Boasters, Whiners, Cons, Libs (CLOSED) Topic





Independent.co.uk

Mamet's new work: Why I am no longer a brain-dead liberal

By David Usborne in New York
Thursday, 13 March 2008

The -wing literati of London and New York were surely in a stew last night after one of their leading and most loyally liberal lights, David Mamet, confessed that advancing years have given him a greater appreciation for things conservative.



"I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind," the playwright and screenwriter informs the readers of the venerable (and reliably -leaning) Village Voice.

He cites as reasons for his epiphany his recent readings of such conservative thinkers as Paul Johnson and a sudden, even visceral, frustration with NPR, America's cosily liberal public radio network.

In the article – "Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal" – Mamet questions everything from his past faith in government to his worship of John F Kennedy. In fact, there is one line that will make many of his former political allies jump clean out of their sandals. JFK, he daringly suggests, was just as worthy of our disdain many decades ago as George Bush is today.

"Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh."

You wonder if such expressions of outright heresy might lose Mamet friends, notably in Democrat-loving Hollywood where he has done most of his best-known work on films including House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross and The Postman Always Ring Twice.

But if readers surmise he has crossed to the dark side, he is not about to argue with them. "Aha, you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

Mamet reflects, for instance, on his past attachment to the dogma that government is the citizen's friend. He wrote: "Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow."

He credits his awakening – his acknowledgement that the political beliefs he once clung to no longer fitted with his day-to-day existence – in part to his wife and her ability to read his mind.

"We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the $#&@* up. '?' she prompted."





3/22/2008 11:27 AM
open?
3/22/2008 3:21 PM
Quote: Originally Posted By r0b0t on 3/22/2008
open?
Quote: Originally Posted By doubletruck on 2/08/2008




CAUTION: This thread has undergone several turns and long ago stopped having anything to do with baseball. It really belongs now in the General Discussion forum, but I don't know of any way to move it there. If you don't want to read about politics or social issues, don't go here...

(Original post: A man I used to work with said that bad news always comes in threes.

(Three straight 100+win teams have lost in the LCS.

(Today I had three Maddux '95 starts, and lost all three -- two of them in playoff games.

(I can't wait to see what comes next...)




doubletruck tried to stay on topic in SimLeagues where he started this thread.

As you can see above he edited and updated his opening post. Administration moved this thread from the Baseball forums to WhatIFSports forums, I have posted in this forum since it was removed from the baseball forum,doubletruck may not be aware it was moved.

I like exploring the idea of how sincere, caring people end up with such different conclusions.



3/22/2008 5:36 PM


March 31, 2008

Watergate-Era Judiciary Chief of Staff: Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical BehaviorDan Calabrese of the North Stars Writers GroupAs Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.



The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.



Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.



Why?



“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”



How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.



Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.



The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.



The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.



“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.



The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files. So what did Hillary do?



“Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.



The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.



Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.



Of course, Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending Hillary’s career on the Judiciary Committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary if anyone wants to check the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.



But they show that the pattern of lies, deceit, fabrications and unethical behavior was established long ago – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before cattle futures, Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make her president of the United States.

Established in 2005, North Star Writers Group is a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based syndicate, providing columns to publishers throughout North America. Our writers are selected for their fresh, engaging perspective on real issues - political, family, social, economic, moral . . . and many others.










4/3/2008 10:59 AM

Some say Sarah Palin was not vetted, John GPF pointed to her way back in February.



Quote:
Originally Posted By ooooohdoggie on 2/29/2008



Quote: Originally Posted By JohnGPF on 2/12/2008

...all the hot button political issue polarizing crap just turns off voters like myself for whom ideology isn't at all important...
...after mrs kucinich's and mrs thompson's husbands dropped out of the race, i pretty much felt like i don't have any real choice and i'd hate to feel like i have to vote for mrs obama's husband just because he has the only nice looking woman ...
if mccain doesn't at least select alaska's governor ( Sarah Palin ) as his running mate, this is going to be a pretty dull election for me...


Que Sarah, Sarah
By Thomas Cheplick
Published 2/26/2008 12:08:10 AM



img src= http://images.politico.com/global/v3/homelogo.gif">
McCain explains Palin vetting
By: Mike Allen
September 2, 2008 08:22 PM EST
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Pushing back aggressively against charges of lax or hasty vetting, the McCain campaign disclosed Tuesday that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was one of six finalists for running mate who filled out a 70-question form that included detailed personal, professional and financial probing.

The campaign says the form included such detailed questions as: Have you been faithful in your marriage? Have you ever paid for sex? Have you ever downloaded pornography? Have you ever used or purchased drugs?

“Anybody who says that she wasn’t completely vetted is completely wrong,” a McCain campaign official said. “Everything that has come out over the last couple of days is information that we already knew — that came during this vetting process. The bottom line is that John McCain believes she is a qualified executive who’s able to fill the role of the vice president.”

