Dumbass?
 

You are the most pathetic type of partisan hack. You don't care what the truth is. You just want to blame Bush.

If the President was a Democrat and the Mayor and the Governor were Republicans you would have been finding all sorts of cites that showed that it was all the Governors and Mayors fault. And even though you found those cites, you would have found no evidence of the President's culpability because you had not been "reviewing the news". Of course during this non review of the news you would still, somehow manage to find criticism of the Governor and the Mayor. Of course, while defending the President you would also claim you were not defending him.

In the current situation, if the Mayor and the Governor had gone out and shot people on the streets and the federal government had done everything right you would have still found fault with the Bush administration.

When I pointed out that you were defending Nagin, when you said you were not, you said I was twisting the truth (even though all I did was take two of your quotes and place them side by side), and then you went and defended Nagin again, and said you were not defending him, again. Then when I pointed that out by simply quoting you, you said I was twisting your words when I didn't even paraphrase you. After I point out that all you do is point out evidence that shows FEMA culpability you create your biggest post doing just that.

You have the temerity to critisize people for not focusing on the human tragedy (focusing on the buses) when your main focus during this whole tragedy has been to find reasons to blame the Bush administration.

No one on the board comes even close do your partisan bias or your hypocracy. You may call me a dumbass but I would much rather be a "dumbass" than a partisan hack with a complete disregard for the truth.

Dumbass?
 

When you repeatedly mis-read and mis-construe what I and other people say, you will get called a dumb-ass. Congratulations: You've done it again.

I'll admit this: I expect more from the federal government than I do from the New Orleans city government. I think federal service is a honor and a calling; I think that the federal government ought to attract the best and brightest, and I think anyone who gets to work for it should feel lucky for the chance. I have never felt any of this about the New Orleans municipal government. So when I see the federal government fail the people of Louisiana, I feel particularly let down and disappointed. In my book, that's not hypocracy.

And while you're slinging the term "partisan hack," only one of us is involved in party politics, and it isn't me. I have been a registered Republican, I vote for Republicans, and I would happily go to work for a Republican administration.

Maybe part of the reason I spend less time arguing with Democrats on this board is that none of them are as pedantic, stubborn, and obtuse as you have been in the last several days.

eta:

Dan Balz in the Washington Post describes Bush's unique success in dividing the country along party lines. But the fact that many of us can no longer abide Bush does not make us partisan, unless the GOP is defined not by its principles but as a cult of personality.

Any takers.
 

I would appreciate if people would start framing their criticisms of Ty with temporal boundaries. Like in the above, it would make it fairer to me, and I think clearer to the board, if you refer to "the current Ty."

Pardon the Interruption
 

about Katrina, however it appears that the Palestinians have begun doing what everyone thought they would do once the Israelis pulled out of Gaza - begin slaughtering each other. Way to go guys! Good luck with that whole "country" thing!

PA ratchets up security alert following Moussa Arafat killing

Palestinian Authority Interior Minister Nasser Youssef ordered security forces to go on high alert Wednesday, following the pre-dawn ambush and murder of former Palestinian security chief Moussa Arafat.

Arafat, 65, a nephew of late Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat, was fired earlier this year by the new PA chairman, Mahmoud Abbas.

A Palestinian militant coalition, the Popular Resistance Committees, claimed responsibility earlier Wednesday for killing Arafat and kidnapping his son, Nahmal, a senior Palestinian security official. A spokesman for the committees said that the organization was "questioning Moussa's son, Manhal, over his father's crimes and he will be sentenced according to Allah's law."

Youssef also ordered an investigation into the killing.

"This is a very regrettable and dangerous incident that does not bode well as we await Israel's pullout. The president... cabinet and all security forces are determined to find the perpetrators," said Abdallah al-Ifranji, a senior aide to Abbas.

Dozens of gunmen stormed Arafat's Gaza City home early Wednesday morning, dragged him into the street and shot him dead, witnesses said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/621914.html

aV

Justice Janice Rodgers Brown
 

You still think the GOP can win with the white-male vote alone?

And, Penske, why would the Christian-Right want an anarcho-libertarian justice?

"You're in the asshole of the universe, Captain..."
 

