[He makes it sound as if “sensible human beings” and “Americans” are mutually exclusive........
The exception being if you buy Thinkers bumper stickers at an incredibly low price to, you know, raise awareness and stuff. At CNN alone this morning I read that:
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP)—A New Zealand man has been accused of assault with a prickly weapon—a hedgehog.
Police allege that William Singalargh, 27, picked up the hedgehog and threw it at a 15-year-old boy in the North Island east coast town of Whakatane on February 9.
“It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks,” police Senior Sgt. Bruce Jenkins said Monday. The teen did not need medical treatment, he added.
Kid’ll probably just need a little vegan aromatherapy....
SYDNEY, Australia (AP)—Five teenagers brandishing baseball bats and a machete rampaged through a school in Sydney on Monday, smashing windows, terrorizing students and hitting a teacher over the head, police said. Eighteen other people were slightly hurt.
The five, between the ages of 14 and 16, were arrested after storming into suburban Merrylands High School and would likely be charged with assault and other crimes, Police Detective Inspector Jim Stewart said.
The offenses carry penalties up to seven years in prison.
One teacher was treated at a hospital after being hit on the head with a bat when he tried to stop the attackers, and 18 students were treated for cuts from broken glass and other minor injuries, Stewart said.
“It beggars belief they would attempt this kind of activity against innocent students,” Stewart said.
Remember that baseball is an American sport.... nothing says ”Eff, you, #$%^ beeeyotch. Word. Mofo.” like a hickory bat.... but, then, global warming must be stopped NOW or there will soon be nothing but algae floating from the US coasts towards Nepal. Speaking of which:
The Olympic torch relay was disrupted Monday by protesters in Paris demonstrating against the Chinese government, causing authorities to twice extinguish the flame and put the torch on a bus, according to The Associated Press.
The torch was being carried by a wheelchair athlete when it was halted and extinguished for a second time due to demonstrators shouting, according to AP. Backup flames, also lit from the birthplace of the ancient games in Olympia, Greece, are on call with the relay at all times to relight the torch.
Agencies report that the relay has now resumed.
The incidents came one day after human-rights activist demonstrators made the torch’s journey through London more like running the gauntlet than a journey of celebration, with UK police making more than two dozen arrests
Uh, Tibet. I meant Tibet, I think. Tibet borders on France.
Lastly, even Clinton’s camp has been seduced by big oil, the enemy of true socialist peace and equality that only Peru can provide:
WASHINGTON (CNN)—Sen. Hillary Clinton’s chief presidential campaign strategist is quitting his post amid criticism of his public relations firm’s contacts with the Colombian government over a pending free-trade deal, Clinton’s campaign announced.
Mark Penn will continue to advise Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Mark Penn and his political consulting firm will continue to advise the New York senator’s Democratic presidential bid, but Penn will give up his job as chief strategist, campaign manager Maggie Williams said.
(I meant Venezuela) Viva Chevez!! Death to America!
Discerning Thinkers everywhere should be rejoicing, cuz the gas prices are finally forcing our dangerously inept and greedy for-proift airline crud down the toilet where it belongs. Perhaps one day all people will be able to sit next to each other shuttling to and from Club Med on green airplanes powered by mere algae.
WASHINGTON (AP)—Late flights and lost bags, to say nothing of higher fares, are making air travelers grumpy, an annual survey of airline quality says.
Southwest had the best on-time performance among U.S. carriers in 2007, a study shows.
The industry posted declines last year in every area of the Airline Quality Rating, amid rising fuel prices, safety problems and bankruptcy filings that shut down three carriers last week alone.
The biggest change was in the rate of consumer complaints, up 60 percent overall. The rate more than doubled at US Airways and Comair, and rose for 15 of the 16 airlines included in the study. The exception was Mesa Airlines.
On-time arrivals dropped for the fifth straight year, with more than one-quarter of all flights late, according to the survey. The rates of passengers bumped from overbooked flights and bags lost, stolen or damaged also jumped in 2007.
“The trend is bad, and it doesn’t look like it gets any better,” said Dean Headley, an associate professor at Wichita State University and co-author of the study.
Hooooray! Death to America! Free umbrella drinks for all! All hail the New World Order!
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Cmon, buy a few dozen and reward yourself with a Club Med vacation. You’ve sacrificed plenty and have truly earned a week off replete with umbrella drinks and fellow discerning Euros, having done all you can to peacefully and critically save the earth from the US.
He makes it sound as if “sensible human beings” and “Americans” are mutually exclusive........
Might be, once you’ve considered baseball bats and machetes…
r.j.
