Bring Them Home Now!!!

Please check out this site, and do whatever you can to support these troops in coming home to their loved ones. And to put and end to the lunacy that is going on in Iraq.

Time to Bring the Troops Home
Chalmers Johnson

The United States is today virtually the only nation on earth that maintains large contingents of its armed forces in other people's countries. After World War II and during the cold war, the United States built a chain of military bases stretching from Japan and South Korea through Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and Australia to Diego Garcia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, England and Iceland--in effect ringing the Soviet Union and China with thousands of overseas military installations. In Japan alone, following the Korean War, there were 600 US installations and approximately 200,000 troops. There are still today, ten years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, some 800 Defense Department facilities outside the United States, ranging from radio relay stations to major air bases. To those unlucky enough to live near them (sometimes dependent on them for work or customers), these military outposts often appear less like "peacekeepers" than occupiers.
In East Asia, the United States maintains massive and expensive military forces poised to engage in everything from nuclear war to sabotage of governments that Washington finds inconvenient (for example, the government of former President Suharto in Indonesia, which in May 1998 the US government helped to bring down via troops its Special Forces had trained). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States still deploys some 100,000 military personnel and close to an equal number of civilian workers and dependents in Japan and South Korea. These forces include the Third Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa and Japan; the Second Infantry Division in South Korea; numerous Air Force squadrons in both countries (Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa is the largest US military installation outside the United States); the Seventh Fleet, with its headquarters in Yokosuka, Japan, patrolling the China coast and anywhere else that it wants to go; and innumerable submarine pens (for example, White Beach, Okinawa), support facilities, clandestine eavesdropping and intelligence-collecting units, Special Forces and staff and headquarters installations all over the Pacific.
From approximately 1950 to 1990, the US government invoked the cold war to justify these so-called forward deployments--actually, in less euphemistic language, imperialist outposts. During the late 1940s, when it became apparent that the Chinese Communist Party was going to win the Chinese civil war, the United States reversed its policy of attempting to democratize occupied Japan and devoted itself to making Japan Washington's leading satellite in East Asia. The United States entered into an informal economic bargain with Japan: In return for Japan's willingness to tolerate the indefinite deployment of US weapons and troops on its soil, the United States would give it preferential access to the American market and would tolerate its protectionism and mercantilism. These were advantages the United States did not extend to its European allies or Latin American neighbors in the cold war.

My Next Read - This Is the Man

Obama’s Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon
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By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: October 17, 2006
Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois and the Democratic Party’s new rock star, is that rare politician who can actually write — and write movingly and genuinely about himself.



Deborah Feingold
Barack Obama

THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama

375 pages. Crown Publishers. $25.

Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” written before Mr. Obama entered politics, provided a revealing, introspective account of his efforts to trace his family’s tangled roots and his attempts to come to terms with his absent father, who left home when he was still a toddler. That book did an evocative job of conjuring the author’s multicultural childhood: his father was from Kenya, his mother was from Kansas, and the young Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.

And it was equally candid about his youthful struggles: pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” he wrote, could “push questions of who I was out of my mind,” flatten “out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.” Most memorably, the book gave the reader a heartfelt sense of what it was like to grow up in the 1960’s and 70’s, straddling America’s color lines: the sense of knowing two worlds and belonging to neither, the sense of having to forge an identity of his own.

Mr. Obama’s new book, “The Audacity of Hope” — the phrase comes from his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, which made him the party’s rising young hope — is much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech, and the bulk of it is devoted to laying out Mr. Obama’s policy positions on a host of issues, from education to health care to the war in Iraq.

But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced.

Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.

He recalls a meet-and-greet encounter at the White House with George W. Bush, who warmly shook his hand, then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.” (“Good stuff,” he quotes the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”) And he recounts a trip he took through Illinois with an aide, who scolded him for asking for Dijon mustard at a T.G.I. Friday’s, worried the senator would come across as an elitist; the confused waitress, he adds, simply said: “We got Dijon if you want it.”

In his 2004 keynote address Mr. Obama spoke of the common ground Americans share: “There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” And the same message — rooted in his own youthful efforts to grapple with racial stereotypes, racial loyalty and class resentments — threads its way through the pages of this book. Despite the red state-blue state divide, despite racial, religious and economic divisions, Mr. Obama writes, “we are becoming more, not less, alike” beneath the surface: “Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.”

Mr. Obama eschews the Manichean language that has come to inform political discourse, and he rejects what he sees as the either-or formulations of his elders who came of age in the 60’s: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage. The victories that the 60’s generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.”

His thoughts on domestic and foreign policy try to hew to this consensus-building line. Some of his recommendations devolve into little more than fuzzy statements of the obvious: i.e., that America’s “addiction to oil” is affecting the economy and undermining national security, or that the education system needs to be revamped and improved. Others echo Bill Clinton’s “third way,” methodically triangulating between traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas.

Mr. Obama writes that “conservatives — and Bill Clinton — were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old A.F.D.C. program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect.”

He uses the Bush administration’s tough language to talk about national security in the age of terrorism (“if we have to go it alone, the American people stand ready to pay any price and bear any burden to protect our country”) but adds, crucially, that “once we get beyond matters of self-defense,” he is “convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world.”

He assails President Bush for waging an unnecessary and misguided war in Iraq and for promoting an “Ownership Society” that “magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy.” Yet he also takes the Democrats to task for becoming “the party of reaction”: “In reaction to a war that is ill-conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.”

This volume does not possess the searching candor of the author’s first book. But Mr. Obama strives in these pages to ground his policy thinking in simple common sense — be it “growing the size of our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules” or reining in spending and rethinking tax policy to bring down the nation’s huge deficit — while articulating these ideas in level-headed, nonpartisan prose. That, in itself, is something unusual, not only in these venomous pre-election days, but also in these increasingly polarized and polarizing times.

Vote Different

I saw this over at THE OCD GEN X LIBERAL site. She couldn't post this because of blog issues. This is a very powerful ad, so I thought I would pass it along to everyone for her. Thanks Lizzy.

His War? It's Personal Now

This man seems to be driven by some sort of personal issue. I think it's pride. And pride is the devils work!!! He really thinks what he's doing is the right thing. Micromanage? They can't even manage what they got themselves into. What a buffoon.



Bush threatens to veto any Iraq bill with 'strings'

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Accusing Congress of trying to "micromanage" his administration's war in Iraq, President George W. Bush used his weekly radio address to threaten a veto of an emergency spending bill unless it is passed "without strings and without delay."
The purpose of the legislation, he said, "should be to give our troops on the front lines the resources, funds, and equipment they need to fight our enemies," but "some in Congress are using this bill as an opportunity to micromanage our military commanders, force a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, and spend billions on domestic projects that have nothing to do with the war on terror."
Long used to getting his way with a compliant Republican Congress, Bush's signature issue has run into trouble in the new Democratically-controlled chambers, elected last fall largely due to widening public opposition to the war, which has killed more than 3,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
Still, Bush said that the "troops urgently need Congress to approve emergency war funds" and that he has "has begun pursuing a new strategy in Iraq."
The new approach has produced "hopeful signs," he claimed and will "help the Iraqi government stabilize the country, rebuild the economy, and advance the work of political reconciliation."
On Saturday, three suicide bombers driving trucks full of chlorine hit in Anbar province, killing two policemen and forcing about 350 Iraqi civilians and six U.S. troops to seek treatment for exposure to the gas, the Associated Press reported.
He added that the bill would place "impose arbitrary and restrictive conditions on the use of war funds and require the withdrawal of forces by the end of this year if these conditions are not met." That would "handcuff our generals in the field by denying them the flexibility they need to adjust their operations to the changing situation on the ground."
Further, "these restrictions would substitute the mandates of Congress for the considered judgment of our military commanders."
Under Article I of the U.S. Constitution, the legislative branch has the sole power to appropriate funds; no money can be spent by the government without an act of Congress.
"Congress needs to approve emergency funding for our troops, without strings and without delay" he concluded. "If they send me a bill that does otherwise, I will veto it."

