Keeping it civil instead of returning to our dark ways

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Refuting Fugee' suggestion of an internet hoax, ABC's 20/20 finally ran that Shepard story.

Link

That refutes Fugee, but still leaves me wondering why you claimed to have seen the show two weeks ago.

And what a reliable story it was. Based on the preliminary press report:

The murderer, who first averred that he killed Matt Sheppard specifically because he was gay (because he thought that might lead to a reduced manslaughter charge) now says that gayness had nothing to do with it (because he is trying to get his sentence reduced by saying that this was not a hate crime). His girlfriend who supported the first story now supports the second.

When you said it was a "meth deal gone sour," that seemed to suggest the victim was buying meth. But it was really the killers who were on meth, and who planned to rob Sheppard, and who did rob him. But for some reason, this robbery ended with a particularly brutal murder. Which suggests to me that something other than a robbery was going on.

Personally, I believe the first story, not the second, based on the fact that a simple robbery turned into something so different. And regardless of which story you believe, it doesn't change the fact that people in the great state of Wyoming went to the funeral with signs bearing lovely Christian messages, like "He got what he deserved."

[Bad_Rich_Chic]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
But for some reason, this robbery ended with a particularly brutal murder. Which suggests to me that something other than a robbery was going on.

Personally, I believe the first story, not the second, based on the fact that a simple robbery turned into something so different.

Having seen some tweakers, the crazed brutality is entirely consistent. That is some bad, bad shit. I don't have a strong bent toward one story or the other, but the "he freaked on meth" story is 100% believable to me.

And regardless of which story you believe, it doesn't change the fact that people in the great state of Wyoming went to the funeral with signs bearing lovely Christian messages, like "He got what he deserved."

2. Which is why the original story is also 100% believable to me.

No reason why both couldn't be true.

[SlaveNoMore]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
That refutes Fugee, but still leaves me wondering why you claimed to have seen the show two weeks ago.

I asked someone [Shifter?] if they had seen it.

• Did you watch the recent 20/20 episode debunking the entire Matthew Shepard myth?

I thought I was quite clear that I read the pre-airing reports.

• According to the report, it was a meth deal that went sour, and his being gay had nothing to do with it.

Provided a link to one of the numerous articles discussing same.

• here's a pre-airing link to the story.

And read several blogs that discussed the story at length, including Sullivan

• Sullivan has also discussed at length.

So show me where I said otherwise?

And what a reliable story it was. Based on the preliminary press report:

The murderer, who first averred that he killed Matt Sheppard specifically because he was gay (because he thought that might lead to a reduced manslaughter charge) now says that gayness had nothing to do with it (because he is trying to get his sentence reduced by saying that this was not a hate crime). His girlfriend who supported the first story now supports the second.

When you said it was a "meth deal gone sour," that seemed to suggest the victim was buying meth.

That is what the articles seemed to allege, yes. Shepard was also an apparent user in the local scene.

But it was really the killers who were on meth, and who planned to rob Sheppard, and who did rob him. But for some reason, this robbery ended with a particularly brutal murder. Which suggests to me that something other than a robbery was going on.

Why?

Personally, I believe the first story, not the second, based on the fact that a simple robbery turned into something so different. And regardless of which story you believe, it doesn't change the fact that people in the great state of Wyoming went to the funeral with signs bearing lovely Christian messages, like "He got what he deserved."

Right, so the bussed-in Phelps jackasses are representative of the entire population of Wyoming? Right. I see.

[sgtclub]

59% Want Abortions Kept Legal:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,139841,00.html

[Gattigap]

Interestingly, SCOTUS has passed on hearing the MA gay-marriage challenge. Fucking activist judges -- time for Bush to get to work.

[SlaveNoMore]

sgtclub
59% Want Abortions Kept Legal:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,139841,00.html

Here's how the poll was phrased. Note the utter lack of any discussion on how it would then revert to the states:

"As you may know, President Bush may have the opportunity to appoint several new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court during his second term. The 1973 Supreme Court ruling called Roe v. Wade made abortion in the first three months of pregnancy legal. Do you think President Bush should nominate Supreme Court justices who would uphold the Roe v. Wade decision, or nominate justices who would overturn the Roe v. Wade decision?"

