In These Times

So, what if the government was color-blind genetically but not politically? After all, millions of blacks (and whites, and browns, and yellows) were not targeted by the police or FBI, only those that were red politically, or otherwise criminal, regardless of their skin color. And you admit this in the small print (quasi-Marxist). You might have pointed out that Dohrn and the Weathermen were terrorists and killers as were some of the Black Panthers, but that would have destroyed the premise of the article; all these innocent young terrorists were attacked by the nasty old police, who were, after all, required …

Posted to Assassinated by the State

Weathermen members Kathy Boudin, Judith Alice Clark, and David Gilbert attempted to rob a Brinks truck and killed two policemen and a guard, they were sent up to long prison sentences. But the low death rate from Weathermen bombings was mostly due to the Weathermens' stumblefart incompetence, such as the Greenwich Village accident. "Off the cops" was not just a saying with the Black Panthers. Dozens of Panthers died fighting the police, and a number of police, innocent victims of Black Panther crimes, and Black Panthers, victims of internecine warfare, died, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. Black Panther H. Rap …

Posted to Assassinated by the State

This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders�assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers�made very bad decisions.

Damn! I could have sworn it was the Democrats who did that. Wasn't it LBJ and Democrats in congress that gave us the War on Poverty? $6.6 trillion dollars was utterly wasted over a thirty-year period, there was substantial destruction of poor, mostly Black, family life in the USA, and there was a legacy of crime and drugs among displaced males when women were paid only if there were no males in their households. The whole …

Posted to The Dark Side of the Bright Side

I love reading Sirota's stuff. He is such a fucking idiot. With all due respect, of course. A Party With No Punch? How can you say that? In nine short months, the Obama Progressives have utterly wasted over a trillion dollars on a stimulus package and other financial nonsense that has only stimulated the unemployment rolls, as planned. Their domestic and foreign agendae are doing exceedingly well, by Marxist standards. They will get a wasteful, corrupt, destructive, ineffectual health care bill and call it victory, but the recent global cooling has proven global warming to be a fraud and a deceit, …

Posted to A Party With No Punch

Maria - Welcome back, lady. Long time, no hear. The original well-recognized AGW fraud was the hockey stick curve, wherein global temperatures were depicted as stable for a thousand years until recently when temperatures suddenly began rising. Marxists attributed this temperature rise to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. The fraud was perpetuated in many computer-generated climate models that consistently showed temperature rising indefinitely from 1980 forward. But the hockey stick curve ignored the Medieval Warm Period. An accurate temperature graph of the last millenium shows that the temperature curve looks more like a roller coaster track or a sine wave than …

Posted to A Party With No Punch

Maria - During the Great Depression, Marxists loudly and proudly proclaimed themselves as Communists and Socialists. In this they were following Marx's own injunction in the last sentences of The Communist Manifesto: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims." Norman Thomas was prominent among those Marxists, running for president on the Socialist ticket numerous times. (Evan Thomas, Newsweek editor and Norman's grandson, was the one that said that Obama was "like God", ) The Great Depression was a time of social and economic turmoil, and one might think that Marxists would have attracted many followers. But no one was …

Posted to A Party With No Punch

Maria - Are you still with us? I am looking forward to your input, particularly your justification for your use of the "savage capitalism" meme.

Posted to A Party With No Punch

... hot-button cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage. According to Frank�s polemical thesis, Republicans succeeded in getting poor whites to vote against their own economic self-interest by focusing on these issues. ... Frank�s book and this movie are both vulnerable to accusations of condescending elitism, Frank for his thesis and the movie for its focus on the eccentric Kansas personalities.

Oh, I doubt if there is any organized or disorgaized effort by anyone to persuade anybody "to vote against their own economic self-interest" by invoking "hot-button cultural issues." The effort would have to be massive, and there is no evidence …

Posted to Why Kansas Matters

High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously.

So, I'm sure this was written before WaPo publisher Katharine Weymouth, a low-end two-bit journalistic whore by any measure, started trying to sell herself at $25,000 a pop. Her price is outrageous, if her actions are common. It is standard practice in the mainstream Marxist media (MSMM). Dan Rather tried to sabotage the 2004 elections and got caught lying. NBC and ABC are selling Obama infomercials that no one seems to watch or care about. No one pays attention …

Posted to Death of the Newspaperman

I love reading Sirota's stuff. He is such an idiot. With all due respect. Quite apart from the historical joke concerning campaign promises, the election of a real live Marxist to the presidency has institutionalized dishonesty within the government. Not that dishonesty hasn't been a feature among Democrats for decades. Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson were men of integrity and were Democrat Party leaders. But JFK and LBJ were monumental liars, and cost the Republic terribly. JFK stole the 1960 presidential election by lying about the missile gap that he knew did not exist, plus his father bought and paid for …

Posted to Whither the Sacred Campaign Promise?

(Continued) The Constitution of the United States of America presupposes a moral order. Violation of that moral order is a sin and/or crime, and is an act of hypocrisy. But Marxism rejects the Western Judeo-Christian moral order, on the grounds that the bourgeois moral order was a tool for repression of workers. Marxism embraces a "moral order" predicated on the success of Marxism, whereby any sin, crime, dishonesty, or hypocrisy in pursuit of Marxist goals is the highest form of "virtue." But workers, as a class, reject Marxism. There has never been a Marxist revolution led by workers. So-called Marxist revolutions …

Posted to Whither the Sacred Campaign Promise?

Schwartz - "The disaster of deregulation" Ummm, would you care to expand on that a little? Now, I can see that if the Democrats pass laws that require banks to give mortgage loans to people who have no income or assets, this would be not only unproductive, but stupid. I suppose one moderately priced home in bankruptcy might have $10,000 in costs, and the home owner and/or lender (and/or the taxpayer now) will have to absorb that cost. If that home is now underwater by $20,000, $30,000, or more, that amount will be absorbed by someone, probably the taxpayer. So if …

Posted to The Only Road Out of Crisis

M - I am amused and bemused that you would make patently false and ridiculous arguments on well-documented recent historical events. Not only did the Democrats pass laws penalizing lending institutions that did not issue toxic mortgages, the government issued policies that described, in detail, how these lending institutions were to fake the data to make non-eligible borrowers appear to be eligible for mortgage loans. The relevant document is "Closing the Gap: A Guide to Equal Opportunity Lending" issued by FRB Boston in April 1993 and subsequently adopted as policy by FDIC and the Clinton Administration. The document is twenty-nine pages …

Posted to The Only Road Out of Crisis

M - " ... do you ... REALLY believe either party was going to prevent any of this stuff?" Well, yes, one party has a long history of cleaning up the other party's social and financial disasters. In the 1960s, LBJ and the Democrats passed the Great Society legislaltion and the War on Poverty. The WoP alone cost $6.6 trillion over the next thirty years, failed utterly in it's stated goal of reducing poverty, and ended in a morass of Democratic Party waste, fraud, and corruption. Two years ago, the federal debt passed the $9 trillion mark, and almost exactly three-quarters, …

Posted to The Only Road Out of Crisis

I love reading Sirota's stuff. The gentleman is a perfect idiot. The 1918 flu pandemic was the worst in history, killing 50 million worldwide. And predating "lax anti-trust enforcement and corporate welfare", "global agribusiness", and "factory farming". I defy you to explain how "overuse of antibiotics" can possibly "increase the possibility of diseases like swine flu", since swine flu is a virus and antibiotics have no effect on viruses. While you are at it, document all the bad effects of "overuse of antibiotics" in this context. Your left thumbnail will be entirely adequate for this purpose. Swine/bird/human flu shifts and mutates …

Posted to Piggish Capitalism

The Geneva Conventions promulgated a set of actions and behaviors to make wars more humane: organized military formations, recognizable uniforms and insignia, limits on certain weapons, etc. Governments that signed and observed the Geneva Conventions could expect humane treatment for its personnel, including its personnel held captive. Any person or any nation violating the Geneva Conventions removes themselves from consideration for protection under the Genva Conventions. Thus, during the Battle of the Bulge, Germans speaking English and dressed in American uniforms infiltrated American lines to cause disruptions. When they were caught, they were summarily shot and no one had cause for …

Posted to The Psychologists of Torture

Paul - I appreciate your philosophy, but you need to re-evaluate your take on who spent what:

That�s when the next Depression starts. Bush started the process by 8 years of insane spending, Obama will not be upstaged, and there it is�

You have to go back a bit to get the full story. The Democrats regularly complain that President Reagan increased the national debt, but as always, the Democrats are lying. According to the Washington Post, LBJ's War on Poverty cost $6.6 trillion over a thirty year period; that is an average of $220 billion per year. Do the math …

Posted to The Meltdown Goes Global

Don't build your house on a foundation of sand, and don't write your article based on Democratic Party prevarication points. Moberg's first paragraph:

Only a year ago, the United States seemed likely to be the main victim of its own bursting housing bubble and financial crisis. Now the American collapse has deepened�and spread worldwide.

Well, no, that is not what happened at all. In the first place, one year ago the markets were down only slightly in the USA, less than 10%, but much more among our major trading partners. You might argue that the economic downturn spread to the USA …

Posted to The Meltdown Goes Global

Dr. Cornelius - I take it you are not a medical doctor. Marxist professor? Figures. "Capitalist" is a Marxist term and is grossly inadequate to describe anything in contemporary economics and politics. The proper term is "free-market, rule-of-law democracy", but that is awkward, and "capitalist" is used as long as we know what we are talking about, as Paul does. But you are using the term "capitalist" as Marx would use it, and consequently you and Paul are talking past one another. For instance, Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Dynegy, Global Crossing, and Qwest were cited by Democrats as failures of "capitalism". But …

Posted to The Meltdown Goes Global

Dr. Cornelius - Besides that, your analogy is silly.

Posted to The Meltdown Goes Global

Jack - With all respect, it will help if you address specific remarks to specific people. It was not clear that your first post was addressed to Moberg, and I found your position confusing. That said, I am becoming more and more concerned by many references to, as you say, "a typical boom and bust cycle." This is old, outdated talk that is used up to prop up old, outdated thinking. For example, tell me which of the bust cycles since the end of WWII were "typical". We had twenty years of steady economic growth from 1945 to 1965, fostered by …

Posted to The Meltdown Goes Global

Jack - Etiquette no, effectiveness yes. Earlier, you professed that you "cannot figure out how you (Paul) might have misunderstood me (Jack)". This is getting to be a habit around here. I absolutely do not understand how you might interpret anything I said as indicating you might be "some sort of old lefty ." I neither said nor considered that. Be that as it may ... I appreciate your insights from the 1980s era, and confess to be envious of your opportunity to see things from the inside. I was in Saudi Arabia at the time. Even from there, I always …

Posted to The Meltdown Goes Global

I am sure that I can understand that one bankruptcy involving a mortgage would be expensive for the mortgagor and the mortgagee. $10;000? And if the house in question had lost value (28% was the national average recently, probably more by now). $50,000? That would be $60,000 total lost on one house. Multiply that by one million houses and that is $60 billion. Every story of a failed bank or a failing bank lists mortgages as the primary cause of trouble for the banks. Rarely, but sometimes, credit card debt is listed as a secondary cause. I have never seen a …

Posted to Let’s Expose the Poster Boys of Greed

I have an immediate solution to all our economic problems. The Federal Debt was approaching $9 trillion at the end of 2006. LBJ's War on Poverty cost $6.6 trillion over a thirty year period, and was a complete, total, absolute waste. The poverty rate was the same in 1995 as in 1965, and the WoP was ended because of fraud, waste, and lack of positive results. Moreover, the social costs (broken families, crime, drugs, prisons) were probably as great as the direct cost to the Treasury. [DEMONICRATS complain bitterly that President Reagan increased the national debt, but the total increase in …

Posted to A Spectre is Haunting America

WTH - Hello again.

Long time, but how did your enthusiasm for the economic conditions pay off last year? I did my best to warn you, but still not too late to go for the gold.

I'm afraid you will have to be more specific. You certainly did not warn me about Obama, it was I who warned you about Him. My comments to you on Obama include: "God help us all if Obama brings his tender Socialist ministrations to the economy." ObaMarxist and theDEMONICRATS' Mortgage Follies are the only things that have happened in this economy, $50 trillion and …

Posted to A Spectre is Haunting America

Mr. Sanders - Do you really think that "deregulation" has cost us so much? If so, can you identify $1 million in costs that can specifically be identified and traced back to "deregulation"? $1 million is a modest amount in the current economic environment, so surely you can identify an instance to demonstrate your contention. Now, the current crisis is directly traced to the Democratic Party, President Carter, and the Community Reinvestment Act 1977, and the changes made by President Clinton to the CRA in the early 1990s. Specifically, the Democratic Party made it a matter of law that mortgages be …

Posted to The Failed Prophet

Here we go again. In 1964, over 80% of Black children lived in two-parent family units. Now less than one-third of Black children live with two parents. This is a tremendous change, with devastating social costs in broken families, crime, drug use, and social pathology. What happened? LBJ's Great Society and the War on Poverty (WoP) happened, that's what. The War on Poverty paid poor women to get rid of the men in their lives, and cost $6 trillion over a thirty-year period, until it was terminated as a bad job. Then during the Carter Administration, the Democrats passed the Community …

Posted to It's Not Easy Becoming Green

Ken - It is 1330 CST as I write this. The only election result I have seen was from Dixville Notch, NH, where Zero took sixteen votes and McCain took five votes, out of nineteen registered voters. Regardless, I want to make some comments on some of your absurd takes on the American condition.

... we can make the world a far better place than it is today.

While the world needs to be a better place, your Marxist foolishness won't help. In the last century the number of democracies has increased from about twenty to well over one-hundred …

Posted to Old Dreams, Present Opportunities

Ken - I got it wrong. I regret having misread the election so badly, and apologize for doing so. I certainly agree that Obama's election is a remarkable and positive cultural and social event. I need not repeat my misgivings about his qualifications and ideology at this time, though these would seem to be more important considerations for this office. Congratulations to President Obama.

Posted to Old Dreams, Present Opportunities

Its churches are known for a lively and energetic style of worship. They also tend to be, like Ashcroft, theologically conservative and doctrinaire. Its followers have typically been �born again� as adults and are infused by the Holy Spirit during worship, manifested through dancing or speaking in tongues. They also tend to uphold rigorous traditional moral standards in the face of what they see as a sinful world, believe God�s will is revealed to believers through prayer and signs, insist on the importance of prophecy, and view the Bible as the literal word of God.

Sounds just about like Zero's …

Posted to On a Mission From God

The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair � stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror.

Why, sure. And Marxism is noted for its peace, prosperity, and happiness, if you ignore the millions repressed, imprisoned, and dead from starvation or a gunshot to the back of the head. Unfortunately, Marxism works as poorly, if on a smaller and less deadly scale so far, in the USA as it does …

Posted to Saying “No Deal” to This New Deal

Weatherman members Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans were convicted of transporting 740 pounds of explosives for use in domestic terrorist bombings, and were imprisoned for long terms. Hillary had perfect rebuttals for Zero throughout the long Democratic campaign, but she could not use them. The last act of the Clinton presidency was to pardon a bunch of exceedingly guilty people, including Rosenberg and Evans. Bill shot Hill in the foot, because Hill could not bring up the fact that Weatherman bomber Ayers was a political confederate of Zero, without bringing attention to Bill's pardon of the guilty Rosenberg and Evans. Then …

Posted to Was Hillary’s speech a turning point?

In practical terms, everything in this article is blatant nonsense. The single most interesting piece of blatant nonsense is the accusation that President Bush is "taking broad liberties to subvert the Bill of Rights". But then there is nothing that tells us what the President has done or has tried to do to subvert the Bill of Rights. Perhaps it was the attempt at gun control? Oh, no, wait, that is what the Demonicrats are doing. Maybe it is the restrictions on religious freedom? Well, no, that is the Leftist Demonicrats, led by the ACLU. How about the FISA laws? Wait, …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Moraff - Well, OK, reporter. Report to us why you said that President Bush is "taking broad liberties to subvert the Bill of Rights". That is a very serious charge to make against the President fo the United States. But you treat it as a self-evident throw-away line, and make absolutely no attempt to prove, illustrate, or justify your position. Meanwhile, as I pointed out, the Demonicrats really are trying to subvert the Constitution. And it is all politics. Pelosi supported FISA before she did not support FISA. Obama did not support FISA before he did support FISA. Both of them …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Tim - Let's have a review of the bidding here. Moraff is claiming to be a respected, competent reporter. My point to Moraff was:

Report to us why you said that President Bush is �taking broad liberties to subvert the Bill of Rights�. That is a very serious charge to make against the President of the United States. But you treat it as a self-evident throw-away line, and make absolutely no attempt to prove, illustrate, or justify your position.

So, Moraff replies:

I am, in fact, a registered Independent and an outspoken supporter of gun rights.

Which, of course, …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

WTH - I have been preparing a post for you, so I will just answer your points and make a point of my own. Your point on President Bush President Bush's favorable rating is less than 30% nationwide, but it is 56% in Louisiana.

The poll checked the popularity of President Bush, who got a 56 percent overall favorability rating, higher than in recent national surveys. - July 01, 2008 http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/capital/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1214890809159290.xml&coll=1

But wait a minute. The Marxist rap on President Bush, and the constant theme of the MSMM and the Soros news outlets is that Bush is an evil genius …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Wangle

States in Profile: The State Policy Reference Book (State Policy Research, Inc. 1991) lists Louisiana�s illiteracy rate at 16%, the nation�s worst.

Just out of curiosity, how did you happen to go back nearly two decades to produce a datum that is outdated and is irrelevant to this discussion? But it is not idle curiosity, of course. You have graciously informed (warned) us that you are Marxist. Marxists are, by definition, corrupt and inefficient. This is universal, whether we are discussing a Marxist state or a Marxist individual. The Soviet Union collapsed of corruption and inefficiency. Dan Rather collapsed …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Tim � A Bush rally? A Bush rally would be for Republicans, and, like any pep rally, would be notably lacking in substance and heavy on enthusiasm. So what was it that you expected to learn? When Andrew Jackson was elected President, his followers thronged into the White House and stood on the furniture in muddy boots, the better to see. Some of us have more refined manners now, and we learned the hard way to improve protection of the President; he almost never goes out and mingles. You cannot go to the Annual Gridiron Dinner or a press briefing without …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Wangle -

By saying I'm a Marxist I merely mean that I believe in the fundamental truth of the labor theory of value and that history can be understood in terms of class struggle.

OOOOO-Kay! Let's parse this one. "By saying I'm a Marxist I merely mean ... " You do not "merely" mean a goddam thing. Marx set out to destroy Western civiliazation and Judeo-Christian historical values, and substitute a somewhat unoriginal and utterly unproven master system that has never worked in general or in particular, in macro- or in micro-, in broad scope or detailed item. The 100 …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Sheesh, Wangle, sometimes you Marxists are as dumb as dog shit. This is in response to your sequential posts starting at Aug 25, 2008 at 10:14 AM. I am well aware that some people of education, culture, and good intent embrace Marxism; that is not in question. The question is: why do they persist in their delusion when all results of all Marxist experiments have resulted in failure, disaster, or catastrophe, depending upon to what degree Marxism is followed? Why do they credit Marxism with successes in which Marxism played no role? Why do they deny Marxism's failures way past the …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Wangle - As a self-confessed Marxist, you can't get any more ridiculous than you are. OBAMA 2008 - Because THIS time, Marxism might work! Listen, dim bulb, the American Constitution does work. We do not need to change, supplement, or reverse it with a foreign philosophy that has never worked. So, why do you refuse to answer my questions and fall back on Marxist propaganda for the solution to all problems? Vonnegut, indeed! Why not quote dos Passos or Kahlo or Marx if you are searching for irrelevant Marxist nonsense?

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Wangle -

Finally read the first paragraph and realized that was a Vonnegut speech and not my own words?

For some reason you assume I do not know that Vonnegut is Marxist, or who Eugene Debs was. Stupid of you. I am well aware of the Wobblies, and some of the personalities they ginned up in their minor footnote in the American labor movement. So, why are you so focused on Debs? Haywood and Flynn both died in the Soviet Union, and Flynn was given a state funeral by her Marxist masters in Moscow. So, why Debs? The IWW was …

Posted to Feeding the Beast

Oh, come now. If "amass(ing) not a single significant accomplishment" makes one ineligible for high national office, what the hell is Zero doing at the head of the Demonicrat Party? I presume Zero has to find someone to run with Himself, but the potential running mates are taking themselves out, voluntarily and involuntarily, at an alarming rate. Maybe they know something? A couple of weeks ago, the buzz was that a Republican female was being considered, I don't remember her name. But at the rate Zero is going, he may have to select a Whig or a Tory or a Know …

Posted to Will Obama Wave Bayh Bye to the White House?

Wow! An expose of a Christialn mediator dealing with opposing viewpoints, in the climatololgy field, no less. And he has also mediated in political and labor disputes. This is terrible. Maybe we ought to take it to the Supreme Court. Or we could just go back to sleep. Z-Z-Z-Z.

Posted to Unholy Allies

Thomas P. Christie is a dedicated public servant, a patriot, an extremely effective administrator, and an honorable American. Not the Marxist idiot type that is normally featured in ITT, but we thank you for the recognition. And yet this article did not get around to mentioning Christie's greatest single contribution to America. John Boyd was a wild man, a fighter pilot, a warrior, a scholar, and a philosopher. Boyd changed the art of war, and Christie provided vital help in some of Boyd's greatest achievements. While in the Air Force as a flight instructor, Boyd developed mathematical tools that proved American …

Posted to All Guns, No Butter

Progressive. That has a nice positive ring to it. The Progressive movement in the United States was active in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Republican President Teddy Roosevelt was a leading Progressive reformer. Some of the adherents of Progressivism had unsavory aspects, such as racism and euthanasia. Communists became active in the United States about this time, but no one wanted anything to do with Communists, particularly after the murders and starvation in Ukrania and Russia starting in the 1920s. Communists ran for office in the United States, but no one would vote for them. The Communists changed their name …

Posted to Does a Nationwide 'Progressive Movement' Actually Exist?

Gavin - It is easy to make fun of the ridiulous. Even so, that is surely one of the funniest things I have ever heard in my life.

Posted to In Defense of the '60s

Sirota - Good! As in Good God, this is the dumbest thing I have ever read! The states with the highest union membership are doing the worst economically. The industries with high union membership are collapsing: Toyota (non-union) recently surpassed GM (union) as the world's largest car manufacturer. And you want to increase the burden on unionized industries by increasing wages and increasing regulation and work restrictions? That is no way to increase productivity, and increasing productivity is the only way we can make the world a better place, for workers and for everyone. Universal union membership in the USA will …

Posted to Six Little Words To Fix America's Wage Crisis

Well, not all newspapers are doing poorly and not all TV news is doing well. The dividing line between media outlets that do well and those that do poorly is quite distinct; the further Left the outlet, the worse it does. The NYT, once one of the most respected newspapers in the world, has turned itself into an outlet for Marxist propaganda aimed at destabilizing the United States Republic and it's values. Consequently, the NYT, it's circulation, and it's economic value are plummeting. Who the hell is going to pay to read anti-American propaganda? The Daily Worker is not doing so …

Posted to Bad Days for Newsrooms — and Democracy

The right to weapons for self-defense is a bourgeois value. All of the items in the Bill of Rights are bourgeois values. Marxists set out to destroy bourgeois values lo, these many years ago. Marxists in the USA demand our weapons, establish speech codes, promote multiculturalism, create restrictions on the Christian religion (but usually not on other religions) precisely because our freedoms are a threat to the Socialist utopia they hope to establish. You can bet your ass the more Socialists whine, the more threatened they are by the freedoms they are whining about. But every single Socialist experiment has ended …

Posted to Gun-toters in La-La Land

Al -

A more likely reason is that shrill anti-gun fanatics (like Ms. Washington) have hijacked the issue.

And why do you suppose that they would want to do that? People like Ms. Washington also want to restrict the free expression of the Christian religion, as the ACLU does, and restrict our freedom of speech, as Bill Moyers does in another ITT article this week. These people are called Socialists, and they have been attacking American values for nearly a century. They have also tried to win political office, with poor results, here in America. When they could not win …

Posted to Gun-toters in La-La Land

WTH - You are correct, we agree on most things except the economy. Economic arguments are meaningless to you because of your personal experience in your home state. But look, you live in a relatively high-tax state, a state without Right-to-Work laws, and a state that routinely elects corrupt Democratic machine politicians. And you wonder why your economy is bad? I understand that Prius was going to build a new automobile manufacturing facility in California, but decided that the California tax structure and regulatory environment made the project not worthwhile. So, Prius is going to Mississippi. If you can't go to …

Posted to Gun-toters in La-La Land

Alan, Jon - The Vietnam War was started by a Democrat, continued and escalated by a Democrat, and ended by a Republican. The Democrats found that intolerable and unforgivable, and destroyed the Republican, who was criminally and politically less culpable than either Kennedy, who stole the 1960 election and damn near got us in a nuclear war, and Johnson, who pissed away $6 trillion (six trillion dollars) on the War on Poverty Socialist experiment that resulted in the near-total destruction of black family life in the United States for generations. So, it is with some amusement that I observe the continuing …

Posted to Earth to Ken Brociner

Jon B - Well, let's have a review of the bidding. In our previous correspondence, in "The American Left: What Progressives Can Learn From Obama" article, I reported that Blondemike had threatened to shoot me, among other things, and I said, more or less, that you Socialists are all nucking futz. Then you declared that my position and Blondemike's position were morally equivalent and accused me, in the form of a question, of being wrong based on "Two wrongs make a right?". So, Socialist revolutions always attack and kill those who oppose them and a lot of innocent by-standers besides. You …

Posted to Earth to Ken Brociner

Jon B - Cute. Irrelevant. You falsely accused me of being disrespectful (truth is a defense) and now you are way off-topic, thus violating the only two guidelines given for this site. Would you care to address the issues raised in this discussion? Almost certainly not, but I continue to try. My observation is that Socialist Revolutions are never led or supported by the workers who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the Revolution. Socialist Revolutions are led by militant elitists, who kill off the workers who do not appreciate the efforts of the elitists on their behalf. Can you …

Posted to Earth to Ken Brociner

Yo Ken - You withdrew from our excellent discussion on a previous thread, to our mutual detriment, but I am intrigued by some of your comments here. I note that democratic political entities that encourage discussion and dissent tend to have fierce internal conflicts before they go out and stomp whomever and whatever needs to be stomped. Israel is the leading practitioner of this dynamic, with the United States as a distant but capable second. This process, often thought of as inefficient, is actually a key component of successful democracies throughout the world. I therefore think the current fierce discussions within …

Posted to What Progressives Can Learn from Obama

Greg - I have six E-mails that you have posted messages this afternoon, but only two actual posts are now on this website. I am most interested in your third post and this in particular:

"Progressive" is one of those fun words that is inherently neutral of content but has an implied meaning that we can argue over. I mean progressive means being in favor of progress, right? But progress toward what? That is the real question. So to some people the industrial revolution was progress and progressive. We can progress toward the cliff and our doom, or we can progress …

Posted to What Progressives Can Learn from Obama

Jon B - I am shocked - shocked! - that you find me insulting and that you are insulted. I was not insulted when Blondemike (aka Michael P. Hardesty) wanted me to send him my address so he could beat me up. I was not insulted when he wanted to shoot me with his genuine .357 mag. I was not insulted when Maria wished me dead, but Maria had the good grace to edit the comment out. All right here on ITT. Far from being insulted, I was amused and bemused by the irrational and violent tone of the anti-war (anti-violence?) …

Posted to What Progressives Can Learn from Obama

I am surprised that Sheppard is still referring to "global warming". The new phrase is "climate change", and "climate change" is the current usage by both Al Gore and Barack Obama. "Global warming" is as outdated as Y2K. There has been no net global warming since 1998, and there has been emphatic global cooling for the last eighteen months, co-existent with a sudden lack of sunspot activity. Since global cooling inconsiderately and unaccountably does not fit into Gore's specious hypothesis on global warming, Gore could not very well continue pretending things were getting warmer when the thermometer was saying that it …

Posted to A Textbook Case

I have no sympathy for the estrogen or melanin arguments that have dominated the Dimocratic campaign to date. Who cares? But I cannot help but note that the Soros interests have hijacked the political process in order to promote their candidate Obama. How else could a nobody from nowhere suddenly become an international phenomenon with millions of dollars of political backing? Hillary may not have been the ideal candidate because of her baggage, but how does Obama, with no baggage, or resume, or history, suddenly spring from nowhere? I don't suppose even-handedness is a realistic possibility, much less a realistic ideal, …

Posted to Damned If Feminine, Damned If Feminist

Wolf - You think charisma is a good quality in political candidates? Perhaps charisma is a good quality in con artists and used car salesmen, but it is not a good quality in political candidates. JFK had charisma and lied about the missile gap, and had little else to recommend him, and he still needed his father's money to steal the 1960 election in Chicago. The results were near catastrophic. Krushchev and Kennedy had a summit, and Krushchev decided that Kennedy was weak and irresolute, which led directly to the Cuban missile crisis when we almost got involved in a nuclear …

Posted to Damned If Feminine, Damned If Feminist

Since you have to provide identification to drive a vehicle or cash a check, it would not seem to be too burdensome to provide identification when voting. But that is not what the Leftists are up to. They have whined constantly about the close Bush win in year 2000, but that is irrelevant now. The new voter fraud issue is Obama's theft of the Democratic nomination from Hillary. There is no way a nobody from nowhere could hijack a presidential nomination without Soros' money and political organization. But that is exactly what we have seen happen.

Posted to The Right's New Attack on Voters

In the early years of this Republic, Europe took a dim view of everything about the Western Hemisphere:

" ... due chiefly to atmospheric conditions, in particular excessive humidity, all living things in the Americas were not only inferior to those found in Europe but also in a condition of decline." - James Ceaser, "A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism," >Public Interest (Summer 2003). http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/951675/posts

The European attitude, similar to that expressed above, has a very long history, as documented by Ceaser and others. So, taking a dim view of the Western Hemisphere in general and the United States in particular has …

Posted to Does the E.U. Hate You?

