While I'm ranting...
 

Actually, he'll have to work with whomever the Iraqis elect - say. Sadr.

If he wants a puppet, it's clear he'll get his own instead of using Bush's. I mean, I wouldn't want a used Penske sock, would you?

While I'm ranting...
 

Dunno the exact details, but if Tony Blair wanted to appear on "Today" for some reason, I doubt that the protocol would be arranged by the American Ambassador in London. In any event, that Negroponte did so, and then flip-flopped when he realized how stupid his involvement looked here, did not help with the impression of a strong, stable, independent leader that Allawi (with no Bush involvement, natch) was trying to establish.

While I'm ranting...
 

Well, I don't work for ABC, but I assume that they don't normally ask the US Ambassador to Great Britain for permission to interview Tony Blair when he is in the US for meetings. Nor do they get a call from said ambassador cancelling the interview. Negroponte apparently has such a role in Iraq.

And as for 1), please. If we didn't approve of whoever was picked, we wouldn't have handed the guy the keys.

While I'm ranting...
 

Well, if Allawi is elected, he won't be a puppet.

The rest of your arguments (aid and comfort, blah blah blah) essentially mean that no one can say anything critical of the war, or of the bozos in charge of handling of the war, because such criticism only helps the enemy. Bullshit.

(oh, and gatti and I are apparently the same person. Except he is funnier.)

The real "Coalition of the Willing"
 

Fiscal conservatives, listen up. The Money Gods are talking to you, and they are Not Pleased with Your Leader. Will you listen, or will you continue to bow down to the Sacred Cow?

• This raid-the-piggy-bank approach has allowed American consumers to play sugar daddy for the world economy. Spending down their savings, Americans have purchased the world's goods so avidly that they have pumped the current account deficit to a record 5.7 percent of GDP in this year's second quarter.
  
  "Never before has a president stood for reelection with the United States more dependent on foreign financing of domestic growth," notes [Morgan Stanley's Stephen] Roach. Looking at the countries, such as China and Japan, that finance this "increasingly tenuous disequilibrium," Roach wryly comments: "This is the real 'coalition of the willing.' "
  
  Wall Street knows the numbers don't add up. And investors must have noticed this week when the head of the International Monetary Fund, Rodrigo Rato, lectured America about its deficits as if it were a Third World country. Thus the sluggish stock market -- despite corporate profit rates that have bounced back to bubble-economy levels of the late 1990s. Indeed, according to Fed valuation models cited by Makin, U.S. stocks that were trading well above "fair value" before the bubble burst in early 2000 are now well below.
  
  Perhaps the reason for Wall Street's torpor is that investors have actually been following this wretched political campaign -- and noted the vapid debate about economics. Bush and Kerry are claiming they'll cut the budget deficit in half over the next four years, but neither is offering convincing details. "In fact," writes Roach, "there is good reason to worry that campaign promises of both parties could compound the problem rather than fix it." He notes that Bush's pledge to make his unfunded tax cuts permanent is "especially worrisome."

WaPo

My sentiments exactly
 

In an article in the local rag yesterday, the author tries to argue that Kerry's position on Iraq has been (mostly) consistent, yet he ends with this:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGQK8TI8O1.DTL

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

I actually wouldn't be surprised by this. Failed assault weapons ban renewal aside, DiFi has been doing a reverse Scarborough (now that's a term I never thought I'd coin) for a while now. The Green party aficionado whose rants I am subjected to whenever I go to the office refrigerator bitches about her conservative streak as often as he explains to me how Halliburton is inserting subliminal messages into SpongeBob episodes to get kids to support drilling in ANWR.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

You get me so hot when you're all patriotic... I've got the biggest tent in my trousers.

While I'm ranting...
 

And for the children damnit!!! Won't someone please fire Lockhart for the children!!!

Slave, are you cribbing your style from MADD brochures? If this bit above ain't tongue in cheek, I respectfully suggest that you've passed through the right wing "looking glass" so to speak...

