<p>Flip flopping?</p>
<p>Mitt? Is that you, again?</p>
<p>BTW, regarding the second link, it’s a cryin’ shame that our Commander In Chief’s views on the Iraq war haven’t followed public opinion a little more closely.</p>
<p>Oh wow. Since when is flip-flopping a Republican word? Just look through her BS for one second and see that she is a corporate shill. BTW, I don’t support Mitt.</p>
<p>Want more evidence of her despicable behavior? While Bill was president, she tried to get a health care bill passed. Later on, she stopped speaking up about healthcare. Why? Big pharma paid her off.</p>
<p>If she gets elected, then we’ll have another term of corrupt business deals and lobbyists.</p>
<p>Flip flopping is kind of off the table for anybody else with Mitt Romney in the race – a candidate who instantaneously changed his views 180 degrees on EVERY major issue as his governor’s term came to a close, conveniently just as he embarked on a presidential campaign.</p>
<p>As to the rest of your conspiracy theories, where’s my tinfoil hat? I need it to protect me from the black helicopters flying in low over the grassy knoll. You should send all those Michael Moore DVDs back to NetFlix.</p>
<p>Oh wow, it’s a conspiracy theory that she receives the biggest amount of money from pharmaceutical lobbyists?</p>
<p>I like to support the more honest and genuine candidates which so far are slim: Ron Paul and Mike Gravel. I’d like to say kucinich but I don’t know that much about him and if he’s receiving money from big corporations.</p>
<p>Instead of attacking me, why don’t you care to attack my arguments.</p>
<p>Two wrongs don’t make a right. These two wrongs being Hillary and Mitt’s flip flops. Rather than vote for the lesser of the two evils (Hillary), vote for somebody else who is true to their word rather than trying to get more supporters.</p>
<p>Hate to say it, but Kucinich is way too short to ever be elected president. Height and stature do matter, as we’ve seen time and again. I’ve met Kucinich (and Bush, as a matter of fact), and the man is very small.</p>
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<p>I did attack your arguments. I suggested sending the Michael Moore DVDs back to NetFlix!</p>
<p>Bill Clinton was the luckiest man who every lived. His legacy is a ribald joke because he never cared to risk anything.</p>
<p>The next president is going to be the unluckiest man(or woman) who ever lived. W crossed the river, burnt his boats, and smashed his cooking pots. There is no retreat from this war now. The winner of the next election will promise that there is and either reverse themselves once elected or commit a blunder that will leave unimaginable chaos in its wake.</p>
<p>Iraq will sort itself out after we redeploy. It may take five or ten years, but eventually they’ll get tired of killing each other. All we are doing there now is postponing the inevitable, serving as an excuse for the Iraqis to avoid the struggle of identifying somebody or group with political legitimacy.</p>
<p>At this point, things are getting worse with every passing year of our occupation. It is hard to argue for continuing it.</p>
<p>Oh, I suppose the NY Times is also a conspiracy theorist?:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/nyregion/12donate.html?ex=1185940800&en=0417ffb0dd33677f&ei=5070[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/nyregion/12donate.html?ex=1185940800&en=0417ffb0dd33677f&ei=5070</a></p>
<p>Refresh right after you go to it.</p>
<p>Did you post that to slam Senator Clinton? It was an extremely positive article about the respect she has earned from the health care industries for her leadership on health care issues. The big beef with her effort in 1993 was that she was not sufficiently attuned to the interests of health care providers.</p>
<p>I look forward to watching her as President taking a pragmatic, incremental, bipartisan approach to universal health care. Between the expansion of S-CHIP and the bill she sponsored with Lindsey Graham extending VA medical coverage to Guard and Reserves, she’s already added several million to the ranks of the insured.</p>
<p>I find it interesting that she’s pitching universal health care as a pro-business necessity…because businesses are getting swamped by the cost of health insurance. That’s how she won over the CEO of Morgan Stanley, who was a Patriot level fundraiser for Bush in the last two elections and is now fundraising for Clinton’s Presidential run. She had two lengthy policy wonk dinners with him and his wife (who is on the board of a NY hospital). Sold him the old fashioned way, with in-depth understanding of policy issues and pure competence.</p>
<p>“Iraq will sort itself out after we redeploy. It may take five or ten years, but eventually they’ll get tired of killing each other.”</p>
<p>Nature hates a vacuum. When we pull out of thos erstwhile buffer state Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey will go in each backing a different faction. It will go from being a civil war to a regional war. Everyone who says W didn’t listen to the experts or covered up what they said is currently guilty of the same thing.</p>
<p>A regional conflict will inevitably cripple oil production and possibly close the Straits of Hormuz which will force us right back in to the region only this time in a shooting war with Iran.</p>
<p>BTW in strickly military terms a retreat under fire is one of the most difficult military manuevers to pull off. We might actually have to put more troops in to cover a retreat unless we can actually count on the Iraqi military to cover our backs. </p>
<p>A pullout from Afghanistan would have to happen at the same time or even precede an Iraq pullout because our situation there would quickly become untenable and that retreat would have to be done by air with most or all equipment left behind or destroyed.</p>
