lostfan

QUOTE (Rex Kicka** @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 05:06 PM) Because success is boring. When Mehsud got waxed a few weeks ago, if it had happened 3 years ago there would've been a party on the South Lawn and conservative columnists would be high-fiving each other. It barely made a ripple.

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 05:05 PM) terrorists. More profiles should be done on gates. Guy just quietly does his job and doesn't give a s*** about looks. Oppo. of Rummy. I'm hoping Gates is a fixture for more than TWO presidents now (three?) Absolutely one of the finest public officials around. The knee-jerk reaction in blogland was to be disappointed that he kept a "Bush holdover" but it's not about that with him, the guy doesn't give a s*** about politics. Unfortunately I don't think he wants to stick around much longer. He's staying only because the president asked him to. He's been in the government since Ford or Carter, I forget which one, and he was pretty high in the Reagan administration and of course was Bush's DCI so it's definitely more than two presidents, Obama is more like his 5th.

StrangeSox are you talking about the killing terrorists thing, or the missile defense thing?

Kap this can start you off (see 3rd paragraph, ignore pro-Obama cheerleading). I'll find some better links when I get time. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009...ealism?page=0,1

I'll post links when I go home. add: the everyday goings-on of counterterrorism from Bush to Obama haven't hardly changed at all, and won't, and Obama never said they would. Only in style and tone, and some of the critical strategic mistakes the Bush administration was making.

QUOTE (ChiSox_Sonix @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 04:30 PM) Good. What's the reason people are allowed to vote 'present', by the way? There's a lot of different reasons, I would list more but I'm about to leave work. One reason might be that you agree with the bill in principle but there is something about it you didn't like and didn't want to compromise. Another is sending a message of disapproval like NSS said.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Sep 17, 2009 -> 12:55 PM) Barack Chamberlain abandons missile defense system!!!! Can't green the hyperlink. Missile defense just doesn't work and costs an enormous amount of money. Not only that but Iran doesn't have any long-range delivery systems and won't for at least another decade so even if they worked it's a moot point. They don't have nuclear warheads either, and we would be able to detect these kinds of developments well in advance. Interestingly though the critics' knee-jerk reaction focuses on what he's not doing as opposed to what he is doing. In the place of this program he proposed a system to counter short and medium-range missiles from Iran, the ones that actually do exist, with defense systems that actually work. Furthermore, the Iranians know that an attack of that magnitude is borderline suicidal and would almost certainly be followed by a crippling counterattack (if not preemptive one, before the missile launches). In a similar vein, anyone who's been paying attention to The Conflict Formerly Known as the War on Terror in the last few weeks has noticed the Obama administration has been just as effective as the Bush administration in killing terrorists (Mehsud, Nabhan) but I haven't seen anyone talk about this anywhere from the usual national security peanut gallery. It doesn't fit the predetermined stereotype that Democrats are weak on terror and going to get us all killed.

I see at least two false equivalencies a day in this forum. I always wonder, do I want to actually take the time to deconstruct it, or do I dismiss it out of hand.

Totally uninteresting conversation, this is why I hate when someone brings up race, even if they say something true. It pollutes everything.

Property taxes aren't that bad in Maryland, but income tax is a b**** (basically right behind the feds) and it seems like there is an excise tax for everything.

lol did someone tell that guy you CAN be from Kenya AND be a Christian?

lol at all those

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Sep 16, 2009 -> 05:56 PM) I was actually working during this transition. They were boxed up, shipped to corporate, and the disposed of. Yeah, when I was there this was something that was happening gradually. They didn't just go cold turkey off VHS and phased it out, but yeah when we had too many copies of a movie we'd try to sell what we could in the store, then the rest would just get shipped back to Texas or wherever the hell and what they did with it I never knew.

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 16, 2009 -> 11:33 AM) whatever to the GOP, if this is the bill that the dems need to pass to get BLUE dog support, why would the repubs support it. The bill the dems will be owning is essentiallly telling the poor and middle class voters they need to pay money to health insurance companies, who are probably dancing to the bank right now. Greenwald's been writing articles about this, that it was the insurance companies' plans all along. They basically are going to write laws, on terms favorable to them.

QUOTE (GoSox05 @ Sep 16, 2009 -> 04:22 PM) Labor unions support the democratic party, but what else are they gonna do? The other major party doesn't think they should be allowed to exist. I don't know of too many cases of extreme violence by labor unions. There are cases, but they are few. Now violence against labor unions has been much worse in the history of this country. I'm surprised how many people don't notice how much of a paradox it is to have environmentalists and union activists/trade protectionists in the same party, both heavily involved in pushing policy.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 16, 2009 -> 04:02 PM) Uh, I would rope them into the left wing as much as you want to rope in these people on the right. These people are a major part of the biggest parts of the Democratic platform, such as the guys who think it is a good idea to fire bomb car dealerships to protect the environment. I don't see that as any different than lumping the Klansmen in with the right because they are religious. By and large these people vote Democratic, and are on the Democratic side of policy. The way you guys are defining the right wing, that makes these guys a legitmate part of the left wing. No, they really don't, that's a hilarious, borderline desperate exaggeration. The Dems aren't anywhere near far enough left for these guys and they despise the entire system, to include the Democrats who they think are complicit. Think about this logically for a minute. If hypothetically they WERE a big part of the Democratic platform then they wouldn't be out fire-bombing dealerships and setting mansions on fire because they would have significant influence in the government and they wouldn't feel the need to resort to domestic terrorism tactics to change policy.

