I find that to be a very charitable interpretation of events. I don't generally feel like giving politicians much benefit of the doubt when I see that their actions don't match up with their words.
That's very charitable to Obama. He certainly didn't make use of his house and senate majority through 2010 and Senate majority through 2014. It seems pretty disingenuous to me to suggest that while President Obama could completely reform healthcare (and accomplish most of the rest of his agenda), that he couldn't close one prison.
That might well be true -- OTOH, anecdotes like Bush dismissing the "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" briefer with a simple "All right. You've covered your ass, now." [washingtonpost.com] don't look too flattering in retrospect. But sure, maybe they did all they could reasonably be expected to do, and just got unlucky.
Bereft of context, I don't know how to take that. One thing to mention is that CIA analysis pieces do not say "XYZ is going to happen." They say "There is a possibility of X, a possibility of Y, a small possibility Z, a great possibility of A, and a very small chance of B." I was an analyst at CIA and I found the vast majority of analysis reports utterly useless. The DO does useful stuff, the technical divisions do useful stuff, but I would close the entire analytical branch. It's certainly possible that things went down exactly as above, but I don't know.
The idea that the decision to invade Iraq was an "honest mistake" has been pretty well discredited. The Bush Administration (and in particular the Vice President) were deliberately and willfully "Fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy" [wikipedia.org]. That is, they knew the conclusion and the policy they wanted, and they were perfectly willing to ignore any inconvenient facts that might contradict it, and even make up facts to support it when necessary. In particular, Dick Cheney kept pressuring the CIA for reports that fit his preferred narrative [historycommons.org], until they finally gave him a report that said something close enough to what he wanted it to say. Whether the Executive branch had actually fooled themselves or were "merely" being dishonest to others in service of a preordained policy objective is beside the point -- a competent and serious administration would have remained objective and thoughtful about such a serious matter, and thereby likely would have avoided a catastrophic policy mistake.
My point is not that Iraq was an "honest mistake" to use your term. I DO think it was a mistake and poorly executed, I just think the intent of the administration was not to get al-Qa'ida or Bin Ladin, but rather the more typical neo-con line of removing a cruel dictator to bring in a Democracy to a dangerous dictator. The theory being that democracies don't tend to go to war with each other, tend to be friendly to each other, etc. Plenty of room to debate there without getting into the intelligence aspects, which were deeply flawed.
The first two weeks of all employees at CIA take an orientation course (EOS--entry on service). They teach institutional history, discuss aspects of security, general things about the job, etc. One day was dedicated to intelligence successes and failures. Much of this time was spent specifically on Iraq, and it was presented as both a success and a failure. The success was that CIA did NOT present a link between Saddam and al-Qa'ida, and refused to budge on the point. Political pressure to receive a particular report was specifically mentioned as a constant in the CIA's history, and the success here was that the CIA did _not_ modify their reporting to fit a narrative. The failure was that CIA had source failures (e.g., they got conned) and did report on the existence of nuclear and chemical weapons and weapons programs.
I read the link you presented. I knew one or two of the quoted people. One thing I will say is that the administrators of the CIA (and all government agencies) are political appointees. They come and go with each administration. And, they are always disgruntled when a new administration comes around. The big thing when I was there was not political pressure but rather the diminishing prestige of the CIA ("first amongst equals" in the intelligence community versus unquestioned top dog) and also the increasing militarization of the CIA (meaning former-military leadership bringing military-style administration to the CIA. CIA has always prided itself on being unabashedly a civilian org.).
I remember the argument that the competence of the President doesn't much matter. I gave it a lot more credence back before George W. failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks (he didn't take the threat of terrorism seriously, because the people warning him about it were outgoing Clinton staffers and therefore not to be listened to)... and then after the shit hit the fan, he let his emotions override his judgement and invaded Iraq for no good reason.
Given that I'm, for all intents and purposes, a random AC on the Internet, you have absolutely no reason to believe a word I say. I worked at the CIA for 2 years in the mid-2000s (I hated the job, hated working for the government, and felt we were doing a shit job, so I quit). From what I read, studied, and heard from others, I do not believe a single thing you said (above) is accurate.
I don't particularly want to rehash this argument (I've had it on Slashdot before), but a few random things I will note:
1) There was basically a hiring freeze at the CIA during much of the Clinton administration. When I worked at the CIA there was a huge bubble of employees in their ~50s and a huge bubble in their 20s/low-30s. Very few middle-career employees. The agency was working hard to recruit and rebuild to fix the problem of this "missing generation," but it was widely believed that some prominent intelligence failures from this area were due to this organizational issue.
1a) I'll also note that as a 20-something at the CIA, the 20-somethings were almost uniformly very left-wing, yet this seemed to make no difference when it came to the the morality of what we were doing. I could never understand--some serious cognitive dissonance.
