JayB

You appear to be equivocating the numerous reports of criminal activity by our government with some kind of supermarket tabloid gossip – your apparent selection of reading material might explain that confusing “otherworldly” dementia you seem to be complaining about. Let me assure you that here in America several ongoing criminal practices by the Republican government have already been recently identified in federal courts and anybody who has been paying attention knows this. It’s no secret, and the only silence is that of the Republican-controlled Congress and the right-wing media moguls for whom you advised imprisonment and fines. All that aside, the silence from the Republican Congress over the past six years has enabled the unlawful activities of the Republican government to continue while the Democrats in Congress have consistently been expressly prohibited by the majority rule from conducting hearings on the alleged unlawful activities. As surely as the preponderance of evidence is not only NOT secret but often available in best selling published accounts, the courts have ruled, and anybody who has been paying attention has heard what the courts said. What you hear next, if anything, will be the sound of the other shoe falling with the midterm elections. That is all. Thanks Obe Wan. So....in your world, Congressional hearings are the only means available to a political party if they wan't to reveal official misconduct on their opponent's part? That certainly explains why no one ever got around to appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the Plame affair, the various ethics committees never uttered the names Delay or Cunningham? Since you've gotten the intel on the downlow from your fellow analysts (did the secret decoder rings come with 24 sided dice and special masks?), how about indulging us with some specifics. Identify the culprits, the specific violations of the law that they are responsible for, and which member of the administration or Congress is responsible for impeding the indictment. And - if I'm following you here - the Republican Congress have been able to effectively throttle any and all investigations into their misdeeds, yet detailed accounts have somehow appeared in best-sellers, and the disclosure of the said details has resulted in prosecutions in Federal courts, of all places - yet...somehow the absence of a Democratic majority in Congress is keeping the information under wraps and the prosecutions on ice?

You mean like classified documents that outline the details of things like the NSA surveilance program, the monitoring of the SWIFT network transactions that the media didn't reveal because the Democrats were not in control of Congress and couldn't convene a subcommittee to formally request the documents? If Fitzgerald requested a document and the people under indictment say no, then all he can do is say "Okay - thanks for your time."? This is like arguing with people from Bizzaro world, where no one in DC leaks documents to the press, the press abhors getting a scoop, and politicians won't capitalize on the oppositions misconduct in office because doing so would hurt them at the polls. Sage voices from the masses that the Democrats must have been heeding en route to their recent chain of electoral triumphs.

Perhaps the democrats believe it will be easier to expose scandals when the current government propaganda machine has been neutered and a balance in power in the government has been restored. At the moment, anything critical of government policy is immediately and aggressively dismissed as "liberal hysteria", "sour grapes", and "anti-American rhetoric". It would also be political suicide to pursue scandals just before elections, wouldn't it? If the dems did that, you don't suppose the Republican reaction would be to accuse them of playing politics in an election year? At the moment, the democrats best move will be to simply be quiet and allow the Republicans to hang themselves with their own threadbare accusations of anti-Americanism, et.al, coupled with the shortcomings of their policies. Yes - Rinpoche - your analytical powers are as mighty as your fists. It's clear that the overwhelming power of the government to silence dissent and suppress the flow of information is evinced by the fact that top secret programs like the NSA surveilance program, and the CIA secret prisons never made it before the public, and staggering embarassments with major strategic consequences like the Abu Ghraib scandal and the massacre at Haditha were never mentioned in the press, and the details of the surveilance techniques used to monitor suspicious financial transactions never saw the light of day in the New York times. If the adminsistration ever lost their ability to throttle the media and impose its message on the public through them, Duke Cunningham and Tom Delay might have found their careers in Jeoparday, and the Plame/Wilson thing might have even resulted in the appointment of a special prosecutor. Thankfully the ever circumspect head of the DNC has been able to keep his minions in line, because they know full well how revaling substantive evidence of corruption and wrongdoing in office can work on behalf of the incumbents who have engaged in such activities. They remember well the electoral triumph that the Republicans enjoyed after Nixon's downfall. "Whoa - keep that under wraps Billy. Remember how much Watergate hurt the Democrats!" FWIW I think that this business about the administration suppressing dissent, etc, has got to be the most laughable bunch of hokum I've ever heard in my life. If you are a prominent left-of-center politician or intellectual, the only thing that is likely to damage your standing or prospects is a LACK of vitreol directed at the administration. All of this business about suppression of dissent is just petulant whining on the part of people who have failed in their efforts to develop cogent arguments and substantive policy alternatives that resonate with enough of the electorate to gain widespread popular support and win consistently at the polls.

All of which explains the Democrat's otherwordly reticence vis-a-vis the staggering scandals that their entrepid volunteer intel analysts have unearthed via collective electronic seance. "Psssst. SssssssssHHHHHH!!! Keep that shit quiet until AFTER the elections...." Maybe you can keep busy drafting a list of TV execs that you'd like to see fined and imprisoned for airing docu-dramas that you disagree with until the said hearings get underway.

I liked stone gardens better for a lot of reasons. Mellower crowd, cooler vibe, better bouldering, and....the lead routes were never that crowded, and often empty, even during the busiest after-work megaclusters. Start off with the leading, wait 'til the bouldering mobile-cluster departs, then do a few problems. Great fun. UW rock in the summer, SG in the winter. Great combo.

Of course it does JayB! The political process is entirely transparent! I see. Now that the genius of the "keep the explosive scandal that will devastate your opponents quiet until after the election" strategy is apparent to me, it's equally clear who the political mastermind behind the Democratic party's stunning electoral triumphs since 1999 has been. One of our very own.

This makes a ton of sense. Clearly if the Democrats had strong, factual evidence to implicate republican lawmakers in illegal or scandalous activity, they'd take pains to suppress any hint of either prior to the mid-term elections, just to make the race to secure the congress that much tougher, and so that they could delight in breaking the news in the midst of the-always-heavily-watched committee meetings, rather than doing things the easy way and airing the information via press conferences or leaks to the press. "We've got information that will bring down the administration and restore our control of Congress, but by God, we're going to make both the people and the press work HARD to pry it out of us. If they're not paying attention to the minutes of sub-committee meetings, that may or may not occur depending upon whether or not we actually win the election without the assistance of this massive scandal, then they just don't deserve to know!"

Bring 'em on! The words of a sober genius, or a drunken fucktard? America has the democracy it's earned. Let it rot. Back to mountains: Nothing goes with splenetic nihilism better than...mountains.

You can't be serious. Are you for real, or is this some kind of self-parody inspired by "Animal Farm"? "Free speech is sacred and inviolable *unless* it contains something that I object to, in which case I want the government to shut them down and charge them with crimes." ABC is acting within its rights here, however much you may disagree with the manner in which it is choosing to do so. If there are factual inaccuracies, I don't blame the members of the Clinton administration and others for being upset with the manner in which they are portrayed, and I am glad that there's a legion of private citizens, columnists, etc who will work hard to expose them. Write ABC and tell them why you think that they should not air the program, write to corporations that do business with the network, boycott the network, burn the head of the network in effigy, turn your house into a giant anti-NBC billboard, stroll up and down I-5 wearing an anti-NBC sandwhich board - but the moment you call for the government to silence and/or prosecute people who are expressing sentiments that you object to, you've become the very thing that you've been warning others about. I've never been too crazy about the docu-drama genre for many of the same reasons, but I'm happy to let public outrage and lost revenues work their magic in the event that a network chooses to air something along the lines of "Hero and Patriot: The Timothy McVeigh Story."

Maybe Canada should quit confusing complete and utter irrelevance with any particular merit and STFU. No one hates Canada because Canada is a staggering geopolitical nullity that could be erased from both the world and history without its absence having a significant impact on either.

If popular support were the sole determinant of which leaders one should support, then Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot would have been worthy of everyone's unqualified backing. Subcommandante Chavez is busy squandering the limited-duration oil-windfall, and production is declining on a daily basis. Let's see how popular the guy is when the Venezualan's are get a taste of poverty along with the mounting repression.

The odds that I'll ever contract AIDS, or starve to death, or die from malaria, etc - are virtually nil, but I am still concerned about the harm that these things inflict on the rest of humanity. I'm less concerned about the prospect of being blown to pieces or beheaded than of hundreds of millions of people being forced to live under a form of regressive totalitarianism that belongs in the Middle Ages.

Seems strange to me that more Mexicans aren't flocking to Canada.

Maybe they're thinking of all of the habitat reverting back to its original state south of the border as small, isolated villages lose population to El Norte. It seems kind of trivial next to the plight of the people who traverse it, but the desert on the border is slowly being converted to a diffuse landfill. To return to a familiar topic of conversation, the guy who wrote the article had a good chuckle when asked about the threat of Islamic terrorists using the Mexican border crossing to infiltrate the US. He said something to the effect that any Islamic terrorist who had the temerity to set foot in a northern border town would be spit-roasted in hours of setting foot there, and they know it. He didn't go into detail, but it sounded as though he thought the combination of lawlessness, ruthlessness, and old-school catholicism would not make for very friendly territory. Plus an attack routed through the Mexican border would probably be bad for the people-smuggling business. I have not idea if he's wrong or right, but he's lived on the ground there for decades so it was interesting to hear his thoughts on this topic.

If you pick up a copy of the Freeskier gear-guide they had a pretty good summary of all of the skis out there. Having said that, if you are looking for one ski that does everything pretty well, you should look into the Rossignol Scratch BC. Sounds like a pretty good match for what you're looking for.

9/11 has been sort of a global ink-blot test, and what people project onto the event says quite a lot about them. After reading through that passage, I had a difficult time choosing the most ironic statement, but after a moment's reflection, the clear winner was the concern about the US consuming Canada's resources. The irony here is that the greatest calamity that could possibly befall Canada vis-a-vis the US would come about if we suddenly *stopped* consuming their resources. The near decade of intense lobbying that Canada engaged in in order to insure that the US did not errect or enforce obstacles to the sale or shipment of a single Canadian resource to American consumers is quite telling in this respect, and I don't recall anyone in Alberta dancing in the streets when the US government imposed a ban on Beef imports. If the entire Canadian economy can be said to have a central organizing principle, it's the sale of whatever that Canada or its citizens can produce to the US. Millions of Canadian souls have toiled for well over a century to perfect the various mechanisms necessary to turn their country into a near perfect machine for exporting products to the US. Why send an army to enforce a duty that generations of your countrymen and your government have already volunteered for, and are executing to perfection? Sleep tight, JMcKay - you are already living in your nightmare-world .

Heard the author being interviewed on NPR today, and followed up by reading his article at lunch. There's a lot of historo-politico-economic analysis in the article that I'd take issue with, but it's worth reading for the in-the-trenches perspective, and the sober assesment of some of the facts on the ground. "They are no longer migratory workers. And it is not seasonal labor. The people walking north all around me are not going home again. This is an exodus from a failed economy and a barbarous government and their journey is biblical." Link to Article

Might as well be clear. What is it, exactly, that the existence of this film makes "you wonder about the Americain [sic] people?" Are you posting these links because you believe the conclusions they reach in the film, or because you can't believe that anyone would believe such things. My guess is the former, but feel free to chime in.

The fundamental claim, "Plame was outed by the administration in an act of political retribution" was not correct. With respect to Wilson's role, I'm sure that the record is consistent with your understanding of the events, Matt. Bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report Link Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly. Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House. Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. Yesterday's report said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched "yellowcake" uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question. Much of the rest of the intelligence suggesting a buildup of weapons of mass destruction was unfounded, the report said. The report turns a harsh spotlight on what Wilson has said about his role in gathering prewar intelligence, most pointedly by asserting that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, recommended him. Plame's role could be significant in an ongoing investigation into whether a crime was committed when her name and employment were disclosed to reporters last summer. Administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak then that Wilson, a partisan critic of Bush's foreign policy, was sent to Niger at the suggestion of Plame, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at CIA. The disclosure of Plame's identity, which was classified, led to an investigation into who leaked her name. The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional. The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said. Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me." The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. The committee found Wilson had made an earlier trip to Niger in 1999 for the CIA, also at his wife's suggestion. The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." "Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger. Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said. Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq." According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998. Still, it was the CIA that bore the brunt of the criticism of the Niger intelligence. The panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin. The agency did not examine forged documents that have been widely cited as a reason to dismiss the purported effort by Iraq until months after it obtained them. The panel said it still has "not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa."

Which part is incorrect? Is the editorial at odds with the factual basis of Corn et. al's summary?

Washington Post Editorial "End of an Affair It turns out that the person who exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame was not out to punish her husband. Friday, September 1, 2006; Page A20 WE'RE RELUCTANT to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame because of our oft-stated belief that far too much attention and debate in Washington has been devoted to her story and that of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, over the past three years. But all those who have opined on this affair ought to take note of the not-so-surprising disclosure that the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame's cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage. Mr. Armitage was one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly. He was a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war and whom Mr. Wilson accused of twisting intelligence about Iraq and then plotting to destroy him. Unaware that Ms. Plame's identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak "in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip," according to a story this week by the Post's R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage. It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage's identity been known three years ago. That's not to say that Mr. Libby and other White House officials are blameless. As prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has reported, when Mr. Wilson charged that intelligence about Iraq had been twisted to make a case for war, Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney reacted by inquiring about Ms. Plame's role in recommending Mr. Wilson for a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, where he investigated reports that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium. Mr. Libby then allegedly disclosed Ms. Plame's identity to journalists and lied to a grand jury when he said he had learned of her identity from one of those reporters. Mr. Libby and his boss, Mr. Cheney, were trying to discredit Mr. Wilson; if Mr. Fitzgerald's account is correct, they were careless about handling information that was classified. 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 turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously."

Pretty impressive. That's like a 2%-and-dropping real interest rate.

The availability of those loans also played a significant role in elevating prices. Take a look at I/O's, option arms, etc as a percentage of total loan origination and compare that to home-price increases in a given market and you have a pretty strong correlation, especially in coastal markets. If mortgage lending were governed by the same rules and regulations that investment companies have to follow when dealing with retail customers, this situation never would have developed. When you are dealing with a stock broker, your knowledge of financial markets, income, liquid assets, etc all determine how much risk they'll permit you to take - and they are subject to disciplinary action if they permit people to assume more risk than they are qualified to handle.

Never saw this coming. "Nightmare Mortgages They promise the American Dream: A home of your own -- with ultra-low rates and payments anyone can afford. Now, the trap has sprung For cash-strapped homeowners, it was a pitch they couldn't refuse: Refinance your mortgage at a bargain rate and cut your payments in half. New home buyers, stretching to afford something in a super-heated market, didn't even need to produce documentation, much less a downpayment. Those who took the bait are in for a nasty surprise. While many Americans have started to worry about falling home prices, borrowers who jumped into so-called option ARM loans have another, more urgent problem: payments that are about to skyrocket." Businessweek