If you are assaulted or attacked, and your attacker happens to die, as a result of wounds inflicted by your legal self-defense, then the attacker is responsible for their death or injuries.
That's the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. If your self-defense was legal, you're not responsible. If your self-defense wasn't legal, you are responsible. What's legal? Who decides? Being legal depends on acting "reasonably". What's reasonable? Who decides? Being legal depends on the facts. What are the facts? Who decides?
If you pull a gun and kill somebody, you're gambling that afterwards, you'll be able to establish in court that you were legally defending yourself and legally killed him. As the Zimmerman case shows, the circumstances are usually ambiguous.
In any case, if you are ever put in a situation where you actually must use force to preserve your very survival. The ultimate legal ramifications might be the last thing on your mind; would you actually choose to potentially let an assailant kill you, over ensuring you survive and accepting the risk of being charged with a crime?
It's rare for most middle-class people to be in a situation where they have to defend their life against an attacker. It's more likely for them to get into one of these fights like Zimmerman was in where they act in the heat of the moment, without thinking. I think Zimmerman would agree right now that he would have been better off taking the beating than taking the legal problems he's in right now.
Would you rather get beaten up by Martin, or would you rather serve 20 years in jail?
My point is that when you throw a gun into the situation, you're more likely to end up killing somebody illegally, and serving serious prison time, than you are to save your own life.
That's right. Florida is one of those jurisdictions where you have the right to use deadly force when you're in "reasonable" fear of death or great bodily harm. "Reasonable" is determined by the jury after the facts.
The jury might decide that Zimmerman had reasonable fear. Or they might not, and they might convict him of murder.
Based on my experience, the harm of getting beaten up like that isn't great enough to justify killing an opponent. If I were on the jury, I might decide that Zimmerman wasn't in "reasonable" fear.
It's like killing someone over a schoolyard fight. When you throw a gun into the situation, someone gets killed.
Bernie Goetz wasn't in danger of being killed. He was in danger of being robbed. While he does appeal to a vigilante sense of justice, one of his robbers wound up with a spine injury crippled for life. The robber was a thug and he deserved some punishment, but he didn't deserve that. Goetz wound up spending most of a year's sentence in jail.
So because Florida is a law-and-order state, Zimmerman might wind up getting sent to jail for 20 years with some kind of mandatory sentencing guidelines. He doesn't deserve that either.
But I think if Zimmerman had a choice, he would rather have taken the beating that night than have to go through what he's going through now.
In most jurisdictions, the law says you have a right to defend yourself with reasonable force. You don't have a right to kill your attacker. Of course, the NRA is trying to change those laws.
If you go around with a concealed handgun, confronting other people, and somebody fights back, you don't have a right to kill him. Try it and you'll wind up like Zimmerman.
Where I came from in Brooklyn, that was a typical fight. Sometimes I was bashing the other guy's head on the concrete pavement, sometimes he was bashing my head on the concrete pavement.
If I pulled a gun and killed the other guy, I'd expect to be prosecuted for homicide or murder. While getting your head bashed against the concrete isn't pleasant, it's not as bad as being dead.
I don't think Zimmerman was in danger of getting killed. He was in danger of getting the shit kicked out of him, and maybe a broken nose or a couple of black eyes.
When you add guns to the situation, people get killed.
That was my suggestion. Track the payments. They're violating a lot of federal and state laws. It should be legally possible to fine the people along the route, or at least make them refund the payments. Civil penalties are easier than criminal penalties, which require stronger evidence. You don't have to actually put them in jail, you just have to make it unprofitable.
The problem is that most of the real difficult companies are hiding their numbers and identities.
At some point, these companies need to get the money. It should be possible to track them through the money. If I were to transfer my credit card account through them, then the credit card company would need some record of who they are. If they make an unauthorized charge to my credit card, somebody has to get the money.
It might be difficult to track down one fraudulent transaction, but in order for them to make any money out of it, they need hundreds or thousands of fraudulent transactions.
Once you've been working in any of those vocational careers for a while, you'll come back and really understand why those science courses are so important.
I had 2 years of college physics. I never understood the gas laws until I rebuilt a VW engine.
Machining? Do you know a machinist who isn't interested in physics?
Nursing? Do you know a nurse who isn't interested in chemistry?
