Spanky Hearts Daniel Ortega
 

But at least the (likely) next president of Nicaragua is on the record as supporting a free trade pact with the U.S.

Damn. Times do change.

S_A_M

Show me the motto!
 

Was it that many? Really? I think the entire US army had twelve and that was reduced to ten under Clinton and Bush I. I could be a little off but not that far off.

We couldn't be occupying Iraq with more than four or five (I am guessing).

Are you sure it was 200 divisions?

Rumsfeld v. Powell and Franks
 

Not me. And there was the Japanese American Army Chief of Staff that was pushed out because he argued we would need more troops. That sucked for him (and us).

Vote early and often - Part 1
 

Didn't you see the matrix?

Spanky Hearts Daniel Ortega
 

You never, never, know. Lula was an avowed socialist, but when he finally got elected president of Brazil he turned out to be completely responisble economically. He even pushed for free trade agreements.

Ortega might surprize us all. Then again, he may set Nicaragua back twenty years.

Show me the motto!
 

I think the neocon doctrine was focused more on providing the proper incentives to other nations by making clear that we would take them out if we cared too. Neocons were not particularly focused on the dangers of non-functioning states. Afghanistan was, therefore, an ideal showplace for the doctrine, since the Taliban crossed us and we fucked them over good.

The original theory was, you get in and you get out, keeping your powder dry for the next regime. The assumption was that you can hand over power to someone, anyone, to get out. There wasn't a lot of thought given to making sure that the government you leave is functional and/or democratic. After our years in Iraq, this now looks like a major deficiency.

Show me the motto!
 

The Soviets had vast numerical superiority. Vast.

Which is why we relied heavily on higher technology, and had incorporated the early use of tactical nuclear weapons into our defensive strategy. I'd bet that we still could not have stopped them short of the Normandy coast.

That's why the real key to the defense of Europe was the threat of mutual annihilation if the Russians invaded. It worked.

S_A_M

Show me the motto!
 

It wouldn't surprise me at various times, but does seem high for Eastern Europe alone. Your numbers would be low.

Iraq has about 140,000 troops right now - probably about 10 divisions, more or less. (a little google-foo - currently 500,000 troops in 18 divisions in active army; about 700,000 troops in the reserves; not clear how many divisions in Iraq - bits and pieces of many divisions have been deployed).

Estimates of troops deployed during the Prague Spring run as high as a half million - assuming an average of 15,000 per division, that would be about 33 divisions. And the most heavily occupied was always East Germany.

Show me the motto!
 

how come no one answered my question about Afghanistan?

You have accused me of two different things.

First, you said that I "spliced" a quote. That is flatly wrong, and I'm waiting for you to admit it. I quoted one sentence from the Economist, verbatim. I didn't splice anything. Show some class and admit you were wrong.

Second, you are suggesting that the Economist is not blaming Bush, and that it gives him credit for being a free trader. To this, I'll say three things:

(a) You are flatly misreading the article and misunderstanding reality if you think that Bush was "trying to make the Doha round cut more [agricultural] subsidies." That Economist article says the opposite. The U.S. wanted to cut agricultural tariffs but was unwilling to cut agricultural subsidies. If you are not understanding this, read it again. Or, to take just one example from many on the web, this:

• This round collapsed, as many before it did, in a deadlock between farm import tariff users and farm subsidy users. Washington continued to argue for steep cuts in farm import tariffs, which are used by the European Union, India, and Japan, while refusing further cuts in its agricultural subsidies. Four of the six negotiating parties blamed U.S. intransigence as the downfall of this last round of talks. Brazil, usually aligned with the United States on farm tariffs, began earlier this year to shift its position away from that of the United States and toward the European Union, after Brussels was held to blame for the lack of progress at the December ministerial meeting in Hong Kong. Only Australia neglected to single out the United States for the failure.

(b) Notwithstanding (a), you are correct that the Economist gives Bush credit for being a free trader. It points to the "irony" that people blame the U.S. for the recent collapse, since the U.S. pushed to get the talks back on track after the Cancun failure. This does not contradict the point I made with the Economist article, which is that the U.S. was not somehow blameless for the Doha collapse, as you suggested. My failure to agree with every point in the Economist article does not mean that I misrepresented it when I accurately quoted it in part.

