Doesn't George Bush have a degree? Or are you saying we should judge political leaders based on whether they've had elocution lessons or something equally superficial?
But of course the Supreme Court is what I was referring to.
No, the court has already ruled that we are at war and the declaration to use power was the same as a declaration of war. This was determined in the club Gitmo detainees court cases where they were attempting to get people classified as combatants or criminals and such. We cannot back away from a declaration of war now. The same court that would be hearing this case is the one who claimed it was a declaration of war, the US supreme court.
Um, no. You are mistaken. Read the link. And there has been no declaration of war. Besides, even if it were a declared war, the President can not suspend habeas corpus unless there is either a rebellion or an invasion. We have neither.
Of course I could be wrong, they could return a favor and just stall it out so it can be used to paint political opponents in a certain light come next election.
Not likely. What is likely, is that they would give a long and legally wordy way of saying "if you don't like it, impeach him".
True, but if he hadn't been screwing around that wouldn't have been a problem, now would it?
No, the problem was the Republicans were trying to undo the 1992 and 1996 elections by any means necessary. They investigated Clinton and then re-investigated him without probable cause, and when they couldn't come up with something they started rooting around in his personal life until they could manufacture a perjury charge. Which wasn't even perjury, since the judge in the Paula Jones case ruled that whatever happened between Bill and Monica wasn't relevant to the Jones case. And it it's not relevant, it's not perjury. Further destroying their perjury excuse are the number of right wingers falling over themselves calling for a pardon of Scooter Libby. For that matter, why don't we have Congress do a dozen investigations of your life, and give a vindictive judge unlimited time, staff and resources to investigate every inch of your life, and see if making misleading statements about your sex life is the worst thing he can come up with.
And what, exactly, would we do with him? I can see the news stories now: "Government improperly holding Bin Laden without charges",
WTH are you talking about. He would have been charged and convicted years ago, and be serving a few hundred consecutive life sentences (don't want to make him a martyr by executing him).
"US negotiates with impressive regime, for what?"
Huh? China. Pakistan. Saudi Arabia. Egypt. Israel. The U.S. government negotiates with opressive regimes all. the. time.
It probably wouldn't stop Al Qaeda either
Yeah,, he only killed 3,000+ Americans, so who cares if he gets away, right?
just as stopping the leader of the insurgency in Iraq didn't do much
To paraphrase a movie, Zarqawi was but the leader of two things: Jack and shit, and Jack left town. And certainly not of the insurgency, which has no leader.
If you want to act that way, I guess I have to spell it out for you. Once the planning is done, and all the the people are in place, there is very little you can do to stop an attack.
It's called getting a grip. The point of terrorism is to terrorize. By waving your hands and crying about non-existent sleeper cells when you have a higher chance of committing suicide than dying in a terrorist attack, you are doing their job for them. Osama is sitting in a cave in Afghanistan drinking a non-alcoholic beer laughing his ass off at Fox News for trying to terrorize Americans on a daily basis.
Maybe you advocate racial profiling?
No, I'm an advocate of you pulling your head out.
And yet all that success was and is not enough to prevent multiple attacks from occurring.
You do know we haven't had any attacks since 2001, right? Right?
There are countries who spend a whole lot more time doing invasive counter-terrorism work, such as Israel, but they still can't stop everything. If you demand perfection, you're going to be disappointed. That was my point.
Israel is a different kettle of fish. Israel will not have, nor will it deserve, security until it stops screwing over the Palestinians.
Ok, I guess you really do advocate racial profiling.
No, I really do recommend you pull your head out, since the point sailed right over your head.
Hint: Most Arabs are not terrorists.
No shit, Sherlock.
Even if you want to profile in your example, what does the owner of a port matter, when nearly all of your longshoremen are US citizens?
The problem is not that an Arab company was taking over control of U.S. ports. The problem is that the Administration didn't know it was happening.
Clinton launched cruise missile attacks against terrorist training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan
A lot of good that did.
