From Wikipedia: Osama bin Laden's name can be transliterated in several ways. The form used here, Osama bin Laden, is used by most English-language mass media, including CNN and the BBC. The FBI and Fox News use Usama bin Laden, often abbreviated to UBL (favored by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld). Less common renderings include Ussamah Bin Ladin and Oussama Ben Laden (used in French-language mass media). The latter part of the name can also be found as Binladen or Binladin. Officials at the United States Department of Defense encourage the now more commonly used "Osama" transliteration when his name became associated with the September 11th attacks in order to avoid confusion with U.S.A.M.A., the United States Army Medical Association.
Strictly speaking, under the Arabic naming convention, it is incorrect to use "bin Laden" as though it were a Western surname. His full name means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of `Awad, son of Laden." However, the bin Laden family (or "Binladin," as they prefer to be known) generally use the name as a surname, in the Western style. The family company is known as the Binladin Brothers for Contracting and Industry and is one of the largest corporations in Saudi Arabia. For this reason, although the Arabic convention would be to refer to him either as "Osama" or "Osama bin Laden," using "bin Laden" is in accordance with the family's own usage of the name and is the near-universal convention in Western references to him.
Bin Laden has several aliases and nicknames, including the Prince, the Emir, Abu Abdallah, Mujahid Shayekh, Hajj, and the Director.
Obviously your last line doesn't even warrent a response.
There is a dichotomy to this view that is important.
Liberals = All men are created equal and must stay equal. Conservitives = All men should have equal opportunities. Lbertarianism = All men are equal if government gets out of their way
My german history professor traced a lot of this back to the various wars that occured while Germany was fragmented and was a plaything of France. It became obvious to the german people that they needed to organize and become stronger.
As a historian, trying to clasify people according to genetics or prejudices is useless. While the "Great Man" theory is a simplification, the ability of a person to change a life, a civilization and world history irregardless of how/where they were brought up and their enviornment is written all over history.
A couple of notes, Hitler did do sterilization, primarily for political opponents and homosexuals. They (the catholics, the protestants, the homosexuals, etc) died in the camps, but they were not systematically wiped out.
The author goes to extreme ends to try and distance himself from the last people(s) who advocated this philosophy. Namely the Nazis as he himself notes.
Yet for all that, I don't think that he learned the lesson of the Nazi's and their supposed "scientific evidence". Do not ask Religon for "How". Do not ask science for the answer to "Why". To the degree that he explains certain genetic traits, that is fine. But the dangerous application was when the Nazi's used science to justify their hatred of the Jews. This could easily go the same way.
More to the point, I don't believe that genetics are destiny any more then I believe that Demographics are Destiny. Science may point out new characteristics and new theories, but that only answers the how, never the why. It may be interesting, but never a reason for segmenting people.
It's a question of scale. I know when my neighboor leaves to go to work. That doesn't tell me if Saddam had WMD. America needs to develop it's human intellegence. Not's it's sigint.
Frankly, that's BS. Go pick up a real book on Bin Ladin (I recommend "The Osama Bin Ladin I Know" by Peter Bergan who is anything but a fan of the current administration, has met Bin Ladin, and who has been pointing out the danger from Jihadists since the early 90s). Outside of one trip to Europe (and allegations of one trip to the United States -- which Bin Ladin denies) Bin Ladin was isolated and indoctinated into the Wahabist point of view at a extremly young age.
I have no idea where your getting your facts, but they don't resemble reality much. Even at a early age Bin Ladin was estranged from the west. Unlike most of his sibilings he refused to be educated in the west, left at a early age for Afghanistan, refused to work with moderates inside of Afghanistan, returned and opely called for world wide Jihad. His split from the Relief Office exposes that fallacy.
It is a sign of how much he was opposed to the United States that he flipped out as badly as he did when the US came in to liberate Quwait. He didn't polarize against the US, he polarized against the Saudi's that let the dreaded Infidel on their lands. Bin Ladin was pre-disposed against the west at a early age.
