Credit Cards
 

We're not supposed to use people's real names here. You're new, so I'm just sayin' . . .

Credit Cards
 

You could have saved a lot of breath if you just said, "Special interests are people I don't like."

Name Dropping
 

Ooooh, good one. After all, I certainly can't compete with an Nth-year Detroit associate on the quality of my practice.

Credit Cards
 

I don't think he's listening.

Name Dropping
 

Personally, I wasn't sure whether Hank's description was an insult or not. Haning out at the court house waiting for misdeamers sounds potentially more interesting than hanging out at the copy vendor waiting for more boxes of documents...

Ad(yes, I would love to help on your priv log)der

Name Dropping
 

I notice you don't use parentheticals anymore.

You do realize, I hope, that I take credit and pride in your having taken this step forward.

Credit Cards
 

Exactly - well said

Credit Cards
 

I am new and I assumed you are joking. But just to be clear, that was a line from the Bill Murray film stripes. I have idea what Friney's real name is.

Credit Cards
 

I can live with that.

Credit Cards
 

Roseanne, I believe.

Credit Cards
 

Rosanne is monogamous. Anna Nicole?

Credit Cards
 

Your dismissal of special interests appears to ignore the well-established concept that interests that are discrete, focused, and held by a few larger entities are far more likely to win out over interests that are diffuse and of minimal benefit to each entity. It's not like there's a big, strong anti-pork-barrel lobby.

Wow
 

It's a war based entirely on competing demonstrations. Here's this morning's report:

"Lebanon's opposition staged the biggest show of force in the nation's modern history from slain ex-Premier Rafik Hariri's graveside Monday, taking a thunderous oath to break Syria's ruthless stranglehold and tear apart President Lahoud's police state of "secret service phantoms."

Between 1.5 and 2 million opposition activists converged on Beirut's downtown Martyrs Square and surrounding neighborhoods to mark the lapse of one month on Hariri's assassination. They shouted slogans demanding the resignation of all security commanders in Lebanon because of dereliction of duty in stopping the assassination.

The demonstration was so huge that Syria's loyalists led by
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's Hizbullah and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri's Amal movement, who pose as standard-bearers of the Shiite community were dwarfed into an overwhelmed minority."

http://www.naharnet.com/domino/tn/Ne...D?OpenDocument

Assad is toast.

End of Soc. Sec. reform
 

So, with the popularity of this plan dropping further every day, when do we predict the President finally drops it?

My guess is June 28, which is the day after the last session of the Supreme Court, when Rehnquist will announce his retirement.

Wow
 

Come on Bilmore, the vote in Iraq had nothing to do with it.

Wow
 

Assad was probably planning on leaving anyway, just out of decency. He's a great guy, really.

What Bias?
 

• NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. media coverage of last year's election was three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to a study released Monday.
  
  The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36 percent of stories about Bush were negative compared to 12 percent about Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.
  

http://reuters.myway.com/article/200...REPORT-DC.html

Wow
 

And its not like they've actually set up a fully functioning, western style, perfect democracy.

Name Dropping
 

If it helps you, Fluffy, then keep on massaging yourself this way.

What Bias?
 

He was running on his record. There's a lot more to be negative about.

What Bias?
 

I'm surprised you didn't quote this part of the article:

• Examining the public perception that coverage of the war in Iraq was decidedly negative, it found evidence did not support that conclusion. The majority of stories had no decided tone, 25 percent were negative and 20 percent were positive, it said.

Not to suggest that you've carried that particular misperception or anything.

Name Dropping
 

I'm getting this image in my mind of you and Hank meeting up in a bar and spending five hours taking turns spitting on each other.

What Bias?
 

Exactly why Kerry studiously avoided doing the same.

Name Dropping
 

Who do you see hitting their target more frequently?

Name Dropping
 

It's a little bizarre knowing that somewhere in the bowels of Detroit, an associate periodically takes a break from the burdens of representing pawnshops and slumlords and jerks off with an image of me in his head.

An image of me that is a foot shorter than reality, but hey -- on the Hank scale, that hardly even counts as a delusion.

What Bias?
 

What this suggests to me is that the negative coverage was personal rather than policy based.

What Bias?
 

I'm curious about the parameters of the measurement in that study.

One can choose stories to write, and stories not to write, and then write the chosen ones up with an entirely neutral tone, but yet still not be neutral. If, say, the NYT wrote fifty stories about bombs and killings, and none about Iraq public support, or rebuilt power plants, how would that fit into this study? If the chosen stories didn't seem to contain any tilt, or underlying tone, would that count as "neutral"? I suspect it would.

How many stories did you see about the reopening of all the schools?

