Something interesting on electoral-vote.com:

CQ Politics has catalogued all the votes in the Senate and House during the Bush presidency and produced a table of how pro/anti Bush each member was and how often each member voted the party line. For example, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) voted the Democratic Party line 98% of the time. Senators Brown, Leahy, Whitehouse, Kennedy, and Durbin scored 97%. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) was the only Republican to score a 98% party-line vote, but senators Bunning, Allard, Barrasso, Vitter, Isakson, Kyl, Inhofe, and Cornyn all scored 97%. Over in the House, 27 Democrats and 8 Republicans clocked in at 99% or more.

The least faithful Democratic senator was Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) at 56% and the least faithful Republican senator was Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) at 59%. The least faithful House Democrat was Bud Cramer (AL-05) at 71% and the least faithful House Republican was Christopher Shays (CT-04) at 70%. The table also shows how often each member supported President Bush. For example, Barack Obama supported Bush 40% of the time and John McCain was aboard the Bush bandwagon 90% of the time. The much-maligned Sen. Joe Lieberman, who many Democrats regard as a traitor, voted with the Democrats 87% of the time, a tad better than blogosphere darling Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) who came in at 86% and also better than Sen. Evan Bayh (81%) who is considered a possible Obama Veep. Senators and representatives often have a public image that does not jibe with their actual voting records. The table is enlightening.

Depends on the kinds of votes they casted.

pacino wrote:Depends on the kinds of votes they casted.

True. It could count procedural stuff.

Monkeyboy wrote:The Wall Street Journal has a story on the Obama as Anti-Christ ad I mentioned earlier.

[url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121816422728523227.html]McCain Web Ad Is Accused
Of Linking Obama to Antichrist[/url]

McCain can't inspire the religious right, so he figures scaring them will get the same result. Motivate the base and get them to the polls, no matter what it takes.

And what's with all the lobbyists in McCain's campaign after saying he would keep them out? I guess he couldn't plug into the GOP machinery without taking a bunch of them onboard.

I can't take all this Obama as the Antichrist stuff seriously. Yes, there are right wing kooks who believe every Democrat is the Anti-Christ. And there are Left Wing kooks.

McCain never said that someone couldn't have been a lobbyist and work for the campaign. Campaign staffers cannot currently be a lobbyist. Campaign volunteers can be lobbyists, but cannot lobby any McCain staffer. David Axelrod is a lobbyist. I thought we settled this whole lobbyist thing a long time ago.

Russia and Georgia are basically at war now.

Russia has landed thousands of troops in their breakaway regions they are bombing Georgia constantly, Georgia is shooting down their planes, a Russian fleet is headed toward Georgia and unless I read something wrong apparently so is an AMERICAN!

HA!

If NATO gets involved WWIII here we come.

South Ossetia is one of those great corners of the world where the indiginious folk (ossetians) are very cantankerous and don't like being told to do anything by anybody. Stalin relocated a whole bunch of them because he thought they were backstabbing him, and stuck cossacks in their place (I think). So when they started trickling back under kruschev, and found out that they didn't haven any houses and stuff, and georrgia started kicking off, some kinda sided with them, because they wanted to give russia the finger. Oh and some of them are muslim, but not all of them. So now putin is being all big swinging dick about it, which is stupid, because he's only going to give himself a further headache if ossetia stays within russia.

Just for reference, Beslan by Timothy Philips gives a nice run down on ossetian politics, and is the only reason I know anything about the place.

mpmcgraw wrote:Russia and Georgia are basically at war now.

Russia has landed thousands of troops in their breakaway regions they are bombing Georgia constantly, Georgia is shooting down their planes, a Russian fleet is headed toward Georgia and unless I read something wrong apparently so is an AMERICAN!

HA!

If NATO gets involved WWIII here we come.

Hoopefully they'll take out that stupid giant coke bottle at turner field

Bucky wrote:

mpmcgraw wrote:Russia and Georgia are basically at war now.

Russia has landed thousands of troops in their breakaway regions they are bombing Georgia constantly, Georgia is shooting down their planes, a Russian fleet is headed toward Georgia and unless I read something wrong apparently so is an AMERICAN!

HA!

If NATO gets involved WWIII here we come.

Hoopefully they'll take out that stupid giant coke bottle at turner field

Thank god the Braves are playing in Arizona this weekend.

http://english.pravda.ru/allnews_en.html

Wow.

Russia: Again Savior of Peace and Life

The international community collectively held their breath waiting for the reaction of Russia after the savage, brutal, criminal attack by Georgia on South Ossetia. After having offered a cease fire in hostilities, the back stabbing Georgians immediately violated the cease fire, invading South Ossetia and causing massive destruction and death among innocent civilians, among peacekeepers and also destroying a hospital.

The two-faced, underhanded foreign policy of Georgia

Ask anyone in the Caucasus region, and they will tell you never to trust a Georgian because they would shake your hand with a smile and then stab you in the back. On Friday morning, we saw a perfect example of this treachery, when hours after declaring a ceasefire, Georgian military units launched a savage attack on the civilians of South Ossetia.