You say that it was a political decision but then you admit:
Actually that was a political decision. Read up on the subject, the general consensus is that CIA simply acted on outdated info (we know they HAD WMDs in the past) and the Bush administration took that as face value.
(which by the way, doesn't jive with recent reporting. Saddam bluffed to everyone (including, indirectly us) that he had WMD until 2002 when he finally admited to his officers that the didn't have anything they could use against the US. By that time the die was well cast by 9/11. As recently as 1999, he openly threated to use chemical weapons against the Shiites, and his forces were still taking pot shots at Coalition air forces protecting the Kurds.
The information was outdated and simply wrong, but we didn't have anyone in the core of Saddam's circle who could have told us that. That's the problem with dictatorships, it's much easier to hold secrets, much easier to bluff and threaten. There was a great article yesterday in the NYT about how Saddam's efforts to make sure that he didn't have any stockpiles by revisiting his old weapons labs sites, actually was interpreted by the CIA as Saddam going back to his stockpiles and destroying weapons (which is what would have happened if they actualyl found anything). Saddam does this to make sure there is not any real WMD, we see him returing to his weapons sites, put one and one together and rightly note that he never disclosed these sites in the first place.
I am not trying to whitewash the CIA here, but they clearly were reporting to the president that Mr. Hussein was up to his old tricks. Bush was getting attacked at the time by democrats who believed that he should have magically detected the 9/11 plot. Now his CIA agency is telling him that Hussein is stockpiling weapons, sponsering terrorists (including a assasination attempt on his own father). What do you think he is going to do under thoose circumstances?
The money the US provided Iraq was a pittence compared to what France and the rest of Europe was doing. And frankly, if you can possibly move yourself to the context of the 1980s, where Jihadism just took out Iran and replaced it with a group of dictators sponsering American attacks, which would you pick? The Secularist who came to power under shady terms, but has not yet done anything along the lines of the Kurdish massaceres or the Ayatollahs?
Or would you do what we did and hoped that Iran and Iraq would wipe each other off the map?
As far as how this links, both 9/11 and WMD in Iraq (1/3 the arguments for the war) were both serious intellegence errors that were 30 years in the making. In 9/11 we assumed that our Signals Intellegence could trap terrorists before they could strike, and that terrorists would only use planes as hostage situations. However, the "wall" that was put in place between intellegece and judical means (which is not a simple issue) as well as the overall prosecution of what we now refer to as the War on Terror kept us from reaching a minimum amount of information needed to stop the attacks.
Iraq occured because we completly believed singals intellegence (as well as Mr. Hussein gassing his own people, threating to gas the Shiites in 1999, ignoring the no-fly zone, and the videotape) as well as bad human resources (in this case, people who were determined to make Hussein more of a threat then he actually was -- Shiite's in exile who played up the WMD angle) which led everyone (not just our intellegence sources) down the wrong path.
And at the end of the day that's a problem. It's the same problem that Germany faced in 1944 where their Signals Intellegence reported that there was another whole army in Britian that was going to land at Calais, plus a double agent who kept them from responding appropriatly to the normandy invasion.
Intellegence inevitably has it's week points. At some point you simply have to roll the dice. After 9/11 the spectre of a another suprise attack but this one using weapons from Pakistan, Iraq, Iran or North Korea could no longer be avoided. Remember that two of thoose countries (Iraq and Iran) had sponsered terrorist activites against American interests (in Iraq's case, including a attempted assasiation of a former American president), Pakistan had whitewashed the Taleban and North Korea was building new Scuds for Iraq.
Something had to be done. If you had human intellegence capabilities you would have killed Saddam on the first night. Instead of the Saddam Feyadeen survived the war, and formed the nucleus of the Insurgancy.
Actually, if you read both the 9/11 and the WMD reports, both of them state explicitly that there were _no_ valid sources inside of either Al Qaeda or inside of Iraq. That means they had to fall back to Signals Intellegence. Singals intellegence like the video tape they revealed last week that had Saddam on tape planning on hiding WMD.
