Crap Throwing Monkey

Why? No one else has. I'd explain the 'why' of it again...but I'm a little busy right now. See the end of my FFS post from late yesterday afternoon in re. questions of perspective.

Why? Hulk Hogan retiring again?

Could be. The problem I have with that is it requires a bunch of people sitting around planning on having Howdy Doody say something, so they can retract it themselves within 48 hours and make him look either stupid, or weak and not in control of his cabinet. That also requires greater secrecy and organization that I'm willing to give them - or anyone else in Washington, for that matter - credit for. Occam's Razor dictates that I have to go with the "Oh sh--, not again!" theory.

Sounds less like he lied than one of those sadly typical situations where a bunch of people were listening to his speech and suddenly exclaimed "Oh sh--! I didn't know Gomer Pyle was going to say that!" And that bunch of people not only includes the Secretary of Energy, but oil execs as well.

My policy is to vote the better foreign policy for the White House, vote the opposing party for Congressional races, and hope that, if enough people do likewise, the resulting conflict between a Republican/Democratic White House and Democratic/Republican Congress will be intractable enough to bring the entire political process to a grinding halt, so that these crooks will just leave us the hell alone to live our lives in peace.

Uhhh...because the first step in fixing a problem is knowing it exists. Just admitting we consume too much oil is a big step for Curious George. You have a hard time with complex, abstract thought, don't you?

Between that and your drinkling habit... A shame there's so few of us true old-timers left around now. We've been replaced by a bunch of snot-nosed self-important know-nothing Gen-Xers who think typing sh-- like "Jp LoSmAn Is KeWl!!!" or "Would Mighty Mouse be a better QB than Aquaman?" is intelligent conversation.

Geez, somebody's grouchy today. You burn your waffles in the toaster this morning?

You've been the voice of reason before, though. For example...when you coined the term "drunch".

I call dibs on Kate Beckinsale. And that has got to be the worst picture of Bridget Moynahan I've ever seen.

"Heeeeeere's Johnny!"

4% of what we use. We're not the only ones that import oil. Hell, one of the main reasons demand for oil has gone up in the past 5 or so years is Chinese demand. And last I checked, Europeans own cars too. And according to the DOE, our imports of oil from Iran amount to precisely zero barrels...yet, Iran's the fourth-biggest exporter of oil in the world. So theoretically, if we shut down Iranian oil exports it doesn't hurt us...except that the people that do buy Iranian oil will have to get it from somewhere else, which means they're competing against us four our oil supplies, which WILL hurt us. The ultimate truth is that world oil supplies right now are so tight compared to demand that taking any measurable amount off the market is bound to cause prices to skyrocket.

Regardless...I'd rather hear someone admit there's a problem they're contributing to rather than say "What? What problem?"

Same with WNY. Both were abberations compared to the rest of the country as a whole, and neither had to do with the crash of '87.

And I even forgot to mention Haiti. Or his complete inability at Camp David in 2000 to convince Arafat to accept Arafat's own list of demands! The Rwandan thing still galls me...if ever there was a humanitarian mission for the military to perform, it was in Rwanda. But it's Africa...and the last humanitarian mission we had in Africa, we lost 18 Rangers. So !@#$ Africa. But nothing - nothing - gets my blood boiling as much as his Central Asian policy. You've heard me B word about it before...and I'm going to do it again: the Clinton administration allowed its central Asian policy to be dictated in its entirety by a single US oil company (to the point where the Taleban were surprised when the found out Unocol wasn't a department of the US government. ), right up until said policy was completely turned on its head by Mavis friggin' Leno!!!! Let's face it, when you've got Jay Leno's spouse overruling Unocol to dictate your foreign policy...you don't have a foreign policy to speak of. Hell, the one "foreign policy" decision the Clinton administration made that I agree with was Elian Gonzales...and that only because I believe he came down on the correct side of parental rights. It wasn't even foreign policy. There was plenty of blood for oil; the butcher's bill for Clinton's policies just didn't come due in his term. It pisses me off...if the Clinton administration had bothered to engage anyone in Afghanistan with anything even remotely resembling a rational policy in early 1994, 9/11 probably never happens. I actually have a grudging...well, not respect, maybe acceptance...for Clinton's domestic and economic policies. At the very least, he's the only president since FDR to run a budget surplus (even if it was smoke and mirrors, it's still more than anyone else has done), and his social policy wasn't a hindrance to anyone for the most part (though it didn't help much either - his first social policy decision, "Don't ask, don't tell", pretty much set the craven and cowardly "Don't piss anyone off" vote-whoring tone for his presidency). But in terms of foreign policy...I'm hard-pressed to name a worse president in history. Warren Harding, maybe? James Buchanan?

Actually, the market recovered from the '87 crash and was setting new highs within a year. The first two years of Bush I's administration were economically strong...right up until oil went through the roof after Saddam Insane invaded a country no one here had ever heard of.

