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| 7/8 |
| 2005/8/3-4 [Politics/Domestic/California, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:38957 Activity:kinda low |
8/2 http://www.fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Interesting read. -- ilyas \_ Oh no! An ultra conservative writer got killed. BOO HOO! \_ Yeah, the life of anyone who disagrees with your political philosophy has no value. Good way to win friends and influence people. \_ "There is only room for one party in this country" \_ How can you equate gloating over someone's death with a random trollish political statement? Nevermind.... \_ Wow, talk about delusions of grandeur. Do you always put quote marks around your comments? \_ He is quoting one of the motd Conservatives. Or perhaps a troll posing as a motd Conservative. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. http://csua.org/u/cwn \_ Ah, hiding behind http://csua.org. Are you ashamed of the real URL? \_ Wow, you're dumb. Or maybe just deeply paranoid? \_ No, the full URL was too long to put on one line in the motd. Did you even look at it? \_ Uh, ignore the liberal drones above. That wasn't the point of that url at all. -- ilyas \_ Don't you even asscociate some of the above with the Liberal Team - we don't want 'em. -Liberal Team Management |
| 7/8 |
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| www.fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com BBC carries this report: A US freelance reporter, Steven Vincent, has been shot dead by unknown g unmen in Basra, southern Iraq, police have said. Mr Vincent had bee n in Basra in recent months working for the Christian Science Monitor a nd the New York Times. In a recent New York Times article, Mr Vincent w rote that Basra's police force had been infiltrated by Shia militants. He quoted a senior Iraqi police lieutenant saying some officers were be hind many of the killings of former Baath party members in Basra. Mr Vi ncent also criticised the UK forces, who are responsible for security i n Basra, for ignoring abuses of power by Shia extremists. Michael Yon, who describes himself as "an independent, informed obse rver chronicling the monumentally important events in the efforts to sta bilize Iraq. His dispatches have the benefit of his life experiences wit hout drawbacks based on deadlines or demands of marketplace." On Wednesday, an American freelance journalist was found dead in the sou thern Iraqi city of Basra, the US Embassy said. Police said Steven Vi ncent had been shot multiple times after he and his Iraqi translator we re abducted at gunpoint hours earlier. I had just contacted Stephen ask ing when he might come to Mosul. Stephen Vincent was an author and the popular blogger of "In The Red Zone." CNN characterized Mr Vincent and his work in this way: Vincent was in Basra writing a book about the history of the city. He al so maintained a Web blog about life in Iraq, and most recently had an o p-ed piece in The New York Times on Sunday. According to the Web site o f his publishing company, Vincent's work appeared in The Wall Street Jo urnal, Harper's, The Christian Science Monitor, Art and Auction, and Na tional Review Online, along with other art and political journals. He w as a resident of New York for 25 years, the site said. previous post which di scussed, among other things, the rising tensions between Sunni and Shi'i te in Iraq. It's interesting to note that the BBC linked Mr Vincent's m urder to his interest in the sectarian conflict. It would have been iron ic if Vincent had been killed not because he was an American, but becaus e he came too close to a story. What compelled him to cover a battlefield of the war on terror "traveling without security or official connections, living by his wits," accordin g to the Spence Publishing site? "At that moment, I realized my country was at war -- bec ause of the 1993 attack on the Trade Center, I figured our enemy was Is lamic terrorism -- and I wanted to do my part in the conflict. I'm too old to enlist in the armed services, so I decided to put my writing tal ents to use." In that interview Vincent described the weapons with which he intended to fight. That is why the terms the press uses to cover th is conflict are so vital. As yo u noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms insurgents or guerillas to describe the Sunni Triangle gunme n, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liber ation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase paramilitary death squads. Whether Sunni killed Shi'ite or Shi'ite killed Sunni, Mr Vincent knew mu rder when he saw it. It will be interesting to see whether the media wil l attribute Mr Vincent's death to "guerillas" or to "paramilitary death squads". He was witness to the neces sity for honesty and the survival of outrage; conscious of how near deat h stands to all of us in the workaday world without watchful men ready t o give the alarm with just words. Department of Defense News transcript reports: Q General Conway, General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of the Army has apparently just come back from Iraq. And he has said at a luncheon yesterday that US forces had either captured or killed some 50,000 in surgents so far this year. Can you tell us how many were captured or how many were killed? And whether or not -- you know, what that says about the size of the insurgency? CONWAY: I just saw the article this morning, and I accept the fact that General Keane has been in-country certainly since I have. So I'm afraid I can't confirm or deny the accuracy of those figures. Q Well, I mean -- US forces are constantly rolling up -- and Iraqi for ces are rolling up suspected insurgents. Do you not -- can either one of you give us any idea of how many ar e being held now, and does the numbers seem reasonable? And setting the number aside for a moment, what does it say