Data Mining Sarah Palin's info

Most of the people making comments (everywhere) about Mrs Palin's use of Yahoo for her PERSONAL stuff also have no clue how it is to live in Alaska. Imagine that your state Capital is at Key West Florida and your 1st major city is at Washington DC - that is the distance between Juneau and Anchorage - oh yea, you can only FLY between the two - no driving. Now are you going to go to DC and make a long distance call to get your e-mail in Key West if you used a local provider? No, you are going to use a service that is everywhere.
People have NO sense of scale and the problems faced in Alaska. I spent years up there and practices that are taken for granted in the Lower 48 are not there are or just will not work there. These sense of scale and problems also helps her understand USA wide problems since he deals with it every day. Someone who lives in Delaware can drive the length of the whole state in less than an hour - an hour FLYING at 550 MPH in Alaska gets you over the Gulf of Alaska - or still in the middle of no where.

Her account being hacked was not her doing - it was the password recovery feature of Yahoo asking for personal details that only she should know - however with lots of details about her (or anyone) online doing some data mining to guess at the possible (constrained by Yahoo) answers to the recovery questions is the problem - NOT her. The intelligence agencies have been doing since since World War I - operational analysis and data mining of pieces of info to get at an answer. Due to the WWW search engines, these used to be hard to locate pieces of data about individuals are now online and findable with only a little effort (the report I read said it took him 49 minutes to get all the answers to the password recovery feature) and that is a problem. Most everything is said to be "public knowledge" due to efforts of the past 50 years of "public interest lobbyist", ACLU & even Government efforts to be "open and transparent" - now all these efforts have come back around to actually harm people since so much data is regularly posted that a complete profile of people - even those not using any internet service - is findable.

Remember, only the GOVERNMENT has restrictions on what it can do - private people and companies can - and do - use any means necessary to find out information - and its all perfectly legal.

One of most striking ways to tell whose side a firm is on is by who complains - and there was not ONE statement of concern by the ACLU that Sarah Palin's account was hacked into and the loss of her personal information - shows you that the ACLU has an agenda other safeguarding people's rights.

McCain's Acceptance Speech Quote

Senator John McCain's final few sentences from his 2008 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention September 4, 2008 is quite good. It is on par with lots of other famous speeches - the first one that sprung to my mind was Prime Minister Winston Churchill's speech to Parliament after the Dunkirk evacuation (and around 5 others) were completed  where he used emotion and repetition for effect.

 

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender . . ."

PM Winston Churchill June 4, 1940 to the Houses of Parliament

 

 

"Fight with me. Fight for what’s right for our country. Fight for the ideals and character of a free people. Fight for our children’s future. Fight for justice and opportunity for all. Stand up to defend our country from its enemies. Stand up for each other, for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America. Stand up and fight. We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history. Thank you, and God bless you, and God bless America.”

 — John McCain

 

I came up with a phrase from the poster of the Oregon 8th Air Force Historical Society last year of "Meet the People Who Made History" which echoes McCain's "We never hide from history. We make history." since the men (and women) of the 8th USAAF did make history. I would much rather follow someone who wants to make history than someone who wants the United Nations to decide our history.

 

 

 

Problems and solution for US Congressional campaign funding

The problem is that by trying to limit funds, and then at the same time creating 527, and I am sure lots of other government sanctioned legal ways to advertise (like "issue ads", educational ads and the vast pool of others can can be thrown into there) it actually has made it worse than before McCain-Feingold, and countless other rules set up to make all this money "transparent".

 

    If Congress just changed the rules to saying that anyone can give as much money, time, in service, in kind they want, or corporations, but EVERY item must be reported every day on a web site - listing name address, who employs them, how much they earn a year, and all organizations that these people are members of - or even have donated money to in the past or associate with -  so that anyone and everyone can just pull up that list, see who gave them money, see what companies they work for and then can easily tie that into past trips that the candidate has gone on with them on (already public records) then you could see that candidate X got 150,000 from Q who works for Public company T who this person chairs the committee of - you can easily trace the influence pedaling, back scratching etc and thus not vote for them.

 

    By trying to restrict all this, and regulate it minutely and make reporting so complicated and convoluted, it creates more problems than it solves.

 

    Penalty for not reporting: 10x the amount donated.

 

    If you want to have a limit then just put that each rep candidate can never accept more than 30 times what their base salary in contributions every year, and a senator never more than 60 times. (plus adjustment for high cost of living areas, use same formula as used with civil service employees) since it is more expensive to advertise and get the word out in those areas. If they are not elected then all money left over, less 2x their base salary, goes into the US General Fund dedicated to food programs in the USA.

 

    Simple, easy, understandable to all - and pretty fair!