JosephH

Road to The Nose - Checklist of learning to aid

That constitution-steamrolling hurricane which fostered this shitstorm is called the "Bush Administration" - the 'stimulus' response and all that follows can be laid at there feet for squandering three trillion we'd otherwise have to deal with this mess. There is no aspect of their wars which couldn't have been handled with a little patience and Predators.

It would have helped if we hadn't followed up an inadequate invasion with wave after wave of corporate carpetbaggers who never had the slightest intent of rebuilding Iraq.

I was just gonna ask if this means you'll be all growed up the next time I see you...

We've been beating ours into things pretty regularly over the past decade. And the French not only have a navy, they have neutron bombs as well... EDIT: Apparently they say they've destroyed all those weapons.

I'm all for it so long as they're restructured to fit on one side of single sheet of 8.5 x 11 copier paper.

So, you're more concerned with, and obsessing over, people with families making (god forbid) $50k as opposed to MBA's making $1-300m even when they fail. 2007 bonuses alone on Wall Street amounted to $33b - that's 660,000 $50k families worth. Or, the $15k necessary to bring 2,200,000 families up from $35k to $50k. Personally, I don't think we're getting our money's worth as a society.

Turns out that "outspending" the Soviet Union into defeat on the back of an artificial housing boom has downstream costs - particularly when you try region-building in the ME on the back of the very same plan and debt load...

Human Losses of World War Two by Continent Continent / Civilian deaths --------------------------- Asia / 24,203,300 Europe / 23,302,800 --------------------------- Brown people, by slightly under a million noses...

plantar fasciaitis does sound like a possibility along with a sprain or a less-than-obvious break. Nothing particularly dramatic at all has happened in the last few days? No black-and-blue areas? I'm guessing you need to have it looked at if you've tried stretching and walking it off. If that didn't work then probably something wrong and as much of a bummer as it is to hear, you should probably stay off of it and not hike the canyons or climb until you do know what's wrong.

Hmmm, a couple of trillion spent badly in the U.S. vs. a couple of trillion spent badly in a desert far away - I'll take my chances. The only way to get credit flowing immediately would be to absorb all the banks bad debts, nationalize them, and start extending credit. On the other hand, a significant contraction in consumer debt and expansion of savings is what's required in the long term. Like Afganistan and Iraq, the choices facing us and Obama aren't good vs. bad - they're bad vs. really bad. It's worth keeping front and center that there is absolutely no way out of our current financial situation without a terrible amount of pain all the way around for a significant period of time. Realistically, the 'stimulus' is simply an attempt to 'do something - anything' to keep the situation from free-falling into a further melt down further rather than 'getting us out of it'.

I would say for the moment the Kyrgs are prolonging all effects for cash on the barrelhead before handing anyone any sticks which also gives them time to hear counter-offers.

Kyrgyzstan has put off voting on evicting the U.S. from Manas until Russia has paid what they've promised...

If you fall off your roof is it a ripper...? Worst fall in the past 20 years for me was down the front stairs - desperate.

Wow, redefining 'neocon' - is that the latest way the Right and Republicans are distancing themselves from the Bush administration policies and neocon debacle you all so ardently embraced? Hmmm, interesting. And "JEW" - I find it clever how the Right treats 'jew' as sort of a political jackknife - commonly rolled out to both support and discredit ideas you disagree with while at the same time whining about 'them' and 'their influence' under your breath. Dude, read the signatories to all the principle neocon letters - 'jews' are represented, they in no way 'are' the neocons. Wolfowitz is always mentioned because he, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, was a principal architect of the Iraq War and of the regional strategy within the Bush administration. Pretty pathetic argument on your part as they go...

Kleptomania does not typically yield to treatment very often...

