Not to be cynical or anything, but let me know if anyone, besides the well-meaning souls involved, in Tonasket or anywhere else remembers that this resolution was passed a year from now. Joe, out there on Longnecker Road, however, will definitely remember if that pothole was fixed or not though. They do not even proudly put the resolution up on their town's website.
Symbolic gestures can have tremendous impact if they are broadcast and internalized by a great many people. Consider the picture of the young man in Tiananmen Square standing in the path of an advancing tank. Only the picture of that courageous act being reproduced millions of times made it significant symbolic gesture that gives it meaning well beyond the act itself. Without the camera being there and without the picture being broadcast what amounted to a simple symbolic gesture would have never become a powerful statement.
The calculated and carefully worded symbolic gesture by the good people of Tonasket (http://www.tonasketcity.org/ - a pretty little town) will not shake the world because the world will never know or care about it. It will not change anything. It is like the Poppy Days Proclamation they made on 4/22/03. The Tonasket Police Chief even said he would not have a shoot-out the FBI if they showed up in the library looking for information. Just like before the resolution passed. Even if they got every Tonasket in the US to pass such a resolution it would not change anything. All this resolution accomplished was to get all the leftwing blogs all a-twitter. Can anyone name a significant change that occurred because some community's city council passed a resolution such as this?
My brain will explode if I try to make my blog conform to every browser's idiosyncrasies. Being a rightwinger makes the blogging life easy for me. I use IE therefore IE is the Truth and the Light as far as I am concerned. Anyone using those other heathen browsers can go to hell or to another blog they can actually read if mine fails to behave properly for them.
This is all nice. Someone obviously put some effort in putting all this together. No doubt it's inclusion in the minutes of the local town council made someone or some group feel all warm and fuzzy inside as if they had accomplished something practical. I question if this is really the forum for such things.
If I was a resident of this town and we were paying these people a salary out of our taxes I would be down at the next meeting asking them what in the hell is going on and why weren't they spending their time figuring out why the potholes on my street weren't fixed yet instead of trying to solve problems they have no jurisdiction over. But on the other hand I might just say now that they got that big problems taken care of maybe my potholes are next. Am I being too grumpy and being too hard on my good neighbors?
Dick Morris is one of the most interesting characters from the Clinton era. I do not believe Clinton would have been reelected in 1996 if it weren't for Dick Morris who is, in my opinion and his, a political genius. The combination of Clinton and Morris was deadly to the bumbling, incompetent Republicans in those days. Because of his influence on Clinton during that period, Dick Morris, I believe, had a profound effect on the politics and the history of the US. I will read that book. With more than a few grains of salt of course.
Great story.
What is in a person's heart and what he does is sometimes more important than how he talks or what he says.
There is a very good tutorial at http://www.glish.com/css/ that shows examples of various CSS layouts that might be helpful. This is where I started. I use HTML-Kit to try out my HTML before revising my template in blogger. (http://www.chami.com/html-kit/ - free)
You didn't ask for general opinions about your layout. I will volunteer mine for whatever they are worth. I like your layout. It is clean and neat, easy to read, and contains excellent support features that all first class blogs need: comments, trackback, sidelights, recent, and the links. Blogs without comments are deformed from my point of view. If I do not have the opportunity to praise or condemn or interact with fellow travelers I will not waste my time reading what the blogger has to say.
I particularly like your right hand column (you could have guessed that). If you go to 3 columns your informative right hand column is probably going to have to be reduced from 300 pixels to 200 or fewer pixels (on my monitor using a 1024x768 pixel screen resolution) which will make the information in that column now difficult to read.
Eschaton has 200 and 215 pixels (on my monitor) side columns. Eschaton's main column posts and blog begging are very short and lend themselves well to a three column layout. His side columns consist of very short entries. Yours posts are much longer than his and may go on for several screens unless you use smaller font size. I hate blogs that use microscopic font sizes (make quick note: get rid of suspected freeper by reducing font sizes).
