If someone wants to find a reason to walk out, they will. "I don't like the color of your assistant's hair. Black hair offends me. These negotiations are over."
England was a constitutional monarchy around the time colonization of America began, you can argue if thats a "real" democracy but by that standard only well off people were allowed to vote in the US for a long time since conception. Weren't the Dutch the first real republic?
Regardless, we can all agree that the idea of Europe being the heir to a democratic tradition dating back to classical greece (the font of all civilization, dontcha know) is pure self-congratulatory bullshit.
I'm going to have to agree. Democracy didn't really exist more than 300 years ago. Now, we can talk about how humoring relatively harmless self-congratulatory bullshit is a significant part of diplomacy, but still.
That reminds me of an episode of This American Life where the narrator, as a kid, tried to weasel out of answering what prayer would be said over an ice cream cone by claiming the room smelled of poop, as you can't pray in the presence of bodily waste.
Iroquis weren't a democracy and weren't really a republic. It was a oligarchical confederacy of independent nations.
I'll grant that the fact that the ability to grant and rescind chiefdom lied in the hands of the clan's women precludes being a republic, but it was a pure consensus-based direct democracy on the community level.
Sullivan was painting a picture that even if he stayed in, it would be still a win for the pro-Israel lobby since they loudly proclaimed that if Freeman was head of the NIC, then all Middle East assessments put out by that office (even though he's not the one that would write them) would come under intense scrutiny by them.
It was a lose-lose for those that want a more diversified opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the start sadly.
Max Blumenthal profiles the leader of the anti-Freeman brigade: Steve Rosen, facing trial this spring for allegedly passing US national security secrets to reporters. No, I didn't make that up. Two things I didn't know: that one of the chief leaders of the effort to blackball Freeman, Mark Kirk, is the top Congressional recipient of AIPAC money; and that Rosen has long engaged in ad hominem attacks on those allegedly not sufficiently supportive of Israel, including his former boss at AIPAC.
According to Douglas Bloomfield, in an article published last week in the New Jersey Jewish Week, Rosen “coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.”
Sullivan was painting a picture that even if he stayed in, it would be still a win for the pro-Israel lobby since they loudly proclaimed that if Freeman was head of the NIC, then all Middle East assessments put out by that office (even though he's not the one that would write them) would come under intense scrutiny by them.
It was a lose-lose for those that want a more diversified opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the start sadly.
It's a bigger win for them if the President or the National Intelligence Director (or whatever the hell the asinine bureaucracy of our intelligence apparatus would have had Freeman reporting to) never sees the other viewpoint.
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Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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Sullivan was painting a picture that even if he stayed in, it would be still a win for the pro-Israel lobby since they loudly proclaimed that if Freeman was head of the NIC, then all Middle East assessments put out by that office (even though he's not the one that would write them) would come under intense scrutiny by them.
It was a lose-lose for those that want a more diversified opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the start sadly.
It's a bigger win for them if the President or the National Intelligence Director (or whatever the hell the asinine bureaucracy of our intelligence apparatus would have had Freeman reporting to) never sees the other viewpoint.
Yea, this is pretty sad actually. Again by Sullivan (since he's been talking a lot about it recently and mentioning it isn't even in any mainstream media coverage), Obama didn't even support Freeman in this, in a sense that perhaps this was a battle that just couldn't be won at this time given the rabid support of Israel that Congress has at its disposal to stymie the president.
I am sick and fucking tired of having completely fucked foreign policy because of Israel.
Yes, it's because of Israel.
Well, no. But they don't help.
I'd say it's more that there's a correlation between stupid people and the practice of ignoring all wrongdoing by our allies (as also seen in republican support of Diem after he lost and the propping up of Batista, Pinochet, and the contras). Of course, I also think Israel is hurt as much by its association w/ America as America is with it (Israel's actions, while very bad from the general Muslim perspective, is geographically limited, so that the outcry can be anywhere from Darfur to Xinjiang [all talk and no talk], while the US is slightly better but pretty much omnipresent. Actually, there seems to be a bit of a positive feedback loop in the negative reputations we give each other).
FBI agents have raided the D.C. office of the man tapped to be President Obama's chief information officer, sources told FOX News.
The agents on Thursday morning raided the office of Vivek Kundra, who is also the outgoing D.C. chief technology officer. The investigation is related to allegations of corruption, one source said, but at this point is not targeting Kundra.
