Does anybody actually take the tea party seriously?
It looks like it, yes.
The National Review Institute has obliged Representative Waters, commissioning McLaughlin & Associates to take a detailed look at tea partiers: both the 6 percent of the 1,000 likely voters polled in mid-January who told McLaughlin that they had participated in tea-party rallies and the additional 47 percent who said they “have not participated in a tea party protest but . . . generally agree with the reasons for those protests.” The results dispel a number of myths.
The first is that the tea partiers are driven by racial animus against the president. Actually, a third of the people who participated in tea-party rallies say that they approve of Obama’s performance in office and a fifth say that they voted for him in 2008. Five percent of them are black, 11 percent Hispanic. Of those who agree with the protests, 29 percent approve of Obama’s performance. Waters and Krugman can rest easy.
The second myth is that the tea partiers are unpopular. Krugman wrote last April that the tea parties “have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so,” and Brooks speculated that “the tea-party tendency” might “be the ruin of the Republican party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate.” Some Republican officials worry that media criticism and Democrats’ attacks on the activists have made it politically risky to associate themselves with the tea-party movement.
The polls do not bear out this fear. Most voters don’t consider themselves well-informed about the tea parties, but have a favorable view. As noted already, 53 percent of the electorate look sympathetically on the tea parties. McLaughlin also asked likely voters which characterization of the tea parties they leaned toward: an “anti-government, fringe organization that is driven by anger” or a group of “citizens concerned about the country’s economic future.” A majority of 57 percent chose the benign characterization while only 19 percent disagreed. Even a plurality of self-identified liberals went with “concern” rather than “anger.” -- The Coming Tea-Party Election
Let me fix that for you: Obama's birth was questioned, IMMEDIATELY answered to the satisfaction of his Democratic primary opponents, his Republican opponents in the general election, and the Supreme Court justice who swore him in when he presented the fully legal certificate from Hawaii. All sane people moved on. It was only not "settled" in the minds of a few pathetic trolls who can't accept the fact that a black man with a funny name might actually be allowed to sit in the Oval Office.
That's not really all correct, is it? The controversy over Obama's status was started by Hillary Clinton's campaign. I don't recall that the McCain campaign ever made it an issue. I am unaware of the Supreme Court Justices checking birth certificates prior to swearing in --- do you have a reference on that? I doubt that race plays any significant part of this as similar controversies have arisen with white candidates. Nationality certainly is the key part of it. There is a very dangerous attempt to try to depict any opposition to Obama administration policies as racist. That is very troubling.
The qualifications to be president are constitutionally unique. Arnold Schwarzenegger could be governor of California, and hold pretty much any Federal office, but could never be president. I don't think the FEC does any screening of candidates, I think that is up to the states.
Asymmetric damage causes symmetric collapse of buildings. It happened three times in one day, it has to be the truth.
I once had an Industrial Arts instructor question my class on what would be a better situation if the building was on fire - that it was framed in wood, or steel. The correct answer is wood, since wood retains practically all of its structural strength until it is consumed by fire, unlike steel, which loses its strength very quickly when exposed to high temperature. So here we come to the heart of the issue - a Roman blacksmith from 2,000 years ago would make a more useful investigator of the building collapse than most "truthers" since he understands the fundamental fact that metals soften and can be reshaped when heated (by the blacksmith's hammer, or the weight of 10 building floors above) - no melting required. When the sprinkler system either doesn't come to the rescue, or is overwhelmed, it's over. For all of the fancy computers, the internet, and leadership of English majors and Philosophy professors, the "truthers" fail to grasp that simple fact. They are baffled by things a blacksmith knows. Because of this they are forced to invent ever more improbable and elaborate explanations that fail the common sense test - "the building was secretly rigged to implode"..... even though when done commercially it requires weeks of work by teams of people, drilling into the beams, stripping away insulation and structural materials, etc., etc..... all unnoticed. Trapped by the absurdity of it, the escape routes range from magic thermite mixtures to space aliens. All of this, as part of a conspiracy that killed 3,000 Americans, has somehow been kept secret despite the fact that the US wasn't able to keep secret the waterboarding of a total of three people in 10 years without multiple leaks and widespread howls of outrage that the US bordered on being as bad as the worst criminal states ever, worse than even Germany which attempted genocide and killed millions. Ya, it must be "true". My guess is, whatever they're selling, you're buying.