My blog is 2 columns with a header. I considered 3 columns but that would have meant that I would have had to find some meaningful content for the 3rd column. Also I was concerned about readability of the main column because I write long posts and I wanted to have pictures.
Side note: A couple of good, easy to use design tools that I like are a caliper used to measure the width and height of pictures, columns etc. and a color picker. Both are free at http://www.iconico.com/caliper/ at http://www.iconico.com/colorpic/index.asp). I used them a lot when I was designing my blog.
Anybody who gives up and doesn't vote because they think their candidate has lost, based on what they see on TV, is too shallow to feel sorry for. After all, there's still the point spread to consider.
Sure, someone is going to stand in line 2 hours outside in the heat (I live in Arizona) to vote either in a lost cause or a blow out. In your dreams. It would be like standing in line for a sold out movie that you knew was sold out as far as I am concerned. Rather than calling someone shallow for doing that I would call them stupid. I am partisan as they come and I won't do it so hang the shallow tag on me (for that).
they have gone from accepting contributions from anyone, in the traditional American manner, to refusing to accept donations from anyone who also donates to the Democratic party
Could I get a link to that policy please? Thanks.
It'l be interesting to see who else in the GOP runs against him for Zell's seat, and which Democrats enter the race as well. In the meantime, I'll just have to content myself with wondering where on earth the Georgia GOP dredges up the toxic lackwits they keep thrusting onto the national stage. Probably the same place they find 'wonderful' people like DeLay and Lott. I cringe everytime I see one of them in front of a microphone. The Democrats do not have to run a smear campaign against DeLay because he is doing a good job of doing it himself everytime he opens his mouth. My daughter was on a candidate search team at one time and it was tough for her to get good, qualified, and motivated people to run for any office. She had well-designed packets of information so that the canidate did not have start a campaign from scratch.
Steve:
I do not think that the election could have reasonably been considered over if Gore won Florida. If you reviewed the states called for Gore up until that point and add in California I think it would have been safe to say that Gore had the election won at that point.
although IIRC there have been studies showing that it depresses voter turnout among both parties about equally. I did not say it depressed one party's vote versus another's.
I do not think that word "zero" means what you think it means Tell me what I think it means.
I am not aware that there were any states in 2000 which had only one contested election.
I am not sure what elections you are talking about or what you actually mean by this statement.
Is there any circumstance, I wonder, in which you would consider the ratio of fallacies to sentences in your posts to be unacceptably high? Fallacies? I am not aware of any fallacies.
Avram: That is a terrible article. I should have looked for something better about the matter. I wanted to document the vote numbers. Try this http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/01/28/wclin128.xml&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=120859. Hasidic Jews normally vote Republican. Two nearby precincts on primarily Hasidic Jews voted Republican in the same election.
Scott:
I don't like that ridiculous aphorism either.Talk to Jeff, he brought it up first to get in a dig at Republicans with deep held religious beliefs for some reason. I was just doing a little light mocking of what he said. You are right Taliban are certainly the epitome of evil. Bush was 100% correct at removing them from power in Afghanistan.
why is it that your stock response I tried my best in my post to be as balanced as everyone else is by saying that Republicans are guilty of the same sort of thing. They are. I didn't want to upset the over-sensitive readers who thought I might be only bashing the poor helpless Democrats.
Is it possible that the voters in that precinct found the alternatives to Hilary distasteful enough to grudgingly support her No. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/01/28/wclin128.xml&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=120859 The surrounding Hasidic precinct voted Republican. This one did too in 1998. I guess maybe Hillary's ads touched their hearts?
James:
No. I would prefer that the companies that make voting machines not be owned or influenced by parties or politicians of any stripe. I agree. A rock solid verification system that Jeff suggests would guard against hanky-panky because as a cynic I know we will never have a politically pure system. Without verification the integrity of our elections will always be in question. The losers will always cry foul and will try to remove the mantle of electoral legitimacy from the winner if the system isn't secure.
