Mickey

I am not sure I understand the question. Are you asking whether Iran would have been willing to make a non-binding public statement with regard to their program with no verification if Kerry were elected? Is that the question?

A strict construction, ie narrow interpretation, of the constitution is spoken of by the right almost as if it were a self proving truth. The Republican Party Web site says of President Bush's agenda: "President Bush will continue to appoint to the Federal courts well-qualified judges who share his commitment to strictly interpret the law." Bush Agenda. I think "strictly interpret" was chosen as it played better in front of focus groups than "narrowly interpret". In any event, I hear this from the right repeated as a mantra, a mystic chant that seems to invoke reverence and awe from among them. I don't usually howeve hear them explain why it is they think that is a good thing. Remember that the Constitution in large part tells us what rights we as individuals have that can't be taken away or infirnged upon unduly by the government. It is a set of rights which in sum make up this abstract thing we so reverentially speak of called "freedom". When we talk about "American Freedom" we are talking about the rights granted to us by the Constitution. Why does the right want our freedoms to be narrowly interpreted? Why is it that they assume without explanation that it is a good thing, so good it is accepted at face value, to limit as much as possible, ie strictly interpret, the breadth of our freedoms? If we are to err in interpreting the Constitution, should we not err on the side of more freedom, not less? Was the legacy of our founding fathers meant to be so cheap, so paltry, that any expansion would be a crime against a frugal grant of rights so limited so as to barely exist? Did Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Madison and Hamilton mean to bequeath us a miserly set of limited rights never to be expanded beyond the most literal and limited interpretation of their words? Why are so many so willing to cheapen such a rich inheritance?

Why do you equate a "measured response" with "basically do nothing"? What is the alternative, a response beyond measure? I am no military geopolitical strategist but I am thinking that there might be something between doing nothing and destroying the world. One example might be that if Iran fires a nuclear weapon at the United States, we fire 10 times that many at Iran as opposed to Iran and anyone else with a copy of the Koran in their glove compartment. Besides, we don't have to worry about that anyway. We are safer than we were because the President and his administration says we are. In fact, the attorney general announced that we are secure from terrorism so this is really just a flight of fancy, why worry?

Campy's post was in response to several shots at Edwards as a trial lawyer and the Democrats made by billsfanone and bill. I thought his reponse under the circumstances was measured, asking whether those posts were examples of compassionate conservatism. His post didn't inject politics into this thread, it was a reaction to the injection of politics by others. You can't use Campy as an excuse for your insensitivity.

Actually, "pimple" is probably too kind. Well, it is a "G" rated board.

What do you have now, a five or six prayer a day habit?

Nooooo. I shall instead convert you into a zombie, powerless to resist my bidding.

It is no longer needed for control, it is however still needed for the purpose of anesthetizing the masses.

I have little doubt that Anonymous says what he is credited as saying. Whether or not he is right, well that is another kettle of popcorn (this is muddled metaphor day here at the office).

How would we get the oil we need to run our economy after we have nuked the entire middle east and made it uninhabitable for the next two thousand years?

It has an executive summary for god's sake.

John, I am sure you remember the deafening battle cry from the right to go after terrorists and how they applauded his cruise missile attacks against our enemies, don't you? Why I remember well all the public speeches given by Newt and company about getting tougher on terrorists. Didn't he publicly call for an invasion of Afghanistan? Didn't he? Ohhhhhhhh riiiiiigggghhhhhttt, I forgot, he and the rest of the right had their noses buried in the President's pants so far they couldn't be bothered with little things like national security. I seem to remember the President's lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court that the Jones suit should be delayed until after he left office to keep it from being a distraction to a President who has more important concerns and because such civil suits could be used as a political weapon against sitting Presidents. Hmmmmm in retrospect, maybe we could have waited a few more years to see that case come to a conclusion.

The most liberal candidate we could find?!?!!??! No, that would have been Howard Dean. We rejected him because he was too liberal and instead nominated a slightly left of center candidate with a good military bio and a dead center VP in Edwards. As soon as that happened the republican operation to tag them as the most liberal of the liberals was thrown into high gear. No matter who the democrats nominate, unless perhaps they resurrect George Wallace and give him the nod, the republicans will tar and feather them as extremist liberals. No matter how far right the democrats move, the republicans can always take a step further to the right themselves. If Richard Nixon was running today on the same positions he had in 1968 and 1972 he would, by comparison to modern day republicans, be a flaming liberal. Hell, Dole used to be the extreme righty back in '88 but by '96 he was considered a moderate republican.