It would have done a lot more good if the Republicans hadn't been screaming that Clinton was "wagging the dog" while they were trying to invent a reason to impeach him. It also would have helped if Bush had negotiated with the Taliban when they offered to hand over Bin Laddin.
Yes, but the sleeper cells came to the US under his watch
Sleeper cells! Oh, the drama!
Or you can be honest, and admit that a government that respects people's privacy is not going to be able to prevent every possible attack. Clinton knew this, and Bush may know this although he doesn't act like it, although he's probably just giving in (or taking advantage of) the impossible task that the public is demanding.
Problem: all the successes we've had fighting terrorism have come from the boring, "pre 911 mindset", Constitution-abiding law enforcement. On the other hand, the Administration has it's Patriot Act, waterboarding, NSA wiretapping, kidnappings, endless detention w/o trial, and yet is too fucking incompetent to know when an Arab company is about to take over administration of the largest ports in the U.S.
President Clinton was using OBL and Al Qaeda as a Wag The Dog...
That bullshit talking point is sooooo 1998. The new bullshit talking point is that 911 was Clinton's fault for not going after OBL hard enough, even though the bullshit talking point three years earlier was that he was "wagging the dog". Get with the times, already.
You don't need to look any further than the testimony - under oath - of President Clinton's Terror Czar Richard Clarke:
Did you read your own link? He's talking about how the tactics were ineffectual, which is a completely different subject from "wagging th dog".
The problem with the pre-9/11 era was that law enforcement should have been able to do the job, but suffered from severe systemic and organizational failures.
No, the real problem was our incompetent President. It was all laid out to him a silver platter in the form of two daily briefs: that Bin Laddin was going to attack the U.S., and that he might use planes to do it. He could have directed the FBI to watch passenger lists. He could have told the FAA to watch out for suspicious activity. He could have told NORAD to come up with a plan to deal with kamikaze 747's. On the day of the attack, he could have ordered fighter jets in the air when he was notified (since he told the FAA to be vigilant) that four planes had disappeared. He could have done all of this in about five minutes.
Instead, he told the person giving the brief "All right. You've covered your ass, now" and sat on his butt reading My Pet Goat while planes were hitting buildings.
Flash forward a few years to Bush's "post 911 mindset". There have been enormous increases in intelligence gathering and law enforcement powers, and yet Bush and his team are too fucking stupid to realize that an Arab country is going to take control over the largest ports in the U.S. until the deal is almost finished.
The next president, Hillary most likely, will use this precedent to run an even more secretive and authoritarian white house.
Not bloody likely. You're forgetting that Republicans and the media have vastly higher standards for Democrats than they do for Republicans. They impeached Bill for getting a blow job, and while Bush has made the worst of Nixon's shenanigans look like Sunday School pranks, they will defend him to the bitter end.
This most important is to head off the situation were the court would have to find an exception allowing it like with portions of the new deal.
But the courts have already smacked down Bush's claimed exception: that the AUFM allows him to do just about anything under the sun.
If I understand it correctly, the president claims the constitution obligates him to do certain things in a time of need (war) which we are in.
No we aren't. The U.S. is not formally in a state of war until Congress declares it, which it has not. So even if Bush is right he's still wrong.
You are right in that SCOTUS is unlikely to step in, as the court has historically preferred to let the President squabble with Congress over such things. Especially when a Contempt of Congress charge has to be pressed by a U.S. States Attorney - who are appointed by the president.
his home state is definitely Texas, which he did win.
His adopted home state, thank you. I would also like to ask Bush to his face if he considers himself an alcoholic. Normally, I wouldn't say it was any of my business, but he saw fit to ask it of Ann Richards when he was running against her.
No, I don't think you are a liar. You are, however, an asshat engaging in classic right wing misdirection. And don't give me BS about "particulars" when these are BIG issues. Or maybe you'd care to explain to me why Bush, son of a war veteran and former president, a man who did (token) service in the Air Guard, couldn't so much as tell his aids to get on the phone to NORAD or Rumsfield (a two time Secretary of Defense) or Cheney (a former Secretary of Defense) when our nation was under attack. Or why people who have health insurance have to have bake sales to pay for medical bills. Or why health plans will pay $300,000 for a kidney transplant but not the $3,000 per month in anti-rejection drugs.
