Washington Navy Yard bombing 1983 not 1984. But who's counting?
This is the first I've heard of it, although I lived in DC until 1982. At the time of the bombing I was focused on the happy event of Harold Washington's election as mayor of Chicago.
Unafraid to set off irony alerts, HBO today yanked the YouTube video of Seeger's performance for copyright violation.
But every so often, after long stretches of preternatural boringness, Canadian politics becomes, for brief periods, the greatest show on earth.
And those periods are when I look back longingly to the early 1990s, when CBC was available on the big dish. Or up until a couple of years ago, when The National was still available on the little dish as part of an all-news channel that was the joint project of CBC, Deutsche Welle, and the Australian BC. (Al Gore bought the channel for the useless CurrentTV.)
Ken Houghton: That they are referring to it by the Southern name, not the Northern,...
What do you mean by this? What would be "the northern name" for Manassas? It's a town, not just a battle site, and its name has always been Manassas. That is, it's not "the Southern name", it's the name of the town.
albatross: Where did Minneapolis get all the policemen to handle the RNC convention?
St. Paul (not Mpls) has accounted for its spending of the $50 million security grant to each convention city; Denver has not. From the Pacifica story on that breakdown:
Around $34 million is going to pay personnel costs for more than 3,500 law enforcement officials from various jurisdictions. Note that St. Paul normally only has 600 officers. The others are coming from other cities - even as far away as Mesa, Arizona. Plus, there are all the county sherriff's deputies, state troopers, National Guard forces, and FBI -- all of them coordinated by the Secret Service and St. Paul Police.
I doubt very much that any "volunteers" are involved. There are plenty of problem cases on existing, paid, purportedly professional police rosters.
Apologies to Randolph, not Randolph Fritz.
Randolph Fritz: Dare we hope that the Democratic Party would provide some help?
No.
The Democratic Party sent the cops outside the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver to get rid of the ABC cameraman who was inconveniencing them by filming senators, lobbyists, and big donors. He was arrested and charged, despite standing on the public sidewalk and not interfering in any way with the comings and goings.
The Democratic Party gave no attention at all to anything the cops did in Denver. The Democratic mayor of Denver has not made public his city's expenditures from the $50 million grant each convention city gets for "security". St. Paul has, and on the model Naomi Klein reported from China, part of the spending stays in place as more state surveillance against the city's residents.
#34: the USA may, in fact, have seen Russia's preparations.
How could they/we not have seen Russia's preparations? We were conducting maneuvers with the Georgian military (and with troops from Azerbaijan and Ukraine) from July 15 through August 7th, and there were corresponding Russian maneuvers taking place in North Ossetia.
Provocations back and forth began in early July.
The weapons-selling lobby that operates in both wings of the money party prepared (Billmon link) a very, very long fuse that was lit this month.
Another point of view on whether the cyber-attacks were centralized and/or government directed.
Until there are news photos of such ordnance, there's no particular need to believe it, though as many commenters have said, the practice is almost universal.
Saakashvili has made a series of wild claims -- including that Georgian air defenses had shot down, variously, between twenty and sixty Russian planes. I saw him make the messages-on-bombs claim among many others in an unnerving, unhinged interview he gave to a BBC reporter he'd summoned to his office at 3 a.m. (on the 12th, I think).
As many comments above make clear (10, 26, 31) at least), the post should be corrected to:
... Slacktivist, Fred Clark, who has been doing a brilliant ana[ly]sis/takedown of the Left Behind series from the liberal evangelical Christian point of view, ...
Disemvowelment's an elegant solution to a common problem. Its one drawback is occasional ambiguity for those interested in reading the original. If the disemvoweled commenter can't resolve the ambiguity for anyone inquiring because they didn't keep an original, too bad for them.
Main posters who make significant retractions, corrections, or updates are not obliged to do so anywhere other than in the original post. Doing so in a more visible spot (in addition to the post itself) is commendable. Failing to do so is not grounds for demands or harsh condemnation in comments at the site, though a single polite request or suggestion shouldn't be considered out of line.