More Obama 'pragmatism' disappointing the folks who elected him. This administration is shaping up to be to the Clinton Whitehouse what W's administration was to Reagan's - full of folks looking to 'get it right the second time' - I have my doubts... Under Obama, same stance on rendition suit

From my perspective that's quite an eclectic leap of an assessment and one which way, way prematurely attempts to broadly fix causation and specific meaning to current events. Rather than 'testing' Obama, I see every nation on the planet - 'friend' and 'foe' alike - posturing and playing the strongest possible cards they can at the Obama table. I'd do nothing different if I were running some country. Oil prices have collapsed underneath Russia and Iran with Iran far more affected than Russia, but still putting Russia in a tough place domestically. And even a passing familiarity with Russian history should be enough to understand their posturing and appearing "tough" is as much for internal consumption as it is for ours. What I see in Kyrgyzstan is the Russians attempting to keep momentum in following though with the opportunities presented in the wake of Bush's complete debacle in Georgia. That, and it's part of Putin's on-going struggle to reassert and restore Russian influence over many of it's prior satellites. And I'd further say the above assessment of the Manas air base events is completely ass-backwards - rather than Russia doing the forcing, it's likely Kyrgyzstan (which is crawling with U.S. oil/gas lobbyists) is realizing now is its time, if ever there was one, to play the Russians against the U.S. We've been paying them a $1b package and they just hustled the Russians for $2.33b package - not a bad improvement and it gave the Russians some leverage to boot. Also, the idea that the Bush administration could crudely lean on the Russians with a missile defense system in their backyard without some serious blowback is stupid. Obama hasn't even started with the Russians, but it would be pretty damn hard to f#ck it up more than Bush's crew has. Ditto with Pakistan and India - the Bush's crew couldn't have screwed the pooch worse with their incompetent and ham-handed approach to 'diplomacy' with both. Let's see, giving India, a non-signatory to the NPT, a big nuke deal (pissing off Pakistan); years of payola to Gen. Musharraf (pissing off India) leading directly to the rise of democrats with no motivation to assist the U.S. since we had been helping suppress them. And the U.S. doesn't have clean hands in the Mumbai attack either after years of turning its back on Pakistan's use of the money we give them for the transit of our material to Afganistan. Everyone has known the entire time part of our cash stream was being diverted to provide support to ex-Afgan jihadists as a backhand way for Musharraf to keep the Indian army pinned down in Kashmir. Let's not kid ourselves - bankrolling Lashkar-e-Taiba was part of the price we've paid for the war in Afganistan. The Bush administration showed zero interest in helping resolve the stalemate in Kashmir (or in conflict resolution in general) and allowed Pakistan to become an even greater nightmare than it's ever been. And Iran and badmiton, please, don't even get me started...

Regarding Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy per Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (October 2003 to July 2004): Every president in war time and in crisis—Lincoln, Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, just to name three—exercised extraordinarily broad powers. They pushed the law and stretched the law and bent the law, and many people think they broke the law. And we’ve largely forgiven them for doing so because we think that they acted prudently in crisis. So Lincoln—he did all sorts of things after Fort Sumter. He spent unappropriated moneys. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Now, there’s a way of looking at the Cheney-Addington position on executive power which is not unlike some of the most extreme assertions of Lincoln and Roosevelt. But there are important differences. One is that both Lincoln and Roosevelt coupled this sense of a powerful executive in times of crisis with a powerful sense of a need to legitimate and justify the power through education, through legislation, through getting Congress on board, through paying attention to what one might call the “soft” values of constitutionalism. That was an attitude that Addington and I suppose Cheney just did not have. The second difference, and what made their assertion of executive power extraordinary, is: it was almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake.

I'd take that gear sling...

I might agree with your attempts to homogenize responses across party lines if an overwhelming body of evidence and facts weren't publicly available in fine detail that the neocons / Bush administration worked backwards from a set of desired outcomes they viewed as pre-ordained if the U.S. were to restore it's pre-eminence. The neocon ( Cheney / Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz) agenda pre-existed well before 9/11. Their specific responses to 9/11 were all entirely aligned and consistent with that agenda. Again, the entire prisoner pipeline from points of origination, through intermediate prisons, and on to gitmo - along with the intel protocols, legal cover, and military commissions - were at every turn designed to be offshore, out-of-sight, and out-of-mind of the American public until final pronouncements of assigned guilt were made on short TV announcements. What would have been fundamentally different under any democratic Presidency is the entire rubric will not have been constructed, deployed, and cloaked behind Executive power, the enhancement of which was itself was a principle objective of the same team. The Constitution wouldn't have been trampled and subjugated to a political agenda. And none of this is supposition or guessing, but simply read from the trail of their own proud and detailed documentation at every undeniable step of the way.