How does that contradict the fact that Castro is a dictator?
Of course not. He never implied that. What he was showing was the massive double standards the U.S. employs with its foreign relations and 2) that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Duh.
Can someone who agrees that this is flamebait please tell me why they consider it flamebait?
Probably because the U.S. has been very, very friendly with regimes far worse than Castro's when it suits our "national interests". Until the fall of the Soviet Union, we'd back just about any Pol Pot dictator who opposed communism. Not only that, the CIA helped overthrow many a democratically elected leader in a peacefull country that made the grave mistake of voting in a socialist government. Now, we buddy up to anyone who makes a show of lending us a hand in the GWOT, which so far has gone leaps and bounds ahead of the War on Drugs as wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and wrecking hundreds of thousands of lives.
Before Farenheit 9-11, no one ever thought about or discussed 9-11 and the war on terror.
You think so, Sparky? Just how widespread was the media and politcal condemnation of Bush's sitting on his ass for 20 minutes while the nation was under attack?
I'm glad he's going to get everyone to discuss the health care system again too, because I haven't heard anyone talking about it since at least yesterday, maybe even two whole days ago.
No, you haven't heard it. At all. Politicians today are talking about covering the uninsured, but one of the main points of the film isn't so much those without insurance. It's about those who think they have good insurance and find out they are fucked when they are hit with a serious accident or illness and rapidly hit their benefit caps. The two main problems with U.S. health care is the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. And after what happened to the Clintons when they tried pushing universal health care in the 90's, policians are very wary of taking on these two families of 800 lbs gorrillas.
and then see the gross misproportion of the gun deaths in USA vs the rest of the civilized world.
Okay, go for it: who has more per capita gun crimes than the United States in the civilized world. Three words sum up most of MM's critics: pot kettle black.
I'm sorry, but the only states where that kind of things happened, were either fascist or communist totalitarian regimes.
But of course we are under a fascist regime. Rampant jingoism? Check. Demonizes anyone who doesn't share the same ideology? Check. Put's party before country? Check, check. Acts above the law? Check, check, check and check.
Yawn. Notice how this chestnut doesn't get drug out for Republicans born in liberal states; Bush didn't win his home state either. Besides, if they had bothered to recount all the votes in Florida, he would have won that state and taken the eletion.
Ah, the usual argument by annecdote. The problem is that the U.S. has far more per capita annecdotes than Sweden does. The problem in this country isn't government involvement, its that we place a higher priority on middlemen being able to make hundreds of billions per year than in the health of our citizens.
One of the main points of the movie isn't people without insurance - it's people with insurance who think they are covered but find out they are screwed when they hit their benefit caps when hit with a serious illness/accident. Start paying attention to the numbers of charity events in your area ment to help people pay medical bills. Start paying attention to policies that pay for organ transplants but not the $3,000 a month people have to spend on the anti-rejection drugs.
The state of the American health care system is atrocious, and anyone who defends it is either ignorant, a crazy Libertarian, or a tool for the insurance industry.
Ah, the last gasp of a an idiot who's asinine arguments have all been shot down: engage in some rhetorical masturbation and declare victory. You are a tool and a fool, your talking points are nonsense, I award you no points and may god have mercy on your soul. Now go rent some Barney tapes to keep that fearsome intellect of your busy, ok?
Slashdot Mirror
thank you :)
Doesn't George Bush have a degree? Or are you saying we should judge political leaders based on whether they've had elocution lessons or something equally superficial?
Are you saying idiots can't have degrees?
The only court that matters is th supreme court.
But of course the Supreme Court is what I was referring to.
