Politics: Where we struggle to kneel in the muck.

[SlaveNoMore]

Shape Shifter
Al Franken has challenged Bill O'Reilly to a friendly bowling match. A group called Meetup.com has organized The Great American Bowl-Off, to happen on Oct 7 at a bowling "center" near you, as part of an effort to put partisan politics aside for a day as the election heats up. A spokesman for O'Reilly has said, "Bill O'Reilly is not going to respond to anything Al Franken says." O'Reilly was probably afraid that Al would catch him in another lie. Or Al may have challenged O'Reilly to wager his prestigious Peabody awards that he won for his work on A Current Affair.

Look at Al. He probably has his own ball and a polyester shirt with "Al" on the front pocket and BOB'S TOWING on the back.

Would you challenge Amstrong to a bike race? Me neither.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
i.e., "waaah, don't you dare send those people out my way" . Skip your original motivation. Can you or the rest of the NIMBY crowd give one good reason you shouldn't be fairly subjected to the burdens of our national policy? I mean, I realize y'all are saying how you love poor people, and how you ain't afraid of minorities, etc. etc. etc., but I'm not hearing any good reasons why you shouldn't be subject to the same draft I am.

Let me guess though, smart people like you and Wonk and the other suburbanites are too important to serve in Johnson's other great war.

eta White people hate these conversations

Uh, you're nuts. And bag the cheap race baiting. You've chucked that lure into the pond about 100X and come back empty so far. Take a hint.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Look at Al. He probably has his own ball and a polyester shirt with "Al" on the front pocket and BOB'S TOWING on the back.

You mean Bill doesn't have his own? After all, he did grow up in the working-class part of Levittown.

[Did you just call me Coltrane?]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
OK, so showing that yuppies come back when they aren't subject to concentrated public housing and section 8 goes against what I'm saying how? Meantime, the tax base of the south suburbs is steadily dropping as section 8 concentrations move in. Where haven't we seen that before? But its all just a coincidence, because some people just want a one acre lot (with no poor people within 10 miles).

My point was that people still flee to the burbs even though the near north is becoming more white. So why are they still leaving?

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?
I didn't mean the actual candidates. I meant others doing the dirty work for those candidates. Marcellus Wallace didn't go to work on the homes with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. He had others do it for him.

Understood, but I think you are just wrong. Hatchet men come and Hatchet men go on both sides, but I don't think they matter a drop. Its the candidate.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Gattigap
WSJ reporter Farnaz Fassihi recounts things in Baghdad in emails to friends:



Why are wussy reporters from liberal outposts like the WSJ making up these horrible lies? Why, bilmore, why?

More Iraqi violence; 35 children die.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid...World&cat=Iraq

eta: With insurgents targeting anything with even a hint of officialdom, why are they having a ceremony to mark the opening of a sewage plant?

[Did you just call me Coltrane?]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Look at Al. He probably has his own ball and a polyester shirt with "Al" on the front pocket and BOB'S TOWING on the back.

You of all people should respect this. If not, you can no longer be a Little Lebowski Urban Achiever.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by sgtclub
This is shite. If you look at every election in the last 50 years (and probably longer) the more optimistic/personally likeable candidate always wins. The reason why the DEMs are having trouble this that thier candidate is not optimistic/likeable.

Anger never wins shit. Clinton stuffed the GOP anger in 1996 and eventually lead to Newt's departure.

The problem for the Dems is that their sunny candidate is only running for VP, while their angry candidate is running for preseident, whereas the GOP has the reverse situation. Bush is free to look sunny and above the fray while Cheney wields the hatchet. Edwards looks like a whiffle candidate while Kerry looks like an angry wierd old Massachusetts rich guy.

[Say_hello_for_me]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Uh, you're nuts. And bag the cheap race baiting. You've chucked that lure into the pond about 100X and come back empty so far. Take a hint.

Uh, you don't have any answer. And bag the cheap name-calling. You've not answered the question 100X, but used words like "nuts", "stupid", "silly" etc. 101. Which is funny, you expect me to let the issue go away because you call me names, while all I'm asking for is one good reason you shouldn't be subjected to burdens fairly.

Look, I don't really expect you to answer that. The fact is, both you and I would both be happy if anyone ever brought this topic up in national politics. These programs would be killed yesterday if someone were to threaten to impose them semi-uniformly tomorrow.

[sgtclub]

Several on this board have been passing along this myth (Ty, SAM), so I'm wondering what the lefty blogs have to say about this.

Kerry is voicing inaccurate statements that have been repeated so often on the Internet, on radio talk shows and by campaign surrogates that they have come to be regarded as the truth -- for example, the explanation for how Eric Shinseki's long and distinguished military career ended.

