Sorry to point this out sparky, but the Bush administration never claimed Iraq had anything to do with 9-11.
The Bush administration talked about it several times as a way to conflate in the publics' minds unrelated connections. Cheney reported several times that Mohammad Atta, the 9/11 field leader, met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague. Both the CIA and the FBI said no such meeting took place. Condoleezza Rice received intelligence estimates that there was little to no link between Saddam Hussein and al-Quaeda, he felt they were a threat to his power given that they don't respect country governance. Bush continued nonetheless claim that Hussein was "a threat because he's dealing with al-Quaeda."
The administration started debating internally an invasion of Iraq in the days after 9/11. Donald Rumsfeld wrote an internal memo in Nov 2001 to plan out how to sell an Iraq invasion, one of the bullet points reading "US discovers Saddam connection to Sept 11 attack?"
Bill Moyers correctly predicted that prior to a national press conference on the Iraq War that "at least a dozen times during this press conference he [the President] will invoke 9/11 and Al-Qaeda to justify a preemptive attack on a country that has not attacked America. But the White House press corps will ask no hard questions tonight about those claims."
If the goal was to reduce terrorism, then the 2003 Iraqi Invasion was a pretty big miscalculation.
Where is the science that any of that is actually bad for either cows or humans? The FDA has some of the strictest regulations in the world, yet you say they're letting farmers poison the population with milk?
The antibiotic problem is a huge one. I don't think it affects whether the milk will make people sick, but the this constant dosing of even healthy farm animals with antibiotics assists in the creation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
That is why Canada has a tariff on US dairy products. Canada doesn't subsidize its dairy industry at all. The tariffs came into effect because the US insists on subsidizing its dairy industry with more US tax dollars than the entire Canadian dairy industry is worth [dairyinfo.gc.ca].
I agree 100% that this was a stupid, stupid thing to try to point out. Canada is totally in the right here. If the government subsidizes an industry, it's fair to apply tariffs to correct that make your goods competitive again. Yet when we want to slap tariffs on goods going to China because the Chinese government does the same thing, everyone loses their shit.
3. Obama was appeasing Iran with literal palletes of US cash and an inspection regime which was full of holes. Many people feel confirmed with the left's increasingly insane rhetoric towards Israel and Jews generally that Obama did this to hasten not deter the Iranians getting the bomb because in the left's view, Israel is the sorceof the problems in the Middle East.
That cash was Iran's not the US's. It was the release of Iranian assets that the US had seized. Israel is not "the source of problems in the Middle East," but its creation was a vast miscalculation. But, well, that was done long ago, so no use crying about it now. But to frame "all Israel = good, everyone else = evil" is pretty nuts.
MacArthur wanted to nuke them and that is exactly what we should have done.
MacArthur insisted that we invade China, who would have declared war on the US, and the Soviet Union would have as well, since they had a defensive pact.
Yes, that's the GP's point. Saddam caved to the US demands for weapons inspectors and stopped developing WMDs of any kind. In response, we killed him.
Saddam played both sides. He played ball with the weapons inspectors for a time until the CIA sent infiltrators hidden in the inspectors to bug sensitive areas. He kicked them out and gave the impression to his neighbors that he had WMDs as a deterrent to prevent them from attacking him (IE, Iran..).
Shooting at military aircraft is, of course, an act of war. Clearly, it was the Americans who were untrustworthy and eventually got tired of that shit and shot back.
What about shooting at civilian aircraft? Is that an act of war too? If so, how do you justify the US shooting down an Iranian civilian airliner? Just curious.
It could have been an act of war. Fortunately neither the US nor Iran were particularly interested in going to war over it. Both sides believe it was a terrible reckless mistake and settled it diplomatically.
tell people that I'm a old school Republican, I believe in more power at the State level with a lean and efficient Federal Government. With that said, Trump is a fucking IDIOT
You don't like Trump because he's a liar and idiot and takes credit for things he didn't do? Did you not get the memo that because Trump won, you're not only supposed to abandon all your principles, but pretend that you never had them and follow the leader no matter how immoral you might think he is?
Trump could cure cancer, elevate world hunger, and invent weather control and the left would still attack him. There is literally no way for him to be successful in their eyes.
Yes, I know, you've cut and pasted this nonsense over and over again. We're definitely familiar with your message here.
Why shouldn't NK and Iran have nuclear? An overriding sense of perceived moral superiority over other nations with a different colour skin is not an answer.
