Jim

Congress did no such thing. A handful of Senators and Congressmen did, however. Dude, that's the kind of bullshit we don't need in this country. Your comment above is just as evasive and rationalizing as this pathetic comment below: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/18/mukasey.hearing/index.html Nothing ambiguous about it. Just a fact. You either need to break open Webster's or the Civics book.

Congress did no such thing. A handful of Senators and Congressmen did, however. On the larger question. We've gotten the leaders we deserve. I consistently try to recruit folks for our neighborhood committees or at least to show up to the once a month meetings - too busy. Volunteer for some NGO, the school. Good luck. By and by I've come to the conclusion that folks don't care, or don't care enough to try and make a difference. "I'd like to change the world, but I don't know what to do - so I'll leave it up to you".

You might have an argument if Bush actually did anything productive to counteract his impression of being an idiot.

Wow. You are getting wrapped around the axel on the Nobel award aren't you. Seems to be a right winged trait these days. Given that there's nothing to be happy about with our current chief exeuctive's Midas touch of turning everything he comes in contact with to mush, it's expected you're depressed. And the comparison of Craig to Gore. Oh boy, you are getting desperate now.

Gore Derangement Syndrome By Paul Krugman The New York Times Monday 15 October 2007 On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore's name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more. And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore's stance." You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change - therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists. What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane? Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration. And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job - to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped for - the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme. The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man," but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, "the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam." And so it has proved. But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn't just inconvenient. For conservatives, it's deeply threatening. Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously. "We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said F.D.R. "We know now that it is bad economics." These words apply perfectly to climate change. It's in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater. The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. "cap and trade" system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain. Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America's lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America's air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet - and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get. Everything I've just said should be uncontroversial - but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them. So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved with tax cuts or bombs - well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of - who else? - George Soros. Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He's taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

This is an independent weather consultant's site. He gets hired for expedition work. It concentrates on the mountain forecast. You also can sign up for his email forecasts. http://www.wowweather.com/

Given the current track record I think that an entirely market-based approach would be sensible. Why bother reallocating resources that will aleviate (some) human suffering in the near term (keeping corporate profits at a maximum)when future glacial melting and concurrent weather changes are only a 99% certainty in the next 100 yrs or so. Likely there will be improvements such as availability of sea wall construction design, floating city design, and improvement of mass dislocation strategies. No reason to do anything now but let the market prevail.

They have one. It's the Republican Caucus room

My housemate had a great dog when we were out on 40 acres and had two rivers nearby to go swimming in the summer. Never had a cat until I got married and lived in the city. Gotta say I'd feel a bit guilty leaving a pooch all day in the house and it would be a pain to do the scooping thing or have to DRIVE somewhere to let them have a good run. I really like dogs, just don't want one in the city. The cat - very mellow. Fill up its food bowl and give it water for 4 days and its good. I'd feel guilty leaving a dog that long and would hate to see what home smelled like after that.

.....and Orson Wells. Gotta rent that one soon.

I never read Moby Dick in high school or college, and remember all my class mates who read it, hated it, and bitched about it, so I never tried it. I finally picked it up two years ago, and absolutely LOVED it. Melville is a genius, and packs that novel with so much dense symbolism and references it is unbelievable. I especially enjoyed his sense of humor. It's probably my favorite classic - right up there with the Iliad and Heart of Darkness. Have to agree. I was impressed with the complex metaphors and the many, many references to art, history, music, and literature. Without the footnotes I would have been lost on many of those references. The original did not have these. I guess those who were reading back then were very good scholars.

Moby Dick - a great book. I put lots of pencil notes in that one. Came away with the impression that folks are not quite as literate as they used to be back then. The Wild Trees - very interesting, some crazy tree climbers. The Odyssey - Fagels interpretion

How come only KK gets a beer?

We have to go in because it's, a, well, TERRORIST HAVEN! ........roll blunder tape We can't leave because,well, it's a, TERRORIST HAVEN! Repeat ad nausem.

No good answer to this simple question: What good has been done by the invasion?

What fantsy land does this guy inhabit? Has he been reading the newspaper? I also like the "leave it to the historians" remark. Let bygones be bygones. So every assumption that the Bushies had were wrong - and because everyone got a purple ink mark on their finger then democracy is ruling - what a joke. I think the question is how much longer do we remain in the quagmire. According to the Bushies their role model is South Korea. Given that we're building the world's largest embassy compound and quite a few permanant looking air bases - I'd say 30 yrs or so. There is no elegant solution to this mess Bush and Cheney made. There is little sign that things are stable enough to hold together if we pull out, Iran is ingrained in the political process, and there is no sign of a strong colalition government. So how long can we afford to be pouring 200 billion a year into this rathole? Likely the foreign policy blunder of the century.

Patriotism is the last refuge for lack of an argument.

yea - the training is expensive, and the US taxpayer has paid it! BW are all ex-military, all trained at US expense, but BW reaps the profit. Another excellent example of the efficiency of the marketplace. 8D

It's called a windfall for the "private" sector don't ya know. It is also the price of not having to institute a draft. KBR provides all the logistics support, food service, etc, and Blackwater the security, at 8 times the cost the military could do it. But we've stretched the armed forces as much as possible, have the backdoor draft with the reserve and stop orders, and that keeps the public happy because they don't have to cough up their sons.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/10/02/blackwater.witness/index.html The police officer, whom CNN is identifying only as Sarhan, said the Blackwater guards "seemed nervous" as they entered the square, throwing water bottles at the Iraqi police posted there and driving in the wrong direction. He said traffic police halted civilian traffic to clear the way for the Blackwater team. Then, he said, the guards fired five or six shots in an apparent attempt to scare people away, but one of the rounds struck a car and killed a young man who was sitting next to his mother, a doctor. Sarhan said he and an undercover Iraqi police officer ran to the car but they were unable to stop it from rolling forward toward the Blackwater convoy. "I wanted to get his mother out, but could not because she was holding her son tight and did not want to let him go," Sarhan said. "They immediately opened heavy fire at us." "Each of their four vehicles opened heavy fire in all directions, they shot and killed everyone in cars facing them and people standing on the street," Sarhan said. The shooting lasted about 20 minutes, he said. "When it was over we were looking around and about 15 cars had been destroyed, the bodies of the killed were strewn on the pavements and road." Sarhan said no one ever fired at the Blackwater team. "They became the terrorists, not attacked by the terrorists," he said. "I saw parts of the woman's head flying in front of me, blow up and then her entire body was charred," he said. "What do you expect my reaction to be? Are they protecting the country? No. If I had a weapon I would have shot at them."

I ride minimum 24 mi RT every day, longer if it's dry. So-- 1) If it's wet I just think how uncomfortable I'd be on the bus. WTF - on rare occassions when I ride I feel like I'm suffocating and with the heat on STUN setting. I look around and no one is sweating, just reading their books or dozing. 2) Stress relief. Better to unwind on the way home. 3) Getting older but not fatter. Think pulling the plastic is hard in the winter, just add 5 lbs or so. 4) Your minor contribution to eco-commuting. 5) Remind youself of Kathryn Hepburn. When she was interviewed by Diane Sawyer late in her career she was asked about her swimming in her pond at her Conn. home in winter. Did she enjoy it? No -- Then why do you do it? Her reply was "To make my neighbors feel weak".

Friend of mine on Queen Ann had put some small stone lions on his wall last month. They lasted two weeks. He used a minor amount of mortar but that didn't stop them.

As ususal, no rebuttal. Do you let your ego sit by the computer or just lean over your shoulder? I'll bow out now and you two can continue your conversation.

That's like trying to prove a non-event. Rather I would point to the results. Judith Miller's reporting was not scrutinized because she was blowing in the right direction. Go back and look at the reporting at that time. Every article started with "the administration claims..." but no where was a sentence added "...but there appear to be no facts to bolster this claim" Given the lack of any critical analysis in the mainstream media it's fair to say that a reality check was squashed. You're really not that naive to say everyone was fooled. That's not reporting. That's cheerleading. The role of the press is to "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable". During the lead up to the Iraq war the press was merely a conduit. I know, you're going to say everyone had it wrong, blah, blah. Bullshit. The facts were out there. Within an hour of Powell's UN speech it was known that some of his graphics were lifted from a Master's thesis and that he conviently left out the fact that the International Atomic Energy Commission had been on the ground on these sites and nothing was there. Reporters learn the internal rules pretty readily. There is no need have the wrong story even approach the front page.

I would argue that there is no liberal press in the US, or none that is widely distributed anyway. Look at the rah-rah leading up to the Iraq War. The NYT, LA Times, Washington Post, were no different than the Wall St. Journal. Only Knight-Ridder was standing in the back of the room calling bullshit, and now they are defunct. Even rather conservative countries, Israel for instance, have a decent range of political discourse in their media. In the US the advertising dollar rules. If you're a cub reporter and you stray too far from the mainstream you get your knuckles rapped early and often. They learn the trade well that way.