I'm not sure what you are proposing here mountainphan. We don't have a division for future crime. They didn't do ANYTHING.

And if you don't think Guantanamo Bay is used as a negative across the world, and isn't seen as one at home by many, then I don't know what to tell you. It's just wrong to violate human rights. It's not a palace,despite what you seem to be suggesting. The idea of an enemy combatant should not exist. To deny people rights because of some perceived 'war on terror' is simply flat-out against everything our country supposed believes.

pacino wrote:I'm not sure what you are proposing here mountainphan. We don't have a division for future crime. They didn't do ANYTHING.

Unfortunately for your argument, many of "they" did and are doing something. I'm sorry the term "war" causes you so much discomfort, but at some point you're going to have to get used to the seriousness of this war/conflict/brouhaha/pick your term.

there is no 'war on terror'. you don't police by military force.

and as has been said by dajafi, bush released them because there was no evidence of any 'extremism' at that time. lo and behold, after they spent time at the bay, they turn to it. who saw that coming

Mountainphan wrote:

pacino wrote:I'm not sure what you are proposing here mountainphan. We don't have a division for future crime. They didn't do ANYTHING.

Unfortunately for your argument, many of "they" did and are doing something. I'm sorry the term "war" causes you so much discomfort, but at some point you're going to have to get used to the seriousness of this war/conflict/brouhaha/pick your term.

MP, with reciprocal and sincere respect, this herring is deep red.

The "they" we're talking about specifically, are the ones who should never have been detained in the first place. There's no moral alternative to restoring to them the freedom we never should have taken; that was all I meant by admitting our mistakes and trying to make restitution. Presumably the others who are in there for cause--and nobody is suggesting that there are no such people--will remain in custody under whatever process we deem fit for them plays out.

It's one thing to be at "war" with people who actually did or intend to do us harm. (I'm not sure if a great nation can really be at "war" with what's essentially a criminal gang in a sense other than colloquial, but we'll leave the semantics aside.) But blanket condemning a larger group only increases the odds that the war will be longer and costlier than any of us want.

If Obama were the lily-livered pansy that the Cheney right tries to paint him as, I don't think we'd have seen the much higher rate of drone strikes in Af-Pak or the commitment to raising the troop levels there. If you haven't read the recent Peter Baker piece in the NYT Sunday magazine, you might find it worthwhile: the basic premise is that with a few exceptions, there's been little non-cosmetic change from the anti-terror tactics of the Bush years. One of the things he has tried to change, of course, is shutting down Guantanamo. Given the demonstrated willingness to piss off the Democratic base by escalating the Afghan war, I think it's safe to conclude that the rationale for closing the base is that informed opinion believes it's doing a lot more harm than good in the wider struggle.

Mountainphan wrote:

pacino wrote:I'm not sure what you are proposing here mountainphan. We don't have a division for future crime. They didn't do ANYTHING.

Unfortunately for your argument, many of "they" did and are doing something. I'm sorry the term "war" causes you so much discomfort, but at some point you're going to have to get used to the seriousness of this war/conflict/brouhaha/pick your term.

Serious people understand that a nation-state's resolution of its confrontations with non-state actors entail more complex responses than "KILL ALL 'EM TERRISTS!!1!"

Serious people also get concerned about the spectacle of the planet's most potent nation-state - potent theoretically because of the resilience of its conceptual underpinnings - continually behaving instead like a neurasthenic sexagenarian political hack from Wyoming.

drsmooth wrote:

Mountainphan wrote:

pacino wrote:I'm not sure what you are proposing here mountainphan. We don't have a division for future crime. They didn't do ANYTHING.

Unfortunately for your argument, many of "they" did and are doing something. I'm sorry the term "war" causes you so much discomfort, but at some point you're going to have to get used to the seriousness of this war/conflict/brouhaha/pick your term.

Serious people understand that a nation-state's resolution of its confrontations with non-state actors entail more complex responses than "KILL ALL 'EM TERRISTS!!1!"

Serious people also get concerned about the spectacle of the planet's most potent nation-state - potent theoretically because of the resilience of its conceptual underpinnings - continually behaving instead like a neurasthenic sexagenarian political hack from Wyoming.

Serious people also don't engage in garbled, non-sensical hyperbole at every turn. Seriously.

Also one of the authors of Game Change gon be on Colbert tonight

jerseyhoya wrote::lol:

Also one of the authors of Game Change gon be on Colbert tonight

This is on right now, and Colbert is basically killing him in the intro.

Peter Baker is a dick.

So that's paraphrased, since it's not in quotes

Rococo4 wrote:starting to get a lot of false hope that brown might actually pull this out.

