The Democrat Thread

[StrangeSox]

That they were reporters is inconsequential; they could have just as easily been civilians carrying some kinda-gun-shaped item.

[Rex Kickass]

Senator Tom Coburn ®: Don't believe everything you see on FOX News, Nancy Pelosi is nice.

 

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2...ews.php?ref=fpa

 

Hold on to your hats. At a town hall meeting in Oklahoma City last week, staunch conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) defended House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, disparaged Fox News and told a constituent her fears about the health care law were unfounded.

 

When a woman in the audience asked Coburn if it was illegal for the government to jail citizens for not complying with the new health care law, Coburn responded by blaming TV news, and Fox News in particular, for that false rumor:

 

"The intention is not to put anybody in jail," Coburn said. "That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that isn't the intention."

 

Later, when his audience started to boo at the mention of Pelosi, Coburn stopped them.

 

"Come on now... how many of you all have met her? She's a nice person," Coburn said. "Just because somebody disagrees with you, doesn't mean they're not a good person."

 

"Don't catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody's no good," Coburn added.

[BigSqwert]

Good for him for showing a little bit of sanity.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Post-Palin Alaska has largest debt burden in US

Sarah Palin has long sold herself as a fiscal conservative, arguing against the Democrats' health overhaul on the grounds that the nation simply can't afford it.

 

But when the former vice presidential candidate resigned as governor of Alaska in the summer of 2009, she left the state with a 70 percent debt-to-GDP ratio -- the highest state debt burden in the United States.

 

That's according to data compiled by the Washington Independent's Megan Carpentier, who notes that Alaska has a debt burden similar to "that of Jordan and Palin’s favorite health care resource, Canada, and a higher ratio than Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, India, the Philippines or Uruguay."

 

By comparison, crisis-stricken California has a debt ratio of less than 40 percent. All the more confounding about Alaska's debt is the fact that it is an oil-producing region with a small population to share in that wealth. Oil-rich Alberta, Canada, for example, collects no sales tax and still managed to retire its debt entirely in 2004.

 

While Alaska's massive debt burden can't be blamed entirely on Palin's two-and-a-half-year stint as governor, she did face similar debt problems while mayor of Wasilla, and those appear to be of her own making.

(more at the link)

[jasonxctf]

interesting statistical number...

 

projecting the 2012 presidential election, after the 2010 expected census related changes to the electoral college...

 

if obama has a 5% decrease in voter support, in each and every state, it would cause him to lose 4 states that he had won in 2008. (NC, FL, IN and OH plus 1 vote from NE)

 

if that happened, he wins 286-252.

 

if obama has a 7% decrease in vote support, in each and every state, you can add Virgina to the list.

 

if that happened, he wins 273-265.

 

if obama has a 10% decrease in vote support, in each and every state, you can add Iowa and New Hampshire to the list.

 

if that happened, he loses 275-263.

 

So to summarize, for Obama to lose in 2012, he would need to have to lose 10% of the voting support in each and every state for the Republican candidate to win by 5 votes.

[lostfan]

Senator Tom Coburn ®: Don't believe everything you see on FOX News, Nancy Pelosi is nice.

 

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2...ews.php?ref=fpa

April 1 was 5 days ago. Although I think Coburn is an asshole from the quotes and press statements he's made, so maybe I should take his advice. lol.

[lostfan]

I generally avoid doing this but I'm going to pull out the "combat veteran" card for a minute here, just to say that there are a lot of people that don't understand what war is actually like. If you think it's 100% orderly, disciplined, and always clear what the right answer is, you're completely wrong. It's total chaos that you do your best to dress up as something organized, and a great deal of the time you probably have less than half of the information you wish you had even when you have what would be considered "good" intelligence.

[Balta1701]

I generally avoid doing this but I'm going to pull out the "combat veteran" card for a minute here, just to say that there are a lot of people that don't understand what war is actually like. If you think it's 100% orderly, disciplined, and always clear what the right answer is, you're completely wrong. It's total chaos that you do your best to dress up as something organized, and a great deal of the time you probably have less than half of the information you wish you had even when you have what would be considered "good" intelligence.

