Nutjobs Ranting About Politics.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Bullshit. I live in an older suburban community. I bought there specifically because (a) the houses were older and there were no McMansions around (which drive value down), (b) there was no room for any sort of development anywhere nearby (which means the investment is protected and will likely appreciate) and (c) because I'm close to a train and a town with an eclectic mix of restaurants, shops, etc. I have just about every low end to high end store imaginable within 4 miles of my place, and about 30 bars/restuarants in walking distance.

You must be talking about those shitty developments of new McMansions on the outskirts of the burbs. But even those folks tend to have loads of good stores around them; they just don't get very good restaurants.

If you stick the elderly/college kids/section 8 folks near me, you'll kill my property value. So the tradeoff, if its a tradeoff at all, is that I get less "diversity" and better resale? Your point, if there was one, is beyond me. I think you just want to find a way to bitch about NIMBYs. Whatever. I'm proudly one - I have a lot of cash sunk into my house. You think I want to put that in jeopardy because of some upper-middle-class horseshit guilt complex about being selfish?

You're a few zeros on your paychecks from being a limousine liberal sometimes. Everybody's a democrat when he's young; but we're all republicans when we get older and start having real expenses.

I live in a place that sounds not all that unlike what you describe. I don't know Philly very well, but I don't think an older suburb like the one you describe is what I'm talking about. I'll bet the density is somewhat higher, and that elderly/college kids/Section 8 are not as far away as you think.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by baltassoc


But your argument ultimately collapses on itself. You say S.8 recipients are more likely to do X, or be Y, but then admit that not all, or even most, recipients fall into any of these undesirable categories.

When the client's paying, do you stay in the same hotels, take the same flights, and eat at the same restaurants as when you're footing the bill yourself?

Having someone else foot your rental bill adds yet an additional layer of irresponsibility and lack of investment in the transaction

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Francis Fukuyama sounds like he's given up on Bush's "plan" for Iraq:

• The Bush administration's failure to plan adequately for Iraq's postwar reconstruction was a big failure of policy, one that will greatly limit future US policy choices. The recent escalation in violence, with US deaths passing the 1,000 mark, underlines just how insecure the country is.... The long-term plan laid out by the Bush administration since the June handover of sovereignty in Iraq is straightforward.... Anyone who thinks this scenario will materialise is living in fantasyland....
  
  Allawi's government faces dual insurgencies... Moqtada al-Sadr... Fallujah, now a base for religious extremists, seems but one of a number of areas where coalition forces cannot go. The US has, in other words, permitted the establishment of a new terrorist haven in central Iraq....
  
  Equally serious is the lack of state capacity on the part of the new government.... If elections are postponed, leaving de facto power in the hands of militias, the next US president will face a critical choice: continue pressing for a unified Iraqi state, or seek a power-sharing arrangement based on agreement by the Kurdish and Shia communities, in which stability rather than democracy is the goal....
  
  Heavy fighting and more casualties lie ahead, and [the] US force posture in other troublespots such as Korea is under strain. Washington can maintain current US troop levels in Iraq only through a covert draft of National Guard and reserve forces, the very people whose families form Mr Bush's political base....
  
  The Republican convention outrageously lumped the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war into a single, seamless war on terrorism - as if the soldiers fighting Mr Sadr were avenging the destroyers of the twin towers... mismanagement of the war has created a new Afghanistan inside Iraq.... The Bush administration has made any number of foreign policy errors, particularly over Iraq.... But if Mr Bush is returned... the administration will have got away a Big Lie about the war on terrorism and will have little incentive to engage in serious review....

Financial Times

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Francis Fukuyama sounds like he's given up on Bush's "plan" for Iraq:

• The Bush administration's failure to plan adequately for Iraq's postwar reconstruction was a big failure of policy, one that will greatly limit future US policy choices. The recent escalation in violence, with US deaths passing the 1,000 mark, underlines just how insecure the country is.... The long-term plan laid out by the Bush administration since the June handover of sovereignty in Iraq is straightforward.... Anyone who thinks this scenario will materialise is living in fantasyland....
  
  Allawi's government faces dual insurgencies... Moqtada al-Sadr... Fallujah, now a base for religious extremists, seems but one of a number of areas where coalition forces cannot go. The US has, in other words, permitted the establishment of a new terrorist haven in central Iraq....
  
