percent per year. Until the Nixon shock, the price remained fairly stable versus other currencies and commodities, but suddenly became extremely volatile thereafter. OPEC ministers had not developed the insitutional mechanisms to update prices rapidly enough to keep up with changing market conditions, so their real incomes lagged for several years. The large price increases of 1973-74 largely “caught up” their incomes to Bretton Woods levels in terms of other commodities such as gold.

As the price of petroleum (a commodity) adapted to the price of gold (no longer an aspect of the international monetary system, but merely another industrial commodity), the US monetary system came to depend on the value of the commodities it could purchase.

The fluctuation in petroleum prices is now inversely related to the purchasing power of the US dollar. What an asinine conclusion to silver/gold arbitrage of the 1890s… but arguably, the modern US dollar is a better measure of actual value.

The fundamental error in the current monetary system is in the assumption that the value of commodities is regulated by free market exchange, which is assumed to be free from non-market influences. Of course, this isn’t the case at all, because political systems are deeply embedded into the international exchange of commodities, and vise-versa.

For better or worse, the United States executive branch is currently managed by a serial petroleum entrepreneur: Bush was a partner or CEO in Arbusto Energy, Spectrum 7, and Harken Energy. Cheney, in his capacity as CEO of Halliburton, oversaw the activities of KBR, one of the world’s premiere oil industry construction companies.

If anyone is going to understand the fundamental mechanisms of the US monetary system, by way of understanding the commodities that it is based on, then Bush and Cheney are probably some of the best fellows for the task. However, this intermingling of politicial and industrial interests obviously threatens the fundamental assumptions of the free-market exchange of commodities.

The current US dollar is perhaps a “fairer” metric of value than gold-based incarnations, but as the wild post-2002 fluctuations in petroleum prices indicate, the value of the US dollar is anything but stable at the scale of a decade-by-decade analysis.

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7094881.stm

For the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer is cracking codes at Bletchley Park.

The machine is being put through its paces to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer.

It is being used to crack messages enciphered using the same system employed by the German high command during World War II.

The Colossus is pitted against modern PC technology which will also try to read the scrambled messages.

War work

Colossus is widely recognised as being one of the first recognisably modern digital computers and was developed to read messages sent by the German commanders during the closing years of WWII.

It was one of the first ever programmable computers and featured more than 2,000 valves and was the size of a small lorry.

The re-built Colossus will be put to work on intercepted radio messages transmitted by radio amateurs in Paderborn, Germany that have been scrambled using a Lorenz SZ42 machine - as used by the German high command in wartime.

Thank you for your letter regarding the amendment offered by Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT) to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 1585), expressing the sense of the Senate regarding Iran. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.

I understand your concerns about this issue. I believe that the United States should resolve its differences with Iran diplomatically, through direct negotiations and dialogue with Iranian officials. We must also work closely with our friends and allies in the international community to pressure Iran to abandon its uranium enriched program, cease its active support for terrorist groups, and become a positive force for change in the Middle East.

I am also deeply concerned about allegations that Iran has provided arms, training, and financial support to Iraqi insurgents carrying out attacks against U.S. and Coalition troops and Iraqi civilians. In recent years, Iran has played a destabilizing role in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, and has pursued a nuclear enrichment program in violation of its international legal obligations and United Nations Security Council resolutions.

On September 26, 2007, I joined 75 of my colleagues in approving the sense of the senate amendment regarding Iran introduced by Senators Kyl and Lieberman. I decided to support this amendment after two very controversial provisions were removed. Those provisions would have stated that it is the policy of the United States to stop violent Iranian activities inside Iraq and to use all tools at our disposal, including the military, to do so. I felt this could be interpreted as an authorization of military force against Iran and was pleased that Senator Kyl and Senator Lieberman agreed to remove these provisions from the amendment.

Again, thank you for writing. I hope that you will continue to write on matters of importance to you. Best regards.

Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/.

I didn’t expect to receive such a relevant response to my original petition, so I was pleased to find this letter in my inbox, this morning. In fact, I am immensely pleased.

I can’t help but comment on the latency, though. It’s approximately 60 days after the fact… I know that the ping times to Dianne Feinstein’s CGI mailer are on the order of 200ms, so the bottleneck is obviously not with how quickly “they” receive the message.

To briefly digress, the essence of a Denail of Service attack is to overwhelm an event responder with more events than it can respond to. In practice, an attack against an Apache web server takes the form of lots of bogus requests flooding the server, which is generally unable to separate the legitimate requests from the bogus. The legitimate requests are therefore not responded to. Put another way, legitimate access to the web service is denied: Denial of Service. There are technical solutions to the DoS problem (or at least band-aid-type responses), but it’s still a relatively open issue.

Getting back to the latency with the federal government, I think this is essentially evidence of a DoS. It’s not an attack, per se, but the “representation service” provided by federal representatives is effectively denied until the time after which it is no longer relevant.

I understand why this is necessarily the case: one person’s attention can only be split so many different ways, and a person is also quite different from a timesharing computer server. As the controversial Linux Completely Fair Scheduler can attest, there’s a lot to be said about how you prioritize the focus of your attention across multiple, simultaneous tasks. It makes sense for a senator’s organization to take longer to respond to a single message from an individual, such as myself.

There are several solutions to the problem. Clearly, other federal representatives, who are in “less demand,” need to be brought into the loop. This means the next step is to contact the appropriate federal house representatives. It should be the case that their attention is focused on a smaller number of constituents.

In the end of the day, this is the question: is it possible to participate in current political events, in the United States? Of course, I’m optimistic that the answer is “yes.” However, it may be the case that this “yes” answer only applies at a fairly local level, and that federal policy is more difficult to influence.

RTFA: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/996…

…Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a “failure.” Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public suppo