Theresa Lepore, the lady who designed the infamous butterfly ballot had a previous job [in a heavy German accent] Ferrry Interrresssttting. [end of accent] I have a hard time imagining her as a stewardess. Stewardesses are trained to be poised and self-confident. Ms Lapore was anything but that as unfair criticism rained down on her from all sides. She made a mistake and paid for it dearly. She probably thanks God everynight that she was not a Republican.
Jeff:
Scroll to the bottom of http://www.bartcop.com/diebold.htm and see who the officers of Diebold donate money to If I were a lawyer employed by Diebold I would recommend to top management that they sue this individual for libel. They probably won't because Otter is a small rabid fish in a samll stagnant and polluted pond. It is not against the law to be a conservative, an ultra conservative, or a right wing whack job. Nor is it against the law donate to the party of your choice. Otter makes the grassy knoll and black helicopter people look normal. From my reading of the article it sounds like instead of connecting the dots Otter is trying to connect invisible dots. He is lucky that the subpoena bearing people aren't knoclomg at his door as we write.
Palast quickly bypasses any discussion of the role that election supervisors play in the elections in FL. Probably because it does not fit in with his agenda. Election supervisors in FL are elected. They do not work for the Sec of State. The Sec of State's role in the election is to set basic guidelines and certify the election. The Sec of State does not micromanage the elections at the county level. The county supervisors have a lot of power. Palast ignores all that and seems to quickly pass over their responsibilities in general and with the certification of the voter rolls. Palast wants to get into placing the blame on Harris and Bush. At least in the article I read. Perhaps no other media did not get into this story because it was just simple story of government incompetence. That isn't news.
Teresa: Please ... have a nice day. You can be sooooo funny.
I see someone's been issued their freeper talking-points memo.
Yes, i got mine this afternoon. It is printed on the back of the DLC talking points memo that you got this morning.
There is a bill in the House right now that would require states to use machines that produce a verifiable paper trail.
If the Diebold machines do not a verification system what good are they? It seems to me if my online bank has figured out a way to be electronically comfortable with who I say I am then a electronic voting machine company should be able to figure out some kind of system that does the same thing. I will go look up that bill and give my congersman a hollar too. Sounds like a good idea. Did you talk to the congressman or one of his interns?
is that the three major electronic voting machine makers all have ties to the Taliban wing of the Republican party. Including Diebold
Would you be more comfortable if Diebold had ties to the ____________ (fill in a name - I do not want to offend any one of the nine candidates) wing of the Democratic Party instead? I will be looking for those Republican Taliban on the floor of the Republican convention. Will they be wearing traditional headgear and executing non-believers? Where did you find that information about the voting machine makers' political affiliations?
Avarm:
The only major embarassment along these lines I can recall was when the networks called Florida for Gore,
Isn't that is enough? It had a pretty big impact on the election. If you lived in the western US and turned off your TV at that point the chances of you going out to vote were zero. If Gore won FL the election was over. This is a pretty good article that describes the problems the networks were having. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/med1-m14.shtml I usually do not recommend stories from the World Socialist Website but this one seems to be more or less free from bias. Another interesting thing about the news coverage that night was that the networks called Gore states within minutes after the polls closed in a state even though the vote was extremely close and waited to call Bush states for 20 minutes or more and in one case waited 1.5 hours in a state that he won by more that 5% of the vote. This gave the impression that Gore was winning big and that network technique, intended or not, could have significantly influenced voter turn-out in the west.
Care to name the counties in which such precincts can be found?
Sure, here are the counties, some example precincts, with links to the data.
Palm Beach County.
http://www.pbcelections.org/ElectionResults/2000/GEN/PCT0001.HTM Look at precincts 066,160, 168, 222, and 223.
Broward County.
http://www.sbgo.com/Papers/Election/Broward%20Precinct%20Level%20Data.xls Look at precincts 10A, 6C 17D, 27M, 70R and 28-37Z. I was recalling figures from memory and I can't recall exactly where I saw a total like 1800/10 but there is one like that because it burned into my memory but not into my bulging favorites list. There are probably similar outcomes in Bush strongholds if you look for them.