No, the court has already ruled that we are at war and the declaration to use power was the same as a declaration of war. This was determined in the club Gitmo detainees court cases where they were attempting to get people classified as combatants or criminals and such. We cannot back away from a declaration of war now. The same court that would be hearing this case is the one who claimed it was a declaration of war, the US supreme court.
Um, no. You are mistaken. Read the link. And there has been no declaration of war. Besides, even if it were a declared war, the President can not suspend habeas corpus unless there is either a rebellion or an invasion. We have neither.
Of course I could be wrong, they could return a favor and just stall it out so it can be used to paint political opponents in a certain light come next election.
Not likely. What is likely, is that they would give a long and legally wordy way of saying "if you don't like it, impeach him".
True, but if he hadn't been screwing around that wouldn't have been a problem, now would it?
No, the problem was the Republicans were trying to undo the 1992 and 1996 elections by any means necessary. They investigated Clinton and then re-investigated him without probable cause, and when they couldn't come up with something they started rooting around in his personal life until they could manufacture a perjury charge. Which wasn't even perjury, since the judge in the Paula Jones case ruled that whatever happened between Bill and Monica wasn't relevant to the Jones case. And it it's not relevant, it's not perjury. Further destroying their perjury excuse are the number of right wingers falling over themselves calling for a pardon of Scooter Libby. For that matter, why don't we have Congress do a dozen investigations of your life, and give a vindictive judge unlimited time, staff and resources to investigate every inch of your life, and see if making misleading statements about your sex life is the worst thing he can come up with.
And what, exactly, would we do with him? I can see the news stories now: "Government improperly holding Bin Laden without charges",
WTH are you talking about. He would have been charged and convicted years ago, and be serving a few hundred consecutive life sentences (don't want to make him a martyr by executing him).
"US negotiates with impressive regime, for what?"
Huh? China. Pakistan. Saudi Arabia. Egypt. Israel. The U.S. government negotiates with opressive regimes all. the. time.
It probably wouldn't stop Al Qaeda either
Yeah,, he only killed 3,000+ Americans, so who cares if he gets away, right?
just as stopping the leader of the insurgency in Iraq didn't do much
To paraphrase a movie, Zarqawi was but the leader of two things: Jack and shit, and Jack left town. And certainly not of the insurgency, which has no leader.
If you want to act that way, I guess I have to spell it out for you. Once the planning is done, and all the the people are in place, there is very little you can do to stop an attack.
It's called getting a grip. The point of terrorism is to terrorize. By waving your hands and crying about non-existent sleeper cells when you have a higher chance of committing suicide than dying in a terrorist attack, you are doing their job for them. Osama is sitting in a cave in Afghanistan drinking a non-alcoholic beer laughing his ass off at Fox News for trying to terrorize Americans on a daily basis.
Maybe you advocate racial profiling?
No, I'm an advocate of you pulling your head out.
And yet all that success was and is not enough to prevent multiple attacks from occurring.
You do know we haven't had any attacks since 2001, right? Right?
There are countries who spend a whole lot more time doing invasive counter-terrorism work, such as Israel, but they still can't stop everything. If you demand perfection, you're going to be disappointed. That was my point.
Israel is a different kettle of fish. Israel will not have, nor will it deserve, security until it stops screwing over the Palestinians.
Ok, I guess you really do advocate racial profiling.
No, I really do recommend you pull your head out, since the point sailed right over your head.
Hint: Most Arabs are not terrorists.
No shit, Sherlock.
Even if you want to profile in your example, what does the owner of a port matter, when nearly all of your longshoremen are US citizens?
The problem is not that an Arab company was taking over control of U.S. ports. The problem is that the Administration didn't know it was happening.
Fortunately for Bush, his Vice President is so much less trusted that the Democratic majority dare not impeach him.
Easy solution: impeach Cheney first, then Bush.
Of course it was preventable. A lot of good that did.
It would have done a lot more good if the Republicans hadn't been screaming that Clinton was "wagging the dog" while they were trying to invent a reason to impeach him. It also would have helped if Bush had negotiated with the Taliban when they offered to hand over Bin Laddin.
Yes, but the sleeper cells came to the US under his watch
Sleeper cells! Oh, the drama!
Or you can be honest, and admit that a government that respects people's privacy is not going to be able to prevent every possible attack. Clinton knew this, and Bush may know this although he doesn't act like it, although he's probably just giving in (or taking advantage of) the impossible task that the public is demanding.
Problem: all the successes we've had fighting terrorism have come from the boring, "pre 911 mindset", Constitution-abiding law enforcement. On the other hand, the Administration has it's Patriot Act, waterboarding, NSA wiretapping, kidnappings, endless detention w/o trial, and yet is too fucking incompetent to know when an Arab company is about to take over administration of the largest ports in the U.S.
President Clinton was using OBL and Al Qaeda as a Wag The Dog...
That bullshit talking point is sooooo 1998. The new bullshit talking point is that 911 was Clinton's fault for not going after OBL hard enough, even though the bullshit talking point three years earlier was that he was "wagging the dog". Get with the times, already.
You don't need to look any further than the testimony - under oath - of President Clinton's Terror Czar Richard Clarke:
Did you read your own link? He's talking about how the tactics were ineffectual, which is a completely different subject from "wagging th dog".
The problem with the pre-9/11 era was that law enforcement should have been able to do the job, but suffered from severe systemic and organizational failures.
No, the real problem was our incompetent President. It was all laid out to him a silver platter in the form of two daily briefs: that Bin Laddin was going to attack the U.S., and that he might use planes to do it. He could have directed the FBI to watch passenger lists. He could have told the FAA to watch out for suspicious activity. He could have told NORAD to come up with a plan to deal with kamikaze 747's. On the day of the attack, he could have ordered fighter jets in the air when he was notified (since he told the FAA to be vigilant) that four planes had disappeared. He could have done all of this in about five minutes.
Instead, he told the person giving the brief "All right. You've covered your ass, now" and sat on his butt reading My Pet Goat while planes were hitting buildings.
Flash forward a few years to Bush's "post 911 mindset". There have been enormous increases in intelligence gathering and law enforcement powers, and yet Bush and his team are too fucking stupid to realize that an Arab country is going to take control over the largest ports in the U.S. until the deal is almost finished.
The next president, Hillary most likely, will use this precedent to run an even more secretive and authoritarian white house.
Not bloody likely. You're forgetting that Republicans and the media have vastly higher standards for Democrats than they do for Republicans. They impeached Bill for getting a blow job, and while Bush has made the worst of Nixon's shenanigans look like Sunday School pranks, they will defend him to the bitter end.
This most important is to head off the situation were the court would have to find an exception allowing it like with portions of the new deal.
But the courts have already smacked down Bush's claimed exception: that the AUFM allows him to do just about anything under the sun.
If I understand it correctly, the president claims the constitution obligates him to do certain things in a time of need (war) which we are in.
No we aren't. The U.S. is not formally in a state of war until Congress declares it, which it has not. So even if Bush is right he's still wrong.
You are right in that SCOTUS is unlikely to step in, as the court has historically preferred to let the President squabble with Congress over such things. Especially when a Contempt of Congress charge has to be pressed by a U.S. States Attorney - who are appointed by the president.
Though Bush was born in Vermont
No he wasn't.
his home state is definitely Texas, which he did win.
His adopted home state, thank you. I would also like to ask Bush to his face if he considers himself an alcoholic. Normally, I wouldn't say it was any of my business, but he saw fit to ask it of Ann Richards when he was running against her.
But that has nothing to do with the parent.
It has everything to do with the parent.
He stated facts about Cuba that has absolutely nothing to do with the US.
The giant "whooshing" noise you heard when you posted your responce was the point sailing right over your head.