Saddam Hussein didn't like Al Quidea - it's very, very unlikely that he would have had anything to do with them at all. AQ moved into Iraq filling the power vacuum when the government fell.
WASHINGTON — A Pentagon review of about 600,000 documents captured in the Iraq war attests to Saddam Hussein's willingness to use terrorism to target Americans and work closely with jihadist organizations throughout the Middle East.
The report, released this week by the Institute for Defense Analyses, says it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda. But it does say Saddam collaborated with known Al Qaeda affiliates and a wider constellation of Islamist terror groups.
The report, titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," finds that:
The Iraqi Intelligence Service in a 1993 memo to Saddam agreed on a plan to train commandos from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat and was founded by Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
In the same year, Saddam ordered his intelligence service to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia." At the time, Al Qaeda was working with warlords against American forces there.
Saddam's intelligence services maintained extensive support networks for a wide range of Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations, including but not limited to Hamas. Among the other Palestinian groups Saddam supported at the time was Force 17, the private army loyal to Yasser Arafat.
Beginning in 1999, Iraq's intelligence service began providing "financial and moral support" for a small radical Islamist Kurdish sect the report does not name. A Kurdish Islamist group called Ansar al Islam in 2002 would try to assassinate the regional prime minister in the eastern Kurdish region, Barham Salih.
In 2001, Saddam's intelligence service drafted a manual titled "Lessons in Secret Organization and Jihad Work—How to Organize and Overthrow the Saudi Royal Family." In the same year, his intelligence service submitted names of 10 volunteer "martyrs" for operations inside the Kingdom.
In 2000, Iraq sent a suicide bomber through Northern Iraq who intended to travel to London to assassinate Ahmad Chalabi, at the time an Iraqi opposition leader who would later go on to be an Iraqi deputy prime minister. The mission was aborted after the bomber could not obtain a visa to enter the United Kingdom.
The report finds that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who is wanted by the FBI for mixing the chemicals for the 1993 World Center Attack, was a prisoner, and not a guest, in Iraq. An audio file of Saddam cited by the report indicates that the Iraqi dictator did not trust him and at one point said that he thought his testimony was too "organized." Saddam said on an audio file cited by the report that he suspected that the first attack could be the work of either Israel or American intelligence, or perhaps a Saudi or Egyptian faction.
The report also undercuts the claim made by many on the left and many at the CIA that Saddam, as a national socialist, was incapable of supporting or collaborating with the Islamist al Qaeda. The report concludes that instead Iraq's relationship with Osama bin Laden's organization was similar to the relationship between the rival Colombian cocaine cartels in the 1990s. Both were rivals in some sense for market share, but also allies when it came to expanding the size of the overall market..... read more.....
I wonder how many recruits we've generated by killing innocents with our bombs and drones.
Probably fewer than you think....
But the Pakistani general leading troops in the North Waziristan has for the first time publicly acknowledged the U.S drone attacks are hitting mostly militants and al-Qaida fighters.
Major-General Ghayur Mehmood spoke to a group of Pakistani reporters on a rare trip to Miran Shah, the administrative center of North Waziristan.
The Pakistani general says that information the military has gathered from its sources suggest most of those killed in drone attacks are hardcore militants, and the number of innocent people being killed is relatively low.
The official paper distributed among reporters says that there have been 164 drone strikes in the militant-dominated region of North Waziristan since 2007, killing 964 "terrorists". There were 171 al-Qaida fighters among those killed, mostly belonging to central Asian and Arab countries. -- Pakistan Says Drone Strikes Have Been Effective
...