Uphold - 59
Overturn- 31
Unsure - 10

[sgtclub]

I agree with Kaus:

• kf is Stupid II: I still don't understand why it's a good idea to centralize intelligence under a single czar. If the problem with pre-Iraq intelligence was the tendency to tell the Administration what it wanted to hear, won't narrowing the information funnel maximize the chances of that happening again? Won't it be easier to "politicize" a single "National Intelligence Director"? What we want is a multiplicity of perspectives and an error-revealing debate, no? Rich Lowry's op-ed in Friday's N.Y. Post predicts:
  
  if the bill passes and if--God forbid--there's another major terror attack a few years hence, the complaint will immediately go up that U.S. intelligence is "too centralized."
  
  Are Democrats so wedded to the 9/11-Commission and the 9/11 families that they don't see this? During the election season, the 9/11 families were a media-compatible vehicle for criticizing the Bush administration. But the election is over. Democrats should be able to take a fresh look.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110033/

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Here's how the poll was phrased. Note the utter lack of any discussion on how it would then revert to the states:

"As you may know, President Bush may have the opportunity to appoint several new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court during his second term. The 1973 Supreme Court ruling called Roe v. Wade made abortion in the first three months of pregnancy legal. Do you think President Bush should nominate Supreme Court justices who would uphold the Roe v. Wade decision, or nominate justices who would overturn the Roe v. Wade decision?"

Uphold - 59
Overturn- 31
Unsure - 10

Sure, but that doesn't effect the conclusion. People apparently want abortion kept legal by a wide margin.

[Gattigap]

Friedman argues that it's crunch time in Iraq, and time for the US to finally get its shit together. Consider this question.

• Here's this week's news quiz. It's just one question, but it's a big one: Who's in charge of U.S. policy in Iraq? No, seriously, give yourself a simple test. Just look in a mirror and mouth these words: "Overall coordinator and strategist of U.S. policy in Iraq today," and tell me whose picture comes into your head.
  
  George Bush? Donald Rumsfeld? Porter Goss? Dick Cheney? Condi Rice? Steve Hadley? Colin Powell? General Casey? Karl Rove? Bono? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Tommy Franks? David Stern? (He should be in charge.)
  
  I confess that I cover this story and it has never been clear to me who was our chief strategist for Iraq - who was really orchestrating the intelligence and public affairs, with the politics, diplomacy and military operations, around a coherent plan that was being communicated to Iraqis and the world. Indeed, I have never understood how an administration that wanted a war so badly and will be judged on it by history so profoundly, could manage it so sloppily. Right now we need an "intelligent czar" for Iraq much more than we need an "intelligence czar" for America.

I'm not so sure that we need a single person to be the face of the Iraq Policy (look at Condi's intent to fill the role, and see how well that turned out). But Friedman is, I think, right about the underlying point -- that our overall approach to prepping Iraq for elections kicks ass when it involves paving over Fallujah, but is, ah, lacking in other areas.

• Consider one small example. Last week, The Times's defense correspondent, Thom Shanker, wrote about a study conducted by the Defense Science Board, which found that nearly two years into the war in Iraq, America's institutions charged with "strategic communications" - about what we are doing in the world and why - are broken. The study found that "the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam."
  
  No kidding. We are losing a public relations war in the Muslim world to people sawing the heads off other Muslims. But this is only one dimension of a larger problem, which cannot be allowed to continue.

[Bad_Rich_Chic]

Originally posted by sgtclub
...If the problem with pre-Iraq intelligence was the tendency to tell the Administration what it wanted to hear, won't narrowing the information funnel maximize the chances of that happening again? Won't it be easier to "politicize" a single "National Intelligence Director"? What we want is a multiplicity of perspectives and an error-revealing debate, no....

I wasn't aware that the pre 9/11 intel problem was telling the Admin what it wanted to hear. (I though that was the pre-Iraq criticism.) I thought the pre 9/11 problem was: (i) lots of people had collected bibs and bobs that might have alerted the powers that be, but everyone was collecting and no one was analyzing; (ii) group-think meant that no one took al Q seriously as a domestic threat, because "everyone knows" terrorists are just desperate, pathetic mental defectives; (iii) the US is very good at collecting intel on what foreign governments are doing but sucks at intel on just about anything else (like non-state actors or major populist (non-G) changes or events); (iv) no one agency is in charge of pulling together and analyzing ALL intel collected from ALL sources, meaning that no one can put together a total picture; and (v) to the extent anyone did make enough of a leap to consider an effective al Q domestic attack, the practice of developing analysis by consensus and sourcing everything to death that has been SOP since Bay of Pigs, and the resulting intelligence culture of CYA above all, meant that any such imaginative assertion would be shouted down.

The pre-Iraq failures are of a different nature, since that was the sort of intel (information about what government actors are up to) that the CIA was supposedly actually good at ....