How do you react to this Greenwald bit?

I was just on Democracy Now along with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange discussing the Iraq video they released yesterday, and there's one vital point I want to emphasize. Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents myth and propaganda from distorting those realities. That's why the administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the same with regard to the Afghan massacre), and why whistle-blowers, real journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. The discussions many people are having today -- about the brutal reality of what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation -- is exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.

 

But there's a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn't. It's the opposite: it's par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that's rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we're seeing it on video not because it's rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed, and (B) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. But what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety -- as though there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.

 

A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars. That's why it's repulsive to watch people -- including some "liberals" -- attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because "our guys are the good guys" and they act differently "99.99999999% of the time." That is blatantly false. Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu Ghraib abusers as rogue "bad apples" once their conduct was exposed with photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false. In a perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is some sort of rare and unusual event: those who support having the U.S. invade and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior.

 

[lostfan]

How do you react to this Greenwald bit?

All of that falls under "what war is actually like," as Greenwald even said in that article, and still needs to be seen in its proper context. With a few obvious exceptions, none of this is as cut and dry as it's made out to be by a lot of people, not necessarily by Greenwald because he is actually saying the same thing I'm saying (that war is an ugly business), but by the commenters and other amateur bloggers. The ones who run with the "OMG MURDER" angle are just as misled/uninformed/delusional as the ones who run with the "OMG DISRESPECT TO TROOPS" angle.

 

The purpose of the military is to kill people quickly and efficiently, that's not always directly acknowledged, but that's what it does, and it really doesn't serve any other purpose particularly well. It's tricky enough telling friend from foe in a regular war, but in places like Iraq and Afghanistan it's really, really hard to tell legit targets from unarmed civilians. It sounds easy, but it's not. There's rules you have to follow, and procedures in place to make those rules easier to follow, and there is punitive action when people get caught breaking the rules, but that only mitigates, it doesn't prevent everything. I just want to know why people act all surprised when they find out something bad happened in a combat zone. This type of s*** happens every day. Off the top of my head, I can recall certain particular events that still stick out 6 years later:

 

-Me getting very close to having my s*** blown off, missing the VBIED only because I forgot to fill up my gas tank before a long trip and had to stop to fill up, and the convoy 2 minutes behind us got blown up and took casualties

-Me almost flipping a Humvee over and nearly killing my gunner near the same location as above, trying to avoid what I thought was an IED

-Getting ambushed in a crappy town, being almost shot, shooting at what I assumed was an armed man (why else would he be there, everyone else went inside), but wasn't really sure, but didn't exactly have time to think...

-Seeing one of my teammates throw a grenade at this armed insurgent who was retreating into a house - said house catches fire somehow a couple minutes later, and I heard the guy screaming

-Hearing about the neighborhood Zarqawi got killed in, realizing I had been there, and noticed at the time none of the villagers were ever cooperative

-Trying to warn an interpreter about all the threats against her I'd found, having her confidently ignore them because she "felt safe" and then getting lit up execution-style on her way home with several dozen 7.62 rounds a week later while I was on R&R

-Having that same interpreter's best friend, a 55-year old grandmother I'd made friends with, get shot in the stomach days later, visiting her in the hospital while I waited for a ride back to my base camp

-Having arrested an insurgent who got caught setting an IED, seeing him assault my interpreter, then seeing my interpreter pull a handgun out of nowhere and having to restrain him from doing something that almost certainly would've gotten him sent to prison

-Listening to one of the Iraqi women who cleaned on my base camp hysterically tell me that her son got killed the day before by stray fire from an American convoy that had gotten attacked by an IED and ambushed

-Driving by kids while I was in the gun turret of a Humvee doing 70 mph and they threw big f***ing rocks at me and wondering what the hell to do? I ended up bluffing them, drawing my pistol to scare them, getting killed by enemy fire/explosion is one thing, getting killed by a kid's rock is just insulting

-Seeing the aftermath of Fallujah after Operation Phantom Fury where the city was 95% destroyed, and the hundreds of dead Iraqi bodies that we prepared for burial

 

This is just stuff I saw or was involved with personally and is by no means an exhaustive list, I could probably come up with 10 more, but you get the idea.