January 10, 2011: While the Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan's tribal territories are not happy with the six year CIA decapitation (kill the leaders) campaign, many of the local tribesmen are. Attacked by Predator and Reaper UAVs, armed with missiles, the terrorists (al Qaeda, Taliban and the Haqqani Network) have lost about 40 senior leaders in the last six years, most of them in the last three years. These losses are not only bad for morale at the top, but are seriously disrupting terrorist activities. The locals love this, because the Islamic radicals have been nothing but trouble. For one thing, the radicals come across as a bunch of self-righteous bullies, and use their weapons to intimidate, or kill, anyone who crosses them. This includes coercing families to provide daughters to be wives of bachelor terrorists. Then there is the terrorist tactic of using civilians as human shields for protection from the missile attacks. Here's where the CIA won hearts and minds, by scrupulously avoiding casualties among the innocent tribesmen. Moreover, the tribes eventually drew the line on human shields, bringing out their own guns and forcing the Islamic radicals to back off on hostages. The locals also abandoned their compounds when the terrorists came by to spend the night. If the CIA hit the compound (after noting how the owners fled), the tribesmen blamed the Islamic radicals, not the CIA, for the damage. The Islamic radicals know that the tribesmen have been cheering, not so much for the CIA, as against the radicals, but don't make an issue of it. On the surface, everyone is a good Moslem. But the local Moslems make no secret of wishing that the super-Moslems would go somewhere else. read more...Schadenfreude In Taliban Country
Our rationale for going into Afghanistan is that Management wouldn't turn over an accused war criminal.
Well, in fairness I doubt the US would have settled for just taking bin Laden and leaving thousands (ten of thousands?) of trained terrorists unsupervised in their state within a state role and under the next echelon of leadership. Would you have been for that?
Of course, we *will* stay now... Excellent illustration of how mission creep works. (Or maybe just of how tiger-by-the-tail works.)
Oddly enough I suspect that Al Qaeda might be thinking the same thing. They expected cruise missiles, not invasion and liberation.
I hope nobody has been encouraging you to hold your breath on that.
I hope none of the moderators confuses trite with insightful.
Interesting, so the US has ground troops in Pakistan, too? Shall we assume that they have both permission of the Pakistani government and the constitutional blessing of the US Congress for being at war in a FOURTH country...
Why, yes, as a matter of fact they do. And I'm glad to see that you are clear that they are fighting against the same enemy in Pakistan, not against Pakistan.
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.--- Authorization for Use of Military Force
Mission Accomplished ---- Now let's bring 'em home.
Actually no, it isn't. Although Bin Laden's death is going to be very helpful, all that happened is that the current enemy leader was killed. Someone, probably far less effective, will take his place. The Coalition Forces killed the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq multiple times, and he was always replaced. Al Qaeda will fight on despite this. We ignore this fact at our peril.
The US & NATO need to remain in Afghanistan for at least several more years until their army are police are built up and trained, and their country is stabilized. Otherwise, we can expect another go around of this.
Apparently this is your "Mission Accomplished" moment?
'In China, we will have a debt crisis — a high-speed rail debt crisis,' says Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University and longtime critic of high-speed rail who worries that the cost of the project might have created a hidden debt bomb that threatens China's banking system. 'I think it is more serious than your subprime mortgage crisis. You can always leave a house or use it. The rail system is there. It's a burden. You must operate the rail system, and when you operate it, the cost is very high.'"
Unfortunately, that apparently isn't the only bubble in China:
In times of crisis alternative economic models become more appealing. Since the USA, the beacon of capitalism was the epicentre for the current crisis and the Chinese economy escaped relatively unharmed, there is a certain logic in asserting that the central planners in China have the right economic prescription.