OMG there's no way to know who the target it but it has to be Kundra right? They searched his office!
Except Jake Tapper had this about 30 minutes before the Fox News story FBI Arrests DC Official
Before the crack of dawn Thursday morning, more than a half-dozen cars and SUVs full of FBI agents pulled up to the northwest, Washington, DC, home of Yusuf Acar, the head of IT Technology in the Washington DC city government's Office of the Chief Technology Officer.
The FBI agents, wearing bullet proof vests, presented a search warrant to Acar, handcuffed him and arrested him.
They then began searching his home. Acar's mother-in-law came to take away his three young children while his wife remained in their house.
Also this morning, agents began searching the office of the Chief Technology Officer.
Vivek Kundra -- who last week was appointed Chief Information Officer by the Obama administration -- is Acar's former boss, having served as the city's Chief Technology Officer until early February.
So that will be the GOP spin and there's your reality based rebuttal.
ed Ben Smith has
The search of the office at 1 Judiciary Square is part of "an ongoing investigation," said a spokeswoman for the FBI's D.C. Field Office, Lindsay Gotwin, said.
She said two men, Yusuf Acar and Sushil Bansal, had been arrested.
Acar is an information security officer who was also, according to online requests for proposals, responsible for contracting. Bansal is listed on the city's procurement website as the CEO of the Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation, which was awarded two technology contracts last year worth a total of $350,000.
The Washington Post and WTOP Radio report that the men are being held on bribery charges.
Vivek Kundra -- who last week was appointed Chief Information Officer by the Obama administration -- is Acar's former boss, having served as the city's Chief Technology Officer until early February.
So the best case scenario here is that Kundra wasn't directly involved in any wrongdoing, it was merely happening in his office on his watch. Great.
Vivek Kundra -- who last week was appointed Chief Information Officer by the Obama administration -- is Acar's former boss, having served as the city's Chief Technology Officer until early February.
So the best case scenario here is that Kundra wasn't directly involved in any wrongdoing, it was merely happening in his office on his watch. Great.
Well, if you're looking for the best case scenario for Obama politically on this, it would be that the FBI screwed up and nobody did anything wrong. There's a whole spectrum of other ways this could go down, and yours falls somewhere in the middle.
This week, President Obama signed the $410 billion omnibus bill into law containing over 9,000 earmarks totaling $7.7 billion in wasted taxpayer funds. As a vocal opponent of this bill, Senator McCain urged President Obama to use his veto power to reject the bill so the Congress could start over without the pork.
Unfortunately, President Obama chose to pass up this opportunity. In response, Senator McCain said, "The President's rhetoric is impressive, but his statement affirms we will continue to do business as usual in Washington regarding earmarks in appropriations legislation."
Country First PAC is dedicated to electing reform candidates to federal office who will join Senator McCain in the fight against pork-barrel spending. Today, we're asking you to support these candidates with a generous contribution to Country First of $25, $50, $100, $250, $500 or more.
It's more important than ever that we elect leaders to Congress who will act in the best interest of the taxpayer and who will not dig us further into debt. We must continue to hold President Obama and his allies accountable for the many promises of "change" they made while campaigning for president and other offices.
Thank you for your support and we will continue to keep you updated on Country First PAC's fight against pork-barrel spending.
You know. They try and make $410 seem like a lot (which it is) then they go and say $7.7 billion in "wasted" taxpayer funds. If you do the math... 410/7.7 is roughly 0.01. 1% of this entire $410 billion is "wasted" I'd say that's pretty fucking good considering I probably waste 50% of my paychecks a week.
2:
Did you guys read about how the Obama administration is not going to use the term "enemy combatant", and stop putting people in jail for indefinite amount of time?
In not quite Cabinet level but still interesting news, Samantha Powers at the NSC and Cass Sunstein at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs had a kid today.
In not quite Cabinet level but still interesting news, Samantha Powers at the NSC and Cass Sunstein at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs had a kid today.
I assumed they were lesbians from the names. :P
Also, they're doing the hyphenated thing. So retarded.
In not quite Cabinet level but still interesting news, Samantha Powers at the NSC and Cass Sunstein at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs had a kid today.
I assumed they were lesbians from the names. :P
Also, they're doing the hyphenated thing. So retarded.