McCain says something stupid people post in droves, world peace threatened? Meh who cares.

So Pravda is still... Pravda?

VoxOrion wrote:So Pravda is still... Pravda?

Indeed.

The website would be more hilarious if it wasn't about such an important thing.

Houshphandzadeh wrote:Call me crazy, but while your wife is battling cancer seems like a sort of reasonable time to get a little on the side.

Aw Housh, you just dropped 10 chick points--that was so harsh!

jerseyhoya wrote:http://english.pravda.ru/allnews_en.html

Wow.

Russia: Again Savior of Peace and Life

The international community collectively held their breath waiting for the reaction of Russia after the savage, brutal, criminal attack by Georgia on South Ossetia. After having offered a cease fire in hostilities, the back stabbing Georgians immediately violated the cease fire, invading South Ossetia and causing massive destruction and death among innocent civilians, among peacekeepers and also destroying a hospital.

The two-faced, underhanded foreign policy of Georgia

Ask anyone in the Caucasus region, and they will tell you never to trust a Georgian because they would shake your hand with a smile and then stab you in the back. On Friday morning, we saw a perfect example of this treachery, when hours after declaring a ceasefire, Georgian military units launched a savage attack on the civilians of South Ossetia.

Fox News of Russia?

Man, this Georgia thing is wacked out.

"Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century," the president said in a televised statement from the White House, calling on Moscow to sign on to the outlines of a cease-fire as the Georgian government has done.

"The Russian government must reverse the course it appears to be on and accept this peace agreement as a first step toward solving this conflict," Bush said, adding that he is deeply concerned that Russia, which Georgian officials say has effectively split their country in two, might bomb the civilian airport in the capital of Tbilisi.

He said Russia's escalation of the conflict had "raised serious questions about its intentions in Georgia and the region" and had "substantially damaged Russia's standing in the world." "These actions jeopardize Russia's relations with the United States and Europe," Bush said. "It's time for Russia to be true to its word to act to end this crisis."

Forget who is delivering this message, forget where our troops are or arent - that'll just send us down a pointless hole of debate. Otherwise, how do you guys feel about the US taking this stand from a philosophical standpoint? Is this the right thing to do?

Do you, as an american, want to get in Russia's face, and are you happy with committing a steady level of military spending to a set of allies who helped you out in your previous conflict? Then, you're doing the right thing by you.

Do you, as an american, feel that the ossetians should be able to determine their own national destiny, even if they are happiest doing so within russia? than, you're doing the wrong thing.

Is the latter what's going on, or are you hypothesising?

Monkeyboy wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:http://english.pravda.ru/allnews_en.html

Wow.

Russia: Again Savior of Peace and Life

The international community collectively held their breath waiting for the reaction of Russia after the savage, brutal, criminal attack by Georgia on South Ossetia. After having offered a cease fire in hostilities, the back stabbing Georgians immediately violated the cease fire, invading South Ossetia and causing massive destruction and death among innocent civilians, among peacekeepers and also destroying a hospital.

The two-faced, underhanded foreign policy of Georgia

Ask anyone in the Caucasus region, and they will tell you never to trust a Georgian because they would shake your hand with a smile and then stab you in the back. On Friday morning, we saw a perfect example of this treachery, when hours after declaring a ceasefire, Georgian military units launched a savage attack on the civilians of South Ossetia.

Fox News of Russia?

No

I mentioned a bit back that the ossetians had been booted out of their homeland. I got confused with their neighbour, another ethnic group called the ingushetians who share a common background with the ossetians, but who ended up becoming more musim. Both groups have no great love for authority, but one got crapped on by Stalin - the ingush - and got booted out of their country, which was then settled by ossetians. Ossetia became an autonomous republic under the USSR, but got split in two when it collapsed and georgia took a large chunk of south ossetia. then all the refugees ran into the already crowded north ossetia and further spilled over into ingushetia, who are now full of returned ingush who have no land or are buying it back from ossetians at a much higher rate. That's really just an aside, but to it muddies things further, because the chechens try to exploit the situation in ingush, the ossetians treat the ingush like crap and call them filthy muslims and non-soviet patriots, and russia is in a position to exploit ossetias seperation between north and south. Then beslan happens (north ossetia), the ossetians blame the ingush for being dirty muslim terrorist bastards, and russia does feck all, but remains in a position to exploit local tensions.

Are the georgians being aggressive in trying to grab land from soviets? Yes. Are they in the process maintaining an artificial division between north and south ossetia? Yes. Are the ossetians right to want a return to their own former autonomous republic (and their original ethnic unity)? depends how you feel about very small nations and how their drive to autonomy gets exploited by their very large next door neighbours. Wiki says south ossetia was part of georgia in the turn of the century. But the ossetians are (from what I read in the aforementioned book), notoriously stubborn, independent and constantly telling everyone else to feck off and leave them alone.