(c) Moreover, I would suggest that (a) and (b) are absolutely consistent with my criticism of Bush on free trade, which is that he pays it lip service but has not invested political capital in it. Bush paid no political price whatsoever for pushing foreign countries to return to the table after Cancun, which is what the Economist praised him for. But he was not prepared to make the case domestically to limit agricultural subsidies -- for which he would have paid a price politically -- and so the Doha talks failed. When it cost him nothing to be for free trade, he was for it. When he would have had to invest something, he wouldn't ante up.

Per my post above, if you believe this then you are getting your news about free trade from some sort of hallucinogenic drug, and not the Economist. Bush has never been prepared to eliminate U.S. agricultural subsidies, and the U.S. had taken this position in the Doha round I would be truly impressed.

Vote early and often - Part 1
 

Pretty sure they're Republicans now.

If you re-read our exchanges with the notion in mind that we seem to mean different things by the term "free trade," maybe you'll stop accusing me of being dishonest. I.e., if you pull your head out of your ass, maybe you'll see the light. We disagree on policy, and it would be more interesting to discuss the policy than our competing understandings of the term "free trade."

Show me the motto!
 

I was busy reading back issues of the Economist.

Vote early and often - Part 1
 

I'm on a DNC list. I also received 47 calls this week - all from left leaning candidates and groups (and 1 from Ahnold).

Who can I sue?

Vote early and often - Part 1
 

Under California law, pretty much anyone you damn well please.

Now you are playing with semantics. You put in a statement that with out the surrounding language was misleading. I stand by the statement. I call that splicing. If you dont' like the term fine. What ever you want to call it, it is misleading. That is the substance of my argument so why don't you cop to that.

Quoting from another periodicle to say what the Economist said is bunk. Stick to what we are talking about. The quote speaks for itself.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
(b) Notwithstanding (a), you are correct that the Economist gives Bush credit for being a free trader. It points to the "irony" that people blame the U.S. for the recent collapse, since the U.S. pushed to get the talks back on track after the Cancun failure. This does not contradict the point I made with the Economist article, which is that the U.S. was not somehow blameless for the Doha collapse, as you suggested. My failure to agree with every point in the Economist article does not mean that I misrepresented it when I accurately quoted it in part.
[QUOTE]

You are splitting hairs. You were also using the quote to show that Bush was not a committed free trader. The fact that the article directly contradicted what you were trying to argue, and therefore, you used just one sentence of the article to back up your point was misleading.

He pushed very hard to get CAFTA through. To defeat CAFTA the Unions and the Democrats put up their biggest fight ever to defeat a free trade agreement. During the negotiations he Democrats tried to get him to insert all sorts of riders that would kill the deal, and then presented a solid front against him to defeat it on the up or down vote. He got unanimous Republican support. It is almost impossible to get unanimous Republican support on anything.

You just don't like to give him credit for what he did because you didn't want him to succeed. And since he beat your side, you don't want to think your side played its best game. Well they put up one hell of a fight.

You just want to use a different definition of free trade that no one accepts but the unions in their disinformation campaign. At least they usually have the courtesy to call what they believe in "fair trade". It is not semantics, it is a substantive argument. If your notion of "free trade" can be considered "free trade" then I can believe the government should own the means of production and call myself a capitalist. Following your rules words would have no meaning at all.

You object to Bush pushing through a free trade agreement (because it was too much of a free trade agreement) and then accuse Bush of not pushing hard enough on free trade. Only a person whose brain is in Permanent Park could not see the hypocrisy there.

That is the bottom line. There is no sense in arguing this anymore.

Buy a fucking dictionary and look in it if you plan to have conversations with people who speak the English language. The word "splicing" has a meaning, and it does not refer to taking things out of context. If you're going to accuse people of misrepresenting things, you ought to be pretty careful about it. If I've learned anything from the defenders of George W. Bush on this board in the last several years, that would be right up there.

The Economist does not say that the U.S. was willing to cut agricultural subsidies in the Doha round. It says the opposite. I found another respected source because I thought you might believe it if you saw it somewhere else, but apparently you are a brick.