Ehh, when both your parents are relatively famous in their own right I can see both wanting their name in there. And it's no more arbitrary than assigning the father's name, since at this point paternal ancestry doesn't matter any more than anything else.
edit: And more to the point, Samantha Powers is fuckawesome and can do whatever she wants
I'm surprised Cass Sunstein is only at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He's a major legal mind, as in a Chair at UofC in law and polisci, a Chair at Harvard Law and a perennial potential SCOTUS pick under the last three administrations. Maybe that position is a bigger deal than I know about but this is the guy Obama would likely pick if he wanted to replace Stevens (or maybe Kennedy) with a like Justice IMO.
And I didn't realize he was married to Power either, but I guess they got married after the "monster" controversy.
Yesterday CNN or MSNBC (I can't recall. It was backgound noise to my workout) was saying that his appointment signaled that Obama intends for regulations to be a Big Deal.
Especially since the last administration seemed to consider regulation a dirty word.
I don't have a link from the transition, but if I remember correctly that was explicitly the spot Sunstein wanted. It's apparently the regulatory czar slot, and he basically signs off on and runs all the regulatory efforts in the administration.
Yeah. Christ Matthews (I guess it was MSNBC) was asking if Obama had gone czar-happy/crazy. CM is a douche, so I didn't care what he or his guests said beyond "Sunstein's appointment makes this a big deal."
But as it happens I am reading an article right now about behavioral economics being used to push people into acting to prevent climate change, and it mentioned Sunstein so I came back to mention it.
Early in Ho’s presentation, he mentioned a book called Nudge, written by the behavioral economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and lawyer Cass Sunstein, his former colleague, now a professor at Harvard Law School and the Obama administration nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In their book, Thaler and Sunstein coin a term: choice architecture. They argue that because the way in which we are presented with information changes our response to it, the best choice architecture gently steers us into the salubrious behavior that more thoroughly rational beings would choose.
Ho’s own work has investigated how someone’s awareness of the carbon footprints of others influences that person’s carbon usage. Nudge describes a simple but astonishing experiment along such lines: Residents of a community were shown how their energy use measured up against the communal average. If they consumed more than the average, most reduced energy in the months ahead. If households saw that they consumed less energy than their peers, however, their energy use actually rose, except when the frugal households were given the merest of rewards: a smiley face on their bill. Nudge is full of other devices to help funnel us into more pro-environmental behavior, including glowing orbs that help make our energy use visible, and smart meters that can be programmed with precision. Rare is the engineer who would think of using them, however. It’s just not how engineers view the world, says Ho, who should know. He works with them regularly at Cornell, and is trained as one himself. “It’s a very top-down perspective: If you want to make this carbon-efficient, just put this power line here, this power line here, and bam, it’ll be fixed. But as an economist, I’m thinking, ‘You can’t just put things there.’” Engineers treat such issues more like a math problem, Ho says, than like something involving people making decisions.
I like the idea of the guy who has to sign off on all regulations (like on... regulating CO2...) believes in behavioral economics.
In not quite Cabinet level but still interesting news, Samantha Powers at the NSC and Cass Sunstein at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs had a kid today.
I assumed they were lesbians from the names. :P
Also, they're doing the hyphenated thing. So retarded.
Ehh, when both your parents are relatively famous in their own right I can see both wanting their name in there. And it's no more arbitrary than assigning the father's name, since at this point paternal ancestry doesn't matter any more than anything else.
Speaking as someone whose parents hyphenated their last names, it is unbelievably goddamned annoying. Guess how many government/financial/business forms let you put a non-alphanumeric character in the name field. Guess how many organizations correctly address stuff sent to you.
That lovely Senator for Nebraska Ben Nelson strikes again. He opposes Obama's choice for the head of hte Office of Legal Counsel. Why?
“Senator Nelson is very concerned about the nomination of Dawn Johnson, based on her previous position as Counsel for NARAL. He believes that the Office of Legal Counsel is a position in which personal views can have an impact and is concerned about her outspoken pro-choice views on abortion.”
Obama is pro-choice numb-nuts! Most of the country is pro-choice. Your party is explicitly pro-choice. Most of those who have voted for him are pro-choice. He might vote for cloture but against the nomination.
People get on Bayh but at least he's not universally against everything Obama is for.
That lovely Senator for Nebraska Ben Nelson strikes again. He opposes Obama's choice for the head of hte Office of Legal Counsel. Why?
