I wanna order....
 

Oh. You mean:

• Don't feel bad. Like we say in France -- you lose some and you lose some.

I wanna order....
 

Congratulations. That's your funniest post ever.

I wanna order....
 

This post is kind of like earlier, when Sidd said he thought I said something smart. both times I thought, somewhere Ty is thinking there are Daubert like problems with the opinion.

more bad news from Iraq
 

4% is more than enough to create chaos for decades.

more bad news from Iraq
 

I don't think I have ever accused you or either, although I do remember you making those accusations in the not too distant past. Ironically your accusations were in response to the suggestion that

But come on. This is ridiculously simplistic:

Let's look at just a few the highly questionable embedded assumptions:

1. We, a hated external power, have the ability to in any way give people "hope." Note that the people we are trying to "help" have lived their entire lives surrounded by messages supporting our evil and decadence. Note also that these people have been the targets of our military power at various points over the last 2-3 decades. Note further that we are also a strong supporter a counrty that many of these people see as a natural enemy.

2. Such "hope" can be created through military force i.e. the killing of anyone who gets in our way.

3. The lack of a "vision" for improvement is the only source of frustration that leads to fanaticism.

Look. It's easy for us to see ourselves as creating hope through liberation. But its just as easy for others to see us as imposing our will through invasion. It remains to be seen what the net effect will be in the long run, and you are clearly more optimistic than I.

Some food for thought
 

And therein lies the myth.

I don't know what this means. Can you explaing why future taxpayers will face higher interest costs? Or is he conflating the concept of privatization with the President's plan to privatize through current borrowing?

They need not be at the high-water mark, and he knows it. We are not talking here about a lump sum on either end. We are talking about people investing systematically over their entire working lives, and then drawing down the funds systematically over their entire retired lives. As such, the ups and downs of the market are minimized. It is very basic personal finance.

You can talk about privatization in the abstract as if we were designing a whole new system, but the fact remains that SS is pay as you go.

Without looking back at the piece, he could be making one or both of two points:

(1) The advocates of "reform" are using the best of all numbers to make their case, but things aren't always that rosy.

(2) Even though the "ups and downs of the market" can be "minimized" to some extent in the way you describe, there are long periods of time when markets do poorly, historically speaking, and some people will have the misfortune to be screwed by that.

Some food for thought
 

Do you have evidence, or can you just imagine this is true?

http://lastofthefamous.blogspot.com/...overnment.html

See above- France admits US better at disaster relef-\\


Ty before you were posting all those "% of income to charity things"

given that most people seem to agree the US miltary is the best help, question arises whether DOD budget was included in your numbers?

Oh. So THAT's why.
 

From WaPo:

• President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.
  
  "We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

Well, I suppose this explains the medals.


GOPers? You guys agree with this particular worldview?

Oh. So THAT's why.
 

But . . . not everyone voted for him. And it's not like the people who did checked a box that said "I'm voting for him because I approve of what has happened in Iraq."

sigh. now I'm depressed again.

Oh. So THAT's why.
 

Don't be depressed, Fringey. Look! It's a Circus!

(From JibJab, via the Sunday Opinion section of the LA Times).

http://www.latimes.com/media/graphic...1/15871123.jpg

Some food for thought
 

Do I have any evidence that the insurgents in Iraq are more than just "Baathist thugs?"

Yes.

Oh. So THAT's why.
 

That just makes me more depressed.

It's a wonder that the soundstage didn't collapse from the weight.
 

Hank, we've seen yourt little bit of sphistry on evolution before. If you're digging up that old rerun it's time to just kill off the bottle and take a nap for a few days while all your bullshit blows over.

It's a wonder that the soundstage didn't collapse from the weight.
 

Nope. You can thank your buddy Hank for helping you out with that one, Club. You know the old expression -- if you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.

It's a wonder that the soundstage didn't collapse from the weight.
 

The fact that you've reproduced (I'll assume this fact for now) actually shows man has overstepped the forces of natural selection.

no offense, but did your wife teach you your mailman's first name?

It's a wonder that the soundstage didn't collapse from the weight.
 

I don't know if she was ever that friendly with Stacey. Why do you ask?

It's a wonder that the soundstage didn't collapse from the weight.
 

[:cool:

Kos For Dean
 

This may be the funniest thing posted on this board in some months.

Kos For Dean
 

Heh. I seriously considered nominating this board as "Best Group Blog" at Wampum for a Koufax award, but despite what some might think, we're not left wing enough.

Kos For Dean
 

Is there a cash prize?

If so, "Bush Lied, People Died."

This article from Monday's NYT gives a detailed look at the way that Ukraine's intelligence services intervened on the reform side, giving advice and warning off Interior Dept. troops. Read it soon before the Times makes you pay for it.

A small success in Iraq.
 

This article from Reuters suggests that a lot of things are not going well with the effort to train Iraqi security forces, but it closes with a reassuring hint that through improvisation, we've found new ways to meet some of our objectives:

• As Marines work to bridge the gap, they must improvise. For months, they tried in vain to coax largely uneducated guards onto the Internet, a vital training tool. "They wanted no part of it -- until we introduced them to Internet porn. Now we can't get them off the computer," one drill sergeant said.

FB x-post!

A small success in Iraq.
 

Holy shit. It's Phase I of sebby's plan for peace in the Middle East.

A small success in Iraq.
 

