A disgusting vat of filth that no self-respecting intelligent person would wade into.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
I'm on a DNC list. I also received 47 calls this week - all from left leaning candidates and groups (and 1 from Ahnold).

Who can I sue?

Under California law, pretty much anyone you damn well please.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
You have accused me of two different things.

First, you said that I "spliced" a quote. That is flatly wrong, and I'm waiting for you to admit it. I quoted one sentence from the Economist, verbatim. I didn't splice anything. Show some class and admit you were wrong.

Now you are playing with semantics. You put in a statement that with out the surrounding language was misleading. I stand by the statement. I call that splicing. If you dont' like the term fine. What ever you want to call it, it is misleading. That is the substance of my argument so why don't you cop to that.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Second, you are suggesting that the Economist is not blaming Bush, and that it gives him credit for being a free trader. To this, I'll say three things:

(a) You are flatly misreading the article and misunderstanding reality if you think that Bush was "trying to make the Doha round cut more [agricultural] subsidies." That Economist article says the opposite. The U.S. wanted to cut agricultural tariffs but was unwilling to cut agricultural subsidies. If you are not understanding this, read it again. Or, to take just one example from many on the web, this:

• This round collapsed, as many before it did, in a deadlock between farm import tariff users and farm subsidy users. Washington continued to argue for steep cuts in farm import tariffs, which are used by the European Union, India, and Japan, while refusing further cuts in its agricultural subsidies. Four of the six negotiating parties blamed U.S. intransigence as the downfall of this last round of talks. Brazil, usually aligned with the United States on farm tariffs, began earlier this year to shift its position away from that of the United States and toward the European Union, after Brussels was held to blame for the lack of progress at the December ministerial meeting in Hong Kong. Only Australia neglected to single out the United States for the failure.

Quoting from another periodicle to say what the Economist said is bunk. Stick to what we are talking about. The quote speaks for itself.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
(b) Notwithstanding (a), you are correct that the Economist gives Bush credit for being a free trader. It points to the "irony" that people blame the U.S. for the recent collapse, since the U.S. pushed to get the talks back on track after the Cancun failure. This does not contradict the point I made with the Economist article, which is that the U.S. was not somehow blameless for the Doha collapse, as you suggested. My failure to agree with every point in the Economist article does not mean that I misrepresented it when I accurately quoted it in part.
[QUOTE]

You are splitting hairs. You were also using the quote to show that Bush was not a committed free trader. The fact that the article directly contradicted what you were trying to argue, and therefore, you used just one sentence of the article to back up your point was misleading.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop (c) Moreover, I would suggest that (a) and (b) are absolutely consistent with my criticism of Bush on free trade, which is that he pays it lip service but has not invested political capital in it. Bush paid no political price whatsoever for pushing foreign countries to return to the table after Cancun, which is what the Economist praised him for. But he was not prepared to make the case domestically to limit agricultural subsidies -- for which he would have paid a price politically -- and so the Doha talks failed. When it cost him nothing to be for free trade, he was for it. When he would have had to invest something, he wouldn't ante up.

He pushed very hard to get CAFTA through. To defeat CAFTA the Unions and the Democrats put up their biggest fight ever to defeat a free trade agreement. During the negotiations he Democrats tried to get him to insert all sorts of riders that would kill the deal, and then presented a solid front against him to defeat it on the up or down vote. He got unanimous Republican support. It is almost impossible to get unanimous Republican support on anything.

You just don't like to give him credit for what he did because you didn't want him to succeed. And since he beat your side, you don't want to think your side played its best game. Well they put up one hell of a fight.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If you re-read our exchanges with the notion in mind that we seem to mean different things by the term "free trade," maybe you'll stop accusing me of being dishonest. I.e., if you pull your head out of your ass, maybe you'll see the light. We disagree on policy, and it would be more interesting to discuss the policy than our competing understandings of the term "free trade."

You just want to use a different definition of free trade that no one accepts but the unions in their disinformation campaign. At least they usually have the courtesy to call what they believe in "fair trade". It is not semantics, it is a substantive argument. If your notion of "free trade" can be considered "free trade" then I can believe the government should own the means of production and call myself a capitalist. Following your rules words would have no meaning at all.

You object to Bush pushing through a free trade agreement (because it was too much of a free trade agreement) and then accuse Bush of not pushing hard enough on free trade. Only a person whose brain is in Permanent Park could not see the hypocrisy there.

That is the bottom line. There is no sense in arguing this anymore.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
Now you are playing with semantics. You put in a statement that with out the surrounding language was misleading. I stand by the statement. I call that splicing.

Buy a fucking dictionary and look in it if you plan to have conversations with people who speak the English language. The word "splicing" has a meaning, and it does not refer to taking things out of context. If you're going to accuse people of misrepresenting things, you ought to be pretty careful about it. If I've learned anything from the defenders of George W. Bush on this board in the last several years, that would be right up there.