Talked to someone more plugged in than I am, and people in the know are somewhat optimistic. Not that it's worth a whole lot, since people in the know are often dumb, but they get to look at more polls than we do. Man, I really wish the election was tomorrow. I think there are too many days left for her to save herself.

Also, the Globe's endorsement of Coakley is spectacular. It legitimately could be published on kos.

Something interesting from the Wash Times:

President Obama notched substantial successes in spending cuts last year, winning 60 percent of his proposed cuts and managing to get Congress to ax several programs that had bedeviled President George W. Bush for years.

The administration says Congress accepted at least $6.9 billion of the $11.3 billion in discretionary spending cuts Mr. Obama proposed for the current fiscal year. An analysis by The Washington Times found that Mr. Obama was victorious in getting Congress to slash 24 programs and achieved some level of success in reducing nine other programs.

Among the president's victories are canceling the multibillion-dollar F-22 Raptor program, ending the LORAN-C radio-based ship navigation system and culling a series of low-dollar education grants. In each of those cases, Mr. Obama succeeded in eliminating programs that Mr. Bush repeatedly failed to end.

To be fair, I don't think it's entirely shocking that a Dem president is more successful in getting a Dem Congress to agree to cuts than was his Republican predecessor. And the budget outlook is still legitimately terrifying. But this is still at least a little encouraging.

Nice commentary in the NYT about Schwarzenegger and the impossibility of his position:

In his six years as governor, he took on state employee unions, entrenched and cynical Democrats, entrenched and anti-tax Republicans, a bloated pension system that has seen costs rise by 2,000 percent in 10 years. And he lost — to every group.

He tried to make California a role model for a clean energy state, to make it more European by championing smart design and caring for its citizens. But when the economic crash came, he was left with the DNA for disaster that has determined this state’s fate for a generation.

The simple tragedy of California is that its tax and budgeting restrictions — voted in by citizens’ initiatives — make it impossible to pay for the prison, school and health mandates OK’d by those same people.

The reason the prison population has increased 10 times more than the population at large, for example — creating a well-paid industry that gets more money than the university system — is because people demanded it, though they had to be unsure of its longterm consequences.

that seems to be the general trend with the population in general. most want lower taxes, but awesome roads, schools, whatever. the demands are so out of whack it is impossible to deal with.

Mountainphan wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

Mountainphan wrote:

pacino wrote:I'm not sure what you are proposing here mountainphan. We don't have a division for future crime. They didn't do ANYTHING.

Unfortunately for your argument, many of "they" did and are doing something. I'm sorry the term "war" causes you so much discomfort, but at some point you're going to have to get used to the seriousness of this war/conflict/brouhaha/pick your term.

Serious people understand that a nation-state's resolution of its confrontations with non-state actors entail more complex responses than "KILL ALL 'EM TERRISTS!!1!"

Serious people also get concerned about the spectacle of the planet's most potent nation-state - potent theoretically because of the resilience of its conceptual underpinnings - continually behaving instead like a neurasthenic sexagenarian political hack from Wyoming.

Serious people also don't engage in garbled, non-sensical hyperbole at every turn. Seriously.

I can't help your deficiencies of vocabulary and rhetoric. You simply need to learn how to read better.

dajafi wrote:Linked without comment

BECK: Who is your favorite founder?

PALIN: You know, well, all of them because they came collectively together with so much diverse .

BECK: Bull crap. Who is your favorite?

PALIN: So much diverse opinion and so much diversity in terms of belief, but collectively they came together to form this union...No, and they were led by, of course, George Washington, so he's got to rise to the top. Washington was the consummate statesman.

Besides the fact that this sounded like it was almost the Couric newspaper thing all over again, I'll bet George Washington wishes he weren't dead so he could kill himself

Fox should have traded its draft pick. George Washington? Sarah, could you be any more obvious?

If I thought she had any idea about the characters of the Founders, I'd say it was an interesting answer. The implication could be that for all the brainiacs like Jefferson and Hamilton, and deal-making pragmatists like Franklin and Madison, you need a charismatic Leader type to pull it all together. But my guess is that she couldn't give you too much on, say, the Federalist vs. anti-Federalist debate, or why the Articles of Confederation had to go in the first place.

Stepping back from that, I keep thinking about the irony of these right-wing, selectively small-government populists hearkening back to and claiming to take inspiration from the Founders. Much as they hate "us" (liberal overeducated people who live on the coasts) as snobs, they're looking back at a bunch of guys who were the ultimate self-selecting elitists. Were the Tea Party types around in the 1790s, they probably would have been with Shays' Rebellion or the Whiskey Rebellion, anti-tax revolts that the new government squashed.

I will never understand the left's fascination with spotlighting every word that comes out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth.