Nutjobs Ranting About Politics.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
I assume you're talking about the list.

I think he may mean their tooth. But I could be wrong.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
I could go on for hours, but there are some chicks in skimpy outfits on the VMAs that I need to watch.

Sure beats what those guys in Baghdad are doing, huh?

[SlaveNoMore]

Shape Shifter
Sure beats what those guys in Baghdad are doing, huh?

Au contraire, mon frer.

Abu Ghraib and the VMAs: Much Ado about Nothing.

Oh, and speaking of the VMAs, judging by the horrific response the Kerry daughters recieved from the young, Miami crowd, I'm thinking the Ketchup King of Kampuchea better start concentrating on Ohio.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Au contraire, mon frer.

Abu Ghraib and the VMAs: Much Ado about Nothing.

Oh, and speaking of the VMAs, judging by the horrific response the Kerry daughters recieved from the young, Miami crowd, I'm thinking the Ketchup King of Kampuchea better start concentrating on Ohio.

I missed the show. I read the report on Drudge, but I don't necessarily believe everything I read on his site, particularly the stuff he writes. What happened? Cubans? Apologies in advance if this is more appropriate for the fb.

[SlaveNoMore]

Why is it that when I see the photos of the protestors, the only thing that comes to mind is:

"Michael Moore... Jesse Jackson... joined by thousands of ... retired teachers without air conditioning... bored Eurotrash needing a public place to smoke... students (that don't vote anyway) looking to get away from Mom and Pop before shipping off to College next week... straggler NYers that were too cheap to spring for a house at the shore... men (and lesbians) trying to pick up chicks like these:

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Why is it that when I see the photos of the protestors, the only thing that comes to mind is:

"Michael Moore... Jesse Jackson... joined by thousands of ... retired teachers without air conditioning... bored Eurotrash needing a public place to smoke... students (that don't vote anyway) looking to get away from Mom and Pop before shipping off to College next week... straggler NYers that were too cheap to spring for a house at the shore... men (and lesbians) trying to pick up chicks like these:

Damn, I just looked at the tits. Like the president, you need another vacation.

Politics on the fb, TITS! on politics . . . I'm so confused.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
TITS! on politics . . . I'm so confused.

As long as I can remember, TITS have always been on the PB.

[Not Bob]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
when Bush served a full 4 years in the Texas Air Nationals dangerously flying combat aircraft and who volunteered for pilot service in Vietnam (and being rejected for not having the requisite experience).

Did Bush really volunteer for pilot service in Vietnam? Serious question.

That seems kind of strange, because one would assume that he could have just gone into the regular Air Force (or Navy aviation) if that's what he wanted. But, you never know.

(Oh, and as for Kerry, the Navy may not have been using the Swift Boats in the same way before he volunteered for them, but I'm pretty sure that even in that "safe duty" they were closer to being shot at by the bad guys then the destroyer he was serving on beforehand.)

[Hank Chinaski]

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5822306/

So anyway, NYC is all bogged down by addled, like this board gets when Panda and Sammy start posting alot, but here's a quote that caught me:
“Fahrenheit 9-11” director Michael Moore told demonstrators that “the majority of this country opposes the war ... The majority are here to say, ‘It’s time to have our country back in our hands.”’

2 things:
If the majority hate the Republicans, they really don't need to protest, do they?

If the main issue is the war was wrong, why not support Nader?

[baltassoc]

I know how both sides like to post pictures of the two candidates looking manly/goofy playing sports, but screw that.

I want a leader who can take down another world leader on the field. (Spree disclosure: Yahoo article, no nudity)(Hank disclosure: does suggest Italians are pussies)

Prime Minister Tony Blair kicked his Italian host Silvio Berlusconi so hard on the left knee during a game of soccer earlier this month that the Italian premier had to have the injury scanned at a hospital near his vacation villa in Sardinia....

At the hospital, Berlusconi was diagnosed with a cartilege injury.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore

Oh, and speaking of the VMAs, judging by the horrific response the Kerry daughters recieved from the young, Miami crowd, I'm thinking the Ketchup King of Kampuchea better start concentrating on Ohio.

This shocked me. I thought that in that venue, it would have been the Bush sisters that got booed. The audience was respectfully polite to the Bushies.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
Huh? If there are ten different ways to interpret "proportionally higher", I'm guessing you are interpreting it in the only way that supports your statement (assuming any way exists).

The chart shows effective taxes for the top 20% going down to 14.2 from 17.1. Thats a proportionate decrease of approximately 17% or so.

For the next 20%, to 6.6% from 8.5%. Thats a proporationate decrease of approximately 21 or 22%.

For the middle 20%, to 3.5 from 5.2. Thats a ballpark 33%.

The 20% after that receive welfare checks, whereas before they paid taxes.

The lower chart shows that the top 20% pay a higher proportion of taxes now; whereas every other group pays a lower proportion.

What proportion do you see in that chart that justifies your statement?

Hello

The top 20% got a reduction in their effective rate of 3%. The second and third 20% each got a cut in effective rates of less than 1%.

All this debate is proving the old Mark Twain adage: there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics.

[Replaced_Texan]

I know that some of you dismiss the New York Times out of hand, but you might want to check out the Book Review section from yesterday's paper. Judge Posner reviewed the 9-11 Commission Report, and I think it was a very good and more importantly, a very necessary, critique.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/bo...29POSNERL.html

He really liked the first part of the report, and he seemed almost amazed at how well it was written:

• the 9/11 commission report is an uncommonly lucid, even riveting, narrative of the attacks, their background and the response to them. . . .
  
