Politics As Usual

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
Or maybe not?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ea/iraq_attack

(Spree: uh oh, a video tape to partially counter U.S. claims. Cuidado!! contains graphic references to polygamy... not suitable for Papists or children)

I want to believe that it was not a wedding party. But goddammit, this administration ran out of free passes a long time ago. Fuck them for making AJ a credible news source. Fuck them.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
I want to believe that it was not a wedding party. But goddammit, this administration ran out of free passes a long time ago. Fuck them for making AJ a credible news source. Fuck them.

No offense, but your post about going to a shelter and finding a tabby lost you all credibility here. We KNOW the cat owners are voting for Kerry.

[Gin Rummy]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
I want to believe that it was not a wedding party. But goddammit, this administration ran out of free passes a long time ago. Fuck them for making AJ a credible news source. Fuck them.

I hereby declare this one of the stupidest, hyperbolicalist posts that I have encountered today. The false hysteria about this story is making Michael Moore’s feces on film seem to be serious scholarship by comparison. You liberals and turncoats love to sacrifice W at the altar of the Islamofacists.

Free pass? AJ? Puhleeeeeeeze! You’ve got to be kidding me. Please cite any corroborating evidence that this was a wedding and nothing more, although I doubt you can as you like the mainstream leftwing press don’t vet the propaganda you propagate. If our enemies say it, its gospel, if the President says it, a lie. Let me ask you, has Al Jizzera ever held out a fake video as real news? How about the AP? Would it run fake stories? The USA Today? Any chance the Boston Globe would run stills from commercial porno movies and report them as abuses at Abu Grabe?

I will call Jason Blair and see what he thinks and then get back to you all.

In the meantime I could care less if a wedding was going on here. BFD! Apparently our enemies had their wedding at the wrong time and place, not to mention made the mistake of shooting guns at us rather than throwing rice. How gauche. The truth, whether Bush says it tonite or not is that radical Islamic women and children (or midgets dressed as kids) are the ENEMY and maybe one or more of the ten “kids” would have grown up to fly planes into the Freedom Tower buildings, or blow themselves up at a Walmart after being welcomed to our country by a future dimocrat.

If that’s the price of our safety, bill me.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
No offense, but your post about going to a shelter and finding a tabby lost you all credibility here.

A lizard's gotta eat.

[Gin Rummy]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
No offense, but your post about going to a shelter and finding a tabby lost you all credibility here. We KNOW the cat owners are voting for Kerry.

Pussies!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
Nothing else on Iran here, as it appears you appreciate my point about what motivation Iran would have to do what we are accusing them of doing.

I likewise have a hard time believing that Iran would want to manipulate us into invading Iraq, and would be inclined to think that Chalabi was working his own agenda on that one.

[sgtclub]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ea..._id=1000517184

[Hank Chinaski]

Do you know where Privat England and her beau vacationed?

Did you know that outside of a few towns much of Iraq has started having elections?

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn...t-steyn23.html

Something of the sort is already happening on the ground in Iraq. There are some 8,000 towns and villages in the country. How many do you hear about on the news? For a week, it's all Fallujah all the time. Then it's Najaf, and nada for anywhere else. Currently, 90 percent of Iraqi coverage is about one lousy building: Abu Ghraib. So what's going on in the other 7,997 dots on the map? In the Shia province of Dhi Qar, a couple hundred miles southeast of Baghdad, 16 of the biggest 20 cities plus many smaller towns will have elected councils by June. These were the first free elections in Dhi Qar's history and ''in almost every case, secular independents and representatives of nonreligious parties did better than the Islamists.'' That assessment is from the anti-war anti-Bush anti-Blair Euro-lefties at the Guardian, by the way.

That policy of ad hoc, incremental, rolling devolution needs to be accelerated. Towns and provinces should have as much sovereignty as they can handle, on the obvious principle that the constituent parts of ramshackle federations rarely progress at the same pace. In the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia is now an advanced Western economy, Kosovo is a U.N. slum housing project. If one were to cast the situation in rough British terms, the Kurdish areas are broadly analogous to Scotland, Dhi Qar and other Shia provinces are Wales, and the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland.

