FYI

[swede]

The primary is over, but I love the exercise of having two discrete bodies of closed-minded people throwing information at each other in the hopes of winning the hearts and minds of the opposition.

The problem for conservatives is that other side has so little of the latter.

Anyway, to help Obama out with the actual context of his "I know a Captain whose platoon has no ammo" story.

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/0...etttt-fla.html

[Freak Out]

The primary is over, but I love the exercise of having two discrete bodies of closed-minded people throwing information at each other in the hopes of winning the hearts and minds of the opposition.

The problem for conservatives is that other side has so little of the latter.

Anyway, to help Obama out with the actual context of his "I know a Captain whose platoon has no ammo" story.

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/0...etttt-fla.html

Do you have a transcript or a link to one of this speech?

[Freak Out]

Nader is on Talk of the Nation right now.

[swede]

Anyway, to help Obama out with the actual context of his "I know a Captain whose platoon has no ammo" story.

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/0...etttt-fla.html

Do you have a transcript or a link to one of this speech?

I believe the remark came about during the debate in Texas. Obama had heard from a captain whose platoon had been split up so that only a small portion of a full strength platoon had gone into Afghanistan. The sense of the remark was that direct information from an American military officer with first-hand knowledge supported Obama's contention that the "better" war in Afghanistan was being poorly supported because arms and men were directly siphoned to the war in Iraq.

Initial reactions from those who know the military were that the story almost certainly had to be factually false. Captains, for one thing, don't lead platoons; lieutenants do. And fighting forces are never deliberately split up at the platoon level, ever, to go to different geographic areas. Weapons and ammunition have simply not been a problem in either theater that anyone has heard.

Here is a helpful link in which the actual captain--yes, he was once a lieutenant--did have some things happen so that some guys went to Afghanistan and other guys got reassigned roundaboutly and may have ended up in Iraq.

The sense I get is that Obama's organization was able to spin this inconsequential anecdote into a clearly negative impression of great consequence without stepping across the line and actually telling fibs. With this talent of taking a few grains of truth and building phantasmagoric smears Obama should take a break and make a few hundred million suing tobacco, pharmaceutical, and oil companies. He'd be able to outright buy the Presidency in ten years.

Here's the link to the Captain's tale:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpu...he-fact-3.html


And for comparison remember to read this anecdotal account of service in Afghanistan:

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/0...etttt-fla.html

After reading both we will pick the source that confirms our beliefs and call it more credible than the other.

AND.. fwiw...

Why is it that whenever I hear Afghanistan I reflexively think Bananistan and am filled with an overwhelming urge to let you open someone else's safety deposit box?

[Freak Out]

Anyway, to help Obama out with the actual context of his "I know a Captain whose platoon has no ammo" story.

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/0...etttt-fla.html

Do you have a transcript or a link to one of this speech?

I believe the remark came about during the debate in Texas. Obama had heard from a captain whose platoon had been split up so that only a small portion of a full strength platoon had gone into Afghanistan. The sense of the remark was that direct information from an American military officer with first-hand knowledge supported Obama's contention that the "better" war in Afghanistan was being poorly supported because arms and men were directly siphoned to the war in Iraq.

Initial reactions from those who know the military were that the story almost certainly had to be factually false. Captains, for one thing, don't lead platoons; lieutenants do. And fighting forces are never deliberately split up at the platoon level, ever, to go to different geographic areas. Weapons and ammunition have simply not been a problem in either theater that anyone has heard.

Here is a helpful link in which the actual captain--yes, he was once a lieutenant--did have some things happen so that some guys went to Afghanistan and other guys got reassigned roundaboutly and may have ended up in Iraq.

The sense I get is that Obama's organization was able to spin this inconsequential anecdote into a clearly negative impression of great consequence without stepping across the line and actually telling fibs. With this talent of taking a few grains of truth and building phantasmagoric smears Obama should take a break and make a few hundred million suing tobacco, pharmaceutical, and oil companies. He'd be able to outright buy the Presidency in ten years.