President Reagan predicted, worked for, and accomplished the collapse of the Soviet Union, monumentally assisted by the Soviet Socialists' incompetence and inefficiency. American Socialists ridiculed, obfuscated, and denied President Reagan's accomplishments, as is their wont. Now Sirota is looking backward to how the Socialists can stop the war, but the war is over. Al-Qa'eda is defeated in Iraq. Mookie is defeated in Sadr City and Basra. The Iranis have failed in their effort to subvert Iraqi democracy. And the American Socialists ridicule, obfuscate, and deny President Bush's accomplishments. The Socialists complain bitterly about the "costs" of Afghanistan/Iraq, but in real figures …

Posted to Why Democrats Won’t Stop the War

WTH - Thanx for the input. In real terms, the effects of inflation are minimal, as everything in our economy is denominated in dollars. The actual price rises are in fuel and food. The Democrats and Socialists have resolutely refused to tap American fuel sources (East, West, and South coasts, ANWR, and more coal than anybody else), creating artificial shortages that have contributed mightily to the costs of energy. And the shifting of food supplies to fuel production has contributed mightily to worldwide shortages of food. I am told that the corn to provide 25 gallons of ethanol would feed a …

Posted to Why Democrats Won’t Stop the War

While the 1972 campaign had the potential (if McGovern gone on to defeat Nixon) to radically transform American society while also having significant international impact, an Obama victory in 2008 would lead to important reforms in the years ahead.

Well, yes, but back in the real world McGovern was crushed in the popular vote and in the Electoral College, meaning that the great majority of the American people rejected McGovern's Leftist views, regardless of Brociner's admiration for those views. Now, stop and consider: When was the last time an overt leftist was elected to the office of President? Exactly never, of …

Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change

Duplicate post withdrawn.

Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change

Ken -

You seem to relish the opportunity to bait leftists.

bait, verb To torment with persistent insult or ridicule: badger, bullyrag, heckle, hector, hound, taunt. Informal needle, ride. Idioms: wave the red flag in front of the bull. See treat well/treat badly/treat. To disturb by repeated attacks: annoy, bedevil, beleaguer, beset, harass, harry, pester, plague, tease, torment, worry. See feelings, pain/pleasure. To excite (another) by exposing something desirable while keeping it out of reach: tantalize, tease. See excite/bore/interest.

I have neither tormented, nor insulted, nor ridiculed, nor bullyragged you, so what are you going on about? Is ITT …

Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change

Ken -

The magnitude of McGovern�s loss to Nixon in 1972 was due to a wide variety of factors - many of which had nothing to do with McGovern�s progressive politics.

Why, sure! The Soviet Union collapsed as a result of Socialist corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence, in addition to Marx�s faulty philosophy, and I have no trouble attributing McGovern's collapse to additional factors characteristics of McGovern's Socialist ideology. Ditto Dukakis. Ditto Mondale. Ditto Gore. Ditto Kerry. Did you actually read what I wrote? Kerry is the classic case of moral corruption combined with Socialist ideology. Kerry voted against the Gulf …

Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change

Totsuka - I have been in project management most of my life. All projects go through six phases: 1. Enthusiasm. 2. Alarm. 3. Panic. 4. Search for the Guilty. 5. Punishment of the Innocent. 6. Praise and Honor for the Uninvolved. The Enthusiasm phase for Iraq began in 1998 when the United States Congress (100% of the Senate and almost 90% of the House) voted for the Iraq Liberation Act 1998 and President Clinton signed it into law. Among the many listed reasons for the Iraq Liberation Act was that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction (MWD). Senators Kennedy, Rockefeller, Biden, …

Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change

Now that Sen. Barack Obama has taken care of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ...

Or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has taken care of Sen. Barack Obama. Whatever.

Posted to Obama Not Feelin’ the Love from Smiley

U.S. Media Trivializes Campaign 2008

Naaaah. The candidates have trivialized themselves. I thought John Kerry was the least accomplished major party candidate in history in 2004, and damned if the Dims didn't come up with their final three who were even less accomplished candidates in 2008. Do you really think that simultaneously running as a war hero with faked credentials and an anti-war hero with a solid gold record of traitorous talk against your own country qualifies you to be president? Neither race, nor gender, nor the dirty tricks BO and Hill are playing on each other are really significant in …

Posted to U.S. Media Trivializes Campaign 2008

I have never understood why the term �socialist� gets spat out like a wad of snot by people.

How about a wad of coagulated blood? Well, let me try to explain it to you in words of one syllable, appropriate to your level of comprehension. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) killed some 40 million innocent people while establishing their socialist utopia, which collapsed from corruption and inefficiency. Communist China starved some thirty million of their own people while establishing their version of socialism, and then killed more, including some of my relatives, in the Cultural Revolution and …

Posted to U.S. Media Trivializes Campaign 2008

The New York Senator’s last-ditch efforts to win the Democratic nomination could rely on the “Race Chasm” and the trampling of democracy.

Say, what? The whole idea of superdelegates was designed and intended to trample democracy. Left to their own devices, the Democratic Party comes up with some real lulus when it comes to picking presidential candidates; after the McGovern disaster in 1972, the superdelegates were to make sure the party did not stray so far into blatant Socialist orthodoxy that the Party would again be humiliated. The plan did not work too well: Carter, Mondale, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and …

Posted to The Clinton Firewall

Socialists say the damnedest things. You know, of course, that LBJ's welfare program in the Great Society cost $6 trillion, and the only result was the near total destruction of Black family life in the United States. Destruction of families and morality are principles of Marxism, and it worked just as you planned. So what are you bitching about now?

Posted to Debt: Our 9 Trillion Pound Gorilla

Hope in the Time of NAFTA?

Hope? You sound like that vacuous idiot running for president. A few facts are much more to the point than all the hopes of Osama, Obama, and Bonnie and Clod. NAFTA passed in 1993, sponsored by Republicans and endorsed by President Clinton and some Democrats in Congress, and, more particularly, by Clinton�s wife on numerous occasions. Economists, the people who study markets, jobs, and economic growth, are virtually unanimous that free trade improves everyone�s economic well-being in the aggregate. Manufacturing employment rose for five years after NAFTA, stabilized for two years, and only started down …

Posted to Hope in the Time of NAFTA

The term �progressive� has evolved a great deal over the past 35 years.

Well, yes, and it evolved even more in the years before that. Within the last century, in the USA, the Communists could not get themselves elected during the Great Depression, so they began calling themselves Socialists. The Socialists could not get themselves elected, so they began calling themselves Progressives, hijacking a perfectly honorable name (except for the racist and eugenic aspects) for their Leftist objectives. The Progressives could not get themselves elected, so they began calling themselves Liberals, hijacking another perfectly honorable name for their Leftist objectives. …

Posted to Liberals, Progressives and the Left

MM - So, if Fascism and Communism are the two sides of the capitalist coin, how do you account for the collapse of the Soviet Union into corruption, inefficiency, and bankruptcy, while the United States staggers from triumph to triumph? This despite the Sinisteres' decades-long predictions and insistence that the USA is "failing". In fact, Fascism and Communism are each collectivist and totalitarian, while American democratic capitalism is uniquely individualist and thrives in a (relatively) free environment, both in theory (the Constitution of the United States) and in practice. The Sinisteres want the USA to fail, but so far, no luck. …

Posted to Liberals, Progressives and the Left

Sirota's article is very insightful, and provides an important piece of the big puzzle. Class warfare would seem to be an appropriate battlefield for two Marxist class warriors. A different piece of the puzzle that Sirota does not address is the nature of the debate within the two parties: * Clinton and Obama have very similar views on the important policies: out of Iraq and into populist Socialist economics. But the Democratic Party's long absorption with identity politics is revealed to be a fraud. Identity politics was the tool of party bosses to organize and marginalize the various tribes to their …

Posted to The Democrats' Class War

Slow Eddie - Fast Eddie you are not.

There is no difference between the two parties.

The most mild and most predjudicially jaundiced glimpse of the "two parties" reveals just how fatuous your observation is: * Terrorists attacked us multiple times during the Clinton administration: Somalia, the African embassies, USS Cole, WTC I, etc. We made no meaningful response to these multiple attacks, and bin Laden was convinced that the USA would not defend itself, hence 09/11. After Bush's vigorous response to 09/11in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have not been attacked again. Al-Qa'eda has substantially destroyed its credibility and effectiveness …

Posted to The Democrats' Class War

WTH - I have long been amused and bemused by your nonsensical statements on the economy and on politics. You seem to think that everything that happens is bad, all these bad things are the politicians' fault, and the politicians do all these bad things for the worst possible reasons. All of your assumptions are wrong. For example:

On economic issues both parties are under the influence of big money through lobbyists. George H.W. Bush initiated NAFTA and Clinton pushed it through.

During the Great Depression, we deliberately restricted trade in an attempt to save American jobs, and all we accomplished …

Posted to The Democrats' Class War

Eddie -

I do plod on and tromp through the muck and mire,until I get tired and have to rest.I pick myself up and try to make sense of what is going on around me.I like eheller try to get information from all sides and humbly try to make sense of what I see,hear,and read.I am not a great thinker and yes I can be slow,but I do my best.

Eddie, you are far to modest.

Is (sic) bush/cheney (sic) being held accountable for an illegal war?

George Orwell was talking about you and people like you when he said:

…

Posted to The Democrats' Class War

Jon B -

"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: No ordinary man could be such a fool." Orwell, when he wrote that in 1945, was referring to a few in Britain that thought the Americans entering the Second World War were doing it to suppress an English revolution rather than fight the Germans. He was talking about British conspiracy theorists, that's all. But taking quotes out of context and getting caught makes scorp the big fool, as if he hasn't proved this repeatedly before.

Ummm, no, as a matter of fact. That is rich, …

Posted to The Democrats' Class War

Jon B - You have gone from uncomprehending to incoherent. Why don't you take some time and actually read what Orwell had to say in his essay, Notes on Nationalism? You would learn many wonderful things and save yourself from further embarrassment.

So what English revolution was to be crushed by the US? It was nothing but conspiracy theory to think that the US was entering the war in Europe for that reason particularly as the US was aiding Britain prior to actually declaring war on Germany.

Like all conspiracy theories, this one is nonsense. But Orwell clearly identified this …

Posted to The Democrats' Class War

Jon B -

First, as usual you have completely changed the subject of the original subject of David Sirota. I keep forgetting about your classic tactic of blatant essayist red herring.

Jon B, sometimes you are as dumb as a turnip. The title of Sirota's article is, "The Democrats' Class War". The whole article is about Clinton and Obama saying one thing and doing another, and reversing positions, in dealing with those they perceive to be the lower classes. WTH introduced the unemployment aspect to the discussion. Clinton, Obama, Sirota, and you accept the class nature of the current political …

Posted to The Democrats' Class War

mwalimu -

Let's call it TeamAmerica.

Naaaah. Call it Team Socialist. That would be more appropriate for a team led by Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. Even at the height of the Great Depression, with its devastating social and economic upheavals, the American people were too smart to embrace Socialism. You Socialists want to overturn our Constitution (freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, right to keep and bear arms), the very things that have made our country strong, and install your own genocidal Socialism (USSR) or suicidal Socialism (EUSSR). I find it mildly disturbing that you have attracted …

Posted to The Democrats' Class War

The NIE, in an abrupt reversal of the U.S. intelligence community�s previous best guess, stated that Iran has not had an active program for building the bomb since 2003. A mild euphoria gripped Washington, except the White House where spokespeople were sheepish, and the right-wing think tanks where Iran hawks muttered darkly about State Department derailment of the Bush-Cheney agenda. Within two weeks, however, the euphoria wore off, and the old bipartisan consensus�Iran is a threat�reemerged.

Well, there was certainly a lot of muttering on many sides. The �abrupt reversal� from previous intel estimates did attract serious attention. But interestingly …

Posted to The Next President's Iran Dilemma

As always, ITT publishes stuff and leaves out the most interesting parts. Al-Rawi has been accused of association with al-Qa'eda, aiding terrorists in moving between Britain and Pakistan, concealing terrorists in Britain, and moving funds in support of al-Qa'eda operations. Al-Rawi's return to Britain followed an extradition request by Britain, where he was wanted on terrorist charges, and which followed negotiations between Britain and the USA to assure that adequate security safeguards were in place for al-Rawi in Britain. These charges against al-Rawi are somewhat more serious than having a "suspicious" "common store-bought battery charger" in his luggage. My horseback estimate …

Posted to Extraordinary Rendition on Trial

Change, like hope, is a word in which people can make an emotional investment without requiring thought or work. Rational adults do not waste time with emotionally charged nullities. A big chunk of our population has a child-like faith that they can wish upon a rock star, who will take care of them without effort on their part. So, why are so many Demonicrats in a state of arrested development?

Posted to Mr./Ms. Change Goes to Washington

The United States of America is a Federal Republic, and is defined as such in the Constitution. The Founders feared the tyranny of raw democracy, and built in restraints that protect minorities, minority viewpoints, and electoral procedures, and that also balance the contending forces. The Senate and the Electoral College are the two most visible aspects of our Federal Republic. Each state, large and small, California and Rhode Island, has two Senators and the Senate has important functions to perform, on the rare occasions it chooses to perform them. This keeps a few large states from dominating many small states, and …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

Damian - Kennedy's theft of the 1960 Presidential election and Johnson's theft of his first Senate term are well documented. The only documentation of President Bush's 2000 election is by the Supremes, the highest court in the land. That is not quite the same as the squalid and corrupt Dimocratic practice, regardless of the Dims braying and bleating about year 2000.

... betcha didn�t know that certain Ohio Republicans are going to jail over that election ...

In fact, I spent considerable time researching that very question back a couple of years ago. I am certainly not going to …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

Oh, come now, Damian, don't be such a Sinisturd. RFK, Jr.'s article in Rolling Stone is "impeccably sourced", while the Supreme's decision in 2000 is evidence of electoral theft? Meanwhile, the Sinister MSM overlooked or ignored massive voter fraud in Ohio? That would be highly untypical; the MSM is more likely to perpetrate voter fraud, as CBS attempted to do in forging the Bush ANG records. It does not occur to you that the Sinister hysteria in Ohio did not merit serious consideration, not even by your media allies? As I pointed out, Kathleen Dreamer is identified as both a Republican …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

Modesto - I "will find a fist in (my) mouth one day"? What is with you Sinisteres and violence? Why do you not prefer reasoned (or unreasoned, as you often do) debate? I have been threatened with death, beheading, assault, and the wish for my death on this site, always by Sinisteres. I can't say it has never happened, but I certainly have never seen any physical threats to anyone by any Dexter. The only thing I will say is that I am perfectly willing and able to defend myself from physical and verbal assault. The irony is that you Sinisteres …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

Damian -

... Dan Rather�s reporting was accurate.

Let's see if I understand this correctly: ABC fired Dan Rather and Mary Mapes for reporting the news accurately. Not likely. Not only would reporting the news accurately be a first for ABC, you are a prime example of why Sinisteres are widely regarded as insane little dumbshits.

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

LXXI. The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. - Rubaiyat, Omar the Tent Maker

My apologies to ABC and to ITT readers. I seldom watch network television, as they are all a bunch of Sinister ideologues in precipitous moral and financial decline. (For that matter, I have never in my life listened to Limbaugh, Hannity, or O'Reilly.) So, can all your Tears wash out the 100 million dead victims of Communism? No. How about …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

JJ -

I'm lucky, I' a liberal in a liberal state; if you are contrary to your State' prevailing ideology, the EC makes your vote pointless.

Ignorance is bliss. As a self-confessed "liberal in a liberal state", you also display all the characteristics of the Sinister education you suffered: historical ignorance and utter lack of logic.

The EC was one of a few provisions put in the Constitution to coerce the southern states to ratify it - so was counting most black people as 3/5 of a person and we eventually got rid of that disgrace.

I absolutely defy …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

Damian -

... I have heard almost everything you have said in this thread before, and almost all of it has come from partisan hacks, so you can understand why someone who pays attention to the media would be confused.

Well, you should be well qualified to recognize a partisan hack if you saw one, including the Sinister media, but I somehow doubt that you do. Like this:

You should ask the sweatshop workers in China what they think of their economic growth.

Very shortly before Nixon went to China for the express purpose of opening the Chinese …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

Damian - Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, described human cognitive development as a series of stages. In the Pre-Operational stage of early childhood, youngsters from the ages of about two years to about seven years exhibit certain characteristic communication modes, including what Piaget termed "Egocentrism". Children at this level tend to talk past one another, with little reference to or understanding of what the other says or means. Talking to a Sinstere is sort of like talking to a two year old, but at a different, more sinister, "stage" of development, if I may stretch Piaget's organizational scheme. The most basic …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

Damian -

I never advocated or showed any tolerance of robbery, genocide, or any other crimes, and you fucking know it.

Well, not exactly. You advocate every Sinister position and repeat every Sinister propaganda in contemporary American politics. Have you forgotten that a central premise of Marxism holds that bourgeois morality must be destroyed and that any lie is justified to effect that destruction? So, you practice dishonesty, but not the criminal corollaries that eventuate as a result of your Sinister philosophy? You expect me to believe that? Couldn’t you just acknowledge that “mistakes were made” as Krushchev did, talking …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

Damian -

... betcha didn't know that certain Ohio Republicans (plural) are going to jail over that election ...

Ever since I suggested that Republicans were just as guilty as Democrats of election fraud ...

You are right. And I still don't know that. The site you provided still does not work, and the only Republican(?) (singular) cited is still identified with different party labels on different sites, and at any rate she did not have any effect on the outcome of any election; her crime was cutting corners in a recount verification. Do you have a legitimate …

Posted to Dropping Out of Electoral College

"Why Is Yazan Sawalha in Prison?" My horseback estimate is that he is a Palestinian terrorist. Israeli Intelligence is the best in the world, unlike our own stumblefart Sinister-infiltrated Intelligence services. The Israelis do not make many mistakes when trying to identify the people who are trying to kill them. Asking the Israelis to clean up after themselves when taking down a terrorist is a bit much. Tell the Palestinians to quit firing rockets into Israel, and the Israelis will not have any terrorists to go after.

Posted to Why Is Yazan Sawalha in Prison?

Welcome back, Natalie. Your incisive comments on Kelo are exactly right. Why would Fortunato argue that the Leftist Supremes' decision in favor of stealing poor peoples' property be the fault of Conservatives? Leftists like Fortunato generally are clueless, but this is ridiculous. Note, too, that Fortunato cited six unanimous(!) decisions in his attempt to prove that Conservatives are stomping all over the rights of the common man: * Whren v. United States, 1996 * Los Angeles County v. Rettele, 2006 * United States v. Grubbs, 2006 * Long Island Care at Home Ltd. v. Coke, 2007 * DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno, …

Posted to Supreme Court Inc.

Poor Zizek. His slavish devotion to his impossible Marxist dream has addled his brain, not to mention that it has muddled his thinking. But I suppose Zizek's muddled thoughts are no greater or less than Marx's own muddled thoughts. But that is no excuse, of course. Consider: There has been an irregular but inexorable progression from the primitive to the current advanced state of personal freedom and economic development. If the current situation is not perfect, neither has it terminated. Democracy, the rule of law, and free-market capitalism have contributed to this advance, and there is no end in sight. And …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

In Russia, after the collapse of Communism, the government adopted �shock therapy� and threw itself directly into democracy and the fast track to capitalism�with economic bankruptcy as the result. (There are good reasons to be modestly paranoid here: Were the Western economic advisers to President Boris Yeltsin who proposed this approach really as innocent as they appeared? Or were they serving U.S. strategic interests by weakening Russia economically?)

Zizek is not "modestly paranoid", he is big time bonkers. Russia was already bankrupt; that is why it collapsed. "U.S. strategic interests" required Russia to survive and prosper. We definitely did not …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Good take, Louis. You might point out that Lenin strained mightily to fit medieval Russia into Marx's philosophical industrial economy model. The industrial world had developed over a period of several centuries when Marx made his observations, positing that industrial workers would take control of their own futures. Marx's scientific socialism "proved" that history was inexorably moving toward a socialist Utopia, and that the state would wither away. The advanced state of capitalism was necessary to make workers aware of their exploitation, and that in turn was a necessary step toward Socialism. So, how did Russia get from a medieval past …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Jon B - I recall distinctly reading about a job seeker in year 2000. This young man was a college graduate, age 24, and was desperate to find work. The only entry on his resume was as CEO of a multi-million dollar dot.com start-up which had never made any money and which had crashed when the NASDAQ fell by 50% in Clinton's last year as President. Try to keep the young man's story in mind as you read this. Sorry to take so long to respond. It took a while to quit laughing at your ridiculous assertions and then to decide …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Duplicate material deleted.

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Zimcan - Your idea is interesting, but why apply it to China, for gosh sakes? Egypt had a great civilization long before China. I am sure we can learn much from Egypt. And just what is it that you wish to learn from China? Confucius taught a moral and ethical system that worked quite well until it was corrupted by the warlords and Sinisteres, who brought war and death and destruction to China. Confucius' teachings are now regarded as an impediment to modernization, that is to say, Confucius would frown on the modern Communists, who killed and starved upwards of 30 …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Jon B - You shitting me, boy? Most of your quotes are from Jeremy Rifkin and NYT, blatant Sinisteres and dubitable sources at best and grossly corrupt and inaccurate at worst. How could it be otherwise? Has there ever been a Socialist bureaucracy, such as Rifkin proposes, that did not end up inefficient and corrupt? No, of course not. "The European Dream" is not reality now (Rifkin is projecting and clearly admits this), and will end up the same way as the Soviet dream did after 1918, in more death, more destruction, more inefficiency, and more corruption. .

Lending her support …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Jon B -

And once again for the umpteenth time Scorp thinks I'm a democrat and is wrong.

Naaa. Calling you a Democrat is just a polite way of saying that you are a Marxist, which is the cover Marxists typically use when they are not pretending to be Progressives (!) or Liberals (!!!). Marxists need cover because they are ashamed that one of the tenets of their philosophy holds that conventional/bourgeois morality must be overturned. In practice, that means that dishonesty is a principled way to gain political power if you are a Marxist. But Marxists cannot just come …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Jon B – Liberalism (the philosophy, not the Sinisteres) is based on the primacy and sovereignty of the individual, to the exclusion of kings, nobles, priests, potentates – and commissars. The most concise and eloquent statement of liberal principles is the Constitution of the United States of America. The first ten Amendments to the Constitution enumerate the rights of free men, including their right to protect themselves from government and from each other. Fortunately, most people are decent, hard-working, and non-aggressive. But if everyone is free to do what they want, conflicts invariably result. That is why the United States was …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Jon B. -

You don’t have to give me a history lesson I already know.

What is it that you know? The barest flash on history books should make it obvious that Marxism, in all its disguises and in all its locations, results in stagnation and rot at best and death and destruction as a more normal condition. Meanwhile, back in the real world, democracy, the rule of law, and capitalist free markets work extremely well, and have expanded geometrically for the last hundred years because of its remarkable successes, in social, economic and military spheres. Look at China; constrained …

Posted to China's Valley of Tears

Never heard of any of these rags. But if you think they have some importance, I'll take your word for it. But if the radical Leftist small press is in decline, the radical Leftist large press is also in decline: NYT, WaPo, LAT, not to mention CBS, NBC, and ABC. So, what does it all mean? If nobody is willing to buy your message, how will you continue to distribute your message? Don't do like your predecessors, Lenin and Stalin. They robbed banks to finance revolutionary activities. Not very moral of them, but then they did not claim morality anyway. Just …

Posted to R.I.P. LiP

I was astonished, and gratified, and suspicious, that Paul Krugman identified himself as a liberal, as in the title of his book The Conscience of a Liberal. If Krugman is a liberal, he must support freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to private property, and all of the liberal values as enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Alas, no. Krugman is not a liberal, but is a Liberal, which is the most illiberal ideology since Marx, on whom it is based. The Communists could not get themselves elected during the Great Depression …

Posted to Tax and Spend? Hell, Yeah!

WTH -

The dollar has fallen over 20 percent since 2002 and 9 percent this year - one of the biggest tax increases in our lifetimes.

Ummm, no. While the dollar has fallen against foreign currencies, domestic wages and prices have barely moved at all, consequently it has had no effect on your income or outgo. The only exception to this is our improved competitive position in world markets, as American goods are less expensive and imports are more expensive. We are, in fact, exporting more and importing less in the last few months. You are the one who complains, …

Posted to Tax and Spend? Hell, Yeah!

WTH -

The idea that an economy is �manageable� is a myth.

If the economy is not perfectly manageable, there are many things we can do to create conditions that foster growth and jobs, and to alleviate potentially disastrous conditions. The dot.com Bubba Bubble was an incipient disaster, and Bush and Greenspan took the correct actions to provide investment funds, which restored growth and jobs after a very mild recession. We are now in the biggest, longest lasting period of growth in the nation's history. By way of comparison, Japan in the 1980s was on a growth pattern that many …

Posted to Tax and Spend? Hell, Yeah!

WTH - On a parallel note, free-market democracy is thriving throughout the world. A century ago there were only about twenty functional democracies world-wide. Now there are well over one hundred. Right now, there are exactly four nations that are overtly hostile and threatening toward democracy: Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and China. Russia, Iran, and Venezuela have pegged their anti-American fortunes on the rising price of oil. Russia, at least, should know better, since the collapse of the Soviet Union was substantially the result of the fall of prices for oil and other commodities superimposed on their corrupt and inefficient economy. It …

Posted to Tax and Spend? Hell, Yeah!

WTH - I'm glad you gave a bit more thought to my China question. Your first response was flip and unworthy. Now give some thought to the alternatives. When Nixon went to China, the leadership of China was a bunch of totalitarian murderers with atomic weapons. What is the appropriate response, hide in a bomb shelter? I have always thought that the Chinese people are the finest natural capitalists on the the planet. Empowering those people may not be without risk, but it beats any alternative. You keep concentrating on petty and provincial trade matters. You have run a constant anti-competitive …

Posted to Tax and Spend? Hell, Yeah!

We have exactly what we produce. No more, no less. The distribution of our products depends exactly on the attractiveness of those products: style, comfort, price, whatever. The fact that the automobile producers have achieved some degree success and prosperity is an exact measurement of their customers satisfaction with those products. No discussion of the auto industry after WWII is valid unless you understand the role of Robert Strange McNamara and W. Edwards Deming. You know Robert Strange McNamara. He was the one who brought you the Edsel and Vietnam. Who the hell was W. Edwards Deming? If you are an …

Posted to Treaty of Detroit Repealed

Jane -

... but I would add that the McNamarra (sic) model was not so much a production model as a social and political model, one that ensured a particular versoin (sic) of the US post war social settlement.

Well, no. You would be entirely mistaken. McNamara was numerical-analytical (and anal retentive), and showed no awareness of social factors at all. His engagement in politics was incidental to his fearsome reputation as an analyst, and his catastrophic political failures were a direct result of the inapplicability of his analytical methods to political and social problems. But he had JFK …

Posted to Treaty of Detroit Repealed

The New Road to Serfdom. Same as The Old Road to Serfdom. The old road to serfdom was inspired by Marx-Engels Socialism, and grew to hold sway over a substantial portion of the globe, it's peoples, and it's resources, all in a period of about a century and a half. Then, in it's various manifestations, it collapsed from corruption and inefficiency, rapidly in the Soviet Union, and more slowly as capitalist principles were embraced in China and India. The only remnants of the original Marxist serfdom are Cuba and NorK, two of the poorest, most benighted, corrupt, and inefficient countries on …

Posted to The New Road to Serfdom

Brociner seems to have settled on "Progressive" as the proper term for term our Leftists. May I suggest "Neocommunist" as a more appropriate label. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, a new Collectivist philosophy, originating in Europe in the 1800s, arose in the United States. Known first as �Communism�, it attracted few followers among the American electorate, who had extensive reports on the horrific death and destruction that accompanied the imposition of Communism in Russia. Communism in the United States did not not thrive, but neither did it go away. Communists changed their name to �Socialists�, but Socialism also …

Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis

WTH - You have a charmingly naive and thought-free view of the world. Everything you don't like, you find something or someone to blame it on, even if there is no correlation whatsoever. And you don't let facts get in your way.

The I.D. crisis is a universal political problem in the U.S. and has been for some time.

Oh, come now. The American Revolution and the War Between the States are examples of true ID crises, when Americans fought against Americans over who they were and what kind of country they wanted. Far from being a "universal political problem", …

Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis

Matt -

(Hillary) Clinton most certainly supports such Liberal institutions as international free trade, a market based economy, rights-based restrictions on the power of government, protection of private property, rule of law, and checks and balances among governmental powers.

Hillary supports the rule of law? Does she now? I hadn't heard. Whitewater. Jim and Susan Mc Dougal, Susan went ot jail. Castle Grande billing records. Cattle futures. Billy Dale and the Travel Office. The FBI files. Hubbell, went to jail. Lippo Group. And the three separate fraudulent compaign contribution scandals involving illegal contributions by Chinese agents. Every one of these …

Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis

Matt -

... a low-brow attempt to smear Clinton via negative association.

Clinton is not associated with her own quotes? Well, that is certainly a novel interpretation. Especially since she has said essentially the same thing in different contexts over a period of years. And the contexts are quite accessible if you care to look them up. I distinctly remember at least two of them from news coverage at the time. So, you ignore (or embrace) Hillary's criminal activity and her radical plans for the American people, the American economy, and the American government. Noted. Of the several possible …

Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis

Matt -

The negative association I was referring to was (obviously) your pairing of Clinton with, you know, Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Goebbels, etc.

Ummm, no. I did not pair Hillary with anyone. �I certainly think the free-market has failed.� That is Hillary's statement, and it stands alone. And if it sounds like something that Marx or Lenin or Molotov might have said, that is probably only a coincidence. We have already examined Hillary's committment to the rule of law, which is about on par with Stalin's committment to the rule of law; Stalin robbed banks to finance the …

Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis

Matt -

You still have failed to offer any substantive critique of Clinton's policies.

Au contraire! I have done nothing else on this thread. Did Lenin and Stalin tell the world that they were going to kill 40 million or so of their own people, and destroy the Russian economy? What would have been the effect if they had done so? We are blessed with the knowledge of Hillary's assault on the health care system in the 1990s, and her repeated comments on her plans to assault the free market if she gets elected. If you don't remember, review the …

Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis

Waypast and Raven - Good take on the Second Amendment. The Bill of Rights were the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. Liberal philosophy sprang from the Enlightenment, which largely originated in Great Britain and revolutionary France. The Bill of Rights was the distillation of centuries of philosophical development, and is at the foundation of our stable and flourishing Republic. The Rights enshrined in the Constitution belong to the people; the government did not grant these Rights to us, we own them. The ability to defend our Rights is fundamental to the preservation of all our Rights; …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

jdege -

I disagree with all liberals. Because I disagree with their basic premises. But I don't think all of them are idiots, and I don't think all of them are malevolent. Some are. Most are simply ignorant. They think the world works the way they would wish it to work, or that it would work the way they'd wish it to work if only enough people believed. And that because they have good intentions, the results of their policies will be good. I think that's dangerously naive. But I don't think it makes them bad people.

