Firestarter

MA is on March 2nd along with nine other states. The Democrats' national convention is in July.

Good Lord, some of you people are fucking nutjobs.

I think there are like three of them this year.

In that case, it's your turn now. The federal budget deficit is insignificant. It sets a "new record" only in absolute terms, and in absolute terms the deficit is and always has been completely irrelevant. It is only as a percentage of GDP and in relation to the GDP per capita that the deficit has historically been an indicator of any sort of trends whatsoever, and as a percentage of our over $10.45 trillion GDP ($37.6k per capita) it is actually quite modest. Next. Oh yes. But I fancy I'm more for the kind Mike advocates than whatever you favour. Throw out all the idiotic laws with all their idiotic loopholes and substitute merely full disclosure. Let Soros use his billions any way he wants. Let the candidate who takes his money tell us all about it and let the FEC investigate if so much as a cent is out of place. "Dukakis's Lieutenant-Governor" would very quickly be replaced with "Soros's poodle." You wanna guess how many votes that would help you pick up? Go on, Soros. Spend all you want. We're making a dollar in free advertising on every dime. "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him." - Proverbs 26:27

I can't believe Dean did so poorly in New Mexico (not that it would've helped him much even if he hadn't, but Jesus). If ever I've seen a campaign coming off the rails, this campaign is that campaign. And the now-expected reaction of a man so deep in denial it'd take ECT to shake him: "This is all about who gets the most delegates in Boston in July, and it's going to be us!" Boston? July?! You want to actually WIN something somewhere, anywhere in the country first, Governor?

Don't make me kick your ass. - Marney the Elder

I hereby unilaterally christen this thread the repository for useless fluff topics and general CE humour. Biggest "Eh" story of the day: Montana death row inmate found dead

Carthago delenda est.

Well, that didn't take long.

So, basically, only about 0.1% of the time are you actually being honest about anything. The rest of the time you're just trying to manipulate people. Thanks, I think that says it all.

It's more the fact that you lot are too involved with one particularly useless, idiotic, uncivilised, prolific, and wholly ridiculous aspect.

Neither. It was political cunning and luck. To quote Methos, the times were right for a Führer.

The real problem is with the posters, not the folder. Axe NHB (or whatever its new name is) if you like, but also axe anyone with a plurality of posts in it. Edit: in order to avoid scooping up people who have substantive posts in a bunch of different forums, the plurality threshold could be set at 40% or so. So, some guy who's interested in sports, movies, current events, computers, video games, and several different kinds of wrestling wouldn't get the boot just because 19% of his posts were in NHB and the others too widely scattered to offset them. 40% or more, though, and you're probably clinically brain-dead.

Oh, I agree; I'm just saying that the numbers don't bear out anything like the massive backlash Moslems and liberals shrieked about and marched against and sued for. It was a deliberately deceitful exaggeration from beginning to end. Frankly, if after something like 9/11 that's the worst foreign-looking folks have to endure, Americans as a whole are far more moral, upstanding, fair-minded, level-headed, and downright noble than anyone's ever given us credit for.

Never heard of anything of the sort in my whole damn life, unsurprisingly. Sounds like rawmvp gets most of his information about women from usenet porn texts.

This gets better and better with every post.

Senator McCain supports the President and has been campaigning for him for quite some time already. He has also stated numerous times that if nominated at a later date he will refuse to stand, and from everything I know of him (he lives one floor below me, and I see him at my parents' cocktail parties from time to time), I believe him. I agree with Mike - I think Dr Rice would make a brilliant President. Again, though, she's indicated more than once that she isn't very interested, and as a candidate she would have obvious weaknesses as well as equally obvious strengths.

Like, one?

No. You don't seem to understand. Whether it was intentional or not doesn't matter. As soon as you realised when the photo was taken, if you were at all concerned about the propriety of inventing mockeries of a real person in the middle of a real tragedy, you would have edited it out or replaced it with something else. Either you don't care just because it's the President, or you just - don't care. Whichever is the case, I'm done with this now. Try setting aside your pride and listen to your conscience. FYI: what you used is a very well-known photo which was available for quite a time to the public immediately after 9/11. The President is in Air Force One, as is obvious from the porthole-shaped areas of light on the curved cabin wall he is facing. It was published in practically all national newspapers and many international newspapers, not just for days but even a month or two afterwards. I saw it again in a special edition of The Economist one year later.

November 2nd 2004.

I don't leap down the throat of people who poke good-humoured fun at the President. If you'd been nasty or mean-spirited about his former drinking problem I might have commented, but since you didn't seem to be I took it as the harmless pleasantry I considered it. Actually, on second thought, if it seemed you were being nasty I would probably just have ignored it. I really only comment when people either criticise the President directly to me, or try to invent some sort of commentary on his ability based on wholly irrelevant facts or lies. I still think your use of the 9/11 photo was in extremely poor taste. It has nothing to do with the President per se. You could conceivably come up with funny captions for pictures of people jumping from the collapsing Towers, but that wouldn't mean I'd appreciate those either. Remove it a step and invent a funny caption for a candlelight vigil for the victims - would that make you laugh? It wouldn't make me laugh. Do what you did, and take a picture of the President in one of the worst hours of our nation's history - grieving for the dead, absorbing still more terrible news with every passing minute, and deciding how best to defend us - and slap a funny caption on that. Does that make you laugh? It's no different from taking a hypothetical photo of a crying woman holding a portrait of her daughter, say a military officer who died in the Pentagon, and writing underneath something like "Boy, those onions sure are strong!" That doesn't make me laugh. That appalls me. There are some things that you can't, that you shouldn't decontextualise. Ever. This is one of them.

Rob wins. Jobber is disqualified for being dumb enough to try to spin a picture of the President making a call on 9/11 as comical. Whatever your politics, you don't need to go there.

"Stay short and looney, Dennis. You make me look tall and almost presidential." "Hey, John, I was thinking. We should cancel the World Bank and the IMF along with NAFTA and the WTO and create a Department of Protectionism. Isn't that a great idea?" "Super, Dennis." "Thanks!"

So are you.

"Look, I'm the real moderate up here, not Joe Lieberman. I'm so moderate I still don't know which party I want to belong to. I haven't even figured out if I'm against killing babies as they're delivered. Is this my index finger or my pinkie? What am I whistling?" "General, maybe Mr Rove didn't return your phone calls because he thinks you're a raving lunatic."