1b) The Intelligence Community absolutely knew 9/11 was coming. They didn't know what or when, but they knew something was happening and they were trying like crazy to find out. Sigint for weeks beforehand was filled with cryptic things like "birthday presents being delivered" and "your cousin will meet his new bride," etc. One colleague (now retired) told me that there was actually a room with a chalkboard and a post board with people trying to tie together the clues (like a scene from a shitty hollywood drama). The 9/11 failure was not due to a lack of effort or stupid 'ole Bush not listening to intelligence.
1c) Even amongst left-wing colleagues, it was widely held that Cheney was one of the most widely informed and knowledgeable people in the country when it came to intel. The presidential briefer had a big job presenting the PDB to the president, but the VP briefer's job was far harder.
2) Nobody believed that Saddam was behind 9/11, but it absolutely was believed (see again, faulty intelligence) that he had chemical weapons and probably nukes. There were a few unreliable sources that the DO put too much credence in. I'm not going to defend the action the invade Iraq because I thought--and think--that it was poorly executed (SEE AGAIN, FAULTY INTELLIGENCE), but the decision was not simply "I'm mad, let's invade Iraq."
3) We'll never know what a President Gore would have done, but he would have done something. President Obama made it a campaign promise to close Gitmo--it's still open. He rose to preeminence on an anti-war platform, and look at the number of drone strikes (another reason I quit--I find drone strikes to be one of the most horrible things the US has ever done) in countries across the world. Look at jingoism against Russia and China. I just don't see a difference between the parties.
We were one of the states that "declined" to create a state exchange and so has a federally-managed exchange. Blue Cross Blue Shield also issues the vast majority of the plans in NC (I don't have the statistics in front of me, but my recollection is 80%+).
Thanks for your perspectives and conversation, incidentally. Much appreciated.
If you want self-interest, he's your guy and you can read all about how he thinks he did it. If he had been the saint of low-income housing, he would be better placed to work with other politcians. But that wasn't his interest.
For comparison's sake, President Obama _did_ work with low-income people (and on housing specifically) as a community organizer when he was in Chicago and at the University of Chicago. I lived in Hyde Park in the mid-2000s, when he was on his meteoric rise, and he was beloved in the neighborhood amongst university and neighborhood folks alike.
President Obama also does not have a reputation for being easy to work with, and he has actually been pretty publicly invective against many of his political adversaries (somewhat unusual for a sitting US president).
For me, it just goes back to my belief that the president really doesn't matter. Maybe I'm jaded or apathetic, or maybe I'm right. I personally hope I'm right!
I would also take just about any bet offered that, if Trump becomes president, life will continue as normal and nothing cataclysmic will happen. WWIII won't happen, businesses won't implode, the economy won't collapse, etc. The several millennia long trend of life getting better just might keep going too!
Leaders of many other countries have been happy to work with Obama. I think they could not allow their own electorate to see them working with Trump. He's already painted himself as the sort of politician Europe has suffered from. Like KaradiÄ or Putin.
Perhaps. I do think it's ironic that today the man who authored "The Art of the Deal" is seen as somebody who would be impossible to work with.
Yes, things got better under Obama. One need only look at employment figures. But for me personally, it's health care. I have a medical issue that has never, in 20 years, had a symptom but made me uninsurable under the old system unless I worked for a big company. I can own my own company and have health care now.
Employment is a macro-trend that I don't give any credit to the President or Congress for having much to do with. For almost the entirety of Bush's presidency, unemployment was very low. I don't give him any particular credit for that either.
I do agree with you that something HAD to be done to make health care accessible. I have my own issues with the Affordable Care act, but it was an absolute necessity to insure access for self-employed, people like you, etc. My company, ~25 employees, just received notice that our premiums would be going up 38% this year. We're scrambling to figure out what to do, but the marketplace is not looking good. I'm afraid we're approaching that "death spiral" that's been bandied about. I'm a free-market type, but I would have rather had single payer than this bastardized system.
Very cool (I mean, ignoring the overtones of WWIII!) about the radio thing--I had never heard of him or that!
When George W. Bush got elected, I took a job at a University in Norway just so that I'd have a place to run. If by some mass brain flatulence Trump gets elected, I'll need to convince Elon Musk to send me first.
With all due respect, and in all seriousness, good for you for having an escape hatch. I wish everybody had that option. I'm the kind of person who hasn't travelled abroad in several years but always makes sure I have my passport ready. I hope it never comes down to that, but I think it's critically important for people to be able to decouple from their countries.
Having said that--did anything _really_ change for the worse for you under Bush? Did anything _really_ get better for you under Obama? I would bet that the vast majority of Americans if they were blocked from hearing national news (ok, so that's probably not really that far from the actual status quo!) would not be able to tell you if things were going to hell due to Republicans or Democrats.
The President just really doesn't matter that much. I'm not even convinced that politicians, other than at either far end of the bell curve, really matter either. The city I live in has had a great urban revival over the past ~12 years. City leaders (Democrats) point to their policies for driving the success. Perhaps they helped, but you also see the same kind of thing all across the county in similarly sized and placed cities.
Even Warren Buffett (Hillary supporter) has said that Trump wouldn't have any negative business consequences for the country.
And people claiming that Trump would start WWIII? Bonkers.