Nice that 40% of my bonus check is being used so that antiwomen antisemites in far away countries can cop a good hard on. Fuck. When I have kids the public schools better be really fucking good.

more bad news from Iraq
 

Tom Friedman is coming around to my way of thinking, even:

"I believe the tensions between us and the Muslim world stem primarily from the conditions under which many Muslims live, not what we do. I believe free people, living under freely elected governments, with a free press and with economies and education systems that enable their young people to achieve their full potential, don't spend a lot of time thinking about who to hate, who to blame, and who to lash out at. Free countries don't have leaders who use their media and state-owned "intellectuals" to deflect all of their people's anger away from them and onto America.

So I don't want young Muslims to like us. I want them to like and respect themselves, their own countries and their own governments. I want them to have the same luxury to ignore America as young Taiwanese have - because they are too busy focusing on improving their own lives and governance, running for office, studying anything they want or finding good jobs in their own countries."

The scary part is, this wasn't a democratic uprising for fair elections so much as it was a bloodless coup by the siloviki.

Correction, I think:

It is a bit troubling that the success of the legal (?) democratic uprising for free elections in Ukraine was only possible because of a corresponding illegal (?) effort by senior elements of the S.B.U. (FBI/CIA) and the Ukrainian Army.

Reminds me a bit of how the Russian special forces refused orders to massacre Yeltsin and his supporters in the Russian White House in 1992(?) -- though this was more a protracted and complex campaign.

I view it not as a coup -- but as counter-coup activity, which ensured that reasonably free elections could be held resulting in about 54% of the population voting for Yuschenko.

This factor -- i.e. the inculcation of democratic values among the senior military/intelligence establishment, or at least a desire to solve internal political problems by means other than mass coercion -- seems like a key step on the road from modern authoritarian government to democracy.

S_A_M

more bad news from Iraq
 

I don't know that he's ever believed anything else. The paradox is finding a way to do that by force without alienating the people you are trying to develop.

more bad news from Iraq
 

True. And I think we're mostly there. The death rate in Iraq today is lower than the murder rate in Chicago. (I'll try to find where I read that last night, and cite to it.)

Pretty much all true - the only reason I call it a coup, and not a counter, is that it brought the U out from the old way (of, basically, military control, no matter what they called it for public consumption) into a more true democracy. It was a regime change at heart - old, corrupt U to the new U.

more bad news from Iraq
 

Look, things seem bad there, and the only solution is for Iraquis to step up and take over. But still, there's something to what bilmore's saying here. I used to have Newshub.com bookmarked. It was a news linkage site that was updated every 15 minutes. There was way more violence going on daily across the US than I could possibly have imagined. People are violent and if you look at violence with extreme detail, you will get an sense of lack of order. At times, I wonder whether the US is "ready for elections."

more bad news from Iraq
 

I don't disagree with you or Bilmore here.

I didn't believe we went in at the right time (we should have gone straight on through from Kuwait under Bush I) and I still believe that Bush II's administration engaged in some creative thinking, rather than fact-finding, to justify their invasion.

However, having gone in, it was clearly necessary to find a way to restore the Iraqis to power under a regime chosen by the people. It appears that, to the extent possible, that is going to happen.

What I wonder about, and I don't see evidence of this yet, is how we or they are going to move things to the next level - development of a market-based economy and a society that rewards maintaining democratic principles and a growth economy.

PB Book Club
 

I'm in the midst of reading this:

http://a1055.g.akamai.net/f/1055/140...00/7426369.gif


Which might be described as Friedman plus a military outlook. Barnett is a military analyst who posits, among other things, that:

* We have little to fear from countries who have bought in to the global economy (so that the Pentagon's planning over the last 15 years for an eventual showdown with China was a horrible misapplication of resources)

* The real risk comes from those regions and countries that are the most disconnected from the global economy.

I'm still working through the book, but the argument is pro-Bush in that he argues that new, shared and agreed-upon "rule-sets" are required in the post Cold War era to deal with these problems.

It's critical of current Bush policy in that pre-emption is necessary to this new rule-set but is in no way sufficient, because (a) getting other "core" nations who are part of the globalized economy to buy into these new rule-sets is critical, and (b) for the disconnected nations in which we intervene, "smoking holes" alone will not solve, and will actually exacerbate, the problem -- the dedication to making that country more "connected" is the only thing that will ultimately work.

None of this is earth-shattering material, but it seems to provide a good way to frame the discussion. Interesting stuff.

A small success in Iraq.
 

Freedom is hard.

Its fun to make shit up
 

In Chicago last year, there were 449 murders, out of a population of just under 3 million. So that is about 15 murders per hundred thousand. (FYI, with 8 million people, NYC had 570 homicides, so a rate of less than half Chicago's - Chicago is about as bad as it gets in the US).

With a population of 25 million, a similar death rate would result in just over 3700 deaths (and I assume you mean deaths in war, not all deaths). Can you find anyone who will estimate that there have been fewer than 3700 deaths in Iraq in 2004?

The most verifable count of reported civilian Iraqi deaths is at http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ , which added well over 7,000 civilian deaths to its total in 2004. This would not include all deaths, only those reported by mutilple credible (mostly Western) sources and only civilians, so not people considered by them to be combatants. This number would exclude the run of the mill murders; it only looks to deaths resulting from the occupation. This is also the minimum number, and does not include all deaths reported by multiple credible sources - that number would be higher.

Just getting the facts straight
 

It seems like a distinction can be drawn, too, between run-of-the-mill murders that occur in connection with robberies, or spousal abuse, or killing your husband's piece-of-ass-on the side, or intimidation relating to payola, and killing specifically intended to interfere with people voting.

Just getting the facts straight.
 

I read somewhere that if you are an American soldier in Iraq, you are four as likely to die or be injured as a Chicago gang member, mainly because the gang member's have better armor for their bullet-proof Escalades.