Offering constructive criticism to the social cripples in our midst since early 2005.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
That's fair, on the first. Although I'm not sure whose territory it is. Saddam's? What is his claim of right to it--certainly not democratic elections. It belongs to the people, generally speaking, who inhabit it. And the choice they face is having Saddam run the place or us run the place, at least for a time.

Agree on i and ii, which are both fair questions, but really concern only the cost to americans, not iraqis.

Actually, the choice they faced was leaving Saddam in power or deposing him. I don't recall Bush asking for an invitation to step in.

[Fair and Equitable]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Though Club apparently ignores the numbers he doesn't like, I will repeat that according to the study published in The Lancet, it is 95% likely that the number of deaths in Iraq resulting from the war exceeded 98,000. And that's a few months old now, although it's not just murders.

You should learn to read better:

But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:

We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.

Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

Critique of Lancet Study

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by taxwonk
Actually, the choice they faced was leaving Saddam in power or deposing him. I don't recall Bush asking for an invitation to step in.

Sure, but the choice of deposing him is inadequately described. It actually would require the use of force. Perhaps they should have called the French. They know how to win wars.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Iron Steve
User taxes bother me less than income or wealth based taxes. The vast majority of Americans have public transportation options but eschew them to indulge in the benefits of cheap oil. All the liberals here rant and rave about how Bush is killing the environment (along with innocent terrorists) but the public buses, trains, rideshare programs et al are utilized at something less than 30% of capacity. I see more SUVs here than in any other place I have ever lived (although in fairness that is also a prodduct of the fact that SUVs continue to become more popular generally). the green faced treehugging liberals are the worst hypocrats I have ever seen.

Also, going back to the first sentence, to some extent I am for raising gas taxes, especially if the money was earmarked for purposes in furtherance of the public good. Like killing our terrorist enemies and furthering our superpower rule over the world.

I wasn't speaking of the use taxes. I was talking about the fact that in order to use Iraq's oil to finance our war against them or continued occpuation of their country we would have to (i) steal the oil from the Iraqi people; (ii) charge current market prices for it, thus putting the US government of acting like a socialist power with respect to state ownership of the resource, but profiting from the world market like a capitalist totalitarian state; (iii) pass part of the profit from that state-run enterprise to a few selected private parties; (iv) prolong our need to stay in Iraq in order to quell the inevitable increase in opposition to our taking their resources; and (v) maintaining order in an incresaingly poorere nation as we siphon off the one truly valuable commodity thier economy has to finance its improvement.

[Iron Steve]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Good for you. As I said, I'm no big fan of Bill, but we voters elected him to be President, a job which includes being Commander in Chief of the military, and you and fellow blow-job obsessed Republicans were so intent on talking about blow jobs and semen-stained dresses that you did not exactly support the fellow when he tried to take out Osama bin Laden. So keep talking about blow jobs if you like, but don't complain that he wasn't doing more to fight terrorism, since you guys weren't exactly standing with him as he tried to defend the country. You had other priorities.

Did I miss the part where Clinton was having national referendums on what course of action he should take on national defense issues? Maybe Scaife had my proxy and voted for me? Was there one about about taking custody of bin laden or taking him out?

He's the President of a republic. It was his responsbility to lead. He was immature and reckless in his personal life and that deflected his attention from his job, but that is not a defense for his failure to lead regardless of what was going on in the media. 9-11 essentially is on his tab and he (and his supporters) should take responsbility for it, rather than blaming the mythical VRWC.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

If you believe this, you are misinformed. You should stop posting for a while and read The Age Of Sacred Terror, and then you should come back here and apologize for the ignorant things you are saying. Get your facts straight, man.
.

The camel part is rhetoric. He still failed.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Demoting Richard Clarke and ignoring counterterrorism policy wasn't exactly making up for anything, except perhaps for the nation's shocking failure to waste enough money on a useless missile defense system. Bush did nothing in those months to stop Al Qaeda.

What would we have done, started racial profiling at airports?

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Rove also accused Sen. Durbin of trying help our enemies:

• "Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America's men and women in uniform in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

WaPp

No. Shame.

Actually, no, Al Jazeera doesn't give a shit, according to Abu Aardvark:

• Al-Jazeera broadcasts Durbin's words...
  Karl Rove says:
  
  "Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
  
  An aide to Bill Frist says:
  
  "Well, when you say something that appears all over Al Jazeera, you have a lot of work to do."
  