Signals Intellegence is important. It was a vital asset in WWII. But for how important enigma was, it wasn't until the Brits turned every agent in London that we really gained the intellegence advantage.
You miss the definition completly. By your own admission they only use public intellegence. They don't have anyone on the payroll. And unless Chemical Ali had his own blog, information that is truely critical, for example that Saddam didn't have WMD, and just was claiming/bluffing that he did to keep Iran, the US and the Shiites at bay would never have been revealed via this mechanism.
I am not dispariging Stratfor, I am pointing out that dependence on this type of signals intellegence is what led us (and the previous administration) to the philosophy of regime change.
The entire point of Stratfor (once again) is that it is primarily Signals Intellegence. Ie, it does a great job consolidating information out there from a variety of sources. The entire failure of both 9/11 and Iraq was the complete failure of Human Intellegence.
Saddam lined up his staff in 1998 and made plans on how to use his "WMDs." He ringed Fallujah in 1999 with soilders in bio-chem suits to threaten them. Signals intellegence told us, Saddam has WMD. Human Intellegence was needed to figure out that no, Saddam was bluffing.
That continues to be the problem with the CIA/NSA. Going to one more SigInt organization will not fix it.
Wow. That is the first time ever I have seen someone buy so completly into StratFor... You are aware that StratFor like the CIA and every other intellegence agency on the face of the planet was convienced that Saddam had WMD? Or that the Iranian's were behind the insurgancy in Iraq? Or that the isrealli's know everything about Iranian WMD?
As far as your George H Bush cheap shot, remember that the CIA was built to take on and stop the Ruskies. Not terrorism. In comparison, foreign power survallience is a hell of a lot easier then tracking down guys that no one has ever heard of who like to blow themselves up where they can kill the maximal number of jews, christians, hindus, women and children.
Frankly, this is a much harder question. And as much as we have heard critics of the administration blast them for every single decision, I have yet to see a workable plan from anyone on how we (as Americans) handle this problem long term other then capitulate or nuke them all.
The above link is just plain wrong. If you bother to do your homework, and look at the recent book "The osama Bin Ladin I know" which was hardly written by a friend of the Bush administration the leading authority on Bin Ladin, Peter Bergan, completly debunks this particular liberal wet dream.
Not that they guy we ended up supporting (because the pakastani's supported him) was that much better, but please remember that Bin Ladin was first and foremost a financer during the Afgani conflict... He was there because he had jihad money in the first place.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled group-think
Am I the only one disturbed by the fact that CNN and others won't run the (rather tame) comics that "sparked" this violence, yet will dredge up 4 year old Abu Gharib pictures and splash them around everywhere? Guess the media doesn't care about inciting violence unless it is against Americans and Britons.
Really? Go check out the Iranian mullahs. Here is a nasty secret. They are filthy rich. Also note that almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were fairly well off, and educated in Europe. For that matter realize that Bin Ladin himself was a very rich man before the US and Saudi's started cutting him off....
A couple of quick notes, a) Al Jazeera.net is not the same as Al Jazeera broadcast. b) Al Jazeera is popular in the states with corrupt govenments because it points thoose out. c) Al Jazeera is not popular in Iraq. Iraqi's often complain that Al Jazeera encourages terrorists.
Actually, quick fact check. The UN did not agree to Kosovo. It was blocked by Russia and China instead of by France. Apparently that makes all the difference.
You may now return to your self imposed exile from reality to whatever fantasy world you like.
(Oh, and by the way, Clinton also bombed the daylight out of the Iraqi's without even informing our allies to say nothing of UN approval)
This is no where near as insane as it sounds. The predective model behind bayes is good for things other then spam filtering. In particular it is good for analyticaly modeling unstructured data. Given that other predictive models (for example, linear regression, logistical regression, neural networks and additive scorecards) require more structured information (the variables must be explicit "which studio supports it, " or "what rating did ebert give it") a purely unstrucuted bayes algorithm that looks at reviews, hypes, or events in the movie might be far more effective.