If bombing Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, the Sudan, sending troops to Ukraine, building up forces all around the border of Russia, and provoking China in the south China Sea hasn't caused WWIII, what the hell will it take? You'll notice that both Bush and Obama have been involved in most or all of these actions. Do you think Clinton would be better? I actually think Trump would get us out of places that she would not.
I'm hoping this election cycle results in the GOP splitting in two.
That's what I'm hoping about the Democratic party as well!
I don't know what demographic you're in, but the 20-something urban progressives I see a lot of certainly think their party is at breaking point.
I live in a mid-sized (and fast growing) southern city. Democrats rule the city, Republicans rule the county (and the state). Within the city, the Democrats are split between, IMHO, basically black interest groups, highly-educated white progressives, and a smattering of others. For many years the progressives and black interests lined up perfectly--and they still do to a considerable extent. Over the past decade I've been interested to see how the primary progressive PAC and the primary NAACP-affiliated PAC have begone to endorse entirely different slates for city council, county commissioners, etc. In fact, during the most recent primary cycle, the NAACP-affiliated group had far more endorsements in common with the Republican group (that pulls ~20% of the vote in a good year) than with the progressive slate.
First, it depends on the type of battery. Utility scale you use sodium sulphur, residential scale you use lithium. Both are highly recyclable and will last for more than 10 years. In the case of lithium, most batteries will already have been recycled from cars anyway, so are on at least their second stint.
Is that true (the italicized portion)? I had not heard of that before.
I love it when people (and President Obama is guilty of this too) white knight (and I hate that term) for other people's religions. Guess what, your opinion on what is real Islam is no more reputable or accurate than bin Laden's--both are merely opinions. You do not get to be the arbiter of whether other people are accurately following their religions or not. That's more or less how the Inquisition (and many similar movements across history and across the world) got started, and the end results are nasty.
Woohoo! MBP 3,1 here--2007. Definitely on its last leg though. Ist been dropped so many times that I have to hold the screen together with clamps. SSD and ram upgrades make it a totally viable computer, though.
Sounds good then. Cheers, I do appreciate the conversation (any thread on Slashdot that goes for more than 3-4 messages without resorting to _total_ name calling is a win in my book). I do think it's worth considering that those who disagree with you might not always be racist, hateful people of ill-intent. That kind of judging has always turned me off of the left.
Yup, the submitter had the hyphen in the right place. Maybe there needs to be an article with the title, "Why Learning To Edit Won't Save Your Job."
Being purely pedantic, the character in the original submission was not a hyphen but an em dash ("em" because in traditional typography it's a dash that is as wide as a capital M). Em dashes are typically used to separate a clause from the surrounding sentence—somewhat like a parenthetical clause. En dashes are shorter and are most typically used in number ranges like in the years 1981–2005. A hyphen is shorter yet and primarily used within hyphenated words, as in the archaic sentence "I sent an e-mail to-day."
It wouldn't surprise me if the slashdot software strips out em dashes and other "special" characters in submissions.
The voters in the first article may be interested to learn the discrimination has an Anglo-Saxon cultural basis, but I doubt they would find solace in that in any case.
Some people want to find discrimination or outrage everywhere. I read the article you linked and I honestly find not a thing to be outraged about. Do you?
Once again, the subject is not ballot-box stuffing or similar attempts at mass fraud. Voter fraud is when someone impersonates another person at the poll or tricks authorities when registering to vote; That is salient to the subject of voter IDs and immigrants.
Here is a link [wikipedia.org] about written tests in US voting history. Also, more recently poll taxes. [wikipedia.org] As with Tamany Hall, this is grade school history.
Yes, history that happened well over 50 years ago. History that also, despite your protestations, did involve people voting as other people. You might as well be saying how you think we're about to start interning Japanese again. Times have changed, people have changed, situations have changed, the population has changed, and the country as a whole has changed. Jim Crow isn't coming back. Drawing a false analogy between verifying voter identity (that again, the vast majority of people already have, and are available without cost from almost all states) and, e.g., literacy tests, is ludicrous.
That judicialwatch link is an opinion piece from nine years ago that doesn't even give a rough idea of scale beyond weasel words like "many". It has one broken link to a newspaper, and several other links that are activist groups (just as judicialwatch is, itself, a conservative activist group). IOW, they don't feel confident enough to link directly to research and they conveniently left statistics out. You took accepted their opinion as true on their authority. The other articles you think you saw were probably about accusations that didn't pan out -- see the studies I referenced via washingtonpost. [washingtonpost.com]
Liberals write against voter ID, conservatives write for voter ID. No surprise there.
That's interesting about Mexico, though it would be ironic to hold them up as a good example when their people are fleeing. As for "pot-kettle", false equivalence canards got old in the 90s. They don't hold water in most places. Not only have I looked at your sources more closely than you have looked at mine, I have backed-up my concerns; you haven't.
