Slashdot Mirror
Karl Rove Resigning Aug 31
tetrahedrassface writes "According to CNN current Bush Administration political advisor Karl Rove will be resigning his post as senior political advisor at the end of August to spend more time with his family. Few if any prior senior political advisors to presidents have been the lightning rods for controversy that Mr. Rove has. Accused of running smear campaigns and celebrated for pioneering district level up campaigns that rely heavily on databases and fake grassroots origins, Mr Rove is one of the chief architects of the Republican Revolution."
He's far from the first to leave the administration.
And how's this ship burning? It doesn't appear anyone is going to be indicted for any more crimes. Impeachment proceedings haven't begun. And it's their second term so no worries over re-election. Bush doesn't care about his lack of popularity as he's already accomplished most of his goals.
Developers: We can use your help.
To start - I'm a libertarian, I'm very opposed to the current administrations handiling of a number of items, not the least of which is the impinging of my right to privacy, the handling of the "War on Terror", and getting us into a war in Iraq that I still fail to see how it benefits the US citizen. I have taken a bit of criticism from my friends by asking that question, but my response is and has been "When you spend US solders lives and Billions of US dollars, it seems to me that there should be an answer to the 'What did we purchase?' question."
That said, Karl Rove's handling of the 2000 presidential election was excellent, but the 2004 presidential election was masterful. Granted, the democrats helped some (and appear to be helping again now, for that matter), but there is no way Bush would have been re-elected without his help. In any normal situation the incompetency of any of those three items would have cost Bush the 2004 elections. I'm kind of sorry to see him go, regardless of my opinion of the administrations polices, Karl Rove is a master of politics and for good or for badad, I think he should have stuck around to see it though, there is only another 18 months in the administration, after all, and I'm sure he's on the short list of blanket pardons that Bush is going to write as he exits his term in office.
Besides that, who is left for the media to target? Dick? He is already a target, and doesn't care. He has so much "clout" in Washington that he can, and does, ignore everyone and do his own thing.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
I am certain nobody will complain about whoever the next president is.
If there's one thing I can guarantee, it's that this is plain wrong.
It doesn't matter who gets elected, the complaints never stop.
Or did your sarcasm just go completely over my head?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
The movies did not cover "The Scouring of The Shire," so, no, you don't get it....
e
Maybe this will help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouring_of_the_Shir
WARNING!!! SPOILER!!!
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
The thing that stunned me about the whole "swiftboating" of John Kerry was that allegations were made, did their damage, and there was never any apparent followup. Well, the key word in that sentence was "apparent." Google was my friend on this matter, though it was some 6 months ago, so my memories may not be precise, at least I can't remember which news agency. Reporters went to to Viet Nam, to the vicinity of the battle cited for Kerry's Silver Star, to interview the locals. The locals did not remember Kerry, because "all of those American GIs look alike." But they remembered their people who participated in the battle, their side of the story. All relevant facts which could be verified with the locals resident at the time of the interview were consistent with the "official" version, under which Kerry was given the Silver Star. For instance, the fighters on the Viet Namese side were able soldiers, not children or infirmed seniors.
The swiftboating was a stunning success, considering that it smeared mud all over a candidate, and there was never followthrough to assess its validity.
Our press is really doing its job.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm a slashdot subscriber. See that little * by my name? That means I get to see the article early.
Those are my thoughts, typed by me, after the story got posted to the home page for subscribers, but before it got published to the public (which is usually about 10-15 minutes).
Oh, and by all means, "really, check my homepage". I'm, like, totally hiding my identity! I don't even include my real name, web page, and contact information right in my slashdot profile and at the top of every post.