Nice spin, but the facts that the Democrats controlled the Senate until 2002, that the majority of money pre McCain/Feingold went thru the parties rather then thru the congress kinda negates them.
You are joking right??? You remember the entire Lincoln bedroom thing right?
As far as the indian tribes go, it's the exact same money that is being looked it. Just because it goes to a (D) instead of a (R) doesn't change that the whole thing is shady. All of these guys, Delay and Reid, need to be voted out.
The phrase spin zone came out of Clinton's media war room. You are seeking to crucify only thoose you disagree with politically for doing the same thing (albiet in Bigger numbers) that the democrats did. I say, I don't care. Kick all of them out of office.
K-Street became popular and really pushed the bounds of access for money during the previous administration. Remember the Lincoln Bedroom.
These slimeballs should all be tossed. I don't care if you agree with them or not.
Typical line. Attack the messanger if you don't like the message. Dems too money. Republicans took money. I am not so blinded (unlike others here) to think that anyone should be spared the consequences simply because I agree with their ideology.
Otherwise it's nothing more then just another blank sheet attack.
And by the way, I suggest that you do some real research in places other then RedState and Dailykos. There are several major Dems with massive contributions from Abromoff's clients in exchange for access. That includes Harry Reid and the entire DNC.
That's exactly what is going on here. Abramoff traded access in favor of groups who rotued money around both the political reforms in the 60s and the very poorely implemented McCain/Feingold bills by asking thoose groups to donate to various causes directly without him the loop. The indian casinos were certainly the biggest player in this game.
That money went everywhere in Washington. AFAIK, be it Reid, be it Delay, anyone who took a illegal amount of money should have to explain exactly why it didn't apply.
Slashdot Mirror
Please tell me you are joking right? Please?
From Wikipedia:
Osama bin Laden's name can be transliterated in several ways. The form used here, Osama bin Laden, is used by most English-language mass media, including CNN and the BBC. The FBI and Fox News use Usama bin Laden, often abbreviated to UBL (favored by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld). Less common renderings include Ussamah Bin Ladin and Oussama Ben Laden (used in French-language mass media). The latter part of the name can also be found as Binladen or Binladin. Officials at the United States Department of Defense encourage the now more commonly used "Osama" transliteration when his name became associated with the September 11th attacks in order to avoid confusion with U.S.A.M.A., the United States Army Medical Association.
Strictly speaking, under the Arabic naming convention, it is incorrect to use "bin Laden" as though it were a Western surname. His full name means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of `Awad, son of Laden." However, the bin Laden family (or "Binladin," as they prefer to be known) generally use the name as a surname, in the Western style. The family company is known as the Binladin Brothers for Contracting and Industry and is one of the largest corporations in Saudi Arabia. For this reason, although the Arabic convention would be to refer to him either as "Osama" or "Osama bin Laden," using "bin Laden" is in accordance with the family's own usage of the name and is the near-universal convention in Western references to him.
Bin Laden has several aliases and nicknames, including the Prince, the Emir, Abu Abdallah, Mujahid Shayekh, Hajj, and the Director.
Obviously your last line doesn't even warrent a response.
There is a dichotomy to this view that is important.
Liberals = All men are created equal and must stay equal.
Conservitives = All men should have equal opportunities.
Lbertarianism = All men are equal if government gets out of their way
My german history professor traced a lot of this back to the various wars that occured while Germany was fragmented and was a plaything of France. It became obvious to the german people that they needed to organize and become stronger.
As a historian, trying to clasify people according to genetics or prejudices is useless. While the "Great Man" theory is a simplification, the ability of a person to change a life, a civilization and world history irregardless of how/where they were brought up and their enviornment is written all over history.
