If you get to the Yearly Kos convention a couple days early, you might be in for a rude surprise.
The U.S. military plans to detonate a 700 ton explosive charge in a test called “Divine Strake” that will send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, a senior defense official said March 30.
”I don’t want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons,” said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency…He said the Russians have been notified of the test, which is scheduled for the first week of June at the Nevada test range. ”We’re also making sure that Las Vegas understands,” Tegnelia said.
Nothing to be alarmed about. What’s on your mind?
I think I’d rather be there for the mushroom cloud than attend Yearly Kos 🙂
why so bitter? There will a lot of cool people there and a lot of interesting things to do.
first of all Booman, there was a smiley after the comment so how you got ‘bitter’ out of that one is beyond me.
secondly, i’m not a democrat anymore and Markos has specifically stated (in retrospect of course) that Dkos is a partisan DEM site. that gave him justification for banning most of the really great posters there as they had a tendency, like many astute folk, to think for themselves.
thirdly, Markos is way into “branding” and i think that practice is for cattle and sheep (both types, the four-legged and the ones ready to go over the cliff after the one before them).
i’ll pass, happily.
sorry, i missed the emoticon. Were you banned from dkos? Why?
i was banned by DHinMI, who by the way didn’t have banning privileges when he did it). He went into the control panel and took away my rating ability when i troll rated him for a vicious attack on Madman (you know, the kind of insidious stuff DH is well known for).
Then when i called him on it months later i used his first name and he went back into the panel and banned me. I wrote an apology to he and Hunter because I didn’t know it was not ok to use D’s first or last name but they flipped me the bird.
They didn’t treat most of the people I grew to really admire on the site any better.
I wish accomplishment for any site that exposes Neocons and wingers but the site is a shadow of it’s former self and I mourn the fact. That’s why I post here sometimes, some of the wonderful folks here were banned as well and Dkos is much the worse for it.
I’ve had my run-ins with DH and I understand. Still, using his name without permission is a valid reason for banning you. We all expect and deserve to control our own anonymity.
Why was Madman banned, and what caused the problem with Marisacat?
by the way, i didn’t know using his first name wasn’t ok, i had seen it used on the site so i assumed it was ok. i used it for emphasis to let him know what he had done wasn’t ok. that would be a reason to put a longtime member on probation but not for permanent banning as it wasn’t done spitefully (and only his first name for goodness sakes).
it was a convenient excuse to remove someone he hated. he’s not a good person (for more reasons than i can elaborate here) and the fact that he’s valued there says alot.
Madman and Marisa were simply banned for being much smarter than those in power at Dkos, pure and simple. They are brilliant intellects and DH, Delaware Dem, FleetAdmiral and the other right-wing Dems couldn’t win the arguments in thread after thread so they banned them. They would have to give you the specifics because I wasn’t there in the final threads (i was banned first) but we all saw the handwriting on the wall when we openly called Reid et all Vichy Dems for their sellout of the base of the party.
Obviously we were ahead of our time but we’ll get the recognition from those Kossacks when the Dems get an apology from the Neocons for fucking the country up… how about the 12th of Never. That’s why i lost respect for Dkos, it was about winning just like the Neo’s, the rest of us prefer seeking the truth first.
heh.
that’s always been my critique of Madman. He doesn’t give a shit about political truth, only truth.
It puts him in a natural conflict. He’s not really a political thinker, but a philosophical one.
I think that is one reason why we see eye-to-eye on most things, but rarely agree on strategy.
well, i agree with him that truth is truth and strategy is strategy.
using the term ‘political truth’ alone makes my hair stand on end…. that sounds scarily like ‘truthiness’ to me.
Well, if truthiness didn’t rule the political world, half the polticians in Washington could admit they aren’t Christians tomorrow.
In politics, truth is the first casualty. BushCo just takes this to extreme and Goebbelsesque extremes.
without a standard, a goal, there can be no strategy, as the whole point of strategy is to design an overall campaign to accomplish an objective. If you don’t know what you value, if you can prioritize values, then you can have no strategy. You’re left with only the form of politics, without any real political truth.
What is endlessly hashed over by the clueless dems and the howling mob over at the Big Orange Frat House isn’t strategy, but tactics. You can have tactics without an overriding strategy to guide them, but that just leaves you with a string of meaningless battles, mindless flailing back and forth, hither and yon, like the armies in one of those old Monty Python animated bits.
Without a philosophy, you can’t practice politics, only peddle influence and graft. Politics REQUIRES values, and my neverending disgust and frustration arises from most peoples’ unwillingness to confront this basic fact.
The Republicans have truths, which they can recite, even if we think they’re being hypocritical about it. The Democrats can’t. Thus, they lose.
Well, I am too tired to get into it with you today, but I look forward to hashing it out with you soon.
I am having trouble getting around our differing analyses of strategic losing. I think our two party system is something that must be taken as a given and no time should be wasted kicking and screaming about it.
Grab ahold of the western end of the rope and pull.
there have been several instances in our history when third parties have been huge influences on events, even if they only ended up being absorbed into another party.