It doesn't matter what the color of the skin is (Iran is ethnically Caucasian), but yes, having moral superiority is nice. NK and Iran have both promised to use everything in their power to wipe their peaceful neighbors off the map. I think their word on such matters should be trusted.
While that is indeed callous an international incident where soldiers were killed is not a war. In a war there is a declaration of intent and then lots and lots of shooting and appropriation bills that congress has to allow.
The way that this has often gone since WWII is that you can have some small "military action" without it being an actual war. Obviously, not every situation where a soldier is shot and killed is an all out war. What we had with Korea, and later Vietnam, are very small conflicts that slowly got bigger. Each month the conflict is a litttttle larger than the month before. Those incremental additions never require approval either. So while sending hundreds of thousands of troops into a war zone at once might require a declaration of war, you can get the same effect without one by starting small and slowly growing the presence.
The Vietnam War, for instance, started with a number of troops simply there to help the South Vietnamese with troop training and assistance. It wasn't until a bit later that those troops were taking active roles in fighting. And then we started sending a few more, a few more.
HAS BEEN FULFILLING CAMPAIGN PROMISES AT A STARTLING RATE.
Could you please provide some proof for this because it is simply NOT true..
It's mostly behind the scenes. Not the huge flashy stuff like banning Muslims or building the wall, but with the sort of social culture wars he has been fighting for. I suggest reading/listening to this interview from reporter Dan Diamond, about Trump's appointments at the Dept. of Health and Human Services. We're talking about abortion rights, "conscience protections" for doctors and pharmacists, reductions or eliminations for any protections for gay people, etc. He mentions interviewing Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, who says that "from a policy standpoint, [Donald Trump] has delivered more than any other president in my lifetime." As in, Trump has done more for Christian conservatives than Nixon did, than Reagan, than both Bushes. That is why Christian Conservatives flocked to Trump during the election, because they feared the sort of judges that Hillary might appoint.
That is why they overlooked his rather un-Christian temperament, his corrupt (professionally and personally) past, and that is why they are still on board the Donald Trump Express.
Since when has the US given a hoot about international laws?
International law is something you accuse others of breaking, so you can play the moral superiority game. It's not something you particularly care about yourself, because sovereignty is more important.
Before somebody wonders, the poster is being sarcastic.
The poster is definitely running afoul of Poe's Law! It's difficult to tell, sometimes. He wasn't exaggerating the opposition argument at all, just playing it very straight.
Then work on that problem, not on the "problem" of what actions the FCC does or does not take. Sorry it's harder, but shouldn't passing laws that affect an entire country be somewhat difficult and not in the hands of five people?
The problem that we have in the US is that almost everyone LOVES their congressional representative. And they universally dislike all of the other congressional representatives. So their there is a real contempt of Congress, but the makeup of Congress rarely changes because their rep brings home the bacon.
Yeah yeah, I know, you're just trolling. But just to clarify: 1) You wouldn't have seen any changes yet because the rules are still in place. They expire today. 2) The repeal of Net Neutrality is extremely unpopular outside of the corporate boardrooms. As a previous Slashdot story pointed out, ISPs will wait until we're not paying attention as much before they really screw you over. It would be an absolute PR nightmare for them to pull this crap on Day One, so they'll play it safe for awhile, say "see? Nothing to worry about after all" before pulling shit like throttling web sites who pay for their bandwidth but don't give the ISPs additional kickbacks.
Much the same way as when you grab someone's fist, hit them with it, and say "stop punching yourself!"
The only throttling Netflix has done themselves was for Verizon and AT&T customers who had data caps, switching to lower quality streams to prevent those customers from going over their caps.
You guys are arguing apples and oranges. Lynnwood is quoting global sales, you're quoting United States sales. Additionally, your figures are for the first five months, Lynnwood's are for the first three only, and Model S sales really took off in the Spring. They don't really sell internationally yet, and BAIC's sales are pretty much non-existent in the US.
No no no. You were dumb enough to buy it, you recycle it.
If you force people to be responsible for the post-life disposal of their every items, then they'll just dump them by the side of the road, because they can.
One reason? He killed 11times more people than bush with drones.
A number of reasons, but one of them is: technology marches on. Drone strikes became more feasible under Obama than Bush, because drone technology become a hell of a lot better. Drones become more easy to control, could carry more payload, able to enter areas previously inaccessible.
Drone strikes sure beat dropping a bomb from a plane onto a building, or a tomahawk fired from a cruiser offshore. More of a chance of hitting the target you want to hit and missing the people you don't want to hit.