Interesting that you hadn't heard about Mexico's voter ID laws (wait till you hear what they do with illegal immigrants)--it's been a pro-voter ID POV talking point for, I don't know, a decade? Here's an article that goes in more depth (http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2015/aug/26/sid-miller/sid-miller-says-voters-mexico-must-have-tamper-pro/ -- hat tip, it does mention some US statistics you'll enjoy). As with everything else in the Internet echo chamber. Liberals write against showing an ID to vote (but yes to showing an ID
So you think there are Mexicans plotting to walk into polling stations so they can impersonate Americans? Or that there are enough of these people willing to risk arrest and deportation to make a significant difference?
As I've said before, I think absentee voting is a bigger area of fraud, but yes, what you just said clearly happens, and I doubt we know the true extent of it. Certainly, you can do study after study, but with no means to verify identity, it's impossible to know the extent. After googling "illegal voting in the united states (ok, DuckDuckGoing it), first hit is https://www.judicialwatch.org/.... I've seen similar articles about my current state--North Carolina--and in Illinois and Virginia where I used to live.
If you ignore the history of voting fraud in places like Chicago, or the organized (frequently through illicit means and threat of force or violence) control of marginalized peoples by Tamany hall, then you're ignoring a lot of important history.
I live in North Carolina. My first name is an old family name of Irish origin that is neither easy to spell nor pronounce. I have to spell my name each and every single time I vote. I have done this ever since I turned 18. I am not offended! Additionally, this story doesn't make much sense, as I have never seen a voting place in North Carolina where the volunteer staff had to type in any names into a computer. In fact, I think this 2016 election was the first one I remember where the staff actually had computers available. They have the voter rolls in front of them in printed form. Possibly this was some early voting site or something like that, but that part doesn't jibe with my experiences at all. AFAIK, polling places are standardized across the state. Optical scan FTW.
Next they'll be issuing written tests to screen voters, and jacking up the fees and conditions for holding an ID. And of course, it not like any of this has anything to do with the darker periods of electoral history. Just like racism itself, that old stuff happened on another planet and people suggesting its a real problem are 'bonkers' and there is just no way to discuss the issue with data [washingtonpost.com] so ridicule will do instead. LOL
Once again, you start talking about paranoid racists, and I then off you go here--pot, kettle, black. (Not the racist part, the paranoid part.)
Voters should be able to prove who they are with a visual ID. That's it. Every state I know of that has IDs goes to great lengths to make free IDs available to those who don't have them (and that is, of course, a very small percentage of the population to begin with). Where in your paranoia do you seem these requests for written tests, etc. showing up?
BTW, I lurrrrve the assertion that elections are too neck-and-neck to allow even one foreigner to besmirch our lovely democracy... because the rights holders in this debate ARE US citizens and the flippant "anti-populist" sentiments about "oh some long lines, polls closed on them, so what boohoo losers -- lets move on" are whats completely insane by comparison. When conservative douchebags want to turn over a new leaf on this issue then maybe they'll warrant more respect.
That's an interesting assertion to talk about. Where did you hear that? Straw men are such fun things to tilt at it!
I will absolutely agree that when you have no way to verify identity, violations are hard to catch.
The rest of your comment I find bonkers--and specifically, totally ignorant of American history.
It's nice that people who have a lot to lose (illegal immigrants in your example) don't break the law. Only a paranoid fantasy of the privileged who cannot understand what it's like? Pshaw. I read your comment as a case of the pot calling the kettle black...
Well that's even funnier... I live in a working class town and they yank you from the voter rolls as soon as you fail to return their annual census.
Clearly a class-based conspiracy. I've no doubt that if you go to the wealthy town next door they of course don't have to go through any such indignities.
You know what's even funnier, Beavis? When you check in to vote in-person they cross your name off a list for that polling date. No ID poll taxes or sudden spelling tests for the brown-skinned required!
What's turn out in an average municipal election--15-20%? National? 30%? Presidential year? 40-50%? A few votes can swing many of these elections, and with 60-70% of the electorate NOT voting, how easy is it to find someone who hasn't voted in 20 years and request absentee ballot / vote in person / etc. Plus there's registering people who are not eligible to vote, absentee fraud, etc.
Really, the biggest shame to me is that many elections come down to whichever side has more money to marshall their get out the vote efforts. Seems to me a VERY thin line between promoting accessible voting and allowing oligarchs with money to decide an election.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does Condi matter?
By the what metric and where?
dinosaur porn (banned on Amazon!)
What about the Hugo-nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion?
https://www.amazon.com/Space-R...
Or This American Butt Hosted By Ira Ass (apparently Ira is a stegosaurus)
https://www.amazon.com/This-Am...
They seemed to have slipped past the censors. Maybe it's just cis-heteronormative dinosaur porn that's been banned?
I find that to be a very charitable interpretation of events. I don't generally feel like giving politicians much benefit of the doubt when I see that their actions don't match up with their words.