I have posted Anonymous's take on AQ and OBL/UBL in the past after reading his books but they were immediately taken as potentially critical of Bush and therefore attacked, rejected, dismissed and/or ignored. Never mind that Anonymous pillories republicans and democrats alike.

Research into human sexual behaviour did not begin with and more importantly, end with Kinsey. Even if you discount all of his research, you have to come to terms with 54 years of research since, much of which confirms some of his findings. "Dr." Judith Reisman by the way, has her own agenda. First of all, she has no training in human sexuality or any related studies. Her PHD is in communications, not medicine or psychology. She leads a campaign called "RSVP America" which stands for "Restoring Social Virtue and Purity in America." Her criticism and accusations against Kinsey are by no means universally accepted. For example, the diaries from pedophiles Kinsey accumulated were all dated prior to the start of his research. Therefore, the incidents described in those diaries, as awful as they were, took place long before and hence had nothing to with, Kinsey's research. The guy was a freak who basically made a study of his own perversion. In his work, Kinsey made it clear that some data was collected from pedophiles who had illegal contact with children. He never hid that information. What he did do for reasons few understand is say that the information came from 9 such pedophiles when the vast bulk of it came from that one freak. In any event Reisman is sponsored by a number of conservative goups and has been a tool for their agenda for years. It has been their goal, long before having any proof to justify it, to discredit Kinsey. It is no surprise that they eventually published research that validated their pre-ordained conclusions. I don't claim to have the final answer to this controversey but your post seems to imply that she is an objective, dedicated scholar who simply stumbled on this startling information. That is not the case. Not even close. At the same time there are legitimate questions to be asked about Kinsey and his research and that shouldn't be lost just because Reisman may be an academic hack. In response to some of the more valid criticisms of Kinsey's research, mainly that he had a sample where people with sexual issues were over represented and therefore led to skewed results, his data was revisited by Gebhard and Johnson. Just for example, 25% of Kinsey's male respondents were or had been in prison. 5% were male prostitutes. Gebhard and Johnson scrubbed the data of these and other sample contaminants and published the results in 1979. They were not significantly different than Kinsey's original numbers. By its very nature, it is almost impossible to get a truly random sample when it comes to surveying sexual behaviour so even Gebhard and Johnson can't swear to the perfection of their data. Neither can "Dr." Reisman however. Kinsey is often pinned by the right with outlandish claims that he never made. For example, Kinsey never claimed that 90% of the population is homosexual or that women enhance their ability to reach orgasm by masturbating but he is often accused of having done so. Funny, sex is everywhere you look so the right concludes America is dangerously sex obsessed. When every movie at the drive-in was a war movie or a cowboy shoot 'em up movie, no one was worried that we were therefore violence obsessed. Drive-ins? I know, I am one old fart.

It is an interesting issue, separating a person's personality or character from his job performance. I always laugh when they talk about a professional athlete being a "high character" guy as if that tranlates to performance on the field. Fans want winners and to a point, really don't care about character. Lawrence Taylor was and still is reprobate but he was the also perhaps the best LB in the history of the game. I would take him in his prime to be a Bill any day. I wouldn't want him as a friend or business partner though. We like to think that there is a link between character and performance be it athletes or doctors but more often than not, that is simply not the case. It ought to be and it would be a better world if it were.

Which post is that?

I offer this link to a report by the US Commission on Civil Rights without editorial comment. I do note that the Commission was formed in 1957 and is made up of 8 Commissioners. Congress appoints 4 and the President the other 4. At no time can there be more than 4 members from any one political party. Currently there are 3 Republicans, 3 Democrats and 2 Independents on the Commission. There is at least an attempt being made at bi-partisanship. Though in result it might not work out that way, it is still far more bi-partisan than you will see from just about any other source. I am sure there will be those who will simply dismiss the conclusions and those who will use them as ammo to slam the President. That is unfortunate. US Commission on Civil Rights

Really? Would the Madrassas have allowed a place on campus for a Republican group of students to set up shop? The whole reason there was an argument is because the University permitted two groups of completely opposing political viewpoints express their opinions on campus. I don't think Madrassas allow for opposing views. Even after the "altercation", the Republicans were back the next day at their table and the other group was still up and running. Had that occurred at a Madrassa, I don't think that would have happened. I know that your political ethic, frozen as it is in 1971 or so, requires you to forever look at colleges as hives of anti-American protest and centers of intellectual elitism so I won't bother arguing it with you but to go even further and compare them to the Madrassas of the Middle East is just too ridiculous to let pass without comment.