Many would argue that his net neutrality laws disincentivized the bandwidth war and caused consumer bandwidth accessibility to grind to a halt.
The economy started turning around immediately after the election, but before Trump went into office
The economy was starting to boom well before the election. Trump campaigned against it, saying it was a bubble, that the high stock market couldn't be trusted. Of course he changed his tune after the election and frequently talked about how great the stock market was, but he sure trashed that sort of thinking when the credit went to someone else.
Yeah, the extreme so called left wing positions from internet crackpots are so outrageous it is almost as if they are false plants put there to discredit what is actually a more moderate view.
When the reports of the Russian astroturfing campaign came out, they were pretty clear: the trolls (sometimes even the same people) played both sides, spouting far-left flamebait and far-right flamebait. They had a strategy of "further their divisions as possible, and let them show the world the failure of Democracy." The investigations have made this pretty clear, yet so many people are only hearing "hello Ivan posing as a right-wing nationalist. I see you astroturfing here." I'm not sure why, but I don't see much acknowledgement that many far-left posts are similar plants. We just assume a right-wing nationalist crackpot is a troll, but not the left crackpots.
"Representative service can cost thousands of USD per year"
Oh noes! How will the multinational conglomerates worth billions of dollars on the open market be able to handle such a cost?
It's also a very high barrier to any smaller business trying to start in Europe or expand into it. But it's not like the immediate effect of regulations shutting down a business, it's more that you have no idea what businesses could have started up if the barriers to entry weren't so high. But since that's an unknown, we tend not to think about it very much, and thus undervalue what those barriers are actually costing us, because we're only considering sticking it to the big boys. Well anything applied uniformly hits the smaller guy a lot harder than the big guy.
> Just because it is better does not mean that it is good. And even if it is good, it does not mean that it can't be better.
In other words you are a raving ingrate with zero perspective.
You would find the dark cloud in any silver lining. Your kind of nonsense is why the suicide rate is up.
Well that's a similarly pessimistic way to interpret what he said. Another interpretation might be "there is no situation so good that you can't try to think of something better."
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to point this out sparky, but the Bush administration never claimed Iraq had anything to do with 9-11.
The Bush administration talked about it several times as a way to conflate in the publics' minds unrelated connections. Cheney reported several times that Mohammad Atta, the 9/11 field leader, met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague. Both the CIA and the FBI said no such meeting took place. Condoleezza Rice received intelligence estimates that there was little to no link between Saddam Hussein and al-Quaeda, he felt they were a threat to his power given that they don't respect country governance. Bush continued nonetheless claim that Hussein was "a threat because he's dealing with al-Quaeda."
The administration started debating internally an invasion of Iraq in the days after 9/11. Donald Rumsfeld wrote an internal memo in Nov 2001 to plan out how to sell an Iraq invasion, one of the bullet points reading "US discovers Saddam connection to Sept 11 attack?"
Bill Moyers correctly predicted that prior to a national press conference on the Iraq War that "at least a dozen times during this press conference he [the President] will invoke 9/11 and Al-Qaeda to justify a preemptive attack on a country that has not attacked America. But the White House press corps will ask no hard questions tonight about those claims."
If the goal was to reduce terrorism, then the 2003 Iraqi Invasion was a pretty big miscalculation.
Where is the science that any of that is actually bad for either cows or humans? The FDA has some of the strictest regulations in the world, yet you say they're letting farmers poison the population with milk?
The antibiotic problem is a huge one. I don't think it affects whether the milk will make people sick, but the this constant dosing of even healthy farm animals with antibiotics assists in the creation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
That is why Canada has a tariff on US dairy products. Canada doesn't subsidize its dairy industry at all. The tariffs came into effect because the US insists on subsidizing its dairy industry with more US tax dollars than the entire Canadian dairy industry is worth [dairyinfo.gc.ca].
I agree 100% that this was a stupid, stupid thing to try to point out. Canada is totally in the right here. If the government subsidizes an industry, it's fair to apply tariffs to correct that make your goods competitive again.
Yet when we want to slap tariffs on goods going to China because the Chinese government does the same thing, everyone loses their shit.
3. Obama was appeasing Iran with literal palletes of US cash and an inspection regime which was full of holes. Many people feel confirmed with the left's increasingly insane rhetoric towards Israel and Jews generally that Obama did this to hasten not deter the Iranians getting the bomb because in the left's view, Israel is the sorceof the problems in the Middle East.