Going back to the numbers of the 9/12 protesters I did a little reading and figured out the sequence of events. Some conservative blogger, I forget who, said there were between 1 and 1.5 million and attributed it to ABC News. He basically completely made that number up, didn't link to it or anything. Malkin repeats this on her blog but she "rounded up" and said there were 2 million protesters, and from here it got linked to/repeated everywhere, and of course Beck jumped on the bandwagon too. ABC, having not said anything remotely close to this, has to come out with an article essentially saying "we have no idea where the 2 million number came from but it wasn't us, we cited the Capitol Police/Fire Dept. number that said 60-70k." Malkin eventually corrected herself Interestingly the guy who started the whole thing corrected himself too but blamed the "media" for the inaccuracy. The photo with the big crowd is apparently one from years ago that someone arbitrarily started passing around and saying it was a picture of 9/12. This is what the crowd looked like on Inauguration Day by the way. And this isn't showing the crowds in the streets that didn't get into the Mall. Edit: I'm not a hypocrite btw, the number isn't that important if we're talking about the difference between 70k and 100k, it is in fact a large crowd, but we're talking about multiplying the number by 28.5 times the actual number. Funniest analogy I saw was from Nate Silver who said exaggerating by a factor that large is like claiming to have a 53 inch penis.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 16, 2009 -> 12:23 PM) I have to admit I haven't reasearched this a lot yet, but, here is what I am waiting for. Since movies take up a lot more disk space than music, its hard to find a blu-ray or DVD player that allows you to save everything to memory (like iTunes is for music). These hard-drive based modules exist, some with a couple terabytes of space, but those still cost 4 figures. But I really am tired of having to keep and store a bazillion disks. So what I'd love, is for a service to essentially host my collection. You buy movies from them, or upload your own, to shared space they host, and your machine just hooks to the internet or cable to go get what you want to watch. I think the problematic part is the stuff I already own. For buying new stuff, I'd bet this sort of thing is coming soon, if it doesn't exist already. Maybe the best bet is to hook up to a service like that when it comes out, then wait for the big disk drive players to get cheaper, to put my disks onto. I can just wait until then to throw out the ones I already have. I started that networking thread a few weeks ago and this is what I've been doing. I've been ripping my DVD collection to digital copies and building libraries of TV shows. They don't cost as much as you think they do. You can get some like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16833124345

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Sep 16, 2009 -> 12:26 PM) I wonder how much effect the constantly changing portable media has also affected this. They had to get rid of all of those videos, now DVDs, Hi-Def for a minute, now Blu-Ray. They are losing money trying to keep up Well shedding inventory is a pretty normal part of their everyday business operations. Let's say you get 200 copies of Transformers 2 from distribution, those go out to rent, and the first couple of weekends they're 100% rented out. Over the next few weeks less people start renting it. Those, you put into shrink wrap and sell or you send back to distribution (no idea what they do with it after that) since you don't need 200 copies on the shelf anymore. When DVDs first came out the store would have, say, 150 VHS and 20 DVDs since everyone didn't have a DVD player yet.

I was a Blockbuster employee once too. I still know my employee number which of course is my de facto membership number by heart. They were a little late to the game on the digital distribution thing. I also could never understand how they made money with no late fees? I used to have to explain to customers that kept new releases like a week overdue that the reason for their late fees was Blockbuster needing to have the movie in the store for it to be rented out. New releases are checked in and out at a pretty high rate and the customer is basically screwing the store over when he/she keeps it. The whole "due by noon" thing was a good idea but there was so much backlash from stupid customers who pretended to not hear you tell them multiple times.

I'm really not sure people actually want all the labor in places like California to be done by legals at the rate that would cost once they realize how it will affect the prices of their goods.

Sensationalist bulls***. They assume people want to know.

I didn't know it was recorded. lol. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3YyK8khpKQ

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 15, 2009 -> 03:23 PM) let's not scare the s*** out of me, k. Sex gets girls pregnant? Yeah and sometimes you can have funny stuff happen to your no-no spot if she is not clean.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 15, 2009 -> 05:40 PM) So...that article is written intelligently enough that it actually seems to focus on the issue of renewing/checking the most controversial parts of the act (i.e. the anti-terror librarians). They do specifically mention the changing-phones issue as well. Yeah, but probably 3 out of 4 times I hear it mentioned the person talking is referring to the ENTIRE act, and how unconstitutional it is and it needs to go. That's simply not true. You know, it'd be better for everyone if Congress just repealed the damn thing to get the stench of the phrase "USA PATRIOT Act" out of circulation and pass a new law, with a different name, with the (still constitutional) parts included.