Hillary's (Freudian) slip is showing…again.

Yeah, where is the Internet-Police when you need them???

@dinosaur:

Yea, I remember those days too.  The best game out there was a text based Star Trek game called Space Wars because of possible copyright infringement.  It took about one minute to make a single move or fire a torpeedo.  If you warped into a sector with more than two Klingon ships, you’d better use phasers and knock them out in a single salvo or you may not get a second chance.

We had that game on our high school PDP-8 computer.  The key was to do a scan of the entire universe so you knew where the klingon’s were.  We had a grid made the represented that universive size, and could determine the number of units to warp to each occupied space.  Also used photon torpedos to pick off individual klingon ships instead of phasers that used lots of power.

I believe we did clear the galaxy once, but it was a lot of work to do so!

Plus the evolving Beatle Eras offered different tastes of Beatles music.

In other words, all their music doesn’t always sound the same.  Can’t say that of too many bands.

Yes and no, Stuka.  It would only make vetoing a budget a thing of the past, in other words, it would streamline the budget process.  But ONLY if the Congress decides to spend MORE then they get in taxes.  Bear in mind, if Congress decides to actually, don’t faint now, spend ONLY what it has without a deficit, then it only needs a simple majority and a signature instead of a super majority AND a signature.  Likewise, if the budget has no deficit, then a veto can still be over-ridden by a super majority.

The whole idea is to make it SOO hard to go into debt that most times the country will operate above board.

In fact, I’d like to see legislation that states that 10% of all taxes MUST be invested in local government or domestic corporate bonds. (Relatively secure, helps the country or countrymen.)  Eventually, the feds should have enough invested throughout the land that they will never need to tax the people again.

Furthermore, that’s not so outlandish an idea.  Many governments domestically and abroad are buying mutual funds to supplement their income so they can ease the tax burden.  Why can’t the feds?

Ahh.  That’s pretty cool.  8-)

I think most of the backing came due to two facts:
(1) the USSR needed reforms, that was obvious.
Still, they probably wanted a long term leader that could be influenced => a younger one, after the two short reigns of Andropov and what-was-his-name… Probably, the influentials wanted some change, but surely not that much that it would threaten their power-base, one of the reasons for the coup that failed due to Jelzins help for Gorbachev.
(2) The general secretary and all the other positions he fills made him the most powerful man in the USSR. Probably, whoever put Gorbachev into place, underestimated him. Pretty much the same underestimation that Hitler faced when he was appointed Chancellor, but luckily Gorbachev used that to reform positively, and i consider the new freedom of information, the right to ask wether the party is right and that the crucial reform.

So, I don’t think that there was “real” backing, i believe Gorbachev was kind of a compromise candidate, kind of a makeshift. Of course, once he was into power, you ccouldn’t remove instantly, that would have meant that the party made a mistake (which was not “allowed” before Gorbachev). And he was clever enough to stay into power, and use his popularity at the beginning (which soon, after the economy started to collapse openly, was reduced to more or less nothing) to enforece the reforms.

IL, this is 2002.

Well apparently bringing old threads back is in vogue.