“Senator Nelson is very concerned about the nomination of Dawn Johnson, based on her previous position as Counsel for NARAL. He believes that the Office of Legal Counsel is a position in which personal views can have an impact and is concerned about her outspoken pro-choice views on abortion.â€
Obama is pro-choice numb-nuts! Most of the country is pro-choice. Your party is explicitly pro-choice. Most of those who have voted for him are pro-choice. He might vote for cloture but against the nomination.
People get on Bayh but at least he's not universally against everything Obama is for.
The NARAL bullshit is a smokescreen, mainly because Nelson is smart enough to realize that if he actually came out and said why he really opposes Johnson's appointment - that she was one of the first people to actually go after the OLC in the Bush Administration for trying to find loopholes to allow torture - it wouldn't be good for him politically.
In not quite Cabinet level but still interesting news, Samantha Powers at the NSC and Cass Sunstein at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs had a kid today.
I assumed they were lesbians from the names. :P
Also, they're doing the hyphenated thing. So retarded.
Ehh, when both your parents are relatively famous in their own right I can see both wanting their name in there. And it's no more arbitrary than assigning the father's name, since at this point paternal ancestry doesn't matter any more than anything else.
Speaking as someone whose parents hyphenated their last names, it is unbelievably goddamned annoying. Guess how many government/financial/business forms let you put a non-alphanumeric character in the name field. Guess how many organizations correctly address stuff sent to you.
Here's something I just thought about hyphenated names:
Let's say I'm Mr. Able and I father a child with one Ms. Barnes. We name our kid Able-Barnes. Now, what happens with the kid's children? Do they also hyphenate, and if so, what? If Able-Barnes has a child with Cassidy, do we get Able-Barnes-Cassidy, or if it's Cassidy-Duncan as the other parent Able-Barnes-Cassidy-Duncan? This is a logistically awful situation, as with time the ability to write, record, and remember people's names will drop off with this practice. Hyphenated names seems like a recipie for disaster, as it means that a few generations of hyphenating results in John Able-Barnes-Cassidy-Duncan-Eisen-Franks-Garibaldi-Hoynes-Immemlam-Johansson-Kearns-Lebowitz-McNamara-Naison-Oppenheimer-Powers-Quine-Redford-Stevens-Thurgood-Uwilingiyimana-Valentine-Wallace-Xiaogang-Yarbrough-Zajączkowski.
Here's something I just thought about hyphenated names:
Let's say I'm Mr. Able and I father a child with one Ms. Barnes. We name our kid Able-Barnes. Now, what happens with the kid's children? Do they also hyphenate, and if so, what? If Able-Barnes has a child with Cassidy, do we get Able-Barnes-Cassidy, or if it's Cassidy-Duncan as the other parent Able-Barnes-Cassidy-Duncan? This is a logistically awful situation, as with time the ability to write, record, and remember people's names will drop off with this practice. Hyphenated names seems like a recipie for disaster, as it means that a few generations of hyphenating results in John Able-Barnes-Cassidy-Duncan-Eisen-Franks-Garibaldi-Hoynes-Immemlam-Johansson-Kearns-Lebowitz-McNamara-Naison-Oppenheimer-Powers-Quine-Redford-Stevens-Thurgood-Uwilingiyimana-Valentine-Wallace-Xiaogang-Yarbrough-Zajączkowski.
I've met multiple people with up to eight surnames in Spain. They usually go by the first, maybe first two.
Posts
"It smells funny in here, bye"
"This chair is too short/tall, bye"
"Your nose is ugly, bye"
That reminds me of an episode of This American Life where the narrator, as a kid, tried to weasel out of answering what prayer would be said over an ice cream cone by claiming the room smelled of poop, as you can't pray in the presence of bodily waste.
Iroquis weren't a democracy and weren't really a republic. It was a oligarchical confederacy of independent nations.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Assholes. Fuck you, diversity of thought!
Sullivan was painting a picture that even if he stayed in, it would be still a win for the pro-Israel lobby since they loudly proclaimed that if Freeman was head of the NIC, then all Middle East assessments put out by that office (even though he's not the one that would write them) would come under intense scrutiny by them.
It was a lose-lose for those that want a more diversified opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the start sadly.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
I am sick and fucking tired of having completely fucked foreign policy because of Israel.
Yes, it's because of Israel.