RT just posts facts - unbiased facts, unlike Ty’s Berkeley blog quotes and Penske's assembly line of Richard Mellon Scaife supported right wing media trash biscuits. She’s a “Penske/Spanky Victim.” Gave up fighting way back in the days of abortion rights debate.

NCS is the mean Heather of the board, bashing the tools for playing a form of political Dungeons and Dragons all day.

You’re the classic FB poster reluctantly pulled into the PB out of boredom. You see action on the PB, figure you’ll have a look and quickly regret becoming engaged in the debate here. You follow a predictable arc - you engage the debate with a joke, which Spanky misses. You then reply to something factual in his long winded reply. Spanky contemptuously dismisses your follow up. You fire off a vitriolic insult, including some facts refuting Spanky. He ignores the facts and continues responding to you in a patronizing fashion. You give up after three or four rounds of this, realizing there’s no point. You leave the “debate” with a snide insult to Spanks.
He then declares victory in your absence.

Occasionally, I school you about pensions.

"You're in the asshole of the universe, Captain..."
 

"You're in the asshole of the universe, Captain..."
 

Not even pretend girls!

"You're in the asshole of the universe, Captain..."
 

You two get to fight it out over who gets to be Diane and who is stuck with Lilith. Overeducated snob lady catfight!

"You're in the asshole of the universe, Captain..."
 

So that makes Hank Norm and Ty that really mean guy who threatens to beat up Cliff in one famous episode.

"You're in the asshole of the universe, Captain..."
 

Ty is management. I'd say Woody.

That you for the talking points. Unfortunately, I found them as difficult to decipher as the "Operation Deflect Blame: Nagin's Buses" talking points. I hope you sent them to Spanky. He can say almost anything with a straight face.

I've tried to write my own, based on my own deeply felt admiration for your work.

Hank is one of the truly valuable posters here. There is no one who can change the subject like he can, and he takes setbacks and disgrace with aplomb. The way he jovially and directly responds to belittle a poster who has just made a fool out of him should be a model to us all.

Hank, like brothers Falwell and Robertson and great American heros like Jefferson Davis and George Wallace, knows how to stand up for the right thing, regardless of logic and regardless of what anyone else says.

Hank, I'm glad you're with us.

Will all your socks be writing?

Most of them are cowering in fear of your threatened armigeddan.

Lilly livered Yankee liberals.

Class
 

Not a bad piece, but that guy has a huge ego. "When [i]I[/] won this case Requist did X". I also don't know why he had to throw in this jab:

• and reducing the protections accorded the mostly poor people of color who are suspected or accused of crime.

in other news
 

I saw that last night. What a fucking punt. For someone who says he's a conservative, this is obscenely ironic.

Patriot
 

Hmmm. Clues. A misspelling and hyphen misuse.

So, does that rule anyone out?

Patriot
 

Misspellings can be intentional. In fact, for a word like that, a misspelling is almost certainly intentional. No one would be comfortable trying to guess and not looking it up. 'em's trying to cover his tracks.

in other news
 

Judicary powers, activate!

Patriot
 

Damn elite over-educated yankee snob. Our schools down here may not be as high-fallutin as yours, but we've got enough common sense to come in out of the rain.

Patriot
 

Your primary works in invisible mode. Was it an oversight or intentional that this sock doesn't?

"You're in the asshole of the universe, Captain..."
 

I would prefer to be Lilith.

Patriot
 

I think it is two misspellings, a failure to capitalize, and a failure to hyphenate. The hyphenation problem might be attributable to the fact that there's a red-herring adjective ending in "-ly."

Hey! Check it out:

It turns out Louisiana formally requested emergency Federal aid before Katrina made landfall.

A call for revolution!
 

September 6, 2005
The Larger Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.

It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.

But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.

If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.

Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.

Under Mr. Bush, the national infant mortality rate has risen for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.

So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. Nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. On immunizations, the U.S. ranks 84th for measles and 89th for polio.

One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.

"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."

The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.

It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children.

None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990's, we made real headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books ever written on American poverty, "American Dream," by my Times colleague Jason DeParle.

So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that may be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: "a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina.

Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.

Patriot
 

You are correct, of course. I was taking into account only the last line.

Dumbass?
 

No, no that was done by such geniuses as Fat Sean Hannity and Even fatter fuck fag and dope addict Rush Limbaugh with what, a grand total of one year of cottege between the two?

Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana the day before that letter was dated.

And what was requested? Money for state actions and debris removal.

in other news
 

In fairness, it sounds like the NYT did a number on Ms. Thompson's statement. From the Mercury News (picked at random from about 10 different articles on Google news all putting the statement roughly the same way):

• Margita Thompson, Schwarzenegger's press secretary, would not say whether Schwarzenegger would sign the gay-marriage bill. The governor does support the state's current domestic partnership laws, which grant same sex couples many, but not all, of the rights and obligations of married couples.
  
  ``The governor believes that the people spoke when they voted in Proposition 22,'' which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman, Thompson said. ``It's now before the courts, which is where the governor believes it belongs. He will uphold whatever the court decides.''

It's still a punt, and he's still a punk for doing it, but at least it's not quite as outside the Republican anti-judicial activist agenda as the NYT made it sound like.

Sounds like Karen Hughes is thinking hard about how to improve the way the U.S. comes across on Al Jazeera.

So you mean the whole thing about not being able to take any action until Louisiana requested it formally was just bullshit?

(Note, I have drafted letters of this length and formality before, as I am sure has most if not all the people on this board. As we all know, they do not spring out of the keyboard in 15 minutes. I suspect there may have been an oral request proceding it, and this was not the first communication the Bush administration received.)

At any rate, it took FEMA another day to bang out a one pager requesting that DHS consider sending some personnel sometime in the next week.

With some arguement about why DHS should think about caring.

Your federal government working for you.
 

This is growing tiresome.

Your federal government working for you.
 

Yeah, but everyone acknowledges Spank and Penske are tiresome on this topic. Will you admit Baltassoc and Ty have also just gone way too far?

That press release is a wonderful read. Thank you, Chief Justice, for pointing out that our noble President assumed responsibility as this storm approached.

I know many will criticize the man, saying that as Ivan hit the great swing state of Florida Bush was scheduling his visit to the state while he didn't interupt his well-earned vacation until after the levees broke in New Orleans. But you and I know, that this man, Haiglike, announced that he was in command when action was needed, and did his very best. The best he could.

Your federal government working for you.
 

Growing tiresome?

Did you appreciate my homage last night? It needed the capper. The new post with no subject line that asked whether anyone on the board could possibly agree with Spanky's position that the school bus shot was The Most Common Picture Associated With The Hurricane and then took some pot shot at Spanky's politics and or personal debating style. Unfortunately the lead up wore me out. He has stamina, I tell you.

Your federal government working for you.
 

I have posted about 10 posts on the subject, most of them clumped around a half hour period, and mostly in response to a particularly asinine postition you insisted on defending. As it was a holiday weekend, I choose to believe you were simply drunk.

This morning, I linked to two documents that seem to be relevant to a discussion of interest to the board, but not particularly to me (i.e. who was more negligent in the early stages of responding to the disaster).

To the extent I have energy to discuss the topic at all, I am much more interested in ongoing, current incompetence (the subject of my multiple posts with you Sunday).

I have nothing more to say on the topic for now. Except that people who don't give money to the Red Cross are chumps.

(Again, with a few exceptions who have disclosed themselves to me directly, I have no idea who has given what. Hank may be cool. Or he may be a chump. I'll leave that to the board to decide.)

Class
 

The goose-stepping in front of the Jewish dorms when he was at Stanford was pretty classy.

I haven't been hung up on that -- my concern expressed here is that the state, when overwhelmed, threw up its hands and started complaining that the feds weren't doing anything.

I don't actually care too much about legal niceties; just the big picture, which from what I can tell is that La. never developed a plan for what happens if they're overwhelmed beyond sending a request to FEMA. And, because I believe our federal system should have meaning, I don't expect FEMA to have drawn up plans for every contingency without prior input from states and localities, who are (or should be) more familiar with local circumstances.

Dumbass?
 

2.

Your federal government working for you.
 

The discussion of NO has devolved into something like the Peter Thottam tirades about Palestine, and the angry replies some people gave him. The only lesson here is, be warned: The Govt, at any level, will not save your ass anymore. We’re not the rich country we once were, and we’re headed headlong into a 70s energy crisis and recession with a very incompetent man behind the wheel. Bush is no Reagan - he’s a fucking Jimmy Carter.

Rudy in 2008!