Let's leave it this way: I will admit that if the U.S. was prepared to put serious cuts in agricultural subsidies on the table at Doha, then George W. Bush has been a leader on free trade who both talked the talk and walked the walk; if you will admit that if the U.S. did not put serious agricultural subsidies on the table at Doha, then you have been talking out of your ass because you were egregiously misinformed about free-trade negotiations.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but I have been arguing about this particular issue with you for several posts now.

Show me the motto!
 

That was my recollection, but I went back and checked. According to a 1988 CBO study, which cited the 1987 and 1986 Department of Defense figures as its source, there were 230 Warsaw Pact divisions -- about 6 million soldiers.

Soviet-style divisions are smaller than US divisions -- about 10,000 men instead of 15,000. 25 Warsaw Pact divisions, mostly Soviet, invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Why don't you look up "free trade" in the dictionary. The word "free trade" has a meaning. It does not mean insuring a level playing field and making other countrys have similar labor and environmental laws.

You focused on the word splicing because you know what you did was misleading. If you didn't believe what you were doing was misleading, you would focus on that word, and not splicing.

I am sorry if you can't see that critisizing Bush for pushing through CAFTA and then critisizing him for not doing enough on free trade is beyond hypocritical, then this conversation can't continue. You can blabber on but I have had enough.

Show me the motto!
 

Wow. That is a big army. Isn't that like half the population of Austria?

Show me the motto!
 

Too bad those 6 million were all needed where they were - otherwise, the Soviets could have invaded Iraq.

Show me the motto!
 

Or Afghanistan.

Oh, wait....

Show me the motto!
 

They should have followed the Rumsfeld Doctrine.

Vote early and often - Part 1
 

My solution: stop using a land line home phone. We have a phone line for the satellite tv, but we never answer it. I received zero political calls this year on phones that I actually answer.

Show me the motto!
 

Weren't Soviet divisions larger? (The better to have enough cannon fodder and still operate the heavy weapons.) Your numbers would indicate that--6,000,000/230=about 23,000.

trending
 

breaking....

Sources are telling me that exits polls et al are suggesting that this are trending the right now. America may yet be a winner today.......

more to come....

Show me the motto!
 

Uh, math is hard.

The pdf within the link took too long to open for me to go back and check again, but I am pretty sure that that's what they said. Or maybe they were just talking about armor divisions? Where's patentgreedy when we need him?

At any rate, the cite proved that my 20 year old memory was reasonably correct on the number of divisions waiting to turn us all into a bunch of borscht-eating atheistic Ivans, so my work is done. Besides, defining free trade is much more interesting.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/.../img_intro.jpg

I'm happy to talk about the substance of free trade with you, if you ever want to move beyond the semantic question of whether what I support is "free trade" in the sense in which you mean it. Since you don't know what policies I support and I don't want to bother to figure out how you use the term, I agree that further discussion in this vein is pointless.

I've addressed both halves of this at quite some length, and you've run out of things to say, which is telling. I focused on the word "splicing" because you said I did something I did not do. But I have explained why what I quoted from the Economist was not misleading. Again, here is why:

There is a very simple factual point on which we disagree. You said that the U.S. was an innocent bystander to the collapse of the Doha round, blameless for the failure of the Europeans and the third world to come to an agreement with each other, and that you think Bush was prepared to make big cuts in U.S. agricultural subsidies. You think the July 24 article in The Economist says this, though it says the opposite.

Here's the Financial Times' coverage from July, when the talks collapsed:

• The stumbling "Doha round"of trade negotiations fell into indefinite suspension yesterday after last-ditch talks ended in recrimination.
  
  An emergency meeting in Geneva of the talks' six core negotiators - India, Brazil,the US, EU, Japan and Australia - collapsed over irreconcilable differences about farm liberalisation.
  
  The US continued to argue for big cuts in farm import tariffs to open up markets for its farmers, a demand fiercely rejected by the EU, Japan and India, which said the US had first to go further in offering to cut agricultural subsidies.
  
  The Doha round, which began in November 2001, will nowenter indefinite suspension unless and until a consensus in the World Trade Organisation's 149 member countries can be found to revive it.
  