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[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
It's a bigger win for them if the President or the National Intelligence Director (or whatever the hell the asinine bureaucracy of our intelligence apparatus would have had Freeman reporting to) never sees the other viewpoint.
Yea, this is pretty sad actually. Again by Sullivan (since he's been talking a lot about it recently and mentioning it isn't even in any mainstream media coverage), Obama didn't even support Freeman in this, in a sense that perhaps this was a battle that just couldn't be won at this time given the rabid support of Israel that Congress has at its disposal to stymie the president.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Well, no. But they don't help.
I'd say it's more that there's a correlation between stupid people and the practice of ignoring all wrongdoing by our allies (as also seen in republican support of Diem after he lost and the propping up of Batista, Pinochet, and the contras). Of course, I also think Israel is hurt as much by its association w/ America as America is with it (Israel's actions, while very bad from the general Muslim perspective, is geographically limited, so that the outcry can be anywhere from Darfur to Xinjiang [all talk and no talk], while the US is slightly better but pretty much omnipresent. Actually, there seems to be a bit of a positive feedback loop in the negative reputations we give each other).
Obama's Pick for Information Officer Raided by FBI OMG there's no way to know who the target it but it has to be Kundra right? They searched his office!
Except Jake Tapper had this about 30 minutes before the Fox News story
FBI Arrests DC Official
So that will be the GOP spin and there's your reality based rebuttal.
ed
Ben Smith has
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
So the best case scenario here is that Kundra wasn't directly involved in any wrongdoing, it was merely happening in his office on his watch. Great.
Well, if you're looking for the best case scenario for Obama politically on this, it would be that the FBI screwed up and nobody did anything wrong. There's a whole spectrum of other ways this could go down, and yours falls somewhere in the middle.
1):
You know. They try and make $410 seem like a lot (which it is) then they go and say $7.7 billion in "wasted" taxpayer funds. If you do the math... 410/7.7 is roughly 0.01. 1% of this entire $410 billion is "wasted" I'd say that's pretty fucking good considering I probably waste 50% of my paychecks a week.
2:
Did you guys read about how the Obama administration is not going to use the term "enemy combatant", and stop putting people in jail for indefinite amount of time?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090314/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/guantanamo_detainees
Pretty interesting read if you ask me.
Also, they're doing the hyphenated thing. So retarded.
Ehh, when both your parents are relatively famous in their own right I can see both wanting their name in there. And it's no more arbitrary than assigning the father's name, since at this point paternal ancestry doesn't matter any more than anything else.
edit: And more to the point, Samantha Powers is fuckawesome and can do whatever she wants
And I didn't realize he was married to Power either, but I guess they got married after the "monster" controversy.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Especially since the last administration seemed to consider regulation a dirty word.
But as it happens I am reading an article right now about behavioral economics being used to push people into acting to prevent climate change, and it mentioned Sunstein so I came back to mention it. I like the idea of the guy who has to sign off on all regulations (like on... regulating CO2...) believes in behavioral economics.
People get on Bayh but at least he's not universally against everything Obama is for.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
The NARAL bullshit is a smokescreen, mainly because Nelson is smart enough to realize that if he actually came out and said why he really opposes Johnson's appointment - that she was one of the first people to actually go after the OLC in the Bush Administration for trying to find loopholes to allow torture - it wouldn't be good for him politically.
Here's something I just thought about hyphenated names:
Let's say I'm Mr. Able and I father a child with one Ms. Barnes. We name our kid Able-Barnes. Now, what happens with the kid's children? Do they also hyphenate, and if so, what? If Able-Barnes has a child with Cassidy, do we get Able-Barnes-Cassidy, or if it's Cassidy-Duncan as the other parent Able-Barnes-Cassidy-Duncan? This is a logistically awful situation, as with time the ability to write, record, and remember people's names will drop off with this practice. Hyphenated names seems like a recipie for disaster, as it means that a few generations of hyphenating results in John Able-Barnes-Cassidy-Duncan-Eisen-Franks-Garibaldi-Hoynes-Immemlam-Johansson-Kearns-Lebowitz-McNamara-Naison-Oppenheimer-Powers-Quine-Redford-Stevens-Thurgood-Uwilingiyimana-Valentine-Wallace-Xiaogang-Yarbrough-Zajączkowski.
I've met multiple people with up to eight surnames in Spain. They usually go by the first, maybe first two.