Harrump harrump harrumph

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

As I understand the law, you can end up on a watch list for giving money to a charitable group which is suspected of misusing funds, even if the government can't prove it and/or you had no idea. So the better analogy is one where Cobourn gives money to an apparently legitimate anti-abortion group which is suspected of giving other aid on the side to Eric Rudolph (e.g.).* As applied to citizens, the First Amendment implications ought to be clear enough (freedom to associate, anyone?). If Stevens (or whatever his name is) is anti-violence in his public statement, and gave money to one of these groups, it seems at least as likely to me that he was defrauded by the group (or, more innocuously, that they used his money for whatever they said they would use it for and used other money for something else) than that he was saying one thing publicly and doing another thing with his money.

Stevens isn't a citizen anymore, and when you're dealing with foreigners it makes a certain amount of sense to err on the side of caution. But don't pretend that Stevens necessarily brought it on himself. It's the collateral damage of the way this crowd is fighting the war on terror. They've made it much harder for foreigners to come to that country, which is often not a good thing.

* We've had very, very little luck in getting to the bottom of the finances behind the terrorists and 9/11, so it would be a mistake to assume that the government has really good dirt on the terrorists involved.

Yo, Larry
 

I've discovered that you, Coltrane, and probably some other folks have monikers that are too damn long for the PM field, and it's impossible to send you one.

(Slave, Ty -- why is this, by the way? Even if you click on the name from the membership directory to try and send a PM, it kicks it out).

In any event, IM me or email me.

Gattigap

My sentiments exactly
 

Yglesias in Tapped, on the same article (by the DC bureau chief for the SF Chronicle):

• MEDIA SLOWLY AWAKENING. Marc Sandalow of The San Francisco Chronicle notes that "[n]o argument is more central to the Republican attack on Sen. John Kerry than the assertion that the Democrat has flip-flopped on Iraq." Nevertheless, writes Sandalow, "an examination of Kerry's words in more than 200 speeches and statements, comments during candidate forums and answers to reporters' questions does not support the accusation." Imagine that. Knight-Ridder's Thomas Fitzgerald has a similar piece. Kerry's "positions are not contradictory, but his attempts to explain the distinction between them are often complicated, and they have given President Bush an opening to caricature Kerry as a flip-flopper. However, beneath the torrent of campaign verbiage, Kerry's position on Iraq for the past two years has been consistent and defensible - just difficult to sell in a sound-bite world."
  It's about time, though as Nick Confessore wrote yesterday I would appreciate it if the media revisionists would stop pretending that Kerry's acquisition of an image as a flip-flopper is something that just happened, rather than something the press itself did. Going back to read the text of the speeches Bush and Kerry gave at the time of the vote on the use of force resolution isn't exactly the most arduous investigative reporting I can imagine.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Yes. Along with anyone who votes for him. And all terrorists. And Jeff Probst.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Whoa, we're talking 70s AM radio here. It ain't like Dylan or Neil Young decided to become monks in nepal or something...

I understand the need to speak prositively of the dead or the religiously insane, but when I hear people on VH1 say things like "Jim Croce's loss cannot be understated" or "Chapin's death left a chasm in modern music", its hard for me not to think "Whaaaa?" "Peace Train" is a fine and dandy little ditty, but its not Cole Fucking Porter. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" is not "Blowin in the Wind". We're talking about 70s quaalude ballads. The bar was set so low that Gordon Lightfoot was considered a poet at the time. I understand that taste is in the eye of the beholder, but come on... Cat Stevens put out a few moderately good songs during the bleakest period in modern American music. Waste of talent my ass. If he weren't waxing idiotic about fatwas and managing his beard, he'd be cracking jokes with Danny Bonaduce on informercials for Time Life "best of the 70s" collections on late night television.

"I fly sooo high... when I'm s t o n e d."

"Superior they said never gives up her dead when the gales of november come early (cue flute solo)..."

Crimes against nature... all of it.

While I'm ranting...
 

All he's really saying is the same thing Cheney was. Vote for Bush or we'll all die. Anything you say critical of us or our policies means more terrorists will come to blow us up and rape our women and children.

It's getting kind of sad, really.