Also, you seem to have totally misunderstood the point of what you quoted. Utterly. Which isn't surprising, given that you think that anyone who has any kind of affiliation with any part of government must be a propaganda mouthpiece. Brilliant. The point, in case you're too ignorant to grasp it, is the part you forgot to quote, which is falling "to the common fallacy of 'recentism', believing that a recent event must necessarily be the worst such case of an event in the history of mankind". The part you quoted was nothing more than a simple observation of the truth, namely, that "the internet can simply deluge us with an increasingly unprecedented level of information about any person or group which may pique our interest, allowing a wide range of ever more specific issues and minutia to be amplified to levels never witnessed in the past."
Does is scare you when someone states the obvious, and points out a giant flaw that is related to it? Apparently so!
But, as someone else stated once, Slashdot is the place where I come for tech related news, if I wanted politics news I would go to BBC/politics, if I wanted entertainment news I would go to eonline or yahoo enterntainment...
/., adjusting your personal preferences is a much quicker way to solve that problem than wading into the discussion for the sole purpose of expressing your disinterest.
If you truly can't handle political stories on
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
As a retired Captain (USAF), I took great offense at Al Gore's election-2000 team explicitly trying to get them to throw out the absentee votes of GIs stationed overseas. What was the usual reason? No postal cancellation. Much mail sent by those on ships doesn't get cancelled. There was one especially grevious case--a guy serving on one of the ships helping rescue the USS Cole after it was boat-bombed managed to track it down. His vote had been thrown out.
During the news this morning, there was Hillary talking about the need to count every vote and make every vote count.
You hate Rove & Republicans? Fine. But please recognize that yours is not a side made up of angels, pure and bright. Thou hast thy blemishes, too.
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
This is a man who had a well-known dream of creating a permanent Republican electoral majority and who really perfected the use of wedge issues to obtain and hold power.
I'm sure there are plenty of people on the Democratic side that dream of cementing a permanent Democratic electoral majority too. Neither objective is evil, unless of course, you consider the Democratic or Republican party as innately evil. And if you do, honestly, you have no business discussing politics.
The contention that we should be respectful towards him is absurd. He spent decades working as hard as he could to ensure that everyone's interests were not represented equally or fairly
My, aren't we naive. No one pursues "everyone's" interest, they pursue their own interests. In the case of political operatives, this usually (but not always) means following their base's interest. It's manifestly impossible for any one person to represent everyone else's interest. The fact that you would bring this up in a character assessment of Rove suggests that you aren't thoughtful enough to assess people. Why don't you be honest and say "I don't like Rove because he didn't represent me and he was successful"? That's why I don't like Rove.
One of the problems with political discourse is the inherent dishonesty like the parent's. Do we really think the parent wants folks like gun owners or trailer park residents fairly represented? No? Then stop acting like fairness is at issue here, because it isn't.
and helping to destroy the middle ground, to make the "us versus them" vision of politics more deeply entrenched.
Give me a break. Left-wing Democrats have been attacking the "middle ground" since the New Deal. Electoral ads against Bush in 2000 suggested he wanted to roll back the clock to slavery. And that's not hyperbole. Those were the ads. I don't like Rove (mainly because he's been disasterous for conservatives), but Rove was hardly some grand architect of "us versus them". If anything, he's a "big tent" Republican and tried to make the party more inclusive to traditionally Democratic voters like Catholics and Latinos. If anything, liberals, leftists, and Democrats should love Rove since, in the end, he's been the grand architect of the fracturing of the Republican party and the conservative base.
Everytime I hear her speak it sounds so condescending. And that speech she gave about 2 years ago about "We're going to have to take some things away from you for the common good" smacked of communism.
He might be humorously surprised at the assertion that Gingrich "masterminded" a political tactic initially conceived by über-pollster Frank Luntz and the Heritage Foundation.