But as James Chanos and others have pointed out, centrally planned economies lead to malinvestment and nowhere is that malinvestment more manifest than in China’s Property market. Consider John Mauldin’s November 24th, Outside the box interview with Vitaliy Katsenelson. Katsenelson compares Japan’s property bubble of the late 1980s to modern day China and the results aren’t pretty.....
The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to take out protection against the risk of a sovereign default by China as one of its top trade trades for 2011. This is a new twist.
It warns that the Communist Party will have to puncture the credit bubble before inflation reaches levels that threaten social stability. This in turn may open a can of worms.
"Many see China’s monetary tightening as a pre-emptive tap on the brakes, a warning shot across the proverbial economic bows. We see it as a potentially more malevolent reactive day of reckoning," said Tim Ash, the bank’s emerging markets chief.
Officially, inflation was 4.4pc in October, and may reach 5pc in November, but it is to hard find anybody in China who believes it is that low. Vegetables have risen 20pc in a month.
China may seem to have defied the recession and the laws of economics. It hasn't. When China's bubble bursts, the global impact will be severe, spiking US interest rates.
The world looks at China with envy. China’s economy grew 8.7 percent last year, while the world economy contracted by 2.2 percent. It seems that Chinese “Confucian capitalism” – a market economy powered by 1.3 billion people and guided by an authoritarian regime that can pull levers at will – is superior to our touchy-feely democracy and capitalism. But the grass on China’s side of the fence is not as green as it appears.
In fact, China’s defiance of the global recession is not a miracle – it’s a superbubble. When it deflates, it will spell big trouble for all of us.
It seems likely that the world has a few more financial tremors coming.
I wish people would stop pretending like there is anything new here. All we have is a new word coined to pretend like the laws of our nation don't apply.
I quite agree - there is essentially nothing new here. Therefore, we will hold them indefinitely (or till the end of the conflict) without trial like we did hundreds of thousands of Germans in World War 2, as provided for in the Law of War. And, if justified, they will be tried before military tribunals as has been done before. All nicely legal under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (legally the same as a Declaration of War), the Law of War, and the Geneva Convention.
Same old problems - same old solutions. No fuss, no muss.
Just because it sucks to be them doesn't mean that it isn't the correct solution.
What else can we call detaining people in an extralegal prison based purely on the say-so of the President or forces under his command?
You can call it what it is: WAR. Guantanamo is not "extra-legal", it is a perfectly legal prisoner of war camp, visited by the Red Cross and everything. Speaking of war, there was an especially big one about 70 years ago called World War 2.... maybe you've heard of it? The US held hundreds of thousands of captured German soldiers for years, pretty much all without trial. They weren't entitled to a trial for being captured as enemy combatants. Some were tried by Courts Martial for various crimes that they committed, including murder. That is Court Martial, or military commission, not civil or criminal courts. Other countries were at war even earlier, and could have been holding prisoners of war for up to 5 or 6 years or longer.
This is one branch of government playing the role of two branches, and violates the checks and balances fundamental to the system. As another poster points out, the military base at Guantanamo Bay is not part of the criminal justice system.
The Military has its own justice system with judges, juries, prosecutors, and defense lawyers, that tries cases on its own, everything from murder to theft and drunk on duty. If it is good enough for American service members, I'm sure it's good enough for dealing with the murderous perverts of Al Qaeda. (Didn't you know any part of this?)
The fact that it puts Al Qaeda members in a bad position doesn't mean that the US is the one doing something wrong. In fact, it is the US that is abiding by the laws, treaties, and customs of war. It is Al Qaeda that is in the wrong.
You might want to try reading that again, and this time take note of the bold section below:
...except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger;
Al Qaeda declared war on the United States and has been making war for about 15 years, killing thousands or tens of thousands of people in the process. The United States is making war right back now (under the authority of the Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force which legally as the same force as a Declaration of War). They can be tried before military commission or Courts Martial just as the Germans were in WW2, not to mention being held legally indefinitely (or until the end of the conflict). That makes for grim prospects for them, but that doesn't make it the wrong outcome either.