I remember a piece I heard on NPR a few years back with some choice quotes about the effort that Obama actually put into closing Gitmo (executive orders are easy, after all), and I actually managed to find online: ahref=http://www.npr.org/2013/01/23/169922171/obamas-promise-to-close-guantanamo-prison-falls-shortrel=url2html-19326http://www.npr.org/2013/01/23/...>
That's very charitable to Obama. He certainly didn't make use of his house and senate majority through 2010 and Senate majority through 2014. It seems pretty disingenuous to me to suggest that while President Obama could completely reform healthcare (and accomplish most of the rest of his agenda), that he couldn't close one prison.
That might well be true -- OTOH, anecdotes like Bush dismissing the "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" briefer with a simple "All right. You've covered your ass, now." [washingtonpost.com] don't look too flattering in retrospect. But sure, maybe they did all they could reasonably be expected to do, and just got unlucky.
Bereft of context, I don't know how to take that. One thing to mention is that CIA analysis pieces do not say "XYZ is going to happen." They say "There is a possibility of X, a possibility of Y, a small possibility Z, a great possibility of A, and a very small chance of B." I was an analyst at CIA and I found the vast majority of analysis reports utterly useless. The DO does useful stuff, the technical divisions do useful stuff, but I would close the entire analytical branch. It's certainly possible that things went down exactly as above, but I don't know.
The idea that the decision to invade Iraq was an "honest mistake" has been pretty well discredited. The Bush Administration (and in particular the Vice President) were deliberately and willfully "Fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy" [wikipedia.org]. That is, they knew the conclusion and the policy they wanted, and they were perfectly willing to ignore any inconvenient facts that might contradict it, and even make up facts to support it when necessary. In particular, Dick Cheney kept pressuring the CIA for reports that fit his preferred narrative [historycommons.org], until they finally gave him a report that said something close enough to what he wanted it to say. Whether the Executive branch had actually fooled themselves or were "merely" being dishonest to others in service of a preordained policy objective is beside the point -- a competent and serious administration would have remained objective and thoughtful about such a serious matter, and thereby likely would have avoided a catastrophic policy mistake.
My point is not that Iraq was an "honest mistake" to use your term. I DO think it was a mistake and poorly executed, I just think the intent of the administration was not to get al-Qa'ida or Bin Ladin, but rather the more typical neo-con line of removing a cruel dictator to bring in a Democracy to a dangerous dictator. The theory being that democracies don't tend to go to war with each other, tend to be friendly to each other, etc. Plenty of room to debate there without getting into the intelligence aspects, which were deeply flawed.
The first two weeks of all employees at CIA take an orientation course (EOS--entry on service). They teach institutional history, discuss aspects of security, general things about the job, etc. One day was dedicated to intelligence successes and failures. Much of this time was spent specifically on Iraq, and it was presented as both a success and a failure. The success was that CIA did NOT present a link between Saddam and al-Qa'ida, and refused to budge on the point. Political pressure to receive a particular report was specifically mentioned as a constant in the CIA's history, and the success here was that the CIA did _not_ modify their reporting to fit a narrative. The failure was that CIA had source failures (e.g., they got conned) and did report on the existence of nuclear and chemical weapons and weapons programs.
I read the link you presented. I knew one or two of the quoted people. One thing I will say is that the administrators of the CIA (and all government agencies) are political appointees. They come and go with each administration. And, they are always disgruntled when a new administration comes around. The big thing when I was there was not political pressure but rather the diminishing prestige of the CIA ("first amongst equals" in the intelligence community versus unquestioned top dog) and also the increasing militarization of the CIA (meaning former-military leadership bringing military-style administration to the CIA. CIA has always prided itself on being unabashedly a civilian org.).
I remember the argument that the competence of the President doesn't much matter. I gave it a lot more credence back before George W. failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks (he didn't take the threat of terrorism seriously, because the people warning him about it were outgoing Clinton staffers and therefore not to be listened to)... and then after the shit hit the fan, he let his emotions override his judgement and invaded Iraq for no good reason.
Given that I'm, for all intents and purposes, a random AC on the Internet, you have absolutely no reason to believe a word I say. I worked at the CIA for 2 years in the mid-2000s (I hated the job, hated working for the government, and felt we were doing a shit job, so I quit). From what I read, studied, and heard from others, I do not believe a single thing you said (above) is accurate.
I don't particularly want to rehash this argument (I've had it on Slashdot before), but a few random things I will note:
1) There was basically a hiring freeze at the CIA during much of the Clinton administration. When I worked at the CIA there was a huge bubble of employees in their ~50s and a huge bubble in their 20s/low-30s. Very few middle-career employees. The agency was working hard to recruit and rebuild to fix the problem of this "missing generation," but it was widely believed that some prominent intelligence failures from this area were due to this organizational issue.
1a) I'll also note that as a 20-something at the CIA, the 20-somethings were almost uniformly very left-wing, yet this seemed to make no difference when it came to the the morality of what we were doing. I could never understand--some serious cognitive dissonance.
1b) The Intelligence Community absolutely knew 9/11 was coming. They didn't know what or when, but they knew something was happening and they were trying like crazy to find out. Sigint for weeks beforehand was filled with cryptic things like "birthday presents being delivered" and "your cousin will meet his new bride," etc. One colleague (now retired) told me that there was actually a room with a chalkboard and a post board with people trying to tie together the clues (like a scene from a shitty hollywood drama). The 9/11 failure was not due to a lack of effort or stupid 'ole Bush not listening to intelligence.