  The White House's authority from the US Congress to negotiate entire trade deals expires next year, meaning the end of this month was in effect a deadline for a WTO deal on farm goods and manufactures.
  
  Most experts and officials think Congress unlikely to renew that authority, rendering any near-term agreement impossible.
  
  Four of the six countries present rounded on the US as the culprit for the collapse in the talks, which started on Sunday and ended yesterday.
  
  Peter Mandelson, EU trade commissioner, told the Financial Times: "If the US continues to demand dollar-for-dollar compensation in market access [cutting tariffs] for reducing domestic support, no one in the developing world will ever buy that, and the EU will not either."
  
  Even Brazil, which shares some of the US's interest in reducing farm tariffs, identified American intransigence on subsidies as preventing an agreement.
  
  Kamal Nath, the Indian trade minister, said of the US: "Everybody put something on the table except one country who said, 'We can't see anything on the table.' "

Do you see that this account flatly contradicts your understanding?


That would be hypocritical. But what I said was that I wasn't impressed with what Bush did with regard to CAFTA. It just wasn't much of an accomplishment, and he didn't have to do much to get his own party to vote for it.

trending
 

What, NewsMax.com? You'd better hope the GOP loses today. Otherwise, it's going to lose in 2008. Best to get it over with now and hold onto the Presidency in 2008.

Vote early and often - Part 1
 

Are you sure they're from left-leaning groups? Maybe they're from the RNC but designed to make it seem like they are from liberals to irritate you into voting Republican.

There are an aweful lot of underused automated dialers around the country just sitting there since DNC. Setting them up on a sabotage campaign would be pretty cheap. I'm just saying.

Personally, I don't have a landline, so I don't have this problem.

trending
 

I see the McCain/Jeb Bush ticket as unstoppable. Obama has replaced Hillary as the flavour of the month. Ultimately it will be a same old same old D. Maybe Gore.

MCain will take the middle and Jeb will bring in the christians. All will be well.

Rumsfeld v. Powell and Franks
 

Shinseki. Yet, Bush claims that they listen to the generals.

I've been skimming this discussion, at best, but this caught my eye.

Spanky -- you should be able to agree with what Ty said. And the question of what Bush put on the table at Doha should be objectively verifiable.

And then you two can talk about something else.

Show me the motto!
 

Confession: I like borscht.

Greg Mankiw, Felix Salmon and Brad DeLong on the differences between Republicans and Democrats on free trade. Sounds about right to me. (Oddly enough, it was posted this afternoon. Something in the water?)

Show me the motto!
 

Why do you hate America?

Of course it caught your eye, because that is something Ty said and it was a minor sub issue, and having no eye for the relevant you globbed onto it.

The main thrust of the argument was Ty criticizing Bush for not being strong enough on Free Trade. I pointed out that that was totally ripe because Ty spent pages and pages on this board arguing with me against CAFTA a year ago. So how could he criticize Bush for not being strong enough on free trade, when he did not support Bush's biggest free trade accomplishment?

Further, to criticize Bush's commitment to free trade, Ty quotes an economist article but part of that article (which he strategically omitted) stated that Bush has been really strong on Free Trade.

Then after arguing that CAFTA wasn't a good deal because it didn't establish a balance playing field, something that someone who supports real free trade would never say, he says he is a free trader.

1) So he says he is a free trader. If he is a free trader then Penske is a pacifist.

2) He argues against CAFTA for pages and pages with me (I think the argument lasted at least four days), but then today says he is not sure he was ever against it (which he clearly was).

3) But then admits he still stands by his criticisms of CAFTA.

4) Then he says as a free trader that he is disappointed in Bush.

Don't you find it completely hypocritical that Ty does not support CAFTA, but then says as a "free trader" he is dissapointed in Bush for not supporting free trade enough? Is that not totally ridiculous and unsupportable?

Isn't it completely unsupportable when he says he supports free trade, but he supports the idea of a level playing field, which is a standard invented by unions because following that standard a free trade agreement would never pass the test? Is that not completely ridiculous?

If we can agree that Ty's position on these issues is completely ridiculous and irrational we can address any one of the side issues you want to address.