Posts by Russell Brown
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Russ,
New thread... yea or nay...
Alright, you've convinced me. I'm still feeling my way with this discussion thing ...
New thread here for poll-watching, now that the returns are poised to come in. Feel free to keep on arguing in this one though ...
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Murtha is not being persecuted; his views and his offered solution of redeploying the troops in Iraq to Okinawa is just too stupid to be true.
Sigh ... this is exactly what I mean. In the 'Meet the Press' interview in June, which attracted all the attention, he was asked to respond to a Rove comment demanding to know where the US could station troops if it withdrew from Iraq. Murtha mentioned Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait - and then, as an afterthought, Okinawa. He has apparently mentioned increasing the existing cohort at Okinawa before, but I couldn't find references.
Okay, Okinawa is too far from the Middle East to be practical as a staging post, so not a great idea. It also didn't warrant the batshit-crazy response it got from the winger media and blogosphere.
Ironically, Jack Kelly, who castigated Murtha over this on Real Clear Politics, is now, three months later, declaring that "it's plain we've worn out our welcome" in Iraq, calling for a "timetable for withdrawal", etc. He unfortunately neglected to answer Mr Rove's question about where to send the troops next ...
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sigh* Thanks for the thoughtful rebuttal, but I think I'll leave RB to decide what's permissable discourse around here and respectfully suggest you stick the 'tude in the first available orifice.
And I was all good with it right up till that point. That wasn't a very respectful suggestion. I'm really trying not to go down the Kiwiblog gurgler ...
WRT to your point, I find it hard to gauge how either of the major parties really feels about trade liberalisation. The current administration never seems to live up to its rhetoric on trade, and I don't really trust the Dems on it either, which tends to take the issue out of play somewhat.
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This is interesting:
"Is corruption in Washington, D.C., the dominant issue driving voters at the polls today? That's what CNN's exit polls are showing, according to Wolf Blitzer and Bill Scheider, who are chatting about their exit numbers on TV as we speak. Scheider just said that 42% of voters cited "corruption in Washington" as the issue which is "extremely important" to them. If true, this would obviously bode ill for the GOP, given the string of GOP officials facing investigation or indictment and given the fact that the GOP runs the place."
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Hi James,
So what are the implications? I bet none of you know much about Nancy Pelosi, the loony tunes San Fran lib who would become speaker if the Dems win. Well, Osama, Al Zawaheri, Kim Jong Il, Armdinajad the head hackers in Iraq and various other assorted despots will be happy campers indeed if Nancy is the new Speaker. She sees terrorism as a law enforcement issue.
This is a common Republican talking point that has also been hurled at Murtha, Kerry, etc, etc. If you go and look at the original statements it's fairly silly: Pelosi's comments came in the context of demanding additional resources for law enforcement, both domestically and internationally. In another case she was bagged for declining to use the word "war" in an interview where she actually said: "We're in a struggle against terrorism throughout the world ..."
Murtha's crime was saying: "[T]he heart of terrorism is not in Iraq. The heart of terrorism is worldwide and you have to do it internationally."
The implication seems to be that if you don't endlessly repeat the phrase "war on terror" you somehow want the terrorists to win. Frankly, I don't think the war will be won on the basis of vocabulary ...
Not much use if you become one of the people who have to jump 100 floors to your death (like the people in the top floors of the WTC on 9/11) in the next terrorist attack that she would make much easier for terrorists to successfully launch , if she got her way.
Could you explain this? Law enforcement seems highly salient to the task of detecting and foiling terrorist groups; it's reasonable to say that if law enforcement agencies had been better co-ordinated, the 9/11 attacks might well have been prevented.
The comparison that's often raised is with the British government's pursuit of the IRA, which bore fruit when it was identified and conducted as a law enforcement issue.
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Good grief. The Republican robo-pestering calls in Nebraska have gone a step further. They're using the Democrat candidate's voice.
Meanwhile, the usual chaos and under-provisioning at polling places ...
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As for the Renaissance "bad" vs Apple "good" debate, I'll have to agree with John Holley. I'm also an ex-employee of the big red R and I totally agree that Apple Oz is certainly responsible for a significant amount of the angst at Renaissance.
I went to Macworld NY one year, at Renaissance's expense because Apple Australia didn't give a crap about NZ journalists. When we got there, the Apple Aust comms person proved highly adept at organising expensive dinner outings, less so at doing anything remotely useful for me. Interviews? Hah. I couldn't even get into the press conference, although, of course, the Aussie journalists did. The Renaissance folks were great, but they couldn't do anything about it.
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Robyn, something very cool on youtube is HBO doco "Hacking Democracy" linked on Scoop FP....
It's out there on the torrent wires too. I grabbed it this week, but went out and left the torrent running: uploaded 1.4GB. Whoops.
And may I say Al, I think it's a feather in Scoop's cap that all this way down the road, the black box voting issue you guys helped kick off has made it to the status of a major HBO doco. I liked the way that HBO told Diebold to jam it last week when Diebold demanded the programme be yanked ...
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One final spanner in the works: if the Dems take the Senate 51-49, Joe Lieberman could be the one-seat majority. Could he be lured across the aisle by Karl Rove?
OTOH, are there any moderate Republicans who might be tempted to pass the other way?
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__"On the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of every even-numbered year, elections are held for all 435 members of the United States House of Representatives and 33 or 34 of the 100 members of the United States Senate.__"
Um... I'm going to stay out of it and instead watch some funny videos on YouTube.You're right. No wonder hardly anyone votes.
I hope that's not an example of the slow death of Wikipedia:
"On the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November ..."
Are there some Tuesdays that come before Mondays in America?
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