Votes are bought and sold all the time in our country. There are some disgusting examples of it. If we are worried about the accuracy and security of voting machines we should also we worried when this type of raw politics that goes on to essentially buy votes. A couple of examples: There was a conservative Republican precinct in Hillary's election that voted 1359 to 10 for her in the Senate race. Her husband shortened the sentences of 3 of 4 men from that community against the recommendation of his own Justice Department on his infamous last day in office. htmhttp://www.nationalreview.com/george/george012501.shtml
Her husband also offered clemency to 14 FALN terrorists from NYC prior to the election that was a purely political move made to help his wife in her NY Senate race. http://www.jonathanpollard.org/1999/092199. This is old stuff and I don't mean to pick on the former president because I know we can dredge up plenty of examples of Republicans doing the same thing. It is a problem with the system not with particular individuals or particular parties.
Gore's push to get more immigrants added to the voter roles:
It is referenced here: http://www.migrationint.com.au/ruralnews/finland/oct_1996-14rmn.asp There were a lot of other articles concerning this program at the time and there were the usual calls for congressional hearings. I do not know if they were ever held. I recall the INS put pressure on local offices to forgo FBI background checks on applicants to speed up the process and Gore was pressuring the INS. Both political parties must have smart people who sit around all day and do nothing but think up things like this to do to give them a little extra edge. Then everyone is supposed to act 'outraged' at the 'stunning' 'massive' effort someone makes to swing a couple extra votes their way.
tricks like Jeb pulled in 2000 and 2002, stripping thousands of Floridians of their right to vote
I think these are the facts. As required by FL law, the FL State Department provided the basic list of purged voter candidates, which was provided to them by a firm called DBT, to each county election supervisor prior to the election. Under FL law it was the supervisor's responsibility to insure that the list was correct. Either DBT did terrible job of screening the names on the list or it was a case of garbage in garbage out - they may have had very poor and incomplete data to begin with that they had gotten from a variety of sources. Prior to DBT, there was a small company was doing this job on a shoe string. There is no question there was a problem with DBT getting good clean data to work with in the first place. Then, on top of that, the county election supervisors did a terrible job of checking the list, riddled with errors, that DBT gave them. So if most felons or former felons in FL usually vote Democratic as the Democrats claim, it hurt the Democrats the most. Sure, it was partially Harris's fault, she was the one responsible for the process up until the point in the process where the county election supervisors assumed responsibility. Since she was an elected official (in our state the Sec of State works with the Gov not for her) I do not know if you could say Bush was her boss or not but for the sake of argument we can assign him blame as well. A controversial election will expose all the warts in any election process. I understand a lot of people investigated this matter. It has been 3 years now, have Bush and Harris or anyone else been charged with election fraud yet?
Patrick asks:
Explain to me again how it is that the networks92 election-day exit polling simply stopped happening all of a sudden. Was that magic, too?
Having had enough statistics courses to make me dangerous, I can understand how they can report outcomes based on a limited sample IF their model and their sampling is accurate. In the 2000 election neither was accurate in some key states. The networks were totally embarassed by their 2000 track record at calling the calling 2000 election and do not want a repeat of that fiasco.
Living in a western state I do not appreciate looking at the results coming in and being informed my vote does not count. Reporting results on TV before the polls close everywhere is not a good idea. On election night in 2000 at 5:00-6:30pm it looked like, according to the exit polling data, Gore was going to win and many people I know did not go vote because there were also somewhat frantic reports (inaccurate in many cases) that the lines were around the block at polling places. Early reporting based on exit polls that showed that Gore was probably going to be the eventual winner (I was getting ready to call Alex Baldwin to see if he would sell me his one-way ticket to France) may have influenced our close local and state elections. The media is so anxious to be the first to call a state on their election night extravaganzas that they have corrupted the election night reporting system to a point where it is worthless and may be unduly influencing elections in progress.