If we are left at the mercy of these two parties indefinitely, this country is doomed. Hell, look at the mess in PA. Rendell & Co are going down, and they’re doing so because they insist on fighting over one small group of voters, leaving other populations completely unrepresented. When that happens, the system is broken, and it’s corporate money and the meddling of churches that broke it.
well, I also called Testor, Massa, Clark and others Republican trojan horses. That was the last straw for the li’l martinet.
Yes, it’s a terrible thing to get banned from a site you like. Even worse if it’s without warning or good reason. Especially if they leave your writing up and just take your name off it. Awful. I wouldn’t associate with a site like that.
hi my friend.
I’m sure you know that that action was taken by somebody who no longer runs LSF, who did it without consulting the rest of us.
I opposed it then, as did Wilfred, and I think it’s a little unfair to tar us with that action.
Thanks, Madman, I very much appreciated your personal support then as I do now.
wilfred and I were both very upset, and we miss many of those who left/were forced out. Sadly, that rift got turned into some kind of either/or choosing of sides, something that shouldn’t have happened.
Live and learn.
Yes, it was all very sad, very unfortunate.
To this day i’ve not been able to find proof of anyone’s accusations there. Just he said/she said/he said and as far as i have been able to determine all 3 were equally wrong.
and throwing stones are we? Nothing I’ve ever seen in the blogosphere, and i mean nothing was as bankrupt as what the Unbossed people did to their own member Madman for some publicity. NOTHING.
i still have the e-mails planning it so please get out of your glass house. and then the entire thread was erased afterwards so they could hide the disgusting actions.
for shame.
For shame, indeed. I thought smearing was beneath you. If this is an attempt to actually communicate, you know my email.
i figured if you were interested in that kind of communication you would have used my e-mail to begin with as it remains the same but you chose this thread.
you started the stone tossing on this thread so i held up the mirror right here.
oh, and smearing?????? i have proof via the e-mail. and can you find the thread in your archive? just telling the truth, is it called a smear when it’s factual but not pretty?
then we must be smearing Bushco every day because we hold up their unpleasant facts to them.
smearing is what was done to those of us who remained at LSF and got it on track (taking the high road, no games behind the scenes and lots of work and increased viewership). So much nastiness was (and is still) directed to those of us not involved in any of that bad blood at the very beginning of the blog.
Proof? Email it to me then. I didn’t make anything personal in this thread. I pointed out in a general way what I feel is hypocrisy on your part. I guess it pushed a button. Maybe you should turn your mirror around.
and inoperable bullshit filter, a condition that renders him unwelcome on the more extreme of the right wing blogs…
that’s kind of you to say, thank you.
Some would say that that filter filled the place where my “tact” organ shoulda been. I don’t find myself missing my “tact” much, though, kinda like a gall bladder that’s been removed.
That’s the reason I never say more than ‘Bad Kitty’ to my cat.
What a considerate cat daddy you are.
Either that or I can’t post in the right diary. 🙂
while standing up to that bully, but got a report back from kos that it was just a glitch.
Still, the little recess brought me back over here. Too bad for you guys. (visualize appropriate emoticon)
Timed to scare away kossacks? 😉 (I’ll be there anyway.)
I was just thinking things are pretty strange when terrorist kidnappers are more humane than American “liberators” of Iraq. Conditions for Jill Carroll in the “Vengeance Brigade’s” lockup were apparently a good deal kinder than for US prisoners at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Another triumph for the credibility of “freedom”, US-style. From the NYT:
Divine? DIVINE??? Deeee-fucking-vine?!
What’s the second word? I forgot.
Jill Carroll, the reporter for Christian Science Monitor and the Italian ANSA newswire, was released today. Jill was kidnapped on January 7th, in Baghdad while waiting to interview a Suunite leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi. Her friend and guide, Allan Emwiyah, was murdered during the kidnapping.
Her kidnappers had asked the release of eight woman held by authorities on charges of terrorism.
In a televised interview Carroll declared that she had been treated well and now wished only to be with her family.
Didn’t realize they’d already set a test date. This is yet another horrific step in ensuring that the NPT is moot.
Long before I’d ever heard of Halliburton or KBR, Bechtel was on my ‘corporate global bad-boys’ radar. They have been making major moves into the nuclear industry and are now running the Nevada Test Site.
Bechtel took over the contract for Los Alamos Labs from the University of California in December (Lawrence Livermore Labs, on an earthquake fault in CA are now up for bid). Other nuclear concerns include building a missile-defense site in the South Pacific, and “is also the “environmental manager” at the Oak Ridge National Lab, which stores highly-enriched uranium, and is carrying out design work at the Yucca Mountain repository where the plan to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste has environmentalists and community activists up in arms.”
from the World Policy Institute’s Frida Berrigan, Privatizing the Apocalypse
“Political Truth,” Booman? Sometimes you really scare me! 🙂 Here’s what that phrase conjures for me:
Murray Waas has a new piece out:
John Sweeney out? Sandy Treadwell in?
Are Sweeney’s ethics and/or health problems enough to force him out of a re-election bid in NY-20?