I don’t think she has been around long enough to have influenced flow rates through environmental policy. None the less, enough bad energy policy from Pelosi and, say, Clinton or Obama chasing windfall profit taxes would certainly drive prices up. But that’s not the reason now. Besides, you shouldn’t be too American-centric on these things. Some economists think that if America went into recession that oil prices would come down, but you have (well, not officially) and they haven’t. The price of oil is global and determined by supply and demand. The main demand pressures are from China, India and increased consumption within OPEC…
I said all of this three pages ago. I even mentioned China and India specifically.
Even without FF we still have plenty of energy, it’s called the sun. In 1800 we were only using a tiny fraction of that energy. Take the water cycle for instance. The sun heats water, which evaporates and goes into the sky, then it rains on mountains and gravity carries it downhill back into the ocean.
Ahh, but global warming believers say that the Sun doesn’t really heat the planet all that much. It’s overrated.
As for Bartlett, I’d caution using a U.S. politician’s words anytime you want to propose a “fix” for an issue. Congress has been “fixing” the oil crisis since the seventies and it’s only gotten worse. They’ve been “fixing” social security since Clinton (save sosh security NOW) and it’s only gotten worse. They can’t even deliver a letter as efficiently and inexpensively as UPS or FedX and they’ve been working on it for decades. I’m quite certain that when our politicians say they have a fix for gas prices they mean that they’ll go higher, not lower. That’s why I started this thread, Pelosi claimed that she had a fix and they only change we’ve seen is much higher oil prices since the dems have taken over. John Dingell, a dem from my home state of Michigan, has even proposed recently a 50 cent per gallon tax on gasoline to “force” people to quit driving. He’s not considering all of the goods and services in this country that depend on transportation to delivery to the customer. I’d just use caution when considering a politicians words, especially when they’re trying to convince you that they’re an expert on a subject. They’re not. And they’re notoriously unsuccessful with their “fixes”.
Yeah, and we’ve been fixing the war on terror and its...wait, what?!
Did you not read what I wrote? The war isn’t causing oil prices to stay high or go higher. The prices are much higher now than at the height of the war, only recently going over $100 per barrel. If the war was responsible for increasing oil prices then it would have been $100/barrel when the war first started, and it wasn’t close to that.
Arguing it isn’t the only factor is one thing. Saying that it didn’t increase at all because of the war is not really that defensible.
China and India have vastly increased their consumption, that’s huge in causing the price of oil to soar. Our guvment, led by greenie backed democrats, aren’t allowing us to drill offshore which is also having a big impact in oil prices. Our guvment isn’t letting us build any refineries (the last new one was built in the 70’s when consumption was a lot less than it is now), that also is having a big impact on oil prices. All of those things are bearing more on high oil prices than the war.
Except there was that big jump in prices over a short period of time that coincided with the war not some giant leap in consumption over the same short period of time. War affects the futures. Futures affect the price. Its pretty simple.
And back to my original point, we can control whether we invade middle eastern countries. Controlling India and Chinese consumption? Not so much.
Also, if we get out of Iraq, the sunni’s will need support from Saudi Arabia. There will be a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Since the Saudi’s have no substantial military to use against Iran, they might drop the price of oil as weapon against Iran.
Bart, another thing about Big Oil is that although their profits are historically high, their price/earnings ratios are historically low. This is the ratio of stock price to earnings. That’s because everyone knows that current profits aren’t the best measure of the value of these companies. A lot of lefties look at the profits and think that Big Oil is making out, but by other measures they aren’t. They aren’t replacing oil productions with new discoveries and some of them (Shell and BP) aren’t maintaining production levels.
Of course their profits are high, the price is high. But that isn’t their fault and ultimately it makes them vulnerable not strong.
P/E is not the indicator to watch, IMO. Profit/share is a better measure for this discussion, it seems to me.
I find the argument that a business’s profits rise because the cost of the pre-refined product rises. I can’t imagine Dell reporting record profits due to rising prices of computer parts. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
But we don’t have real competition. We don’t have a free market at all with oil. There are international cartels and domestic oligopolies. Those make it so we don’t really know what the market price for oil actually is.
Oil companies do have an uncertain future. Right now, however, they are making out like bandits.
I find the argument that a business’s profits rise because the cost of the pre-refined product rises.
Uh...eh?
I can’t imagine Dell reporting record profits due to rising prices of computer parts. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
If they raise their prices to keep a constant profit margin, their total profits will rise, at least until demand drops enough to make the difference. As you know, oil price is pretty elastic, which leads to the question of what the “proper” price of oil is.
But we don’t have real competition. We don’t have a free market at all with oil. There are international cartels and domestic oligopolies. Those make it so we don’t really know what the market price for oil actually is.
“Oligopoly” doesn’t mean “no real competition”. If the companies in this “domestic oligopoly” are colluding, then they’re breaking the law. If they’re not...well, then, they’re not. It sure would be nice, though...wouldn’t it?...if our domestic companies didn’t have to rely as much on the foreign cartels. Say...by not being barred from exploration all over the country.
If we keep buying the same amount of oil when the price rises, clearly the market price is higher than the current price. That’s no mystery.
Oil companies do have an uncertain future. Right now, however, they are making out like bandits.
So having an uncertain future, shouldn’t they maximize their present?
Which boy do you fix your gaze upon for that special, final moment?
Probably whichever you think is the better poet…
These guys are so Euro, so boyishly, androgynously New World Order it almost makes me wanna strum “Kumbaya” and have an umbrella drink at Club Med whilst bemoaning China’s treating Tibet so rather unfairly these days despite their otherwise textbook socialism. That is, until the soccer game starts…
Yeah, and we’ve been fixing the war on terror and its...wait, what?!
I’m so glad that Bart and his ilk were not in charge of WWII. Can you imagine the shrieks of dispair on D-Day? And how many cries for “Surrender now; we can’t win!” would have come out of Congress during the Battle of the Bulge?
Bart: there’s an old saying that perfectly describes what’s going on in Iraq now: Fighting like trapped rats. Al Qaeda in Iraq has its back to the wall, and is striking out in all directions in sheer desperation. Right now, the Iraqis hate them so much that even surrendering won’t save their sorry asses. And Mookie al Sadr is beat—no matter how hard the LA Times and the NY Times try to award him the gold trophy. Right now, he’s desperately trying to salvage a little bit of face by saying that he will take the matter to Ayatollah al Sistani, and if Ayatollah al Sistani tells him to disarm, he’ll disarm.
And I might mention that 63 years after the end of WWII, the US still has troops stationed in Germany and Okinawa, and that more than 50 years on, we still have troops stationed in Korea.
Yeah, and we’ve been fixing the war on terror and its...wait, what?!
I’m so glad that Bart and his ilk were not in charge of WWII. Can you imagine the shrieks of dispair on D-Day? And how many cries for “Surrender now; we can’t win!” would have come out of Congress during the Battle of the Bulge?
Bart: there’s an old saying that perfectly describes what’s going on in Iraq now: Fighting like trapped rats. Al Qaeda in Iraq has its back to the wall, and is striking out in all directions in sheer desperation. Right now, the Iraqis hate them so much that even surrendering won’t save their sorry asses. And Mookie al Sadr is beat—no matter how hard the LA Times and the NY Times try to award him the gold trophy. Right now, he’s desperately trying to salvage a little bit of face by saying that he will take the matter to Ayatollah al Sistani, and if Ayatollah al Sistani tells him to disarm, he’ll disarm.
And I might mention that 63 years after the end of WWII, the US still has troops stationed in Germany and Okinawa, and that more than 50 years on, we still have troops stationed in Korea.
And I might mention that 63 years after the end of WWII, the US still has troops stationed in Germany
I got to shoot a few rounds with a crooked G3 rifle from ‘63 - a year older than I. The rest of the 15 months were but a mind-numbing document shuffle controlled by bureaucrap paperpushers who wouldn’t have fought their way out of a shit-stained paper bag without the proper permissions signed over a schnitzel and a beer.
Most Krauts aren’t worth the stale feces of even the most podunk American NRA rube from Bumfuck, Kentucky.
Sethery
“Oligopoly” doesn’t mean “no real competition”. If the companies in this “domestic oligopoly” are colluding, then they’re breaking the law. If they’re not...well, then, they’re not. It sure would be nice, though...wouldn’t it?...if our domestic companies didn’t have to rely as much on the foreign cartels. Say...by not being barred from exploration all over the country.
How funny is it that the same anti-Bush liberals who oppose outsourcing at every opportunity have no problem with it when considering oil--the product that most fuels our economy. And that goes back to my original reason for bringing up the Pelosi Magic Bullet. The dems have no vested interest in “fixing” the problem.
Yeah, and we’ve been fixing the war on terror and its...wait, what?!
I’m so glad that Bart and his ilk were not in charge of WWII. Can you imagine the shrieks of dispair on D-Day? And how many cries for “Surrender now; we can’t win!” would have come out of Congress during the Battle of the Bulge?
Bart: there’s an old saying that perfectly describes what’s going on in Iraq now: Fighting like trapped rats. Al Qaeda in Iraq has its back to the wall, and is striking out in all directions in sheer desperation. Right now, the Iraqis hate them so much that even surrendering won’t save their sorry asses. And Mookie al Sadr is beat—no matter how hard the LA Times and the NY Times try to award him the gold trophy. Right now, he’s desperately trying to salvage a little bit of face by saying that he will take the matter to Ayatollah al Sistani, and if Ayatollah al Sistani tells him to disarm, he’ll disarm.
And I might mention that 63 years after the end of WWII, the US still has troops stationed in Germany and Okinawa, and that more than 50 years on, we still have troops stationed in Korea.
Better to have McCain, another tongue-tied president who says incoherent things about the most important challenges facing the US?
SEN. MCCAIN: There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?
GEN. PETRAEUS: It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago.
SEN. MCCAIN: Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shi’ites, all overall, or Sunnis or anybody else.
McCain keeps thinking that al-Qaeda is a Shiite, Iranian plot, when in fact its leadership is hyper-Sunni Egyptians and Saudis.
He also thinks that al-Qaeda would take over Iraq if the US left. But they are not even popular in most Sunni Arab areas. As for the Shiites, they are a majority of Iraqis and they hate al-Qaeda (which has massacred Shiites), and they would just crush it if given the opportunity.
Then he apparently ‘misspoke’ about not mentioning his massive security (100 soldiers, bullet proof vest) when ‘walking around’ Baghdad and making out it was safe and that people were living normal lives, despite a huge increase in attacks from Feb to March.
The he has a fundamental misreading of Sadr’s aim in respect to the Basra ceasefire......the list goes on.
So based on that I’m glad McCain wasn’t in charge during WWII. He seems to be inhabiting the same non-reality based community as Bush.
Better to have McCain, another tongue-tied president who says incoherent things about the most important challenges facing the US?
SEN. MCCAIN: There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?
GEN. PETRAEUS: It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago.
SEN. MCCAIN: Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shi’ites, all overall, or Sunnis or anybody else.
McCain keeps thinking that al-Qaeda is a Shiite, Iranian plot, when in fact its leadership is hyper-Sunni Egyptians and Saudis.
He also thinks that al-Qaeda would take over Iraq if the US left. But they are not even popular in most Sunni Arab areas. As for the Shiites, they are a majority of Iraqis and they hate al-Qaeda (which has massacred Shiites), and they would just crush it if given the opportunity.
Then he apparently ‘misspoke’ about not mentioning his massive security (100 soldiers, bullet proof vest) when ‘walking around’ Baghdad and making out it was safe and that people were living normal lives, despite a huge increase in attacks from Feb to March.
The he has a fundamental misreading of Sadr’s aim in respect to the Basra ceasefire......the list goes on.
So based on that I’m glad McCain wasn’t in charge during WWII. He seems to be inhabiting the same non-reality based community as Bush.
…
Last night, Howard Dean issued his latest mean-spirited and, this time, incomprehensible attack on McCain:
John McCain is so wrong on Iraq, he can’t even get the basic facts about the situation on the ground correct.
Today, as he was questioning Gen. David Petraeus, he again confused the difference between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
At least five times as a candidate John McCain has stated that Iran (a Shiite nation) is supporting Al-Qaeda (a Sunni group) in Iraq. This is not some minor mistake, but a significant gaffe. He clearly does not understand the sensitive political dynamics in that region of the world.
What’s worse is that he’s done it at important times when you’d expect him to be at his best—he did it today in the Senate while questioning the commander of American forces in Iraq, and he did it on a recent trip to the Middle East. ***
We just can’t afford someone who just doesn’t understand Iraq—it’s too dangerous.
I had read the entire transcript of yesterday’s proceedings in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and had no idea what Dean was talking about. Dean, of course, doesn’t quote the offending exchange in his email--a fact which seems telling, to say the least. I went back and re-read McCain’s questioning of Petraeus and Crocker, and this is the only exchange that Dean could possibly be referring to:
MCCAIN: There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view Al Qaida in Iraq as a major threat?
PETRAEUS: It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago.
MCCAIN: Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shiites overall…
PETRAEUS: No.
MCCAIN: ... or Sunnis or anybody else.
Al Qaida continues to try to assert themselves in Mosul, is that correct?
Dean apparently wants to twist this question into a suggestion that al Qaeda is a Shiite sect--a confusion that Petraeus evidently didn’t share. In fact, McCain was obviously contrasting al Qaeda with the Sadrists, the subject of his immediately preceding question, by noting that in the global scheme of things, the Sadrists are an obscure sect compared to al Qaeda. The idea that the Democrats would try to criticize McCain on this exchange--without, of course, quoting it so that readers can see how bogus their attack is--is just one more in a long series of indications of how low the Dems are wil