One thing that this last election demonstrated to me was how many ways there were to cheat during elections. Watching the hearings in FL was like attending a seminar on how to throw elections. And some other methods I learned elsewhere at about that time weren't covered in court. Punch cards are extremely easy to manipulate before or after someone votes. I heard an interview with one vote changing expert on NPR during the recount of the recounts in FL. He said let me into a room full of punched cards to recount the votes and I can make the election come out whatever way you want it to right in front of judges. He said he had done it many times for Democrats involved in recounts of close elections. He knew of Republican counters like himself that were just as good.
Election fraud in some areas is probably rampant. If you look at precinct by precinct tallies in the FL vote for example you can see results like 1818 Gore 10 Bush. That count almost screams fraud to me. If the judges were both Democrats it is not only possible but probable that that is what had happened. The same, no doubt, happens in Republican precincts as well. Electronic voting machines are supposed to cure vote manipulation as blatant as that example appears to be. However, I think that if people can figure out ways to manipulate slot machines they can figure out how to manipulate electronic voting machines during the voting process or by changing the software that does the tabulating after the vote is in the system.
One thing for certain if no one trusts the system then election results will always be in doubt and who won will decided by the election judges or courts reading tea leaves. If that happens it is our own fault. Start of lecture: I am going to be an election judge in 2004. How about you? And check your punch cards before and after you punch them. If you want your vote to count you have to take the responsibility of making sure it is properly excuted. We have seen the results of voters leaving it up to others to figure out what the hell they were thinking from scratches, food stains, and partial punches they left on cards. End of lecture.
There are other little voting tricks similar to the voter roll packing Al Gore was accused of during the 1996 election that can play a part in an election. We have had a proposal in our state to use unclaimed lottery ticket money to buy lottery tickets to give to those who vote. And I swear this is true, you can get more than one ticket on election day. What class of voters do you think getting a lottery ticket would more likely motivate to vote? This smacks of Daley's Chicago to me. It reminds me of ministers paying people to register. It reminds me of party workers giving cigarettes to homeless people in order to get them to vote. All these things are probably not illegal but they are certainly unseemly. It is kind of sickening to think that our elections may be decided by a homeless dude who is voting only because he got a couple of packs of smokes or a free lottery ticket? (Note to nitpickers: I am in no way implying that homeless people should not have a right to vote. I know everyone, including homeless people, who is legally qualified, has a right and in my opinion an obligation to inform themselves about the candidates and issues the best they can and vote however they please.) If the lottery ticket scam is adopted in our state I am going to vote ten times instead of my usual two times. It is easy to do since they voted down asking for picture IDs at the polling place. Racism they say.
Vote manipulation can occur many ways not just by changing totals within a computer or punching some additional holes in a card.
Lydia:
Hmm. Find a friend with the appropriate clearance, and see if you can persuade him to do that. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that you can't.
It was a joke. See the --------> "On a humorous? note" <---------- that prefaced what I said. It was not a serious argument or statement. Just a joke. Nothing more nothing less.
Yon:
Are you seriously arguing that "knowledge that bad things can happen to me" can ever be regarded as remotely related to "consent for these bad things to happen to me"?
Forgive me, I was having a difficult explaining what I meant by consent. I am not sure what I said about consent has merit or not either. Since I did say this in my post "I do not know if I can effectively argue whether her knowledge of the possibility of being outed is the same as thing as consent in this case." I can claim that I knew I was on shaky ground and just wasn't being completely stupid. Consent is probably not the right word in this case. I was trying to hard to respond to Terry's great analogy. Erase what I said and let me try again with my own simple analogy.
If you sign an agreement with an insurance company that absolves them of any liability if your house burns down because of, oh let's say an elephant turns over a lantern on your porch, then if that happens you knew that that possibility existed when you signed the insurance document. When you signed you accepted the unlikely possibility** of a big old ugly elephant wandering onto your back porch and turning over the lantern and when it did happen you should smile, take the loss, and move on if what the elephant did was not illegal or negligent.
(Analogy assistance for the analogically challenged: you = Plame, insurance company = CIA, knocking over a lantern = outing, and elephant = administration official or other evil person) Note: this is a small attempt at some levity which is ruined by pointing this out.
Does that analogy help explain what I was trying to say? Is the nasty old elephant absolved of the responsibility (criminal or moral) for knocking over the lantern? I think I would say "it depends" as you howl in anger or with laughter.
** I think this might be a form of consent. A legal mind could probably define the term I want to use to describe this for me in a jiffy. Maybe I am confusing assent with consent?
I like my trial analogy that I posted on 4:53 and Terry dismissed. Do you see any logical problems with what I said there?
Terry: Excellent posts.
Since the facts of the matter cannot be stated (there is no-one who can come forward to admit or deny the charge) the facts cannot be determined.
This seems to parallel the point I have been making that how can we judge whether the officials committed a crime or were irresponsible without more facts.
What you seem to be saying, agreeing with others, is that no matter what Plame's status is, the administration official is wrong either legally or morally or both. I have found it difficult to accept that idea because only way for that underyling suppositions to be true, it seems to me, is to construct a basis consisting of labyrinth of qualifying statements in such a way to make the basis worthless. Again, whether the supposition is true or not, basically boils down to Plame's actual employment status and whether she would be materially harmed by such a revelation and we do not know any of that yet. I have conceded in a previous post that if the culture of the CIA and the industry that she works is such that she may be punished in some fashion for either being a CIA or not being one but being described as one then the administration officials were irresponsible. I do not know what the actual climate is within the industry or the CIA so I cannot say for certain that she will be materially damaged by statements made by officials. I think guessing about these things is not productive.
Reading back over that I think I am repeating myself. If I am, I am sorry. Time for me to move on.
Statutory rape is not about the consensuality of the event, and can be successfully prosecuted if the, "victim," was the initiator.
I chose that as the analogy because I see a correlation to this with rape, if she was an agent, a harm was done to her, and aspects of her private, professional life were violated.
I like your analogy. Tough to respond to. I understand that statutory rape is an illegal activity involving lack of legal consent. Assuming that the CIA informed her of the effects and possibilities of intended or unintended relevation of her covert status when she was hired, any claim that she was not aware of the possibility of her status being revealed and what would happen to her if it was would be certainly shaky. I do not know if I can effectively argue whether her knowledge of the possibility of being outed is the same as thing as consent in this case. (the lady,naked,bar,lying on pool table, 'I was raped.' type of argument) Whether what happened was an illegal activity is debatable as well.
On a humorous? note: Therefore, accepting everyone's arguments but my own, it would be possible for me to get rid of my super obnoxious neighbor with 3 dogs by getting a friend with an appropriate clearance to anonymously tell the media that my neighbor works for the CIA and my neighbor would have abolutely no defense from this revelation even if he did work for the CIA? He then would lose his job and have to sell his house and move or some foreign agent would show up at 3:00am and whack him? OMG, this better than knowing someone in the mafia, I'll be right back. ** dialing **
Teresa,
We will continue to disagree on the reasons for zapping. It does not matter.
Just a couple of points before moving on. If you look back at the source of those quotes you will find that they were made to me mostly because I did not agree with them not because I did not answer their questions. I will not usually answer those questions or posts framed in such a way to personally provoke me. Nor will I answer questions that are the same lame post after same lame post. I have repeatedly said in response to questions that we do not know what Plame's actual status is with the CIA. Sure the news reports say she is a CIA agent but is that enough to charge some one with breaking the law? With the information we have I do not feel that it is. Some here wanted to charge the officials with breaking the law after reading the Novak article and not having any idea what the law actually said. I have explained this in answers to questions many many times. I feel like I have done my best to answer questions even though they have been repeated over and over. I think that many, not all, here are not used to dealing with someone who has a different viewpoint than their own. When you look at those quotes I posted it is as almost as if the authors of those quotes are shouting "How dare you not to think the way we do!!" I tried to refine my viewpoint and my way of expressing it with each post and as I got more information from Kleiman, posts at CalPundit, and posts here, etc..
James introduced a different slant that I answered several posts later. I regret that I did not immediately respond to it because he comes up with good, logical, intelligent posts with interesting points in them and he deserves our full attention. His posts are usually very difficult to respond to casually.