Even in the Sunni Triangle, remove Fallujah and the remaining 95 percent is relatively calm. And, while Fallujah hasn't been removed, it has been more or less quarantined. There have been fewer lethal attacks in Baghdad in recent weeks in part because many of the perpetrators were Fallujah residents who used to drive up to the capital for a little light RPG work in the evening. Now they're pinned down in their hometown.

We need more of that.

So much of what we hear is contradicted, or biased or whatever..but if the above facts about elections are accurate, isn't that something that should have gotten a little more coverage?

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by sgtclub
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ea..._id=1000517184

That's interesting, but I'm not sure what it proves, other than that when you ask a journalist what his/her personal political philosophy is, that it skews liberal more than the self-assessment of the population. Doesn't really speak to what the media reports or how it reports it, other than the soft connotation that noone can ever be truly objective.

In any event, why is the comparison of the two Pew surveys thought to be so meaningful? From those numbers, I'd imagine that there's a gap between how people respond to the poll, and how they really behave.

Consider - only 20% of the public considers themselves liberal? Really? Sounds like 25 years hence, Reagan's tarring of the word still leaves that sticky residue.

IMHO, significant portions of the public are still wary of admitting in -- well, in public -- that they're liberal. Overeducated journalists may or may not have that same fear.

Gattigap

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by sgtclub
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ea..._id=1000517184

Club --

(a) Interesting, but these numbers are no big shock. I'd bet the numbers are lower than 10-20 years ago. Anyway, don't you really mean that a disproportionate number of those who work in the "media" business consider themselves liberal as compared to the general population?

(b) As a second point -- here we have the market at work. Doesn't this really mean that you conservatives need to get on the stick to balance those numbers out ? Stop complaining and do something (which some are)? Convince your conservative friends of the value of ideas and/or the nobility of a life spent reporting the news, monitoring the government and protecting the little guy's right to know.

Or is this imbalance impossible to resolve because your garden-variety conservative either (i) lacks the requisite literacy to work as a journalist or (ii) is too damn greedy to accept the low salaries? Just an innocent question.

S_A_M

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Or is this imbalance impossible to resolve because your garden-variety conservative either (i) lacks the requisite literacy to work as a journalist or (ii) is too damn greedy to accept the low salaries? Just an innocent question.

S_A_M

Yes, a very innocent question indeed. Right up there with, "so how often do you beat your wife."

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
from CNN:

Why didn't this get 1/100th of the press coverage that the "US attacks wedding"? Or the purported "child with head blown off"

Talk about a free pass.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
The UN may have wanted to make decisions regarding the reconstruction, but I do not believe it wanted to run, and certainly was not capable of running) the post war clean up. How could it? It has no military and no stomache (e,g., witness the pull out after the first bombing). So yes, it could have "run" post war Iraq from NYC head quarters, but it certainly could not have, and had no intention of having, the boots on the ground necessary to accomplish this.

The UN would have done this the way it does everything else -- with its permanent people where possible, and with people on loan from members otherwise. The boots on the ground would have been from many different nations, but they all would have been under baby blue helmets.

Of course they have a plan. And it is no longer hidden (and hasn't been for several months). See the letter I posted above. See the letter. That is why they are shooting at us.

I really don't understand the significance of the part of the letter, or the part you posted.

I didn't see the post, but I don't believe it is accurate because it just doesn't jive with what I've been reading. Sadr and his militia have been left hanging out to dry by the clergy, and it is just a matter of time before he is gone (I agree, most likely he will be killed, or turned over to authorities for proescution for the murder he is alleged to have committed).

When the facts don't agree with National Review Online, it's time to get new facts.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Why didn't this get 1/100th of the press coverage that the "US attacks wedding"? Or the purported "child with head blown off"

It came out on a Saturday afternoon. That's surely part of it.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Gattigap
That's interesting, but I'm not sure what it proves, other than that when you ask a journalist what his/her personal political philosophy is, that it skews liberal more than the self-assessment of the population. Doesn't really speak to what the media reports or how it reports it, other than the soft connotation that noone can ever be truly objective.

It also doesn't address the biases of the people who own the media. If you assume that the liberal biases of journalists matter, you should assume the same about the biases of publishers and major corporations, who would have to be acting pretty irrationally to let their employees use their capital to spread lefty messages.