60,000 wakadoos
 

Henry "Hyde Amendment" Hyde is stepping down after 2006 elections:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor.../hyde_retiring

60,000 wakadoos
 

I think I posted the stats on abortions a few months ago when Hello was in his "things have gone downhill since 1947, damn you FDR! Damn you!" mode. They were from the CDC.

Pope in a Pizza
 

Well, I suspect the biggest accomodation Sully's gonna get from this new guy will be, the stake he gets burned on will be sanded first.

Maybe.

60,000 wakadoos
 

Has anyone been looking at the Senate races yet? Until Hutchison announces which race she's going to run (and the last report I heard was that she has $7million stashed away already for a run on the Governor's mansion), no Republican is going to step up. There's a lawyer at V&E named Barbara Radnofsky who will probably run in the Democratic primary, and I have heard rumblings that Ken Bensten is interested in running again. Obviously, an open seat will be more competitive than against KBH, but it will probably boil down to voter turnout.

I can't imagine that Rick Santorum will have an easy run next time around in PA. Hyde will be gone, and I don't know anything about West Virginia politics, but I imagine the seat will be hard for the Ds to keep.

I find it interesting that both majority leaders will be up for reelection next year. ETA, I read that wrong, only Bill Frist will be up for reelection.

60,000 wakadoos
 

Is Gov. Goodhair term-limited?

60,000 wakadoos
 

Nope. We're all anticipating the primary with glee. It's gonna be bloody. And hopefully split the party up a little.

He's already relseased videos of her with *gasp* Hillary Clinton.

strategic bombing
 

They's all be dead by now anyway so get off it. My point was the post-war/anti-war writing of a guy from the fraternity that invented instant vaporization of tens of thousands is suspect-

60,000 wakadoos
 

you need to go to less serious parties-seriously

60,000 wakadoos
 

A SENATOR has been filmed with another SENATOR?!?!?!?! The scandal!

60,000 wakadoos
 

Your post today wasn't really responsive to mine.

Or maybe someone has a better theory on what has changed since 1996?

60,000 wakadoos
 

Yeah, nothing has changed since 1996 except for a reduction in welfare benefits. And all those people who were thinking "score! I got a baby and my AFDC will go up a whole 'nother $120 a month!" learned their lessons.

The reduction in welfare benefits also caused the dot-com boom and bust, the fall in crime rates, and 9/11. Because, after all, nothing else has changed and generally any social trend is caused by a single factor.

60,000 wakadoos
 

Just for the hell of it, I thought I would check the underlying data, rather than just comment on your theory (i.e., that neither increased access to birth control, nor sex education, nor increased engagement in religion, nor anything other than welfare reform had contribued to the "40% drop in abortion rates in the last ten years" that you cite).

Go to google, and put in "abortion rates." Check the first hit -- you'll see that the abortion rate began falling in 1990, well before welfare reform.

Then, check a few more hits. You'll see that the CDC hasn't published data going past 2000, so the 40% decline you cite is not particularly well established. However, several articles indicate that the abortion rate has increased since then.

Can you provide the source on which you relied for the claimed fall, that you claimed began in 1996, and that you claim is causally related to welfare reform?

strategic bombing
 

When you think about what he was doing, you can understand why. When they firebombed Tokyo, there really wasn't a pretense that they were going after military or industrial targets.

strategic bombing
 

As I think I've posted here, it was a little more complicated. A Luftwaffe night raid trying to hit the docks near London -- a military target -- dropped bombs instead on civilian areas. In retaliation, the English bombed Berlin. Hitler then ordered the shift in focus from military to civilian targets.

strategic bombing
 

Strategic. You can call it effective, but the actual facts suggest otherwise. E.g., our decapitation strikes against Hussein at the start of the war didn't.

OK, I'll qualify my argument for nukes.

strategic bombing
 

That, though, had far more of a logical basis than some of the other carpetbomb plans. One of the main impediments to reining the Japanese in was their belief in the infallibility of the Emperor, and the corrollary belief that their homeland could never be touched/breached/damaged. In that case, there was a well-grounded thought that the Japanese morale needed to be hurt with a measure of damage thay they considered impossible, and the Tokyo bombings actually accomplished that to some degree.