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<p>It’s already a regional war. The Iranians are supplying the Shia. The Saudis are supplying the Sunni insurgents. And, we are sitting there taking casualities while NOTHING happens politically. They are down the 1 hour a day of electricity in Baghdad. Basra has disintegrated into chaos.</p>
<p>I think the risk of a “regional” war is remote. The Iranians and Saudis will keep it a proxy war on Iraqi soil. From a purely US perspective, how does it hurt our interests if Sunnis and Shias want to kill each other in the Middle East? I mean, the whole idea of an Islamic jihad kind of loses its luster when Muslims are busy killing Muslims in Iraq.</p>
<p>No matter how brutal the proxy war in Iraq, none of those countries can afford to stop of the flow of oil. Shut off the spigots and Saudi Arabia and Iran have no economies.</p>
<p>“Frederick H. Graefe, a health care lawyer and lobbyist in Washington for more than 20 years, said, “People in many industries, including health care, are contributing to Senator Clinton today because they fully expect she will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008.””</p>
<p>Oh, look. You think somebody getting more money than any other candidate from these healthcare companies is not going to act on their behalf?</p>
<p>Watch, if she gets the presidency, then she’ll just renege on an issue (this time health care reform int eh interest of people) like she always does.</p>
<p>Here’s a breakdown:
<a href=“http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/sickos-for-sale/candidates/[/url]”>http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/sickos-for-sale/candidates/</a>
<a href=“http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/[/url]”>http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/</a></p>
<p>Please note that Ron Paul is a gynecologist which probably accounts for the contributions he received (e.g., rich doctor colleagues). He has a disclaimer for not receiving contributions from companies.</p>
<p>The article never said one way or another whether the professor had Clinton’s permission to publish the letters. It was clear, however, that he had already shown the letters to a biographer authorized by Clinton, and that he had provided Clinton with copies years ago, and that the letters generally reflect pretty well on her. I surmise either (a) they had some private conversation about them years ago, in which Clinton said she didn’t care if they became public, or (b) it was reasonable for him to believe that if she cared she would have said something. I’m sure she’ll eventually ask him to donate the originals to her presidential library, if it comes to that. (Here’s an interesting question: If Hilary Clinton is elected President, do they eventually build a whole new presidential library for her, or should she double up with Bill? How about Georges H.W. and Plain W.? Something should be done to stop the proliferation of these things.)</p>
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<p>It doesn’t sound as if he had permission, although the “businesslike letter” Peavoy refers to probably had to do with all this, and it’s possible. At any rate, I agree that the letters reflect well on her.</p>
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<p>Does he require permission? Once the letters, which were addressed to him, are in his possession, does he have any legal obligations to the author? (Ethical obligations are a different matter).</p>
<p>Legally, the recipient of a letter owns the original of the letter itself, but the author retains the copyright.</p>
<p>Note that this was a news story, not full publication of the letters. Neither he nor the New York Times would be permitted to publish the letters in full, or indeed substantial extracts, without the author’s consent. Things get complicated where, as here, the text of the letters is relevant to a bona fide news story – I believe it is fair use for a newspaper to quote copyrighted material without permission in order to report on a topic of current interest, as long as what it does isn’t tantamount to actual publication of the material. But the line there is pretty fuzzy. I’m sure the Times’ lawyers vetted the story, and that they made a judgment that Clinton was unlikely to protect her copyright aggressively in these circumstances.</p>
<p>It was something of a comfort to see that this brilliant woman went through the typical college-age, self-absorbed and angst-ridden phase like the rest of us.</p>
<p>A quick Google about copyright of personal letters shows this:</p>
<p><a href=“http://misssnark.blogspot.com/2005/12/more-on-letters-and-copyright.html[/url]”>http://misssnark.blogspot.com/2005/12/more-on-letters-and-copyright.html</a></p>
<p>excerpts:
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<p>I think that last bit is slightly misleading. One can’t sue for statutory damages without registering the work. In most cases, statutory damages will far exceed any actual economic damages, and in most cases it is extremely hard to prove economic damages, at least not without spending more money than the case is worth. So for 99% of the copyright violations in the world, there’s no realistic prospect of damages if the work isn’t registered.</p>
<p>However, where the work has real, obvious commercial value, economic damages are a meaningful remedy.</p>
<p>Furthermore, regardless of damages, the copyright owner can usually get an injunction against publication.</p>
<p>That line about fair use in works of criticism, scholarship and research is a little ironic, too. One of the leading cases in this area involved an academic book about J.D. Salinger and his work that quoted extensively from his letters and journals. The courts held that the quotes had been so substantial as to constitute full publication of the material, and thus that it was outside the fair use exception. The publisher was forced to withdraw the book.</p>