Palin, unveiled on Friday as vice presidential running mate for the Arizona senator, has been in a media storm since her announcement Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. The daughter plans to keep the baby and marry the father, the announcement says.

As part of the McCain staff’s effort to fight a media storm, official campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb labeled as “fiction” a front-page New York Times story questioning the Palin vetting process.

Palin had been researched thoroughly even earlier than the questionnaire stage, as part of a group of 21 semifinalists who were not informed of their status but who were researched from public records.

“The fact of the matter is she was vetted over the course of about four to five months," the McCain official said, "in a vetting process that was read by a former Reagan White House counsel,” Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr.

“It included a comprehensive group of researchers and investigators prepared background memos that included information in regards to all media coverage pertaining to her, her political positions, her issues, a review of finance documents, a credit check, a personal interview with the candidate, and a questionnaire,” the official said.
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC img src= http://images.politico.com/global/irides.jpg">




http://www.goldpanners.com/Seasons/pressbox.htmClick Here to View Baarns Interview of Sarah Palin





9/4/2008 3:24 PM
This post could not be converted. To view the original post's thread, click here.
11/4/2008 5:31 AM
Quote: Originally Posted By crazystengel on 2/11/2008As long as Republicans can fix the polling booths come election day, it's all good
Actually, it was the Democrats who fixed it come election day in 2000 and in 2004.

GWB would have won by a lot more otherwise.

And I'm not referring to the popular vote which he lost by a landslide.
11/4/2008 8:19 AM
Quote: Originally Posted By doubletruck on 2/11/2008
Quote: Originally posted by ashel1 on 2/11/2008<DIV banish the pollster because they always have an agenda. Just look at the Presidential election. It's fixed the media wants Obama

This is so wrong, I hardly know where to begin. There are a dozen variables that determine what TV news emphasizes, and the primary ones are good visuals and excitement, both of which favor the Democratic race now that the GOP race has settled (and on a candidate who is not very telegenic).

The media overall comprise one of the major conservative forces in our nation, regardless of the mindless slogans from the rants of the Limbaugh-Coulter ilk. (They have self-serving reasons for wanting you to believe that the media are liberal. The fact is that the media play liberal on only a few issues -- gay rights, abortion, gun control -- that the corporate elites don't give a damn about.)

The bottom line is that media outlets are owned by large corporations and they favor the corporatocracy, corporate welfare, corporate fascism and the domination of the working classes for the welfare of the privileged.

When one of the Democrats is running one on one against a Republican, what you percieve as the media romance with Obama will end, and it will be swiftboat time again.
I see that not only did your prediction become seriously 100% wrong but your assessment is half wrong.
11/4/2008 8:21 AM
Quote: Originally Posted By grizzly_one on 2/14/2008



I think he'd say the same about you. I've read the bible many times. It has some good ideas in it, but it also has some horrible things. Never read L-Ron, have no interest. The truth is that both books are equally nonsense. You are so smug in your little world, yet can't answer the questions of the hypocrisy the bible spews.

I'm hopefull that some day you can open your eyes and see the truth and not live your life for a great lie.

What hypocrisy?

Try me then.
11/4/2008 8:23 AM
Quote: Originally Posted By grizzly_one on 2/14/2008Since DT has closed this thread, this will be my last post here..
Hmmm, so I guess then you won't try me.

Ok then.

Should I start a thread on this?

I don't want you to start one. Think of it as less responsibility for you.
11/4/2008 8:25 AM

This thread was originally started in MLB SimLeagues.

Administration chose to relocate this diverse topic thread to WhatIfSports General Discussion .

Most of the people active in the thread back in early 2008 are unaware it is located here in this forum.

I have continued to recall issues from this discussion topic as the election approached, so I have bumped it several times.

----------------------------------------------------





Suffrage Fighting for their votes. By Mark Hemingway
November 04, 2008, 6:00 a.m.

Electoral democracy is a very messy and often controversial process. And, as with seemingly every other issue these days, the two political parties are at loggerheads over how to resolve issues complicating voter registration and ballot counting.

But some perennial voter problems are so obvious and so easily correctable it’s downright shameful they have yet to be addressed. Nowhere is this more obvious than the issue of absentee military ballots, which are often challenged due to the difficulty of complying with wildly divergent local voting requirements from half a world away.

Perhaps most famously, absentee military ballots were the subject of a legal tug of war in the squeaker of an election in 2000. However, the current election has also seen its fair share of travails in counting military ballots.

On Monday, just a day before the election, the lawyers for the McCain campaign filed a temporary restraining order/preliminary injunction to allow an extra ten days to count absentee ballots in Virginia, which the McCain campaign says could potentially allow for thousands of military ballots to be counted that might not be received by the November 4 deadline.