Edited April 6, 2010 by lostfan

[lostfan]

btw, the prisoner I was talking about earlier, we didn't abuse him. I felt the temptation and I'm sure others did too, but I wouldn't do it. I knew he was personally responsible for the deaths of 6 Iraqis that next morning when his IED blew up (he wouldn't tell us where it was) - it could've been Americans, but at that point did it matter? I never thought about arbitrarily killing someone, not counting combat situations, but the thought actually got extended play that night.

[HuskyCaucasian]

I love Ol' John "Flip Flop Express" McCain:

September 26, 2008: "The American people know me very well, that is Independent and a maverick of the Senate."

 

September 17, 2008: "What do you expect of two mavericks?"

 

2008: McCain/Palin - Original Mavericks

 

2010: "I never considered myself a maverick, I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

[chunk23]

All of that falls under "what war is actually like," as Greenwald even said in that article, and still needs to be seen in its proper context. With a few obvious exceptions, none of this is as cut and dry as it's made out to be by a lot of people, not necessarily by Greenwald because he is actually saying the same thing I'm saying (that war is an ugly business), but by the commenters and other amateur bloggers. The ones who run with the "OMG MURDER" angle are just as misled/uninformed/delusional as the ones who run with the "OMG DISRESPECT TO TROOPS" angle.

 

The purpose of the military is to kill people quickly and efficiently, that's not always directly acknowledged, but that's what it does, and it really doesn't serve any other purpose particularly well. It's tricky enough telling friend from foe in a regular war, but in places like Iraq and Afghanistan it's really, really hard to tell legit targets from unarmed civilians. It sounds easy, but it's not. There's rules you have to follow, and procedures in place to make those rules easier to follow, and there is punitive action when people get caught breaking the rules, but that only mitigates, it doesn't prevent everything. I just want to know why people act all surprised when they find out something bad happened in a combat zone. This type of s*** happens every day. Off the top of my head, I can recall certain particular events that still stick out 6 years later:

 

This is just stuff I saw or was involved with personally and is by no means an exhaustive list, I could probably come up with 10 more, but you get the idea.

 

There has been a concerted effort to make sure videos and images like this one do not make it to the public. As far as the general public is concerned with the occupation, out of sight is out of mind. So now that reality has surfaced, it's obviously going to be surprising to a lot of people.

 

it is the fact that this does happen everyday that makes is so disgusting. Simply saying "war is hell, stuff like this happens" serves to normalize terrible acts like this one, making it more and more likely it will happen again. The gunner certainly didn't seem to care that he had just injured children and killed unarmed men. That's because he's been trained to think that bad things happen to innocent people and that it's inevitable, so it's okay if he's the one to do it. Obviously terrible things happen in war, that's what war is, but there appears to be no effort whatsoever to minimize these losses. In other words, the US is saying "war sucks, but we love it and don't care what happens to innocent people".

 

What rules did the military follow in the video? The ones that say it's okay to shoot unarmed individuals trying to rescue people?

 

What chaos was going on prior to the killings? The men were walking casually in the street and there wasn't an ounce of fear or stress in the voices on the recording. It was more like hunting than combat.

 

This isn't even going into the coverup aspect of it.

 

btw, the prisoner I was talking about earlier, we didn't abuse him. I felt the temptation and I'm sure others did too, but I wouldn't do it. I knew he was personally responsible for the deaths of 6 Iraqis that next morning when his IED blew up (he wouldn't tell us where it was) - it could've been Americans, but at that point did it matter? I never thought about arbitrarily killing someone, not counting combat situations, but the thought actually got extended play that night.

 

Why would it matter in the first place?

Edited April 7, 2010 by chunk23

[Rex Kickass]

Everytime the Republican party argues about "accounting tricks" and "fiscal responsibility," just think about this story:

 

The Republican National Committee at the end of last year struck a deal with the Michigan Republican Party that if the state party could raise what turned out to be a half a million dollars for the RNC from its donors, the committee would immediately give the money back, in a scheme apparently devised to increase the RNC’s 2009 fundraising numbers.

