Re: #2 in the post - Yglesias's cover story for the most recent TAP is similar to that.
I like #1 a lot. Remember that kid in your fifth grade class, the weird one who never said very much, the one who liked to blow stuff up? He didn't socialize much or play any sports. He did, however, have access to low grade explosives, and a large back yard. Well he grew up, and now he runs the defense department. Make you feel safe?
Surely there's room in the kitty to preserve the United States' most endangered sites.
Ha, yeah, very much like Yglesias's article. I hadn't seen that.
Smasher, you damn liberals...
I'm picturing a TV spot featuring Caroline and her cohort beating each other to a bloody pulp.
Followed by a list of things like
Bought every bottle of wine in Italy.
I'm now imagining a remake of the monster.com ads, where the monkeys run the company. Only we're at the white house, and the only non-monkey is Colin Powell. He points to the graph with the downward trend, and the monkeys turn it upside down, and then he dances, reticently, to "Feel the Noise."
It was probably a lot like that. Anyway, I always wanted to work for that company.
You can't get liberals talking about homeland security for even a minute.
The monkey thing would also work well since they don't believe in evolution -- thus, they are stuck at the monkey stage. Get it?
Smasher, you damn liberals...
Hey, one of those endangered sites is New Orleans & the Gulf Coast. Ogged doesn't care about black people.
Ogged doesn't care about black people.
You bastard, some of my best friends know black people.
In this context, I remember seeing somewhere a calculation of what it would have cost the US to buy and free every single slave in the South at market prices in 1860 -- something like a couple of percent of the cost of the Civil War. I wonder if there'd be a useful way to bring that in to make a point.
George W to Lizardbreath: "So I could buy all the Iraqis?"
George W to Lizardbreath: "So I could buy all the Iraqis?"
Sure, there's something bothersome about buying the slaves v. freeing them by force. Maybe that would be outweighed by the huge costs of the civil war, but it's a cost that goes on the other side of the scale.
But I don't see anything like that with regard to Iraq. To the extent that we freed anybody, their freedom wouldn't have been tarnished had we funded a revolt from the inside.
Except George would be so embarrassed that he'd double-posted. He'd apologize right away.
Also there was that whole thing about the South seceding before anybody could be freed. Who knows, maybe such a plan was on Lincoln's hopper.
I wonder if there'd be a useful way to bring that in to make a point.
For the price of so much body armor, Ogged could buy a slave?
All the tea in China.
Also, how about "the difference between security and 'yee ha! let's get them sumbitches'"?
We could have gone to Mars 10 times, Bitches!
How many times could you get to Mars if you lined up Iraqis end to end? It really makes you appreciate numbers.
14: "black people" s/b "blackies".
The main problem, of course, with buying slaves to free them is that you create a market for more slaves. The Union would have had to both buy up all the slaves and seriously enforce the ban on importing new slaves (which I think was in place.)
One of the problems with publically advocating pacifism is that people expect you to come up with plausible alternative histories to explain how each and every major war could have been avoided. Since no one human being can do this, your position always winds up looking weak.
24- that sounds like a response from a GYWO strip.
Oh, the idea would have been to make slavery illegal and pay for the freed slaves, and it wouldn't have worked because the Southern slaveowners wouldn't have gone for it.
"Compensated emancipation" it was called, and I believe it was actually proposed at the time (though nothing came of it).
Wasn't this what a lot of Christian organizations were doing in South Sudan during that civil war? And, as I recall, secular NGOs were begging the Christian organizations to stop because the money received for the slaves was going directly to buy guns, and the freed slaves often got kidnapped and re-enslaved. I don't know what the situation is like these days.
Yeah, it's pretty useless if not combined with an effective ban on slavery. I'm not actually certain what point I'd make with this; it just seemed related.
Why don't we buy Palestine from the Israelis and set the Palestinians free?
The Israelis themselves are already costing us $3b a year.
I'm wish 'Smasher. A comparative tally of actual policing efforts might be nice, but so would a tally of all the other things that might actually affect people, like saving endangered sites, funding education, alternative energy, I dunno, things like that. I get the idea of being more serious than BushCo about actual security, but at the same time I feel like it simply allows them gall-durned terr'ists to remain the center of debate and requires us to stay in this reactive stance. Letting "national security" be the trump card in the political deck, forever and ever, prevents us from getting the hell on with our lives and provides extremely convenient cover for politicians (on both sides of any given aisle) who aren't up to the task of all-around governing but are good at puffing their chests out and pounding away at them.
"We're more serious about national security"/"No, we are" has come, to me, to smell an awful lot like "no, we're more serious about {family values,flag burning,Attack of the Butt-Sex Wedding,etc.}" over time. I think playing that game, win or lose, says nothing good about the ability of the country to look to the future.
Maybe all the other America-haters and I would be appeased if the list were only half national security. It would, without a doubt, still depict a more effective effort at policing likely avenues of terrorism, and it would also serve the purpose of reminding people that there are, in fact, other issues which are the responsibility of a functioning government.
Everyone knows that Attack of the Butt-Sex Wedding II is the superior film.
Attack of the Butt-Sex Wedding III: Anus Tart, however, was very disappointing.
Did the anus tart in question have white frosting for the wedding?
Har har, very tongue in cheek.
#37 more tongue in between cheeks, really
We just need a video "leaked" with Pelosi, Dean, and Reid drinking, smoking, and torturing a terrorist in a Congressional office in their spare time. And I mean blood and screams - while they find endlessly amusing. Dems'll fuckin win in a landslide.
Michael, what type of wood do you recommend for smoking terrorists? Mesquite?
Or were you talking about pipe smoking?
Yeah, I bet you were. I don't think movies of prominent Dems engaged in gay sex with terrorists will win over many red staters.