The U.S. Army has destroyed more than 70-percent of its stockpiles of chemical weapons -- some dating as far back as to the World War I era -- as part of an elaborate, decades-long process slated to be largely completed by 2012, service officials said.
"As of 26 January, 2010, the U.S. has destroyed a 22,322 tons of the original 31,500 tons," said Greg Mahall, chief of Public Affairs for the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency (CMA).
The U.S. arsenal -- which used to include 31,500 tons of chemical weapons such as Sarin, VX and Mustard agents-- is systematically being destroyed at an increased pace, Mahall said.
So, here is what we hear from the proponents of government run socialized medicine:
I would like to second what you said. I'm currently in Venezuela, and the health care here is way better than what I had available when I lived in the US. First of all, it's really cheap, the doctors are top of the line, and maybe the only thing you can complain here is that when they actually see somebody here with insurance they really squeeze them dry, but you still get your medical attention. If you don't have insurance you can still pay the bills since they have a different rate so to speak.
Palacios, Venezuela's largest public maternity hospital and once the nation's beacon of neonatal care, has fallen on hard times. Half of the anesthesiologists and pediatricians on staff two years ago have quit. Basic equipment such as respirators, ultrasound monitors and incubators are either broken or scarce. Six of 12 birth rooms have been shut.
On one day last month, five newborns were crowded into one incubator, said Dr. Jesus Mendez Quijada, a psychiatrist and Palacios staff member who is a past president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation.
The deaths of the six infants "were not a case of bad luck, but the consequence of an accumulation of circumstances that have created this alarming situation," Mendez said.
He and others say the problems at Concepcion Palacios are symptoms of a variety of ills that have beset the public healthcare system under leftist firebrand President Hugo Chavez. Cases of malaria nearly doubled between 1998, the year before Chavez took office, and 2007. Incidents of dengue fever more than doubled over the same period.
Poorly paid doctors regularly demonstrate at hospitals from Puerto La Cruz in the northeast to Maracay in the industrial heartland, demanding back pay and protesting the lack of equipment and supplies. Others are leaving in droves for Spain, Australia or the Middle East, where they make 10 times the $600 monthly average salary they earn in public hospitals.
By Thair Shaikh 12:00AM BST 07 Sep 2003 Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study.
The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds.
The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them.
However, a closer look at countries with national health care systems shows that those countries have serious problems of their own, including rising costs, rationing of care, lack of access to modern medical technology, and poor health outc
Was totally adequate at the time, but started pining for that newfangled Apple Macintosh thingy when that came out.
For getting real work done at the time you were way better off with an Osborne or a Kaypro, or one of the many competitors. The typical software bundles shipped with CP/M machines at the time (word processor, database, spreadsheet, programming language, etc.), relatively easy telecommunications, wide choice of printers, and typical 2 disk drive configuration made them far more useful than the typical Macintosh configuration (unless you were doing graphics). The two advantages of the Macintosh were doing graphics, and general ease of use for the much more limited software that it had.
Every creationist regardless of religious orientation depends on a logical fallacy to advance their beliefs. Which is essentially a form of lunacy as the OP advanced.
So, committing a logical fallacy renders you insane? I would say that you've just condemned pretty much the entire human race as insane, no doubt including yourself.
As soon as you reject occum's razor and introduce non-empirical shenanigans every theory is subject to the Spaghetti Monster/Last Tuesday fallacies.
The experiments to try and generate the chemicals of life in what is thought to be conditions on the young earth are interesting, but they are at best a form of speculation. I don't believe there is any way to prove that any given method truly resembles what actually occurred. The fact that some scientists are attributing life or the presence of the chemicals of life on earth to meteors doesn't really change things either. If anything, it just confuses the picture even more - "life didn't begin on earth, but in space, and it came here on meteors!" And how did it start in space? Isn't that just a bit more of a hostile environment?