  The prose is free from bureaucratese and, for a consensus statement, the report is remarkably forthright. Though there could not have been a single author, the style is uniform. The document is an improbable literary triumph.

Posner critizes, at length, the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. For example:

• And with the aid of hindsight it is easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been suspected) to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from that observation to the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was the result not of bad luck, the enemy's skill and ingenuity or the difficulty of defending against suicide attacks or protecting an almost infinite array of potential targets, but of systemic failures in the nation's intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by changing the apparatus.
  
  That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the report's narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures.

Posner stopped reading the report after the narrative section (page 338), and developed his own list of " improvements in our defenses against terrorist groups like Al Qaeda are implied by the commission's investigative findings." They are:

• (1) Major buildings should have detailed evacuation plans and the plans should be communicated to the occupants.
  
  (2) Customs officers should be alert for altered travel documents of Muslims entering the United States; some of the 9/11 hijackers might have been excluded by more careful inspections of their papers. Biometric screening (such as fingerprinting) should be instituted to facilitate the creation of a comprehensive database of suspicious characters. In short, our borders should be made less porous.
  
  (3) Airline passengers and baggage should be screened carefully, cockpit doors secured and override mechanisms installed in airliners to enable a hijacked plane to be controlled from the ground.
  
  (4) Any legal barriers to sharing information between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. should be eliminated.
  
  (5) More Americans should be trained in Arabic, Farsi and other languages in widespread use in the Muslim world. The commission remarks that in 2002, only six students received undergraduate degrees in Arabic from colleges in the United States.
  
  (6) The thousands of federal agents assigned to the ''war on drugs,'' a war that is not only unwinnable but probably not worth winning, should be reassigned to the war on international terrorism.
  
  (7) The F.B.I. appears from the report to be incompetent to combat terrorism; this is the one area in which a structural reform seems indicated (though not recommended by the commission). The bureau, in excessive reaction to J. Edgar Hoover's freewheeling ways, has become afflicted with a legalistic mind-set that hinders its officials from thinking in preventive rather than prosecutorial terms and predisposes them to devote greater resources to drug and other conventional criminal investigations than to antiterrorist activities. The bureau is habituated to the leisurely time scale of criminal investigations and prosecutions. Information sharing within the F.B.I., let alone with other agencies, is sluggish, in part because the bureau's field offices have excessive autonomy and in part because the agency is mysteriously unable to adopt a modern communications system. The F.B.I. is an excellent police department, but that is all it is. Of all the agencies involved in intelligence and counterterrorism, the F.B.I. comes out worst in the commission's report.

Posner disagrees with the National Intelligence Director (" Efforts to centralize the intelligence function are likely to lengthen the time it takes for intelligence analyses to reach the president, reduce diversity and competition in the gathering and analysis of intelligence data, limit the number of threats given serious consideration and deprive the president of a range of alternative interpretations of ambiguous and incomplete data -- and intelligence data will usually be ambiguous and incomplete"); he thinks that American provinciality is a problem that needs to be overcome; he thinks the MI5 model in the UK may be worth checking out; he thinks that the 9/11 Commission concentrated too much on attacks similar to 9/11 and did not really focus on other methods that terrorists might use; he thinks that we're focused too much on Islamacists; and he thinks that concentrating on likely targets in the US (i.e. New York and D.C) leaves the rest of the population vulnerable.

I think that Posner's main critique, if there is one, is that intelligence should not be centralized: "Diversity of methods, personnel and organizational culture is a strength in a system of national security; it reduces risk and enhances flexibility."


I haven't read the full 9/11 Commission Report, but Posner's review is compelling. I think it's vitally important that a document like the 9/11 Commission Report is challenged and critiqued. Someone like Judge Posner, who is a bit removed from the political fray, seems like a very good candidate indeed. I didn't disagree with any of his points, though like I said, I haven't read the source document.

You might want to check it out.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by bilmore
The point I thought you were making was that the lower-and-middle-classes got screwed out of a tax break that only the rich ended up with. This shows that the "rich" ended up paying a higher portion of the taxes collected than they did before. Sort of contradicts your repeated cries that no one but the rich got a break, doesn't it?

This makes me think that you don't really care about the numbers, or the reality, at all. As long as you can find some statistic that seems to let the "rich" "get away with something", you are incensed. Or, more accurately, you can find a more acceptable reason to be incensed than the real one - your party lost to the hated Bush.

If all the Kerry people simply put their hated tax break into an envelope and sent it in to their own choice of charity, I'm betting we could have wiped out poverty. But, no, that wouldn't be possible, because the fact that the enemy is getting away with something is far more important than the facial excuse of "we love the disadvantaged, and you hate them".

No. The point I was making was that the Bush tax cuts were sold as lower and middle class tax relief. There was some tax relief at those levels. However, the elimination of the highest income tax bracket and the dividend tax break were the single highest tax cuts in Bush's plan and those almost entirely benefited the wealthy.

I don't hate Bush. I think he's a shitty President. There's a difference. I do hate Dick Cheney, but that's because he has the scruples of a pit viper.

And I'm not really incensed. I'm simply debating who I feel is worse candidate. I can't debate who I feel is the best candidate because he or she isn't running. Yet again, our system has delivered up two choices who are mediocre on their best days. And once again, come November, I will find myself voting against the lesser evil instead of for the greater good.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Skeks in the city
That table is irrelevant. What matters to people is their effective tax rate, and their after-tax income. Bush's tax policy hasn't done much for most people on either count. Bush helped really rich people, and that's about it.

It's nice to see that somebody else get this. That's all I've been trying to say all along.