Or, he might be laughing at the use of the term "mastermind" to describe Newt Gingrich, whose political career displayed a great deal of confusing his own hypocritical moralizing and three-bong-hit ideas about the role of the market with public sentiment.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Hillary always knew what was going on... she's a very, very shrewd politician and so is her husband. On that vein, she really is a totalitarian marxist, but she knows that it won't play politically in the US so she pretends to be a moderate. She wrote her college thesis about her idol, Saul Alinsky, who was a leftist radical and "the father of grassroots organizing." Her biggest mistake gave her her only major political set back while also revealing her stripes. The 1993-4 Hillary Care plan where the government would control things down to the level of telling you what doctor you were allowed to go to while forcing a state take over of 1/7th of the US economy and introducing whole new levels of taxation on people.
In terms of popularity, she held on to her position as Senator of New York Her choice to run from NY is another example of her political savvy. First of all, lets look at the party enrollment. 5,320,943 Democrats, 3,015,385 Republicans, 2,331,561 unaffiliated. Many of those Republicans are fairly liberal and I'm not sure why they even associate with the party. A Republican candidate needs to garner every Republican vote (bridging the divide and getting the conservatives and liberals to vote for them) as well as all of those unaffiliated votes just to put them in the default position of the Democrat. They need to get some Democratic votes to actually win. Also factor in that the media never asked Hillary the tough questions, they portrayed Lazio as a victimizer for trying to get her to sign a campaign financing pledge, they failed to mention that her infamous "listening tour" was all pre-scripted questions asked by people on an invitation only basis, etc. Basically, Hillary couldn't lose and she deliberately chose NY because there are only a handful of states in the country with that kind of demographic with an open seat... and she needed experience of her own if she was going to further her political ambition.
On a side note, 3,744,244 of those Democratic voters live in NYC, Long Island, Rockland or Westchester Counties. Despite taking up a small fraction of the area of the state (I'd guesstimate single digit percentage), they control the entire state and have no clue that there is a huge body of land north and west of them. Back in the 90s, they held up state budgets to force the state to renew WWII era rent control policies for NYC and they're constantly forcing mandates statewide that are good for NYC but are crippling the rest of our state. As manufacturing and industry have left Buffalo and Rochester, young people are fleeing to find economic opportunity leaving behind a rapidly aging population, an ever increasing number of government employees and every increasing taxes which just fuel the cycle more. But hey, NYC is thriving and the Island is nice, so who cares. I'm also still waiting for Hillary to fulfill her 2000 campaign promise to help bring 200,000 new jobs to upstate NY.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
The Democrats came up with literally hundreds of accusations, and the committee had to go through all of them. And every one was bogus, but ONE where he accidentally used a certain type of donation for the wrong purpose. If even half of Congress could stand up to that kind of scrutiny and come out that clean, it would be a much better place than it is now.
Wrong again. The House Ethics Committee, both Repubs and Demos with a Repub majority, filed eighty-four ethics charges. Perhaps that may figuratively equal "hundreds," but not literally.
Wrong again, as you would know if you actually read the article I linked which discussed the findings of the ethics committee, instead of disgorging some half-remembered Republican talking point (that I also remember from the relevant period of history.)Far be it from me to hold up the rest of Congress as an ideal of purity, but Gingrich is still a lying hypocrite. And especially so, given his stance as a "reformer."
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Of course deficits add to the debt. The question is, as long as the economy is growing, why do we need to pay the debt off at all?Yes, Social Security will be underfunded starting in about 40 years, but that has absolutely nothing to do with intragovernmental debt. Just like any treasury security that you or I buy, the securities held by the Social Security trust fund are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and have the same 0% chance of being defaulted on. No, Social Security's problems are more systemic with it promising more benefits to more retirees, but fewer workers are paying into the system to fund the benefits.