A couple of notes, Hitler did do sterilization, primarily for political opponents and homosexuals. They (the catholics, the protestants, the homosexuals, etc) died in the camps, but they were not systematically wiped out.
The author goes to extreme ends to try and distance himself from the last people(s) who advocated this philosophy. Namely the Nazis as he himself notes.
Yet for all that, I don't think that he learned the lesson of the Nazi's and their supposed "scientific evidence". Do not ask Religon for "How". Do not ask science for the answer to "Why". To the degree that he explains certain genetic traits, that is fine. But the dangerous application was when the Nazi's used science to justify their hatred of the Jews. This could easily go the same way.
More to the point, I don't believe that genetics are destiny any more then I believe that Demographics are Destiny. Science may point out new characteristics and new theories, but that only answers the how, never the why. It may be interesting, but never a reason for segmenting people.
It's a question of scale. I know when my neighboor leaves to go to work. That doesn't tell me if Saddam had WMD. America needs to develop it's human intellegence. Not's it's sigint.
Frankly, that's BS. Go pick up a real book on Bin Ladin (I recommend "The Osama Bin Ladin I Know" by Peter Bergan who is anything but a fan of the current administration, has met Bin Ladin, and who has been pointing out the danger from Jihadists since the early 90s). Outside of one trip to Europe (and allegations of one trip to the United States -- which Bin Ladin denies) Bin Ladin was isolated and indoctinated into the Wahabist point of view at a extremly young age.
I have no idea where your getting your facts, but they don't resemble reality much. Even at a early age Bin Ladin was estranged from the west. Unlike most of his sibilings he refused to be educated in the west, left at a early age for Afghanistan, refused to work with moderates inside of Afghanistan, returned and opely called for world wide Jihad. His split from the Relief Office exposes that fallacy.
It is a sign of how much he was opposed to the United States that he flipped out as badly as he did when the US came in to liberate Quwait. He didn't polarize against the US, he polarized against the Saudi's that let the dreaded Infidel on their lands. Bin Ladin was pre-disposed against the west at a early age.
You say that it was a political decision but then you admit:
Actually that was a political decision. Read up on the subject, the general consensus is that CIA simply acted on outdated info (we know they HAD WMDs in the past) and the Bush administration took that as face value.
(which by the way, doesn't jive with recent reporting. Saddam bluffed to everyone (including, indirectly us) that he had WMD until 2002 when he finally admited to his officers that the didn't have anything they could use against the US. By that time the die was well cast by 9/11. As recently as 1999, he openly threated to use chemical weapons against the Shiites, and his forces were still taking pot shots at Coalition air forces protecting the Kurds.
The information was outdated and simply wrong, but we didn't have anyone in the core of Saddam's circle who could have told us that. That's the problem with dictatorships, it's much easier to hold secrets, much easier to bluff and threaten. There was a great article yesterday in the NYT about how Saddam's efforts to make sure that he didn't have any stockpiles by revisiting his old weapons labs sites, actually was interpreted by the CIA as Saddam going back to his stockpiles and destroying weapons (which is what would have happened if they actualyl found anything). Saddam does this to make sure there is not any real WMD, we see him returing to his weapons sites, put one and one together and rightly note that he never disclosed these sites in the first place.
I am not trying to whitewash the CIA here, but they clearly were reporting to the president that Mr. Hussein was up to his old tricks. Bush was getting attacked at the time by democrats who believed that he should have magically detected the 9/11 plot. Now his CIA agency is telling him that Hussein is stockpiling weapons, sponsering terrorists (including a assasination attempt on his own father). What do you think he is going to do under thoose circumstances?
The money the US provided Iraq was a pittence compared to what France and the rest of Europe was doing. And frankly, if you can possibly move yourself to the context of the 1980s, where Jihadism just took out Iran and replaced it with a group of dictators sponsering American attacks, which would you pick? The Secularist who came to power under shady terms, but has not yet done anything along the lines of the Kurdish massaceres or the Ayatollahs?
