Crazy... in love

jerseyhoya wrote:Overblown Story of the Day: Michele Bachmann's State of the Union Response

i imagine you waiting at your computer, maddeningly refreshing this thread for the previous 5 hours and anticipating someone mentioning Bachmann and her freight train of freedom.

and fwiw, what she got wrong in her little history lesson-type tuneup to her address.

I'm doing stats homework on the computer, so BSG is getting refreshed at least 50x an hour.

Bachmann is an idiot. She won't be the nominee. Idiots run for their party's nomination every cycle. Ron Paul won straw polls and got a $201 donation from Werthless last cycle ffs.

what's the dollar for?


fwiw, i gave like five bucks each to biden and obama, i think?. I forget

I dunno. Maybe there was confusion on whether one had to give $200 or over $200 in order to make sure every google search of your name for eternity would return the news that one essentially lit $200-201 on fire.

oh my:

Overall, the services reported 434 suicides by personnel on active duty, significantly more than the 381 suicides by active-duty personnel reported in 2009. The 2010 total is below the 462 deaths in combat, excluding accidents and illness. In 2009, active-duty suicides exceeded deaths in battle.

Last week’s figures, though, understate the problem of military suicides because the services do not report the statistics uniformly. Several do so only reluctantly.

Figures reported by each of the services last week, for instance, include suicides by members of the Guard and Reserve who were on active duty at the time. The Army and the Navy also add up statistics for certain reservists who kill themselves when they are not on active duty.

But the Air Force and Marine Corps do not include any non-mobilized reservists in their posted numbers. What’s more, none of the services count suicides that occur among a class of reservists known as the Individual Ready Reserve, the more than 123,000 people who are not assigned to particular units.

Suicides by veterans who have left the service entirely after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan also are not counted by the Defense Department. The Department of Veterans Affairs keeps track of such suicides only if the person was enrolled in the VA health care system — which three-quarters of veterans are not.

But even if such veterans and members of the Individual Ready Reserve are excluded from the suicide statistics, just taking into account the deaths of reservists who were not included in last week’s figures pushes the number of suicides last year to at least 468.

jerseyhoya wrote:I'm doing stats homework on the computer, so BSG is getting refreshed at least 50x an hour.

Bachmann is an idiot. She won't be the nominee. Idiots run for their party's nomination every cycle. Ron Paul won straw polls and got a $201 donation from Werthless last cycle ffs.

But the idiots are getting more idiotic. I think someone like Alan Keyes or even Ron Paul know what they're doing running as marginal candidates (you could add people like Jesse Jackson and maybe Kucinich as well) but Bachman is just a straight out loon.

I don't even think it's fair to lump Bachmann in with Palin.

Certainly the crazies get more attention because there is more cable time that needs to be filled and blogs on the left and right are more popular/can cater to niches/focus relentlessly on how EVIL AND STUPID the other side is. DailyKos wasn't around in 1999 to pretend that Gary Bauer's response to Clinton's SotU was a big deal.

pacino wrote:oh my:

Overall, the services reported 434 suicides by personnel on active duty, significantly more than the 381 suicides by active-duty personnel reported in 2009. The 2010 total is below the 462 deaths in combat, excluding accidents and illness. In 2009, active-duty suicides exceeded deaths in battle.

Last week’s figures, though, understate the problem of military suicides because the services do not report the statistics uniformly. Several do so only reluctantly.

Figures reported by each of the services last week, for instance, include suicides by members of the Guard and Reserve who were on active duty at the time. The Army and the Navy also add up statistics for certain reservists who kill themselves when they are not on active duty.

But the Air Force and Marine Corps do not include any non-mobilized reservists in their posted numbers. What’s more, none of the services count suicides that occur among a class of reservists known as the Individual Ready Reserve, the more than 123,000 people who are not assigned to particular units.

Suicides by veterans who have left the service entirely after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan also are not counted by the Defense Department. The Department of Veterans Affairs keeps track of such suicides only if the person was enrolled in the VA health care system — which three-quarters of veterans are not.

But even if such veterans and members of the Individual Ready Reserve are excluded from the suicide statistics, just taking into account the deaths of reservists who were not included in last week’s figures pushes the number of suicides last year to at least 468.