@Doctor Science #134: No, you're not the only person on the internet who saves her own comments.
Long comments into which one's put a lot of work are writing. Before I blogged (which I do only fitfully), I saved some of those comments for the same reason as any writer keeps access to their own writing.
Only a small percentage of my comments are saved, but I've been glad of the ones that are there. After more than a month or two, it can be surprisingly hard and/or time-consuming to find them again at the original location.
Having been an regular commenter for much longer and much more effectively than I've been a blogger, I've found it useful on occasion to point someone to a past comment. The saved-comments file, which includes the url, allows me do that easily. It's also helpful for looking at the evolution of my thinking on some subjects.
Added motivation came from the painful experience of having been an active participant in blogs whose archives became unavailable on relatively short notice (Body and Soul and MaxSpeak among them).
With any kind of luck the Department of Homeland Security will have been dissolved.
Dream on. If the Democratic nominee is HRC, the whole approach will be the same -- just slightly milder. Evidence for same.
Oh wait. Now that I've read comments, I have to include the 1956 election, though I don't really count it because it wasn't the result but the process I was aware of. We were living in Germany; my parents had to make repeated visits to the consulate in Munich, thirty miles away. When they got back from doing the actual voting, and were having drinks on the porch, my father asked my mother who she'd voted for. It was in the nature of a leetle joke, as he assumed she'd joined him in voting for Adlai Stevenson.
When he found out she'd voted for Ike, canceling his vote after all the trouble and expense they'd gone to to vote, he didn't speak to her for days.
To this day I don't know if she really did vote for Eisenhower or just wanted to see what kind of a rise she could get out of my father.
Sputnik. I was five.
Excellent points about the subtext of Coulter's message and the "condemnations" of R candidates, etc.
But on the mundane level of fact, men are voting Democratic. The only subgroup of men in which D's don't outpoll R's is among white, Christian, non-union men. And there it's a rout, 70-30 Republican. The demographic is shrinking (and would shrink even more quickly if the Employee Free Choice Act were to become law, and a Democratic administration made new appointments to the NLRB).
This info via a post full of other interesting data points at OpenLeft.
James McD #4: I hope that whoever the next president is makes disestablishing the Department of Homeland Security his or her very first official act.
Don't hold your breath. Here's Sen. Clinton in the CNN debate, making a little speech that could have come from Bush's mouth:
BLITZER: Senator Clinton, do you agree with Senator Edwards that this war on terror is nothing more than a bumper sticker; at least the way it's been described?
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D) NEW YORK: No, I do not. I am a senator from New York. I have lived with the aftermath of 9/11, and I have seen firsthand the terrible damage that can be inflicted on our country by a small band of terrorists who are intent upon foisting their way of life and using suicide bombers and suicidal people to carry out their agenda.
And I believe we are safer than we were. We are not yet safe enough. And I have proposed over the last year a number of policies that I think we should following.
via Jon Schwarz, who gives this kind of talk the treatment it deserves. I've bolded the especially disingenuous and Bush-like passages. It should go without saying, but apparently doesn't, that disassembling the DHS isn't one of the proposals to which Clinton's referring.
The Patriot Act was not repealed, it was extended, and now has no sunset. There's not any political momentum to restore habeas, much less repeal the full detention, torture, and kangaroo court provisions of the Military Commissions Act. (We can hope for a favorable decision on habeas now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Guantanamo prisoners' case, but Congress is sitting on its hands because "the votes aren't there.")
Once powers are ceded to the executive, they are almost never successfully clawed back. Do you really think that in a Democratic administration, a Democratic Congress will make that a priority? And even though Republicans are capable of turning on a dime and becoming rabid advocates of Congressional authority once a Democrat is in the White House, they won't be fighting to restore habeas or end torture.
RealID is probably about the only case in which enough Rs will join with civil liberties Ds to bring us back to the not-particularly-free-but-looks-awfully-good-from-here days of the twentieth century.
OT - I was pleased and amused to see that the McClatchy News Service site moderates the comments on stories using disemvowelment.
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