Occam's razor is a guide, not an iron law. If it was an iron law, we would probably be using the TeVeS theory of gravity and leave the search for "dark matter & dark energy" (supposedly the matter and energy that makes up all but a tiny fraction of the Universe despite never really being seen) to compete for funding with the search for eluminiferous Ether.
Godel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems for mathematics. The theorems, proven by Kurt Godel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The two results are widely interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all of mathematics is impossible, thus giving a negative answer to Hilbert's second problem.
I think the ground you're on is shakier than you recognize, or care to admit.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted it's hard to define a movement with no membership requirements, but there's plenty of nutters in there to make the rest seem a bit dodgy. .
It's pretty easy to identify the majority of the "dodgy" part of the Tea Party movement.
Dems who created fake Tea Party candidates arraigned in Michigan
Who’s Behind the ‘Crash the Tea Party’ Website?
Democrats Embarrassed by Campaign Tricks
Liberal Orgs, Unions Funneling Money to Anti-Tea Party Group
Does anybody actually take the tea party seriously?
It looks like it, yes.
Party Smartly
And in Unixland, an RPN calculator is often only as far away as a shell prompt: dc
Very handy.
That's not really all correct, is it? The controversy over Obama's status was started by Hillary Clinton's campaign. I don't recall that the McCain campaign ever made it an issue. I am unaware of the Supreme Court Justices checking birth certificates prior to swearing in --- do you have a reference on that? I doubt that race plays any significant part of this as similar controversies have arisen with white candidates. Nationality certainly is the key part of it. There is a very dangerous attempt to try to depict any opposition to Obama administration policies as racist. That is very troubling.
You should direct your questions to Hillary Clinton's campaign - they are the ones that started the questioning of Obama's status.
Birther row began with Hillary Clinton
The qualifications to be president are constitutionally unique. Arnold Schwarzenegger could be governor of California, and hold pretty much any Federal office, but could never be president. I don't think the FEC does any screening of candidates, I think that is up to the states.
No, and neither has any god ever answered a prayer.
The Prophet has spoken,.... I guess the matter is settled.
Yes, all official stories are true.
Because all conspiracy theories are true?
Asymmetric damage causes symmetric collapse of buildings. It happened three times in one day, it has to be the truth.
I once had an Industrial Arts instructor question my class on what would be a better situation if the building was on fire - that it was framed in wood, or steel. The correct answer is wood, since wood retains practically all of its structural strength until it is consumed by fire, unlike steel, which loses its strength very quickly when exposed to high temperature. So here we come to the heart of the issue - a Roman blacksmith from 2,000 years ago would make a more useful investigator of the building collapse than most "truthers" since he understands the fundamental fact that metals soften and can be reshaped when heated (by the blacksmith's hammer, or the weight of 10 building floors above) - no melting required. When the sprinkler system either doesn't come to the rescue, or is overwhelmed, it's over. For all of the fancy computers, the internet, and leadership of English majors and Philosophy professors, the "truthers" fail to grasp that simple fact. They are baffled by things a blacksmith knows. Because of this they are forced to invent ever more improbable and elaborate explanations that fail the common sense test - "the building was secretly rigged to implode"..... even though when done commercially it requires weeks of work by teams of people, drilling into the beams, stripping away insulation and structural materials, etc., etc. .... all unnoticed. Trapped by the absurdity of it, the escape routes range from magic thermite mixtures to space aliens. All of this, as part of a conspiracy that killed 3,000 Americans, has somehow been kept secret despite the fact that the US wasn't able to keep secret the waterboarding of a total of three people in 10 years without multiple leaks and widespread howls of outrage that the US bordered on being as bad as the worst criminal states ever, worse than even Germany which attempted genocide and killed millions. Ya, it must be "true". My guess is, whatever they're selling, you're buying.
Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report
NIST NCSTAR 1A: Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7
Osama was one of the few people who could mastermind the destruction of three towers with just two planes.
More on that...
NIST NCSTAR 1A: Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7
Saddam Hussein didn't like Al Quidea - it's very, very unlikely that he would have had anything to do with them at all. AQ moved into Iraq filling the power vacuum when the government fell.
Nonsense.
Report Details Saddam's Terrorist Ties
Christopher Hitchens debates Iraq with Reagan Jr.
I wonder how many recruits we've generated by killing innocents with our bombs and drones.
Probably fewer than you think....
. ..
Well, in fairness I doubt the US would have settled for just taking bin Laden and leaving thousands (ten of thousands?) of trained terrorists unsupervised in their state within a state role and under the next echelon of leadership. Would you have been for that?
Oddly enough I suspect that Al Qaeda might be thinking the same thing. They expected cruise missiles, not invasion and liberation.
I hope none of the moderators confuses trite with insightful.
Navy Seals.
Go Navy!
Interesting, so the US has ground troops in Pakistan, too? Shall we assume that they have both permission of the Pakistani government and the constitutional blessing of the US Congress for being at war in a FOURTH country...
Why, yes, as a matter of fact they do. And I'm glad to see that you are clear that they are fighting against the same enemy in Pakistan, not against Pakistan.
Right? RIGHT?!
Oh.
Right.
FML
Yes, it is over in exactly the same sense that the Cold War was over .... when Lenin died.
Mission Accomplished ---- Now let's bring 'em home.
Actually no, it isn't. Although Bin Laden's death is going to be very helpful, all that happened is that the current enemy leader was killed. Someone, probably far less effective, will take his place. The Coalition Forces killed the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq multiple times, and he was always replaced. Al Qaeda will fight on despite this. We ignore this fact at our peril.
The US & NATO need to remain in Afghanistan for at least several more years until their army are police are built up and trained, and their country is stabilized. Otherwise, we can expect another go around of this.
Apparently this is your "Mission Accomplished" moment?
Unfortunately, that apparently isn't the only bubble in China:
How Big Is the Chinese Property Bubble?
China's credit bubble on borrowed time as inflation bites
China: the coming costs of a superbubble
It seems likely that the world has a few more financial tremors coming.
Typical.
How about.... It's Al Qaedas fault!
Or are you a bunch of enablers?
I quite agree - there is essentially nothing new here. Therefore, we will hold them indefinitely (or till the end of the conflict) without trial like we did hundreds of thousands of Germans in World War 2, as provided for in the Law of War. And, if justified, they will be tried before military tribunals as has been done before. All nicely legal under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (legally the same as a Declaration of War), the Law of War, and the Geneva Convention.
Same old problems - same old solutions. No fuss, no muss.
Just because it sucks to be them doesn't mean that it isn't the correct solution.
You can call it what it is: WAR. Guantanamo is not "extra-legal", it is a perfectly legal prisoner of war camp, visited by the Red Cross and everything. Speaking of war, there was an especially big one about 70 years ago called World War 2.... maybe you've heard of it? The US held hundreds of thousands of captured German soldiers for years, pretty much all without trial. They weren't entitled to a trial for being captured as enemy combatants. Some were tried by Courts Martial for various crimes that they committed, including murder. That is Court Martial, or military commission, not civil or criminal courts. Other countries were at war even earlier, and could have been holding prisoners of war for up to 5 or 6 years or longer.
The Military has its own justice system with judges, juries, prosecutors, and defense lawyers, that tries cases on its own, everything from murder to theft and drunk on duty. If it is good enough for American service members, I'm sure it's good enough for dealing with the murderous perverts of Al Qaeda. (Didn't you know any part of this?)
The fact that it puts Al Qaeda members in a bad position doesn't mean that the US is the one doing something wrong. In fact, it is the US that is abiding by the laws, treaties, and customs of war. It is Al Qaeda that is in the wrong.