Or would you do what we did and hoped that Iran and Iraq would wipe each other off the map?
As far as how this links, both 9/11 and WMD in Iraq (1/3 the arguments for the war) were both serious intellegence errors that were 30 years in the making. In 9/11 we assumed that our Signals Intellegence could trap terrorists before they could strike, and that terrorists would only use planes as hostage situations. However, the "wall" that was put in place between intellegece and judical means (which is not a simple issue) as well as the overall prosecution of what we now refer to as the War on Terror kept us from reaching a minimum amount of information needed to stop the attacks.
Iraq occured because we completly believed singals intellegence (as well as Mr. Hussein gassing his own people, threating to gas the Shiites in 1999, ignoring the no-fly zone, and the videotape) as well as bad human resources (in this case, people who were determined to make Hussein more of a threat then he actually was -- Shiite's in exile who played up the WMD angle) which led everyone (not just our intellegence sources) down the wrong path.
And at the end of the day that's a problem. It's the same problem that Germany faced in 1944 where their Signals Intellegence reported that there was another whole army in Britian that was going to land at Calais, plus a double agent who kept them from responding appropriatly to the normandy invasion.
Intellegence inevitably has it's week points. At some point you simply have to roll the dice. After 9/11 the spectre of a another suprise attack but this one using weapons from Pakistan, Iraq, Iran or North Korea could no longer be avoided. Remember that two of thoose countries (Iraq and Iran) had sponsered terrorist activites against American interests (in Iraq's case, including a attempted assasiation of a former American president), Pakistan had whitewashed the Taleban and North Korea was building new Scuds for Iraq.
Something had to be done. If you had human intellegence capabilities you would have killed Saddam on the first night. Instead of the Saddam Feyadeen survived the war, and formed the nucleus of the Insurgancy.
Actually, if you read both the 9/11 and the WMD reports, both of them state explicitly that there were _no_ valid sources inside of either Al Qaeda or inside of Iraq. That means they had to fall back to Signals Intellegence. Singals intellegence like the video tape they revealed last week that had Saddam on tape planning on hiding WMD.
Signals Intellegence is important. It was a vital asset in WWII. But for how important enigma was, it wasn't until the Brits turned every agent in London that we really gained the intellegence advantage.
You miss the definition completly. By your own admission they only use public intellegence. They don't have anyone on the payroll. And unless Chemical Ali had his own blog, information that is truely critical, for example that Saddam didn't have WMD, and just was claiming/bluffing that he did to keep Iran, the US and the Shiites at bay would never have been revealed via this mechanism.
I am not dispariging Stratfor, I am pointing out that dependence on this type of signals intellegence is what led us (and the previous administration) to the philosophy of regime change.
The entire point of Stratfor (once again) is that it is primarily Signals Intellegence. Ie, it does a great job consolidating information out there from a variety of sources. The entire failure of both 9/11 and Iraq was the complete failure of Human Intellegence.
Saddam lined up his staff in 1998 and made plans on how to use his "WMDs." He ringed Fallujah in 1999 with soilders in bio-chem suits to threaten them. Signals intellegence told us, Saddam has WMD. Human Intellegence was needed to figure out that no, Saddam was bluffing.
That continues to be the problem with the CIA/NSA. Going to one more SigInt organization will not fix it.
Wow. That is the first time ever I have seen someone buy so completly into StratFor... You are aware that StratFor like the CIA and every other intellegence agency on the face of the planet was convienced that Saddam had WMD? Or that the Iranian's were behind the insurgancy in Iraq? Or that the isrealli's know everything about Iranian WMD?
As far as your George H Bush cheap shot, remember that the CIA was built to take on and stop the Ruskies. Not terrorism. In comparison, foreign power survallience is a hell of a lot easier then tracking down guys that no one has ever heard of who like to blow themselves up where they can kill the maximal number of jews, christians, hindus, women and children.