My pucker-o-meter did not go off so I was unaware that I was sounding puckered. Defensiveness will do that to me. And sometimes what may be perceived as puckerness is actually a veiled or silly attempt at sarcasm. I view myself as a master of sarcasm.
As your guest here, I will try my best to be respectful of others and to participate with the suggestions that you have made in mind and will expect others will do the same. And I will overhaul the pucker-o-meter and make use of Patrick's potent and effective "Bite Me" weapon when offended instead of going off the deep end. Thanks.
Teresa,
I guess I didn't have enough phoney qualifiers in my poor attempt at satire?
Below is a sampling of the kind of responses I get to my posts. Not everyone responds this way. Mark, Jeremy, James, Terry and CHip give thoughtful and respectful replies to everyone's posts including mine and I have to work hard to match the quality of their ideas and wording. That is the way it should be. Other posters seem to be more interested in posting "You are stupid" type of posts. I do not see you disemvoweling the kind of BS as shown below yet you drop the dime on me without so much as a word of explanation. That is why I take issue with your apparent lack of consistency. Disemvoweling me does not really say as much about me or what I have said as it does your view of my ideas.
As our beloved, respected 43rd President said, "Bring it on".
Seriously, I am trying to ignore the insightful intellectuals that post the personal slights shown below but sometimes I am weak and give into my baser instincts. From now on I will just draw Patrick's trusty "Bite Me" sword when offended and wield it against those who attack me and not my ideas and go on from there. I hate to have to whine like I have here.
Please note that I only responded to 3 of these snide, rude, offensive, and personal remarks that were obviously written to goad me into a verbal food fight.
--------------------------------------------
His opinion seems to be the morality of it is irrelevant.
it's nice to know you're a fine upstanding type
I'm delighted you've shown your true colours.
Got a source, other than some right-wing birdcage liner?
Where would we be without people like yourself willing to put on your World-Weary Cynic hats
How could anyone allow you to referee kid's basketball games? Calling fouls strictly is an essential part of teaching them the game. You're not only being macho and inhumane, you're being pedagogically irresponsible.
But then, we've established in another thread that you live in a county that doesn't value humanity (in the sense of humane-ness).
The only meanings I can dredge up are all frightfully anti-Semitic. If that is what you mean, and I do hope it isn't, please fuck off and die.
Are you ready for that step, or would you prefer to go away, have some "quiet time", and think about it for a while?
And the facts won't all be in until I take my fingers out of my ears. Lalalalalala ... I can't hear you!
Oh hell, why are we all bothering? It's clear that Dennis Slater is never going to admit
But I still think we're all wasting our time on you:
As for Dennis Slater, to quote the late great Michael Callahan, you can lead a whore to culture but you can't make him think.
And the color of the sky in your world is...?
Would you care to share with us your definition of the word fact, since it appears that what you mean by it is nothing like its usual meaning?
Yet Dennis is trying a variant of the classic "show me the scientific references that prove the Sun rises in the east" technique.
n rgrds t my bng dsmvwld: Th nl mnngs cn drdg p frm bng dsmvwld r ll frghtfll Nz-lk. f tht s wht mdrtr mns t d, nd d hp t sn't, hp sh fcks ff nd ds.
- And that is just the ones on this thread!
Mark/Jeremy:
That response to some extent assumes she actually is a CIA agent (which rather misses the point of the irresponsibility accusation anyway). If she is CIA, one would think that being outed as an undercover operative would in some way affect one's career, regardless of the letter of the procedures, no?
It seems to me whether you talk about Plame's job within the CIA or her contacts with other people in the industry you have to start making assumptions. Any assumptions that you make are based on the likelihood of what you are saying is plausible. You (and everyone else) have not suggested one implausible scenario. All the scenarios I have seen proposed, however, are based on many things we do not know. We do know that she works for the CIA. We do have a good indication that she is/was a undercover operative although we have no idea what the exact nature of her job is/was. We do not know what her actual status or relationship was in the industry. We do not know what the exact nature of any blowback from her status being revealed will have on her career on her status within the industry. The details about her job is important to determine whether the law was broken. We know that law concerning outing a CIA undercover operative is pretty straightforward and that, given the information we have now, we cannot say with certainty, at this point, that the law applies to her. We need more information.