Naaah. They are …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Major Major

This guy is having some problems, and he goes to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist talks to him for a bit, and then decides to give the guy a Rorschach test. He tells the patient to look at these inkblot images, and to say the first thing that the images remind him of. The psychiatrist holds up the first image, and the guy immediately says, "Oh, that reminds me of sex." The psychiatrist holds up the second image, and the guy says, "That reminds me of sex, too." The psychiatrist holds up the third image and the guy says, "That …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Captain A - Hitlery? Billery? Why don't we all just settle on Hillarity? "Do I even need to point out that most of their "studies" wouldn't be academically or statistically rigorous enough to pass muster in a high school civics class?" You obviously haven't been in a high school civics class since the Neocommunist NEA has taken control of the curricula and eliminated thinking.

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Major Major - You foolishly obsessed about Lott, and got nowhere. Now you are foolishly obsessing about Canada gun laws, and are getting nowhere. THIS IS NOT CANADA. This is the United States of America. The people are sovereign. The government is our servant. The police are our servants. We have the right to own firearms. We may use our firearms well or poorly (mostly well, by a very large margin), but the government has nothing to say about it if no crime is committed. Murder is a crime, but failure to register a firearm is not a crime, because the …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

.45 Be my guest. I did not intend the list to be all inclusive. Your comments on the Jihadist situation in Europe are well taken. We have gone into Europe twice in the last century to clean up their mistakes, and I firmly believe we will go in again to clean out the Jihadists.

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Major Major - Oh, come now. You have gone from faulty interpretations of Lott, to irrelevant comparisons with Canada, to illiterate and irrational confusion of polar opposites. Patriots and tyrants, indeed. If you can't make a coherent argument, and can't distinguish between, for example, George Washington and Robert Mugabe, you must be the educational product of the Neocommunist NEA. Just how old are you, anyway?

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

jdege - MM does not care what Milton said. Milton is a dead white male. Dead white males are not politically correct. The wisdom and insight that inspired the creation of our world have given away to political correctness, appeasement, pacifism, and globalism which are the defining values of the Neocommunists. The Communists and Neocommunists have an unrelieved history of death, destruction, and failure, all of which are irrelevant to True Believers who think that political correctness will bring a new Utopia, and Americans will become the New Soviet Man. Not as long as you and I enforce the Second Amendment. …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Why are we discussing accidents, suicides, and domestic thugs? Thirty thousand gun deaths a year represents one/ten-thousandth of the people of the United States. And some of those gun deaths are quite commendable. There are tragic and regrettable gun deaths, but they are not a threat to our cultural survival. Totalitarians are a threat to our survival and to our cultural survival. In the last century, Russia and particularly Germany were Western cultures in which totalitarian terrorism became dominant. Millions of innocents died at the hands of the Fascists and Communists, not to mention the millions more that died in combat. …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

"Liberal" may be the most misused term in our language. The Constitution of the United States of America is a pre-eminent liberal document. Democracy is a liberal value. Self protection is a liberal value. Freedom of speech and religion are liberal values. So, why is it that gun opponents are almost exclusively Liberal Democrats? Why does the Liberal ACLU attempt to restrict Christian expression, and not that of other religions? Why did forty-one Liberal United States Senators attempt to restrict a private citizen's freedom of speech? Why are Liberals trying to restrict what is said on the radio, but not what …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

.45 Your points are well taken. We in the USA have a long history of rejecting Collectivists: Socialists, Communists, Progressives, Liberals, or whatever they are currently calling themselves. But if these ideologues have exhibited atrocious, murderous, inefficient, and corrupt behavior, they do have a certain persistence. So, can they establish themselves, much less prevail, by pretending to be other than what they are? Can Marxists triumph by pretending to be Progressives, or Liberals? In my previous post, I discussed Gramsci's Cultural Communism, whereby he advocated taking over institutions (schools, churches, poitical parties, the media, etc.) in order to take over the …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Sheesh! You succeed in doing good in the world and all the nutjobs come out in force to criticize.

Another War We Can't Afford

In the first six months of 1942, immediately after Pearl Harbor, the United States wrote purchase orders for war materials and related war efforts that exceeded the GNP. The national debt during WWII reached over 125% of GNP. Right now the national indebtedness is falling in comparison to GNP. To say that the United States "can't afford" another war is patently ridiculous. This is the only war in American history in which the deficit is falling. …

Posted to Another War We Can't Afford

Anarcho -

... the result of that war will ultmately cost the public ...

You are assuming that 09/11, Beirut, and Mogadishu were cost free. Can you justify that novel historical and economic interpretation? Every time a person stands in line at the airport, it reasonably costs him $50 per hour, money that was not required and time that was not lost before 09/11. A reasonable cost for 09/11 is somewhere north of $1 trillion, and still counting after all these years.

Social programs have already been slashed ...

No shot, Sheerluck. The biggest social program was …

Posted to Another War We Can't Afford

Maria -

... if you read the list of wars you mentioned youwill see that they were started by your country's succesive governments and that must surely mean something.

Well, yes, it means that you are grossly ignorant of history and/or your leftist ideology has left you incapable of coherent thought. WW2 was started by Germany's attacks on Czechoslovakia and Poland and raged in Europe for two years while the United States was still locked in isolationism. The USA became directly involved when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, at which time Hitler declared war on the United States, and not …

Posted to Another War We Can't Afford

aolaw -

Maybe the GOP will reign him in if only for the sake of the 2008 congressional elections.

And maybe you Collectivists will pull your collective heads out of your collective behinds, but I doubt it. The last time the anti-war forces made a lot of noise, they drove the electorate away from McGovern to Nixon, in a near record Electoral College defeat and popular vote defeat in presidential election history. The MSM has been going on and on and on and on about how badly the War on Terror has been, so that no one recognizes good news …

Posted to Another War We Can't Afford

RP -

And what would that "win" entail, Scorp?

Why, it might look something like this:

... support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime. ... support Iraq's transition to democracy by providing immediate and substantial humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, by providing democracy transition assistance to Iraqi parties and movements with democratic goals, and by convening Iraq's foreign creditors to develop a multilateral response to Iraq's foreign debt incurred by Saddam Hussein's regime.

In fact, this is the …

Posted to Another War We Can't Afford

RP - Ummm, since all I did was quote United States Law, and point out that many Dimocrats embraced that law and the reasons we went to war, I'm a hoot? Clinton is not a hoot? All the United States senators in 1998 are not a hoot, but I am? You are not a prophet, you can't even tell what the past was, much less what the future will be. My horseback estimate is that al-Qa'eda in Iraq will continue to lose local support, the Sunnis and Shi'ites will come to an armed truce, business and civil life will continue to …

Posted to Another War We Can't Afford

... the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is releasing a get-tough regulation that would force employers to either fire workers whose names and Social Security numbers don�t match or risk a fine of up to $10,000. Corporation and labor advocates both fear it could lead to mass layoffs of immigrants.

Can we agree that "workers whose names and Social Security numbers don�t match" are suspicious? There are several millions of illegal aliens in this country who invent, buy, or steal fake identification and SSNs. Inventing, buying, or stealing fake identification and SSNs is (1) against the law and (2) …

Posted to No Match? No Mas!

This crisis is more akin to a lymphoma or termite infestation ...

Termite infestation, guaranteed. Only a wooden-headed Progressive could find a problem which is "(l)argely unrecognized by the American public, unacknowledged by those in power, and denied by professionals in uniform" and which has no symptoms, as described in detail in the second paragraph of the article. The American public is solidly behind the US Military, while respect for politicians is extremely low. So, Foster sees a problem with the military that no one else sees? Say what? So what? The Progressives made a massive bet against the United …

Posted to General Failure

MM - Every Progressive academic has impressive credentials and a wooden head. Ask Ward Churchill. Many people in positions of authority and responsibility are functional idiots. I first recognized this in the Army, and, to my surprise, discovered that the same thing was true in business, where you might think that the need for markets and profits might serve to discipline the organization. But no, there are idiots in business, as well as in the military. So, the first thing you have to do is to learn to distinguish the idiots from the non-idiots. You particularly want to avoid those idiots …

Posted to General Failure

Hayden -

One example: despite limiting press access far more than occurred in Vietnam, despite an unusually low number of mainstream media correspondents inside Iraq, far more stories have emerged about criminal acts committed by soldiers and groups of soldiers than were reported in Vietnam. ... That does suggest a breakdown in training and command structure.

You obviously were never in Vietnam. I was, twice. You are full of shit. You have no recollection of My Lai, fragging, or combat refusals. Those were parlous times in Vietnam and Iraq, in contrast, is a politically correct cakewalk in comparison. Ralph Peters …

Posted to General Failure

WTH -

Perhaps we should admit and accept that the war has been mishandled in many ways.

Name two. Surely everyone understands that war is serious business, and blood and treasure will be expended. These two criteria are primary to the evaluation of any military endeavor. At the time of the Iraq War Resolution 2002, the Pentagon estimated 5000 American combat deaths in Iraq. Hillary, Biden, Dodd, Edwards, Feinstein, Kerry, Reid, Rockefeller, and Schumer voted for this War, and these deaths, because it was vital to United States national interests. Total American combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are now …

Posted to General Failure

WTH, Hayden - "Too few troops". "State Dept. and CENTCOM". Ad infinitum, ad asinintiy. According to the Progressives: * Everything that George Bush did was bad. * Everything George Bush did had the worst possible results. * Everything that George Bush did was done for the worst possible reasons. So, how in the hell did he fight two major wars which are having substantial success in spite of the Dims attempts to sell us out, and with BY FAR the fewest casualties and the least cost of any war in American history? Why do you think we had too few troops, …

Posted to General Failure

Hayden - "Revisionist history at its best ... " And you can point out a historical error or omission in my arguments?

Posted to General Failure

John Edwards is not the obvious posterboy for either poverty or unions. He has no history as an advocate for either cause, either as a lawyer or as a politician. On the contrary, Edwards has done much to impoverish the very people he seeks to represent. Doctors in North Carolina cite Edwards as a main cause of the rise in their medical malpractice premiums, dating back to when Edwards was winning multi-million dollar awards in medical malpractice suits and driving some doctors out of North Carolina or out of the medical profession altogether. Higher insurance premiums and fewer medical practitioners both …

Posted to The Unions' Man?

MM - You really need to get yourself better informed. There is this marvelous Internet system called "Google" which contains all kinds of fascinating information. I highly recommend it. Edwards earned (?) 50 awards of $1 million or more, and he kept one-third of each award. Edwards concentrated on psychiatric and cerebral palsey malpractice cases, and the science does not support the arguments that Edwards convinced the jurors of. Do not end a sentence with a preposition. Edwards used a combination of psychic chicanery, witchdoctory, and flim-flamery to make himself very rich, and fifty unfortunate people moderately rich, and left millions …

Posted to The Unions' Man?

Davion - You are as gullible as a goose. In twenty years as a tort lawyer, Edwards made himself rich, and did absolutely nothing to help the poor, except for the fifty people whose cases he won. Millions of people in North Crolina and across the nation ended up paying higher insurance premiums. After becoming rich, Edwards opted for political power, and then he discovered the attractiveness of poverty and unions. How convenient!

He (Edwards) has thus far dedicated and proven himself to a cause which most politicians seem to ignore.

You shitting me, boy? There was a man named …

Posted to The Unions' Man?

Not only are the statements and sources reported in this article quite dubious, as WTH has pointed out, there is a quite simple solution to the problem. The Geneva Conventions prescribe rules for conducting warfare. If the terrorists would follow these rules, such as wearing uniforms and avoiding civilians during conduct of military operations, they, the terrorists, could virtually eliminate any confusion leading to civilian deaths. Perhaps Cook and ITT could use their influence with their friends, the terrorists, to follow existing international rules? Convincing President Bush to lay-off of the head-hunters and practitioners of human sacrifice is obviously not going …

Posted to Death from Above

God - And Progressives - Save This Honorable Court!

A rose is a rose is a rose ... And a Progressive is a Liberal is a Socialist is a Communist. This is the third iteration of the Progressive theme and meme in the last century. The original manifestation of Progressive thought had a genuine concern for social welfare in a more primitive economic environment. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican President, was a leading political embodiment of the Progressive movement in the early Twentieth Century. Much progress was made in social justice during this period. The Great Depression was a time of …

Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!

Matt - Sorry my comments went so far over your head. I will try to clarify some of your misperceptions. Straw man? To the degree that Collectivists are able to take control of a state, the people suffer. This is true of the total control exercised by the corrupt, inefficient Communists in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cambodia, and it is also true of the EUSSR, which is corrupt, inefficient, and disintegrating. Tens of millions of victims of Communism are dead men, not straw men. If your mental faculties are not well developed, Collectivism can be very seductive. The …

Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!

Matt -

The straw man you've erected is this notion of a Collectivist hiding out in American society - someone who harkens for totalitarian state control of all property.

That is nonsense, of course. I have not referenced nor inferred economic Communism nor "totalitarian state control of all property" at all. As you are undoubtedly aware, Antonio Gramsci, in Italy before WWII, criticized classical Marxism for its emphasis on economic aspects in the world struggle for Collectivist domination. Gramsci advocated a cultural Communism, rather than an economic Communism, whereby institutions (schools, churches, courts, social organizations, political parties, not just workers) …

Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!

Pussycatpussycat -

I know that in it's history it (Supreme Court) has been larger than the current number of nine justices. Was a law passed preventing this? Can anyone answer that?

The Supreme Court has always had nine Justices, as established in the Constitiution. FDR attempted to increase the number of Justices, in order to gain a majority to pass his programs. He was able to pass a lot of programs, but the American people firmly rejected messing with the Constitution and the Court. All your other "facts" and opinions are wrong as well. I did an extensive study of …

Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!

Tigertiger - Well, that is a response. Of sorts. I suppose. You have not tried to verify my observations on the 2004 election. You certainly have not made your own observations. You just KNOW. Like you knew that the Supremes were "larger than the current number of nine justices", but they were not. Ignorance is bliss. I predict you will have a happy life, as long as some one else defends your right to ignorance, someone else preserves your freedoms. someone else makes the sacrifices that have made our country strong. Enjoy.

Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!

Eric - Excellent. Thank you.

Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!

"We did not worry if our work would upset funders; we just worried about whether the work would help our communities.�

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded argues that foundations perpetuate First World interests and free-market capitalism, thus preserving many of the problems radical activists wish to eradicate, such as the unregulated concentration of wealth.

So close, and yet so far. Do you see the contradiction? The observations in this article and book are quite penetrating and refreshing, until they collide with the conventional leftist ideology. Capitalism, indeed! The thrust of the article could be summarized as anti-bureaucratic, and …

Posted to Forget the Foundations

Democrats are selling out the economic populism that got them elected in the first place

No shit! And that's not all that is being sold out. Democrats are selling out many principled positions they once held: * Supporting democracy in oppressed states. * Defending the United States from socialist totalitarians and terrorists. * Supporting liberal values, including freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms. In place of the democratic ideals that made us strong and free, Democrats have adopted such dubious propositions as political correctness and diversity as their guiding principles. Try defending yourself and your …

Posted to Kissing up to K Street

A defense mechanism is a psychological device that alleviates stress without solving the problem that causes the stress. There are many recognized defense mechanisms, and they fall into three broad categories: denial of the problem, substitution of a non-stressful lesser problem for a real problem , and substitution of a non-solution for a workable solution to a problem. Examples of defense mechanisms include withdrawal, deceit, rationalization, ritual, projection, displacement, and daydreaming. Our real problem is that there are people out there who would like to kill us, if they are not able to convert us to their way of thinking, or …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

mhouston - Nice try. Jet-A is the standard commercial jet fuel in the USA and is primarily a mixture of hydrocarbons in the kerosene range, plus additives to give anti-icing, anti-static, and anti-corrosive properties. Kero is comprised of hydrogen and carbon, and it combusts incompletely to give CO2 and water vapor. The molecular weight of carbon is 12 and the molecular weight of oxygen is 16. The oxygen comes from the atmosphere, not from the fuel. Therefore, the total weight of CO2 from fuel combustion in a jet aircraft is 12/44 from the fuel and 32/44 from the air. So Monbiot's …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

Maria - Twice in your lifetime we came uncomfortably close to living in a murderous, totalitarian world. If the Jihadists have their way, we may yet achieve that unhappy fate. Fortunately, they do not have the wherewithal to capture our world and destroy our democracy, but they could do some serious damage, much more serious than 09/11. It is worth our time and effort to avoid the fate the Jihadists plan for us. No one, certainly not me, is denying a problem. But problems are for solving, not for retreating from as leftists traditionally do.

There is no shortage of energy. …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

WTH - We are eye-ball to eye-ball on this one. Immediate members of my family experienced the terror, and horror, of communist oppression, and I have a good understanding of the destruction of the individual in pursuit of collectivist goals. I know that leftists ignored the genocidal atrocities of the socialist empires for ideological reasons. I can well understand that leftists not only ignore the Jihadists atrocities, but support the Jihadists against American ideals, again for ideological reasons. They can easily ignore the moral realities of 09/11, in pursuit of their asinine ideological agenda. Our task is terminate progressivism, as they …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

WTH -

A small suggestion. It may be the shady side of your family�s �black sheep� is an unconscious manifestation of the repressed and unexamined shady side of your family. The nature of human psychology is that it is never a �one-sided phenomenon�, but the inter-penetrating, inter-related and inter-active consequence of the conscious and unconscious thoughts, expressions and actions of all involved. Our psychological make-up is a swamp that only persevering compassionate feeling and self-critical rational examination can aid us to rise above. Externalizing blame, guilt and responsibility only embeds us deeper into the mire. This is as true of our …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

Loony Booty -

Archie Bunker wasn�t a dingbat. It was Edith who was called a dingbat by Archie.

How little comprehension you have. Let me try to pierce the fog that surrounds the functions of your cranium, using words of one syllable: R-CHEE WAS THE DING-BAT. You obviously didn't get the joke in one of the most popular series in TV, and thereby missed the whole point of the show, and most of the humor. If you missed the entire point of a simple-minded TV series, how do you expect to understand the way the world functions? You can't. You …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

Loony - Hey. Loony, you made the national news! Victor Davis Hanson wrote an article on you, Blissfully Uneducated. You really, really, really, really ought to read what Dr. Hanson has to say. Dr. Hanson is a real scholar, unlike the left-wind ideologue hacks you studied under.

Just as you believe anyone who says anything that raises the notion of economic democracy or egalitarian justice must, must, must be brainwashed by a frozen and antiquated presumptive construct of Marxist ideology and wedded to monolithically uniform collectivism because it is opposed to, and the only allowable explanation within, your own narrow and …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

Loony - I am sure that you did not strain my poor little brain. Statistically, it would be extremely improbable that your verbal skills and comprehension come anywhere close to mine, and your big words in service of small thoughts do not recommend either your verbal abilities or your reasoning capabilities at all. You sound as if you are somehow ennobled by working in agriculture. I am sure you are, just as I am ennobled by working in engineering. If there is any discipline that is more ennobling than others, it is scholarship, and Dr. Hanson is a prime example. Activities …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

Loony -

Global warming is a joke? This is a rational argument? You�re lost, buddy. You have nothing but spew. No reason at all.

But that is not true, of course. This is my comment and your response in a previous discussion on global colding:

* (Scorp) CO2 output was reduced world-wide during the Great Depression, with no corresponding decrease in atmospheric CO2. (Loony) This assumes that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are linearly correlated with CO2 emissions. They are not. The world�s oceans serve as a huge buffer that by absorbing the largest proportion of CO2 emitted, tends to …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

President Reagan's degree was in economics. I am not sure if or when the USA ever had an economics-trained president before Reagan, but I am fairly certain that it had not happened in the previous hundred years. The USA economy was flat-lined for seventeen years after President Johnson mismanaged Vietnam and the Great Society programs, with no plans for paying for either one of them. There were three recessions during this period. The economy barely kept up with population growth during this time. It is no coincidence that President Reagan instituted radical economic reform and tax cuts, followed immediately by investment …

Posted to The Enduring Lies of Ronald Reagan

Tabonsell -

Reagan's economics degree was in economics that gave us the Great Depression and depressions of the 1840s, 1870s and 1890s. Unemployment under Reagan hit 10.8 %, the highest since 1940 when we were still in the Depression. Reforms by FDR apparently saved us from a Reagan depression.

You have missed your calling, sir. You should have been a professional cherry-picker. There is no question that Reagan grew up in the Depression and was a staunch believer in FDR and his programs. It was only later that he developed his new ideas on the economy, influenced more by JFK …

Posted to The Enduring Lies of Ronald Reagan

Tabonsell - Regarding anticipation of the fall of the Soviet Union:

Try reading. William O. Douglas' dissenting opinion in Beauharnais v Illinois (1952) in which he documented what you say isn't available.

Fair enough, and here it is:

BEAUHARNAIS v. ILLINOIS, 343 U.S. 250 (1952) The only thing Douglas wrote on this case was: MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS, dissenting. Hitler and his Nazis showed how evil a conspiracy could be which was aimed at destroying a race by exposing it to contempt, derision, and obloquy. I would be willing to concede that such conduct directed at a race or group in …

Posted to The Enduring Lies of Ronald Reagan

Tabonsell - Don't be such a cherry-picking Densan. Faced with high and rising unemployment, high and rising inflation, high and rising interest rates, and a stagnant economy from the Carter years, a comprehensive economic package was required. The most visible piece of that package was the Reagan tax cuts, but it also indexed taxes, maintained fiscal and monetary policy to fight inflation, and relaxed business regulations. The 1981 tax cuts amounted to 5.6% of GDP, and were soon realized to be excessive. In 1982, modest tax increases amounting to 1.2% of GDP were passed to correct the tax structure. Your argument …

Posted to The Enduring Lies of Ronald Reagan

To be sure, the Bush administration�s foreign policy is provoking the kind of global anger that motivates terrorists to attack the United States.

I really don't expect knowledge, much less comprehension and understanding, of history from the likes of Liberals in general, and Muwakkil in particular, but this is ridiculous. Fundamentalist Islam has motivated terrorists for 1400 years. The only major respites from Islamist terror followed major Western victories and Islamist defeats at Tours/Poitiers, Lepanto, and Vienna. Islamist terrorism was most recently prominent in the administrations of Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton. To suggest that Islamist terror is the …

Posted to Entrapping Inflated Threats

ZTNJV -

Firstly, real wages are not really falling.

A simple statement of a simple truth, solidly backed up by economic statistics and multiple studies, as documented by Alan Reynolds, Steve Conover, and others. But this is not the leftist position. The Dimocratic Party, the New York Times, and leftists everywhere insist that incomes of the lower economic groups are falling. They also insist that unemployment is NOT near record lows, but that government and economic unemployment figures are not accurate. If incomes are rising and unemployment is falling toward record lows, President Bush's economic policies are working and globalization …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

Who's Afraid of Democracy? Umm, the founding fathers? Democracy has nothing to do with it. This is a republic, not a democracy. A lynch mob is democratic; the victim is simply outvoted.

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

ZTNJV -

I do take issue with some details. Bush is not an economic wizard and has done plenty wrong along with what he's done right. We are not doing the best we can do....it could still be much better.

Since this is the strongest economy in the history of the world, can you please tell me all the "plenty wrong" things President Bush has done? And if we are not doing the best we can do, how will we do much better? Raise taxes, as the Dimocrats propose? Lower interest rates, and overheat the economy? Tighten the money supply, …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

ZTNJV -

why so hostile?

Ummm, because "Dimocrats are screwing with my economic well-being. And yours, if you care to notice."? But I already said that. I am not questioning your politics. We started out agreeing that:

Firstly, real wages are not really falling.

The Dimocratic Party, the Old Media, and WTH are loud and clear (and dishonest and misleading) that wages really are falling for the lower economic quintiles. Why are they promoting this falsehood? Ignorance? No, they have a political agenda which they cannot accomplish by telling the truth.

I guess one I take issue with is …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

Matt - Would you care to list and debate any of my "highly misleading, arguments"? You might start by trying to defend this perfectly ridiculous statement:

One wonders then why the current debt rides at close to $10 trillion. ($8,914,896,000,000 and counting by Conover's calculation two minutes ago, but OK.) At some point, our debt load will start to make buying government bonds here look like a very bad investment. At that point, we will be forced to either curtail spending drastically or increase taxation drastically, both of which will probably have a recessive effect on the economy - maybe even …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

Brian -

What happens when america has to pay back our debt?

Why would we do a silly thing like that? We are constantly turning over our debt, paying off old and issuing new. We have done this for decades, if not centuries. We do not need to pay off the debt, only renew it. The debt performs many valuable functions for us and for those who are so desirous of it. Buying American debt is the best thing China and Saudi Arabia can find to do with their money. If they had a better place to park their cash, …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

WTH -

The only reason China is not selling is because that would devalue the huge amount of US debt they are holding.

Ummm, no. China has maintained a close peg with the dollar for a long period. Therefore, the renminbi stays constant with the dollar no matter what the dollar does. The dollar has just experienced a substantial realignment, but moving out of dollar now would have little effect, except to hurt China. China is diversifying its portfolio, including investments which will provide a higher return. This is quite prudent. This, in fact is what the USA should be …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

sTiVo -

Democratic regulation, even if it is sometimes economically irrational, may be more efficient than waiting for stockholders to come to their senses.

Ummm, no The stockholders own the corporation, and the Democrats and the democrats do not. Just what we need, Democratic democrats making "economic irrational" decisions, otherwise known as socialism.

Tax-shelter islands, relentless offshoring to countries that pursue calculated industrial policies, while the USA �selflessly� refuses to do the same for its citizens - while the �selfless� princes of the corporate world laugh all the way to the bank.

Please name all the "(t)ax-shelter islands" and …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

sTiVo, Brian -

Write back when you grow up, ok?

scorp will never admit defeat he drinks to much orielly kool-aid.

I am impressed! I didn't know that people of your ilk could be so profound. I'm afraid you can't tell me much new about corporate behavior, but that is beside the point. The Soviet Union collapsed from corruption and inefficiency, so I am certain their corporate behavior was much worse than our own. Old Europe putters along well below tt's capability, due to their stultifying socialist bureaucracy. In the 1980s, Japan was growing so fast that there was …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

sTiVo -

>> I'm afraid you can't tell me much new about corporate behavior, but that is beside the point. Really? What is your experience? I work at one of the world�s largest corporations. My wife works at a dysfunctional public hospital with no money. If we listed the dysfunctional things happening at both places and jumbled them together, you wouldn�t be able to tell which was which.

United State Army, the world's largest oil company, and several of the largest international engineering and construction companies. I've published a book on disfunctional managers in organizations, based on my experiences in …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

sTiVo -

Really? Give me the title and publisher, I�ll be sure to check it out.

Sorry, I will have to decline. Hardesty on this site has already threatened to shoot me with his genuine .357 Mag, behead me, and come to my house and whip my ass, if I would only tell him where I live. You know how irrational these leftists can be. But I will give you a hint. Have you ever heard anyone say, "I am a tough son-of-a-bitch" or "I'm a tough little bastard", anything similar? If you have heard this statement, was the person …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

sTiVo - I detect a certain seriousness of purpose in your latest post, when previously we were just talking past each other. I would welcome a serious converstion on Japan or any other topic. To help us establish a common ground for discussion, please demonstrate some knowledge on who J. Edwards Deming was, why the most prestigious industrial award in Japan is named after him, and how this relates to the fact that Toyota surpassed GM as the world's largest automobile company last month. If you have a similar (serious) requirement of me, I will be happy to comply.

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

sTiVo -

Glad you detect some seriousness in my remarks ...

Serious is probably not the word I meant, we were both talking past each other. I am thrilled you know who Deming was; not one person in one-hundred does. We ought to try to forget about Robert Strange McNamara, and concentrate on people who have made a positive contribution to the world. Old Strange inflicted a disaster on the American automobile industry before his Vietnam catastrophe. Deming was a very major contributor to the growth of Japanese industry after WWII, and very major contributor to the revival of Ford's …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

For those of you who do not understand Loony Booty and the post-post-modernist interpretation and obfuscation of history, allow me to translate.

The classical notion that consumers are rational is somewhat belied by the rise of marketing and advertising strategies that appeal to the consumer's base unconscious desires.

We are all evil, and don't even know it. Marketing and advertising manipulate us to take advantage of our evil natures, while we remain blissfully unaware of what is going on.

The idea that rational realism means that mutual sympathy, much less altruism, can be entirely discounted in favor of self-interest has …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

Loony Booty -

As usual, you mis-represent my views as thinking that people are fundamentally evil and that 19th century Marxist doctrine is the answer for it. They are not and it is not.

Well, that is nonsense, of course. Here is what you said:

The classical notion that consumers are rational is somewhat belied by the rise of marketing and advertising strategies that appeal to the consumer's base unconscious desires.

base2 (bās) adj., bas·er, bas·est. Having or showing a contemptible, mean-spirited, or selfish lack of human decency. See synonyms at mean2. Devoid of high values or ethics: a …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

Loony Booty -

Emerging from the late 19th century and early 20th century Progressive Movement; minimum wage, child labor laws, the graduated income tax, inheritance tax, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, women�s suffrage, Land Grant Universities, the Granges, etc., improved the lives of the poor, the oppressed wage earner and small farmer, and put some small constraints on the unrestrained political and economic powers of the ultra-wealthy. Likewise, New Deal policies such as social security, welfare safety nets, work-place health insurance and pensions, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, the CCC, targeted Keynseian jnvestments, et al., and the 30�s Labor Movement victories, as implemented …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

Loony -

As �Pops� Armstrong sang, �I�ll be glad when you�re dead, you rascal, you.�

Go die, and do the world a favor.

Well, this is typical of the socialist approach to people who think for themselves, as opposed to the collectivist approach you favor. You will never find me in the Gulag, however. In their profound wisdom, the founding fathers gave us the wherewithal to defend ourselves from tyranny, such as you espouse. In spite of your false comparison, you really are no different than Hardesty, who proposed, on this site, to kill me. I assure you I …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

sTiVo - Sorry, please do not feel neglected. Loony's needs were much greater than yours.

Why do you keep fighting a Cold War that has been over for years?