 

“It was a known secret that a deal had been struck on the topic,” a former RNC official confirmed to The Daily Caller.

 

“I think the benefit to them was them getting guaranteed money,” the source said of the Michigan GOP, “and the benefit to the RNC was getting higher fundraising numbers.”

 

RNC spokesman Doug Heye, contacted by a reporter Tuesday afternoon, did not comment.

 

The allegations appear to be backed up by FEC reports: Fifteen donors from Michigan maxed out their donations to the committee on a single day —Dec. 31 — the last day of 2009 — giving $456,000 to the committee. Over the next two months, $500,000 was disbursed back from the RNC’s coffers to those of the Michigan Republican Party, with $250,000 given in January and another $250,000 disbursed in February.

 

 

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/04/07/former-r.../#ixzz0kRbbSTEy

[HuskyCaucasian]

Everytime the Republican party argues about "accounting tricks" and "fiscal responsibility," just think about this story:

 

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/04/07/former-r.../#ixzz0kRbbSTEy

Makes me wonder... if it's been done once, it's probably been done before... by both parties.

[Rex Kickass]

Makes me wonder... if it's been done once, it's probably been done before... by both parties.

All I'm saying is if Steele was from Jordan and tried to pull something like this in Michigan in 2007, he'd be in Gitmo right now. This was just a way to fake fundraising numbers, and help the state party raise more money than is otherwise legal.

 

If the DNC did this, it would be horrible too, I think. There are all sorts of back channel ways to funnel money into a campaign if its needed, but this just strikes of plain money laundering.

[lostfan]

There has been a concerted effort to make sure videos and images like this one do not make it to the public. As far as the general public is concerned with the occupation, out of sight is out of mind. So now that reality has surfaced, it's obviously going to be surprising to a lot of people.

 

it is the fact that this does happen everyday that makes is so disgusting. Simply saying "war is hell, stuff like this happens" serves to normalize terrible acts like this one, making it more and more likely it will happen again. The gunner certainly didn't seem to care that he had just injured children and killed unarmed men. That's because he's been trained to think that bad things happen to innocent people and that it's inevitable, so it's okay if he's the one to do it. Obviously terrible things happen in war, that's what war is, but there appears to be no effort whatsoever to minimize these losses. In other words, the US is saying "war sucks, but we love it and don't care what happens to innocent people".

 

What rules did the military follow in the video? The ones that say it's okay to shoot unarmed individuals trying to rescue people?

 

What chaos was going on prior to the killings? The men were walking casually in the street and there wasn't an ounce of fear or stress in the voices on the recording. It was more like hunting than combat.

 

This isn't even going into the coverup aspect of it.

 

 

 

Why would it matter in the first place?

Come on now, saying there is no effort whatsoever to minimize collateral damage is completely ridiculous, that's something you'd hear from a commentary program on Al-Jazeera. Every soldier is trained on the law of war and how it applies to different areas, taught what is a lawful combatant and what isn't, what a war crime is, what's not. In a place like Iraq (post-Petraeus) or Afghanistan (new emphasis on counterinsurgency) there are actually MORE restrictions on who you can and can't engage to the point where it even places the patrol in danger. Like, you see a group of armed men, and they're obviously watching you, and you're almost certain they're hostile, but unless they engage you first (and you know they will when they get a tactical advantage) you can't shoot, that sort of thing. These guys also will deliberately blend in with the civilians as much as possible, or take a position really close to civilians to intentionally cause innocent casualties, so they can film it and call American soldiers murderers. Me saying how war is hell isn't normalizing anything. If the U.S. military was unprofessional and just kind of randomly allowed Private Snuffy from the backwoods of South Carolina to kill whatever he felt like killing that day, you really would be able to tell the difference from now, but there is no such thing as a "clean" combat situation where it just appears fair to someone looking from the outside. That is the norm for war. The alternative is to not have any more war which isn't always realistic.

 

There is no stress or fear in their voice for the same reason you might not hear stress in a surgeon, police officer, EMT's voice. People have coping mechanisms. Whenever I would get shot at, obviously I was afraid, but you wouldn't be able to see it on me physically until later, if at all... that's why people have PTSD and f***ed up dreams and problems sleeping when they come home.