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Right, so the bussed-in Phelps jackasses are representative of the entire population of Wyoming? Right. I see.

They actually come from western Nebraska, although I know that those places all look the same to people in San Francisco.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
I wasn't aware that the pre 9/11 intel problem was telling the Admin what it wanted to hear. (I though that was the pre-Iraq criticism.) I thought the pre 9/11 problem was: (i) lots of people had collected bibs and bobs that might have alerted the powers that be, but everyone was collecting and no one was analyzing; (ii) group-think meant that no one took al Q seriously as a domestic threat, because "everyone knows" terrorists are just desperate, pathetic mental defectives; (iii) the US is very good at collecting intel on what foreign governments are doing but sucks at intel on just about anything else (like non-state actors or major populist (non-G) changes or events); (iv) no one agency is in charge of pulling together and analyzing ALL intel collected from ALL sources, meaning that no one can put together a total picture; and (v) to the extent anyone did make enough of a leap to consider an effective al Q domestic attack, the practice of developing analysis by consensus and sourcing everything to death that has been SOP since Bay of Pigs, and the resulting intelligence culture of CYA above all, meant that any such imaginative assertion would be shouted down.

The pre-Iraq failures are of a different nature, since that was the sort of intel (information about what government actors are up to) that the CIA was supposedly actually good at ....

Yea, sorry, should have been more specific. I have reservations regarding the whole intelligence czar proposal and the rush to adopt the 9/11 commission recommendations in general without further debate on this issue. IMHO, the commission members are acting like an uber-congress, and it some how has become taboo to challenge their recomendations. Further, seems to me that another layer of government is exactly what we don't need.

By the way, your concerns above could be alleviated in ways other than an intelligence czar, but somehow that has not entered into the debate.

[Hank Chinaski]

http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/35364.htm

There is a proposal to cut US funding of the UN unless there is a dramatic response to Oil/Food scandal.

"This is life-and-death stuff. To see U.N. officials involved in a program that was used to pay off families of Palestinian suicide bombers, to discover that money from this program is now being used to fund the people killing our troops in Iraq is very troubling," Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) told The Post. "I definitely feel that people are fed up." Flake has sponsored legislation that would reduce U.S. funding to the United Nations by 10 percent, and claims the bill already has 75 co-sponsors. A companion bill has been introduced in the Senate.

[Bad_Rich_Chic]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Yea, sorry, should have been more specific. I have reservations regarding the whole intelligence czar proposal and the rush to adopt the 9/11 commission recommendations in general without further debate on this issue. IMHO, the commission members are acting like an uber-congress, and it some how has become taboo to challenge their recomendations. Further, seems to me that another layer of government is exactly what we don't need.

By the way, your concerns above could be alleviated in ways other than an intelligence czar, but somehow that has not entered into the debate.

While I think something badly needs to be done, and sooner rather than later, I agree that a tzar is probably pretty useless. That is the job the CIA (& its director) was supposed to do and obviously that didn't have the desired effect. The 9/11 co-chairs were on Meet the Press this weekend, saying "oh, the CIA director is too busy running the CIA to consolidate everything, too, so you need a new guy" and I was left scratching my head wondering "OK, so were is the HUGE AGENCY OF PEOPLE THE TZAR NEEDS TO PULL EVERYTHING TOGETHER FROM 15+ DIFFERENT SOURCES then if it's not the CIA?"

I think, to really effect the changes needed, the whole shebang would need to be dismantled and reconstructed top to bottom. I have no clue how you implement a new culture that encourages speculation, imagination and intuition about what the next shift in culture and politics that breaks with the understandings of the past is going to be, much less how you'd get a G willing to act on those. The middle of an intelligence war is not an opportune time to do any of this, but trying may be better than the alternative. Of course, it ain't gonna happen from a purely practical p.o.v., so the point is sort of moot.

That said, I think even complete and effective basic reforms would only really help us in the long-term war; I don't think it would be particularly helpful in preventing another 9/11 type attack in the mid term. (Particularly since there are big problems with intelligence agencies conducting the same sort of surveillance domestically as they do abroad or conducting preventative strikes on US soil, based on something other than clear proof, without benefit of open (public) judicial review, potentially against US citizens.) But few people want to accept that - we want to feel safe at home and don't want to be told that significant portions of the world may need to be remade in ways we probably don't really understand yet for that to happen.

[Bad_Rich_Chic]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/35364.htm

There is a proposal to cut US funding of the UN unless there is a dramatic response to Oil/Food scandal.

Are we currently paying our UN dues anyway? I thought we were like a gazillion dollars in arears on various pretexts.