That cash was Iran's not the US's. It was the release of Iranian assets that the US had seized.
Israel is not "the source of problems in the Middle East," but its creation was a vast miscalculation. But, well, that was done long ago, so no use crying about it now. But to frame "all Israel = good, everyone else = evil" is pretty nuts.
MacArthur wanted to nuke them and that is exactly what we should have done.
MacArthur insisted that we invade China, who would have declared war on the US, and the Soviet Union would have as well, since they had a defensive pact.
Yes, that's the GP's point. Saddam caved to the US demands for weapons inspectors and stopped developing WMDs of any kind. In response, we killed him.
Saddam played both sides. He played ball with the weapons inspectors for a time until the CIA sent infiltrators hidden in the inspectors to bug sensitive areas. He kicked them out and gave the impression to his neighbors that he had WMDs as a deterrent to prevent them from attacking him (IE, Iran..).
Shooting at military aircraft is, of course, an act of war. Clearly, it was the Americans who were untrustworthy and eventually got tired of that shit and shot back.
What about shooting at civilian aircraft? Is that an act of war too? If so, how do you justify the US shooting down an Iranian civilian airliner? Just curious.
It could have been an act of war. Fortunately neither the US nor Iran were particularly interested in going to war over it. Both sides believe it was a terrible reckless mistake and settled it diplomatically.
Yeah. Play chicken with them when it's our allies who will take the worst fallout.
tell people that I'm a old school Republican, I believe in more power at the State level with a lean and efficient Federal Government. With that said, Trump is a fucking IDIOT
You don't like Trump because he's a liar and idiot and takes credit for things he didn't do? Did you not get the memo that because Trump won, you're not only supposed to abandon all your principles, but pretend that you never had them and follow the leader no matter how immoral you might think he is?
Trump could cure cancer, elevate world hunger, and invent weather control and the left would still attack him. There is literally no way for him to be successful in their eyes.
Yes, I know, you've cut and pasted this nonsense over and over again. We're definitely familiar with your message here.
Why shouldn't NK and Iran have nuclear? An overriding sense of perceived moral superiority over other nations with a different colour skin is not an answer.
It doesn't matter what the color of the skin is (Iran is ethnically Caucasian), but yes, having moral superiority is nice. NK and Iran have both promised to use everything in their power to wipe their peaceful neighbors off the map. I think their word on such matters should be trusted.
While that is indeed callous an international incident where soldiers were killed is not a war. In a war there is a declaration of intent and then lots and lots of shooting and appropriation bills that congress has to allow.
The way that this has often gone since WWII is that you can have some small "military action" without it being an actual war. Obviously, not every situation where a soldier is shot and killed is an all out war. What we had with Korea, and later Vietnam, are very small conflicts that slowly got bigger. Each month the conflict is a litttttle larger than the month before. Those incremental additions never require approval either. So while sending hundreds of thousands of troops into a war zone at once might require a declaration of war, you can get the same effect without one by starting small and slowly growing the presence.
The Vietnam War, for instance, started with a number of troops simply there to help the South Vietnamese with troop training and assistance. It wasn't until a bit later that those troops were taking active roles in fighting. And then we started sending a few more, a few more.
HAS BEEN FULFILLING CAMPAIGN PROMISES AT A STARTLING RATE.
Could you please provide some proof for this because it is simply NOT true..
It's mostly behind the scenes. Not the huge flashy stuff like banning Muslims or building the wall, but with the sort of social culture wars he has been fighting for. I suggest reading/listening to this interview from reporter Dan Diamond, about Trump's appointments at the Dept. of Health and Human Services. We're talking about abortion rights, "conscience protections" for doctors and pharmacists, reductions or eliminations for any protections for gay people, etc. He mentions interviewing Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, who says that "from a policy standpoint, [Donald Trump] has delivered more than any other president in my lifetime." As in, Trump has done more for Christian conservatives than Nixon did, than Reagan, than both Bushes. That is why Christian Conservatives flocked to Trump during the election, because they feared the sort of judges that Hillary might appoint.
That is why they overlooked his rather un-Christian temperament, his corrupt (professionally and personally) past, and that is why they are still on board the Donald Trump Express.
Since when has the US given a hoot about international laws?
International law is something you accuse others of breaking, so you can play the moral superiority game.
It's not something you particularly care about yourself, because sovereignty is more important.
Before somebody wonders, the poster is being sarcastic.