 

The coverup aspect is a whole other story entirely but I guess I can leave it at the fact that the military tries to put a positive spin on the war, and avoid bad press. The reasons why should be pretty obvious.

 

You're asking why it mattered to me, a U.S. soldier at the time, that an Iraqi's IED blew up Iraqi civilians or other U.S. soldiers that I probably knew? I don't know how to answer that. If I really have to explain, I honestly doubt that my explanation would help any.

[Balta1701]

We'll see if it's right of course, but I found this argument that Sarah Palin is very likely to be the Republican Nominee in 2012 to be an accurate summation of my feelings right now.

Anyone who can draw 10,000 people to a rally in Minnesota--in early 2010, no less-- is formidable.

In the specific case of Sarah Palin, it makes her virtually unstoppable.

 

National polling for the Republican nomination has consistently shown Palin in a roughly three-way tie with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. However:

 

1. Huckabee is unlikely to run, and his evangelical / born again base (virtually all Huckabee voters in 2008 were evangelicals) is a lot closer to Sarah Palin than they are to Mitt Romney. So, Palin will likely start ahead in national polls among declared candidates.

 

2. Romney's strength in 2008 was in caucuses, which are dominated by dedicated activists. Of the 11 states that Romney won in 2008, three were "home" states (MA, where he was Governor; MI where his father was Governor; and UT for religion), and the other eight were all caucuses. However, Romney isn't going to win many caucuses if he is facing a candidate who can draw 10,000 people to a rally in early 2010, not to mention what is likely a tarnished reputation among Republican activists after the health care fight.

 

3. Palin's grassroots strength will provide her with all the funding she needs, and also goes a long way to pre-empting any possible insurgent candidacy against her. This will especially be the case if Ron Paul runs again, since Paul can't win the nomination but would soak up pretty much all of the remaining grassroots energy on the Republican side.

 

4. Say what you will about Palin's ability as a campaigner, but if gaffes were going to make her unpopular among Republicans, it would have happened already.

[lostfan]

Well about evangelicals, remember there was also once a time when the black vote still tilted in favor of Hillary, then once it became clear that Obama had a shot at the nomination, they jumped ship. That's just FWIW, because although Huckabee is a likable guy, his personality isn't anything like Obama's, and also evangelicals as a voting bloc aren't anything like blacks.

[KipWellsFan]

We'll see if it's right of course, but I found this argument that Sarah Palin is very likely to be the Republican Nominee in 2012 to be an accurate summation of my feelings right now.

 

Who said Huckabee and Romney are her main competitors?

 

Campaigns matter. And personally I think someone like Haley Barbour or others could chew her up and spit her out. But like you you say, we'll see.

[bmags]

Who said Huckabee and Romney are her main competitors?

 

Campaigns matter. And personally I think someone like Haley Barbour or others could chew her up and spit her out. But like you you say, we'll see.

 

you are right of course, but we'll see what happens. I just don't see many others in campaign mode, but in the next year we'll see for sure.

[Balta1701]

you are right of course, but we'll see what happens. I just don't see many others in campaign mode, but in the next year we'll see for sure.

Pawlenty certainly is. I'm just not sure anyone noticed.

[bmags]

Pawlenty certainly is. I'm just not sure anyone noticed.

 

I think everyone notices. He's tacking hard right. You know, i do have hope though. McCain won because very few republican primaries are closed to republicans. McCain brought in all the independents.

[BigSqwert]

Wtf is that?

 

 

Looks like Karl Rove after a genetic experiment gone horribly awry.

Edited April 8, 2010 by BigSqwert

[Rex Kickass]

We'll see if it's right of course, but I found this argument that Sarah Palin is very likely to be the Republican Nominee in 2012 to be an accurate summation of my feelings right now.

 

It helps that these stops are being wildly promoted by major news outlets, to the point where you have a host on the network simulcasting their show from the event and promoting it.

[Steve9347]

That Michael Steele Muppet bit on the Daily Show last night was outstanding.