Ummm, not exactly. The same left-wind Liberals and loonies (bootiful or not) who supported collectivist philosophies throughout the Cold War until the collapse of the SU are still active. The language has changed from Marxist to Gramscian and post-post-modernist, but the base motivation and intent remain the same. These characters (progressive is their favored term at this time, subject to change without notice) are determined to destroy the liberal values on …

Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?

Oh, bitch, bitch, bitch. Moberg is trying to sell magazines, but why are the rest of you so gullible? From April 2006 to April 2007, we had a net loss of 134,000 manufacturing jobs, or about six-tenths of one percent. Those jobs averaged about $18 an hour. In the same time frame, we had a net gain of over one and one-half million jobs, including over 1,100, 000 service jobs that paid $17.80 and hour or more. http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2007/05/bar_chart_of_wh.html We are manufacturing more than we ever have, using fewer employees. And the American economy is no longer measured in tons of steel …

Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone

WTH -

Manufacturing more than ever? Yes, the introduction of robotics has boosted productivity and eliminated huge sums which pension plans and health care for employees caused us to be noncompetitive globally. But OUR manufacturing is now done largely by cheap, unregulated foreign labor in foreign locations. Last week an economist I went to hear said, �We have chosen to buy the cheaper priced goods and have no one to blame but ourselves.�

Do you see the contradiction in what you have just said? "Manufacturing more than ever? Yes ... " "But OUR manufacturing is now done largely by cheap, …

Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone

Natalie, Alkinae, Miat - Long time, Natalie. Welcome back. I enjoyed your evisceration of the conspiracy theorists, but tired of the repitition. If patience is a virtue, you are much more virtuous than me, which may not mean much. Many of the comments above address leadership, or lack thereof. In an entirely different context, I once had an academic conversation with a psychiatrist who claimed that any purposeful finite group of people will naturally sort themselves out into one leader, a big middle, and one tail-end, who is a source of difficulty and conflict for the group. This is true of …

Posted to Why Women Hate Hillary

WickyW and Wilberforce

Western Europe has found the best balance yet between capitalism and socialism. Guaranteeing the basic needs while leaving plenty of room to grow and aspire. Even then it’s not perfect, and I doubt any of them will be.

You were doing well on this thread until you came up with the above. Western Europe is dying. The native populations are not reproducing themselves, sometimes by wide margins. Core unemployment has hovered at 8-10% for over fifteen years, and growth has been flat for all this time. In the Lisbon Accords in 2000, the EU pledged to match …

Posted to Preaching Revolution

WW - Congratulations. Blondemike only calls you names if he can't think of any good answers to the points you make. When Mike gets really frustrated and flustered, he will threaten you with decapitation or his trusty .357 Mag. Blondemike is actually Michael P. Hardesty from Oakland. He lives with Nina, whom he variously identifies as his wife, girlfriend, companion, S/O, whatever, and a bunch of cats. He seems to fight with everybody, not just on the Internet: the Oakland police, the cat's veterinarian, the neighbors, everybody. He is scatalogic, but otherwise devoid of logic. He stupidly put his tracks all …

Posted to Preaching Revolution

Loony Booty - Now you sound like Mrs. Scheisskopf in Catch-22. Mrs. Scheisskopf was an atheist, but the god she did not believe in was a warm, loving, supportive being. She got all upset when someone made comments similar to what WW has said. But there is also Oriana Fallaci, who claimed to be a "Christian atheist". I suppose this is in oppositon to a "Jihadist atheist" or a "Thugee atheist".

In a socialism is what I say it is and you socialists don’t have any say in the matter.

Oh, come on, Booty. Actions speak louder than words. Communism …

Posted to Preaching Revolution

CDC - Bowel Movement says:

My Jewish wife normally dislikes the epithet �kike� but she uses it for you.

I wonder if that is literally true? That would certainly be a strange thing for a nice Jewish girl to say, but being married to Bowel Movement, maybe she is not so nice. It is hard to believe that she is so naive that she doesn't know what is going on with BM, but that is also a possibility. At any rate, what Nina thinks could be verified. Michael P. Hardesty lives with Nina and a bunch of cats in Oakland, …

Posted to Preaching Revolution

Bowel Movement -

As far as my wife�s characterization of Chicago Commie Cabbie, what the fuck business is that of yours �

Ummm, because you put it on the internet for everyone to read?

� you�d never reveal your identity �

But Hardesty, you never revealed your identity, except that you stupidly put it all over the internet and it was easy to find. And then you even more stupidly demanded that I reveal my identity. You surely don't think that I am as stupid as you are, to leave tracks like a D-9 Cat for people to …

Posted to Preaching Revolution

WW -

Wow scorpy, I think that since you have his name, addres and phone number that perhaps you should contact the Nazi�s local police department, considering how unstable he is

Naah, don't bother. Those two love birds are well known in the Oakland and SF PDs. Nina got her name in the Chron back a few months ago, complaining to the police about something or other. But Hardesty is well protected, he has a .357 Mag. Besides that, he can stomp your butt. Just ask him. If you are so motivated, you contact the police about Hardesty as a …

Posted to Preaching Revolution

WW - Well, how much of a threat can Hardesty be? He can't even protect his wife with a .357 Mag. Hardesty's biggest threat is his big mouth, and that is a threat to himself, not to me.

Posted to Preaching Revolution

Bowel Movement -

Naturally I wasn�t able to protect my wife because I was not at the scene of the crime.

Never bother to explain, Hardesty. Your friends (?) don't need it, and your enemies won't believe it anyway.

Posted to Preaching Revolution

Jon B and WTH � When you criticize the USA for being inconsistent in regard to conduct toward Iraq and toward Saddam, in this instance you get an A+ for perception, and a flat 0 for context, leaving you with a failing grade.

... it was the Reagan Administration that was making deals with Saddam, Rumsfeld shaking the hand of Hussein AFTER, repeat AFTER it was known that Saddam had slammed the Kurds with chemical terrorism. The UN had put out a report on the incidents, the Reagan clan couldn�t claim they didn�t know, yet, there they were dealing with …

Posted to Counterinsurgency 101

Jon B.

Another US blunder as to the Middle East that few people in America are aware of is the last piece of diplomacy with Iraq just prior to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. American ambassador April Glaspie passed the word directly to Saddam Hussein that America had no opinion on any Arab-Arab conflicts, this as Saddam had troops massed on the Kuwaiti border. A week later Iraq invaded.

"Few people are aware?" Au contraire. This is one of the most common left-wind moonbat absurdities extant. There are at least three versions of what Ambassador Glaspie said to Saddam. …

Posted to Counterinsurgency 101

Jon B �

When Saddam hears from the most powerful nation in the world that they essentially don�t care, then yes he might make a miscalculation. He made plenty, attacking Iran was one of many, a war he couldn�t win despite some support from the US. Did you bother to read the link that had the transcript of Glaspie�s meeting? Is it any wonder Saddam may have misunderstand what she was saying? As you say, he thought he could get away with it, but based on a blundered diplomatic meeting.

So, your position is that Saddam �made plenty (of miscalculations)�, …

Posted to Counterinsurgency 101

WTH - How did you get off so easily? Michael P. Hardesty, Oakland CA, aka blondemike, threatened me with beheading. And don't get him started on his .357 Mag. Old Hardesty is a thoroughly dangerous character. Seriously. (Snicker, giggle, tee-hee, Bwahahahahaha!)

Posted to Counterinsurgency 101

� the principal dynamic shaping life in the year 2037 will be the re-emergence of three ancient nations: China, India and Iran. Their powerful economies, muscular militaries, ambitious politicians, nationalistic populaces and resurgent cultures will irrevocably alter the lives of the 2.9 billion people who will then be living within their borders.

Ummm, probably not. None of their economies are very strong, their militaries are decidedly lacking, Iran, India, and China are fragmented into ethnic and religious constituencies, and their cultures are becoming more Westernized. Granting that Iran�s and China�s politicians are ambitious (one out of five ain�t bad?), …

Posted to Eyes Off the Prize

Pretty dense, Pocha. The United States economic policy IS �development and stability� for Asia and everywhere. Why else do you think Nixon went ot China? Have you been asleep for the last twenty years, like Rip van Winkle? Don�t you have any awareness at all outside you idiotic socialist agenda?

Yet, as Nye points out in his book, The Paradox of American Power, any U.S. attempt to undermine or contain the emergence of these new powers could backfire just like Britain, France and Russia�s attempts to contain Germany, Japan and Italy backfired a century ago.

Ummm, I must have missed …

Posted to Eyes Off the Prize

Less than 40 years after (Dr. King�s) assassination virtually killed the civil rights movement �

This strange and ambiguous statement, typical of Muwakkil, stopped me cold. Whatever could he mean? Coretta Scott King carried on heroically. A host of others, including close associates of Dr. King, carried on as well, perhaps not quite so heroically, and maybe even self-servingly. But carry on they did. So, in what sense was the Civil Rights movement �killed�? Well, for one thing, emphasis shifted within the Civl Rights movement at the time of Dr. King�s death. There had been a long history of self-reliance …

Posted to Baracks Black Dilemma

MMM - Fuck off, boy. Hardesty is the stupidest little dumbshit on this or any other site, as he proved when he went and put his fingerprints and footprints all over the Internet while trying to preserve his anonymity. I periodically ring his bell because it pisses him off, and he then makes even more vile and repulsive and idiotic statements. Keep your personal opinions out of this, and let Hardesty shoot his mouth off all he wants. Fools and knaves should be opposed on general principle, as Robert Conquest has said, and opposing Hardesty is my service to the people …

Posted to Baracks Black Dilemma

MMM - Fuck off, boy. Hardesty is the one who is supposed to get bent out of shape by the Conquest reference, so what are you doing here? You are into something you do not understand. Keep your personal opinions out of this. Or not.

Posted to Baracks Black Dilemma

Beyond Marxism

Marxists and other critically disposed thinkers like to point out that the supposed �equality� in cyberspace is deceiving. It ignores all the complex material dispositions (my wealth, my social position, my power or its lack, etc.).

As Zizek (and other critically disposed thinkers) are wont to do, they cast everything in the Internet in terms of class conflict (wealth, social position, power/lack thereof), and find the Internet wanting. Boo hoo hoo. So sad. (Sniff.) Maybe we ought to start a revolution or something. Marxism is a dead philosophy walking, done in by its faulty precepts, inefficiency, and …

Posted to In You More Than Yourself

Loony Booty -“ Why, I declare! I do think you are a "critically disposed thinker"! Meaning you can't think worth shit.

... agriculture worker who has a broken body after forty years of back-breaking labor at minimum wage is deserving of nothing and should just shuffle off to die.

We are all going to shuffle off to die, if you have not yet noticed. You have bought into selected parts of the Marxist "class conflict (wealth, social position, power/lack thereof)" philosophy, while ignoring the wealth and social benefits created by democratic, rule-of-law, free-market capitalism. Agricultural work has always been …

Posted to In You More Than Yourself

BROOKLYN � You are as gullible as a goose. Anyone who would accept Cuban socialist propaganda at face value, on medical care or any other subject, is a fool. When you Google �Cuba medical care�, over half of the first fifty entries contain detailed, and often graphic, criticisms of Cuban medical services. Specific complaints include: > There is a two-tiered medical system, a good one for communist party officials and �rich� foreigners, and a much poorer sytem for the Cuban people. > The highly-touted low infant mortality rate in Cuba is the direct product of the government policy of aborting high …

Posted to In You More Than Yourself

Loony Booty

Venezuela has the largest private sector economic growth in the hermisphere for the last three years.

Umm, what private sector would that be? Chavez has already announced plans to nationalize the oil, electrical power, and telecommunications industries. Maybe Chavez wants to do better than Allende, who nationalized the Chilean copper industry, and who achieved 120% inflation during the month of August 1972. So, when the Venezuelan economy collapses, whom will you blame? Nixon, again? Private sector or public sector, you surely know that the oil strikes in 2002/2003 hit the Venezuelan economy hard, -9% in 2002 and another …

Posted to In You More Than Yourself

Loony Booty - If you want to talk intelligently about Venezuela oil, or oil in general, read up in Rigzone. It will save you a lot of self-embarassment. Since oil profits represent 30% of Venezuelan GDP, and the price of oil is down over 30% in the last few months, that necessarily means that Venezuelan GDP has already taken a sharp hit. We have already had the conversation about Venezuela's reserves and liabilities. At any rate, Venezuela's most valuable asset is trust, and Chavez pissed that away when he started stealing other peoples' property. If you keep misrepresenting Venezuela's position, you …

Posted to In You More Than Yourself

Loony Booty -

I know it is easy to bash bureaucrats, but civil servants mostly only do what the law requires. Politicians theoretically decide what the law is, but given that they are mostly dependent on corporate sponsorship for electoral financing and being treated in the corporate media as legitimate contenders, who do you think is most responsible for this skewing of facts? Who among our elected officials do you think are least dependent on corporate sponsorship? Could it be the Progressive Caucus?

�(S)kewing of facts� is progressive nonsense, exhibiting much more paraoia than accuracy. Isn�t it strange how the …

Posted to In You More Than Yourself

Loony Booty �

Time you checked again into party campaign contributions.

Oh, I assure you I keep current with such matters.

The Repuglicans have always had the bigger end of the stick when it comes to corporate and wealthy donors.

You are full of shit. You have just encapsulated one of the absurd falsehoods that leftists repeat, like a bunch of little Goebbels wind-up dolls. Opensecrets keeps detailed records on campaign finance matters. Of the top twenty corporate donors in the last several years, eleven gave 90% or more of their donations to Dimocrats, and three more gave a …

Posted to In You More Than Yourself

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT You have undoubtedly observed that Mike is irrational, inconsistent, and lacking in intellectual snap. Some of you may not be aware of just how stupid he is, leaving his ID all over the Internet while maintaining his pseudonymous nonentity identity. WARNING: Be careful of what you say about Mike, or he will threaten you with beheading or with his genuine .357 Mag. The following is reproduced from a previous ITT thread: Michael P. Hardesty (aka blondemike) Biography Brackets [] indicate end note citations. Mr. Hardesty is a person of strong opinions, but his relationships with fact and logic …

Posted to Love the Warrior, Hate the War

There are other options than "non-lethal" technologies. Dresden, for example. The fascist empire died of lethal force. The socialist empires died of corruption and inefficiency and sanity. They were not crazy enough to blow up the world for their absurd political and economic beliefs. The Jihadists and their projected Caliphate are corrupt, inefficient, and insane. They are quite willing to blow up the world to further their religious vision of Allah's will. The West can stop the Jihadists at little cost, just as it could have stopped Lenin in 1918, Hitler in 1938, and Mao in 1946, at little cost. When …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH - TASERing the bastards is not the object, but the means to the object. The objects are to preserve Lebanese independence, to sever the shaky mutual admiration society between Persian Iran and Arab Syria, to stop the killing in Iraq and allow democracy to grow there, to allow the Palestinians to burn out their passion against each other rather than against Israel, to further development of democracy in the other Arab states, and to prevent Iran from developing nukes and thereby controlling the oil resources of the Middle East. In this regard, Luttwak has a clarifying article in WSJ that …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH - No options. The excitement over the body armor and the vehicle armor lasted a few weeks, but when was the last time you heard anyone complain about this particular problem? Problems are for solving, and USA military logistics is extremely good, and getting better. Regarding your concern about the machinists. I am from the oil patch. A shell-and-tube heat exchanger is a big metal cylinder with a large number of tubes running lengthwise or bent back upon themselves within the exchanger. Each tube passes through a tube sheet and is sealed to the tube sheet, which is a large, …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

Hardesty -

Scorp, over one third of US manufacturing capacity has disappeared since Bush 2 stole the 2000 Election. We manufacture LESS than we ever have and our huge trade deficit with China proves that.

It is not possible that you are so grossly mistaken so often, so you must be a habitual liar in pursuit of your "left libertarian" agenda, whatever that is. I fail to see how socialist dishonesty differs from left libertarian dishonesty. The Bubba Bubble surplus peaked in 1999, and was in free-fall during the last fifteen months of the Clinton Administration. You don't have to …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

Hardesty - Bankrupt? Gee, maybe we better go file for Chapter 11. Actually, countries do not go bankrupt in the way that individuals or companies do. The only way a country could go bankrupt would be for the currency to collapse or for the currency to hyperinflate. I have followed left-wind doom-and-gloom pronouncements for a number of years. During this time there have been several cycles of collapse/hyperinflate paranoia, always by people on the far left, including your silly self. But the economy just keeps sailing along, punctuated by nasty little episodes like the Carter Catastrophe and the Bubba Bubble. Carter …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH � I can sympathize with your individual circumstance, but the solution is not to close down trade. We did that (along with raising taxes) early in the Great Depression, and the results were horrendous. I am guessing that you live in Ohio, or nearby. But not all states are in the rust belt, and some of the states are doing quite well. The states doing best are known as Red States, in contemporary political parlance, and you are living in a Blue State. During the 2006 election, there were a number of comparisons made between Red and Blue States. Blue …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH �

�...the solution is not to close down trade.� I have never proposed this. What I do propose is spelled out in the Bill of Rights � concern for the general welfare and posterity � OUR own citizens, OUR kids, yours and mine, OUR national future.

I don�t see my children�s futures or our citizens� futures in producing low tech stuff that some Asian or Mexican can produce more cheaply.

The problems are not due to any state policies.

Did you actually take time to read and understand the PRI data? Some states have higher tax rates …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH �

� in the 60s there was a period called �Go-Go� investing. The �experts� were super confident, but looking at the near term only, stocks being bought and sold without much supporting data �

And then the bubble burst. The economic stagnation after the 1960s lasted seventeen years into the 1980s. The economic climate changed for the better in the 1980s because President Reagan changed it. Well, yes, that is what happened in the 1960s. The same thing happened in the 1920, and then the bubble burst. The Roaring Twenties were followed by the Great Depression, which lasted about …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH -

Recessions, bubbles, tax breaks are short term events and financial tactics � what�s happening is a macro change which, unless we figure how to control, will destroy 230 years of national progress.

The Dutch Tulip Bubble crashed in 1637, nearly 400 years ago. The Mississippi Bubble crashed in 1721. Recessions and tax breaks certainly go back much further. There is something new under the sun, but not the things that concern you so greatly. I fail utterly to see how doing things better and faster threatens �national progress�. The Soviet Union died of corruption and inefficiency. There are …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH - Well, I certainly addressed your stated concerns. Now you say that this was not what you are talking about?

My alluding to computer prices falling and "anyone in any country" having access to technology is to point to the vulnerability of our economic condition and how it IS already affecting us.

Naah. Our productivity is making us invulnerable. The Chinese need our dollars to stabilize and improve their economy. Now, how would our "economic condition" be affected if we kept 1.3 billion Chinese and 1.3 billion Muslims in poverty, poor, undernourished, and unhappy, while raising prices for everything …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH - Sheesh! You are taking counsel of you fears, and your fears won. You are a glutton for punishment. If the Dimocrats succeed in electing a hard leftist (Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Gore) to the White House in 2008, some of your predictions could not only come true, it could be much worse than you can imagine in your fondest dreams. The most problematic of your predictions are the ones concerning the price of gold and interest rates. Interest rates, the price of gold, and the price of oil sometimes move in tandem, but we have made major progress in solving …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

WTH - NYT is short-hand for the Old Media, which includes LAT, WaPo, CBS, ABC, and NBC and similar sterling purveyors of fine dishonesty, obfuscation, commission, and ommission. Not to say that New Media does not indulge in the same, but with Old Media, it is constant. You must develop keen senses incorporating knowledge, understanding, wisdom, discrimination, irony, and humor to make any sense out of what is reported to be going on in the world. Subjective ideologues, such as Hardesty, have on tools to deal with any of this.

... I never follow ANY consensus.

Well, that is …

Posted to Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation

Back several months ago, ITT ran a similar article on 24 Hours and Jack Bauer. You can take this article and the Bauer article, interchange the heros's names and the titles, and the two articles make equal nonsense. The Bauer article bemoaned the fact that Conservatives sit around and rejoice at Jack Bauer's heroics. In fact, I have some friends who enjoy 24 Hours with me, but our favorite recreation is looking for absurdities, of which there are LOTS. The best one last season was when the bad guy stole the CTU ID card and carried a standard brief case into …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

MM - You have a problem with hards, horniness, or heroes? 'what is YOUR problem, boy?

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Good, TI. You might point out that Heritage.org ranks countries as Free, Mostly Free, Mostly Unfree, and Repressed. Chile is the only country in Latin America that is rated as Free, and it has the strongest economy in Latin America. Venezuela and Cuba are rated Repressed, along with NorK, Iran, and Libya. http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/downloads/Index05_EconFreedomMAP.jpg Similarly, freedomhouse.org has a looser rating system: Free, Partly Free, and Not Free. Chile is rated Free, and is rated 1 (highest) for both political rights and for civil liberties, while Venezuela (Partly Free) is rated 4,4. Cuba (Not Free) is rated 7,7, just like NorK. http://www.freedomhouse.org/ The …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty � To quote myself:

But the leftist complaints never cease.

All wealth is created. A mountain of gold is worthless unless someone mines the ore and processes it. An unplowed field does not produce grain. Trained workers, knowledge, factories, production machinery, and raw materials are forms of capital that are required to produce wealth. Free trade, including expanded knowledge, is required to increase wealth in poor countries: China and India are prominent current models, but Estonia, Ireland, and Chile have recently undergone radical transformations and upgrades in their ability to create wealth by following free trade capitalist models. …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty - The capitalist problem of distributing wealth after it is created is quite different from the socialist problem of destroying wealth.

So, in your opinion, scorpy, wage earners, laborers, mechanics, technicians and subsistence farmers are not producers, only the investment and professional managerial classes produce anything?

Well, no. That is not what I said, there is no interpretation of what I said that comes out the way you phrased it, and it is patently stupid of you to say such a thing.

I would ask, who should own the means of production? Those who do the actual work …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty -

... nor am I ignoring the tens of millions dead under nominally "socialist" dictatorships. They simply are not relevant.

You leftists universally ignore "the tens of millions dead under nominally "socialist" dictatorships", but you may be the first person ever to say they are not relevant. So, let's try to provide a little bit of relevance. Marxist philosophy explicitly stated that the workers' socialism would develop and evolve, and that capitalism would fade away, just as capitalism arose as feudalism faded away. Lenin initiated the idea that, instead of the workers developing and evolving their socialism, professional …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty -

Allende wasn't Lenin or Stalin or Castro or Mao or Pol Pot. His is a different case.

Of course Allende is a different case. Allende was a useless idiot, just like you, but on a global scale. The history of Allende's systematic destruction of the Chilean economy is well documented. Who suffered when food shortages developed and inflation hit quadruple digits? The capitalists? Naah. The people suffered, just like the Kulaks suffered under Lenin and Stalin.

The Soviet Union was never a real threat to the US on the global stage.

What a foolish, inconsistent girl …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty -

You just don't understand that socialism can only work in a democratic society.

Socialism is a flawed idea that works poorly in a democratic society, and terribly in a totalitarian society. The socialist bureaucracy in Europe has stifled growth and has long-term high unemployment for over fifteen years. European natives are dying off and Europe is being infiltrated by millions of Muslims, and the socialist Euros do not have a clue what to do about it. Muslim crimes, riots, and destruction are standing fixtures in France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. I guarantee you …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty -

You don�t give up do you, scorpy. You�d murder commie babies with your bare hands and suck their blood through a straw, for a buck, wouldn�t you?

That is a pretty stupid statement, even for you. The left has this romantic, pathetic, mythic, false image of Allende which it actively promotes. Based on what? The most distinguishing feature of Allende's career was the haste with which he installed failed socialist policies, and the speed of the disastrous results, followed quickly by the reactions of people who feared for their well being and their hard-earned property. Allende's Chile …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty -

... but you are obsessively anti-socialist.

Well, that is not true, of course. I am anti-murder. I am against corruption. I am against inefficiency. I am anti-bureaucracy. I am against the Soviet nomenclatura and the American "elite liberals" (same thing). So, yes, I can see how a person such as yourself might think that I am "anti-socialist". I have absolutely no quarrel with socialist objectives. Children do need milk. People need to have their basic needs met. The Soviet Constitution reads like a human rights document. So, how is it that we follow the road of …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty � If ignorance is bliss, you must be the happiest little girl in Creation. In one short post you have made four erroneous and unjustified assumptions.

� Pinochet was a murderer?

Of course Pinochet was a murderer. That is bad. But it is not as bad as allowing Allende to wreck a country and leave the people poor, abused, and ignorant, like his fellow socialists were doing in the Soviet Union and Asia. As long as we are condemning torturers and murderers, I haven�t heard your comments on the men Che personally shot or the people who …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty - Oh, Brother!

I am glad you have admitted that Pinochet was a murderer, at long last.

I'm afraid it did not occur to me to admit the obvious. We were at war, and Pinochet was an ally. Pinochet was not the ideal ally, but a socialist dictatorship, following so close behind the Soviets, the ChiComs, the NorKs, the Cubans, and the North Vietnamese was simply not acceptable. Why do you never complain about the death and repression in Cuba? For that matter, why don't you complain about the hash Allende made of the Chilean economy? Inflation approaching …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Thanks, Wolf. I miss Hardesty. He was so opinionated, so flawed, so inconsistent, so stupid, it was a pleasure to ring his bell. Loony Booty and I go through these intense bouts at widely scattered times. Most of the rest of them are not worth reading, much less writing about.

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty - Sin Commentario, indeed. You are cutting a wide peel off a small potato. Pinochet is the worst example of contemporary right wing extremism you can find, or in fact, exists. That is why you harp on Pinochet. But ALL the socialist regimes were many orders of magnitude worse. Avoiding the horrors of socialist mass murder, repression, and economic destruction is amply justified in war, hot or cold or in-between, as in Chile�s case. So, why don�t you Commentario on the tens of millions of dead in the Soviet Union and communist China, and the millions of dead in …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty �

You seem to believe that the denunciation of brutalities of one side in an historical conflict in some way leads to a justification of brutalities by the other side.

Now, come on, lady. You are the one-track complainer about relatively innocuous Pinochet. Can you say �projection defense mechanism�? I have seen more brutality than you ever thought about, and I hate war worse than you are capable of hating. But if you think we ought to roll over and play dead for every socialist terrorist or Jihadist terrorist that wants to kill us, you are on your …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty - I abjectly apologize for referring to you as a lady. That was clearly a mistake. Perhaps I let myself become exasperated by your absurd takes on things you know nothing about. As an example, you said:

What destroyed the Chilean economy was the bottom falling out of the copper market.

To which I replied:

Ummm, no. The price of copper was $66/ton in 1970 when Allende took office. Allende promptly nationalized the copper mines and the banks, and the big landed estates. He also froze prices, raised wages, and started printing money to pay for it. By …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty -

You�ve been skulking on these pages for how many years now, and you are still clueless why intelligent people find a moral and humane purpose in promoting socialist ideals? Or do you just not believe that progressive moral development and humane purpose serves any �advantage� or �benefit?

Let me tell you what I know about the �moral and humane purpose in promoting socialist ideals�. My brother-in-law has spent most of his life in a mental institution. He was beaten badly by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and it affected his mind. His Grandmother had her …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Thanks, Kim. I have been following your thread. I enjoy what you have to say, and I sense that you are making progress in your search.

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Horse - You may have noted that I invariably refer to "democracy, the rule of law, and free-market capitalism", ideals that I firmly believe in. But the incident(s) you relate fail to give sufficient information to identify the perps as having or being driven by a capitalist philosophy. Were these common criminals? If so, what makes you think they own a capitalist philosophy, or any philosophy at all? Somehow, I doubt a worker, a manager, a CEO or CFO, capitalists all, tried to kill you. Don't be like Hardesty, who blames everything that happened back five hundred years on capitalism, long …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty and All - Thank you for the expressions of interest. I assure you that this is not True Confessions and that I have no need of Tea and Sympathy. The family is well, strong, and prosperous in spite (because?) of our problems, except brother-in-law, of course.

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Horse - Unfortunately, sometimes the police are common criminals, but I fail to see how you link this to capitalism. My brother was once rousted by the Texas HyPo while on vacation, but this was a simple revenue enhancement scheme. It made the national news a few years back, and there was a big issue at the time; I don't think this particular caper is still being played. Incidents like Rodney King and Amadou Diallo brought much attention to this type incident, increased civic and police awareness, and led to corrective action. But it is certainly a never-ending job, given that …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty � Little emotional outburst? Little? Emotional? Outburst? Littleemotionaloutburst? You are projecting again. Knock that crap off. Or not. And I note with interest your abrupt change of attitude:

I, too, am sorry for the cruel and unnecessary suffering of your family. I am so glad you shared that. It has been a long time in coming. It really makes it clear to me exactly why you hate communism so.

Contrast that with your last statement:

glad you�ve recovered from your little emotional outburst. Care to respond to anything I wrote? Or do you intend just to soldier on …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Loony Booty -

Sorry again, scorpy, I was just trying to give you some space to reassert your macho pose.

I'm sure it doesn't make any difference to either one of us, but I take this as an admission that your sympathy for me was faked. But your sympathy for various socialist regimes is obvious, and genuine. Or not? And you really ought to lay-off the psycho-babble. You don't have a clue what "transference" is, but not being able to recognize an "emotional outburst" when you don't see it is ridiculous. You must realize that the socialist regimes had …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Never mind.

Posted to Chávez Consolidates Power

MM - If you are so fucking smart, why didn't YOU discover that blondemike was Michael P. Hardesty? Hardesty kept telling me (not just me, everybody) how stupid they were. That is when I decided to determine who blondemike really was. It took about five minutes. So then Hardesty accuses me of being a government employee, and using government resources to find his identification. But Hardesty left tracks all over the Internet like a D-9 Cat. Not too smart. Hardesty regularly makes major switches in his philosophical positions, and is utterly inconsistent: racist -anti-racist, pro-Chomsky - anti-Chomsky, prone to wild exaggeration, …

Posted to Chávez Consolidates Power

MM -

Don�t take this the wrong way, but he is smarter than all of us. He�s certainly smarter than I am. On second thought, he�s probably just as smart as you are. No more. No less.

Ummm, no! Hardesty once claimed to have an IQ of 145, but that is certainly a wild exaggeration. I am certain that Hardesty's IQ is well within one standard deviation from the norm. At any rate, even if he did have a 145, I assure you that 145 is quite modest in this company. You are far too easily impressed. The key to …

Posted to Chávez Consolidates Power

Neither the article nor the commentary to this point address the most salient factors concerning Venezuela. The author provides us with a fond leftist take on the political situation in Venezuela, and the usual suspects blindly endorse anything socialist. But there is trouble in the Bolivarian Republic. Oil is a major part of the Venezuelan economy but, typical of authoritarian governments, Venezuela is consuming its substance, and is not performing maintenance or administration on its oil facilities: > Financial reports and audits are two years out of date. Bank deposits from PdVSA are not being made to Venezuelan banks. > Trained …

Posted to Chávez Consolidates Power

Loony Booty - Did you read all your IHT cite? Did you think about what it says, and what it means? Did you compare the IHT data with other recognized sources? Where did the "36B in cash reserves" come from? I do not see it in the IHT article. World Fact Book for Venezuela has: Reserves $29.6 B External Debt $41.5 B Venezuela also has: Unemployment 12.2% Poverty 47% I am well aware of the Peak Oil arguement, it has been around for years. But that does not change the dynamics of the markets. Chavez has been spending his peoples' money …

Posted to Chávez Consolidates Power

Michael P. Hardesty (aka blondemike) Biography Brackets [] indicate end note citations. Mr. Hardesty is a person of strong opinions, but his relationships with fact and logic are weak or non-existent. Sorting through his thoughts (?), such as they are, is made infinitely more difficult by his inconsistency, reflecting his internal conflicts and scatter-brained approach to his chosen subject matter, which includes principally foreign and domestic politics. Mr. Hardesty has a wife/companion/housemate/whatever named Nina, and four cats. They all live unhappily in Oakland in a mixed race neighborhood, for which they provide most of the mixing. Their domestic situation reflects Mr. …

Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It

My housemate and I have been almost the sole whites living in a largely Afro-American neighborhood as homeowners the past four years. Our experiences have caused us to revise our formerly glib left-liberal assumptions on race, welfare, civil rights, affirmative action, gun control, identity politics, rent control, ad nauseam.

The only neighbors that don't like us are two criminals, we have great relations with all the rest including several black families.

So, will the real Mr. Hardesty please stand up? Are things so bad in your neighborhood that it has caused you "to revise our formerly glib left-liberal assumptions …

Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It

Lancer - You were doing very well down until your fifth paragraph:

Government control of the monetary system allows the politicians to inflate the money supply (by printing dollars at will) to pay for needless overseas wars, never-ending military spending, and the inefficient welfare state, thus creating inflation and making every hard-earned dollar worth less.

In practice, President Reagan passed tax cuts and tax reform and eliminated the hyperinflation he inherited from LBJ's mismanagement of the Vietnam War and the Great Society, and Carter's disastrous policies. The seventeen years between LBJ and Jimmi Carter were marked by low growth and …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC – You seem fairly well read for a cab driver. Let me guess. You went to college, studied all that liberal nonsense, and THEN discovered that there was no market for little dumb shits that can only think in terms of socialism. Am I close?

We are still at an over 4.5% unemployment rate which is higher than the 3.9% during the Clinton years.

Well, no. Did they teach you to lie with statistics in college? There was a mild recession at the end of Bush 41’s term, caused by the Fed raising interest rates. The Fed was fearful …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Consequent to the rise in interest rates, the unemployment rate was 7.3% in the month President Clinton took office, and rose to 7.8% five months later, in June 1992. The unemployment rate then gradually fell and stabilized in 1995-1996 in a narrow band between 5.4% and 5.8%. In 1996, Chairman Greenspan expressed alarm at the �irrational exuberance� of the markets (the Dow was at 6000), but neither Greenspan nor Clinton did anything to alleviate this irrational behavior of the markets. At that point the unemployment rate began to fall to an historically low level, the lowest level since the Kennedy tax …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike - Of course, 1992 was the election year and Clinton took office in January 1993. Apologize for that one. While we are in correction mode, you have not yet acknowledged or apologized for your gross misstatement of President Reagan's educational qualifications. Or are you left-wind moonbats too good or too important to bother with correcting yourselves when you make a mistake? And speaking of mistakes, or lies, or whatever you are calling it these days, where did you come up with this crap:

That "mild recession" in THE LAST TWO YEARS OF BUSH 1'S TENURE WAS THE WORST SINCE THE …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

Koffi Annan is great!! He didn�t steal nearly as much as US contractors. Over 9 billion unaccounted for at the end of the War!!

Well, that certainly is a ringing endorsement for good old Kofi. "He didn�t steal nearly as much as US contractors." But the Oil-for-Food criminal enterprise was documented at $21.3 billion in 2004, making it the largest bribery/kickback/extortion/graft/corruption scandal in history, and a chunk went to UN officials. About two years ago there were allegations that Halliburton had some financial irregularities in Iraq. I went back and found every scandal I could on Halliburton (there …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike -

I got the figues from the US Dept of Labor for Bush 1. And all the states EDD's verified them.

Can you be a little more specific, with a verifiable reference? BLS has nothing close to the numbers you have provided for Alabama, California, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, either SA or NSA, during Bush 1's term. And you are contradicting yourself again. First you said:

Ronald Reagan WAS NOT A COLLEGE GRADUATE, HE WAS NOT AN ECONOMIST OF ANY SORT AND HE PRODUCED THE MOST MASSIVE DEFICITS IN US HISTORY PRIOR TO THE CURRENT IMBECILE.

Then you said:

Reagan …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC - I'll bet you made really good grades in college. You could really soak up whatever the left-wind professors were pouring into your cranium, and regurgitate on demand. Unfortunately, socialist theory has nothing to do with the way the real world operates (witness the universal failures of socialism, wherever applied). And the object of an education is to learn to think, NOT to spout socialist propaganda. Your last two posts are literate, well constructed, understandable, and silly, to the point of being absurd. All these "facts" you have assembled: did you stop and read any of the source material? Do …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike -

BLS does issue the monthly unemployment stats, they gather them from the EDD's around the country. I got the figures from BLS and they were widely reported at the time, it was the highest double digit official figures since the GOP Great Depression.

Well, that's nice. I guess. But why are your BLS unemployment rates so much greater than my BLS unemployment rates for Bush 1's term? Maximum Alabama unemployment rate, 1989 - 1992 - 7.1% Maximum California unemployment rate, 1989 - 1992 - 9.9% Maximum Michigan unemployment rate, 1989 - 1992 - 9.7% Maximum Pennsylvania unemployment rate, …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

Scorp, I would like you to know that what I write is from my own research. No one writes anything for me and I don�t steal material.

I am not accusing you of stealing anything, I am accusing you of failure to think, which is much more serious. Failure to think is worse than a crime, it is a blunder, as Talleyrand phrased it. You may think you are doing research, but you are not. I checked out your Global South site and you gave a fair representation of GS's position on the matter. As you reported, according …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Goddam, Mike, you are as dumb as a turnip. Now tell me which word or words that you do not understand. Maximum? Alabama? unemployment? rate? 1989 - 1992? California? Michigan? Pennsylvania ? And where did I say "average"? Did you read the site I gave you? http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.al.htm You claim some data from the BLS exists, but it does not show up on the BLS website; entirely different data shows up on the BLS website. And Greenspan's interest rate recession in 1991 and 1992 barely showed up as a blip on the GDP graphs, unlike the Bubba Bubble and the Bubba Recession …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

You have no right to make ad hominem attacks on people you don�t know anything about only because you don�t approve of their politics. This is typical right-wing bullying and intolerance. It is also ignorant beyond belief!! I think a lot deeper than you have by the look of things. I really don�t know who you think you are!!

I. Don�t. Think. So. Here are some real ad hominem attacks from our friend Mike:

... you are dishonestly averaging them (figures) ...

Since I did not average anything, it certainly wasn�t done dishonestly.

Your (sic) a …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike - The American Prospect??? Counterpunch??????? Well, that explains a lot. If you look to Counterpunch and American Prospect for information, you undoubtedly call telephone numbers you find on the men's room wall at the Oakland Bus Terminal in order to find a date. Or do you go to the San Francisco Bus Terminal? Your social life is as empty as your so-called intellectual life. You, Sir, are a nekulturny nut case.

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

Scorp, it may interest you to know that Reagan didn't bring down the Soviet Empire.

Oh, I assure you that I am very interested in what you have to say about President Reagan and the Soviet economy. It is always fascinating the spin you left-wind types put on subjects of which you know nothing. I am sure that President Reagan had lots of help in bringing down the Soviet Union. The Soviets, following good socialist principles, had created a gigantic house of cards masquerading as a superpower state. Reagan just recognized that it was a flimsy structure, and …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC - Have you been following the debate in our colleges and universities on academic freedom? There is quite a history, and some of it is pretty ugly. A key step was taken in Pennsylvania, when the legislature held hearings on academic freedom for students. The leftist professors reacted furiouly, but the hearings revealed that existing rules on academic freedom allowed the professors to say anything, including bald indotrination in areas outside their competence and the class subject. Meanwhile, students' academic freedom was limited to things like being in a smoke-free classroom. The hearings led to new academic freedom standards in …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC - Now, come on, boy. On the one hand you are complaining that I treat you too roughly, by questioning the quality of the left-wind education you received at UW-Madison. Now you are complaining that even though your MA in PolySci only qualifies you for a cab driver's job, you are "educated". Which is it? The two positions you have taken are incompatible.

How could Reagan know things that the CIA, DIA, Mi6, and other Intel groups didn�t pass along.

You have probably never heard of it (you certainly do not exhibit it), but there is a mental faculty …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

The so called movement for academic freedom is nothing more than a rightist ploy to infest the last bastions of free thought in the US, American Universities, with rightist morons who want to spread culture war BS and degrade the level of academic discourse down to that of an unschooled cracker.

Well, I have been trying to convince you that you can and you should learn to think for yourself. It is a much bigger job than I expected. Quite apart from your left-wind, knee-jerk reaction as expressed above, take a moment to consider what Penn State …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

It is well known that the “Cold War II” was initiated by liars like the recently dismissed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who began circulating deliberate misinformation about a “strategic bomber gap” and other such nonsense that everyone now knows is false in order to justify large defense budgets.

Whoa, CDC. Learn to think. Try to use a little common sense. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first ever reference to a "missile gap" was by Senator John F. Kennedy on 14 August 1958. This "missle gap" became a major theme in Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1960, …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

Seeing your opponent as corrupt and inefficient is no reason to knowingly engage in actions that could take the world to the brink of nuclear war when your opponent isn't threatening your security.

Oh, I did not see our opponent as corrupt and inefficient. Our opponent was corrupt, inefficient, and in possession of nuclear weapons with 10,000 kajillion tons of destructive power, the knowledge for which he did not develop himself, but which he had to steal. Sort of like NorK and Iran now. And why did the Soviets gear their entire economy to heavy industry and …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC - I must say that your last two posts (except when you called me a warmonger) have been characterized by more rational discourse and less polemical rants. Let me illustrate what I find objectionable in your rants. This is from your learned discussion on Order 81:

This opens the door to corporate domination of the Iraqi seed market and the abuse of power to make Iraq dependant (sic) on foreign produced seeds while attempting to obliterate from the market the genetically diverse traditional variety of seeds. The New seeds are being promoted toward larger farmers with deep corporate connections who …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC - I am impressed that you actually have experience with agriculture. But I am not impressed with you changing the subject. You spelled out in some detail how the Iraqi native grains were to be "obliterated" and commercial grain seeds would be forced on the poor Iraqi farmers, to nobody's benefit but the commercial grain companies. None of that is true, of course. Now you are talking about meat and vegetables and specialty grains for exotic pastas and redundant trade. All of which is true and interesting, but totally unrelated to our discussion. In 2003, Iraq produced 900,000 metric tons …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike - Just out of curiosity, how tall are you?

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC �

The market for GM seeds are amoung (sic) the most concentrated markets in the entire world.

And what does this tell us? It tells us that GM seeds are superior products, and people are willing to pay for them, of course. At one time, you could have said this, with perfect accuracy:

The market for GM cars is among the most concentrated markets in the entire world.

But then GM compromised on quality and their disciplined approach to employees and markets collapsed, leaving an opening for Toyota and Nissan and Hyundai and Opel and Saab …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

The market for GM seeds are amoung (sic) the most concentrated markets in the entire world.

If GM seeds were the choice of farmers in the third world or even in the first (which they’re not) the WTO would not have needed to push through the TRIPS agreement in 1994 which guarantees the TNCs 20 year patent protections for their seeds.

Duh! Well, which is it? Concentration in a market in which there is no demand is meaningless. Who would go to the trouble of patenting something useless? Intellectual property laws are well defined: patents, …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike - Five feet, six inches, max. I bet you are pretty tough, though, right?

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

Patented high yield seeds are not, as you suggest in your criticism of Paul Ehrlich�s assertions in the late 1960s, a response to the problem of low agricultural productivity, population explosions, or other Malthusian falsehoods. It is based on a desire of a few large agribusiness firms to monopolize and control the source of the world�s food supply in order to profit enormously.

Ummm, forget what I said about, "Learn to think". Before you need to to worry about thinking, you need to learn to read. I defy you to show me where I criticized anything Ehrlich …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

You said (Ehrlich) was wrong in 1968 and he is still wrong today.

Well, no. What I actually said was:

Ehrlich was wrong in 1968, and you (CDC) are wrong now.

Ummm, CDC, criticism involves a value judgement. Stating a fact (Ehrlich's prophecy did not come to pass), a fact with which you have already agreed, is not criticism. When you call me an "asshole", that contains a value judgement, and it is criticism. Now I reply that you are as nekulturny as Mike, and I have made a value judgement and criticized you. What in the …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC, Mike - The 700,000 figure came from Lancet, and has been utterly refuted. Don't be so gullible/stupid. Iraqbodycount give a maximum and minimum range for civilian fatalities, and is widely accepted as the best available data. Iraqbodycount gives a cause/circumstance of death, and most of the bodies are the result of terrorist activity and internecine warfare. About 10,000 fatalities are attributable to Coalition activity, most of them in the first three weeks, and these include civilians used for shields by terrorists. You are incapable of cogent, persuasive arguments, so now you employ dishonesty. Neat trick if you can convince anybody. …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC - If the Lancet figures are correct, about 770 people have died each day since March 2003. But the MSM is joyful when they can report one-tenth that number. I realize that members of the leftist media and socialists (same thing) are incompetent to count beyond twenty-one, but surely there would be wild celebrations at the NYT if they could report numbers anywhere close to the Lancet figures. The Lancet figures exceed the combined numbers of fatalities from the fire bomb raids on Japan, plus Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with Dresden thrown in for good measure. Learn to think, CDC. Don't …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike - I have never been to Auschwitz. But I have been to Dachau, Verdun, Tuol Sleng, the Killing Fields, and WTC. The lesson any sane person would learn from these experiences is that terrorism, whether it is described as communist, socialist, fascist, or Islamist, needs to be stomped out of existence with the least possible delay, at whatever necessary cost. President Bush has been remiss in pussyfooting around in Iraq, while Iran is building nukes. I do not credit you with sanity, much less understanding, but things are coming to a head, as in Europe 1938. Are we going to …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike -

� the death toll from world capitalism over four centuries could be as high as several hundred million or even half a billion deaths.

Yes, and it could be as low as zero, if socialists are not doing the counting. You have a very interesting take on economic and demographic history. Total fiction, of course. Mercantilism preceded capitalism, and lasted through the Eighteenth Century, ending about 200 years ago. So any talk of capitalism three or four centuries ago is historically meaningless. Imperialism is the child of mercantilism, when nations rushed to tie down assets, in order …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC � CDC, when I suggest that you, �Learn to think�, does anything at all register in that brain of yours? Are the words beyond your understanding? Learn. To. Think. Is that too complicated for you, either in terms of understanding the meaning of the words, or the thought encapsulated therein?

Imperialism was more the creature of 19th century capitalism than merchantilism (sic).

Imperialism predates the Roman Empire by at least three millinnia. Modern imperialism, to which our discussion has referred, predates capitalism by at least three centuries. And you argue as if imperialism was invented by the evil capitalists. …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

I believe that historians will see Leninist centralized state planning and ownership as a development and modernization strategy for poor backward countries whose brief experience with industrial capitalism was highly destabilizing.

And you will be wrong, as always. Lenin came to power as the head of a criminal enterprise, not unlike the Mafia. Stalin was top gun for Lenin, and that was how Stalin came to power under Lenin. Some of Stalin�s escapades were a mixture of tragedy and hilarity. After a big bank robbery, the money was taken to Europe to be cashed in, but the serial …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike � Oh, come now, Mike. You have already told us you are a little short shit with modest intelligence. You like to make bloody threats from your keyboard while you are supposed to be at work. And you are a socialist, meaning you are worse than worthless. What else do you have to say?

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC - Your last post was quite remarkable, even for you. Moynihan said:

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

You seem to object to what I wrote about the criminal nature of the Soviet founding, though you do not spell out your objections. Koba was one of the aliases used by Stalin:

The expropriation on Erivan Square in Tiflis on June 13, 1907, was by far the greatest success. Lenin took part in a meeting in Berlin in May to work out the details of the raid. Backed by a band of about 50 …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

Your version of Russian history is utterly warped. No one accepts it, even conservative historians. Drop the shit if you want to debate history and politics seriously.

All revolutions start with a violent illegal act. That is what makes them revolutions. Ours was no different. Boston Tea Party, anyone?

What, you mean my "version of Russian history" was right after all? Well, fancy that! Now you are not going to even apologize for getting it so wrong? The American Revolution was not a criminal enterprise, unlike the Soviet Revolution. The American Revolution did not immediately set out …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

Mike, that is a touching tribute you offered to CDC for his fictional alternate history. Unfortunately, you are both as dumb as dog shit.

No revolution's leadership deliberately intends to harm most of the people in the society in (sic) trys to transform. This makes no sense.

It made perfect sense to Stalin during the period of Collectivization, when Ukrainian peasants were assaulted by military formations and their food was stolen, so that millions of them starved and died. You might argue that Lenin's War Communism and Mao's Great Cultural Revolution might not have "deliberately" deprived and starved people (I …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

You continually harp on war communism and Lenin and Stalin and Mao.

I have mentioned War Communism exactly one time, and that was in response to your characterization of the early Soviet years as an idyllic period, when it was in fact a disaster, a time of death, destruction, massive dislocations, waste, inefficiency, and lost productivity. Lenin and Stalin, more-or-less following socialist theory, were the two main principals that presided over that mess. Something similar happened in Mao's China when he imposed similar socialist theories, and millions died. Old Europe is now non-totalitarian socialist, and it is experiencing …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC � Well, I knew you had it in you. You have actually read and tried to understand an historical text, rather than the socialist propaganda clap-trap you are expert in. But you still have some work to do.

Your Soviet history is warped as usual. In March 1921, the NEP replaced war communism which was explicitly a temporary policy to deal with the foreign invasion of the country and the Civil War with Denikin and the White Armies. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an effort to privatize the entire Soviet economy except for national finance, railroads and some heavy …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

MIKE! DON'T PANIC, MIKE! HYSTERIA DOESN'T ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING AND IT MAKES YOU LOOK STUPID!

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

MIKE - DON'T PANIC, MIKE! AND DON'T PRACTICE WILLFUL IGNORANCE. VOLUNTARY STUPIDITY DOESN'T ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING AND IT MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A TOTAL IDIOT! HOW DO YOU EXPECT TO LEAD THE REVOLUTION IF EVERYONE THINKS YOU ARE A TOTAL IDIOT? HMMMM???

Crystal Night was not the beginning of any "holocaust." The term itself is wrong, it means death by fire and the only deaths by fire in the Nazi concentration camps occurred from Allied bombing.

What a pair of fucking idiots. CDC can't think, and Mike does not know how to read. I said absolutely nothing about the "holocaust". What …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

MIKE - DON�T PANIC, MIKE! AND DON�T MAKE IDLE THREATS WHILE HIDING BEHIND YOUR KEYBOARD! IT MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A RETARDED MORON! WHAT WOULD NINA THINK?

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC -

Soviet Russian history from the revolution to the death of Stalin is really quite irrelevant. The American Left does not seek to follow the old Soviet model.

"The American Left does not seek to follow the old Soviet model." The hell you don't. Mike has threatened me with decapitation for my political beliefs. If it were left up to Mike, my life expectancy would be less than that of a Kulak, who had the dubious benefit of starving to death over a period of time. The purpose of raisng taxes, which has the effect of lowering tax receipts, …

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

CDC - I am on your side on this one, but you are inconsistent (hypocritcal?) by valuing a dead Jew in Dachau more than a dead Kulak in Ukrania. There is no possible justification for either, and Mike's pretense of millions of dead victims of capitalism with no evidence of capitalist death camps, no capitalist Killing Fields, no capitalist Siberian Golgotha, is as deluded as his holocaust denial.

Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt

If Democrats somehow manage to seize a mid-term loss from the jaws of victory in 2006, the DLC will undoubtedly again fabricate a storyline that blames it entirely on progressives.

My comments on the above quote are not directed at the chances of either Party winning or losing on November 07, but on the presumption, by the author, of the blamelessness of "progressives". The many comments in this article about progressives make it clear that the author considers contemporary progressive policies as virtuous, beneficial, and pacific, as well as blameless. We need to look closely at these assumptions. Progressivism has …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike - Ayn Rand? John Birch? How utterly quaint! Where did you dig those up, from the 1960 DNC talking points? If you have been asleep all this time, you have a lot of catching up to do; allow me to help you. I do not do Zinn or Chomsky for practical reasons. I know there is a large body of "scientific" analyses of social and economic factors that seek a just distribution of material wealth; the ideas are quite appealing, even seductive. But apply you scientifically calibrated brain to the world tell me one little socialist country that has ever …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike - If ignorance is bliss, you must be ecstatic. I love it when leftists come up with demonstrably false, easily provable nonsense. Let's consider some of your most verifiable errors/ exaggerations/ lies/ whatever:

"Welfare" never cost anywhere near "six trillion dollars" that is an out and out lie that you heard on Limbaugh's misinformation show. Welfare was never anywhere near 1% of the Fed budget.

The $6 trillion dollar figure made the news several years ago, and received a lot of comment at the time. The high cost/negative benefit results of welfare were a factor in Clinton's agreement to …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike �

The Democrats never said as a bloc they were going to raise taxes on everyone, they need to repeal Bush�s excessive tax cuts for the top 1% of the population so we can fund needed programs precisely because the market doesn�t take care of everything.

And you propose to fund needed programs by restoring tax rates to Clintonian levels for the top 1% of the population? You are cutting a wide peel off a small potato, boy. Marvelous article by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek this morning. Samuelson is a rational author and columnist in the moonbat MSM …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike - Oh, boy! I got me a live one. You are grossly ignorant of the things you address, and you shout your ignorance from the rooftops.

Welfare never cost ANYWHERE NEAR SIX TRILLION DOLLARS AND I CHALLENGE YOU TO DOCUMENT THAT FIGURE. It never ran anywhere near 1/2 of 1% of the Federal Budget, I'm talking about AFDC here. Social Security and Medicare are NOT welfare but entitlement programs that all of us pay for and benefit the middle class more than anyone.

I quite agree that we are not talking about Social Security and Medicare, but AFDC was …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Fred - Yes, you see a lot of defense mechanisms displayed by leftists, including projection, rationalization, negativism, deceit, ritual, displacement, identification, reaction formation, and daydreaming. Identification with absurd, obscene little misfits like Chomsky and Zinn would be hilarious, if there were not so many overstressed, incapable personalities in the world who do so. Fortunately, the American people address this problem about every thirty years or so, and then firmly reject it. The disturbing thing right now is that Europe, where the Enlightenment began, is now rapidly falling under another primitive, violent philosophy, and the EUnucks seem powerless to help themselves. I …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike - Sheesh, Mike, what a Densan you are! I have made no claims. All I have done is present facts. You are the one that claimed the facts were wrong, citing invalid evidence or no evidence at all. Let's have a review of the bidding here. Some time ago, George Will had an article mentioning that $6.6 trillion had been spent on welfare, to no, or bad, effect. At the time I read up on this rather startling figure, and satisfied my curiosity about the background of this number. You are a leftist and question the source of data, with …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike - You, Sir, are without a doubt the dumbest little stumblefart that ever presumed (or pretended) to address the subject of economics. I can well believe that you accept and admire the ridiculous inanities of Zinn and Chomsky, and that you endorse their destructive and malevolent arguments.

You can make up all the BS arguments with all of the phony, unsourced "figures" that you want but the bottom line is that we had eight years of the greatest sustained growth in US history under Clinton and the first four years of Bush were a total flop, the first time since …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike -

Clinton's five trillion SURPLUS was turned into six trillion dollar DEFICIT by Bush AND IT ALL HAPPENED AFTER BUSH'S TAX CUTS.

Of all the dumbass comments you have made on this site, the above may qualify as the dumbest, but the competition is fierce. The statement makes absolutely no sense in any rational context, but I suddenly realized that considering rational context is not valid when dealing with you. I refer you again to the long-term DJIA: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=^DJI&t=my If you extend the 1995-1999 trendline from the Dow readings and if you extend the 1995-1999 federal surplus figures, why, …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

MM - It was also novel in the fourteenth century when ibn Khaldun first noted the phenomenon. Regardless, Kennedy's support for the idea generated fierce debate at the time (it is sort of counter-intuitive), before the idea was actually implemented shortly after Kennedy's death. The results of the Kennedy tax cuts were spectacular, until LBJ wandered off course. Arthur Laffer popularized his graphic representation of the device as the Laffer Curve in 1974, and it again generated controversy before being voted into law in the Kemp-Roth Tax Reforms in Reagan's first term. Despite Kennedy's successful use of the tool, some Democrats …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

MM - "It was novel at the dawn of the agricultural revolution ..." Good Grief, Stoopidmotherfucker. Who was the person at the dawn of the agricultural revolution who first noted and recorded this novel bit of economic arcanum? I am pretty sure you cannot find a single reference to this phenomenon before the late Eighteenth Century or more likely the Nineteenth Century (other than ibn Khaldun in the Fourteenth Century), and I doubt if the first reference available is from JMK. Prove me wrong and I will apologize, profusely and sincerely. Besides, the phenomenon was discovered, not invented. You can't claim …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

MM and Collectivist Dingbats - I have a fairly substantial history on ITT, dating back a number of months. If you bother to check back, I have never spoken disrespectfully to any person on this site (or any other site) except after having been insulted or cursed. I do enjoy mixing it up when faced with provocation. Natalie has endured insults, obscenities, calumny, and irrationality with patience and reason. She has her ways, and I have mine. But MM, CDC, Horse, Rabbit, Joe, Mike, and many other leftists on this site seem to have a single set of attitudes, and seem …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike -

MENSA's always been overreacted (sic) but if your (sic) (!) a member their standards have really slipped (sic).

Pretty sic, Mike. How can you have slipping standards on a normalized standard IQ test? If it makes you feel any better, I have been a member for over thirty years, so at just what point would the standards, even if they had slipped, have affected me? The point is that, like John L.Sullivan, I can lick any man in the house, at least in this house in my area of specialty. You have called me stupid many times and …

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Mike - That is two straight posts in which you have not called anybody stupid. My work here is complete.

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Oh, there is plenty of evidence of stolen and manipulated elections. Joe Kennedy bought Illinois and Texas for Jack in 1960. LBJ's first Senate victory went quite radically opposite the polling, and LBJ won by 87 votes out of one-half million votes cast, after some of the remote South Texas ballot boxes were mysteriously delayed, and came in stuffed to the gills. LBJ got the nickname "Landslide Johnson" from this election; his previous nickname was "Bullshit Johnson" from his college days. And of course there are the perennial corrupt Democratic machine political victories in the big cities: New Orleans, Detroit, Los …

Posted to The Importance of Not Getting Over It

Who is Greg Foster, and why he is writing parody and comedy on ITT? First we are instructed that "our rulers and their ideological acolytes" (I think he is referring to our elected officials) are "route step" types (sloppy and undisciplined), but then he notes that President Bush has "unwaveringly" stuck to calling the hunt for terrorists the Global War on Terror. Foster might have noted that President Bush has also "unwaveringly" fought the terrorists. The contradiction between Foster's imputation of sloppy and undisciplined behavior to President Bush and his Administration contrasts neatly with President Bush's actual unwavering actions. Funny, huh? …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

Curmudgeon - Do you go by Cur, or is your name Mud? In a brief post, you have made numerous mischaracterizations and factual errors. Democracy was not imposed on Germany and Japan after WWII? What are they now, fascist and military dictatorships, the same as before WWII? All you can hear is a few rattling sabers, you didn't by chance notice the millions of purple fingers? I realize the NYT and the leftist media want you to concentrate on the rattling sabers, but do you have to be so obtuse about it? There were about twenty democracies in the world at …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

BB - BB, buddy, you are weird.

... are u saying that you are living in a democracy?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Just because you can't win an election does not mean that I am not living in a democracy.

... in a real democracy the sole purpose of the military is to Defend its own country and the freedom of its own people.

You are not the first leftist to argue this crap. So do you have a theoretical or practical basis for your statement? No, you do not. In fact, democracies rarely …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

Maria -

Why did the USA recognize all the military juntas in South America which overthrew democratically elected presidents some 30 years ago and allowed them to commit crimes, disappear persons and even trained them on torture practices at the School of Americas in Panama, run by CIA?

Oh, come now, Maria. I have told you 40,000 times not to exaggerate. The nasty little conflicts in Latin America (and Africa, and SE Asia) to which you refer were proxy battles between the CIA and the KGB. The KGB and your Soviet friends lost. Get over it. Chile is now the …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

Heck -

We hear talk about needing to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, but the real problem is the Bush administration has not won the hearts and minds of Americans.

Perhaps the best way to make the case that the Muslim threat is a real war, not a criminal problem, would be to elect the most liberal, anti-war candidate. When he sees the daily briefing and classified intel the radical change in his thinking may finally convince those who are more worried about adhering to the Geneva Convention and terrorists’ rights than in preserving another 230 years of …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

Mudge - Mudge it is.

The US tried to spread Democracy to Vietnam and failed (killing millions in the process), tried to spread Democracy to the Philippines and failed (killing hundreds of thousand in the process), tried the same in Cuba and that didn't go so well. True democracy must be a people's movement; it cannot be imposed upon the people and unfortunately the people of Iraq cannot hear our case for democracy over the rattling sabers.

I think you will find that the USA was quite conscientious about avoiding civilian casualties in Vietnam, in spite of a few isolated, …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

BB �

In your democracy only a few billionaires (and not the best minds of your country) can run for the key-roles of your government.