Not to defend the carnage - just to make the abstract point.

strategic bombing
 

Yes. Although a different way to put it is that they have a different view about what's effective.

The Army does the same sort of thing -- because it's allowed to have helicopters, but not fixed-wing ground-support aircraft, it has made a major, major investment in trying to build examples of the former to function as the latter. To mixed results, at best. There were good reasons for the Army to have cold feet about deploying the helicopters against a relatively advanced air-defense system in Albania, as illustrated by the problems they had when they tried that major helo operation in Iraq.

strategic bombing
 

By the time Tokyo was firebombed, there had been an awful lot of damage in Japan. I'm not saying that it couldn't be rationalized at the time, but so can many war crimes. The idea that you can bomb another country into giving up is, as it turns out, pretty dubious, though we always like to pretend that it will happen. Spanky points to Serbia as an exception to my rule, which is fair, but doesn't take you very far.

60,000 wakadoos
 

Uh, I think you mean, there may be a correlation, but correlation is not necessarily causation.

I say only because you don't normally fuck up the hard words with more than two or three syllables.

If an estate tax is the "death tax," is an inheritance tax the "survival tax"?
 

Mark Kleiman hits some of the things we were talking about here:

• Matt Yglesias is entirely right to prefer inheritance taxes to estate taxes. Conceptually, an inheritance tax puts the focus on the recipient of money he or she didn't earn, rather than on the decedent, who having faced one inevitability arguably shouldn't be faced with another. "Paris Hilton" or no, there's a strong, and perhaps politically potent, argument to be made that it's just plain wrong for people to be taxed on the money they earn but not on the money that's given to them. Practically, an inheritance tax has two big advantages: It encourages breaking up huge fortunes, thus reducing the problem of hereditary plutocracy, and it treats those who inherit as part of large families equitably compared to those who inherit equal amounts as part of small families. But Matt is wrong, it seems to me, to scoff at the small business/family farm issue. An economist may view ownership of an enterprise as merely a form of wealth like any other, but someone whose family has owned the local hardware store or newspaper for four generations may have an attachment to the business, and the people who work in it, that isn't at all the same thing as just being rich. That attachment may even have some social value. But Matt is even more wrong to argue about whether it's all right for the estate tax to orce the breakup of family businesses and farms, when in fact it does no such thing. As Stuart Levine explains, Section 6166 of the Internal Revenue Code allows estate taxes on closely-held businesses to be spread out over fourteen years at very generous rates of interest: currently under 3%, which is much lower than the rate on student loans, for example. So the "family business" question is a mere red herring, which a better-trained newshound than Matt would not have allowed to lead him away from the trail. The repeal of the estate tax, unless it's replaced by an inheritance tax, is a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-meritocratic move, taking us one step closer to reproducing the regime of inherited status against which the generation of 1776 fought and won a revolution. Being wealthy and important because of your ancestors is European; making it on your own is American...

(links in the original)

Happy Days Are Here Again!
 

What does it mean when Iraqi generals are assassinated in their own homes? That must be another sign that we're winning, but I can't remember why just now.

More good news in that article: "Insurgents try to assassinate the leaders of Iraq's fledgling military and the police almost daily, and many officers have been killed."

strategic bombing
 

No, they were trying to break the will of the populace. Japan was an enemy unlike any previously seen by the western powers. On some of the island battles, there were literally no Japanese prisoners taken -- the population was apparently willing to fight to the death, despite overwhelming odds and certain death. We firebombed Tokyo, and then A-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because we were looking for options besides an invasion of the home islands -- which surely would have cost far more lives, American and Japanese, then all of the bombings put together.

strategic bombing
 

Okay, so you're the armchair general, with the added benefit of fifty years of hindsight. What would you have done? How would you have avoided the kind of carnage we saw in the island battles? Can you imagine how bad that carnage would have been on the home islands?

60,000 wakadoos
 

No, you mean there may be a coincidence, but a coincidence does not mean a correlation.

Turns out, however, that there isn't even a coincidence. As I've pointed out, abortion rates were falling for six years before the welfare reform act was passed, and may have been rising in more recent years -- the years in which the harsher aspects of welfare reform (i.e. the five-year limits) actually began to take effect.

Happy Days Are Here Again!
 

See? If we weren't winning, they would be succeeding on a daily basis, not just trying.

60,000 wakadoos
 

No, I meant correlation is not causation. Truly. And I think you are using "coincidence" as the same thing as correlation. Where there's correlation between two or more things, there may or may not be a relationship. Coincidence implies (generally; I'm not sure if you are using it in the "coincidence? I think not" sense or the "the co-incidence [pronounced, I think, with the emphasis on the first, not the second syllable] between blah and blah" sense) that there is not a relationship. Causation means that there is definitely a relationship.

Anyway, I don't think one can "correlate a relationship" in any event.

Wow, is chatting with you fun. We should do this more often.

ETA check out definition of coincidence -- http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionar...va=coincidence

God I hate face time.

60,000 wakadoos
 

Was this a run-on sentence? In any event, Hyde is a GOP Congressman (House) from Illinois.

S_A_M

strategic bombing
 

So you have no problem with torture, I take it.

My original point about the effectiveness of strategic bombing -- and Dyson's -- is that notwithstanding the conviction of its proponents, strategic bombing does not "break the will of the populace." You are right that, as a subjective matter, that is what the USAF thought it was doing over Japan, just as the RAF and USAF thought they were breaking Germany's will, and the Luftwaffe thought it was breaking England's will during the Blitz. But they weren't.

As a historic matter, your characterization of the decision to use the atomic bomb is basically accurate, but your grouping of the firebombing of Tokyo is not so right. When we firebombed Tokyo, the invasion of the home islands was not imminent. The rationale was, in part, that light industry was dispersed in wood-frame buildings throughout Tokyo -- suggesting why Curtis LeMay was thinking about prosecution. Killing civilians for the sake of killing civilians sounds like a war crime.

strategic bombing
 

I'm not talking about the use of atomic bomb, which is where you seem to be going. When the Japanese saw what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they surrendered, although some elements of the military wanted to keep fighting. I wager this would happen if you dropped nuclear weapons on just about any country.

60,000 wakadoos
 

I knew it sounded funney when I wrote it. I just looked up correlation in the American Heritage Dictionary, and of course, to cover their ass, they said that Corellation could be "causal, complementary, parallel or reciprocal relationship". So that was no help. Clearly there is a differencre between causal and correllary. So if there was no causation but a correlation what would that mean? Could they have a correlation but not be connected in any way?

60,000 wakadoos
 

Yes. I can't think of any good examples right now.* A basic statistics textbook would cover this, though.

*I am too focused on pizza.

strategic bombing
 

You know what is insane, is that the government (military leadership) of Japan wanted to go on fighting after the second atomic bomb. The Emporer had to intervene to force the surrender. He recorded the announcement of surrender on two discs for a broadcast the next day. That night there was an attempted coup and soliders stormed the radio office trying to destroy the discs. A loyal General put down the coup.

60,000 wakadoos
 

You are about as helpful as that stupid dictionary. I still don't know what correlation means.

60,000 wakadoos
 

http://www.cut-the-knot.com/do_you_know/misuse.shtml

Also, run a search with the words "correlation causation statistics" and it will pull up a bunch of other discussions.

You are welcome.

ETA wikipedia, while not the encyclopedia britannica or whatever, does have an example related to this that involves Homer and Lisa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correla...cal_fallacy%29

Mmmmmm, burgers.

strategic bombing
 

Sherman's March?

strategic bombing
 

The atom bomb was killing civilians to kill them, wasn't it?

strategic bombing
 

No.

strategic bombing
 

You're great great grandma wasn't impregnated by her hubbie- it was a Private from the 21st illinois- does that shit break your will to fight?

60,000 wakadoos
 

More like not paying attention. I was confusing him with Byrd and wondering why the Ds were so happy about it.

You don't want to know the weird ways that my brain works.

So, tonight, Delay's in the news criticising Kennedy - no surprise there - for two things:

- looking to international law for support for his opinions (which I agree is inane); and

- doing legal research on the internet.




Huh?