Oh, and these intragovernmental debts are not at all hidden. The Treasury Dept includes them in their published numbers.I've happily poked my head out from under my rock, and I see that inflation is still low, the market-determined yields on US Treasury securities are still below historical averages (meaning the market still considers them very low risk), and although the value of the dollar is off from its peak, the dollar is still stronger today than it was 10 years ago (trade weighted currency index of 103 this month compared to the Jan 1998 baseline of 100). I also see that our currency has appreciated significantly over the past 3 years compared to 2 out of our 4 top trading partners. Again, where is your fear of impending hyperinflation coming from?The Chinese currently own about 4% of our debt (source). They aren't even the biggest foreign holder of US debt. They could probably do some damage to our currency if they liquidated all of their dollar holdings, but there is no way that would hurt us more than it would hurt them. In the meantime, lets be happy that they are helping to subsidize our low tax rates and helping our economy.This is pretty OT, so suffice it to say that I really don't understand how toppling one of the most brutal dictators that this century has seen, followed by helping the Iraqi people chose a constitutional committee, write a democratic constitution, ratify that constitution, and elect a democratic parliament- all by free national elections- would fall under anybody's definition of "tyranny".
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Hmm... an argument to every point except the erosion of freedom in America... Well, I'll at least address your arguments as they stand.
"Well, first, I don't know where you got the idea that the interest on our debt is compounding. It is straight simple interest. Somebody buys a new security from the treasury, and the government pays him fixed interest payments every six months until maturity, at which time the principle is paid off. It never compounds.
Of course deficits add to the debt. The question is, as long as the economy is growing, why do we need to pay the debt off at all?
Yes, Social Security will be underfunded starting in about 40 years, but that has absolutely nothing to do with intragovernmental debt. Just like any treasury security that you or I buy, the securities held by the Social Security trust fund are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and have the same 0% chance of being defaulted on. No, Social Security's problems are more systemic with it promising more benefits to more retirees, but fewer workers are paying into the system to fund the benefits.
Oh, and these intragovernmental debts are not at all hidden. The Treasury Dept includes them in their published numbers."
What you say is true only if the government is not also borrowing money from you to pay me the interest and will in turn have to borrow still more from me in order to pay you interest... ad nauseam. Besides, if the government gives me my money back and it's worth half as much as it was when I put it in... I've lost money. I believe in charity, but let's call it what it is. As to current valuation of the dollar, are all media outlets including (probably your favorite) FOX wrong when they report the dollar to have dropped "dangerously close to historic support value"? And the figures are hidden because they are not discussed because both parties want to spend like it's going out of style.
"I've happily poked my head out from under my rock, and I see that inflation is still low, the market-determined yields on US Treasury securities are still below historical averages (meaning the market still considers them very low risk), and although the value of the dollar is off from its peak, the dollar is still stronger today than it was 10 years ago (trade weighted currency index of 103 this month compared to the Jan 1998 baseline of 100). I also see that our currency has appreciated significantly over the past 3 years compared to 2 out of our 4 top trading partners. Again, where is your fear of impending hyperinflation coming from?"
Remember the S&L collapse during the 80s? Our current debt/financing of mortgages combined with a similar arrangement in "Private Equity" is deeply reminiscent of the debt for investment trends in the 1920s that the Great Depression was blamed on and which led to the creation of the SEC. Tell me, why should I personally be unable to borrow more than a certain percentage of the money I invest when a publicly traded "private equity" company can do so? http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/06/markets/privateequ itybubble.fortune/index.htm
"The Chinese currently own about 4% of our debt (source). They aren't even the biggest foreign holder of US debt. They could probably do some damage to our currency if they liquidated all of their dollar holdings, but there is no way that would hurt us more than it would hurt them. In the meantime, lets be happy that they are helping to subsidize our low tax rates and helping our economy."
The Wall St. Journal and other media outlets seem to think your source underestimates the debt holdings. Their estimates run in the $1-1.3 Trillion range. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/m oney/2007/08/07/bcnchina107a.xml My guess would be that they only consider the govern
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Sorry. Hillary voted for the PATRIOT Act not once, but twice (the reauthorization a few years later). I will not vote for her.
Obama voted the same way.
That leaves only one candidate who has not supported or voted for the PATRIOT Act.