about the size of the insu rgency if there have been numbers in that range? MR DI RITA: Well, you know, it's something that commanders have been as ked on many occasions. I think the secretary has certainly been asked i t It's an interesting thing to understand, you know, what's the size o f the adversary that we're facing. And the estimates have ranged from a few thousand on the low end to many tens of thousands on the high end -- this now -- this comment that General Keane has made. It's -- there is -- we are capturing or killing a large number of bad guys in Iraq. We are detaining a large number of p eople who are under investigation either as criminal elements or potent ial insurgents from whom we can gather additional information. Nobody's maintaining a count of t he size of the insurgency or the numbers that we're capturing because, as we've discussed from here and elsewhere -- before Congress -- it's n ot a -- first of all, it's not a metric that has a lot of meaning by it self. And secondly, it's a difficult thing to do, and for the effort th at would be expended, one would have to wonder what we'd have at the en d of the day if we were able to count it with precision. Q General Keane also said that the US has a pretty good idea of the le adership of the insurgency. He mentioned that eight to 10 leaders occas ionally meet and that that was something that was known. Is there a -- do you know if th ere's a core of eight to 10 leaders? We're starting to ge t into some classified type of material at this point. But we have an i ndex, we think, on who the leadership is, and we do know that they occa sionally meet. That doesn't portend, I think, other views that it is a very well commanded or controlled insurgency, but we do know that they meet from time to time to talk organization and tactics. Washington Institute, which provided the following summary of hi s remarks. The Iraqi insurgency is overwhelmingly Sunni Arab based and can be divid ed into two main branches: former regime elements and Sunnis opposed to the occupation. The approximately 150,000 thugs and secret police from the former regime are the core of the problem. They have no political agenda for the country, nor are they fighting for a political ideology. Foreign terrorists constitute a small but critical part of the insurge ncy. Syria, which would like to see the Baath Party to return to power in Iraq, has made it a national objective to help the insurgency. As a result, the insurgents are well-financed and capable of maintaining a l evel of violence that creates instability and discourages reconstructio n efforts. Given the insurgents focus on provoking sectarian violence, the absence of all-out civil conflict is remarkable. Of note is the political matu rity of the Kurds and Shiites, especially the remarkable restraint demo nstrated by the latter in not retaliating on a large scale against Sunn is for attacks clearly calculated to foment civil war. Watching Ayatoll ah Ali Hussein al-Sistani deal with elements within his own community ( eg, Muqtada al-Sadr) has been instructive. Although civil war would b e a tragedy, with immense costs, it would at least force a definitive o utcome to the ongoing struggle in Iraq. The best indicator of success in Iraq will be the political process. Man y ministries and government institutions are effectively being rebuilt from scratch, and that takes time, particularly given the insurgencys intimidation campaign. If the political transition is stymied, US pub lic support for the war will erode. They believe they can break... |
| csua.org/u/cwn -> csua.com/2005/07/12/#38572 com, Bloomberg News) The US gov will report this week that rising tax revenue is shrinking this year's budget deficit, possibly by as much as 90 billion, giving Bush a shot at fulfilling his deficit reduction promise 3 years early. v=1 If things do indeed improve in the next few years, will you guys still say bad things about Bush? For that matter, he CREATED the problem in the first place by being the first president EVER to push tax cuts in a time of war. A minor reduction in problems he created won't validate him for me. that found that on our current track, the only thing the gvmt will be able to afford by 2040 is financing our debt. At least your SO and friends will pressure you to always have one. That's why companies were willing to offer these money-losing plans. With buyouts, there isn't as much competition and those still in the biz have to make up the money lost making those before mentioned acquisitions. The best way to game the system now is to abuse the "friends and family" plans that allow unlimited time within their company . I'm not sure I completely agree w/ the premise that geography dictated "success", but I'm pretty sure I can go along w/ the fact that it predisposed certain people to create civilization and culture. I'm going to have to get it from the library after finals. BTW, he seems to have written another book last year called Collapse. The newest hardback edition of the book out now has a new chapter on the author's theory of the origin of the Japanese language and people. I'm going to have to get it from the library after finals. BTW, he seems to have written another book last year called Collapse. com, which seemed to contain theentire show content, and you can read it all in 5 minutes or whatever. I guess seeing the landscapes and people on camera would be fun. html Saratoga has the 7th highest median income in the US, trailing behind Great Falls VA, Darient CT, New Canaan CT, Wilton CT, and others. What the heck do people do in VA and CT that make them rich? What you say is true, but you don't buy a $2M house by making $91K. The "slums of Beverly Hills" must drive down the median. Long time residents might not have the income of people who might be buying in now. Then he said he sold one of them last week, and the other agent said "Jesus! and he replied "Oh, she works for the Judge Judy production." html \_ I regard any list with Chino Hills on it with the utmost suspicion. As someone who lived in LA and SF, though, I think San Diego is the best place in CA. Nice weather, lots of single women, good quality of life, close to LA but not in it. Compare that to California where it is not unusual that average home prices are 10X the household income. Based on unaffordability, I failed to see why they even bother to put in CA cities. I guess it makes sense if you bought houses in the 80s or inherited land. A suburb of chicago, it's a pretty nice city, but not comparable to the bay area in terms weather, outdoors activities, places to go within 4 hours drive, and cosmopolitan demographics. activities, places to go, and cosmopolitan demographics. How much is a decent 1800 sq ft townhouse in the Bay Area (say Fremont) these days? I saw a 3/1 1600 square foot SFR in Naperville for $200K. You still make more money over the long run by buying, even in California. There is a global savings glut right now, driving down yields, forcing investors into things like rental property. Expect disruption in CSUA service between 7pm and wheneverweactuallyfinish. We don't intend on bringing soda down for more than a few minutes to rotate it in the rack (so that it cooks evenly). CSUA for a newer machine in the next few days as part of planned server upgrades. Scotch serves DNS, NIS for the office, mailing lists, and is soda's backup mail server. During the downtime, some or all of these services will be unavailable. The length of the outage depends on our luck, but we hope to have everything back available within a few hours with as little disruption as possible. Note that the soda motd will continue to be as troll-filled as usual. Additionally, the scotch replacement will bring in phase 1 of the new soda upgrade. We will be unifying soda logins and office logins (but not home directories), which means that I will be pulling the password database off of soda to serve as the master list for office logins. This means that if you have an office account, your office password will be the same as your soda password. If you did not have an office account before, this change will not grant you an office account. The exact date and time of this switchover will be announced soon. For example, I stick in a CD and the name of the song and artist would reverse, pop/classical/blues would get falsely categorized, and other things? All my Chinese p1r8 CDs from the Burmese flea market have them, but none of the "legit" gwailo ones do... org/u/coo (Post) "McClellan is indeed well liked by the press corps. But that counts for little now, when recent events have shown that he either misled reporters deliberately or was duped by his White House colleagues." Or is this one of those happy joy joy non-standard windows things? This is actually a fairly complex issue (seeing how lisp treats something is a good way to tell -- lisp has 4 or 5 different notions of equality). In particular, null === undefined is false in Javascript. html "Let's let the investigation take place, and let's let the investigators bring all the facts together and draw the conclusions that they draw, and then we will know the facts at that point." Translation: Dubya buys time for Roveian general to execute on GOP plans, with expectation that Rove will come out fine anyway since the base doesn't really care. In case you didn't figure it out yet: Dubya's current and future position is he will only be firing people for illegal acts with convictions, not for merely being "involved" in the Plame affair as a previously reported position. McClellan: if someone leaked classified information of this nature.. McClellan: the President believes leaking classified information is a very serious matter It's fairly clear that McClellan was saying that anoyone in the WH who leaked classified info would be gone. I guess it depends on what the meanings of "leak" and "classified" are. "I did not leak classified info to that man, Mr Cooper!" if there was no there there don't you think it would have been wrapped up with a bow by now. We'll find out at the END of the investigation if he violated the law. I'm no lefty partisan, but I also don't want someone who would leak classified info in the WH. So if he's found to be guilty, I'll join the chorus demanding that he be fired. Maybe he means the whole situation is worthy of ridicule. I was surprised that it's free, but they only gave me 5 at a time. Anyways, the new checks do NOT come in checkbooks, but in a long piece of paper. In fact, I didn't even realize that was the checks I ordered, so I told them I didn't receive the checks and they sent me one book worth for free. I only need one per month, and it's easy to reorder on-line, so it's not that big of an issue. I think the fear of Rove being outed has driven him over the edge. If you can't beat him, destroy him should be your motto. I know it sucks to find out that your Republican heros are scoundrels, just like all the other politicians, but that is just the way it is. The sooner you admit it to yourself the better off you will be. aid=15626 \_ I wanna see you people tell the British that we're "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here"... Here's a nutty idea: fighting them there doesn't matter if we're inviting them over here. Where do you find these pearls of Conservative "wisdom"? com/ajkk7 (freeper link) \_ The silence is a bit deafening about the three senators who visited gitmo and said it's run very well. I notice you still haven't commented on your favorite traitor Rove. com/7gghk (freeper link) \_ *sniff* I don't know whether to spew because of the content of the post or because our own little freeper troll has finally figured out how to use tinyurl. com/ckl7g (freeper) \... |
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