j_b

they were afraid of dean which is why the "librul media" canned him at the first opportunity he gave them. dems bought the propaganda that he was unelectable and went for the guy with proper demeanor who appeared electable. but dean would have stayed on message with the state of the economy and tax cuts for the upper 1% and he would have gone all out on the iraq issue. he would have energized the dem base like nobody else and way earlier than kerry who basically pandered to the center right until september.

imo kerry lost because he didn't hammer on a few issues that could be reduced to sound bites: 1) the economy whereas people are definitely worse off than they were 4 years ago and there is little prospect of things improving for a while and 2) the war in iraq because he was compromised by his vote on the matter and 3) over the last 30years conservatives have poured billions of dollars in think tanks, media, etc ... to frame the debate in their own terms. short of countering the propaganda we are subject to every day in the media, progressives won't go anywhere. kerry had a reasonable discourse but it wasn't focused enough to prevent the fear-mongering about terror and gays from taking hold. the dems didn't advocate gay marriage, have advocated affirmative action since the 60's and for all intent and purpose are less progressive on "moral" issues than the upcoming generations.

there is no evidence to suggest there has been such a shift, on the contrary since reagan democrats have tried to appeal to the center.

100 times that many were killed before we got there. the new lancet study (via john hopkins) says that so far ~100,000 iraqi civilians have died of a violent death in the 1.5 year since intervention. the sanctions of the previous 10 years caused ~500,000 civilian death. saddam ruled for 24years and is said to have killed ~500,000 civilians. get your math right.

these would be my picks as well except i'd replace dreamer with something at index, like godzilla.

ouch!

thanks, i needed this today! i can't help you with the support group, but i think that an effective strategy is to work on developing smug superiority for performing better with your old gear than others do with the latest stuff. can you think of greater satisfaction than effortlessly linking perfect turns on your no-side-curve-20year-old planks while the tech weenies struggle to recover hats and goggles under mounds of cascade glop? what about posturing in your never-resoled, ratty ebs after being alone in sticking the new difficult boulder problem that everyone talks about? or cheerfully adding a fresh junk of ductape to those tattered nylon rain paints while your companions commiserate about the new holes in their latest breathable turned-muddy rain gear? i could go on forever, just think of the possibilities ....

rob - good to hear you are coming around on the idea of climate change. the more of us understand that we have to start acting now, the better we will be able to lower emissions before damage of potentially catastrophic proportions occur (although some think there is already evidence that some of the extreme climatic events of the past few years are due to climatic warming). as far as i know, we emit the largest amount of greenhouse gases (ghgs) both as a fraction of the whole and per capita. it certainly does not change that everyone on this earth has to start changing their habits; however industrialized nations started spewing significant amount of ghgs a long time before others did and thus bear a greater responsibility than folks trying to move on from a mostly pastoral society to modernism. i am personally not opposed to placing some environmental constraints on developping nations but preventing free trade would hurt them as much as it would hurt us and probably condemn them to develop in the most environmentally unfriendly fashion possible. furthermore, a lot more work remains to be done in assessing the true cost of reducing emissions. i don't believe it is clear that once we develop genuine alternative to fossil fuels and account for, among others, the burden on public health, the cost of reducing emissions would so damning.

for those interested, further discussions of McK's work: http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2004/10#mckitrick8 http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/science/muller.html also of note, mann et al's "hockey stick" is only one of 3 independent reconstructions of past temperatures which show the same thing.

yes, it does. this is why McK & M's work will be heavily scrutinized, which is more than what the author (muller) of this article did. Mann and coauthors disagree that their method is off, so do a number of others who have looked at it. http://davidappell.com/archives/00000427.htm

nooo!!! don't tell me someone voted for jello biafra to create their own reality from the whitehouse!!! btw there are quite a few other pearls in that article i linked. i'll leave to you to appreciate them on your own.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?pagewanted=6

"There should have been an honorable discharge certificate issued to Kerry in 1975,if not earlier, three years after his transfer to the Standby Reserve-Inactive" assuming for a minute there is anything worthwhile about that story, it should not be ignored that a) kerry is a war hero by most accounts and it is difficult to imagine how a war hero wouldn't get an honorable discharge and b) kerry was a favorite target of the nixon administration for having been a leader of antiwar vets. nixon seems to have made it a personal issue: "the Nixon White House kept after John Kerry. It’s said that when Kerry ran for Congress in 1972, Nixon stayed up late on election night until he knew for sure that Kerry had been defeated." http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4534274/ One could thus imagine several scenarios according to which a war hero did not receive his discharge papers until later when a more friendly administration to kerry was in the whitehouse. it's of course all speculations, including the original article.

yes, the usual pork barrel to cater to one's "base" always applies, otherwise from the environment to social security to labor laws his overarching policy is to demolish 100 years of regulations.

well, i was apparently wrong. the guy does seem to be alive, which is the real news in this.

ouch! pretty low blow but i am not surprised. it would suffice to notice your lack of argumentation to dismiss your comment but i'll reiterate to drive the point home. 1) you claim that you support bush only for his stance on wot. i replied i don't believe it one bit because you have supported most of his disastrous socio-economic policies and b) because bush is probably the worst choice one can think of for the security of the u.s. (posturing, unilateralism and arrogance that lead to the isolation of the u.s. in world politics). You are basically hanging your hat onto the only category bush is wrongly perceived to have an advantage over kerry (i.e. as a good neo-con you are playing on people's fear). boy that surely raises the level of the debate i never said you would personally vote for a 3rd party, i said that you were trying to encourage 3rd party voting (consciously or not) on this bulletin board by attempting to lump kerry and bush in the intellectual department. that's more like it. you do perceive the present admin as the ideal tool to push for unabated neo-liberalism (unregulated free markets for those not familiar) onto everybody else.

do you expect anyone to believe this? come on, apart from a few social issues, you have supported bush in everything he has done. as if picking the sole issue of wot to hang your hat onto should legitimize the "strong leader" bs, whereas, in fact, if there is someone not fit to handle questions of national security it is certainly the bungler. as if the level of debate was any better when your hero, reagan, displayed his acting "talent" in the whitehouse. are you trying to conveniently bundle kerry with bush because you know you have no chance of convincing any thinking person of bush's intellectual fitness for the job? your not-so-subbtle attempts at encouraging 3rd party voting are duly noted.

fairweather now thinks he is "anyone" (as if "anyone" could be an extremist loony). i have never said or inferred any of this about "anyone who doesn't think like me". in turn, i have said that many people were misinformed and easily manipulated. lo-and-behold: "Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program." "Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission." “To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq.” "This tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information extends to other realms as well". http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Pres_Election_04/Press10_21_04.pdf orwellian speak coming from one of the most obtuse poster this board has seen. the real arrogance is to suggest that bush's dismal record of failure/deceit warrants reelection.

as i said, i may be very wrong; however, has he been positively identified by independent analysts?

actually, as i have mentioned before, my hunch is that bl is dead but, it is more advantageous for both sides to pretend otherwise. i could be wrong though.

i should also add that the evolution of the reporting of this story is also extremely useful in seeing the extent to which part of the media will go to any length of deception to make the bad news go away. juan coles comments on the spin of the day: "But if DiRita thought that this officer would clear the whole thing up, he was clearly disappointed. The major said explicitly that he had not seen any seals of the International Atomic Energy Commission, which means that he cannot testify that his unit destroyed the HMX. Then he was asked if insurgents could have carried off 150 tons of that stuff in a short period of time as a practical matter. He replied that it seems like a lot, but in fact it could be done really quickly. Then he let it slip that his unit was at al-Qaqaa on April 13, before the KSTP video was shot of US soldiers examining HMX there. So Pearson's unit could not have removed all the HMX at that time. Since he didn't see IAEA seals, it seems likely that his unit didn't remove any HMX." http://www.juancole.com/2004_10_01_juancole_archive.html#109906976577919924

i strongly disagree. it may be reductionist to focus on missing high-grade explosives but this story is truly indicative of what has gone on. invading a country under pretense of imminent danger when in fact increasing danger through the dispersion of weapons that were closely garded by an anti-fundamentalist regime and united nation inspectors, points to some of the lies that this venture has been built upon. as for the overall "what does it take to win an election today?" i am afraid there is little choice in the matter considering the immmense role of the media in determining who'll be president and the unfortunate tendency of many to focus solely on soundbytes. a little reductionism seems a small price to pay considering the alternatives.

and keep doing them?

was it part of the settlement?

for a few million bucks o'reilly can talk dirty to me too!