Why?

What the hell do we have to do to get these kids back home? This debacle has to end now. I am so sick of this sorry excuse for a war. Geez, they won't even increase spending to protect them. People, we have got to stop feeding into this crap!!



The Senate on Thursday rejected a Democratic resolution to withdraw most American combat troops from Iraq in 2008, but a similar measure advanced in the House, and Democratic leaders vowed to keep challenging President Bush to change course in Iraq.

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The Reach of War
Go to Complete Coverage » The vote in the Senate was 50 against and 48 in favor, 12 short of what was needed to pass, with just a few defections in each party. It came just hours after the House Appropriations Committee, in another vote largely on party lines, approved an emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan that includes a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. The House will vote on that legislation next Thursday, setting the stage for another confrontation.

The action in both houses threw into sharp relief the Democratic strategy of ratcheting up the pressure, vote by vote, to try to force the White House to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. But it also highlighted Republican unity in opposition; in the Senate, only one Republican, Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, voted with the Democrats.

Republican leaders said they counted the day as a victory. “It is clear now that the majority of the Senate opposes a deadline for the withdrawal of troops,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, countered, “The Republicans are rubber-stamping the president’s failed policy. That’s the message here.”

President Bush, speaking at a Republican fund-raising dinner, applauded the senators who voted against a timetable. “Many of those members know what I know: that if American forces were to step back from Baghdad now, before the capital city is more secure, the scale and scope of attacks would increase and intensify,” he said.

The Democratic resolution in the Senate would have redefined the United States mission in Iraq and set a goal of withdrawing American combat troops by March 31, 2008, except for a “limited number” focused on counterterrorism, training and equipping Iraqi forces, and protecting American and allied personnel. The House measure set a withdrawal deadline of Sept. 1, 2008.

The prospects for either the House or Senate measure winning final passage were always considered slim, given that the Senate legislation needed a so-called supermajority of 60 to advance. Even so, the White House issued forceful veto threats, sending a clear signal to Republicans where the president stood. The White House also worked behind the scenes this week to keep Republicans on board.

Both parties consider these measures an important political statement, a measure of how far the debate over Iraq has moved in recent months, and a sign of Americans’ discontent with the war.

But Senator Norm Coleman, a moderate Republican from Minnesota who voted against the Democratic measure, argued that the final vote could still be misleading. “There is frustration and deep concern about the war,” said Mr. Coleman, who is facing a tough re-election fight next year.

As they left the Senate floor, several other moderate Republicans who are facing difficult re-election campaigns next year were quick to register their opposition to the president’s overall Iraq strategy. But they said they were leery of legislating a troop pullout to begin within four months.

“That is such a short time frame for withdrawal,” said Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, who opposed the president’s plan to send more troops to Iraq.

In the end, the Senate resolution did not attract the contingent of seven Republican moderates who joined Democrats in opposing Mr. Bush’s troop buildup plan last month. The only Republican defection was Mr. Smith of Oregon, who said in a statement, “Setting specific dates for withdrawal is unwise, but what is worse is remaining mired in the quicksand of the Sunni-Shia civil war.”

Two Democratic Senators, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, crossed party lines to oppose the withdrawal plan. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent and staunch supporter of Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy, voted as expected with the Republicans. Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican running for president, was campaigning in Iowa at the time of the vote.

Democrats asserted that the only alternative to their plan was endorsing, once again, the status quo in Iraq. In a debate steeped in anger and dismay, Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia declared, “We were wrong to invade, we were wrong to think victory would be quick or easy, and we are wrong to stay on in occupation that earns us only hatred — with no end, no end, no end in sight.”

Republicans declared that the resolution would be devastating to the American war effort, “like sending a memo to our enemy,” or “giving notice to the other side of when we’re going to depart,” in the words of Mr. McConnell.