“There were some printing issues and a number of localities did not send out their absentee ballots — including absentee ballots to military service men and women — until October,” Ashley Taylor, a lawyer for the McCain campaign, told National Review Online. “[The McCain campaign is] asking the court to require the state board of elections to count those absentee ballots received after the election but no later than seven p.m. on November 14.”

There is a federal statute — Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) — that requires each state to mail ballots in sufficient time so that the absentee military voter, or absentee voter generally, can receive, cast, and return the absentee ballot in time to be counted. Then each state goes about ensuring that that occurs.

While the statute doesn’t dictate the exact period of time absentee ballots are to be received by, they should be received 45 days ahead of time, according to guidance by the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice. “The basic rule is that if you are overseas it takes 12 to 20 days to receive your ballot and another 12-20 days for your ballot to be received by the commonwealth of Virginia,” Taylor said. “We picked the ten-day period because that would closely approximate the 45-day period that should have been permitted [with localities still mailing absentee ballots in October].”



The state board of elections is charged with ensuring that absentee ballots are sent in a timely manner that will allow them to be returned in time to be counted, and under Virginia law absentee ballots are supposed to be received by the close of election day in order to be counted. In this case, Taylor says that the state board of elections actually provided the proper guidance, informing individual districts and localities that the ballots needed to be sent out sooner. Even though ballots were delivered late against the board of election’s counsel, the board of elections is still the responsible government agency.

“It’s not extraordinary relief we’re requesting, we cite in our brief four instances in which other states have agreed to extensions of time so that these votes are counted,” Taylor said. “Certainly no one in the military in harm’s way should be prejudiced because there was a printing delay.”

This is the second problem that has arisen this past week in Virginia relating to absentee military ballots. The registrar in Fairfax County, Va. — notable for being a partisan Democratic activist — began tossing out military ballots, which trend Republican. The registrar justified his actions because he said the absentee ballots did not comply with a state law that said the ballots have to contain the signature and address of a witness. The state’s Republican attorney general eventually overruled the registrar, but even the Obama campaign agreed that the ballots in question should be counted.

Both of these instances highlight the need for more consistent guidelines governing how military and overseas absentee ballots should be treated, Rosemary Rodriguez of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) said. The EAC is an independent, bipartisan commission — appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate — that develops guidance on voter regulations.

The existing federal guidelines outlined by UOCAVA cover only protocols related to time, and aren’t even specific at that. Otherwise, military ballots have to comply with 51 different sets of state and district guidelines that may or may not be easily complied with by soldiers serving overseas.

“There are some really bad state laws on the books,” Rodriguez said. “Federal Express has made ballot transfer to overseas and military voters free this year — it’s a great program. But if you’re from Alabama, don’t send it that way because state law only allows it to be processed if it comes from the postal service.”

Congress could clear up much of the confusion here by creating a uniform federal standard for military ballots that states had to honor. “But until and unless Congress does something across the board, the states are going to have to come up with solutions,” Rodriguez said. “We’ve [the EAC] been fairly vocal in our advocacy for the states to take a look at the issue.”

Given that soldiers overseas are fighting to preserve your right to vote, it’s especially unjust they should have to fight through so much red tape in order to get their own ballots counted at home.

— Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter. Mark Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C.

11/4/2008 3:21 PM
So if McCain got voted into office today, it's possible for him to get kicked out and replaced by Obama 10 days later (November 14) after counting the absentee military ballots?
11/4/2008 4:19 PM

All Forums > MLB SimLeagues
Topic: So there I am...




Quote: Originally Posted By doubletruck on 1/30/2009
And O'Reilly and Hannity still don't know squat... If this country doesn't come together, we're going to be in worse shape than my baseball teams...


Quote:Originally Posted By doubletruck on 1/30/2009
And O'Reilly and Hannity still don't know squat... If this country doesn't come together, we're going to be in worse shape than my baseball teams...






1/30/2009 7:16 PM


Quote:
Originally Posted By doubletruck on 2/08/2008




CAUTION: This thread has undergone several turns and long ago stopped having anything to do with baseball.

It really belongs now in the General Discussion forum, but I don't know of any way to move it there. If you don't want to read about politics or social issues, don't go here...

(Original post: A man I used to work with said that bad news always comes in threes.

(Three straight 100+win teams have lost in the LCS.

(Today I had three Maddux '95 starts, and lost all three -- two of them in playoff games.

(I can't wait to see what comes next...)




1/30/2009 7:21 PM
Quote: Originally Posted By JohnGPF on 2/12/2008
...all the hot button political issue polarizing crap just turns off voters like myself for whom ideology isn't at all important...
...after mrs kucinich's and mrs thompson's husbands dropped out of the race, i pretty much felt like i don't have any real choice and i'd hate to feel like i have to vote for mrs obama's husband just because he has the only nice looking woman ...if mccain doesn't at least select alaska's governor as his running mate, this is going to be a pretty dull election for me...
1/31/2009 10:10 AM
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