  Leaving aside everything else which could and should be said, let me just point out that Senator Durbin's remarks do not currently appear anywhere on the main page or news page of al-Jazeera's Arabic language site. Its search engine produces only one hit for "Durbin" in 2005: a story from June 16 about his remarks and his refusal to apologize.
  
  I haven't been paying enough attention to the broadcasts, or watching regularly enough, to know whether or not the story has been reported more heavily than this on the air (though I haven't heard anything about it this morning since I started paying attention). But I can say with some degree of confidence that Condi Rice's remarks in Egypt about reform has received far more attention on al-Jazeera than has Durbin's remarks about Guantanamo.
  
  Just for the record.

Rove is a liar in addition to being a traitor.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Sure, but the choice of deposing him is inadequately described. It actually would require the use of force. Perhaps they should have called the French. They know how to win wars.

Oddly enough, the supposed basis for tying this to 9/11 is the Iraqi's ability to use force against us halfway around the world. How is it that they couldn't have used that same force to depose Hussein? Or are you suggesting that it is the US that has provided them with the training and resources to use the force they are currently using to resist the US occupation?

[Iron Steve]

Originally posted by taxwonk
So then Bush's lies about WMD are okay because he wasn't under oath?

I'm not convinced it's a lie. Have we finished searched Syria yet?

[Iron Steve]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Sure, but the choice of deposing him is inadequately described. It actually would require the use of force. Perhaps they should have called the French. They know how to win wars.

lol.

[Iron Steve]

Originally posted by taxwonk
I wasn't speaking of the use taxes. I was talking about the fact that in order to use Iraq's oil to finance our war against them or continued occpuation of their country we would have to (i) steal the oil from the Iraqi people; (ii) charge current market prices for it, thus putting the US government of acting like a socialist power with respect to state ownership of the resource, but profiting from the world market like a capitalist totalitarian state; (iii) pass part of the profit from that state-run enterprise to a few selected private parties; (iv) prolong our need to stay in Iraq in order to quell the inevitable increase in opposition to our taking their resources; and (v) maintaining order in an incresaingly poorere nation as we siphon off the one truly valuable commodity thier economy has to finance its improvement.

Okay. Do you want to work up the power point presentation or should I?

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Originally posted by Iron Steve
I'm not convinced it's a lie. Have we finished searched Syria yet?

When we're done in Syria and come up empty, where are you going to say they are next? Just so we know in advance.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Fair and Equitable
You should learn to read better:

I can read just fine. What I was reading was this:

• [T]he prestigious British medical journal The Lancet ... published a controversial survey on the impact of war in Iraq ahead of last year’s US presidential election. Based on a sample of 788 households in Iraq, it estimated the “excess deaths” resulting from war to be in a range between 8000 to 194,000. It claimed a 95 per cent confidence that the actual death toll was at least 98,000.

It may be that this guy misread the study, which would not be surprising, since he was criticizing it. About which more here. But Fred Kaplan's description of it -- you were quoting Kaplan, who was quoted on another blog -- was specifically criticized in the Columbia Journalism Review:

• Last fall, a major public-health study appeared in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, only to be missed or dismissed by the American press. To the extent it was covered at all, the reports were short and usually buried far from the front pages of major newspapers. The results of the study could have played an important role in future policy decisions, but the press’s near total silence allowed the issue to pass without debate.
  
  The study, though scientifically robust, had several elements working against it. One was its subject matter: Researchers had done a door-to-door survey of nearly 8,000 people in thirty-three locations in Iraq to estimate how many people had died as a consequence of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation. Americans, and their media, were reluctant to accept the study’s conclusions — that the number was likely around 100,000; that violence had become the primary cause of death since the invasion; that more than half of those killed were women and children.
  
  Adding to the scent of propaganda was the fact that The Lancet had rushed the study into print at the lead author’s request. Some reporters may have guessed that the rushed publication — with the U.S. presidential election looming — meant that the study itself was essentially political. But medical journals often fast-track papers that have immediate importance to doctors or to public-health policy. When I was working on a follow-up article about the study for The Chronicle of Higher Education in January, I made three phone calls to other major medical journals and quickly discovered that the manuscript’s turnaround time, about four weeks, was not outside the norm for fast-tracked papers and did not necessarily mean that editing and peer review had been compromised.
  