Do you feign lunacy, or is it for real? Name all the billionaires holding political office in the USA. Now it is true that George Soros is a billionaire, and, until recently, he actively participated in promoting left-wind politics. But after he pissed away several tens of millions of dollars trying to defeat President Bush and the Republicans, he seems to have given up on the idea. But then, you are correct that Soros is …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

TI, Maria - I guess I owe Maria an apology. Here I thought she was a socialist, and now she claims to be a Bush Conservative! How else can you explain that she favors small government? The only way to make government small is to cut taxes. Cutting tax rates (Kennedy, Reagan, Bush 43) increases government tax receipts. Raising taxes (Johnson, Carter, Clinton) lowers government tax receipts. Damn few socialists understand this, no matter how many times it is explained, or what theoretical and empirical proofs are offered. If Maria actually understands this, welcome aboard! But don't celebrate too soon:

…

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

TI - True enough, as far as it goes. But the UN mandate (this was the UN Kuwaiti operation, carefully crafted to include the views of a large coalition of UN partners) was for ending the occupation of Kuwait, not for regime change in Iraq. A number of the UN members of the coalition objected to going further in Iraq. Instead of eliminating Saddam, the UN imposed the Armistice with restrictions on Saddam's behavior and freedom of action. The three principal requirements of the Armistice were that Saddam cease hostile actions against neighboring states, cease repression of the Iraqi people, and …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

Maria -

... or else we will be duly humiliated.

Look, lady, if you are not already humiliated by your inane, insane, asinine, miasmic left-wind emanations, there is no hope for you. Kyoto, indeed! The UN is it? When has the UN protected or enriched anyone's life, other than that of Saddam Hussein? Have you never heard of the Oil-for-Food Program, the biggest financial scandal in world history, presided over by Kofi Annan and his partners in crime at UN headquarters? Rwanda? Darfur? Kosovo? The UN is as corrupt and inefficient as the old Soviet Union, and is only …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

TI - Now do you understand why you don't bother arguing with Lagomorph?

Islam is at war with every other major religion in the world. Hinduism, Buddhism,Sikhism, Judaism, and Christianity.

You might also note that Islam is also at war with itself. There are many more Muslims (by a large margin) dying in internal domestic conflicts than adherents of all other religions combined. It is always thus. It will always be, until we squash the terrorists and killers. This worked in Japan and Germany, with efficacy, if not without cost. This is the only thing that works when dealing with …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

TI - And what would be the object of invading Saudi Arabia? The Middle East is a target-rich environment, but if you are going to take out the terrorists, you should go after the ones with the most capability first. Saudi Arabia has little military and little military capability. Saudi is the locus of the terrorist propaganda wing, but the hostile terrorist firepower is (was) in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and (~) Pakistan. You could take out Saudi at little military cost, but you would just piss off the Islamic firepower if you mess with the holy sites. …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

TI - Where were you in Saudi? I spent five years in Dhahran and up near the Kuwaiti border, with shorter assignments in Jubail, Ras Tanura, Uthmaniyah, and in the Asir and the Rhub al-Khali. I agree, more or less, with everything you say about Saudi, but reducing the role of hydrocarbons in our economy is a long-term prospect, and the terrorists are now. So my question stands:

And what would be the object of invading Saudi Arabia?

The propaganda arm of the Wahhabi/Salafists must be destroyed, but not before the armed militants are serially routed. Otherwise, you would have …

Posted to Route-Stepping? Our Way to WWIII

Chaudrey burns a lot of electrons, but does he have a point? If so, what is it? Surely this is not the point of his article:

The Bush administration�s pragmatic policy toward Pakistan suggests its foreign policy is less ideological than imperial.

Imperial is when you sail half way round the world to establish a colony. Imperial is not when you attack someone who has attacked you. Imperial is not when you establish a democracy to replace an Islamofascist terror regime. Imperial is not when you require terrorist supporters to quit being terrorist supporters. The world is not an ideal …

Posted to Why Pakistan Gets A Nuclear Pass

Po Boy - The reason you are po, and the reason you will always be po, is that you are as dumb as a turnip. Bill Clinton deliberately avoided taking responsible steps when the Islamists made increasingly destructive attacks on the United States. OBL quite naturally concluded that the USA was weak and unwilling to fight. OBL fully expected that the USA would suffer financial and social collapse as a result of Islamist attacks, and that a world-wide Islamist Caliphate would be the result. OBL did not realize that Clinton was a Dimocrat, and that there are people in this country …

Posted to Why Pakistan Gets A Nuclear Pass

Orwell -

First, what system of government? Name me one system in which an "Islamofascist" is currently in power?

Iran, of course.

... fascist regimes tended to be anti-clerical and secular. While Mussolini and Hitler made concessions to the church while in power, they tended both in rhetoric and policy to be athiestic (sic) or pagan. Clearly, political Islam is not secular in orientation, although they oppose many of the established, religious Islamic authorities.

Bullshit. Both the Mullahs in Iran and al-Qa'eda are anti-clerical, secular, and pagan. Practitioners of headhunting and human sacrifice are not adherents of one of …

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

Fewtile Orwell -

Simply stating �Iran� is not an argument.

Umm, you did not ask for an argument.

Name me one system in which an �Islamofascist� is currently in power?

Iran is the correct answer. The richest people in Iran are Mullahs associated with the Council of Guardians, the Expediency Council, and the Assembly of Experts. The controlling devices for these riches are the charities (bonyads) that these people dominate. These charities control great blocks of the Iranian economy. Beneficiaries of these charities, besides the Mullahs, include Hizb'allah and the Mahdi Army in Iraq, and the benefits of these …

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

Tex I - Don't mind Horse. No one acknowledges him anymore, much less tries to reason with him. It's like arguing with a turnip.

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

Lagomorph - Why are you posting as "Jane Doe"? Still having identity crisis issues, are you? Feeling schizo again, or still? Get your personality and psyche settled down, and then we can talk. Or not.

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

Skip - Well, I read your site, and I checked out Jesse's data. What a crock.

The line-up is pretty impressive: John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, John Negroponte, and Rogelio Pardo-Maurer. These men were all rewarded with powerful jobs in the Bush government for their felonious and murderous backgrounds.

None of these fine public servants have a standing felony conviction, except that Pardo-Maurer seems not to have a comprehensive bio on the web, so I can't tell about him. But as a high public official, I doubt Pardo-Maurer has a criminal conviction. Poindexter is the only one of the …

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

Jay - Extremely well put. CDiC is educated beyond his intelligence; that is why he is a cab driver. I have been following this discussion closely, if not actively participating. CDiC's (and his ilks') arguments are reminiscent of the endless discussions that accompanied the nit-picking debates of Marx and Engels at the time of the First International, the debates of the early pre-Soviet and Soviet eras, and the current academic debates in the USA, with which CDiC is well familiar. All these debates aimed at creating a grand theory of everything: social, economic, political. Every exception (there were LOTS of exceptions) …

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

CDiC -

Many things coalese (sic) to make fascism a unique modern form of rule in the 20th century.

Umm, no. Your distinguishment between, say, fascism and communism, is a construct. The ~ six million innocent dead under fascism and the ~ 100 million innocent dead under socialism define and establish the equivalence of these two systems, as well as all other totalitarian and oppressive systems. Such as two million dead under Pol Pot, two million dead under Saddam, etc, etc. Such "philosophy" as went into the academic definitions of socialism and fascism is artificial, contrived, and self-serving, depending on …

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

Loony Booty - You are so cute when you exhibit utter detachment from reality:

Given: Josef Stalin and Mao Tse Tung were bad men. Given: J. Stalin and Mao were Communists. Ergo: All Communists are bad men.

Now, here is what I actually said:

Such �philosophy� as went into the academic definitions of socialism and fascism is artificial, contrived, and self-serving, depending on the individual wants and needs of the �philosopher� (professor, editor, useless idiot, cab driver), who willfully subordinates himself to the strong personality (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Chavez). The kicker is that the strong personality does not really give …

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

CDiC -

First of all it is the absolute height of lunacy to lump Chavez in with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

Well, you are right, of course. Chavez, so far, is nominally less repressive and homicidal than the Big Three. And Chavez uses his physical and fiscal resources more poorly than anyone since Mao. Chavez has recently enjoyed very high returns on his petroleum assets, but has he used this money wisely? Ummm, no. Chavez purged the professional management of PDVSA at the time of the oil strikes in 2003, and the political hacks who were put in charge of …

Posted to The Neocons Lexicon

I'm glad. This will raise the level of intelligence in both Parties. Now if we could just raise the level of intelligence among some of the authors herein.

Posted to Wave of Party Switchers Hits Republicans

Spin - Baruch Spinoza was a Jewish intellectual, philosopher, rationalist, and ethicist, and was one of the world's greatest thinkers. You have taken his name, but you are anti-Jewish, anti-intellectual, irrational, and unethical, and your capacity for coherent thought is somewhere south of a turnip. So, what gives? Are you being sarcastic? Deceptive? Provocative? Do you feign ignorance, or is it for real? Some people who pretend to be smart, are not, but I never heard of anyone pretending to be stupid, except in self-defense. Perhaps you are being stupid in self-offense. So, what gives?

Posted to Lets be Realists, Let?s Demand the Impossible!

Spin - I am sure you are Jewish, hence the Spinoza. But I don't give a shit if you are the Queen of the May, you are still anti-Jewish, anti-intellectual, irrational, and unethical, and your capacity for coherent thought is somewhere south of a turnip.

Posted to Lets be Realists, Let?s Demand the Impossible!

Loquacious Lagomorph is the idiot of the ITT village. Lagomorph is uniquely unqualified to comment on civil engineering, economics, politics, or any of the myriad things he comments on, having no education, qualifications, or introspection in these fields. He is motivated by hatred of authority, being a self-confessed anarchist, and undoubtedly influenced by his criminal record and past problems with what he considers as authority figures. But motivation is not competence, and there is zero evidence to support any of the radical positions he takes on matters in which he is utterly incompetent. Lagomorph is as dumb as a turnip, not …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Continued from above ... Similarly, explosive demolitions of buildings always follow a sequence: blast, followed by great clouds of dust, followed by movement of the building. But this is not what was seen in the thousands of videos of WTC. The building started to collapse, and the dust was generated at the point where the concrete was fracturing, near where the aircraft hit. . The dust followed the descending building, and not the other way around. No blast effect or dust was observed in the lower floors until the upper floors collapsed onto them. Look at the videos. Who are you …

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Lagomorph should adopt the duck as his totem animal, since he is such a quack.

Pyrotechnic - adj. Of or relating to fireworks. American Heritage Dictionary.

Rabbit happens to be a competent and experienced metal worker and welder. More importantly I am an explosives �expert� more or less. As an experienced pyrotechnic chemist and shotfirer and professional pyrotechnician, I think I�m sufficiently well placed to confirm the photos resemble Thermite cutting, and the presence of the chemical residues in the testing which you are conveniently ignoring, is virtually proof positive. Posted by Rabbit on Jun 29, 2006 at 9:40 …

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Lagomorph Eidolon Anatidae - I apologize for the delayed response. I have been busy making too much money to indulge in my favorite pastime - proving the ignorance and folly of you leftist idiots.

I'll agree the column might have been cut with OXY, even probably was. ... You are right. The cut column photo doesn't prove anything.

So good of you to admit the obvious. You have even restored a measure of integrity to your stained reputation, the result of your foolish leftist biases and ignorant conspiracy theories. But how is it that an "expert" welder and firecracker such …

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So, the obvious questions that require factual, or at least rational, answers to consider the validity of thermite or explosive demolition: With hundreds of skilled laborers installing hundreds or thousands of demolition devices in occupied and functioning buildings over a period of (minimum) weeks, how come no one has talked? If you are alleging that each one of hundreds of explosive demolitions were installed by cutting into the interior of each column, when was this done and by whom? Why did no one notice this being done? Why were there no reports of massive firebrick or sandbag containments on hundreds of …

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Now, here is what really happened, in words of one syllable, for your benefit. The two towers were essentially identical, with massive internal columns and smaller peripheral external columns. The internal and external columns were tied together with closely spaced trusses that held the structure rigid and supported the concrete flooring at each level. The two aircraft that struck WTC 1 and 2 caused extensive structural damage to the towers, including damage to the fireproofing on the columns and trusses. Figure 2-13 of the World Trade Center Building Performance Study shows that thirty-three exterior columns were severed by the crash, and …

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Gordian Knot Many things have been said on this thread. With the exception of Natalie and myself, most of the comments fall somewhere between irrelevant and absurd. I hate to see all the ignorance and nonsense being circulated, but here is a guaranteed way to determine the truth. Jones has several videos of buildings being demolished with explosives. If you look at the videos frame-by-frame, you see a pattern. The pattern is just what you would expect. You have a building rigged for destruction, there are a very rapid series of blasts, there are great clouds of dust immediately following the …

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Frog - You give ignorance a bad name. I did not invert anything. Look at a controlled explosive demolition frame-by-frame: blast, dust, building collapses. Look at each of the three WTC buildings frame-by-frame: collapse, then dust, no evidence of blast at all. Pay attention to what the videos show you, without trying to put your silly ideological interpretation on what was a simple mechanical failure.

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Marx - Ummm, actually the "lying eyes" quote originated with your cousin, Groucho. You can't get the simplest thing straight, can you?

Very interesting, particularly since I can see with my own eyes that a plane never hit the building. Whatever it was, it wasn�t a plane. And no plane could have caused that much destruction anyway, not in buildings specifically designed to withstand plane crashes. While commercial demolition may differ in some ways from military demolition, this was demolition, not planes and fires. Planes don�t cause whole building to collapse, never have and never will. They only damage the parts …

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Lagomorph Anatidae -

I do not know of any difference between �commercial� and �military� demolition, except the target: the principles are the same. Of course you don�t Scorpy, we wouldn�t expect you to.

Lagomorph, I will be the trained demolitions expert with the Quarryman MOS, and you be the firecracker man, OK? And, as an "expert welder", you do not impress us since you were unable to identify a cut by welding torch of a steel column, until I showed you a picture of the WTC clean-up and the man cutting the column with a torch. THEN you admitted that …

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Lagomorph Anatidae - Your foolish talk of explosives and seismographic spikes at WTC is perfectly absurd. Let me explain to you in words of one syl-la-ble why this is so. The energy released instantaneously by 5000 kg of TNT is 22.5 x 10 to the 6th power kJ, NOT ALL OF WHICH would be transmitted through the ground to a seismograph. . Each WTC tower weighed a nominal one-half million tons, and was 1368 feet tall. Probably 80% of the weight of each tower was below ground level, leaving 100,000 tons projecting into the air an average of 684 feet. The …

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Lagomorph Anatidae - You are so full of shit, you have cow-patty brains and horse-turd eyeballs. Wake up and use your real brains and eyeballs to see what is going on, instead of resigning your intelligence, judgment, and integrity to the likes of Jones and Rense.

Sorry to inform you dumbo we have about two dozen witnesses to explosions in the basements before the planes hit. One of these witnesses was injured badly, and was being evacuated by William Rodriguez when the plane hit the building. The times given by the witnesses, a few seconds before the plane strike, co-incide with …

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Lagomorph Anatidae - I accept that you are a competent firecracker man (gunpowder, sparklers, oxidizers, whatever). You claim to be an expert welder, but, as a welder, you are so unobservant that you mistakenly accepted Rense's false argument that a column was cut by thermite, when in fact the marks of a welder's torch were clearly visible on the face of the cut. You do not know jack-shit about thermite or explosives. The column in the Rense photo was definitely, stupendously, cosmically NOT cut by thermite. It had absolutely nothing of the signature or the appearance of thermite. And you do …

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3) In my previous post, I used a calculation for 5000 kg (11,000 lbs) of explosive to demonstrate that the seismic shock from your alleged explosives would be quite minor compared to the kinetic energy of a falling tower. So, it is not correct of you to claim that an explosive energy spike was seen at the start of the collapse; no such energy from alleged explosives is sufficient to affect the seismometers in any meaningful way. But, studying the videos, it is seen that three or four damaged floors gave way in one instant, allowing the intact upper floors to …

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Lagomorph, Frog, and Marx profess to believe things that defy the phenomena observed at WTC and that defy common sense. They are happy to point out that a large minority of Americans agree with them, approximately the same number that voted for Traitor John Kerry. There are only two classes of people who share the mental and emotional handicaps of Lagomorph, Frog, and Marx: the deluded and those driven by an organizational agenda, such as socialist fanaticism or religious fanaticism. That is to say, the deluded and the self-deluded. So, what is the nature of the self-delusions driving so great a …

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Now Batgirl, everybody knows the rabbit NEVER bullshits. His reputation for honesty remains as pure as the riven snow.

rive (rīv) v., rived, riv·en (rĭv'ən) also rived, riv·ing, rives. v.tr. To rend or tear apart. To break into pieces, as by a blow; cleave or split asunder. To break or distress (the spirit, for example). v.intr. To be or become split. [Middle English riven, from Old Norse rīfa.] American Heritage Dictionary

So, Lagomorph, you are saying that your "reputation for honesty" is irrevocably shattered. Well, that certainly agrees with my observation. Finally, we agree on something.

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Lagomorph Anatidae -

You get a hard on everytime (sic) you see a spelling error.

Umm, no. I only draw attention to errors of spelling and grammar when I quote someone who has made such an error; I certainly don't want anyone to think I am responsible for your mistakes. The fact that you are sic, sic, sic is your problem, not mine. And besides this was not a spelling error that you made, it was a Freudian slip, and most apropos. Your "reputation for honesty" and your capacity for critical thought are equally abysmal and disreputable. I really don't …

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Natalie - Lagomorph is posting as KK. He has gone schizo, in addition to being deluded, pathological, and suicidal. It is best to ignore him. When he no longer has an audience (he MUST have an audience) he will go somewhere else or, alternatively, carry on a converstion with KK, and possibly other persona of his own construction. Enjoy your excellent work.

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Frog - The quote relating to Suvarov has a certain validity, and has ongoing geopolitical repercussions to this day. It was the American intelligence services and the State Department that portrayed the Soviet military as ten feet tall and fearsome. This is the nature of a bureaucracy; if the bureaucracy's foes were not competent, what was the need to maintain a large bureaucracy? Additionally, the drudges in both the CIA and at State were graduates of the left-wind academy that came to prominence during and after Vietnam, and who had ambivalent attitudes concerning American values and virtues. Drudges can and will …

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Eidolon Lagomorph and the Eidolon Explosions When I first posted on this site, Lagomorph/ Rabbit was posting as Eidolon Lagomorph/ Ghost Rabbit. It is my impression from that time that, as Rabbit, Lagomorph was kicked off the site for his obnoxious behavior and utter lack of relevancy, not to mention lunacy. I don't know who Rabbit blew, but he was subsequently allowed to continue posting as Ghost Rabbit, and then, again, as Rabbit. (Since I first drafted the above, Lagomorph has confessed to having been kicked off ITT twice, while writing from a third IP address, which shows remarkable lack of …

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The duration of each Tower collapse scales to approximately sixty seconds in the seismic record, though the actual collapses of the buildings was about 8-10 seconds from timing the videos. The maximum energy spike occurs, for the first collapse, after about twelve seconds from the time the structural members start to give way in the damaged area where the airplane hit. Similarly, for the second collapse, about eighteen seconds elapse from the time the structural members start to give way in the damaged area where the airplane hit, until the maximum energy spike is observed. The undamaged top sections of the …

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Controlled Demolition (CD) Rigging a large building for controlled demolition (CD) requires weeks, with a very large crew, and the work is obvious to any passer-by, and there were tens of thousands of passers-by in WTC1/2/7. NO PROBLEM! CTs just assume no one notices anything. The CTs argue for both explosives AND thermite as the mediums of destruction. Isn't that redundant? And, while you could theoretically time the explosives with great precision, thermite is an imprecise fire, leading to imprecisely timed results. Controlled demolitions are regularly timed in hundredths of a second, and you can't do that with thermite. NO PROBLEM! …

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But the main point is that there is absolutely no direct evidence of CD explosions, or of massive explosions, or of thermite at WTC. At no point in the fall of the Towers are there any windows blowing out or blast effects to be observed, other than at the point of failure; well, yes, tens of thousands of tons of building crashing down does produce dust and shock, but there is no evidence that the existing damage was augmented by explosives or thermite, which are improbable non-explanations for non-problems. And IF (IF I say, IF, repeat IF) thermite or massive explosives …

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Frog - I am so glad to hear that war crimes cases are being prepared in Scotland. It's about time. I recommend that anyone convicted of headhunting, human sacrifice, deliberately targeting civilians, using human shields to protect themselves while engaged in warfare, or dressing little children as suicide bombers be boiled in pig offal and buried head down in a lime pit 300 feet deep. Anyone who supports or assists such criminals, such as terrorist Imams and Mullahs or UN peacekeepers, should be subject to the same punishment.

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Natalie - The xbehome document is superb. Everything that Brent Blanchard and Protec say about explosive demolitions agrees with my training, experience, and observations as a military demolitions expert, even if it does not agree with Lagomorph's experience with firecrackers and sparklers. But then, as a self proclaimed "expert welder", Lagomorph did not recognize the clear marks of a cutting torch on a steel beam until I showed him photographs of a recovery worker at WTC doing an identical cut on an identical beam. I have tried repeatedly to make the point that, in spite of all the Conspiracy Theorists (CT) …

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Natalie - Jackpot! We write a few sentences, and Lagomorph goes off on pages and pages of incoherent babble. Well, that keeps him busy, anyway. Do you think Lagomorph has actually read anything we have said, or any of the documentation we have provided? I don't think so. In his 2:57 AM post above, item (2), Lagomorph is still talking about jet fuel not melting steel; but that has not been a serious argument for three or four years. Neither you nor I have raised that issue, and Lagomorph does not address the issues we do raise. Consequently, he makes absurd …

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Natalie - 4000 character limit? I don't know and I don't worry about it. I find it much more interesting that KansasKal came from nowhere, agreed totally with Lagomorph on all things, also evaded the 4000 character limit (the only other poster that has done so, I believe), had an Australian Flag logo in spite of being from the USA, and then presented a pre-emptive argument that he was really using an Australian website while visiting Thailand (!) to explain why an American was posting under an Oz flag! Then when I pointed out that Lagomorph was, in reality, posting as …

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Natalie - Did you ever read the The Caine Mutiny? It was one of the best novels to come out of WWII, and was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart. Captain Queeg, in command of the USS Caine, was in way over his head, and compensated for his many weaknesses by fixating on minutiae. In the middle of the war, and in the middle of the South Pacific, the Officer's Mess on the Caine was able to get a gallon of frozen strawberries, a rare treat in that time and that place. Late that night, Captain Queeg went by the …

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Natalie - Lagomorph has your answer. You write 10,000 words, post 3,999, and edit in the remainder. Too bad Lagomorph has nothing worthwhile to write about.

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Natalie � The largest controlled demolition (CD) job in history was the Hudson Building, 439 foot tall, in Detroit, 1998. The building was dropped quite cleanly within fifteen feet of the Detroit Elevated People Mover, with no damage to the People Mover or to buildings across the street from Hudson on three sides.

CDI�s 12 person loading crew took twenty four days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on columns on nine levels of the complex. Over 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay elements were installed in CDI�s implosion initiation system, some to create the 36 …

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Lagomorph - You are a retarded rabbit.

Seismographs (at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, 21 miles north of the WTC) prove that before each collapse, huge explosions went off under the Towers. ... The seismic records show that, as the collapses began, huge seismic spikes marked the moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The 2 strongest jolts were registered at the beginning of each collapse, well before the falling debris ever struck the earth. Lagomorph quote, probably from uscrisis website.

The strongest jolts were not registered at the beginning of each collapse. Look at …

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Natalie - The Brit panel investigating "Why do they hate airplanes?" has it all wrong. Terrorists are attracted to airplanes. The most attractive qualities of aircraft, from a terrorist viewpoint, are vulnerability, the potential for spectacular fireworks and consequent publicity, and potentially large payoffs from quite modest investments.

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Lagomorph - Very good, sir. I did not think you had it in you.

Upon closer examination of the seismic records I do concede that there are not significant spikes before the collapses of the towers, in the actual collapse sequence. However there is a bit of a crossover here from what I was saying at the start about this and it has been brought about by Scorpy treating the whole seismic data issue upon a single detail, while ifnoring what I originally said. It needs to be mentioned as this site already provided by Nat does, that this doesn�t actually …

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WW - You need to remember the words of the old C&W song, "If Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It Isn't Me". Silly question, and appropriate answer from Natalie.

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Lagomorph Anatidae Mustelidae � I have always been curious about your choice of totemic animal. Lagomorphs are generally inoffensive creatures, so was your choice an expression of sarcasm? Anatidae would seem to be more appropriate for you (QUACK!), as I have previously noted. And you definitely exhibit characteristics of the mustelidae family, closely related to skunks and polecats. It would be helpful to clear up your mustela musings on the Rense fraudulent photo (with caption, if you insist), the Chris Bollyn misstatement of fact regarding the WTC Towers collapse, your own fictive �massive explosions� BEFORE the aircraft strikes, and your utter …

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Chris Bollyn Misstatements The uscrisis website starts with a copy of the PAL seismographic printouts showing the small-effect aircraft strikes on WTC Towers 1 and 2, followed by the much larger collapses of the Towers. Then Bollyn makes this curious statement:

Two unexplained "spikes" in the seismic record from Sept. 11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the ground beneath the World Trade Center's twin towers immediately prior to the collapse.

The �huge bursts of energy� came well into the seismic record of the collapse, and corresponded directly with the virtually unrestricted fall of the intact upper floors into …

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"Massive Explosions" AND Thermite Destruction of the Core Columns of the Towers Lagomorph, you are arguing for destruction of the core columns of the Towers seconds before the aircraft strikes AND thermite destruction of the core columns, time undefined. Can you give us any possible scenario where both destructions are necessary, plausible, or even possible? Your utter fecklessness and fraudulence regarding either the "massive explosions" or thermite destruction is utterly absurd. Arguing for both is surely perverted, demented, or worse. Molten Metal Your argument, if I understand it, is that “pools” of molten metal were in the basement, they remained hot …

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WW -

Consistency. Har. So, should we let a mass murderer go because we didn�t complain about the last one enough?

Well, that depends on whom the mass murderer is, of course. You leftists are fine with 100 million innocent dead victims of communism and Saddam's mass murders, and indifferent to Rwanda and Darfur, but you get apoplectic over fascism, which is basically dead history. Justice will come when ALL genocide is ended, but it will never be ended by leftists or the UN. President Bush has done more to end genocide and promote democracy than any Dimocrat in the …

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WW -

I'm not a leftist, scorp. (Doubtful.) And I'm not a Democrat. (Doubtful.) And I'm not "fine" with dead Rwandans". (Doubtful, but you seem to have no problem with the hundred million innocent victims of communism.) And I'm not an imperious ass. (False.)

I was under a self-imposed news blackout during the whole ordeal in the Balkans and will admit I know next to nothing about it.

And did you sleep through the 1980s and 1990s, like Rip van Winkle? That would explain a hell of a lot. You are probably unaware that the democracies and the Soviet Union …

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Natalie - Lagomorph is backpedaling. Now he admits, five years after the event, that bin Laden was involved in 09/11, something that was abundantly obvious to the most casual observer before the sun sat on that fateful day. Despite pretending to be a rabbit, Lagomorph is not too swift.

For a long time I have been convinced that Osama Bin Laden didn�t have anything to do with 9/11, and now I am at least ready to accept that he did know about it, and had a hand in it. - Lagomorph

Of course, true to his mustelidae nature, Lagomorph can't …

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WTH - Early in the Christian Era, schisms developed: Catholics, Orthodox, Gnostics, and many sub-groupings. Each group looked at pagans as raw material for conversion and salvation. Each Christian group looked at other Christian groups as mortal enemies to be destroyed, and the wars got very nasty. This seems to be a universal principle. The biggest conflicts in the Muslim world have traditionally been between Sunni and Shia. The slaughters within Islam, largely unnoted and unremarked in the West, have dwarfed the conflicts between Islam and the West. Even today, the sectarian violence in Iraq and the terrorist events in Pakistan, …

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Lagomorph, Lagomorph, Lagomorph -

Now Ray McGovern is one of the most respected US intelligence professionals to have become publically (sic) known.

Ummm, no. That may have once been true, but now he is a bipartisan nutcase. Rumsfeld and Howard Dean both think McGovern is an anti-Semitic crazy.

Ray McGovern's 27-year career as a CIA analyst spanned administrations from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush. Ray is now co-director of the Servant Leadership School, which provides training and other support for those seeking ways to be in relationship with the marginalized poor. The School is one of ten …

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Bile-y Bitching -

The administration responding, IMO, by leaping into an agenda much older than 9/11 and using the attack as a pretext for illegal activity on their parts.

My Goodness! That is some opinion. You are referring to the "illegal activity" of going to war in Iraq. And you are 50% correct, which is 100% more than is normal for you. The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 set the "agenda" you are referring to:

An Act To establish a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq. ... SEC. 2. FINDINGS. The Congress makes the following findings: (1) …

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Natalie - Neat take on Mr. Atta. Lagomorph, BB, and Musical John are so ridiculous, satire and ridicule may be the only things that will reach them, but they are probably too dense for even that. The worst PR fiasco in Iraq was Abu Ghraib, of course, but even that had its moments. Everyone in the world was condemning the USA for those morons and their photos, but most people did not pick up that the Shia thought that panties on some Sunni's head was hilarious, the prisoners assumed to be, and probably were, Sunni, of course. Then one of the …

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Honest Joe - DON'T PANIC, HONEST JOE! Panic never solves anything, and it makes you look ridiculous. You may or may not be honest, but you definitely are not too swift. Like Lagomorph, who took five years to figure out that bin Laden was behind 09/11, when the proof was right there and it was obvious to most people before sunset on that fateful day. Take Executive Order #10999, dealing with transportation. President Kennedy signed EO 10999 thirty-four years ago, and it is strictly in accordance with Federal Law, 1958 (72 Stat. 1799). EO 10999 grants EMERGENCY POWERS in an EMERGENCY. …

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Joe - Executive Orders. Signing statements. Globaliztion. Free Trade. Federal Reserve. International Monetary Fund. International Corporations and the Banks. New World Order. PNAC. Is there any left-wind talking point you have not listed? Have you any thought process beyond what the socialist ideologists are trying to force on us? You know, of course, that socialism has a terrible track record, destroying lives and property every time it gains control. This is the United States of America. We have proven repeatedly since Henry Wallace in 1948 that the American people do not want socialism. Every time we flirt with the left (Johnson, …

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Biley Bitch - Since the early days of the Bush Administration, it has been a principal theme and meme of unprincipled leftists that George Bush is a liar. The idea is so absurd, it does not bear acknowledgement, much less repeating. The main factoid cited in nonjustification for this slander is the WMD in Iraq, and more particularly the "sixteen words" from the 2003 SoU Address, �The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.� British and American intelligence continue to affirm and confirm the accuracy of this statement. But somehow, Bush�s factual comment …

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Biley Bitch -

... go blow yourself.