You might want to try reading that again, and this time take note of the bold section below:
Al Qaeda declared war on the United States and has been making war for about 15 years, killing thousands or tens of thousands of people in the process. The United States is making war right back now (under the authority of the Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force which legally as the same force as a Declaration of War). They can be tried before military commission or Courts Martial just as the Germans were in WW2, not to mention being held legally indefinitely (or until the end of the conflict). That makes for grim prospects for them, but that doesn't make it the wrong outcome either.
The US still has stock piles of chemical weapons as well... But they will get around to destroying them.. One day.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/cbw/cw.htm
One day? I guess you're at least consistent.
US gains momentum destroying chemical weapon stockpiles
It's a glitch in the Matrix. Among other reasons, it can happen when they republish something.
So, here is what we hear from the proponents of government run socialized medicine:
I would like to second what you said. I'm currently in Venezuela, and the health care here is way better than what I had available when I lived in the US. First of all, it's really cheap, the doctors are top of the line, and maybe the only thing you can complain here is that when they actually see somebody here with insurance they really squeeze them dry, but you still get your medical attention. If you don't have insurance you can still pay the bills since they have a different rate so to speak.
And here is the reality:
Healthcare suffers in Venezuela
More: WikiLeaks Embassy Cables Reveal Venezuela's Health-Care System Collapsing
And the UK?
US surgery safer than under NHS
Thousands of NHS operations cancelled because of blunders as complaints about standard of treatment rise
10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care
The Grass Is Not Always Greener - A Look at National Health Care Systems Around the World
Was totally adequate at the time, but started pining for that newfangled Apple Macintosh thingy when that came out.
For getting real work done at the time you were way better off with an Osborne or a Kaypro, or one of the many competitors. The typical software bundles shipped with CP/M machines at the time (word processor, database, spreadsheet, programming language, etc.), relatively easy telecommunications, wide choice of printers, and typical 2 disk drive configuration made them far more useful than the typical Macintosh configuration (unless you were doing graphics). The two advantages of the Macintosh were doing graphics, and general ease of use for the much more limited software that it had.
The Mac was certainly the way of the future, but the future took a long time to arrive with many bumps along the way. (But Steve doesn't want the Macintosh to be expandable!. MacBasic - Killed as sacrifice to Microsoft! And I won't bring up Apple losing the Hypercard source, of the one-floppy disk swap hell of the origunal Mac.)
Every creationist regardless of religious orientation depends on a logical fallacy to advance their beliefs. Which is essentially a form of lunacy as the OP advanced.
So, committing a logical fallacy renders you insane? I would say that you've just condemned pretty much the entire human race as insane, no doubt including yourself.
As soon as you reject occum's razor and introduce non-empirical shenanigans every theory is subject to the Spaghetti Monster/Last Tuesday fallacies.
Science is already well past that point. String theory: Is it science's ultimate dead end?
Some respond to Japan earthquake by pointing to global warming (Global warming - is there anything it can't do?)
The experiments to try and generate the chemicals of life in what is thought to be conditions on the young earth are interesting, but they are at best a form of speculation. I don't believe there is any way to prove that any given method truly resembles what actually occurred. The fact that some scientists are attributing life or the presence of the chemicals of life on earth to meteors doesn't really change things either. If anything, it just confuses the picture even more - "life didn't begin on earth, but in space, and it came here on meteors!" And how did it start in space? Isn't that just a bit more of a hostile environment?
Occam's razor is a guide, not an iron law. If it was an iron law, we would probably be using the TeVeS theory of gravity and leave the search for "dark matter & dark energy" (supposedly the matter and energy that makes up all but a tiny fraction of the Universe despite never really being seen) to compete for funding with the search for eluminiferous Ether.
Moreover, there are limits to what can be known, and what is provable.
Godel's incompleteness theorems
I think the ground you're on is shakier than you recognize, or care to admit.
Read anything by Donald Knuth lately?