Frankly, this is a much harder question. And as much as we have heard critics of the administration blast them for every single decision, I have yet to see a workable plan from anyone on how we (as Americans) handle this problem long term other then capitulate or nuke them all.
The above link is just plain wrong. If you bother to do your homework, and look at the recent book "The osama Bin Ladin I know" which was hardly written by a friend of the Bush administration the leading authority on Bin Ladin, Peter Bergan, completly debunks this particular liberal wet dream.
Not that they guy we ended up supporting (because the pakastani's supported him) was that much better, but please remember that Bin Ladin was first and foremost a financer during the Afgani conflict... He was there because he had jihad money in the first place.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled group-think
nVidia not only believes that it is the way to go, they helped write the spec for the feature.
Am I the only one disturbed by the fact that CNN and others won't run the (rather tame) comics that "sparked" this violence, yet will dredge up 4 year old Abu Gharib pictures and splash them around everywhere? Guess the media doesn't care about inciting violence unless it is against Americans and Britons.
Really? Go check out the Iranian mullahs. Here is a nasty secret. They are filthy rich. Also note that almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were fairly well off, and educated in Europe. For that matter realize that Bin Ladin himself was a very rich man before the US and Saudi's started cutting him off....
A couple of quick notes,
a) Al Jazeera.net is not the same as Al Jazeera broadcast.
b) Al Jazeera is popular in the states with corrupt govenments because it points thoose out.
c) Al Jazeera is not popular in Iraq. Iraqi's often complain that Al Jazeera encourages terrorists.
Actually, quick fact check. The UN did not agree to Kosovo. It was blocked by Russia and China instead of by France. Apparently that makes all the difference.
You may now return to your self imposed exile from reality to whatever fantasy world you like.
(Oh, and by the way, Clinton also bombed the daylight out of the Iraqi's without even informing our allies to say nothing of UN approval)
This is no where near as insane as it sounds. The predective model behind bayes is good for things other then spam filtering. In particular it is good for analyticaly modeling unstructured data. Given that other predictive models (for example, linear regression, logistical regression, neural networks and additive scorecards) require more structured information (the variables must be explicit "which studio supports it, " or "what rating did ebert give it") a purely unstrucuted bayes algorithm that looks at reviews, hypes, or events in the movie might be far more effective.
Nice spin, but the facts that the Democrats controlled the Senate until 2002, that the majority of money pre McCain/Feingold went thru the parties rather then thru the congress kinda negates them.
You are joking right??? You remember the entire Lincoln bedroom thing right?
As far as the indian tribes go, it's the exact same money that is being looked it. Just because it goes to a (D) instead of a (R) doesn't change that the whole thing is shady. All of these guys, Delay and Reid, need to be voted out.
The phrase spin zone came out of Clinton's media war room. You are seeking to crucify only thoose you disagree with politically for doing the same thing (albiet in Bigger numbers) that the democrats did. I say, I don't care. Kick all of them out of office.
K-Street became popular and really pushed the bounds of access for money during the previous administration. Remember the Lincoln Bedroom.
These slimeballs should all be tossed. I don't care if you agree with them or not.
Typical line. Attack the messanger if you don't like the message. Dems too money. Republicans took money. I am not so blinded (unlike others here) to think that anyone should be spared the consequences simply because I agree with their ideology.
Otherwise it's nothing more then just another blank sheet attack.
And by the way, I suggest that you do some real research in places other then RedState and Dailykos. There are several major Dems with massive contributions from Abromoff's clients in exchange for access. That includes Harry Reid and the entire DNC.
That's exactly what is going on here. Abramoff traded access in favor of groups who rotued money around both the political reforms in the 60s and the very poorely implemented McCain/Feingold bills by asking thoose groups to donate to various causes directly without him the loop. The indian casinos were certainly the biggest player in this game.
That money went everywhere in Washington. AFAIK, be it Reid, be it Delay, anyone who took a illegal amount of money should have to explain exactly why it didn't apply.