The poster is definitely running afoul of Poe's Law! It's difficult to tell, sometimes. He wasn't exaggerating the opposition argument at all, just playing it very straight.
The problem is that Congress won't.
Then work on that problem, not on the "problem" of what actions the FCC does or does not take. Sorry it's harder, but shouldn't passing laws that affect an entire country be somewhat difficult and not in the hands of five people?
The problem that we have in the US is that almost everyone LOVES their congressional representative. And they universally dislike all of the other congressional representatives. So their there is a real contempt of Congress, but the makeup of Congress rarely changes because their rep brings home the bacon.
Yeah yeah, I know, you're just trolling. But just to clarify:
1) You wouldn't have seen any changes yet because the rules are still in place. They expire today.
2) The repeal of Net Neutrality is extremely unpopular outside of the corporate boardrooms. As a previous Slashdot story pointed out, ISPs will wait until we're not paying attention as much before they really screw you over. It would be an absolute PR nightmare for them to pull this crap on Day One, so they'll play it safe for awhile, say "see? Nothing to worry about after all" before pulling shit like throttling web sites who pay for their bandwidth but don't give the ISPs additional kickbacks.
Netflix throttled themselves.
Much the same way as when you grab someone's fist, hit them with it, and say "stop punching yourself!"
The only throttling Netflix has done themselves was for Verizon and AT&T customers who had data caps, switching to lower quality streams to prevent those customers from going over their caps.
You guys are arguing apples and oranges.
Lynnwood is quoting global sales, you're quoting United States sales.
Additionally, your figures are for the first five months, Lynnwood's are for the first three only, and Model S sales really took off in the Spring. They don't really sell internationally yet, and BAIC's sales are pretty much non-existent in the US.
No no no. You were dumb enough to buy it, you recycle it.
If you force people to be responsible for the post-life disposal of their every items, then they'll just dump them by the side of the road, because they can.
One reason? He killed 11times more people than bush with drones.
A number of reasons, but one of them is: technology marches on. Drone strikes became more feasible under Obama than Bush, because drone technology become a hell of a lot better. Drones become more easy to control, could carry more payload, able to enter areas previously inaccessible.
Drone strikes sure beat dropping a bomb from a plane onto a building, or a tomahawk fired from a cruiser offshore. More of a chance of hitting the target you want to hit and missing the people you don't want to hit.
Many would argue that his net neutrality laws disincentivized the bandwidth war and caused consumer bandwidth accessibility to grind to a halt.
...
Yeah. Sure.
The economy started turning around immediately after the election, but before Trump went into office
The economy was starting to boom well before the election. Trump campaigned against it, saying it was a bubble, that the high stock market couldn't be trusted. Of course he changed his tune after the election and frequently talked about how great the stock market was, but he sure trashed that sort of thinking when the credit went to someone else.
Yeah, the extreme so called left wing positions from internet crackpots are so outrageous it is almost as if they are false plants put there to discredit what is actually a more moderate view.
When the reports of the Russian astroturfing campaign came out, they were pretty clear: the trolls (sometimes even the same people) played both sides, spouting far-left flamebait and far-right flamebait. They had a strategy of "further their divisions as possible, and let them show the world the failure of Democracy." The investigations have made this pretty clear, yet so many people are only hearing "hello Ivan posing as a right-wing nationalist. I see you astroturfing here." I'm not sure why, but I don't see much acknowledgement that many far-left posts are similar plants. We just assume a right-wing nationalist crackpot is a troll, but not the left crackpots.
"Representative service can cost thousands of USD per year"
Oh noes! How will the multinational conglomerates worth billions of dollars on the open market be able to handle such a cost?
It's also a very high barrier to any smaller business trying to start in Europe or expand into it. But it's not like the immediate effect of regulations shutting down a business, it's more that you have no idea what businesses could have started up if the barriers to entry weren't so high. But since that's an unknown, we tend not to think about it very much, and thus undervalue what those barriers are actually costing us, because we're only considering sticking it to the big boys. Well anything applied uniformly hits the smaller guy a lot harder than the big guy.
> Just because it is better does not mean that it is good. And even if it is good, it does not mean that it can't be better.
In other words you are a raving ingrate with zero perspective.
You would find the dark cloud in any silver lining. Your kind of nonsense is why the suicide rate is up.
Well that's a similarly pessimistic way to interpret what he said. Another interpretation might be "there is no situation so good that you can't try to think of something better."