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McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama
Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.
Bringing Ireland to Baghdad: How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out
By Gary Brecher, AlterNet
Posted on July 2, 2008, Printed on July 16, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/90149/
It's very easy to see what's up in Iraq right now -- if you're willing to face it. The trouble is, most "experts" aren't willing. That has been the pattern right from the beginning. We didn't want to admit there even was an insurgency, and even now, nobody misses a chance to declare that "the surge worked," as if that translates to "we win, it's over, let's go home."
Fact number one about guerrilla wars: They're not over until the guerrillas win. Mao set out the guerrilla's viewpoint 80 years ago: "The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we simply will not let him." The longer the guerrillas stay in the game, the sicker the occupying army gets. Sooner or later, they'll go home -- because they can. It's that simple, and it works. So anyone who tells you it's over is just plain ignorant. That's one thing you can rule out instantly.
But people keep saying it. The most recent and ridiculous take is that "Moqtada al Sadr is renouncing violence." Talk about naive! What led these geniuses to that conclusion is that on June 13, Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the biggest and toughest Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, sent out a big announcement: "From now on, the resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. ... The weapons will be held exclusively by this group." In other words, he's switching from a big, sloppy, amateur force to a select group of professional guerrillas.
Also, there'll be a non-military role for the civilian supporter, working on local politics to "liberate the minds from domination and globalization."
The glass-half-full school of thought took Sadr's announcement to mean that he's getting out of the violence business, trying to marginalize the "special groups," which is U.S. Army talk for hardcore Shia militias, and move his party to the good ol' middle of the road. See, that's classic misreading of Iraqi reality as if it were U.S. politics. It's like we keep trying to pretend that Iraq under occupation is just a dusty version of Iowa. Sorry, but a country under enemy occupation doesn't think or act like Des Moines. If you want a good analogy to what Sadr is actually doing, it's easy to find one, but you can't look at American politics. You need to go to research other countries occupied by enemy armies, where urban insurgencies started off like Sadr's Mahdi Army did -- as neighborhood defense groups protecting the locals against mobs from across the ethnic divide. And when you start thinking on those lines, there's a really close, clear parallel between what Sadr is doing now and another insurgency that shifted from neighborhood-gang/paramilitary organization to small armed cells, with civilian support channeled into an above-ground political wing: the IRA back in the 1970s.
The basic parallels between Shia Iraqis and the IRA are clear enough: They're both minorities that got stomped on by the dominant tribe -- in Northern Ireland, Protestant mobs used to burn and stomp at will when they were in the mood; and in Shia Iraq, Sunni goons went on regular murder runs in Shia neighborhoods. So both places, Catholic Belfast and Shia Baghdad, got used to defending their own neighborhoods because nobody else was going to defend them. Then they were "saved" by foreign troops from countries that had always been their biggest enemy: The Ulster Catholics were occupied by the British Army, and Shia Iraq by the Americans. Of course, it was all supposed to be gratitude and happiness, the way the occupiers saw it. They expected the slum people to be grateful. Well, there haven't been too many people in history who've been glad to be occupied by foreign troops. Even when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to root out the Khmer Rouge, a lot of Khmer were more angry at the foreigners than pleased to be rid of Pol
You have to click on the score to get the moderation history. It was moderated "underrated" and the poster has a karma bonus. Why "underrated" was an appropriate choice here and why it doesn't get listed next to the score, however, I can't answer.
HAIL!
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
It was unintentional. Kharma is a phunee thing. I actually corrected someone recently for the identical malapropism. Re-reading what I wrote, I cringe at the verbosity, poor construction, and use of cliche. It's like someone else wrote it, but it sounds strangely familiar, and somehow solipsistic. Playgerism, perhaps?
Join the IParty!
junk characters? junk characters? it is an animation for crying out loud!
the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy
Since when was 'savvy' a noun? It can be used as an adjective to mean someone who is well-informed and perceptive. It can also be a verb, meaning 'to understand'. However, it does not function as a noun.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Moderators: Moderate all the elder siblings of this comment insightful. Or maybe underrated. Silly Slashdot.
That's bad enough but you forgot "while reducing Federal income by slashing taxes" at the end.
Except the facts are otherwise
:
Total federal revenues grew by about $625 billion, or 35 percent, between fiscal year 2003 and fiscal year 2006... Had revenues grown at the same rate as the overall economy between 2003 and 2006, federal receipts would have increased by only $373 billion. The other $252 billion of the actual increase in revenues represents growth in excess of GDP growth
So the tax cuts stimulated enough increase in federal revenues to outstrip the growth of the GDP by 40%. Lower taxes increased growth in revenue.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!