  But there’s more to the matter than ideology. The way the researchers presented their results made it difficult for statistics-shy journalists to grasp their significance. The scientists, from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, reported a so-called 95 percent confidence interval. They said that they were 95 percent sure the number of deaths lay between 8,000 and 194,000.
  
  Eight thousand and 194,000? What’s a reporter to make of such a broad range? The lower end of that range overlaps well with previous, nonscientific estimates, but the middle and upper range seem outrageous. True, had the researchers surveyed more houses in more neighborhoods, the interval would have been narrower. But each day spent traveling within Iraq for the study presented grave dangers to the American and Iraqi researchers.
  
  Reporters’ unease about the wide range may have been a primary reason many didn’t cover the study. One columnist, Fred Kaplan of Slate, called the estimate “meaningless” and labeled the range “a dart board.”
  
  But he was wrong. I called about ten biostatisticians and mortality experts. Not one of them took issue with the study’s methods or its conclusions. If anything, the scientists told me, the authors had been cautious in their estimates. With a quick call to a statistician, reporters would have found that the probability forms a bell curve — the likelihood is very small that the number of deaths fell at either extreme of the range. It was very likely to fall near the middle.
  
  The Washington Post’s Rob Stein quoted a military analyst at Human Rights Watch as saying, “These numbers seem to be inflated.” If even Human Rights Watch doesn’t believe the estimate, why should you? (The analyst told me that he hadn’t read The Lancet paper at the time, and that he told Stein so, although the Post didn’t mention that. The analyst now has no reservations about the study’s conclusions.) A reporter asserted in The New York Times that “the finding is certain to generate intense controversy,” even though she quoted no one critical of the study.
  
  British newspapers, by and large, did better — most journalists there seemed unfazed by the wide range of the possible death toll and some newspapers put the story on page 1. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that the British government felt forced to acknowledge it. Parliament held hearings and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, wrote a lengthy response to the paper. But the Bush administration has kept mum on the topic, sticking to General Tommy Franks’s oft-quoted, “We don’t do body counts.”
  
  Had the U.S. and UN responded as they did to the lead author’s similar studies in the Congo a few years ago, tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid might have gone to Iraq, and military decisions could have been altered. But without a nudge from journalists, the government has managed to ignore the paper. Even though it tries not to harm civilians, the military makes no attempt to quantify its “collateral damage.”
  
  In the meantime, five months have passed since the paper came out. If the death rate has stayed the same, roughly 25,000 more Iraqis have died.

So, perhaps not 95% certain that the number topped 98,000, but the death toll was likely in that neighborhood, and it is just as likely that that figure is too low as too high.

[Iron Steve]

Originally posted by Sexual Harassment Panda
When we're done in Syria and come up empty, where are you going to say they are next? Just so we know in advance.

I sent an email to the VRWC talking points desk. As soon as they get back to me I will let you know, although it would not surprise me if some ended up in Iran.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Iron Steve
Did I miss the part where Clinton was having national referendums on what course of action he should take on national defense issues?

You missed the part where your blowjob-obsessed political attacks on the man did what they aimed to do -- limited his ability to lead. That was the point all along. No regrets.

To be fair to Bush and Clinton both, there was little we could do to get bin Laden inside Afghanistan -- if you don't believe this, try reading Sacred Terror, or Clarke's book, or Ghost Wars -- and there was no political support to put boots on the ground inside Afghanistan until after 9/11. But at least Clinton was paying attention, and trying.

The camel part is rhetoric.

The other part -- the "into custody" crap -- is simply wrong.

What would we have done, started racial profiling at airports?

Read Clarke's book, if you care. It's actually interesting stuff.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by taxwonk
Oddly enough, the supposed basis for tying this to 9/11 is the Iraqi's ability to use force against us halfway around the world. How is it that they couldn't have used that same force to depose Hussein? Or are you suggesting that it is the US that has provided them with the training and resources to use the force they are currently using to resist the US occupation?

You must be kidding. Hussein controlled the alleged WMD. The revolution wasn't about to get control of them. Assuming there were WMDs to begin with.