finknottle

As distastefull as surburban sprawl may be asthetically, I have yet to hear how it is the cause of any economic ills. Tax revenue that used to go to the big cities now goes to the counties - the taxpayers are voting with their feet. Would you deny them that right? Assigning blame for our economic woes to cul-de-sacs and their inhabitants seems positively Obama-esque.

The 'Liberal Hegemony' exchange pretty well summed it up for me. But while I understand your interpretation of this through the one-party prism, I don't understand why this clip *must* be about that. Surely seeing it in the context of liberal bias in the media is more natural - would you contend that such an interview could not have happened in the US four years ago?

The meaning of "Good Nutrition" is all too often subject to fad, and much of what was said regarding meat smacks of political correctness. The claim in 12 notwithstanding, a diet based on 11 (d) and 12 would be disasterous for somebody with an irritable digestive tract. Makes me suspicious about the rest...

Depends on what you mean by 'original.' The last of the democratic nomination debates were held in January 2008, with the bulk held in the last half of 2007. This plan, which you note he wrote himself, was from July 2008, after the nomination was safely tucked away. Surely he had some kind of plan in mind during the nomination battles, when Iraq was the number one issue! During the debates he ran sharply to the left of Clinton on Iraq, aligning himself solidly with Kucinich and Richardson to steal their oxygen. He was consistent and clear about leaving Iraq - all units, period, with a strike force remaining in the region capable of entering Iraq and going after AQ. That deadline was what won over the out-of-Iraq wing of the party. His timetable was a firm three months, and he attacked Clinton's flexibility as 'more-of-the-same' and her comments that there might be circumstances which would leave US troops there for several years. Talk of Obama defering to conditions on the ground did not arise untill the final stages of the campaign - Clinton was unsuccessful in getting the media to focus on his late change of position. http://www.blnz.com/news/2009/02/27/FACT_C..._Iraq_7215.html

Can anyone give any examples where large government programs have been eliminated for failure or obsolesence, or where workforces were rooted out for incompetance? What is the correcting mechanism? Or is the answer that governments are immune to the problems of poor employees or poorly thought-out programs?

That's a question of politics and implementation. I don't agree with it for precisely the reasons you state. But it doesn't change the basic point: The program of reimbursement, whether done stupidly or smartly, is PR. It was to make us look better to the world, and to ease tensions with the local populace - but nobody is under any illusions as to the degree of the latter. Reimbursements are neither expected nor intended to get people to join 'Sons of Iraq' and take up arms against the insurgents.

What exactly do you mean by 'not working?' You seem to continue to think that the purpose of reimbursements is to get them to like us - it is not. It is to show that we are attempting to govern our presence and behavior under a semblance of law. You can argue whether that is hypocritical all you like, but it doesn't change the intended purpose. When NATO runs exercises in Germany, we pay the Germans for every bullet fired into a tree. And yet they still B word and moan. Should we stop? By the same token, why do we investigate and try soldiers for wrongfull killings? By your reasoning, we should abandon the practice since it isn't working - no family of a killed Iraqi has ever said "they court martialed the guy who killed my brother, that's alright now." I actually don't agree with the program. I'm simply marveling that you are rejecting it (presumably because it started under Bush), while presumably embracing the idea that it matters what the world thinks of us and that we should set an example on things from interrogation to foreign aid.

Paying off the tribal leaders and reimbursing damages are two separate programs. The former is politics, and the latter PR. When we pay a shopkeeper for busting up his store, we are doing it because we think it right, with no support or forgiveness demanded from him. Which is just as well, because the 'Sons of Iraq' did not form and support us because reimbursement led to an outpouring of popular support. I find it ironic that you would not find the principal behind reimbursement worthwhile in its own right - shouldn't we be trying to show that we have the best of intentions, and that vindictive damage is not our goal?

Great - we can write it off as infrastructure spending in the stimulus bill!

Bush didn't invent the idea of a guy showing up with a bag of money to get a tribe to fight on your side.

I draw a very important line between small/midsized business and large business (particularly unionized ones). I don't see much difference between GM and the federal government. GM has about as much flexibility in changing product lines, and shutting down non-productive plants and shedding their workers, as the USG has in ending obsolate programs, or closing bases and installations. And they both seem to be talking alot about "Change."

At the risk of both of us arguing over overly-broad generalizations, I disagree. What I believe to be more typical is that managers from the private sector expect to come in and make things more efficient (as efficient as the commercial world anyway) with Common Sense 101. And they are blind-sided by the special regulations that government must work under that the private sector does not, and wind up changing very little. - At any small or mid-sized company, if you need a widget you just go out and buy one. Can't do that in the government, you have to initiate a competative bidding process or buy through an in-place mega-contract unless extraordinary efforts have been already expended giving the specific office a measure of purchasing autonomy. - If you want to fire an inept manager or employee, you can do it. In the government, you can't. Same for reassigning people. Same for shutting down failing or obsolete programs. Same for hiring or promoting people - it is out of the hands of line- and mid-level management. - If a company wants to hire temporary workers for a temporary surge, they can. The government can't without years of advanced preparation - hence (in part) the movement towards contracting. - If a company wants to hire the services of a company, they can. The government has to certify all sorts of things from the make-up of the ownership to whether the company is treating it's employees in accordance with various regulations. It is no coincidence that most companies separate government sales from commercial - they are worlds apart in terms of how you go about them and how long they take. And a company that wants to do both will separate the efforts so as to not let one contaminate the other.

Maybe the conclusion ought to be that there is no role for big manufacturing companies in our future. And with them, the types of cities they give rise to.

While they are at it, they should make the NFL put all it's games on free TV and lower ticket prices. Everybody wants it except the owners and players who want to keep their boondoogle going. At a minimum, subsidizing season ticket prices should have been part of the stimulus package.

You are comparing rotten apples to rotten apples. In northern virginia we pay less in sales and property taxes, have better schools, and I've never found reason to complain about the other services. The only real problem seems to be with the inability to keep up with the growth in traffic, a result of people wanting to move here. It's also more business friendly

Geez, you know the left is intellectually bereft when you have to step in and make their arguments for them... The example to bring up is not the Iraq war, which anybody not frothing at the mouth will recognize had at its goal winning militarily and stabilizing the country, preferably with as little killing as possible. An on-point example is the question of who ultimately authorized the Hellfire missile operations - these were intended to kill high-value targets. The answer is Clinton and Bush.

In the early colonies, courts ruled that feeding prisoners lobster more than once a week constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Except that it isn't true, despite the fawning of the media. They are cherry-picking polls. His approval rating according to RealClearPolitics - which averages all of the major national polls - is 61.6. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/ot...roval-1044.html According to figures from MSNBC (who selected a poll giving Obama a rating of 65), the average of the last 10 presidents was 65%. 61.6% puts him behind Ike, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan, but ahead of Clinton and both Bush's. http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/200...24/1906350.aspx The only rarefied air that Obama enjoys is 7th place behind Nixon.

And how do those 8 years of red ink add up compared to this years budget? A mere pimple on the butt of the pigs lining up at Obama and Pelosi's through.

They are claimed to have been by ABC. Do you expect CIA is step up and say "yes, they designed it" or "no, they worked on a different program, the real psychologists involved are these other two guys" And therein lies the problem with such outings - the record can never be set straight. A reporter hears something from somebody only six-degrees involved and who probably has it all wrong; the reporter jazzes it up and publishes it; and those prepared to believe the worst lap it up and never hear otherwise. They are estatic to believe that this tightly-held program was designed by two clowns who BS'd their way in with fake credentials. Apparently Kelly el al who find the article plausible would have us believe that an institution such as the CIA - in the business of recruiting agents from different cultures - does not have it's own cadre of psychologists. Funny, they've been advertising for those positions at job fairs since the late 80's. They would have us believe that the institution is so ignorant of the discipline that they would randomly hire these two guys, thinking they were psychologists, for such a sensitive and fragile operation. And they would have us believe that the psychologists designing the program would be the same people overseeing it, if not the actual ones dunking the prisoners. Uh-huh. Lap it up.

And in how many of those three involved a non-citizen, non-uniformed enemy combatant water-boarded by a government under an authorized program? Your logic leaves something to be desired. Would you say preventing a non-citizen from voting here is illegal because there is plenty of court precedent affirming voter rights in the US? Would you say that spying on somebody in Tehran without a warrant is illegal because it's illegal to do it to somebody in Denver?

Yeah? We also sentenced people to jail for interracial marriage. I assume you are aware that the American public didn't care much for the Japanese after the war. The Japanese did it, therefore it was a heinous crime. Kamakazi attack, a soldier willingly giving his life in battle against other soldiers? Must be a dirty trick and against the rules of war... Do you really think that petty retribution and the self-serving defining of morality was an invention of Bush and Cheney?

By all means, let's go gentle into that good night. We can save our pennies instead of raging against the dying of the light.

Calling it torture is that's pilot's wording. Maybe DOD calls it training to resist enhanced interroragation techniques that some countries around the world do.