The Senate also voted overwhelmingly on Thursday in favor of a pair of nonbinding resolutions, one Democratic and one Republican, expressing support for the troops in Iraq and pledging to provide them with all necessary funds. Republicans have asserted that Democratic policies to end the war will eventually lead to a financing cut that will harm the troops. Democrats furiously deny that charge and have seized on the scandal over poor conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center as evidence that Republicans are not true champions of the troops.

Despite the flurry of votes, the Iraq debate in the Senate is far from over. Senate Democrats said they would try to influence the president’s Iraq policy when they begin taking up the administration’s military spending request next week.

Across the Capitol, the House Appropriations Committee advanced its version of that legislation by a vote of 36 to 28. It was considered a major test vote, with Representative Barbara Lee of California the lone Democrat voting against it. “The American people sent a mandate to us to bring home our men and women before the end of the year,” Ms. Lee said. “I don’t think the president deserves another chance.”

As she spoke, two protesters sat in the back of the hearing room, holding a sign handwritten with black ink on pink paper that said: “Wake up. Stop Buying Bush’s War.” Other antiwar activists milled about outside the committee room, occasionally confronting lawmakers as they came and went.

Largely because of the strength of antiwar sentiment in the House Democratic caucus, and complaints that the legislation’s timetable is not fast enough, party leaders still face a fragile majority when they bring this legislation to the full House next week. While the House proposal calls for most American combat troops to be removed from Iraq no later than Aug. 31, 2008, it would require the drawdown to start up to a year earlier if the Iraqi government cannot show progress.

The plan also places conditions on the war financing, including a requirement that troops receive proper training, equipment and a period of rest between deployments. As a gesture to conservatives, the legislation would allow the president to waive those requirements on national security grounds.

“In World War II, troops were in action 30, 40, 50 days and then got relief,” said Representative John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat. “Now, we don’t have the troops to relieve them.”

But Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, accused Democrats of loading up the legislation — which now has a price tag of $124 billion — with an array of sweeteners, simply to draw support for a controversial plan to bring closure to the Iraq war.

“Welcome Kmart shoppers,” Mr. Rogers said. “This is the shopping mart for those who are nervous about supporting the precipitous withdrawal of troops. This is an effort to buy votes.”

How Far Left Are You Really?

I found this article and thought to myself, just how can anyone be completely liberal. Now don't misundertand me here. I'm about as far left as I can get, but can you actually be 100% I'm curious. I also found a funny little test we can all take.

Liberal Test

I was a 47! Whew! I was worried there for a second.


THE DEFINITION OF LIBERALISM

The purpose of this section is to define liberalism, and the differences between it and other political ideologies. A critique of these political positions will be reserved for later sections of this FAQ.

In defining the differences between liberalism and conservatism, there are five main political spectrums to consider. These are:

1. Individualism vs. Altruism
2. Anarchy vs. Organization
3. Democracy vs. Constitutionalism
4. Equality vs. Merit
5. Competition vs. Cooperation

Let's define each spectrum, and see where liberalism and conservatism reside on them.

Spectrum One: Individualism vs. Altruism

An individualist (in this case) is someone who is 100 percent self-interested. An altruist is someone who is 100 percent interested in the well-being of others. Of course, there is a spectrum between these two positions.

There are many ways to believe in pure individualism and still allow that individuals can cooperate in the sort of interdependent, specialized society that makes us all richer. Libertarians and extreme conservatives believe in the "invisible hand," a term coined by 18th century economist Adam Smith. In his desire to get rich, a baker bakes bread for hundreds of people, and in this he is led by an "invisible hand" to feed society, even though such altruistic notions were not part of his original intention. When individuals are allowed to seek their own rewards, the argument goes, the common interest naturally takes care of itself. No central authority needs to consciously promote the common interest.

But liberals can be pure individualists too. They point out that the "invisible hand" is an important concept, but it hardly works in all cases. The criminal seeks his own self-interest, yet causes harm to society. A polluter finds it cheaper to dump pollution than to treat it, and this self-interest is equally harmful to society. Because it is in the self-interest of individuals to live in crime-free and pollution-free societies, they have a need to defend the common interest. In short, there are selfish reasons to promote the common good through government.