Well, that is certainly eloquent and persuasive. But think of the implications of what you are saying. We have had a three year effort, costing millions of dollars, perpetrated by the very highest levels of leftists within the CIA and the State Department, with the backing of prominent left-wind journalists, to commit fraud against the elected administration:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it …

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Lagomorph - I surrender. This website has convinced me of the impeccable logic of your position. I cannot understand why it took me so long to see the obvious. http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2006/08/redefining-truth-to-mean-anything.html

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Joe -

So the American people (!) took the fedreal (sic) goverment (sic) to court demanding to be shown the law that says we have to pay income tax. On Augest (sic) 31, 2005 federal judge Emmet Sullivan ruled the goverment (sic) does not have to answere (sic) the American peoples (sic) question, even though it is garanteed (sic) in the first Amendment.

Sic, sic, sic! Pretty sic, Joe. Your spelling is atrocious, and your logic is worse. You will have to write something that makes sense if you expect an answer.

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Biley Bitch - "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think." Dorothy Parker AMF.

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Skipper - DON'T PANIC, SKIPPER! Panic does absolutely no good, and it makes you look like a fucking idiot. Your tvnewslies cite is mostly a collection of selected circumstantial (and improbable) evidence. One of the few factual items included is the Rumsfeld quote on the $2.3 trillion. But instead of the sensationalized CBS article, try reading SecDef Rumsfeld's actual speech. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2001/s20010910-secdef.html At the time of the Rumsfeld speech, the Bush Administration had been in office for almost exactly eight months. Do you think that the $2.3 trillion went missing in eight months? Well, no. The fiscal year 2000 Federal Budget …

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Frog -

A recent Guardian/ICM poll in the UK showed an Overwhelming MAJORITY of ONE PERCENT believing the UK was “safer” because of Tony Blair’s support of the Bushling.

So, why did the Brits re-elect Mr. Blair? And was this before or after the latest terror plot? And in Oz, why did they re-elect Mr. Howard? And Canada, why did they kick out the socialists and elect Mr.Harper? President Bush was re-elected by the biggest majority in twenty years. Why? Do you think maybe someone on the left is lying to you, Froggie? Leftists are noted liars and propagandists, which …

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Natalie - What kind of stress do you suppose Horse is undergoing? More primitive, more juvenile talk and behavior indicates he has some internal problem, but what is it? He seems to focus a lot on sex and violence, and is projecting his own fears and inadequacies. He must lead a pretty miserable existence.

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Natalie - Horse has added scatology, sadism, and menstruation fantasies to his pathologies. Old Horse is one sick puppy.

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Natalie - Are you familiar with Mensa? Check it out.

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Natalie - Nah, you don't take another test. You undoubtedly have a college board or some such laying around. You really would enjoy it and you would fit right in. Of course, Horse would fit right in, too. We could serve him as Horse d'oeuvres.

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Natalie Wikipedia has a good summay of Professor Jones academic history. Jones has written a book about Jesus Christ's visit to ancient America, he was active in the cold fusion cock-up before it came to naught, and now he has taken a leading role in the 09/11 conspiracy theory. The boy is a real psychoceramic. No wonder Lagomorph thinks so highly of him.

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Lagomorph - You keep going on and on about "controlled demolition" (CD). You have admired the quality of the "controlled demolition" of the WTC buildings, and have commented several times that they "fell onto their own footprint". You have also, at one time or another, argued for both "massive explosions" and "thermite" on the core columns. Do I understand your position correctly? In the controlled demolition of a building, small charges are placed on vertical support columns at different levels. (The record CD of the Hudson Building in Detroit used charges that averaged just 10 ounces of explosive.) The charges are …

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Lagomorph -

... you do rely on a semblance of logic and reason ...

Thanks, Lagomorph. I take that as an intended compliment, even though you are not in a position to judge such matters. Unfortunately, I can't reciprocate, since all your contributions are unoriginal, derivative, grossly mistaken, and/or outright insane. Your ignorance/dementia is showing:

As for the North and South towers they were far from typical, and the Controlled Demolition expert Loizeaux confirmed that if he was going to drop those buildings he would place a charge to take out the core first, which is precisely what …

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Lagomorph - Congratulations, Lagomorph! I did not think you had it in you. After months of mindlessly parroting anything the nutcases (Jones, Brown, Bollyn, Rense) said, you have actually come up with an original idea of your very own:

Just because the Calcium Sulphate molecule has Sulphur and Oxygen does NOT mean that Sulphur and Oxygen are thus available for further reaction.

I am proud of you, boy. Unfortunately, the only original idea you have ever had on this site is totally wrong, and you are full of shit, like your heroes (Jones, Brown, Bollyn, Rense). Of course wallboard …

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Lagomorph �

Do you wish to deny that the radio mast fell downward many meters before the rest of the building collapsed?

Of course I am going to deny that. We are striving for accuracy here. Accuracy is a concept which seems to be beyond your recognition and capabilities. Worse, you have no moral concept of a relationship with either factual accuracy or metaphysical truth. The mast appears to go into free fall a fraction of a second before the top floors start to collapse at the point where the aircraft caused the damage. If you know the speed of …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Lagomorph – You are such a Densan.

… have a good look at this picture and tell me you don’t believe in explosives. This is just the start of the collapse Scorp, it hasn’t even gathered any momentum. Come on Scorpse, have a good look at that picture. Consider the scale and relate those pieces of debris which are being shot horizontally outward, hundreds of feet, before the building has had a chance to gain any momentum.

Oh, I quite believe in explosives, I once made a living working with explosives. But there is nothing in your referenced picture …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Lagomorph -

I shall be getting back to you about the C4 on the rebar as suggested by Brown. You have obviously not read that site for it relies on actual witnesses to the stuff being installed!

Are you shitting me, boy? You offered up the algoxy site, much of which is nonsense, but I read it anyway. I informed you of the silly C-4-on-the-re-bar bullshit, and now you tell me I haven�t read it? If you weren�t so pathetic, you would be hilarious. You are getting too stressed out again. You are projecting your fears and failures onto me. …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Natalie, Joe - I am not sure how much information has gone before that I did not completely track regarding the discussion of the timing of the seismic events, but at the risk of repeating what has been said, I offer this: Seismic events of sufficient magnitude generate both body waves (earth interior) and (earth) surface waves. Body waves are classified as primary P-waves (longitudinal/compressional) and secondary S-waves (transverse/shear). Body waves travel deep within the earth and are modified by, or reflected by, subsurface conditions. Much of what we know of the earth's interior structure is from the study of body …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Joe -

There was only one elevator shaft that went all the way to B6, the operator was inside, Mr. Grifith and he survived! If a giant ball of flaming jet fuel went down that shaft and you where in it Scorp, we would have a scorched Scorp. Dont you agree?

Oh, I quite agree with the scenario you have described, but that is not the only scenario possible. If JP-4 vapors (jet fuel, similar to kerosene) were ignited by an electrical spark, you would have a semi-major explosion, but not one which would cut the core columns or register …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Joe -

Remember when you where talking to Scorp about the photo of a WTC colum that was cut at a 45 degree angle? Well the latest photos show several colums with a 45 degree angle cut and this is before any clean up had begun! So now you see this same 45 degree angle cut at all three WTC buildings and this is before the clean-up. When the CDI ( the guys engaged for the clean-up ) arrives FIRST for the clean-up , its was like that!

How very interesting! Do you have a cite for this fascinating bit …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

The Truthies Wear Falsies - I Like a woman who has enhanced her endowments, the Truthies employ ephemera to appear attractive and seductive, but all their efforts have the consistency and substance of foam rubber, or paper towels, folded up and strategically emplaced. Big deal. Conspiracy theories go way back. There was a deliberately propagated political rumor that Abraham Lincoln�s grandfather was an ape, because of Lincoln�s long arms and legs, and his craggy features. (Lincoln had Marfan�s syndrome, which contributed to his appearance. Osama bin Laden is also believed to have Marfan�s syndrome; note the similarities of build. Don�t start …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

The Truthies Wear Falsies - II Buildings and Aircraft One of the Truthies favorite themes is that the WTC Towers were designed to survive a strike from a jet aircraft and survive. Therefore, it is obvious that the collapse of the Towers was the result of a vast conspiracy, by George Bush, to start a war, to steal the oil, for the benefit of Halliburton and the Neocons, and yadda yadda yadda. Well, yes, in fact the Towers did survive an aircraft strike, but what came after was not explosives or thermite.

Between September 3, 2001 and September 7, 2001: …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Natalie - Wow, that's something! Do you ever get the idea that the world is getting whacked out? Before WWII, Germany in particular was enjoying a bout of collective insanity based on the Depression, the lost Great War, ethnic, national, and political conflicts, etc. The Allies realized that WWI did not end, hostilities just stopped for a time, and that the Axis would need to be driven to Unconditional Surrender in order to complete the rebuilding of the fascist and militarist societies into democracies. Amazingly, the Allies held to this vision and completed the task, but we lost the vision and …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Joe - The next time you want to print out a long list of goddam bullshit, include me out. Presidential Executive Orders are numbered sequentially from 1, which was Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Current EOs are numbered in the 13000 range. W199I-WF-213589 is not the number of a Presidential Executive Order. There were a couple of court cases (in the Truman and Clinton Administrations) questioning the constitutionality/legality of a particular EO, and, since then, all EOs have cited specific laws passed by the Congress as their basis and justification. So, what is W199I-WF-213589? No one seems to know, but it definitely is …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Natalie - The inplosionworld site and the Dunn article were excellent. Lagomorph, Joe, Frog, and Horse have been loud and clear that the Truthies were winning their argument, but every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. Now the unaffiliated professionals are joining the official Commissions and Studies, and they are all saying that the Conspiracy Theorists are nutso; our point all along. With much effort, Lagomorph, self-identified as an expert welder and firecracker man, finally agreed that: In the Rense photo of the cut column, the column was cut by a welding torch (not thermite), which should have been immediately …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Kuya - Welcome aboard. I am not faulting you, of course, but you have missed out on some ver-r-r-ry in-ter-es-ting (as the little German used to say) stuff among all the posts above. Algoxy website says, apparently with a straight face, that the main charges were emplaced at the time of construction during the 1970s. Not only that, all the re-bar was coated in C-4, meaning that two of the tallest buildings in the world were built without reinforcement in the concrete. I don't know which is worse, the conspiracy theorists who write these absurdities, or the Rabbits and Frogs and …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Joe -

I graduated from BYU with an engineering degree, and in my opinion Dr. Jones is a fine, upstanding individual with no other agenda than to get to the bottom of this.

Really? Are you serious? BYU is now graduating engineers that can't spell, that can only barely write a coherent, semi-literate English sentence, and that have no capacity for critical thought? But I guess we knew that: witness Professor Jones. No one is accusing Professor Jones of having an agenda, he is just dumb as dog shit, that's all. This is extremely depressing news. I am afraid I …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Joe -

Top China Economic Advisor: Buy Gold, Sell Dollars! http://www.rense.com/general73/topp.htm

????????? (mouth agape) The most powerful non-natural force in the world is free-market democracy. The United States is by far the largest practitioner of free-market democracy, and we have a huge lead on everybody else. India is a democracy, but they followed a socialist economic model and went straight sideways for fifty years. Now, practicing free-market principles, India is taking off like a rocket. China is not a democracy, and they went through thirty years of stagnation, decay, and death after WWII, until President Nixon created the opening to …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Joe - You are now saying that you are not an engineer after all? Thank goodness. That restores my faith and my confidence in the ultimate orderliness of the universe, somewhat. Look, Joe, you can't spell, you can't write coherently, you can't communicate, you can't think, you accept the most preposterous nonsense for gospel, and you reject simple truths. I do not see why or how we can continue this conversation. G'day, mate. And good luck.

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Natalie - Domin-8 is an apartment management software company, as if that is germane to anything. Chris Wallace has an interview with Bubba on Fox News Sunday tomorrow. Should be interesting. The vid and the transcripts show Bubba losing his cool when Chris Wallace questioned why Clinton did not do more to stop bin Laden. Clinton did shoot off some missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan on Monica Day, but that was about it. He certainly did not shoot off the Hellfires when bin Laden was clearly identified in Afghanistan. The left appears to think that Clinton has done something great by …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Natalie - What do you suppose Horse is going on about?

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Natalie - In an article on the Connecticut Senate race, the left nut blogs, Kos and such, are cited for "the vicious tone, use of the f-word more frequently than a comma, insults, scathing all-out hatred of dissent from the party line, conspiracy theories, accusations of the New York Times being a tool of the Republican National Committee". Does the leftist lilt remind you of anyone? So, who is winning in Connecticut? Joe Lieberman is winning, by a nice margin, thank you. And Kos has actively backed about twenty leftist politicians in previous elections, and every single one of them lost. …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Natalie - You are not alone.

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Psik(otic)? Natalie has deliberately adopted the form of incoherent rambling that Horse invariably uses; indeed, Horse is incapable of anything more profound. The joke might have been more obvious if she had randomly misspelled words and used more fragmented sentences. Had she done so, you could not have independently determined whether the author was Horse, or someone else, with a strong supposition that it was Horse because of his long history of writing similar nonsense. Horse is a joke. You obviously do not get the joke.

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Natalie - I like and appreciate what you have to say. You may want to give poor Joe a rest; he is not very stable in the best of times, and he is becoming loopier by the day. Joe has attached importance to what Vanity Fair (Vanity Fair!) and Army Times have to say about this Administration, as if either publication had any knowledge or expertise beyond being left-wing journalists. The Vanity Fair article of which Joe thinks so highly is a hilarious crock. The "neo-cons" that VF interviewed all agreed to be interviewed with the understanding that the article was …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

According to Wikipedia, Kennedy won Illinois by 9000 votes, after Mayor Daley had withheld the Cook County ballots until late in the evening, when it was discovered that Kennedy had won Chicago by an "extraordinary" 450,000 votes. There were also irregularities in Texas, and Texas and Illinois together would have given the election to Nixon. Which brings to mind LBJ's first election to the Senate. Some ballot boxes were withheld until most of the votes had been tallied, and the late votes gave Johnson an unexpected victory - by exactly 87 votes out of over one-half million votes cast. Johnson then …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Robin -

Tina said "YOU LOST AND YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT !!! ... And then she laughs..... Tina, that is a dictatorship...

Oh, come on, Robin. Tina is obviously referring to the elite leftist dictatorship of the proletariat. The reason the elite leftist dictatorship of the proletariat (communists, for short) keeps on losing is that they do not understand how the world works. The communists are convinced that the world works the way Karl Marx said it did, but it does not. And, while the communists in Russia were a minority, they were able to seize power, and graphically …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Naiad - Will wonders never cease! A coherent leftist! Don't you feel out of place among the few coherent Conservatives and the large mass of incoherent and incomprehensible leftists on this site? But welcome aboard, regardless. Now, first you say:

The Soviet Union called itself a socialist society, but it never really was�it was dictatorship of an elite, and its policies, especially under Stalin, were not that different from Tzarist policies!

Well, no shit. And then you say:

The right wing works hard to make sure that labels have either negative connotations or positive ones�and that their enemies are associated …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Brian - Since the Dims are (1) fanatical (2) losers, how about you? Are you willing to lay down your life for the Dim cause? Think carefully about this before you commit yourself. The titular head of the Dimocrat Party is John Kerry, by virtue of his being the Dim presidential candidate in 2004. The main rap on Kerry was his flip-flop ways, not normally a desirable characteristic in a president. So Kerry has opened his quest for renomination by --- flip-flopping, again, on the war in Iraq, again. Kerry's Senate Resolution to cut and run in Iraq just lost in …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Liberal - Getting a little incoherent, aren't you? My comment, which you quoted, related directly to the outstanding performance of the American economy, as long as Democrats are not in office. You got off on every possible silly leftist rant, mostly on situations in foreign countries. When you did address the domestic economy, you said:

The Enron case celarly (sic) demonstrated the inability of the market to correct itself from excess and unethical behavior.

Well, that is not exactly true, is it? Enron is out of business, and the main perps have been convicted; some of them are already in …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Naiad - Revising your novel? Cool.

The U.S. does not have and never has had an "elite-leftist" power structure.

Well, that is not true, of course. The leftist media and the leftist academy certainly regard themselves as elite, and actively promote their numbnut elitist fellow travelers: Kerry, Reid, Pelosi, Murtha. And there is quite a history in the origin of the elite leftist terminology:

"American radicals and socialists began calling themselves `liberals'." - F.A. Hayek, 1960.

This nation was founded on liberal principles and ideals from the enlightenment. The hi-jacking of the term `liberal' to serve the purposes of radicals …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Brian - Point proven. You quoted me as follows:

You elite leftists have long exhibited a consuming rage toward President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and President Bush fils. At times it makes you irrational and incoherent.

And then you say:

Just like right wing nuts hate the clintons and all dems. Who is calling the kettle black here? This is why nothing is getting done in congress or the senate.

Nothing is getting done in congress or the senate? Nothing at all? NOTHING??? "Nothing" covers a lot of territory. Here is a partial list of Congressional votes during the …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

2) Afghanistan War Resolution, 2001 Iraq War Resolution 2002 Following 09/11, there was strong bipartisan support for overthrowing terrorist regimes and installing democracies to replace them. The success in this endeavor has been nothing short of spectacular. Fifty million people are now living in nascent democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their security services are being constantly upgraded. When Libya's Qaddafi saw the videos of Saddam getting his tonsils checked by American personnel, Qaddafi opted out of the terrorist business, and the substantial remnants of Libya's nuclear program are now lying in boxes in a warehouse in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Inspired …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Naiad -

Clearly, you at least enjoyed my typos - did that give you a sense of superiority?

Enjoyed your typos? Enjoyed? Your? Typos? Enjoyedyourtypos??? Umm, no, as a matter of fact. After your latest post, I went back and reread everything you have posted on this thread. I noticed no typos the first time through, I see no typos now, and I certainly did not correct or comment on any typos. I rather admire your lack of typos and your clarity of expression (appropriate for a self-confessed novelist), if not your ideological orientation. Unlike Redhorse, for example, who is …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Natalie - The animals are out in force. But these are not real animals, of course. Who ever heard of a hypocritical horse or a lying lagomorph? Or an illiterate animal? Red's mangling of the English language, imaginative spelling, and flawed logic makes him stand out, sort of like an ass at a horse show:

And of course the Civil Rights Movement in amerika (sic) (sic) was a cake walk.........amerikas (sic) (sic) (sic) brutal response too (sic) anybody who stood up and said no more (sic) ...I will state this again....Every ....Absolutely Every right you and we (sic) enjoy in this …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Bonjour, Froggie -

�PRESIDENT BUSH IS TRANSFORMING THE MIDDLE EAST INTO PEACEFUL DEMOCRACIES� is surely the greatest example of SCORPY IDIOCY we have yet seen ? This is not about disputable historical interpretations, but about what we, IF we look of course, can see to be demonstrably false.

Well, we saved your dumbasses a couple of times in living memory. I can see now that our previous efforts are not appreciated, and we won't make that mistake again. The next time Le Boche come marching down the Champs Elysees, you are all theirs; we won't interfere. But why would we …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Sally - When were you born, I mean, what time yesterday?

� It couldn�t get more tragic....

You want tragic? Try Vietnam. American fatalities in Vietnam were 58,000, compared to 2500 in Afghanistan and Iraq. 2500 is about 4% of 58,000. The total cost of Vietnam was 6% of 1972 GDP, while the current cost of GWoT is about one-half of 01% of current GDP. Having lied (Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) to get us into Vietnam, the Dimocrats cut and ran after all that expenditure of blood and treasure. The communist occupation resulted in some two million additional dead, …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

TWIMC - The moonbattery is out in force. The moonbattery is like an artillery battery that shoots nonsense in place of ammunition. Having shot their Democratic Party/leftist nonsense repeatedly, to no effect except their own gratification, the moonbattery is now reduced to shooting rehashed talking points, crude insults, and egotistical puffery. Naiad, when she realized that she had nothing else to say, had the good grace to withdraw from the conversation. The leftists here keep yammering and burning electrons, not realizing they have nothing to say, but it is always thus. This thread is dead.

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Lagomorph (of all animals!) posts something on topic (of all things!):

I thought the FACT that an election, nay two was stolen, according to the records was the point of the thread.

Pretty weak, Lagomorph. Your previous effort was better:

In the meantime the rabbit would like to point out that the elections of 2000 and 2004, have been PROVEN to have been stolen, won by fraud alone,.

And, where might this proof be? Surely if there was proof, it would be evident. So, present your proof, and let us judge. Leftist partisan websites are not proof. And, as …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Lilith - Any computer can be programmed; that is what computers are for. Any computer can be programmed to give any result: Venezuela's last election with DRE had 59% of the votes for Chavez, while exit polls had Chavez losing 40-60. Peanut Carter pronounced the Venezuela vote "fraud free" with no analysis of the vote or the results. A large number of Venezuelan vote machines had exactly the same (low) number of votes against Chavez. Fortunately, we have bipartisan election committees throughout the USA to oversee our elections, which means that they oversee the programming of the machines. Dimocrats designed the …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Scientific proof that Lagomorph is a retarded moron. http://rense.com/general70/pphe.htm 1) Anyone who cites Rense does so for the purpose of dishonesty and fraud. 2) With a quarryman MOS, I worked extensively with explosives, demolitions, and thermite. Thermite on a column leaves a lumpy, bumpy, irregular mass with a large pool of melted metal at the bottom. 3) The picture cited above shows a clean cut, and on the left face of the cut on the column, the diagonal striations are obviously the result of a welder's torch. The waste metal from the cut of the torch is called "slag", and is …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

DON'T PANIC, LAGOMORPH. PANIC DOES NOT BECOME YOU. WHEN YOU PANIC, PEOPLE NO LONGER BELIEVE THAT YOU ARE AN IDIOT, THEY KNOW YOU ARE AN IDIOT. YOU CAN'T APPEAR CAPABLE AND KNOWLEDGEABLE WHILE SCREAMING INANITIES AND INSANITIES AT THE TOP OF YOUR VOICE. Now, are you calmed down?

The thing which shows you are just avoiding the truth and spreading the bullshit, is obvious the way you choose, just like the other Shill, Natty, only to refer to the one reference, a single photo which though indicative admittedly isn�t much on it�s own. You deliberately choose this one because it is …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Back some months ago you were pushing the Jones Report. In five minutes it was obvious that Jonesy was too silly for words: Jones had several videos of commercial controlled demolitions by explosive charges. In every single controlled demolition using explosives, the explosives went off creating blast effects and great clouds of dust, AFTER WHICH the building(s) started to come down. That is not what happened to any of the WTC buildings. After the WTC buildings started to move, THEN great clouds of dust were generated AT THE POINT where the concrete floors were fracturing, but not lower down. Look at …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Natalie - Thank you for the excellent cites on 09/11. Parts of the geocities site agree quite closely with the tms.org info I posted on 30 June concerning the floor joists giving away, resulting in instability of the columns when cross-bracing was lost, and consequently in the apparent pouring liquid. This certainly is a more credible scenario than the vast left-wind conspiracy theories. I am afraid that our good acquaintance Lagomorph is in permanent panic mode. Every time he is presented with information he can't answer, he gets more long-winded, more shrill, and more out of touch with himself. He made …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Natalie - Can I call them, or what?

I am afraid that our good acquaintance Lagomorph is in permanent panic mode. Every time he is presented with information he can�t answer, he gets more long-winded, more shrill, and more out of touch with himself.

Check out Lagomorph's latest three (!) posts. He has this weird obsession about "the only way three skyscrapers could fall into their own footprints". I take it that he means that, without demolitions, WTC buildings should have fallen sideways, like a tree that has been chopped down. But a huge narrow skyscraper weighing one-half million tons …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Loquacious Lagomorph is threatening suicide. I can well believe he is serious. He has always shown an unstable detachment from reality. If anyone is in a position to intervene, this is the time.

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Lagomorph - I won't be dropping anything. I can be concerned for your personal well-being while remaining utterly contemptuous of your left-wind ideology, your inability to think logically, and your abject surrender of personal integrity to malevolent and destructive influences, such as Rense. You are either playing or not playing, you are not setting terms for my participation.

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

MIC is neither good nor bad. Like fire, it can be used constructively or destructively. The USA is unparalleled on this planet in using all its tools constructively. This is because we are a democracy, a nation of laws, and have a free-market economy. Our documents are The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States, and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith instructed the American founders in the value of entrepreneurship and individual initiative in creating wealth. Interestingly enough, French Philosophy was fundamental to the Enlightenment, which was a primary source of our Declaration of Independence and …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Natalie - Do you think Lagomorph is insane? They say that people who do the same thing over and over, while each time expecting different results, are insane. That's Lagomorph. After the 2000 election, the Dims and the Lags said that the election was stolen, Bush was a liar, Bush was not too bright, and Bush was a nazi. So, the American people heard all this too many times, and re-elected Bush by a bigger margin. Of course the "Bush was a liar" argument was a direct, if inappropriate, response to Clinton's perjury conviction. And then it was discovered that Gore …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Frog -

The Military-Industrial Complex is neither good nor bad, like fire ? Have you never heard of Arms Races contrived purely to enrich the Arms manufacturers ?

No, I have never heard that, but I am not accustomed to listening to left-wind conspiracy theorists, so I am fortunate to miss such things. That is not to say that there are not venal men, or venal men in the defense industries and politics. We just put one of them, Cunningham I believe, in jail for overstepping the rules, and we will do so as often as necessary. Which has almost …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Frog - You keep going on and on about what Eisenhower said. You have absolutely no interest in Eisenhower or what he said, except that you can use that particular quote for your political advantage. Except that you can't, because in the 2006 context, Eisenhower's 1961 speech is not overly pertinent. The MIC is not near the threat to the Republic that the Islamist terrorists are, and the Islamist terrorists are not near the threat to the Republic that the socialists are. Every socialist government that every existed degenerates into inefficiency and corruption at best, and mass murder at worst. Including …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Heck -

If our elections are perceived as easily tampered with we need to fix this problem ASAP.

Do you have any basis for this statement, or are you just repeating left-wind talking points? After all, the Dimocrats and their machine politics are the historical sources of voting fraud in this nation. And while a number of Dimocrats were convicted and sentenced for voting fraud and intimidation in 2004, I have yet to see reports of a similar level of criminal behavior among Republicans. Ohio seems to be the focus of voting fraud allegations. You know, of course, that Ohio, …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Irony - After the Florida experience, the Dims demanded electronic voting so that there would be no more questions on inaccurate election results. The nation complied. In the 2004 election, the Dims lost decisively in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. So, were they satisfied? No-o-o-o. The Dims were not looking for a fair election, they wanted John Kerry, of all people, to be president, which would have been a disaster on the order of magnitude of the Carter Catastrophe, if not greater. The mind boggles. But there were simply not enough stupid and gullible people in the USA …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Lagomorph - You seem to be back to your old, ill-informed, obnoxious self. Today you are much improved from a few days ago. I'm glad.

... we have already posted the links to several whistle blowers who allege they took part in activities which suggest fraud in the eelections. There are the none too subtle contrasts in exit poll results which alone should be enough to force a complete re-count or annulling of the results. Then we have the tens of thousands of disenfranchised voters due to obvious and proven attempts to isolate probable democrat voters, ie African Americans. The …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

I suppose that if Bush were to win again in a third election with fairly similar results, despite an approval rating which has not raised above 35% for a long time, Scorpy would still be defending the bowl of poop.

In your ignorance, you are unaware (or deliberately falsify) certain realities of the American polity: 1) Bush's approval ratings are currently 39% and rising. 2) Congress' approval ratings were recently 22%, the lowest of any American institution. Such public persona as the Dimocrats have is a product of the Dimocrat's presence in Congress. 3) The other two traditional left-wind sources …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Frog -

I�ve said before i wished the Mideast adventures had been an outstanding success.

Well, OK, just how would you define an "outstanding success"? Obviously you do not believe that the Soviet Union's (NOT Russian) experience in Afghanistan was a success, outstanding or otherwise. Besides the 15,000 Soviet dead, there were two million Afghani dead, 500,000 Soviet sick and wounded, and the Soviets bankrupted themselves in the process. And Vietnam was surely not a success, where the Dimocrat triumvirate of fools, Kennedy/ Johnson/ McNamara, lied to get us into the conflict (Gulf of Tonkin Resolution), killed off 58,000 American …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Frog -

By favourable I mean a peaceful society. Where girls and boys could go to school and come back home, even late at night. As under Saddam the MONSTER. That would have been an OUTSTANDING SUCCESS. I’d be HAPPY.

Well, I guess you are not joking about something like this. So you must be the craziest son-of -a-bitch on planet earth, except for all the other socialists. If you want to see pictures of Saddam's happy children, check out: http://www.kdp.pp.se/old/chemical.html http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brian_brivati/2006/03/16_march_remembrance_of_anfal_1.html http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ You will note that I have supplied supporting documentation from reliable left-wind sites, Human Rights Watch and …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Lagomorph - Hate to tell you this, but the Abrams M1A1 was specifically designed to withstand the RPG. An RPG might knock a track off, but it is extremely unlikely to have penetrated the crew compartment. There was an incident early in Iraq where SOMETHING penetrated the crew compartment, and we were busy trying to figure out what it was. Nobody was killed in the incident. Note also the Abrams has a four man crew, and absolutely no spare room. Someone is blowing smoke up your butt, Lagomorph, a sensation you seem to enjoy, as often as you indulge.

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Lagomorph -

Scorpy why do you make this strawman? Rabbit never said the Abrams was destroyed by an RPG, so why do you specifically act as if you achieve something by saying otherwise?

Regret to inform you that the bullshit report from the bullshit terrorist site is YOUR strawman, not mine. I don't post terrorist nonsense like that. So, when I point out that your report is factually implausible, you insist it is correct, the old ABC "fake but accurate" defense. Unfortunately, nobody employs you so you can't be fired like your fellow-traveler, Dan Rather. Pity. And why are you …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Heck -

Legendary Funds Manager Predicts Utter Global Collapse Stemming From Bursting of Property Bubble Blames Bush-Cheney �regime�

DON'T PANIC, HECK! EVERYONE WILL CONFUSE YOU WITH LAGOMORPH. Your reference does not quite tell the full story of Mr. Julian Robertson. Robertson's Tiger Funds lost $18 billion and are out of business. Robertson is facing multiple lawsuits. The cite below makes references to business and economic journals that detailed Robertson's long fall from grace and his legal problems. http://www.almartinraw.com/public/column219.html It is a fact that there are economic cycles, and some cycles are more severe than others. It is also a fact …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Lagomorph - China? Well, yes. President Nixon made the historical opening to China specifically to bring it into the modern economic and social world. Nixon's foresight has proven phenomenal, and we are gratified by the wonderful progress China has made. In fact, China's entire GDP is about the same as the growth of American GDP since President Bush passed the tax cuts and revived the American economy after the Bubba Bubble and the Bubba Recession. America's economy is ranked far ahead of China's economy. It is China that is eager to gain American dollars, while America is indifferent to Chinese yuan. …

Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

The perception was that the country's economy is really monopolized by the political class, with tremendous corruption at the top, and nothing is trickling down toward ordinary people.

Well, yes and no. The "political class" is the Mullahs. Iran is a theocracy. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is an ayatollah, a religious leader. Rafsanjani's past offices include speaker of parliament and president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, and he is now chairman of the powerful Expediency Council. He is also believed to be the richest person in Iran, and members of his family control great chunks of the Irani economy. But …

Posted to Irans Powerless President

Talking to Iran at this point is a mistake, in that the Mullahs continue to make progress toward their nuclear goals (and therefore think they are winning) as long as they can keep the USA otherwise engaged. But the Mullahs are ignoring two salient points. Israel and George Bush both have said that the Iranian bomb will never be. George Bush is not inclined to lose his nerve, much less Israel, so the Iranis and the USA are engaged in a little bit of theater, with almost no prospect that the Mullahs will concede. But other forces are at work. The …

Posted to Irans Powerless President

One of the many falsehoods the left spreads about President Bush is that he had no plan for Iraq: too few troops, no plan for government, no plan for confessional conflict, etc. But just because the leftists are not smart enough to recognize a plan if it bit them in the ass, that does not mean that there was no plan. The plan was superb, the results so far have been outstanding, and all the final pieces are just about in place. Consider first what we have accomplished since 09/11. From a cold start, we convinced Pakistan to support us, went …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Maria - Well, I don't despise the Mullahs, I am indifferent to them except that they have announced that they want to kill me. It is the Irani people who are rioting against the Mullahs, who oppress and repress the Iran Nation. But you haven't bothered to read up on that, have you? And you definitely won't find it in the NYT. And, yes, I think that democracy is a good thing and everybody benefits from democracy and the rule of law, after the lawless totalitarian terrorists are eliminated. " ... kill some civilians ... "? And who exactly would that …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

" ... only ones entitled to have and use chemicals, atomic and other weapons ... "? Ummm, no. The USA has long since eliminated its chemical weapons. The acknowledged nuclear powers are Great Britain, France, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan. Clinton was asleep at the wheel (or diddling Monica, or whomever) when he failed to note that India was preparing for nuclear tests, which was a big mistake, but not a catastrophe. The Mullahs are crazy, and Irani nukes would be a catastrophe, so it won't happen. "The only thing we cannot promise you is admiration or respect. " Yeah, yeah, …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Frog - I defy to show me where the Israeli government has ever acknowledged having nukes. Yes, they have them, France and Israel cooperated in developing nukes for both countries. Then France in one of it's perverse changes of philosophe politique decided to help Iraq build nukes, necessitating the famous raid on Osirak.

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Eidolon Lagomorph -

Any analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union, begins and ends with the economic collapse. Largely orchestrated by the USA, and which Afganistan was a large part by bleeding the Soviets dry in a long and expensive war of attrition.

Well, I don't need to address all your silly points, but the above will serve to illustrate your lack of knowledge and leftist ideological bias. We are agreed that the SU suffered economic collapse. Duh! When has a communist economy ever succeeded? Never, that's when. And the socialist economies are only barely staving-off economic collapse, SO …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Maria - You shitting me, girl? Well, yes, we are watching particularly Chavez and Morales. But they are not quite the threat that Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chile were when the KGB was actively engaged in expanding the Soviet Empire. So we won't soon be taking action against these latest two-bit threats, when four-bit Islamist threats are there for the taking. Besides, Chavez and Morales are locked in tight to high energy prices . When the price of energy tumbles next year, they will be out of income, out of investors and investment, and out of office. Their people will be …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - I could estimate the war cost at two cents, and be much, Much, MUCH closer to the real figure than your "estimate". The current cost of Afghanistan-Iraq is $284 billion, which will go to about $350 billion by September of 2006 when it will start to seriously wind down. The figures above are based on Congressional appropriations (or expropriations, according to Maria's definition). In contrast, the annualized 2006 1Q GDP is $13037.4 billion ($13 trillion), up almost 30% since the start of 2002. So, the cost of the Wars through September are right at 2.7% of current GDP, or …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - Knowledge is power. Ignorance is bliss. Cabdriver is ecstatically joyful. Your remarks are utter fiction (entertaining, if you like that type of fiction), down to your last three sentences, when you wander off into conspiracy theory (utterly offensive to anyone with a functioning brain). This discussion will require that you understand the terms federal surplus, federal deficit, federal debt, GDP, and federal debt as a percentage of GDP. You have not only used the terms incorrectly, the data you have associated with these terms is not correct, either. I am not going to define these terms for you, …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

The deficit is NOT dropping like a stone but moving ever upward at an accelerating rate.

Bullshit. The federal deficits are well documented on numerous sites; look it up. The deficit dropped by $95.5 billion from 2004 to 2005. During the first four years of the Clinton Administration, there was a cumulative budget deficit of $496 billion. During the last four years, there was a cumulative surplus of $558 billion. The surplus peaked in 1999 at $236 billion, and fell by nearly 50% in 2000, Clinton's last year. What was going on that caused the abrupt rise and fall of this …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

To Whom It May Concern - Enron - CDC and Redhorse both seem to think that the Bush Administration had something to do with the crimes of Enron, but all the things that Enron was accused of took place during the Clinton administration, when Janet Reno was Attorney General. Reno should have been overseeing such things. Unfortunately, Reno was too busy for mere multi-billion dollar scandals, because she had to take care of important things like sending Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba, and making sure the Branch Davidians were properly disposed of. Other business crimes and scandals that took place during …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Paul Bremer � Paul Bremer was a lousy choice for his position at the head of the Iraqi operation. The State Department prevailed over the Defense Department in selecting Bremer as Iraqi Regent. But Colin Powell was dominated by the leftists in the State Department, and the leftist philosophy is to ROCK NO BOATS and DO NO GOOD DEED; consequently, Bremer. And therefore we suffered much evil from our friends at the State Department. That is why Colin Powell is no longer in office. Both the CIA and the State Department were infiltrated by leftist ideologues, who were incapable of performing …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Contrasted with these minor mistakes, there have been a number of brilliant and spectacular victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have two growing democracies in the heart of darkness that is the Middle East and South Asia. Iran is now the only active Islamist terror state, and it is squeezed by Iraq and Afghanistan while it desperately labors to increase its terror potential by building nuclear weapons. Qaddafi saw Saddam having his tonsils examined, and decide terrorism was not the way to go, surrendering his extensive nuclear and chemical stocks to the USA. Lebanon is free of Syrian Ba�athist occupation. Egypt …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Major Major - Your ignorance is showing. Speculative bubbles are fairly rare, but when they occur, they are distinctive, spectacular, and exceedingly destructive, and they have enough common traits to be classified quite accurately. Google Dutch Tulip, Mississippi, and South Sea Bubbles, and compare them with the Roaring Twenties, the Japanese Bubble, and the Bubba Bubble. You will learn enough to avoid appearing stupid when the subject comes up again. The Bubba Bubble placed the USA economy in the most hazardous situation since Black Friday, 1929. We were blessed to have George Bush and Alan Greenspan in the only positions that …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Heck -

The Enron mess hurt an awful lot of innocent people, but it is irrelevant who was in office and who controlled congress - nobody is watching out for the average person.

And who do you think watches out for the average person, besides himself? If it is irrelevant "who was in office and who controlled congress", all actions are random, and we can save the cost of government by eliminating it. In fact, the choices the voters make determine the politicians and (more or less) their policies, and affect the course of government and of history. There were …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

7) If you extend the curve of healthy growth beyond 1965, you see a triangular void above the flat-line area. This area represents lost economic opportunity. 8) If you extend the curve of healthy growth beyond 1995, you see an area between the healthy growth curve and the Clinton curve: this, of course, is the Clinton Bubble. This area represents wasted economic opportunity, and is extremely hazardous. President Bush and Chairman Greenspan pulled us out of this one with minimal damage, but every other bubble in history ended in catastrophe, like the Great Depression. 9) Seventeen years of economic stagnation began …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Smedley Darlington Butler was one weird bird. His family was Quaker, but he joined the Marines in 1898 to fight in the Spanish-American War. As he was sixteen years old, he lied about his age to get into the War. His father was not happy to see him go into the military, but the old man's main concern was that Butler not raise his age any further than he already had, because the elder Butlers' wedding anniversary was getting too close to young Butler's fake age, and father wanted no hint of impropriety. Butler's military career is spectacular and well-documented, but …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

The best opportunity for the socialists to gain meaningful power is in the United States, but they keep blowing it. There are two opposing leftist philosophies in America, graphically demarcated between the heathen Kos and the refined Peter Bienart. Kos and crew want to purge the refined elements, such as Joe Lieberman, while Bienart maintains that Democrats are the only agency that can win against the Jihadists, ala Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey. And they fight each other, while at the same time the heathen demand radical ideological purity, while scaring the beJesus out of everyone. Not a good formula for …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Redhorse - Well, that's a heck of a contribution to dialogue. I'm not given to loose handling of facts, so if you are unclear on anthing, ask. Knowledge never hurt anyone, but ideology has a number of people on this site utterly screwed.

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Froggy - Conspiracy theory is for fearful people. What are you afraid of? But keep up the good work, I like to keep track of what the little dumbshits are doing.

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Heck - Your poor neighbor. My sympathies. But our system is far better than most, where only a few are criminals and thieves, and they are usually caught and brought to justice, and we have the means to defend ourselves. There are too many people who are governed by people like the criminals that assaulted your neighbor, and some of these nations are prominent among the states that propagate terrorism, such as 09/11. Our personal firearms will not protect us from 09/11, or the Madrid or London bombings, much less the much greater acts of terrorism by Muslims against Muslims around …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

You went to a lot of work to prove numbers �look good".

If that is all the response you have, I have obviously failed in my attempt to communicate. Let me be more explicit.. For seventeen years, from 1965 to 1982, the world's largest and most advanced industrial economy went sideways, culminating in high taxes, high interest rates, high inflation, and high unemployment. Why? With the passage of a few laws and reforms in 1982, this same economy went into a prolonged, dynamic period of growth, prosperity, low inflation, low interest rates, and high employment lasting to 1995. Why? From 1995 …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Redhorse - I am not sure of the difference between "loose with facts" and "twist & spin...spin...spin". I deny doing either, of course, but we seem to be unable to communicate. Can you give me an example of my "preverse manipulations of facts on subject matter so important to the well-being of society"? Perhaps you were talking about my blaming "Bubba for Enron". But Cabdriver was the one who cited Enron and suggested this was evidence that the Bush Administration was "insane". And you brought up Enron in the context ot the energy crunch and California. But all the Enron criminal …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - You are weird. My statement was, "After WWII, the economy went into a healthy rise until 1965, when it flat-lined, and stayed flat-lined for seventeen years." You replied with, "What amazes me is that the period of the fastest and most thorough era of economic growth in our history, 1945-73, had the highest annual average rates of per capita GNP growth, the highest rates of labor productivity, the highest growth rates of end-use energy efficiency, and the highest rates of industrial utilization capacity." And you went on to cite further indicators. Now, the period 1945-73 (in particular) has been …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

I think many of your other comments are out of date. For example, energy consumption as a share of GDP is down by about 44% in the last twenty years, due to conservation and technological efficiency. Therefore, end-use energy efficiency must surely be significantly greater now.

The real cause of the recession of the 1970s was global overproduction of consumer durables in the competing economies of the US, Germany, and Japan.

The real cause of the recession of the 1970s was Democratic politics, when President Johnson tried to fight a war and spent trillions on the Great Society ($6.6 trillion on …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Heck -

I'm well aware of the stagnant DJIA period you mentioned and I think we are in or entering a similar period."

Then you obviously think that the Dimocrats will win in 2006, and there will be a Dimocrat President in 2008, and the Dims will raise taxes. This is the only scenario in fifty years that resulted in serious difficulties for the American economy. When the Dims raise taxes, the economy is deprived of investment capital, factories are not built, workers are not hired, payrolls are not paid, and taxes are not collected. This is not a complicated situation, …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - LBJ pushed the Great Society programs into law, including the Welfare program, which paid poor women and children if there was no husband or father in the house. Consequently, millions of husbands and fathers became superflous, and boogied. Between the passage of the Welfare law and its repeal in 1995, the total cost was $6.6 trillion, and the sole (im)practical long-term result was the substantial destruction of poor, mostly black, families. Daniel Patrick Moynihan did a study on this before the Welfare law was passed, and predicted exactly what would happen. For his efforts, Moynihan was accused of being …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - You are really weird. Facts are where you find them, and are independent of source. That is why I took pains to inform you that I had confirmed what George Will had said about the $6.6 trillion cost of welfare; I thought you might object to what George Will had to say, but I invited you to confirm it for yourself. Now you are taking the position that any fact cited by George Will (George Will is impeccable with facts, what you call "stiff ass") is contaminated, and has to be rejected. But that leaves your perception of the …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Mel - All the leftists pretend that history started on 09/11, but why would someone such as yourself join them?

.... let's look at what the Bush admin has said. Hussein was an imminent threat to our nation, Iraq has ties to Al Qada, Iraq had WMDs.

"Hussein was an imminent threat to our nation ... " You will have to show me where the Bush Administration said that. Bush said that we needed to do something before Saddam became an imminent threat, and there are some ambiguous threat comments from other Administration personnel, and there are about 10,000 …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Heck - Don't mess around with Red's thought processes; perfection cannot be improved upon. Red is pushing two has-beens and a never-was-and-never-will-be as his ideal presidential candidates. How can you beat that? Look at what Redhorse says:

Look the world community was on your side after 9 /11, ready to help and listen ; that�s all gone now.!!!.... .......We could of had a WORLD SUMMIT ON TERROR , sat down talked things out like reasonable adults.....

The world community was on our side since Gulf I in 1991, when the UN sent troops to free Kuwait from Saddam. The UN Security …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Red -

... the poor Iraq civilian population is....just basically being davastated ...

Davastated? Is that the opposite of devastated? The violent death rate for civilians in Iraq is less than in Washington DC and Detroit, and about half the rate in New Orleans before Katrina. Now I grant you that a big car bomb is more spectacular than some dickhead offing his girlfriend or whatever, but the violence in Iraq is not quite what the leftist media wants you to believe. And after we clean up the terrorists in Iraq, we will clean up the terrorists' allies, the leftist …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Red - Now come on, Horse. If I worried about all your typos, errors, non-sequiturs, irrational thought processes, and stupid fucking ignorance, I would hardly have time for anything else. So, I don't worry about you or your mistaken banalities. But you really should consider what I have said. Is it significant that the rate of civilian violence is greater in New Orleans, Washington DC, and Detroit than it is in Iraq? I suppose that sort of depends on where you fall on the political spectrum. Leftists are determined to focus on and exaggerate violence in Iraq, and ignore greater levels …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Heck - Let me tell you about this marvelous Internet service called "Google". To use Google, you just type in "key words", such as the ones I gave you: violence, rate, Iraq, Washington, Detroit. In just 0.41 seconds, you are provided with "about 636,000" entries, the first ten of which report on a study of the rate of civilian violence in the USA as compared to Iraq. (I don't know about the other 635,990.) You may have heard of some of the media outlets in which this study was reported: Newsmax, History Channel, etc. But you did not see it reported …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

"Loss of international prestige". Just whom do you think we have lost prestige with? Germany sabotaged a thirteen-year effort to control the terrorist Saddam regime and his WMD; Schroeder did this to assure his re-election, but the German electorate promptly kicked him out regardless, and elected the centrist Merkel to replace him. France and Russia were eager to go along with Germany (my, how times change) and it turns out that both France and Russia were major recipients of Saddam's graft and corruption. In fact, the USA has "lost prestige" only with Eurosocialists, totalitarians, and the UN. Nothing new there, what …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Red - Yes, but have you ever had an original thought? Obviously not. Insults and morally confused rants are not thoughts, much less original thoughts.

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Heck - Many years ago, I was a 2Lieu in Augsburg. It was the end of the fiscal year, and DivCom discovered he had unspent money in his budget. That was a no-no; if he did not spend all available funds, he was guilty of mismanagement, and next year's budget would be cut. He ordered his staff to spend the requisite amount of money, and among the things that were purchased were IBM ball typewriters for every clerk in the division, at $600 a pop. So our clerks typed in style, there were a large number of perfectly good surplus typewriters …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Heck -

If you can�t see the (Custer) analogy � it�s no wonder you were a 2nd Lt.

And what is your point? Everyone starts somewhere (actually, I started as an E-1), you have already told us where you started. Custer obviously had too few troops for the task he undertook, but there is no good evidence that the Iraqi effort has too few troops, and there is considerable evidence that the existing troop level is entirely sufficient: 1) Afghanistan-Iraq has had the fewest number of American casualties of any war in American history, with the qualified exception of Gulf …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Red -

... a humane response to a humane tragedy ...

Every humane (or inhumane) tragedy since 1918 has been the result of totalitarian aggression: fascist (Hitler), socialist (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim), freelance (Idi Amin, Mugabe, Saddam), or Islamist (al-Qa'eda). Every measure of relief from inhumane tragedy has come from the democracies. And it has not come cheaply to the democracies, much less to the victims of totalitarianism. The fact that you are of the Stalinist persuasion certainly does not negate the truth of the above points. Be afraid. Be very afraid. The democrats are going to straighten …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Red - And the culture of caligula is going to bite you in the ass.

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - Don't be such a Densan. Can you remember or think of any geopolitical situation in the 1970s and 1980s that might have caused the USA and other democracies to ally with less-than-perfect democrats, or non-democrats? Hint: In WWII, the USA and Great Britain allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler. It was not because the SU was democratic, humanitarian, or well-intentioned; in fact, the communists were a bunch of murdering bastards. So, why? Because Hitler was a worse threat, of course. After Hitler was properly disposed of, the murderous socialist thugs took over much of Eastern Europe, China and …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

In case after case, US/UK imperialism has wrought havoc on the world. Yet Scorp only sees evil elsewhere and not in countless right-wing murderous dictatorships supported by the US/UK axis of ignorance. There are countless cases all over the third world! The US is mostly responsible for most of the post-WWII fascist coups in the third world.

Is this a serious statement, or are you just engaging in a little bit of recreational bitching? If you are serious, please list all the "post-WWII fascist coups" you are aware of. There cannot be "countless" numbers of them, because there are only …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - Long ago and far away, on a different website, I got in a discussion with a leftist, and I was giving him a hard time about the millions of people that Stalin's communist system had murdered. His take on the situation was that Stalin had subverted pure communism into "state capitalism", and therefore the forty million innocent dead in the Soviet Union were actually victims of capitalism! Yeah, right!

The list of coups is very long.

Well ... OK. But what you specifically told me was "fascist" coups. Now, surely you are aware that fascism was a political …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Scorp I think it would be interesting for you to tell us a little about your background, what Red State you're from, when you were in the armed services and why you enlisted, and you're educational background. Were your parents very religious and insist on regular weekly attendance at Church? You seem to have had some formal academic training! Tell us a little about yourself to put things in perspective!

And I think it would be even more interesting if you would go fuck yourself and send us pictures. I do not do autobiography on demand. If the idea appeals …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Red -

... vote prgressive (sic) as possibly...like Frog was saying , organize as much as possible...and patience ...

Patience is a virtue. Leftists are notably lacking in virtue, but prepare yourselves for the long haul, because you are going to need it. Progressive is an euphemism for communist. Communists have a bad name, because they are guilty of murder, corruption, and inefficiency. So, in order to avoid the negative connotations of being genocidal, thieving, inept bastards, leftists have adopted various less-polarizing labels for themselves: collectivist, progressive, socialist. But a leftist by any other name is still a genocidal, …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

The newest twist in the Progressive road to nowhere is George Soros' money and Kos' white-hot passion for leftist nonsense and self-aggrandizement. Soros and friends spent increasingly tens of millions of dollars in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 election cycles in an effort to promote their communist ideology, with ever decreasing results. Now they think that they can do better in 2006 and 2008, with no confirming data whatsoever. Kos has made a very large stir within a very small friendly audience on the Internet, but wait until the American people experience Kos' hatred- and obscenity-laced rants; talk about a clash …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - My points about your "fascist dictatorships" were: 1) that your use of the term is factually inaccurate. After WWII there were many power vacuums, filled by many warlords, some of whom espoused one political philosophy or another, with or without adhering to their chosen philosophy's precepts, or none at all. Idi Amin was a Muslim cannibal; he was not a communist, which you would have embraced, but neither was he a fascist. Castro was a warlord that pledged communism, much to the astonishment of the Soviet Union, which had to scramble to accommodate their latest, and unanticipated, satellite. But …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

US support for countless rightist dictatorships in the third world is the issue. They were unforgivable, attrocious, led to needless suffering, and, in the case of the middle east, led to intractable problems which were have today inherited.

Right. Before the USA came along, the whole world was sweetness and light, and then we came in installing rightist dictatorships right and left, for no good reason, and its all our fault. Umm, wait, that's not what really happened, is it? The world has always been a bloodthirsty place, the founding of the United States substantially raised the sweetness and light …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Nonetheless, the communist experience of Russia and China was one of unification and modernization more than ideology.

Unification? Why, sure! When the Soviet Union collapsed, all of Eastern Europe and the tier of states on Russia's southern border were ready, willing, and able to remain as vassal states in the new Russian Empire, which replaced the old Soviet Empire. And Taiwan, Tibet, and the Uigurs of Xinjiang are eager to come under Chinese communist subjugation. Do you realize just how fucking stupid you sound? The ideologically driven Soviets conquered and subdued Eastern Europe, just as the Czars conquered and …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - Don't panic, Cabdriver. Hysteria does not become you, and does not accomplish anything. This site is, after all, a serious inquiry on serious subjects. Your tangential rants interspersed with abject befuddlement do not contribute to understanding and progress. So calm down, and lets review the conversation so far that has you so bollixed. You said: "The US is mostly responsible for most of the post-WWII fascist coups in the third world. " Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Jun 11, 2006 at 5:28 PM I replied: " ... please list all the �post-WWII fascist coups� you are aware of." Posted by …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Your response was: "On the issue of fascist regimes you played with semantics. In this way you avoided the issue of irrefutable US involvement in third world rightist dictatorships." Now you are starting to lose it. There are several things wrong with this comment. The old "semantics" ploy, first. You are not using terms correctly, indicating sloppy thinking (typical of leftists), and then plead "semantics". Well, no. Learn to think and talk with more precision. Then you lumped everyone you don't like together as "'rightist dictatorships", neatly avoiding the irrelevant "fascist" label, and ignoring the many variations among the countries of …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

I made a long response, detailing the inconsistent and irrelevant positions you have taken. Posted by scorp on Jun 14, 2006 at 7:06 AM Then you blew it: �Fascist regimes which emerged in Europe in the 1920s and 30s were not a response to communist aggression.� Ummm, OK, right. But you started out talking about �post-WWII fascist coups in the third world�, and that has been the central theme of this entire conversation, as recounted above. So why are you now off on a tangent, introducing the idea that, �Fascist regimes which emerged in Europe in the 1920s and 30s were …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

CDC - Suspicions confirmed.

I studied this issue many years ago at the UW-Madison in a course called �The Politics of Revolution.�

So, let us review what we know, or believe we know, about Cabdriver: 1) He (probably not she) drives a cab. 2) Attended UW, studied soft subjects for which there is no market (graduated?), consequently drives a cab. (I am not knocking cab drivers, or any form of honest work. I have, on occasion, worked chopping weeds in a tank farm, dug ditches, been a welder's helper, stocked in a warehouse, operated a forklift, and driven a delivery truck.) …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

More importantly, how did you do?

Two rightist fallacies. The first is that the right wing coups assisted to varying degrees by the CIA in the post-WWII third world were responses to KGB meddling. In no case was there the least bit of Russian involvment.

This is the problem with lack of education, combined with a hard political indoctrination, such as you have suffered. Communist and KGB infiltration and attack in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America are very well documented in contemporary news accounts, scholarly research, and more recently, Soviet archives released after the fall of the Soviet …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

The second fallacy is that Russian was all rural with no industrial base or urban working class at the time of the Revolution in 1917.

Cockiepop. Russia's population was about 136 million in 1900, and was only 13% urban; the remainder was rural and agricultural. Before 1918, Russia exported grain to pay for industrial imports, but had no industrial exports. Russia's per cap industrial output was 15% of Great Britain's, and less than 10% of the USA's. It is true that industrial expansion grew by a factor of three under Witte in the 1890s, but from an extremely small …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

JC Hammitt -

... the war ... was executed so poorly. Posted by jchamilt on Jun 16, 2006 at 9:00 PM I am not happy with the way the war is executed. Posted by jchamilt on Jun 17, 2006 at 7:02 PM I do not like the war or the way it was executed .... Posted by jchamilt on Jun 17, 2006 at 8:03 PM

I take it that you do not like the way the war has been executed. But is there anything in particular that you think should have been done differently, or better? Too many civilian …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

If Democrats want to provide the "real security" that matters to most Americans, they must offer protection against these growing risks. That means providing better social insurance: universal health insurance, wage insurance, improved unemployment insurance and expanded public pension programs. It means guaranteeing free college education or equivalent technical training for everyone. And it means advancing a new strategy to regulate the global economy, a strategy that involves not only helping people adjust to global economic changes but ensuring that the benefits of globalization flow primarily to working people in all countries.

In other words, install a socialist bureaucracy to take …

Posted to How Do You Define Security?

You can hardly solve a problem if you do not know what the problem is. President Johnson promoted the "Great Society", and a major part of the program was Welfare. But Welfare had the effect of making babies valuable, and men worthless. Babies got money payments, but the presence of a man in the home reduced those payments. Welfare cost $6.6 trillion dollars before it was eliminated, and the only impractical effect of welfare was to destroy the black family. President Clinton was nearly as mindless as Jimmeh Carter, but even Clinton saw that Welfare was not working and did something …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

MM - Oh, gosh, I have to apologize. I did not realize that your "millions" of people who were formerly on Welfare are now starving, homeless, and naked, and now are ignorant, whereas during Welfare they were all "fed, housed, clothed and educated", by the "government" ( the taxpayer, in reality). So, why don't we just put everyone on Welfare, and solve all our problems? Or, you could pull your head out of your leftist ass, and realize that before Welfare, they worked to support themselves, and after Welfare, they again worked to support themselves - even as you and I. …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

MM -

It was understood that people were free to form their own �values� and save their own �souls�, without the benevolent interference of the god squad.

So, if "people were free to form their own 'values'", why does the leftist ACLU and the leftist media universally assault traditional values? Religion and family life have played a strong positive role in our culture (and most cultures), including black culture. But black culture and the USA economy were badly treated under the socialist Great Society, at great cost to everyone. Now you are out to destroy traditional culture and substitute the …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Baraka - Are you one person, or two? Your first paragraph is a mindless collection of cliches, thoroughly off-putting. But your second paragraph is well thought out and evocative. In fact, your second paragraph is main-stream conservative. The NEA and the education hierarchy are among the main components of the Dimocrat's constituency politics, and these are the people who look to their own interests, to the exclusion of the interests of the children that need education. Thus we have Dims in Florida and Michigan limiting the avalilability of school vouchers, knowing that school vouchers deliver quality education at low cost; but …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Epistrophy -

"The scholars cite many reasons for this deterioration. Primary among them are bad schools, absent parents, racism, structural changes in the economy and a subculture that glorifies gangsterism.� The above quote from the New York Times article provides some clues as to what has contributed to the plight of black men in America.

Your interpretation of the NYT article is imaginative, dynamic, fanciful nonsense. In the first place, if you rely on the NYT for information, you are screwed. Bad Schools You seem to be genuinely concerned about the status of education for blacks. You must be aware …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

A Subculture that Glorifies Gangsterism Glorifying gangsterism is not a Republican vice. But it is a fact that sports and entertainment are prominent in our culture, and a few thousand black people hit it big. Unfortunately, a few million people think that they might hit it big, and they neglect their studies to concentrate on their ball handling, rap, and batting averages. At any given time there are exactly 1440 NFL player slots, and a couple of million young men who think they can pull down one of those slots. There is zero payoff for the vast majority of those who …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

MM -

Faced with the unappealing prospect of providing a commensurate compensation for the people who actually performed the work, commensurate to the compensation given to those who simply supervised the labor of those who did, our industrial titans decided instead to transfer their enterprise to more pastoral environs, first to the suburbs, then to the exurbs, then out of the state, and finally out of the country. Those who could afford to follow the industrial migration were easilly incorporated into its system, while those who could not were allowed to remain mired in their own misery, one which was created …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Baraka - You have referred to me as racist. Regardless of how poorly I express myself, racist I am not. We are totally agreed that the black community, and black men in particular, have a major problem. The problem is of long duration. The problem was made catastrophically worse by paying black women and children to have black men abandon and neglect their families, which is what the Great Society Welfare program did. President Johnson's Welfare program established the game rules whereby responsibility was taken from men and dependence was inflicted on women. The Democratic Party has played the game to …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Baraka -

I totally agree with your analysis and the conclusion of the results of the Johnson war on poverty but that the white bigots in the South who ran the Senate and the House of Representatives crafted that legislation. That�s the only way they would allow a war on poverty and Johnson bought it. They became the Republican majority that now runs the country.

I appreciate the fact you agree with my analysis and conclusions. Unfortunately, you analysis of the voting at the time is a little shaky. The figures below are from the Wikipedia article on Civil Rights …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues