Is this using the liberal test that you posted a few weeks ago?

That was great.......

Let us not forget that Clinton took us into nation building programs in Somalia and Haiti, pretty much took us to war against Serbia, launched missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan and repeatedly bombed Iraq.

Afghanistan attacked us during the Bush administration, and Iraq blatently violated the peace treaty ending gulf war one. None of Clintons actions were supported by international law. The international community may have supported them, but they were not supported by international law - big difference.

It's a hell of a lot better than $350,000. And I'm not convinced that honest to goodness malpractice claims have much to do with the premiums.

I'm not sure why you bring up all the Clinton crap. I think EGTRAA was bad, bad tax policy, and I would have thought it under Clinton. I don't like the social conservatism. I'm not sure why you are bringing this all up as a reply to me, other than that you don't like me. I was pretty clear on what I don't like about Bush. I don't think he was the one pushing for SOX.

You should get a link to whatever site he got that list from. It's always reassuring to read reiterations of what you already believe.

Simply Ridiculous
 

Trying to change the terms already, eh?

He sings their song, even if he doesn't believe their lyrics. He's more conservative, socially, than any other president since the New Deal.

What about making happy noises about promoting democracy around the world? Is that conservative? The only big thing Bush has done to promote democracy is invade Iraq, and we' re only pretending that that was all about democracy because the other rationales have evaporated.

As opposed to the lefties, who like to give weapons to the Chinese (hi Hank!) and canals to the Panamanians?

He's redefined your movement, friend. Conservatism is no longer about small government. That pretense is O-V-E-R. Conservativism now means spending lots of money and borrowing to cover it.

Maybe it's the Republican doctors who bitch about this stuff. The doctor I'm related to doesn't bitch about it at all.

That was George H.W. Bush, actually.

I'm glad you mentioned that, because conservatives around here don't like to acknowledge that Clinton ever did anything to fight Al Qaeda.

If the conservatives are going to be doing the lecturing about international law, maybe black is white and up is down.

Hint: if they've jacked his premiums up to $350,000 while others pay $45,000, you don't want to have him delivering your kid.

Get a Democratic Doctor instead.

On a serious note, the overwhelming amount of malpractice is committed by a relatively small portion of the physician population. The less than 5% of physicians who have had multiple malpractice cases brought against them are responsible for over half the damages paid. See here. Right now, about the only way to push the worst offenders out of medicine is to hike up their malpractice premiums, an admittedly very indirect and inefficient way of doing it. Any malpractice reform needs to have some mechanism for dealing with problem physicians.

I don't think Bush fits into the traditional conservative way of thinking in many ways (e.g., he has been incredibly irresponsible in economic policy, adopting a borrow and spend approach that scares the daylights out of me). Both conservatives and liberals have always had different branches that were isolationist and internationalist, but I think you'll find motive counts: Clinton wasn't going into Bosnia for geopolitical gain, but for humanitarian reasons; almost anyone would have gone into Afghanistan, Iraq is a case where I believe Bush's motivations were based on the neo-con geopolitical objectives.

On economic policy, Bush blatantly favors the wealthy, a hallmark of conservative policy, but does it in an irresponsible way. On social policy, I would argue Bush has been more successful at moving social policy debate to the right than any prior Republican president. So, I understand the conservatives not wanting him, but please don't stick us with him.

Revelation to me
 

From The Poor Man:

• There's a pretty interesting conversation going on at QandO (a very libertarian-leaning blog) about the current conflict between the various factions fighting for primacy within the "big tent". One comment really caught my eye:
  
  
  Quote:

  My theory is the differences you identify, John, are coming to the surface. And as they become more pronounced, so does the hate speech directed toward the politics of the left. In other words, rather than defining what the GOP is, those on the right are attempting definie itself by what it is not. The Right needs to gloss over the differences within the party by uniting the party against the left. And as the GOP becomes more powerful and the differences of its coaltiion more apparent, this becomes more difficult, as it does for any coalition in power. As the power of the GOP grows, the level, intensity and tone of scorn toward the left must accordingly increase. The GOP must define itself by what it is not. ("While we have our differences, at least we aren't a bunch of traitors like Hillary and Ted. Those un-American bastards. Why don't they just crawl back into the spider hole with Saddam and Osama because we all know they hate America.")

  This really gave me a new perspective on why the right-wing punditocracy and bloggerati have been using this line of attack more and more frequently. That's why Reynolds is willing to swallow the Kool-Aid about The Left wanting to destroy America. That's why Powerline can get away with prima facie ridiculous positions on Jimmy Carter's patriotism, even though many Christians agree wholeheartedly with his egalitarian worldview. The Reynoldses and Hindrockets (and Hannitys and Coulters) of the world recognize that there's simply no other way to maintain such a broad coalition for any length of time, so they choose an issue on which they all agree wholeheartedly - what they refer to as "national security" - and flog the notion that The Left's position on that issue is the polar opposite of what all the "grown-ups" and "sensible people" believe. They achieve this by hyper-focusing on readily-available walking targets like Michael Moore and Ward Churchill.
  
  I point this out not because recognition of the right's employment of these tactics is any great revelation; rather, what suddenly occurred to me while reading the above comment was that, quite literally, not only do most on the right not even believe in their own attacks on the left, but the more savvy ones have absolutely no desire to ever see these living straw men go away, because they allow the politically-convenient hawk/traitor dichotomy to be portrayed as the entire range of possible positions on the war on terror. Sure, they might identify an individual such as Churchill and honestly believe that he's a traitor, but the rhetoric that paints everyone who disagrees with the Bush Administration's radically proactive foreign policy as equivalent to Churchill is just that: useful rhetoric. It's empty. It's meaningless. And, most importantly, its target audience is not, as one might expect, just the undecided masses of those for whom the realm of politics is peripheral and nebulous. Rather, the primary target audience is the other members of the pro-Bush coalition. In some cases, it really is just red meat, a way to keep the individual soldiers of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders motivated and fired up. But the rest of the time, left-demonizing is like ideological make-up sex for Evangelical conservatives and hawkish social libertarians: we may not get along all that well, but at least we can still fuck the left together.
  
  And whatever rhetorical tools are necessary to carry out said fucking will continue to be used more and more frequently, with ever more reckless abandon - because otherwise, the paleocon-neocon honeymoon is over.

I'm beginning to understand why Bilmore loves the Democratic Underground so much.

Sorry honey, but that was off the top of my head.

Revelation to me
 

Bush wants an endless war with a stateless enemy-

Michael Moore working an Orwell quote-

I though he meant nameless foreign thugs, but your guy thinks it extends to the Dems. Wow!

no to mention the way their asses treat Ty's blog quotes like tablets from the one true god- geez- Fringey's post was the most hypocritcally funny post in the last few weeks.

An Open Letter to Europe
 

Bring it on Sparky! Just make sure to tell your Euro friends to pull their heads out of jacques and gerhard's asses, respectively-it will make it easier for them to read the letter.

I wasn't lecturing, I just found it Ironic. For the record, I supported each and every Clinton decision to use force (even Somalia). The operation may have been a failure but at least he tried.

Impressive.

The operation was a clusterfuck, and it was Bush's.* I'm glad that we were trying to help the Somalis and all, because they certainly need the help, but we went in without giving much thought to the political dynamics there, and then got into a shooting war with one faction without even realizing it.

Two books about this from different perspectives, both very much worth reading:

http://content.powells.com/cgi-bin/i...sbn=0140288503 http://content.powells.com/cgi-bin/i...sbn=0871138719

Bowden's book is from the perspective of the U.S. military. Hartley is African and was a journalist in Mogadishu.

* eta: I didn't mean this to be nearly as harsh as it sounds. Bush got us into Somalia. Clinton inherited the mission, and by all accounts didn't pay much attention to it until things turned sour. The strategy of fighting with Aidid's clan belonged to military commanders, and can't really be attributed to either president.

bad news, club
 

The Supreme Court didn't sound too receptive to your side in the Connecticut eminent domain case yesterday.

Under Clinton, black people were allowed to vote.

And in many inner cities, at least several times.

Funny, as in "Ha Ha"
 

Funny, as in "Ha Ha"
 

Has that cartoon* ever been funny, in the sense of "funny," as opposed to in the sense of "confirming some reader's views"?

* Day by Day, I mean. A team of Finnish scientists recently discovered a funny Ted Rall cartoon frozen at the bottom of a lead mine.

Finally conceded there was no disenfranchisement in 2000 Fla.

Good. Acceptance is an important step.