I beg to differ with the idea this is a generic issue and the Bush administration's distinction was only about scope and scale; quite the contrary. While there are certainly 'generic' aspects to numerous [institutional] baseline 'anti-terror' protocols, context is everything. Context, and the tone or tenor it conveys, are what define the boundaries, scope, and scale of the infrastructure and implementation, regardless of the appropriateness of the methods. It's not really a fine line either - but rather the distinction between a deliberate professionalism and effective scope on one hand, and ground forces operating under 'terrorist' capture performance measures, a CIA run amok, 'interrogation' contractors, Abu Ghraib, gitmo, and the corrosion of the the Constitution on the other. And when you get the circularly resonating and self-reinforcing themes of 'evil', democracy, privatization, executive power, nation-building, 'reconstruction', and 'terror' all cranked up in the blender known as the Mideast along with a half trillion in cash you just knew it was going to be a train wreck of magnificent proportions. Where I see 'ideology' coming into play is precisely in that divide - do we define and employ such measures effectively, say in the same manner of a sniper rifle, or do we wield them more like cluster munitions from 40,000 feet with little control over the results or collateral damage. The former would dictate a degree of legal transparency, international cooperation, professionalism, and restraint - the latter delivers a horrorfest which always reveal itself in its excess, incompetence, and blame. Carried to extreme, your conjecture for me is a lot like saying the holocaust was (institutionally) inevitable whether Hitler came to power or not. I think the end-to-end pipeline, protocols, and infrastructure around in-country 'capture' and extrordinary rendition of 'terrorists' had little to do with effective intelligence, domestic security, or military objectives and everything to do with an absurd theatre designed to deliver a demonstrable product and justification for the expansion of Executive power and war. The gitmo military commission show trials were designed to be the media events at the end of that pipeline, and guilt, innocence, and [mil/intel] value had little to do with feeding grist to the mill. P.S. That John Yoo and others are free to write articles rather then inprisoned for treason is a mistake that will come back and bite us on the ass some time in the future.

If what's left of my memory serves me right you had to visit Devils Lake back around '75 or so and get ruthlessly whipped and sandbagged by the locals day after day to qualify. (Thinking about reproducing them though, will keep you posted...)

Also, with regard to torture - Rumsfeld and Cheney explicitly shopped for, designed, and built the capability and policy up from, North Korean torture techniques as persisted in our military in the form of SERE training. This was not in any way some innate, lingering capability we used all the time - this was a deliberate and far-ranging policy, methods, and infrastructure play - extrodinary rendition, jet leases, 'interrogation' subcontractors (including Syria and Egypt), gitmo, Abu Ghraib, CIA and DoD policy and protocols, and reasoned treaty abrogations. All part of the plan. The only part they skipped in their planning (what's new) was producing a 'legal' basis for their actions, glibly decrying none was necessary as it all fell under Executive perogative and priviledge. You can tie this behavior directly back to the Nixonian belief that "if the President does it, it isn't illegal" - a belief held far more widely than just by Nixon himself. Post 9/11, Gore, like Obama is now, would have built a vetted legal and Constitutional basis for the use of any extrordinary methods which in turn would need to be authorized on a case-by-case basis by him personally. The entire fabric of any such protocols should have been, and will be, reviewed and vetted by the Congress and SCOTUS and not simply cloaked behind a veil of Executive priviledge.

STP, if you go read any number of the policy letters like this or this at the neocon's website 'Project for the New American Century' (note that's a 'the' and not an 'a' in the title) and check the various signatories, you'll see that is explicitly not the case. 9/11 just gave them the pretext and cover they needed to initiate an attack Iraq they already had in mind. And prior to 9/11 the Bush administration was having numerous internal debates on how the could just attack Iraq. Also, the DoD was actively planning for an invasion of Iraq well before 9/11.