1c) Even amongst left-wing colleagues, it was widely held that Cheney was one of the most widely informed and knowledgeable people in the country when it came to intel. The presidential briefer had a big job presenting the PDB to the president, but the VP briefer's job was far harder.
2) Nobody believed that Saddam was behind 9/11, but it absolutely was believed (see again, faulty intelligence) that he had chemical weapons and probably nukes. There were a few unreliable sources that the DO put too much credence in. I'm not going to defend the action the invade Iraq because I thought--and think--that it was poorly executed (SEE AGAIN, FAULTY INTELLIGENCE), but the decision was not simply "I'm mad, let's invade Iraq."
3) We'll never know what a President Gore would have done, but he would have done something. President Obama made it a campaign promise to close Gitmo--it's still open. He rose to preeminence on an anti-war platform, and look at the number of drone strikes (another reason I quit--I find drone strikes to be one of the most horrible things the US has ever done) in countries across the world. Look at jingoism against Russia and China. I just don't see a difference between the parties.
We were one of the states that "declined" to create a state exchange and so has a federally-managed exchange. Blue Cross Blue Shield also issues the vast majority of the plans in NC (I don't have the statistics in front of me, but my recollection is 80%+).
Thanks for your perspectives and conversation, incidentally. Much appreciated.
If you want self-interest, he's your guy and you can read all about how he thinks he did it. If he had been the saint of low-income housing, he would be better placed to work with other politcians. But that wasn't his interest.
For comparison's sake, President Obama _did_ work with low-income people (and on housing specifically) as a community organizer when he was in Chicago and at the University of Chicago. I lived in Hyde Park in the mid-2000s, when he was on his meteoric rise, and he was beloved in the neighborhood amongst university and neighborhood folks alike.
President Obama also does not have a reputation for being easy to work with, and he has actually been pretty publicly invective against many of his political adversaries (somewhat unusual for a sitting US president).
For me, it just goes back to my belief that the president really doesn't matter. Maybe I'm jaded or apathetic, or maybe I'm right. I personally hope I'm right!
I would also take just about any bet offered that, if Trump becomes president, life will continue as normal and nothing cataclysmic will happen. WWIII won't happen, businesses won't implode, the economy won't collapse, etc. The several millennia long trend of life getting better just might keep going too!
Leaders of many other countries have been happy to work with Obama. I think they could not allow their own electorate to see them working with Trump. He's already painted himself as the sort of politician Europe has suffered from. Like KaradiÄ or Putin.
Perhaps. I do think it's ironic that today the man who authored "The Art of the Deal" is seen as somebody who would be impossible to work with.
Yes, things got better under Obama. One need only look at employment figures. But for me personally, it's health care. I have a medical issue that has never, in 20 years, had a symptom but made me uninsurable under the old system unless I worked for a big company. I can own my own company and have health care now.
Employment is a macro-trend that I don't give any credit to the President or Congress for having much to do with. For almost the entirety of Bush's presidency, unemployment was very low. I don't give him any particular credit for that either.
I do agree with you that something HAD to be done to make health care accessible. I have my own issues with the Affordable Care act, but it was an absolute necessity to insure access for self-employed, people like you, etc. My company, ~25 employees, just received notice that our premiums would be going up 38% this year. We're scrambling to figure out what to do, but the marketplace is not looking good. I'm afraid we're approaching that "death spiral" that's been bandied about. I'm a free-market type, but I would have rather had single payer than this bastardized system.
Very cool (I mean, ignoring the overtones of WWIII!) about the radio thing--I had never heard of him or that!
When George W. Bush got elected, I took a job at a University in Norway just so that I'd have a place to run. If by some mass brain flatulence Trump gets elected, I'll need to convince Elon Musk to send me first.
With all due respect, and in all seriousness, good for you for having an escape hatch. I wish everybody had that option. I'm the kind of person who hasn't travelled abroad in several years but always makes sure I have my passport ready. I hope it never comes down to that, but I think it's critically important for people to be able to decouple from their countries.
Having said that--did anything _really_ change for the worse for you under Bush? Did anything _really_ get better for you under Obama? I would bet that the vast majority of Americans if they were blocked from hearing national news (ok, so that's probably not really that far from the actual status quo!) would not be able to tell you if things were going to hell due to Republicans or Democrats.
The President just really doesn't matter that much. I'm not even convinced that politicians, other than at either far end of the bell curve, really matter either. The city I live in has had a great urban revival over the past ~12 years. City leaders (Democrats) point to their policies for driving the success. Perhaps they helped, but you also see the same kind of thing all across the county in similarly sized and placed cities.
Even Warren Buffett (Hillary supporter) has said that Trump wouldn't have any negative business consequences for the country.
And people claiming that Trump would start WWIII? Bonkers.