  Equally serious is the lack of state capacity on the part of the new government.... If elections are postponed, leaving de facto power in the hands of militias, the next US president will face a critical choice: continue pressing for a unified Iraqi state, or seek a power-sharing arrangement based on agreement by the Kurdish and Shia communities, in which stability rather than democracy is the goal....
  
  Heavy fighting and more casualties lie ahead, and [the] US force posture in other troublespots such as Korea is under strain. Washington can maintain current US troop levels in Iraq only through a covert draft of National Guard and reserve forces, the very people whose families form Mr Bush's political base....
  
  The Republican convention outrageously lumped the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war into a single, seamless war on terrorism - as if the soldiers fighting Mr Sadr were avenging the destroyers of the twin towers... mismanagement of the war has created a new Afghanistan inside Iraq.... The Bush administration has made any number of foreign policy errors, particularly over Iraq.... But if Mr Bush is returned... the administration will have got away a Big Lie about the war on terrorism and will have little incentive to engage in serious review....

Financial Times

Bush 291

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Bush 291

That there is what a tie looks like. According to that site, Bush is up by 1% in Florida and Pennsylvania. Flip those two states, and Kerry has 286 electoral votes.

If you want an explanation of why the polls keep jumping around so much, look here.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
That there is what a tie looks like. According to that site, Bush is up by 1% in Florida and Pennsylvania. Flip those two states, and Kerry has 286 electoral votes.

Actually it was the other way about 3 hours ago.

If you want an explanation of why the polls keep jumping around so much, look here.

Ty actually cites emerging democratic majority .com as a credible source. To quote my fave poster "isn't it pretty to think so!"

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Francis Fukuyama in the Financial Times
Under Bush, Iraq is going to shit.

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
It doesn't matter so long as Bush wins the election.

Andrew Sullivan, on his blog
In the last few days, close to 130 civilians have been killed by terrorists in a country occupied by coalition forces. If you adjust for population size, that's almost half the American death-toll from 9/11. I just scanned two of my favorite websites, Instapundit and NRO's Corner, and the only mention today is an honest piece by John Derbyshire calling for withdrawal after the election. That's telling, I think. And a sign of how unhinged and divorced from the real issues this election has become.

There's still lots of time left, something which should be scaring Bush.

eta: And it's not just Iraq. Since Slave's not around, I'll be the one to quote Sullivan here:

THREE TRILLION DOLLARS: It doesn't even sound better when Dr Evil says it. That's what George W. Bush's proposals for his second term would cost. Actually, that's just the cost of keeping tax relief in place and privatizing part of social security. It excludes the costs of the war or the other fast-expanding parts of Bush's Big Government. In terms of fiscal responsibility, it's way worse than John F. Kerry; and if the Congress remains in Republican hands, there will be nothing to stop the president from trying to spend or borrow all of it. Medicare alone is a nightmare:

• While Congress squabbles over whether the administration hid the new prescription drug benefit's 10-year cost - pegged by the White House at $534 billion versus CBO's $395 billion - the actual liability incurred by the new drug benefit is estimated at $8 trillion to $12 trillion.

I know I'm a broken record, but it seems to me that blogs should not only point out where mainstream media is wrong or blinkered, but also where leading politicians are being irresponsible. It is simply irresponsible either to propose vast new spending, while cynically knowing none of it will happen; or to mean it and have no good accounting for how we can afford it. I cannot understand how Bush is getting away with it: the destruction of fiscal conservatism for a generation.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If you want an explanation of why the polls keep jumping around so much, look here.

The argument that the polls are suddenly turning up too many R id's and so must be weighted back down is sort of troubling. The CW has always been, D's make up X% of the electorate, and so a disproportionate weighting should be corrected. But, historically, this approach has been shown to be less than accurate when compared to final results. Plus, while we here tend to know our own label, there are scads of casual voters who probably switch back and forth, depending on who they're voting for ("today I favor Kerry, so today I'm a Democrat"). At a certain point, this corrective factor can be carried too far. There is a valid argument that you should not use it at all - it becomes circular, in that you are polling, and then weighting the poll to correct for the disparity in answers (i.e., this poll shows 65% favoring Kerry, so we should weight the non-Kerry votes to make up for that imbalance.")

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
There's still lots of time left, something which should be scaring Bush.

the number of people killed 9/11 wasn't the real point. We were attacked here, and our way of life threatened. It would be almost as bad with 1000 dead, or 500. Anyone who recognizes this, also recognizes that equating how many Iraquis have killed other Iraquis last week to 9/11, only shows that you don't get we are at war.