Florida was under Jeb, effectively out of Clinton's control. Sort of like Zarqawi in SH's Iraq.

Funny, as in "Ha Ha"
 

You guys make me feel really out of it. Who is Ted Rall? Doesn't that Morrissey guy work for the Standard? Maybe I have the wrong guy. Why was Ted Rall angry at him?

Funny, as in "Ha Ha"
 

Morrissey was in the Smiths. Penske used him as a role mode, except for the Clinton hating which was organic.

bad news, club
 

That's dissappointing.

ETA: Tell me, those of you that agree with the state on this (and I can't remember who you are), isn't the constitution suppose to protect the minority from majority?

bad news, club
 

I'm really not up to speed on this. With that caveat, we all agree that eminent domain should be permitted when in the public interest, but the difficulty is in distinguishing public from private interests, right? From an economic perspective, why worry about this distinction? The minority's interests are protected by the requirement of compensation. (We all know that the compensation paid is usually a little low, but that's a problem about implementation, not principle.) So eminent domain is like efficient breach, no?

bad news, club
 

There is no just compensation for the home I've raised my family in. I want the home. I want to have it for my kids to come back to. I want their kids to see where they were raised.

Economics be damned.

bad news, club
 

Um, jesus, get over yourself.

bad news, club
 

bad news, club
 

If the Constitution respected your view, the government wouldn't be able to build things like roads and schools and railroads and airports and so on. Needless to say, I feel the same way about my house.

bad news, club
 

NIMBY, baby. Especially about the schools, the waykids are these days.

The whole economics thing doesn't work if people aren't rational.
 

From the LA Times, via DeLong:

• President Bush believes Americans are so eager to join the 'ownership society' that, given a chance, two-thirds of those eligible would divert funds from Social Security into the personal investment accounts he proposes. But when public employees in seven states were offered the opportunity for similar accounts during the last decade, nowhere near two-thirds signed up for them. In many instances, the figure was closer to 5%.... Nebraska's state and county workers were given do-it-yourself accounts... made so many investment errors that they ended up making less than colleagues with fixed-benefit pensions — and less than what analysts have said is needed for old age. Their poor performance led the Nebraska Legislature two years ago to junk the accounts for new employees.
  
  While Americans are just beginning to grapple with the president's proposal for private accounts, employees and retirement officials in Michigan, Montana, Washington, West Virginia and other states have discovered that the accounts can fall far short of their promise. Their experiences sound a cautionary note for Bush as well as for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.... The poor performance of many of the accounts leaves experts to wonder whether most people, even among those who want to make their own retirement investments, have the time or knowledge to do so successfully. 'If people have private accounts in Social Security and they're left to make the decisions themselves, the results likely will not be positive,' said Anna Sullivan, executive director of the Nebraska Public Employees Retirement Systems, which replaced its private account system with a centrally managed plan in 2003.
  
  Joseph Jankowski, executive director of the West Virginia Consolidated Public Retirement Board, said: 'The vast majority of people don't have the inclination or comfort level to be responsible for their own retirements.' West Virginia board officials are debating whether to drop the state's private account plan as Nebraska did.

bad news, club
 

It's a question of balancing interests. The "my land is unique" point of view is why the eminent domain power should be limited and involve true public use. And I don't really buy GM needing a new plant as a true public use. Yes, one state may want to use eminent domain to get GM a good deal and keep their jobs, but is that really a good thing?

I'm also not a big fan of zoning. We haven't talked zoning in a while.

Oh, and Fringie, screw off, fuck you, etc., etc.

bad news, club
 

If you live in Middleboro, and GM wants to expand its plant there, but the only suitable site has a property owner in it who won't sell, and so GM decides to build a new plant instead in Murphysville, you would buy the public-use angle. Or consider the role of railroads in American history. There was a clear public interest in new rail lines, but the railroads were private companies.

bad news, club
 

Ah, but I'm in Murphysville.

Railroads are an example of why eminent domain exists; they are open to and used by the public, and that is why we're willing to use the state power to clear a right of way.

Balancing Act, though. If you want to build a spur for the railroad to serve the Westville Condom Factory, I'm not so happy about using eminent domain.

bad news, club
 

They're only used by the public if the public buys a ticket. By that standard, a city should be able to condemn land to build private development so long as the developer builds a movie theater or just offers paid tours every once in a while.