If bombing Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, the Sudan, sending troops to Ukraine, building up forces all around the border of Russia, and provoking China in the south China Sea hasn't caused WWIII, what the hell will it take? You'll notice that both Bush and Obama have been involved in most or all of these actions. Do you think Clinton would be better? I actually think Trump would get us out of places that she would not.
I'm hoping this election cycle results in the GOP splitting in two.
That's what I'm hoping about the Democratic party as well!
I don't know what demographic you're in, but the 20-something urban progressives I see a lot of certainly think their party is at breaking point.
I live in a mid-sized (and fast growing) southern city. Democrats rule the city, Republicans rule the county (and the state). Within the city, the Democrats are split between, IMHO, basically black interest groups, highly-educated white progressives, and a smattering of others. For many years the progressives and black interests lined up perfectly--and they still do to a considerable extent. Over the past decade I've been interested to see how the primary progressive PAC and the primary NAACP-affiliated PAC have begone to endorse entirely different slates for city council, county commissioners, etc. In fact, during the most recent primary cycle, the NAACP-affiliated group had far more endorsements in common with the Republican group (that pulls ~20% of the vote in a good year) than with the progressive slate.
First, it depends on the type of battery. Utility scale you use sodium sulphur, residential scale you use lithium. Both are highly recyclable and will last for more than 10 years. In the case of lithium, most batteries will already have been recycled from cars anyway, so are on at least their second stint.
Is that true (the italicized portion)? I had not heard of that before.
I love it when people (and President Obama is guilty of this too) white knight (and I hate that term) for other people's religions. Guess what, your opinion on what is real Islam is no more reputable or accurate than bin Laden's--both are merely opinions. You do not get to be the arbiter of whether other people are accurately following their religions or not. That's more or less how the Inquisition (and many similar movements across history and across the world) got started, and the end results are nasty.
Woohoo! MBP 3,1 here--2007. Definitely on its last leg though. Ist been dropped so many times that I have to hold the screen together with clamps. SSD and ram upgrades make it a totally viable computer, though.
Random, but I saw your username and thought of this article I saw today -- http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/15/national/mashiki-quake-survivors-describe-terror-homes-collapsed/
Any connection to you?
If anything and anyone has a 'right to be forgotten' on the Internet, it's this poor 85 year old woman in Kansas.
Seriously! The poor woman has gained 3 years just since I read the article!
That explains a lot ;-)
Sounds good then. Cheers, I do appreciate the conversation (any thread on Slashdot that goes for more than 3-4 messages without resorting to _total_ name calling is a win in my book). I do think it's worth considering that those who disagree with you might not always be racist, hateful people of ill-intent. That kind of judging has always turned me off of the left.
Remember Sue... [tumblr.com]
Beautiful site. Best, -M
Yup, the submitter had the hyphen in the right place. Maybe there needs to be an article with the title, "Why Learning To Edit Won't Save Your Job."
Being purely pedantic, the character in the original submission was not a hyphen but an em dash ("em" because in traditional typography it's a dash that is as wide as a capital M). Em dashes are typically used to separate a clause from the surrounding sentence—somewhat like a parenthetical clause. En dashes are shorter and are most typically used in number ranges like in the years 1981–2005. A hyphen is shorter yet and primarily used within hyphenated words, as in the archaic sentence "I sent an e-mail to-day."
It wouldn't surprise me if the slashdot software strips out em dashes and other "special" characters in submissions.
The voters in the first article may be interested to learn the discrimination has an Anglo-Saxon cultural basis, but I doubt they would find solace in that in any case.
Some people want to find discrimination or outrage everywhere. I read the article you linked and I honestly find not a thing to be outraged about. Do you?
Once again, the subject is not ballot-box stuffing or similar attempts at mass fraud. Voter fraud is when someone impersonates another person at the poll or tricks authorities when registering to vote; That is salient to the subject of voter IDs and immigrants.
Here is a link [wikipedia.org] about written tests in US voting history. Also, more recently poll taxes. [wikipedia.org] As with Tamany Hall, this is grade school history.
Yes, history that happened well over 50 years ago. History that also, despite your protestations, did involve people voting as other people. You might as well be saying how you think we're about to start interning Japanese again. Times have changed, people have changed, situations have changed, the population has changed, and the country as a whole has changed. Jim Crow isn't coming back. Drawing a false analogy between verifying voter identity (that again, the vast majority of people already have, and are available without cost from almost all states) and, e.g., literacy tests, is ludicrous.
That judicialwatch link is an opinion piece from nine years ago that doesn't even give a rough idea of scale beyond weasel words like "many". It has one broken link to a newspaper, and several other links that are activist groups (just as judicialwatch is, itself, a conservative activist group). IOW, they don't feel confident enough to link directly to research and they conveniently left statistics out. You took accepted their opinion as true on their authority. The other articles you think you saw were probably about accusations that didn't pan out -- see the studies I referenced via washingtonpost. [washingtonpost.com]
Liberals write against voter ID, conservatives write for voter ID. No surprise there.