JFK's plan? go ask France to help, and pull out in 4 years.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Bush 291

That really is what its all about Hank. That's why, despite the abject failure of at least the planning and much of the execution for post-war Iraq, no one has lost his job. Doug Feith and Rumsfeld are still beavering away up at the Pentagon.

Despite the intelligence failures and lack of coordination among intelligence and law enforcement agencies pre- and post-9/11, no one really lost their job. (Tenet resigning after 8+ years in office, and more than two years after the Iraq advice, barely counts.) There have been no big changes at the FBI -- which comes off worst of all from the 9/11 commission report.

The only thing stopping the prisoner abuse investigations from disappearing are the efforts of certain GOP Senators (Warner, McCain, etc.) and Congresspeople who have told the military to go back and do a better job of investigation.

This administration has no interest in any sort of accountability for failures which might acknowledge mistakes and/or cost it even .1% in the eyes of the electorate. Both parties seem to have fully adopted the Clintonian maxim -- "First, you have to get elected." This is hardly a conservative value.

S_A_M

P.S. In the interests of "equal time" -- if you want to read some "devastating" piece (harking back to Ty's use of the phrase) -- read the WaPo editorial from Sunday(?) entitled "Mr. Kerry and Iraq." They hit very hard on the flip-flopping and mismanagement of his positions.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
JFK's plan? go ask France to help, and pull out in 4 years.

In a three-way election, I would pick Putin over Kerry.

(Heck, in some respects, I'd pick Putin over Bush.)

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
The argument that the polls are suddenly turning up too many R id's and so must be weighted back down is sort of troubling. The CW has always been, D's make up X% of the electorate, and so a disproportionate weighting should be corrected. But, historically, this approach has been shown to be less than accurate when compared to final results. Plus, while we here tend to know our own label, there are scads of casual voters who probably switch back and forth, depending on who they're voting for ("today I favor Kerry, so today I'm a Democrat"). At a certain point, this corrective factor can be carried too far. There is a valid argument that you should not use it at all - it becomes circular, in that you are polling, and then weighting the poll to correct for the disparity in answers (i.e., this poll shows 65% favoring Kerry, so we should weight the non-Kerry votes to make up for that imbalance.")

OTOH, it's hard to believe that party identification is really changing as much as quickly as you would believe from some recent polls, which naturally leads you to question their results.

It's a pretty inexact science.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
JFK's plan? go ask France to help, and pull out in 4 years.

And yet you are not troubled by the fact that Bush's plan is an abject failure. Funny, that.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
And yet you are not troubled by the fact that Bush's plan is an abject failure. Funny, that.

No, the coverage of Iraq granted to us by the MSM shows an abject failure. But their cameras and reporters only seem to go to two or three neighborhoods. Funny that.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

This e-mail to Sullivan is the single best thing I've read about the Killian memos/CBS fuss, a story I've given up on trying to sort out:

• "I got a good laugh from your post on the "factual superiority of the blogosphere" because I did learn a lot of facts from blogs about the "CBS memos".
  From the right-wing blogs, I learned that the memo font matches MS Times-Roman, and nothing else. From the left-wings blogs, I learned that the memo font matches IBM Press-Roman, and nothing else.
  From the right-wing blogs, I learned that small horizontal variation in spacing is proof of "kerning" and therefore computer generation. From the left-wing blogs, I learned that small vertical variation in alignment is proof of mechanical action and therefore typewriter creation.
  I learned that the right-wing facts are certainly true, as noted by Washington Post experts, and the left-wing facts are certainly true, as established by the Boston Globe.
  From the right-wing blogs, I learned that a trusted expert is one who writes to Glenn Reynolds, offering to withhold any opinion on any topic if only the good Professor will end the stream of right-wing e-mail abuse. This guy's pleading uncertainty proves to Mickey Kaus and a waiting world that the Globe is full of crap.
  From the left-wing blogs, I learned that a trusted expert is a long-time Kevin Drum poster who suddenly reveals (without evidence) that he was an IBM typewriter salesman and therefore has knowledge that apparently belongs to no other living human. This guy's self-proclaimed certainty proves to Dailykos and a waiting world that the Washington Post is full of crap.
  From all blogs, I learned that the low resolution of the documents nullifies all supposed "facts" that contradict any locally favored facts.
  From all my reading, I learned the comforting fact that we can all choose our facts as we please and yet still go to bed at night sure that all of our facts have survived the rigorous scrutiny that only the blogosphere can provide."