The high tech industry follows young bright people…not the other way around.

You’re going to have to prove that because I don’t believe it. The main things companies look for when choosing a location is good government, good schools, quality health care, something to do after work, etc… If a high-tech company is free to chose a location they will pick an attractive place to raise a family most likely leaning towards the progressive and except for Morgantown or Fayetteville, we ain’t got it. Hell, it took Byrd forcing them to put the FBI fingerprint center in Clarksburg to get something. I’m sure you howled over that one, too.

We ain’t dead yet, mountain daddy, but our decline comes from our topography, our inbred politics, and having put all our eggs in one black dust crusted basket. Uncle Buck puts in a hardwood flooring factory in Mingo, the employees demand a living wage, he brings in the immigrants. There’s our history in a sentence. That’s the reason for our demise.

So, if you think you can get a group of college graduates to stay here en masse until a company sees the light, then have at it - I’d love to see the plan. But until you can do what others can’t, at least be grateful for the bone we get thrown once in a while.

Ive no problem with the speculation going on here at all, RRed - my own views as expressed here are just that. What are politics worth if not a good discussion? For most of us, its a spectator sport. Once in a while we have a chance to vote. Most of us don’t bother. Funny, that.

Lewinsky cigar - thats funny too!

members of the intelligence committee hear things inside that lead-lined room that nobody else does in the civilian community

There’s nothing that he could have heard that would change the fact that telecom immunity is a bad idea. The FISA law as it existed at the time would have allowed the Bush administration to do what it wanted to do — they just would have had to get a warrant, from a court whose proceedings are secret, and which they could even have done retroactively. And the telecoms’ lawyers knew that and knew that they were also violating privacy/confidentiality laws that they should be quite familiar with.

And the Bush administration was gunning for this shit before 9/11 even happened.

Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

There’s no way around it, Big Stomp, it’s all bullshit. And since there is no legitimate reason for Rockefeller to do what he did, you’ll have to excuse those of us who start speculating about other reasons that he may have done it.

And why, as many people have pointed out, would they rather shut it down than have the telecoms answer up? Why would the telecoms turn off the taps for non-payment if our security is at risk? Sounds dangerously myopic to me, if it is what they say it is. Hell, even Lucky Luciano didn’t extort the Sicily invasion. What they’re doing does not match what they are saying, and while that’s par for politicians, I think the bar should be a hell of a lot higher when they are trampling the Constitution.

Sometimes a cigar is a Lewinski Cigar and I think that’s what we’re getting.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

How many here recall that, in the mid-80s, Jay sat on the Senate panel investigating obscenity in rock lyrics? That was so funny I watched it twice on C-Span.