To address the irresponsibility part of your question(s), let me say that we, unless someone here has detailed information about the CIA/nuclear industry, do not have first hand knowledge of the culture and the policies/procedures within the CIA and/or the nuclear industry that she is said to be working in. Therefore, we will, when we say that someone was irresponsible, again, be making bald-faced assumptions about the effects of outing her will have on her career or industry standing. These assumptions could be 100% accurate or 100% off-base or somewhere inbetween. Whether a particular assumption is more reasonable than another is just an opinion. It is nature to think that your assumptions are better than the next person's, but that isn't always the case.
If there is an adverse effect on her career within the CIA or the industry because of these remarks, of course it would be irresponsible for someone to have revealed her identity if the assumptions everyone seems to want to make, based on what?, gut-feeling?, are true. There has not been anything in the media but the bald-faced statements that it would affect her career. Again, we do not know actually what the effect any of this will be on her career. We can only make assumptions.
If I were on a jury and the only evidence that a crime had been committed was a couple newspaper articles quoting anonymous sources, several meta-journalistic articles, and some late-in-the-game statements by the victim's somewhat over-wrought husband who may have an agenda, I certainly would ask the prosecution for a little more evidence before I voted to execute the perpetrator(s).
It would helpful to me, as a jurist, to know:
from the revealers: what was their actual motivation? Did anyone tell them to reveal Ms. Plame's identity?
from Ms. Plame and others: what are the actual effect of the revelations on Ms. Plame's, career going to be? What have they been thus far?
from the CIA: what was Ms. Plame's actual status in the CIA and where was she posted? What will be the reprecussions for Ms. Plame?
before passing judgement about guilt or innocence.
In real trials, of course, the accused are innocent until proven guilty, however in unreal foaming-at-the-mouth political media-based 'trials' we (Repubs and Dems) always assume that the accused is guilty until proven innocent. Hopefully, Senator Schumer's investigation, which I applaud by the way, will help us out.
random facts about Ms. Plame's nationality, ethnicity, religion, or travel history are irrelevant
You are right. They are. That is why I prefaced my gratuitous display of my search engine skills that might be of interest to someone else with the phrase "Not that it matters" and used the phrases "I have no way of knowing for sure." and "This is a total guess." During your overwhelming bafflement while reading all that irrelevant material, you must have overlooked those well-hidden qualifiers.
In cases like the CIA-Plame affair, I like to investigate the entire matter rather than just accept what is spoon-fed to me by a journalist or a blogger so I google things to death in interesting cases whether they are totally revelant or not. I do not really trust journalists that much. Most of them have an agenda. And many times they are either too lazy or under too much time pressure to really dig into a story. I did the same for the OJ Simpson trial during which the media totally disgraced itself and I am in the process of doing the same for an episode about a former president where the media played a big role and again totally disgraced itself. Many times my investigations change my original opinions about the matter entirely. Sorry if I confused you. I hope this explains it. I sincerely tried to make it clear what I was doing at the time. Will do better next time.
It is also getting off the topic for some people, for some reason, making me and what I say the issue instead of the facts of the matter. I really do not appreciate little snide remarks, implied or direct, about me personally and, I, unfortunately, feel compelled at times to strike back. I am beginning to like the way Patrick seems to deal with people that annoy him. "Bite me." is a nice concise way of handling interpersonal problems. "Bite me" gets the anger and frustration out while cutting off a lot of unnecessary, unproductive discussion and, at the same time, adding a touch of levity. It seems to work and it always invokes a smile from me.
Thanks for the efforts to disemvowel my post. I actually enjoy being disemvoweled. It means someone has read my post and got passionate one way or the other about what I said. That is fine. I enjoy the discussion no matter what the moderator's standards are any given day. It is their bandwidth and we are all just uninvited guests. At least I seem to be.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 104 |
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