Free Republic

1) Many of the sites are regulated already by some authority. Some are under Irish, some are under Canadian, some are tribal rules.

2) One of the independent research houses on Wall Street (ISI) put out a piece today in their political report saying it could really pass this time around, unlike in '99,'00 and '02.

3) This will bite the GOP in the ass. I have never voted for a democrat, and live in a district where Republicans rarely live so I have little influence in the matter. However, I'm going to do my best to embarass the GOP out of pushing this bill. The Sponsor looked stupid when he was asked on CNBC why he's cool with an online state lottery in his state but looking to outlaw other gambling elsewhere. It's obvious this is a way of "getting back" at Abramoff.

I know that apolitical Joe Sixpack is going to look for someone's head on a platter the first day he logs on for his $0.50/$1 hold 'em game and Party to unwind and is told he can't because Congress said so. If we're looking for a way to piss of the Reagan Democrats, you couldn't find a better one.

Welcome.

Love to hear your reasons why this is a scandal.

4/6? Man, you're GIVING money away there.

I'll take the over...

NA the midpoint of guidance is below consensus for eps.

Spitzer has no right to tell them what they are forced to charge...
HOWEVER
he has every right to enforce the law. And a good minority of mutual fund companies have broken their fiduciary duty over the past 10 years. This is illegal.

So if they come to a settlement that includes lowering fees, that's not a bad thing. Alliance didn't have to settle, they could have paid back all the fees they "earned" while they were allowing the illegal activities to go on.

Most mutual fund investors are getting gouged and don't even know it. The average Joe looks at the "expense ratio" and thinks that's what they are paying. It's only the tip of the iceberg. You wanna be for the free market, you should be for changing the laws so these guys get paid for performance rather than building assets.

Water. H combines with O

I am crying right now from laughing so hard.

A good end to a good day, thanks to you.

"Are there any Czech looking folks in the U.S. Army? Sorry for the cryptic questions...."

No. It's the third question for a recruiter: Is this person Czech-looking?

Now, if they were Slovokian-looking, they are welcomed with open arms.

This happened to me back in college, but it didn't burn down the house. Come with me on a not-so-fun nostalgic trip back to 1994. The place: Madison, WI. The month: November.

I was away at an out-of-town football game, and my roommate was home with his parents for the weekend. For some reason, people liked firing bottle-rockets at each other in the hall (it was one long hallway each floor). Evidently, that wasn't fun enough, for the jackass next door decides to fire one under the door into our room.

Well, it must have hit the couch. From what I was told, it smoldered for awhile, and finally launched into flames. The little spoiled brat who caused the issue freaked out, didn't know what to do.

Enter the stoners. There was a group of slightly more than recreational drug users who lived at the end of the hall. They heard this guy squealing, and they leapt into action. One kicked down the door, while another used the fire extinguisher to spray everything in sight. That worked well enough to knock it down till the fire dept came and threw the couch out the window. It started the tree outside on fire because it re-ignited. It was quite the sight for the bar-time crowd I'm told.

Anyway, they had a special Student Crisis fund at school, so you could take a short-term loan to buy books, etc. They took a bit out of everyone's tuition for this stupid segregated fee program, and this was one of the beneficiaries. Ms. Donna Shalala was in charge of it (it was out of the Dean's office, and she was the Dean.) I went to her to ask for information on the application process. She asked me where I lived, and when I told her a fraternity she said "you probably won't qualify" in that lovely liberal snotty way.

And that, my friends, was when I realized the true essence of liberalism: power over others. It gave me one hell of a shove onto the road to being a conservative.

If you read some of the articles floating around on this, the story is always that it's a tool for the GOP to steal elections. There's a website that has some decent stuff on technology that has taken it up as it's cause the past few months. Frankly, they should stick to technology.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?page=2

That'll bring up all the articles they've done on it. To save you the time, here's a bit from one of the articles:

"The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players--Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia--with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), coming on strong. These companies--all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid--have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nation-wide by the 2004 election. "

So big business is gonna buy the election, blah,blah. The only thing that was disturbing to me was the fact that Diebold left the source code on an open FTP server, so someone if they desired could have uploaded their own source over the "real" code. Not the smartest company on Earth.

"Until then, conservatives will NOT forgive bush for having trillion dollar deficits, that is not conservative."

You wake me when we have a trillion dollar deficit. We're a long way away from there. This year, we had a $345 billion deficit. I'm sure we'll hit one eventually but it won't be under G.W.

And in Regan's time, the worry was jobs going to the Japanese, so I guess I don't understand what your point is. People that lost their jobs to the large Japanese companies didn't pay taxes either. Yet the tax cuts worked then.

Well, the current market being made in Arafat departing (which covers death/leaving the PA) has it a 1:4 chance of happening by end of year. The OCt contracts are going at 1:9. Check it out at http://www.tradesports.com

I think it's a given he's gone by Dec. The way he looks, how fast it spreads, how crappy of shape he's in...I think he won't need a costume for Halloween this year.

Here's the difference in my mind:

It was Rush's JOB to give his opinions in public on sports and society. That's what ESPN brought him in for. By bailing on him (and I'm confident there was pressure on him to resign or be fired) ESPN/ABC/Disney is silencing him.

Ms. Maines was paid to be cute and perform music. No one was particularly interested in her political opinions. By voluntering them, she opened herself up to the backlash. By being surprised and offended that there was a backlash, she showed her lack of wisdom.

I just sent the link to a friend. He said the Financial Times ran it on Page 5 today, with a completely negative spin. It was in the Middle East/Africa section.

The headline was "Poll Underlines Iraqi Distrust of America".

I think it's time we put our foot down on shoddy reporting like this. Anyone know the email address to write the FT and let them know what we think about this level of spin?

BTW< they did mention the part about being better in 5 years..in the last paragraph.

Great article. Not that I expect it to get much coverage, but it's good to have some empirical proof to back up "gut" feel.

" The unspoken fact is that the patient speaking Hmong probably also speaks English better than most Hispanics that have been here a lifetime, coddled by Spanish instructions on everything."

Well, not really true. I used to live near one of the areas where we stuck the Hmong after pulling them out of Vietnam. A majority/significant minority (40-55%) don't seem to speak English.

Of course, these people didn't sign up to come here. They had to move to escape getting killed for helping us in the war, so on some level it's understandable that they'd not assimilate as quickly as other immigrant groups. But in this area many things were translated into their language as well.

At least the kids are English speaking, if not a bit rude.

If you read the articles, they appear to be unrelated. The state of emergency seems to be the same as our terrorist prep drills in the states, and unrelated to the missing helo.

Now, it IS Russia, so who really knows...