So I wonder what that translates to in terms of rate of suicide. The numbers seem insanely high but don't really mean much without the total numbers of soldiers and the rate suicide occurs in the general population.

sequel to armageddon, starring tim pawlenty?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfkNEq1XioE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

pacino wrote:sequel to armageddon, starring tim pawlenty?

wow

even just 30 seconds of that is embarrassing, and it goes on for 90.

Thank God he's going to save us, singlehandedly.




Really, I actually like it as an early ad in a campaign where he's seen as so vanilla. As long as it's followed up with more substantive ads, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. But it's still funny.

it needs the inception soundtrack

The Chicago Tribune flips its shit over the dumb Rahm ruling

i guess he should've commuted from chicago on a daily basis while serving the president of the FREAKING UNITED STATES. what an absurd ruling.

I think that Pawlenty ad had bits of "Independence Day" spliced in. Also, a shot of Romney.

drsmooth wrote:

Wizlah wrote:

Through their harmful example, they have alienated young Palestinians from their own history of resistance to colonial and military rule, so they now believe that tens of thousands of brilliant, imaginative and extraordinarily brave Palestinians never existed or, worse, fought and died for nothing. It cuts them off from any useful mobilising methods and techniques that they might draw upon today – the democratic and collective mechanisms that are needed more than ever. They have given young people the idea that there is no virtue in collective organisation, the mechanism by which popular democratic change is made and preserved.

Wiz, I have to say I agree with the idea the poster laments, to this extent - there IS no virtue in collective organisation. It's more a matter of "the worst (least "virtuous") except for all the others, etc.

I realise that you're not a fan of holding collective action in some kind of absolute high regard. Nonetheless, at some basic level, if you are going to enter into negotiation, a profoundly political act, then you need to be able to organise yourselves collectively, and your negotiators need to be able to represent their constituency, in some cases, successfully convincing them of the way forward even if the goals you're now aiming for are not your original ones.

I'm biaised of course, but the fact of the matter is that the good friday agreement and the subsequent arrangements for disarmement were a far cry from what the IRA army council of the mid-80s would have wanted. The removal of articles 2 and 3 from the irish constitution by referendum was a massive step back for the republican cause in northern ireland - for the longest time, the IRA had been able to claim legitimacy for its actions because it was working in the spirit of articles 2 and 3 which lay claim to the 6 counties. For Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein to successfully argue the case with the IRA army council that many of the arrangements in the good friday agreement were in the best interests of the IRA was a huge achievement.

The more I read of the palestinian negotiations, the more quickly I am aware of how little I know about the crucial points of dispute, both from a historical point of view, their role within each side's negotiating position, and their attainability. Granted, there is the fact that these leaks portray Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in very poor light, and the political motivation for smearing them could call into question just which material has been released. It should be noted that the Guardian stands by its claim that they have verified most of these documents independently (I don't know whether this has been done by themselves or in conjunction with Al Jazeera).

Nonetheless, it does not seem unfair to note that in light of the information leaked about the negotiations, that the Palestinians were offering an awful lot more than their constituency would have been happy with in order to achieve any kind of basis for a two-state solution and that the Israelis can not continue to claim that the palestinians were unbending in their position since they had offered to accomodate israeli demands at the cost of their own political position.

It certainly goes a long way to explaining the shift in political support for Hamas in terms other than an increasingly radicalised population.

I realise this is a topic which rarely if ever gets commented on in this board, but whichever way you look at it, these revelations are going to profoundly affect foreign policy in the middle-east, and by extension the USA's military commitments in the coming years.

dajafi wrote:I think that Pawlenty ad had bits of "Independence Day" spliced in. Also, a shot of Romney.

I detected a pretty strong Oliver Stone influence

Not always a Brooks fan, but I did like this one.

The problem is that it still takes as a basic premise the idea of collective endeavor and, not to be overdramatic about it, the idea that our fates are linked--it's the nation competing as a unit, not a bunch of isolated pomo yeoman farmers, which seems to be how his party of choice sees things.

wow, with all the protests in egypt, tunisia and the lebanon, I'm feeling a strong urge to buy the independent tomorrow and get robert fisk's take on it.

There will come a month when I have no proofing/copy-editing work and I will set it aside for reading his psychotically mammoth volume on the middle-east. 1400 pages. jeezo.