Here's the link to the Captain's tale:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpu...he-fact-3.html


And for comparison remember to read this anecdotal account of service in Afghanistan:

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/0...etttt-fla.html

After reading both we will pick the source that confirms our beliefs and call it more credible than the other.

AND.. fwiw...

Why is it that whenever I hear Afghanistan I reflexively think Bananistan and am filled with an overwhelming urge to let you open someone else's safety deposit box?

Thanks for the links and time...I'll give them a read.

[red]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

not those infamous letters!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i cringed when i saw them, and my blood pressure started to rise

[Freak Out]

Logistics can be a goat fuck.

[Freak Out]

FYI

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat.../2187rank.html

[BallHawk]

Did something happen to Rick DeMulling?

[LL2]

FYI

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat.../2187rank.html

What is this an account balance for? The U.S. has a negative 747 billion in its bank account? That wouldn't surprise me, since the U.S. gov't operates like a college student with 5 maxed out Visa cards.

[swede]

FYI

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat.../2187rank.html

What is this an account balance for? The U.S. has a negative 747 billion in its bank account? That wouldn't surprise me, since the U.S. gov't operates like a college student with 5 maxed out Visa cards.

Hello, this is Ghana.

Hey, Ghana, USA here. Say I wonder if you could front me a few trillion until after the elections. I kinda have a consumer confidence thing going here. I promised to send the taxpayers a few hundred million prebate checks, and I see where AutoZone has got some cool spinners on sale. I thought I could to trick out some Humvees and mail trucks since it's such a good deal and all.

I tell you last time, USA, no more money. I have children to feed and you never pay me back.

Hey, that's harsh man. I almost paid you back last week until the weather kinda went goofy and I had a bunch of FEMA bills. I'd take a few goats if you're short of cash. Mexico is usually good about giving me thirty cents on the dollar for goats.

No goats! No money! Don't call again! (click)

(sigh...boop boop beep beep boop boop beep)

Hey, Tanzania! Howzitgoin man? World's biggest superpower here. You got a second?

[Freak Out]

FYI

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat.../2187rank.html

What is this an account balance for? The U.S. has a negative 747 billion in its bank account? That wouldn't surprise me, since the U.S. gov't operates like a college student with 5 maxed out Visa cards.

Hello, this is Ghana.

Hey, Ghana, USA here. Say I wonder if you could front me a few trillion until after the elections. I kinda have a consumer confidence thing going here. I promised to send the taxpayers a few hundred million prebate checks, and I see where AutoZone has got some cool spinners on sale. I thought I could to trick out some Humvees and mail trucks since it's such a good deal and all.

I tell you last time, USA, no more money. I have children to feed and you never pay me back.

Hey, that's harsh man. I almost paid you back last week until the weather kinda went goofy and I had a bunch of FEMA bills. I'd take a few goats if you're short of cash. Mexico is usually good about giving me thirty cents on the dollar for goats.

No goats! No money! Don't call again! (click)

(sigh...boop boop beep beep boop boop beep)

Hey, Tanzania! Howzitgoin man? World's biggest superpower here. You got a second?

Classic....

I like to check out the latest dirt on the CIA and State Dept websites before traveling just for grins and had to laugh when I came across that CIA ranking. I kept scrolling down thinking "I wonder if they put the US on the list?"......lol.

[Freak Out]

The Audacity of Hopelessness
By FRANK RICH

WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.

As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.

Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.

The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.

If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.

The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election”: Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity.

There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence.

In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular — the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward.

What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.

[Harlan Huckleby]

her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco.

It is pure emotionalism to use that vote as a litmus test of experience or judgement. (no point in trying to use rational arguments to dispell a feeling.)

Frank Rich analyzes the stupidity of the Clinton campaign and ignores the most giant factor: Obama is far more popular than Clinton. I don't think this election or most elections are decided by strategy, it is a cheap thrill to pick apart the supposedly fatal tactics of any losing campaign. The Obama side has a personally appealling person to sell, money is not pouring into their campaign due to their comparatively brilliant strategizing.