End of Soc. Sec. reform
 

I thought the GOP plan was the "nuclear option" of changing the rules to prevent the Senate Dems from filibustering judicial nominees, in the hopes of picking a fight in which Senate Dems start filibustering everything, letting them blame the demise of Social Security on Senate Dems.

Wow
 

Do you think they weren't already holding elections in Lebanon? "The Lebanese have been having often lively parliamentary election campaigns for decades. The idea that the urbane and sophisticated Beirutis had anything to learn from the Jan. 30 process in Iraq is absurd on the face of it. Elections were already scheduled in Lebanon for later this spring." (Juan Cole)

Wow
 

Who said anything about elections? I'm talking about 2 million protestors telling Syria to get the fuck out.

Wow
 

And that has what to do with democracy, or holding elections? I think the protests are wonderful, but I can't figure out what you think the Middle East looks like once you've forced it into the Conservative Master Narrative.

In Iraq, there was an election held while a foreign power occupied the country, and the country is a mess. So this inspired Lebanese to protest to tell the Syrians to leave before the next elections. Is this how we set an example for the rest of the world?

Wow
 

Who is trying to fit what into their ideological narrative? Or have you forgotten that we are in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government?

Wow
 

Elections were scheduled? The Syrians killed the opposition. I know part of the Clinton White House SOP was killing opponents, but even he stopped short of the candidates.

Killing the opposition candidate has what to do with a democracy?

I believe the point Club makes is that w/o seeing people stand up to brutal force elsewhere, the Lebanese might well have taken this more meekly.

Wow
 

I don't have an ideology. I believe in facts. You're the one who is trying to suggest that there's a connection between what's happening in Iraq and Lebanon. They're both Arab countries, so there must be a simple explanation tying it all together, right?

"Have I forgotten that we are in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government?" Only a lawyer could say something so obtuse. We are in Iraq because we invaded -- kind of the opposite of a "request" of the Iraqi government, actually -- and because we haven't left yet. Notwithstanding an election in which the party getting the most votes ran on a platform that we should leave, we have not left yet because we disarmed the military and touched off an insurgency that the government is powerless to stop.

It's touching that you place legitimacy in the "request" of the Iraqi government that we stay, but have you forgotten that that government was appointed at our behest, not elected, and that it did poorly in the last elections? If a government with that kind of legitimacy invited us into Lebanon, there'd be a civil war.

Wow
 

The theory of evolution has less factual support to it than does the idea that our invasion of Iraq, and the resulting change in the form of government, has had a major impact on the course of various ME countries, Lebanon included. There are only five people left in the world who contest this, and you are two of them.

Wow
 

Not much. JFK and RFK were killed, and our democracy continued on.

I'll agree that the Syrians are not democrats. A lot of people associated with the government have been killed in Iraq, too.

And while there haven't been mass demonstrations in Iraq, the Lebanese learned a thing or two from last summer's Republican National Convention, right?

Wow
 

Of course. The causal relationship is that thing about "tone" you so aptly described last week. It's had a "major impact" on the "course" of several countries. It's also responsible for bringing longer, sunnier days to the Middle East in the last several weeks, increasing everyone's productivity and happiness and generally making peace possible.

Wow
 

Also, long-impotent village elders are now routinely having erections.

Seriously, I'm amazed at your intransigence on this one. Most of your compatriots are conceding exactly what Club argues here, yet you are not. You're like Monty Python's limbless knight, yelling "get back here and fight - it's only a flesh wound!"

Wow
 

you talking about the pro-hezbollah guys now?

Wow
 

I'll say the same thing I posted last week when you told me Bush set a new "tone": I haven't seen any actual reporting suggesting that what happened in Iraq has influenced what happened in Lebanon. Inside the Beltway, among people who spent more time watching the President's last State of the Union speech than they have spent in their entire lifetimes trying to understand Lebanese history or politics, it may be taken as a given that Mr. Bush and the Iraqi people are responsible for all the good that transpires in Lebanon. Whoop de do.

Elections are not new to Lebanon. And what you have there is not exactly a groundswell for representative democracy, except among the Hezbollah supporters who would like to have representation proportionate to their numbers -- something your "pro-democracy" Maronites and Druze have opposed.

If our invasion of Iraq made a difference, I suggest the difference is that Syria feels exposed now in a way that it did not before, and feels compelled to withdraw its forces as a result. That is a good thing -- one hopes, unless the Lebanese start killing each other again, which is what was happening when a Republican administration with Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense invited Syrian troops into the country -- that results from the invasion. But it doesn't have much to do with Hallmark-card-grade sentiment about democracy.