A good many other people, however, believe that humans are not 100 percent individualists; rather, they naturally possess a degree of genuine altruism as well. Perhaps the clearest example is romantic and sexual behavior, which is genetic (hormonal). The resulting social union of man and woman is responsible for the creation of new individuals in the first place. And nature has given us maternal and paternal instincts which cause us to sacrifice unselfishly for the survival of our children. This school of thought claims there are also non-family examples of natural altruism as well. These arguments will be addressed in a later section.

Spectrum Two: Anarchy vs. Organization

There are many definitions of anarchy, but for our purposes here let us define it as no laws and no governments. Competition is the main characteristic of such a society. It's survival of the fittest -- kill or be killed.

This is not to say that order and cooperative groups do not arise in anarchy; after all, order and cooperative groups seems to have arisen spontaneously in the anarchy of nature. It's just that they are not centrally planned. (Or appear to be.)

In a perfectly organized society, a central organization plans every aspect of life. Cooperation and coordination are its primary traits. Most people entertain the mistaken belief that the centralized government needed to run such a society can only be a dictatorship, but this is hardly true. A highly centralized government can also be democratic, as proven by the social democracies of Northern Europe. (If this is difficult to picture, then imagine a country where people vote on literally everything, from the price of tea to the safety features of automobiles. The government then puts these ballot results into action.) Nor does the central organization have to be a government; theoretically, it could also be a giant business monopoly (like "The Company" in the movie Aliens.)

Anarchy is the ultimate in individual freedom (meaning individuals can do anything they want); a democratically organized society is the ultimate in group freedom (meaning that the majority can do anything it wants). However, most people desire neither of these extremes, and prefer their government to be somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

A common philosophy of moderation is this: government should support and promote those forms of individual freedom and self-interest which advance the common interest, and prevent those forms of individual freedom and self-interest which harm it.

Although this philosophy is widespread, few people agree on how it should be implemented. Conservatives, for instance, believe that government should allow the invisible hand to work on the free market -- an example of self-interest that advances the common interest. And they believe that government should prevent and punish crime -- an example of self-interest that harms the common interest.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe that government can actively promote, not just allow, the free market. For example, the government can build roads, wire the countryside for electricity and phone service, launch communication satellites and provide economic statistics, all of which allow the free market to flourish. (Conservatives tend to believe these should privatized, but whether this is even possible is one of the controversies we shall explore later on.)

And liberals believe that the government should be more active in preventing harmful self-interest. For example, they believe government should regulate corporate polluters. Conservatives oppose this, but it is inconsistent with the very philosophy that generates their position on crime.

Spectrum Three: Democracy vs. Constitutionalism

Democracy has been with us for thousands of years, but most of these experiments have ended badly. It was the rise of individual rights in the 18th century, as protected by the Constitution, that has distinguished the United States and made it such a successful democracy. (At least so far!)

The Founding Fathers also knew that democracy only works if the voters are educated. But in the 18th century, the overwhelming majority of Americans were illiterate. So they created a representative democracy, or a republic, in which laws were voted upon not by the people, but their elected representatives. For this reason, the United States is technically not a pure democracy, but a constitutional republic -- a fact which conservatives are always quick to point out.

Many of the Founders advocated a government where representative democracy, the constitution and the courts form a system of checks and balances. The entire rational behind such a triangular system is to prevent too much power from accumulating in any one segment of society. We all know the old adage: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Liberals acknowledge the value of all three corners of this system. If anything, they would argue that democracy could be strengthened, because mass education has largely wiped out illiteracy in America. Therefore, more direct forms of democracy are possible, like state or even national referendums. More radical liberals advocate replacing our representative democracy with a direct one -- but there is a real question of whether or not the people are that educated.

Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that the constitution should be strengthened, and democracy proportionately weakened. Why? Because they perceive that the Constitution gives them the individual freedom to act however they want, as long as they don't violate other people's individual freedom. Democracy, on the other hand, often tells individuals what to do. If a law you voted against is passed, your personal will is denied. In other words, democracy forces individuals in the minority to act in the interest of the majority, which is why conservatives tend to oppose it. Libertarians take this opposition to an extreme.

Spectrum Four: Equality vs. Merit

The debate between equality vs. merit is one of the oldest in our society. When merit is rewarded, competition becomes supreme, the fittest survive, and people get what they deserve. When rewards are given out equally, people become more pleasant and civilized to each other, but incentive falls, since trying harder doesn't get you anywhere.

For classification purposes, there are three types of societies: egalitarian, moderated meritocracy, and unrestricted meritocracy.

Socialism is the best example of an egalitarian society. When Marx wrote "From each according to his ability, and to each according to his needs," he was acknowledging that people are certainly born with different abilities, but they should be rewarded equally.

Libertarianism is the closest example of an unrestricted meritocracy, where there are the fewest constraints on the fittest reaching the top. Unfortunately, we have no historical examples of such a government.

Conservatism and liberalism are examples of moderated meritocracies. In a moderated meritocracy, the most successful continue to be rewarded the most, but a percentage of their power or income is redistributed back to the middle and lower class. Liberals, who lean more towards equality, believe the degree of redistribution should be rather high; conservatives, who lean more towards merit, believe that it should be rather low. In our economy, a progressive tax code achieves this effect, and liberals and conservatives argue over how steep its progressivity should be.

Spectrum Five: Competition vs. Cooperation

In general, the right favors competition; the left, cooperation.

The advantage of competition is that it drives humans to their maximum potential and maximum performance. The disadvantage of competition is that it can be destructive.

The advantage of cooperation is that we are all stronger together than we are separately. The disadvantage of cooperation is that it diminishes incentive, since trying harder than the next person will not achieve anything.

There is a complex interplay between competition and cooperation in human society (and, indeed, in all animal life). It is possible to engineer society to emphasize competition (by emphasizing the individual) or to emphasize cooperation (by emphasizing society). Finding the right mix requires an accurate understanding of the roots of competition and cooperation, as well as a knowledge of game theory (which is the science of competition and cooperation).

Hell Hath No Fury

I am absolutely despise this %#%^*#$ woman. I think it's great for the Dems though. Every time she opens her mouth, more hate is spewed. Keep on running your mouth Ann. Eventually, you'll offend everyone.







Our Ann Coulter Problem
Why the press can't ignore her.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, March 5, 2007, at 6:09 PM ET
Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter shocked nobody last week by calling presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot" during her appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Here's the YouTube video, as well as the quotation captured by the Associated Press: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I—so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."

It's true that the Democratic Party leaders displayed outrage. The Edwards campaign e-mailed the Coulter news to its supporters, calling her remarks a "shameless display of bigotry." Howard Dean, Democratic National Party chairman, called her statement "hate-filled" and demanded that the Republican candidates for president repudiate it.

The three Republican front-runners did exactly as Dean instructed with such speed that they must maintain 24/7 "Ann Coulter Damage Control Departments." A spokesman for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the comments "wildly inappropriate." Rudy Giuliani harmonized, saying the comments "were completely inappropriate." Mitt Romney's spokesman slammed Coulter's quip as "an offensive remark." Top conservative bloggers expressed similar indignation, which the Human Events Web site collected: "Ann Coulter doesn't speak for us," harrumphed Red State. Captain's Quarters' Ed Morrissey wrote that "such offensive language—and the cavalier attitude that lies behind it—is intolerable to us." Newsbusters' Warner Todd Huston dubbed Coulter "the H.L. Mencken of our times ... minus the intellect."

The context of Coulter's one-liner was probably too Hollywood for her audience. (As UPI explained, Coulter was probably riffing off actor Isaiah Washington's recent—and calculated—entry into rehab after he called one of his Grey's Anatomy co-stars a "faggot.") Townhall.com's Dean Barnett wrote that "uncomfortable silence" and not "boisterous laughter" followed her remark.