If Frank Rich thinks he could have packaged Hillary and whipped Barack Obama, well, I'm only sorry he wasn't on the Clinton team. Just a cheap and hollow column.

[swede]

her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco.

It is pure emotionalism to use that vote as a litmus test of experience or judgement. (no point in trying to use rational arguments to dispell a feeling.)

Frank Rich analyzes the stupidity of the Clinton campaign and ignores the most giant factor: Obama is far more popular than Clinton. I don't think this election or most elections are decided by strategy, it is a cheap thrill to pick apart the supposedly fatal tactics of any losing campaign. The Obama side has a personally appealling person to sell, money is not pouring into their campaign due to their comparatively brilliant strategizing.

If Frank Rich thinks he could have packaged Hillary and whipped Barack Obama, well, I'm only sorry he wasn't on the Clinton team. Just a cheap and hollow column.

This is a dangerous point of view Blue Dawg.

Basically, you are saying that the factors that caused us to vote for the cool guy in the sixth grade presidential race are still at work on the national level.

Scarily enough, you are probably right.

[Freak Out]

Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

Incompetence will kill you every time. If he wins the nomination will the McCain campaign cut him such slack?

Rove/Bush proved that certain selective campaign strategies can play a pivotal role in any election.

[Freak Out]

her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco.

It is pure emotionalism to use that vote as a litmus test of experience or judgement. (no point in trying to use rational arguments to dispell a feeling.)

Frank Rich analyzes the stupidity of the Clinton campaign and ignores the most giant factor: Obama is far more popular than Clinton. I don't think this election or most elections are decided by strategy, it is a cheap thrill to pick apart the supposedly fatal tactics of any losing campaign. The Obama side has a personally appealling person to sell, money is not pouring into their campaign due to their comparatively brilliant strategizing.

If Frank Rich thinks he could have packaged Hillary and whipped Barack Obama, well, I'm only sorry he wasn't on the Clinton team. Just a cheap and hollow column.

This is a dangerous point of view Blue Dawg.

Basically, you are saying that the factors that caused us to vote for the cool guy in the sixth grade presidential race are still at work on the national level.

Scarily enough, you are probably right.

Probably? Come on Swede....

[Harlan Huckleby]

Rove/Bush proved that certain selective campaign strategies can play a pivotal role in any election.

Bush was viewed as more personable than Kerry, and certainly more likeable than the 2000 version of Gore.
(Gore is warm and fuzzy now, though. )

[hoosier]

It is pure emotionalism to use that vote as a litmus test of experience or judgement. (no point in trying to use rational arguments to dispell a feeling.)

Not if her vote showed flawed judgment. I know you think that's not the case (that her vote didn't reflect political stupidity), but then the real disagreement is over whether or not it was possible to see, back in 2002 or whever it was, that the war was ill conceived and the authorization vote was a terrible idea. Or maybe the disagreement is over whether the war was flawed in principle or just in its realization.

But in any event the position that Hillary's vote reflects bad judgment isn't necessarily based on emotion (hatred of Hillary's personality), it's based on the conviction that her authorization vote was motivated by poor judgment or political cowardice.

In trying to disqualify the anti-Hillary position (as being based purely on emotion) you're actually doing the same thing you accuse them of doing: you portray yourself (or Hillary) as the reasonalbe one and the other side as having gone beyond all reason.

[swede]

By following Blue Dawg's theory--that the middle belt of American voters who actually select presidents make their decisions using the shallowest of emotional impressions--I hereby proclaim Barack Hussein Obama to be the next President of the United States.

But I also predict that this story, linked below, will be Obama's Whitewater Affair. It was a careless grab for real estate made possible by consorting with unsavories looking for influence.

At this point, the ethical and legal problems are complex enough that the American unintelligentsia will miss the point of the story so they'll go on backing Barack. Didn't see that coming.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3433485.ece