Kerry picked up the story April 13 during a campaign event in Providence, R.I., declaring: "Gen. Shinseki said very clearly: We need 200,000 troops. And what happened to him? He was forced into early retirement." Kerry reiterated this last week at a Columbus, Ohio, press conference: "Gen. Shinseki told this country how many troops we'd need. The president retired him early for telling the truth."

That is not true, and even Bush critics in the Pentagon know it. The truth is that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, demanding control of the Army, collided with Shinseki on issues unrelated to Iraq. In March 2002, Rumsfeld announced that Shinseki's term as chief of staff would end as scheduled in June 2003 without extension -- an unprecedented action that made the general a lame duck. It was after that, not before it, on Feb. 25, 2003, that Shinseki told a Senate committee the U.S. would need "several hundred thousand" soldiers (not precisely 200,000) for Iraq occupation duty.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/r...20040930.shtml

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
Uh, you don't have any answer. And bag the cheap name-calling. You've not answered the question 100X, but used words like "nuts", "stupid", "silly" etc. 101. Which is funny, you expect me to let the issue go away because you call me names, while all I'm asking for is one good reason you shouldn't be subjected to burdens fairly.

Look, I don't really expect you to answer that. The fact is, both you and I would both be happy if anyone ever brought this topic up in national politics. These programs would be killed yesterday if someone were to threaten to impose them semi-uniformly tomorrow.

Actually, I don't give a shit. I really don't. I just take offense at your insinuation that I'm somehow culpable in some societal ill for moving to the burbs. Other than that, and the fact that you keep winding this boring goddamned issue into every other discussion, I really have no issue with you.

[ilikenewsocks]

Originally posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?
Agree. The Dems need a coupla hard, pipe-hittin' muthafuckas. Have they ever had one? The Republicans have plenty.*

*but that's b/c they're always so angry. Old angry bitter white men telling the neighbor kids to "STAY OFF MY LAWN" while shaking their fists.

Two words. Marion Barry. He's back!

[Say_hello_for_me]

Originally posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?
My point was that people still flee to the burbs even though the near north is becoming more white. So why are they still leaving?

Look where they are leaving and where they are going. A city that still has a massive social burden. You seeing people leaving for Calumet City or South Holland or Maywood (i.e., other places that are now subjected to the same massive burden but have nowhere near the ability of Chicago to withstand it)? No. They are very specifically going as far away as they can from anyplace that has public housing and section 8. Which leads full circle to the original proposition. Why is it okay to impose it on homeowners in South Holland while exempting those in DuPage?

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Several on this board have been passing along this myth (Ty, SAM), so I'm wondering what the lefty blogs have to say about this.



http://www.townhall.com/columnists/r...20040930.shtml

I'm not sure I really care about the details of how his service ended -- whether it was from the 200k troops statement, or clashes over the brand of toilet paper at the Pentagon.

Shinseki's statement to Congress could not have been more public and hi-profile, nor could the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz slapdown shortly thereafter.

Shinseki, it turns out, was right. Where's the "myth" to that?

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Gattigap
Yep, that's the one (though mine was on radio). The danger for each side's partisans is succumbing to the temptation to extrapolate too far from Bush's abysmal press conferences or otherwise "extemperaneous" interviews, or from Kerry's speeches.

Actually, never mind. Hoagland in WaPo tells us that the negotiated format for the "debates" will essentially reduce the event to dueling stump speeches.

The rules constrain Kerry more than Bush. Unless the challenger is prepared to "cheat" Thursday night -- to go up to and even across the lines of prescribed and proscribed behavior -- the devil in these details will tilt the first debate into an exchange of stump speeches.

That prospect delights the Bush camp.

"We've got the better campaign speech and the only candidate who is good at delivering one," says a Bush campaign insider. An internal study by the Kerry campaign echoes this view. It found that in 2000, Bush took 18 lines from his standard speech and repeated at least one of them 59 times in three debates against Al Gore. "We have to deal with the fact he stays on message," says a Kerry strategist.

The precautions the Bush camp has taken suggest that its fears in the first debate center on Kerry's prosecutorial experience and debate techniques. James Baker, Bush's chief negotiator, seeks to protect his client's flanks with rules that prevent the two candidates from asking each other direct questions or addressing each other with proposals. And they may not roam, Clinton-style, from their podiums, when the debates move into a town hall setting.

I also remember learning via TDS that a big sticking point was the Bush camp's refusal to keep the temperature below 70 degrees because, as a Bush adviser put it, "Kerry's a sweater. Women don't like a sweater."

Nicely done, Karl! Nicely done indeed.