The "just a theory" notion is plain silly. It is a "theory" but not in the way that creationists and other anti-intellectuals mean it as implying tentativeness or a lack of reasonable certainty. As set forth more cleary than I could phrase it: "Calling the theory of evolution "only a theory" is, strictly speaking, true, but the idea it tries to convey is completely wrong. The argument rests on a confusion between what "theory" means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty. Generally speaking, scientific theories differ from scientific laws only in that laws can be expressed more tersely. Being a theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations, and usefulness. (Creationism fails to be a theory mainly because of the last point; it makes few or no specific claims about what we would expect to find, so it can't be used for anything. When it does make falsifiable predictions, they prove to be false.) Lack of proof isn't a weakness, either. On the contrary, claiming infallibility for one's conclusions is a sign of hubris. Nothing in the real world has ever been rigorously proved, or ever will be. Proof, in the mathematical sense, is possible only if you have the luxury of defining the universe you're operating in. In the real world, we must deal with levels of certainty based on observed evidence. The more and better evidence we have for something, the more certainty we assign to it; when there is enough evidence, we label the something a fact, even though it still isn't 100% certain. What evolution has is what any good scientific claim has--evidence, and lots of it. Evolution is supported by a wide range of observations throughout the fields of genetics, anatomy, ecology, animal behavior, paleontology, and others. If you wish to challenge the theory of evolution, you must address that evidence. You must show that the evidence is either wrong or irrelevant or that it fits another theory better. Of course, to do this, you must know both the theory and the evidence." Origins The talk.origins web site, Tlak.Origins Archive has tons of information on this general debate for those interested in a more in depth look at these issues.

Moore's efforts were focused on the young. Take a look at how that demographic voted and tell me again how he failed. The overall results can't be blamed on Michael Moore who is, after all, just one man. Wars, economies, religious passions etc, etc, these were issues far more important to voters than Michael Moore. He did set out to get the youth vote for Kerry and he did just that. It wasn't enough to swing the election but that doesn't mean it was a failure. Most of those new democrats he created will stay democrats for a long time. Their impact is only going to get bigger. Time is on their side. By the way, my Dad is a die hard republican and he watched Moore's movies and thought that there was enough truth in them to make them worthwhile though he wasn't particularly swayed by the bs and there was plenty of that. Some of those remarks are being taken out of context. Like the one about Canadians. He was making a point that Canadians know more about what is going on in America than Americans know about what is going on in Canada. His point being that we are focused too much on ourselves and not enough on even our closest neighbors. He didn't really mean that Canadians are somehow inherently more intelligent than Americans. He emphasized the point by making the tongue in cheek, overstated comment you reference. I wasn't aware that Moore seriously thinks that Bush planned 9/11. What he did say was that the Bushies had close relationships with the Saudis including the bin Ladin family. He also pointed out that Saudis, including bin ladins relatives were allowed to leave the US right after 9/11. These issues have been discussed a zillion times. Nothing new here.

Is that a promotion or demotion from "puddinhead"? I forget.

Actaully, Dean was the radical in the democratic primaries who was rejected by democrats out of fears that he was too far left to ever win a general election. Kerry, with his bona fides military record in Viet Nam was the centrist, Edwards the right of center candidate. We nominated Kerry and he chose Edwards as his running mate. That would be the equivalent of the Republicans running Rudy and Arlen Specter. We thought we had a centrist ticket and then watched the machinery of the right tag them both as big time liberals. It would have been the same if we had nominated Lieberman. No matter how right we move, it won't be as right as them becasue they will just edge even more to the right. We will always be the left and they will always be able to tar us left wing radicals. Clinton was a centrist, a moderat democrat yet according to the right, he is about the most left wing President in history besides Carter. He was able to fight that but just barely, he needed lousy republican candidates, Pat Buchanan and Perot to help him out. A booming economy didn't hurt either and his southern heritage didn't hurt either. We agree that the republicans will keep moving to the right but I see no evidence that there is a point that will be too far. You believe there is but haven't told me why. At what point will we finally start hearing some concern among republicans themselves that they are going over the deep end? Specter's comments the other day was the first I've heard of such a concern being expressed and he got B word slapped in a hurry and has been begging for forgiveness ever since. As for the parent comment, tax cuts are candy and the electorate has never turned one down even if, and it has been true on some occasions in our history, it was bad for the country. The responsible parent, would not deal out the sweets when there are bills to pay. In that sense anyway, they have been more responsible. The deficit numbers for the last 12 years show that.

How do you feel about the hate spread for years now by Limbaugh and more recently Hannity, Coulter, Ingram etc.?

I think World War I proved that quite well.