Coulter has been drawing on her outré political vocabulary for so long that the CPAC utterance couldn't have come as a surprise to her foes, her allies, or even the apolitical who avoid the news. The Washington Monthly cataloged her gift for extreme speech five years ago, just as she was perfecting her political phonemes. Here are a few choice Coulter cuts:

"[Clinton] masturbates in the sinks."—Rivera Live, Aug. 2, 1999

"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.' "—Hannity & Colmes, June 20, 2001

The "backbone of the Democratic Party" is a "typical fat, implacable welfare recipient"—syndicated column, Oct. 29, 1999

To a disabled Vietnam vet: "People like you caused us to lose that war."—MSNBC, Oct. 11, 1997

"Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores."—Salon.com, Nov. 16, 2000

"I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote."—Hannity & Colmes, Aug. 17, 1999

"My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that's because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism."—MSNBC, Feb. 8, 1997

It's probably unfair to Ramsey Clark to call Coulter his right-wing analogue, but there you are. He defends the indefensible, she attacks the undefended. Neither have any shame. Both regard negative publicity as good publicity. Both color their hair.

The press marginalized Clark for his nuttism long ago, but every odious phrase turned by Coulter only makes her a bigger star. Perhaps the newspapers, TV news, the blogs, and the politicians feel obliged to censure her publicly for her transgressions because, unlike Ramsey, she makes them in acceptable or semiacceptable settings such as at a CPAC conference or on a TV show and not at Saddam Hussein's trial in Baghdad. The press and the pols are also afraid that silence in the face of new Coulterisms will be interpreted as sanction, so they huff and puff at her scuzzy comments, as they did this week, to prove their own enlightenment. All that does is advertise Coulter's ideas to still-greater audiences, which translates into additional book sales and TV appearances, which drive still more book sales. She couldn't be happier.

Not everybody can pull off this trick. Dinesh D'Souza out-Coulters Coulter in his new book, The Enemy at Home, published by Doubleday, by blaming 9/11 on America's cultural left. (I'm not kidding.) Although he's mastered the art of the outrageous, he's too easily wounded by his critics because he wants to be taken seriously as a "scholar." The attacks on his ridiculous book have produced genuine sadness, as all this I-can't-get-no-respect grimacing in this January 2007 piece for the Washington Post Outlook section indicates.

Coulter doesn't make D'Souza's mistake of striving for respect. Effrontery is what she does for a living, and she's comfortable with it. So, I suppose it's only a matter of time before she calls Barack Obama a Black Panther masquerading as Uncle Tom, describes Hillary Clinton as a dyke Hitler, or reaches for something even more irreverent. As long as respectable forums like TV talk shows, New York publishers, and CPAC continue to give her a platform, the press won't be able to leave her alone. And this chapter of the Coulter show hasn't even concluded. According to Media Matters for America, Coulter will appear on CNN's Paula Zahn Now tonight.

Have We Seen The Light Yet

Desperate? I Think So.

Remember This Guy?

Remember this guy? Why haven't we caught him yet? Oh, I remember now, we're just next door protecting democracy as we see fit to force it on others. We can't even win a war in a country the size of Maine, let alone find one guy. Do we really even want to find him?

OK Enough With Anna Nicole Stuff

This truly amazing. How is it that we can keep sending more and more troops abroad, but we're not able to protect ourselves. 88% WOW. Hummm, maybe I should become a terrorist. Calling all terrorists! If there's ever a time its now. You could get away with just about anything in this country if you were sneaky enough




88% of National Guard Units Rated ‘Not Ready’
Heavy deployments of the National Guard and reserves for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have deepened shortages, forced the cobbling together of units and hurt recruiting, according to a congressional report delivered Thursday, resulting in 88% of all units inside the U.S. rating as “not ready”. State Guard officials say they are unprepared to respond to a large-scale terrorist attack or natural disaster, and the current troop increase in Iraq is expected to require the call-up of as many as four National Guard combat brigades.