But if protecting free speech, even hateful, intolerant, vitriolic speech, is all the US stands for then I'm damn proud to be American.
As an American, I wish I had free speech right now to go down to Zucotti Park and talk to the people in Occupy Wall Street about their thoughts for the future of America.
But I can't because Mayor Bloomberg kicked OWS out of Zucotti Park, just like he's restricted the other big, effective demonstrations against his privilege.
I'm not sure the US is going to be here in its present form in 10 years. The British Empire, the Soviet Union, and a lot of other empires collapsed unexpectedly and quickly. The wealthy 1% are taking over this country, and throwing the rest of us into poverty. The US no longer has widespread social mobility. That's not sustainable.
But I can't go down to Zucotti Park to ask other people what they think about that.
Occupy Wall Street wasn't allowed to express its First Amendment rights to assembly.
I'll take support for human rights whether it comes from the left or right. Freedom House seems to be the latter. I do wish they would show more concern about attacks on freedom of people like Javed Iqbal in their own backyard, but that may be an unreasonable request when you consider the source of their funds,
Here's what Chomsky said about Freedom House. Fair?
Chomsky and Herman argue that the group's history has been characterized by excessively criticizing states opposed to US interests while being unduly sympathetic to those regimes supportive of US interests. The authors suggest this can be most notably seen by the way it perceived the US ally El Salvador in the early 1980s, a government that used the army for mass slaughter of the populace to intimidate them in the run-up to an "election", but Freedom House found these elections to be "admirable". Chomsky further claimed in 1988 that Freedom House "had interlocks with AIM, the World Anticommunist League [sic], Resistance International, and U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the (U.S) government and international right wing."
I remember reading the Surgeon General's report on smoking and health, which compared survival of smokers and nonsmokers over their lifetime. There seemed to be a big bump in the death rate around 50. A lot of those people who die of a heart attack or stroke at age 50 or 55 are cigarette smokers (although to be fair, some of those deaths are due to genetic diseases).
Quote, Unquote Posted by Matthew Di Carlo on May 13, 2011
This post is co-authored by Matt Di Carlo and Esther Quintero.
Update: Please see this May 2012 “Fact Checker” piece on the Shanker quote in the Washington Post.
***
This week, in an Atlantic article, former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein dropped an incendiary Albert Shanker quote that you’ve probably heard before:
When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.
The negative implications of this statement are obvious, which is why it is so frequently quoted by (mostly) conservative pundits and journalists.
We didn’t know Al Shanker personally. He died while we were still college undergraduates. So, we were surprised to learn that the people who knew and worked with Shanker have long thought this quote to be apocryphal.
We were skeptical but intrigued, and decided to do a little detective work.
The quote has been used many hundreds, perhaps many thousands, of times in newspapers, magazines, blogs, and speeches. Virtually none of the authors has bothered to provide a source – a date, an event, anything. Nevertheless, we uncovered two possible sources of origin.
The first is an article in the Meridian Star (a newspaper in Meridian, MS) from August 13, 1985. It is the earliest published version of the quote that we could find, and a couple of subsequent articles also suggest that it is the first (see here). In addition, this paper cites it as the original (page 176), as do a couple of blog posts (this one, for instance). We were unable to locate an electronic copy of this article, so we took a quick trip over to the Library of Congress, and found it on microfilm.
The article, called “Teacher unions made their bed, must sleep in it”, has no byline. Here is the relevant passage:
American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker may have hit the key difference between his organization and both the public and the legislature a couple of years ago when he said, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.
So, unless you consider “a couple of years ago” to be journalistically-rigorous sourcing, this is not a source.
The second possible origin is the Congressional Record, also from August 1985. For example, a 1995 book, Do the Right Thing: The People’s Economist Speaks, by George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams, attributes the quote (page 83) to a statement made by Shanker that was supposed to have been included in the August 1985 Congressional Record. A 1997 paper by David W. Kirkpatrick, published by the conservative Reason Public Policy Institute, also uses the quote, citing (via footnote on page 10) a Washington Times article called “Rip-Offs in the Schools?” (9/5/92). This article also attributes the quote to the 1985 Congressional Record.
So we searched the Congressional Record. The quote does not appear in August 1985. In fact, there are only two instances in which that quote has ever been entered into the Congressional Record. The first was on March 23, 1994, when former Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) used the quote secondhand. The second was on May 23, 2001, when the quote was put forth (again secondhand, with no source) by Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO). It’s plausible that the Meridian Star article was entered into the record.
It is very difficult – sometimes impossible – to prove a negative, especially w
Actually Iraq's health care system was up to first world standards. Saddam sent students to medical school in London. There were a lot of Iraqi doctors in London (and I read articles and letters in The Lancet and BMJ that they had written denouncing Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses). According to a Washington Post story, Iraq had one of the best health care systems in the Arab/Persian middle east, and people came from all over the region to use their hospitals.
The Iraqi war was an interesting case history to show what the world would be like if the Republicans had their way. GWB was essentially the dictator of Iraq, and he could organize it any way he wanted. According to the Washington Post, GWB fired an experienced public health person who had done this before. He appointed some Evangelical Christian anti-abortion hack to reorganize the health care system. First thing he did was "privatize" the drug delivery system. In order for the privatization system to work, he needed a computer system. He never got the computer system working. Hospitals couldn't get drugs, except on the black market. That's your neocon free market.
at least a purpose was to replace an evil regime with a democracy.
A purpose was to replace the dictator Saddam Hussein with our hand-picked dictator, Ahmed Chalabi. Instead, we replaced the dictator with mob rule. Now Iraq has a hundred Saddam Husseins.
Speaking of scams, Neoconservative Douglas Feith is teaching at Georgetown. So in the run up to the 2003 war, I’m told, Douglas Feith was challenged by a State Department official who knows the Middle East about what in the world the US would do in Iraq once it won the war.
State Dept. Official: “Doug, after the smoke clears, what is the plan?”
Feith: “Think of Iraq as being like a computer. And think of Saddam as like a processor. We just take out the old processor, and put in a new one–Chalabi.”
State Dept. Official: “Put in a new processor?”
Feith: “Yes! It will all be over in 6 weeks.”
State Dept. Official: “You mean six months.”
Feith: “No, six weeks. You’ll see.”
State Dept. Official: “Doug.”
Feith: “Yes?”
State Dept. Official: “You’re smoking crack, Doug.”
Feith: “Oh, so you’re disloyal to the President, are you?”
The American Association for Public Opinion Research is an organization of pollsters who work mostly in the U.S. The Lancet surveys were conducted in a country at war, where foreigners were likely to be killed, and even the surveyors and respondents might be killed. As the Lancet authors said, they could not disclose the details the AAPOR was asking for, because it was too dangerous. Their coworkers and sources might have been killed.
The answer to them is, if you don't like the survey, go to Iraq and do your own survey. They wouldn't because it was too dangerous.
You want to talk about professional ethics? What about ABC's professional ethics in publishing a news story about a controversy written by one party to the controversy?
"Full disclosure: Gary Langer is a member of AAPOR and past president of its New York chapter."
The best estimates of the number of people GWB killed in the Iraq war are between 150,000 (New England Journal of Medicine) and 600,000 (The Lancet).
Even Uday wouldn't have killed that many people. Indeed, we probably tortured more Iraqi prisoners to death than Uday did.
At least Saddam knew how to run a country. Everybody got a basic food basket. The electricity ran. Iraq had the best health care system in the Moslem middle east. Iraq had one of the best education systems -- they had a higher ratio of women college professors than the US. They sent graduate students to study medicine and engineering in London. Saddam was a secularist who suppressed the Islamist extremists. What did GWB replace it with? A third-world country in which armed gangs kill more people than Saddam did. In which Sunnis and Shiites kill each other like the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
I used to think that, until the Iraq War. That disaster made me much more partisan. I really think hundreds of thousands of people died because Gore (barely!) lost that election.
Enough Democrats (including Hillary and Kerry) voted for the Iraq war that GWB could get away with it.
Yeah, it makes a difference. The Democrats will be better than the Republicans. But the Dems have moved so far to the right that the difference is getting smaller every year. If you look at the issues, Obama is farther to the right on domestic policy than Nixon.
-- Instead of a single-payer health care system, or even a public option, Obama gave us a health care plan designed by the Heritage Foundation, for the benefit of the insurance companies that contributed even more to Obama's campaign than to McCain's.
-- Obama took GWB's No Child Left Behind, and added to it with Race to the Top, which forces states and cities to break their union contracts and destroy public education with charter schools if they want to keep getting their federal education money. It's destroying the unions.
-- Instead of prosecuting the people responsible for the worst financial crisis since the depression, including outright fraud, he appointed the very people responsible for the crisis to handle the crisis.
-- When O'Keefe made a fraudulent video about ACORN, instead of defending ACORN, the Democrats abandoned ACORN and let the Republicans destroy the most valuable voter-registration organization the Democrats had. Brilliant! Now who's going to register your voters?
-- When you ask Democrats why we should vote for Obama, they're finally reduced in desperation to saying, "Supreme Court." Yeah, we'll get Supreme Court justices who are merely "centerists" (conservatives) rather than getting far-right partisan justices who will brazenly ignore the Constitution as they did in Bush vs. Gore. Of course the Democrats would never consider a filibuster in a Supreme Court nomination.
"Vote for us, because the alternative is horrible" is not a very inspiring reason to vote.
------ I wanted an FDR and all I got was this lousy Obama.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are assaulted or attacked, and your attacker happens to die, as a result of wounds inflicted by your legal self-defense, then the attacker is responsible for their death or injuries.
That's the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. If your self-defense was legal, you're not responsible. If your self-defense wasn't legal, you are responsible. What's legal? Who decides? Being legal depends on acting "reasonably". What's reasonable? Who decides? Being legal depends on the facts. What are the facts? Who decides?
If you pull a gun and kill somebody, you're gambling that afterwards, you'll be able to establish in court that you were legally defending yourself and legally killed him. As the Zimmerman case shows, the circumstances are usually ambiguous.
In any case, if you are ever put in a situation where you actually must use force to preserve your very survival. The ultimate legal ramifications might be the last thing on your mind; would you actually choose to potentially let an assailant kill you, over ensuring you survive and accepting the risk of being charged with a crime?
It's rare for most middle-class people to be in a situation where they have to defend their life against an attacker. It's more likely for them to get into one of these fights like Zimmerman was in where they act in the heat of the moment, without thinking. I think Zimmerman would agree right now that he would have been better off taking the beating than taking the legal problems he's in right now.
Would you rather get beaten up by Martin, or would you rather serve 20 years in jail?
My point is that when you throw a gun into the situation, you're more likely to end up killing somebody illegally, and serving serious prison time, than you are to save your own life.
That's right. Florida is one of those jurisdictions where you have the right to use deadly force when you're in "reasonable" fear of death or great bodily harm. "Reasonable" is determined by the jury after the facts.
The jury might decide that Zimmerman had reasonable fear. Or they might not, and they might convict him of murder.
Based on my experience, the harm of getting beaten up like that isn't great enough to justify killing an opponent. If I were on the jury, I might decide that Zimmerman wasn't in "reasonable" fear.
It's like killing someone over a schoolyard fight. When you throw a gun into the situation, someone gets killed.
Bernie Goetz wasn't in danger of being killed. He was in danger of being robbed. While he does appeal to a vigilante sense of justice, one of his robbers wound up with a spine injury crippled for life. The robber was a thug and he deserved some punishment, but he didn't deserve that. Goetz wound up spending most of a year's sentence in jail.
So because Florida is a law-and-order state, Zimmerman might wind up getting sent to jail for 20 years with some kind of mandatory sentencing guidelines. He doesn't deserve that either.
But I think if Zimmerman had a choice, he would rather have taken the beating that night than have to go through what he's going through now.
In most jurisdictions, the law says you have a right to defend yourself with reasonable force. You don't have a right to kill your attacker. Of course, the NRA is trying to change those laws.
If you go around with a concealed handgun, confronting other people, and somebody fights back, you don't have a right to kill him. Try it and you'll wind up like Zimmerman.
Ever been in that exact situation?
I was. (Without the gun.)
Where I came from in Brooklyn, that was a typical fight. Sometimes I was bashing the other guy's head on the concrete pavement, sometimes he was bashing my head on the concrete pavement.
If I pulled a gun and killed the other guy, I'd expect to be prosecuted for homicide or murder. While getting your head bashed against the concrete isn't pleasant, it's not as bad as being dead.
I don't think Zimmerman was in danger of getting killed. He was in danger of getting the shit kicked out of him, and maybe a broken nose or a couple of black eyes.
When you add guns to the situation, people get killed.
That was my suggestion. Track the payments. They're violating a lot of federal and state laws. It should be legally possible to fine the people along the route, or at least make them refund the payments. Civil penalties are easier than criminal penalties, which require stronger evidence. You don't have to actually put them in jail, you just have to make it unprofitable.
I don't understand why this wouldn't work.
The problem is that most of the real difficult companies are hiding their numbers and identities.
At some point, these companies need to get the money. It should be possible to track them through the money. If I were to transfer my credit card account through them, then the credit card company would need some record of who they are. If they make an unauthorized charge to my credit card, somebody has to get the money.
It might be difficult to track down one fraudulent transaction, but in order for them to make any money out of it, they need hundreds or thousands of fraudulent transactions.
Once you've been working in any of those vocational careers for a while, you'll come back and really understand why those science courses are so important.
I had 2 years of college physics. I never understood the gas laws until I rebuilt a VW engine.
Machining? Do you know a machinist who isn't interested in physics?
Nursing? Do you know a nurse who isn't interested in chemistry?
etc.
I would hate to have to explain to this guy (or his son) why it's important to vaccinate your children.
(Or anything else we have to do in a democracy.)
I wonder what kind of nonprofit he works for.
It's not OK to post, "Bong Hits for Jesus."
But if protecting free speech, even hateful, intolerant, vitriolic speech, is all the US stands for then I'm damn proud to be American.
As an American, I wish I had free speech right now to go down to Zucotti Park and talk to the people in Occupy Wall Street about their thoughts for the future of America.
But I can't because Mayor Bloomberg kicked OWS out of Zucotti Park, just like he's restricted the other big, effective demonstrations against his privilege.
I'm not sure the US is going to be here in its present form in 10 years. The British Empire, the Soviet Union, and a lot of other empires collapsed unexpectedly and quickly. The wealthy 1% are taking over this country, and throwing the rest of us into poverty. The US no longer has widespread social mobility. That's not sustainable.
But I can't go down to Zucotti Park to ask other people what they think about that.
Question:
Do we really have more freedom in the U.S., or do we just permit freedom for ideas we believe in? Are we smug, hypocritical American exceptionalists?
Javed Iqbal was sentenced to 5 1/2 years for offering Al Manar on his cable TV system.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2009/04/2009423233919457969.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Manar#Banning_of_broadcasts
Occupy Wall Street wasn't allowed to express its First Amendment rights to assembly.
I'll take support for human rights whether it comes from the left or right. Freedom House seems to be the latter. I do wish they would show more concern about attacks on freedom of people like Javed Iqbal in their own backyard, but that may be an unreasonable request when you consider the source of their funds,
Here's what Chomsky said about Freedom House. Fair?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_house#Criticism
Chomsky and Herman argue that the group's history has been characterized by excessively criticizing states opposed to US interests while being unduly sympathetic to those regimes supportive of US interests. The authors suggest this can be most notably seen by the way it perceived the US ally El Salvador in the early 1980s, a government that used the army for mass slaughter of the populace to intimidate them in the run-up to an "election", but Freedom House found these elections to be "admirable". Chomsky further claimed in 1988 that Freedom House "had interlocks with AIM, the World Anticommunist League [sic], Resistance International, and U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the (U.S) government and international right wing."
I remember reading the Surgeon General's report on smoking and health, which compared survival of smokers and nonsmokers over their lifetime. There seemed to be a big bump in the death rate around 50. A lot of those people who die of a heart attack or stroke at age 50 or 55 are cigarette smokers (although to be fair, some of those deaths are due to genetic diseases).
As one famous teacher union boss said, they'll start looking out for kids when the kids start paying union dues.
Among all your misinformation, this one is the most egregiously wrong and easily disproven.
http://shankerblog.org/?p=2562
Quote, Unquote
Posted by Matthew Di Carlo on May 13, 2011
This post is co-authored by Matt Di Carlo and Esther Quintero.
Update: Please see this May 2012 “Fact Checker” piece on the Shanker quote in the Washington Post.
***
This week, in an Atlantic article, former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein dropped an incendiary Albert Shanker quote that you’ve probably heard before:
When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.
The negative implications of this statement are obvious, which is why it is so frequently quoted by (mostly) conservative pundits and journalists.
We didn’t know Al Shanker personally. He died while we were still college undergraduates. So, we were surprised to learn that the people who knew and worked with Shanker have long thought this quote to be apocryphal.
We were skeptical but intrigued, and decided to do a little detective work.
The quote has been used many hundreds, perhaps many thousands, of times in newspapers, magazines, blogs, and speeches. Virtually none of the authors has bothered to provide a source – a date, an event, anything. Nevertheless, we uncovered two possible sources of origin.
The first is an article in the Meridian Star (a newspaper in Meridian, MS) from August 13, 1985. It is the earliest published version of the quote that we could find, and a couple of subsequent articles also suggest that it is the first (see here). In addition, this paper cites it as the original (page 176), as do a couple of blog posts (this one, for instance). We were unable to locate an electronic copy of this article, so we took a quick trip over to the Library of Congress, and found it on microfilm.
The article, called “Teacher unions made their bed, must sleep in it”, has no byline. Here is the relevant passage:
American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker may have hit the key difference between his organization and both the public and the legislature a couple of years ago when he said, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.
So, unless you consider “a couple of years ago” to be journalistically-rigorous sourcing, this is not a source.
The second possible origin is the Congressional Record, also from August 1985. For example, a 1995 book, Do the Right Thing: The People’s Economist Speaks, by George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams, attributes the quote (page 83) to a statement made by Shanker that was supposed to have been included in the August 1985 Congressional Record. A 1997 paper by David W. Kirkpatrick, published by the conservative Reason Public Policy Institute, also uses the quote, citing (via footnote on page 10) a Washington Times article called “Rip-Offs in the Schools?” (9/5/92). This article also attributes the quote to the 1985 Congressional Record.
So we searched the Congressional Record. The quote does not appear in August 1985. In fact, there are only two instances in which that quote has ever been entered into the Congressional Record. The first was on March 23, 1994, when former Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) used the quote secondhand. The second was on May 23, 2001, when the quote was put forth (again secondhand, with no source) by Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO). It’s plausible that the Meridian Star article was entered into the record.
It is very difficult – sometimes impossible – to prove a negative, especially w
Actually Iraq's health care system was up to first world standards. Saddam sent students to medical school in London. There were a lot of Iraqi doctors in London (and I read articles and letters in The Lancet and BMJ that they had written denouncing Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses). According to a Washington Post story, Iraq had one of the best health care systems in the Arab/Persian middle east, and people came from all over the region to use their hospitals.
The Iraqi war was an interesting case history to show what the world would be like if the Republicans had their way. GWB was essentially the dictator of Iraq, and he could organize it any way he wanted. According to the Washington Post, GWB fired an experienced public health person who had done this before. He appointed some Evangelical Christian anti-abortion hack to reorganize the health care system. First thing he did was "privatize" the drug delivery system. In order for the privatization system to work, he needed a computer system. He never got the computer system working. Hospitals couldn't get drugs, except on the black market. That's your neocon free market.
at least a purpose was to replace an evil regime with a democracy.
A purpose was to replace the dictator Saddam Hussein with our hand-picked dictator, Ahmed Chalabi. Instead, we replaced the dictator with mob rule. Now Iraq has a hundred Saddam Husseins.
http://www.juancole.com/2007/02/3-month-record-for-us-troops-killed.html
Speaking of scams, Neoconservative Douglas Feith is teaching at Georgetown. So in the run up to the 2003 war, I’m told, Douglas Feith was challenged by a State Department official who knows the Middle East about what in the world the US would do in Iraq once it won the war.
State Dept. Official: “Doug, after the smoke clears, what is the plan?”
Feith: “Think of Iraq as being like a computer. And think of Saddam as like a processor. We just take out the old processor, and put in a new one–Chalabi.”
State Dept. Official: “Put in a new processor?”
Feith: “Yes! It will all be over in 6 weeks.”
State Dept. Official: “You mean six months.”
Feith: “No, six weeks. You’ll see.”
State Dept. Official: “Doug.”
Feith: “Yes?”
State Dept. Official: “You’re smoking crack, Doug.”
Feith: “Oh, so you’re disloyal to the President, are you?”
The American Association for Public Opinion Research is an organization of pollsters who work mostly in the U.S. The Lancet surveys were conducted in a country at war, where foreigners were likely to be killed, and even the surveyors and respondents might be killed. As the Lancet authors said, they could not disclose the details the AAPOR was asking for, because it was too dangerous. Their coworkers and sources might have been killed.
The answer to them is, if you don't like the survey, go to Iraq and do your own survey. They wouldn't because it was too dangerous.
You want to talk about professional ethics? What about ABC's professional ethics in publishing a news story about a controversy written by one party to the controversy?
"Full disclosure: Gary Langer is a member of AAPOR and past president of its New York chapter."
Oh.. I don't know the first passed health care reform in almost 100 years.
More like half that. Medicare was created in 1965.
"We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in."
In 2000, there was no way I could pull a lever with Joe Lieberman's name on it. I voted for Ralph Nader.
If Gore had won, I guess President Lieberman would be leading us to defeat in Iraq right now.
During the Republican debate, I was with a bunch of Democratic activists.
Every time one of the debaters mentioned "Ronald Reagan", they had to take a drink. By the end of the debate, they were staggering.
When I look at our political options, a good choice is getting drunk until I pass out.
The best estimates of the number of people GWB killed in the Iraq war are between 150,000 (New England Journal of Medicine) and 600,000 (The Lancet).
Even Uday wouldn't have killed that many people. Indeed, we probably tortured more Iraqi prisoners to death than Uday did.
At least Saddam knew how to run a country. Everybody got a basic food basket. The electricity ran. Iraq had the best health care system in the Moslem middle east. Iraq had one of the best education systems -- they had a higher ratio of women college professors than the US. They sent graduate students to study medicine and engineering in London. Saddam was a secularist who suppressed the Islamist extremists. What did GWB replace it with? A third-world country in which armed gangs kill more people than Saddam did. In which Sunnis and Shiites kill each other like the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
I used to think that, until the Iraq War. That disaster made me much more partisan. I really think hundreds of thousands of people died because Gore (barely!) lost that election.
Enough Democrats (including Hillary and Kerry) voted for the Iraq war that GWB could get away with it.
Yeah, it makes a difference. The Democrats will be better than the Republicans. But the Dems have moved so far to the right that the difference is getting smaller every year. If you look at the issues, Obama is farther to the right on domestic policy than Nixon.
-- Instead of a single-payer health care system, or even a public option, Obama gave us a health care plan designed by the Heritage Foundation, for the benefit of the insurance companies that contributed even more to Obama's campaign than to McCain's.
-- Obama took GWB's No Child Left Behind, and added to it with Race to the Top, which forces states and cities to break their union contracts and destroy public education with charter schools if they want to keep getting their federal education money. It's destroying the unions.
-- Instead of prosecuting the people responsible for the worst financial crisis since the depression, including outright fraud, he appointed the very people responsible for the crisis to handle the crisis.
-- When O'Keefe made a fraudulent video about ACORN, instead of defending ACORN, the Democrats abandoned ACORN and let the Republicans destroy the most valuable voter-registration organization the Democrats had. Brilliant! Now who's going to register your voters?
-- When you ask Democrats why we should vote for Obama, they're finally reduced in desperation to saying, "Supreme Court." Yeah, we'll get Supreme Court justices who are merely "centerists" (conservatives) rather than getting far-right partisan justices who will brazenly ignore the Constitution as they did in Bush vs. Gore. Of course the Democrats would never consider a filibuster in a Supreme Court nomination.
"Vote for us, because the alternative is horrible" is not a very inspiring reason to vote.
------
I wanted an FDR and all I got was this lousy Obama.
Google is a money-making machine. Period. It exists to make metric tons of money for its owners and officers. Period.
Google exists for at least 2 reasons: (1) To make money (2) To do cool things.
There are other companies that exist only to make money, by selling penis enlargement pills or leveraged mortgages, etc.
But it's clear that Brinn and Page are in business for other reasons too.
Besides, after the first $100 million, you really don't need any more money.
"Snippit -- an extract small enough to qualify as fair use under the copyright laws."