Add-on to turn broken links into Archive links is very handy. Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20070616203147/http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-votefraud_10tex.ART.State.Edition1.4454f8d.html
Here's an NC article about the complexities of voter rolls, IDs, and immigrants:
http://www.journalnow.com/news/elections/state/dmv-search-of-records-turns-up-ineligible-n-c-voters/article_f4ecc2ae-5981-11e4-9f35-0017a43b2370.html
That's interesting about Mexico, though it would be ironic to hold them up as a good example when their people are fleeing. As for "pot-kettle", false equivalence canards got old in the 90s. They don't hold water in most places. Not only have I looked at your sources more closely than you have looked at mine, I have backed-up my concerns; you haven't.
Interesting that you hadn't heard about Mexico's voter ID laws (wait till you hear what they do with illegal immigrants)--it's been a pro-voter ID POV talking point for, I don't know, a decade? Here's an article that goes in more depth (http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2015/aug/26/sid-miller/sid-miller-says-voters-mexico-must-have-tamper-pro/ -- hat tip, it does mention some US statistics you'll enjoy). As with everything else in the Internet echo chamber. Liberals write against showing an ID to vote (but yes to showing an ID
So you think there are Mexicans plotting to walk into polling stations so they can impersonate Americans? Or that there are enough of these people willing to risk arrest and deportation to make a significant difference?
As I've said before, I think absentee voting is a bigger area of fraud, but yes, what you just said clearly happens, and I doubt we know the true extent of it. Certainly, you can do study after study, but with no means to verify identity, it's impossible to know the extent. After googling "illegal voting in the united states (ok, DuckDuckGoing it), first hit is https://www.judicialwatch.org/.... I've seen similar articles about my current state--North Carolina--and in Illinois and Virginia where I used to live.
If you ignore the history of voting fraud in places like Chicago, or the organized (frequently through illicit means and threat of force or violence) control of marginalized peoples by Tamany hall, then you're ignoring a lot of important history.
Speaking of poll paranoia, its usually racist: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/0... [rawstory.com]
I live in North Carolina. My first name is an old family name of Irish origin that is neither easy to spell nor pronounce. I have to spell my name each and every single time I vote. I have done this ever since I turned 18. I am not offended! Additionally, this story doesn't make much sense, as I have never seen a voting place in North Carolina where the volunteer staff had to type in any names into a computer. In fact, I think this 2016 election was the first one I remember where the staff actually had computers available. They have the voter rolls in front of them in printed form. Possibly this was some early voting site or something like that, but that part doesn't jibe with my experiences at all. AFAIK, polling places are standardized across the state. Optical scan FTW.
Next they'll be issuing written tests to screen voters, and jacking up the fees and conditions for holding an ID. And of course, it not like any of this has anything to do with the darker periods of electoral history. Just like racism itself, that old stuff happened on another planet and people suggesting its a real problem are 'bonkers' and there is just no way to discuss the issue with data [washingtonpost.com] so ridicule will do instead. LOL
Once again, you start talking about paranoid racists, and I then off you go here--pot, kettle, black. (Not the racist part, the paranoid part.)
Voters should be able to prove who they are with a visual ID. That's it. Every state I know of that has IDs goes to great lengths to make free IDs available to those who don't have them (and that is, of course, a very small percentage of the population to begin with). Where in your paranoia do you seem these requests for written tests, etc. showing up?
BTW, I lurrrrve the assertion that elections are too neck-and-neck to allow even one foreigner to besmirch our lovely democracy... because the rights holders in this debate ARE US citizens and the flippant "anti-populist" sentiments about "oh some long lines, polls closed on them, so what boohoo losers -- lets move on" are whats completely insane by comparison. When conservative douchebags want to turn over a new leaf on this issue then maybe they'll warrant more respect.
That's an interesting assertion to talk about. Where did you hear that? Straw men are such fun things to tilt at it!
I will absolutely agree that when you have no way to verify identity, violations are hard to catch.
The rest of your comment I find bonkers--and specifically, totally ignorant of American history.
It's nice that people who have a lot to lose (illegal immigrants in your example) don't break the law. Only a paranoid fantasy of the privileged who cannot understand what it's like? Pshaw. I read your comment as a case of the pot calling the kettle black...
Well that's even funnier... I live in a working class town and they yank you from the voter rolls as soon as you fail to return their annual census.
Clearly a class-based conspiracy. I've no doubt that if you go to the wealthy town next door they of course don't have to go through any such indignities.
You know what's even funnier, Beavis? When you check in to vote in-person they cross your name off a list for that polling date. No ID poll taxes or sudden spelling tests for the brown-skinned required!
What's turn out in an average municipal election--15-20%? National? 30%? Presidential year? 40-50%? A few votes can swing many of these elections, and with 60-70% of the electorate NOT voting, how easy is it to find someone who hasn't voted in 20 years and request absentee ballot / vote in person / etc. Plus there's registering people who are not eligible to vote, absentee fraud, etc.
Really, the biggest shame to me is that many elections come down to whichever side has more money to marshall their get out the vote efforts. Seems to me a VERY thin line between promoting accessible voting and allowing oligarchs with money to decide an election.