Quoting from another periodicle to say what the Economist said is bunk. Stick to what we are talking about. The quote speaks for itself.

The Economist does not say that the U.S. was willing to cut agricultural subsidies in the Doha round. It says the opposite. I found another respected source because I thought you might believe it if you saw it somewhere else, but apparently you are a brick.

Let's leave it this way: I will admit that if the U.S. was prepared to put serious cuts in agricultural subsidies on the table at Doha, then George W. Bush has been a leader on free trade who both talked the talk and walked the walk; if you will admit that if the U.S. did not put serious agricultural subsidies on the table at Doha, then you have been talking out of your ass because you were egregiously misinformed about free-trade negotiations.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
You just want to use a different definition of free trade that no one accepts but the unions in their disinformation campaign. . . .
That is the bottom line. There is no sense in arguing this anymore.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but I have been arguing about this particular issue with you for several posts now.

[Not Bob]

Originally posted by Spanky
Was it that many? Really? I think the entire US army had twelve and that was reduced to ten under Clinton and Bush I. I could be a little off but not that far off.

We couldn't be occupying Iraq with more than four or five (I am guessing).

Are you sure it was 200 divisions?

That was my recollection, but I went back and checked. According to a 1988 CBO study, which cited the 1987 and 1986 Department of Defense figures as its source, there were 230 Warsaw Pact divisions -- about 6 million soldiers.

Soviet-style divisions are smaller than US divisions -- about 10,000 men instead of 15,000. 25 Warsaw Pact divisions, mostly Soviet, invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Buy a fucking dictionary and look in it if you plan to have conversations with people who speak the English language. The word "splicing" has a meaning, it does not refer to taking things out of context.

Why don't you look up "free trade" in the dictionary. The word "free trade" has a meaning. It does not mean insuring a level playing field and making other countrys have similar labor and environmental laws.

You focused on the word splicing because you know what you did was misleading. If you didn't believe what you were doing was misleading, you would focus on that word, and not splicing.

I am sorry if you can't see that critisizing Bush for pushing through CAFTA and then critisizing him for not doing enough on free trade is beyond hypocritical, then this conversation can't continue. You can blabber on but I have had enough.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Not Bob
That was my recollection, but I went back and checked. According to a 1988 CBO study, which cited the 1987 and 1986 Department of Defense figures as its source, there were 230 Warsaw Pact divisions -- about 6 million soldiers.

Soviet-style divisions are smaller than US divisions -- about 10,000 men instead of 15,000. 25 Warsaw Pact divisions, mostly Soviet, invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Wow. That is a big army. Isn't that like half the population of Austria?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Not Bob
That was my recollection, but I went back and checked. According to a 1988 CBO study, which cited the 1987 and 1986 Department of Defense figures as its source, there were 230 Warsaw Pact divisions -- about 6 million soldiers.

Soviet-style divisions are smaller than US divisions -- about 10,000 men instead of 15,000. 25 Warsaw Pact divisions, mostly Soviet, invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Too bad those 6 million were all needed where they were - otherwise, the Soviets could have invaded Iraq.

[nononono]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Too bad those 6 million were all needed where they were - otherwise, the Soviets could have invaded Iraq.

Or Afghanistan.

Oh, wait....

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by nononono
Or Afghanistan.

Oh, wait....

They should have followed the Rumsfeld Doctrine.

[notcasesensitive]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
I'm on a DNC list. I also received 47 calls this week - all from left leaning candidates and groups (and 1 from Ahnold).

Who can I sue?

My solution: stop using a land line home phone. We have a phone line for the satellite tv, but we never answer it. I received zero political calls this year on phones that I actually answer.

[Cletus Miller]

Originally posted by Not Bob
230 Warsaw Pact divisions -- about 6 million soldiers.

Soviet-style divisions are smaller than US divisions -- about 10,000 men instead of 15,000. 25 Warsaw Pact divisions, mostly Soviet, invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Weren't Soviet divisions larger? (The better to have enough cannon fodder and still operate the heavy weapons.) Your numbers would indicate that--6,000,000/230=about 23,000.

[Penske_Account]

breaking....

Sources are telling me that exits polls et al are suggesting that this are trending the right now. America may yet be a winner today.......

more to come....

[Not Bob]

Originally posted by Cletus Miller
Weren't Soviet divisions larger? (The better to have enough cannon fodder and still operate the heavy weapons.) Your numbers would indicate that--6,000,000/230=about 23,000.

Uh, math is hard.

The pdf within the link took too long to open for me to go back and check again, but I am pretty sure that that's what they said. Or maybe they were just talking about armor divisions? Where's patentgreedy when we need him?

At any rate, the cite proved that my 20 year old memory was reasonably correct on the number of divisions waiting to turn us all into a bunch of borscht-eating atheistic Ivans, so my work is done. Besides, defining free trade is much more interesting.