No, I don't think you are a liar. You are, however, an asshat engaging in classic right wing misdirection. And don't give me BS about "particulars" when these are BIG issues. Or maybe you'd care to explain to me why Bush, son of a war veteran and former president, a man who did (token) service in the Air Guard, couldn't so much as tell his aids to get on the phone to NORAD or Rumsfield (a two time Secretary of Defense) or Cheney (a former Secretary of Defense) when our nation was under attack. Or why people who have health insurance have to have bake sales to pay for medical bills. Or why health plans will pay $300,000 for a kidney transplant but not the $3,000 per month in anti-rejection drugs.
How does that contradict the fact that Castro is a dictator?
Of course not. He never implied that. What he was showing was the massive double standards the U.S. employs with its foreign relations and 2) that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Duh.
Can someone who agrees that this is flamebait please tell me why they consider it flamebait?
Probably because the U.S. has been very, very friendly with regimes far worse than Castro's when it suits our "national interests". Until the fall of the Soviet Union, we'd back just about any Pol Pot dictator who opposed communism. Not only that, the CIA helped overthrow many a democratically elected leader in a peacefull country that made the grave mistake of voting in a socialist government. Now, we buddy up to anyone who makes a show of lending us a hand in the GWOT, which so far has gone leaps and bounds ahead of the War on Drugs as wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and wrecking hundreds of thousands of lives.
Before Farenheit 9-11, no one ever thought about or discussed 9-11 and the war on terror.
You think so, Sparky? Just how widespread was the media and politcal condemnation of Bush's sitting on his ass for 20 minutes while the nation was under attack?
I'm glad he's going to get everyone to discuss the health care system again too, because I haven't heard anyone talking about it since at least yesterday, maybe even two whole days ago.
No, you haven't heard it. At all. Politicians today are talking about covering the uninsured, but one of the main points of the film isn't so much those without insurance. It's about those who think they have good insurance and find out they are fucked when they are hit with a serious accident or illness and rapidly hit their benefit caps. The two main problems with U.S. health care is the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. And after what happened to the Clintons when they tried pushing universal health care in the 90's, policians are very wary of taking on these two families of 800 lbs gorrillas.
and then see the gross misproportion of the gun deaths in USA vs the rest of the civilized world.
Okay, go for it: who has more per capita gun crimes than the United States in the civilized world. Three words sum up most of MM's critics: pot kettle black.
I'm sorry, but the only states where that kind of things happened, were either fascist or communist totalitarian regimes.
But of course we are under a fascist regime. Rampant jingoism? Check. Demonizes anyone who doesn't share the same ideology? Check. Put's party before country? Check, check. Acts above the law? Check, check, check and check.
Yawn. Notice how this chestnut doesn't get drug out for Republicans born in liberal states; Bush didn't win his home state either. Besides, if they had bothered to recount all the votes in Florida, he would have won that state and taken the eletion.
The U.S. has been bosoum buddies with far worse regimes, and has done some fairly nasty shit on it's own, just ask Jose Padilla.
Ah, the usual argument by annecdote. The problem is that the U.S. has far more per capita annecdotes than Sweden does. The problem in this country isn't government involvement, its that we place a higher priority on middlemen being able to make hundreds of billions per year than in the health of our citizens.
One of the main points of the movie isn't people without insurance - it's people with insurance who think they are covered but find out they are screwed when they hit their benefit caps when hit with a serious illness/accident. Start paying attention to the numbers of charity events in your area ment to help people pay medical bills. Start paying attention to policies that pay for organ transplants but not the $3,000 a month people have to spend on the anti-rejection drugs.
The state of the American health care system is atrocious, and anyone who defends it is either ignorant, a crazy Libertarian, or a tool for the insurance industry.
Ah, the last gasp of a an idiot who's asinine arguments have all been shot down: engage in some rhetorical masturbation and declare victory. You are a tool and a fool, your talking points are nonsense, I award you no points and may god have mercy on your soul. Now go rent some Barney tapes to keep that fearsome intellect of your busy, ok?
Apple have done PLENTY in their existance to lock their users into their products. PLENTY
Such as?
hmmm....Tipper Gore....PMRC.....Ring any bells?
Hmm, reading comprehension?