Actually, I was specifically thinking of presidents since FISA, since as you say anyone before 1972 doesn't really count, given the different laws. Which is not a misconception I shared...and is a perfectly valid reaction to the SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS decides something is against the law...change the law. For those who don't know, it's called "checks and balances". FISA's still illegal under many interpretations of the Constitution...but that still doesn't mean it can't be made legal via a constitutional amendment (and for the record: I'd hate to see that. Any amendment, no matter how well-intended, weakening our rights against illegal search and seizure is a dangerous thing.) Actually Clinton, or more accurately Gorelick, did. In particular, from the text of Gorelick's same statement to the House Intelligence Committee: Emphasis mine. And that's regardless of the case law establishing the equivalence of wiertaps and physical searches (which I know exists - it has to, because it HAS to have been argued already that wiretaps are not explicitly covered by the Fourth Amendment, as the Fourth Amendment was written before the idea of wiretaps even existed. Case law establishing the equivalence is necessary to establish Fourth Amendment protection against wiretaps). The central point, though, is the one I keep hammering as being ill-considered: the difference between criminal law and national security. In the current War on Terrorism, we have a situation which the Clinton administration treated as strictly criminal, the Bush administration treats as strictly national security, but which in truth lies in a definite gray area in between the two. Terrorist groups fighting against liberal western Democracies by expressed intent conduct military campaigns under the legal protections of the criminal code, mixing the domains of national security and criminal justice in a way that makes it damned awkward to fight them, as we're seeing now. Or, for another example...as the Israelis have learned with the Palestinians. The Palestinians claim to be fighting a military intifada against Israel...but turn around and complain about Israeli brutality and oppression when they in turn fight the Palestinians militarily. That is simply the nature of how terrorist organization fights. Unless you address that gray area sufficiently - which I don't believe anyone has done, from FISA on down to the PATRIOT Act - the government is going to continue with fundamentally unconstitutional acts, for the simple reason that to successfully combat terrorism they have to fight in the same gray area that the terrorist occupy. Not even so much analyzing the debate as playing devil's advocate. "Other presidents did it" is a correct legal defense only in that it establishes precedent. I don't agree with Carter, Reagan, or Clinton using warrantless wiretaps either, but all have made arguments that the powers of the Executive in performing searches - physical or otherwise, as established by case law - in the interest of national security is absolute. It is a relatively simple thing for anyone representing the current administration to argue not only that the precedent is long-argued and long-established, but that the lack of any contrary legal opinion in the quarter century of precedent implies a de facto judicial acceptance of the practice. And while I disagree with the practice itself...I'm not so sure the argument itself is wrong. That's less a function of the practice of warrantless wiretaps than the half-assed patchwork knee-jerk Persian-bazaar Mickey Mouse nature of the precedent and law itself. Since FISA was passed - for a completely different set of circumstances, I might add...and which was almost immediately challenged by the Carter administration as well, I might also add - I have yet to see any indication of any systematic analysis of the laws and issues involved here. And the ramifications go far deeper than the current "scandal" in the fight against terrorism. For example...if a joint Mexican-American anti-drug operation in Mexico leads to intelligence concerning a Venezuelan cartel prompting the interception of emails sent from someone in Saudi Arabia to someone in Afghanistan that end up being used as evidence in an anti-terrorism trial in Detroit...is the evidence acceptable in a criminal trial or not? Yes, it seems like an unrealisticly complex example...except that we know that Islamic terrorist organizations with roots in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan cooperate with South American drug cartels to penetrate the US-Mexico border. I could complicate it even further by postulating a warrant in India to intercept the emails as they're originated from an Indian ISP...but they're actually intercepted by assets in South Korea as they're routed through a Chinese server. Apply FISA to that rat's nest. Apply any legal precedent to that rat's nest. The issue's been given thought...but the more I look into it (and I have been for maybe three years) the more I become convinced that it hasn't been given the systematic analysis it requires with regards to the current environment. I think you don't get it because you're looking at it as who you are: a lawyer. You have an automatic bias to look at these things in terms of criminal law. It's only natural...people in national security I know (and I presume the President...and past ones; what prompted many of the Clinton administration's issues concerning this is the Aldrich Ames case was treated as a national security issue before being a criminal case) have an equal bias towards looking at it as a national security issue. No one's really reconciled the two points of view yet. I have the luxury of seeing both points of view...and I sure haven't reconciled them yet. And I'm very thankful it's not my job to...just discussing it on a message board is messy enough.

What? He covers: Graduation rates After-school programs Tax cuts for the wealthy The dissolution of the American family due to... The overworked American in 75 words. 25 words per issue. Hey, John-boy...you know why you lost the presidential election to an idiot? Because you never managed to make a coherent point. Learn to have a central thesis when you talk.

Ba-dum bum.

Now you know how we feel reading your hypocrisy.

I only borrowed his identity...

I had implied oral consent and a letter for MLB. I thought it was sufficient...

De gustibus non est disputandum. That better?

Seriously, now...how many people realized when it was first stated that the policy of "exporting democracy" was transparently stupid?

Most Americans don't know that not only were the Iranian-backed Shi'ia in western Afghanistan fierce competitors with the eastern Sunnis throughout the '80s and '90s, but that the Taliban executed a half-dozen Iranian diplomats in the late '90s, and as a result Iran nearly went to war with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Most Americans don't realize that not only would a lot of these groups and countries be gleefully making war on each other in the absence of a common enemy like Israel or the US, but not infrequently gleefully make war on each other in the presence of a common enemy as well. Not as easy as it used to be (I believe - but can't prove - that one of the reasons the whole "we must inspect every shipping container that arrives in the US" idea went nowhere is because the radiation detectors are sensitive enough that the container won't get past the immediate unloading pier anyway). But it can still be done. Off the top of my head, I can think of three ways al-Qaeda could deploy a nuclear warhead to the US without getting caught.