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March 25, 2009 03:02 PM UTC
80 Comments
He who has threatened all manner of economic calamity should the oil and gas regulations pass, accuses the Dems of using fear tactics, showing a photo of people who have flaming water coming out of their tap. Repeat–making spurious, disproven allegations that scare people about losing their livelihoods is normal, telling people about actual events is fear-mongering. Post-Independent:
I now return you to your regularly scheduled morning thread…
During yesterday’s 2nd reading, Penry made the claim that the new OGCC rules will “kill jobs and reduce production when we need more of both.”
Ignoring the fact that the claim is outright false in that the rules will do neither (I’ve now received workshop announcements from two consulting agencies offering to train me in how to abide by the new rules – for a hefty fee of course!).
But, hasn’t Penry been paying attention? There is a global glut of natural gas. The price has dropped over 70% since last summer. We do NOT need more production right now since there is not sufficient demand to absorb the current supply.
PS: HB-1292 just passed 3rd reading on a 21 to 13 vote. Do you think Ritter will veto this? 😉
The rules review bill (HB 1292) governs rules made in the past year by ALL state agencies. Chances of this being vetoed are exactly zero. (I realize you may have been joking, but for the benefit of those who don’t know the bill outside of the OGCC rules I thought an explanation might be in order.)
and his crew of “Soggy Bottom Boys”. They just simply can’t seem to get it right. Ever. They must feel that they are not bona fide if they do not attempt hypocritical attacks. This shallow politician, who has elevated fear tactics for years, now claims that sensible rules are brought about by fear? Go figure.
I suspect Penry’s perpetual singing of “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow” has more to do with his disappointing his hydrocarbon lobbyist friends than anything else.
Photoessay on the Somali Pirates and the joint task force protecting shipping:
http://www.boston.com/bigpictu…
blast them the hell out of the water!
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USA is spending about $30 – 50 Million per month to patrol the waters off Somalia.
Fer Pete’s sake,
the US Navy has 11 Supercarriers, and can only put 3 out on duty at a time, and one of those 3 is dedicated to supporting combat air patrols to find skinny guys with spears in canoes in the Indian Ocean.
I was surprised to learn that a carrier goes through 18 months refitting and retraining for every 6-month cruise.
The Navy has 2 big capabilities:
(1)___subs parked off Russia & China, ready to incinerate their cities with nuclear missiles; and
(2)___Aircraft Carriers that are effectively portable air force bases, that can support and sustain aerial combat operations until the Marines can secure a beachhead and the Army can secure territory for the Air Force to follow and build a golf course and Officers’ Club.
Oversimplified,
one third of one half of the Navy’s capabilities is tied up chasing down highway robbers, pirates, who pose no threat to USA.
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One of the interesting piracy attacks was against a Seabourne cruise ship off the Somali coast.
Seems the pirates fired on the ship with automatic weapons and RPGs, but the crew repelled them with firehoses and an LRAD (long range accoustic device).
An LRAD is basically a VERY loud (155db) bullhorn that can cause hearing loss and blurred vision.
Makes one wonder how prirates who can be driven off by firehoses and loud noise could capture a ship that was transporting actual weapons.
The guys in my band used to say that about me. One guy even told me I could make a transistor radio sound too loud.
Woz gets so many votes he’s not even in the bottom 2 – http://www.mercurynews.com/bre…
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though the cost of the war was mentioned.
If the War isn’t so important that it’s the first thing on the President’s mind,
then it is no longer worth the cost.
If he could give a speech or an interview and not once mention the sacrifices that continue to be made because HE hasn’t acted to end the war, then he must think that the war is no longer something he needs to deal with.
As an issue, he has finessed it, without actually dealing with it.
Shame.
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Sorry to break this to you, but the Iraq war was never worth the cost.
The really crappy thing about wars, both necessary and un-, is that once you’re this deep into one you can’t just say “never mind” and go home overnight. At least not if you have a shred of decency. See helicopters leaving Saigon.
On a brighter note, private insurers must be worried that substantial healthcare reform has a good chance of passing in the foreseeable future or they would NEVER be offering to let up on screwing the sick, something that has always been such an integral part of their business model:
http://www.latimes.com/busines…
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He has not acted yet to end the Iraq war.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
Unless, of course, there is a Presidential election in the US coming up in 2012, in which case he will find that being a War President is good for reelection prospects.
You believe in the guy. He gives you Hope.
Me, I see that there has been approximately zero change in policy. Ray Odierno, selected and promoted by Bush, and widely acknowledged to have sanctioned war crimes by US units under his command in 2004-05, is now the top US commander in Iraq.
It doesn’t help to be listening to the commanders on the ground when those commanders are known to be Bush loyalists, determined to “stay the course” in Iraq to eventually prove Bush was right – no matter how long it takes.
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If Obama is planning to conduct the entire withdrawal in 6 months anyway, not 16 or 19 months,
why can’t he start that now ?
Why wait another year ?
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I’m not going to argue. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
The commanders on the ground asked him to go from 16 months to 19 months. I guess they didn’t feel they could get it done on your time frame.
…jump in the Humvees and drive away. If this was an uncontested withdrawl (everybody shooting at us) it would take about 9 montths.
This will be a withdrawl under contact, which means it’s gonna take a while. That’s if Centcom has decided what says, what goes and what gets blown up.
16 months would’ve been hard. 19 is doable.
but I really have to tell you that attributing the SOFA to Obama isn’t any different than Libertad blaming him for the economic meltdown. Obama inherited both.
The good news? The SOFA was forced by Iraq. We don’t have to push them out of the nest, they’re fighting to get out. So be happy! But stop crediting Obama with sticking to it. He has to, just like McCain would’ve been forced to.
On your second part, hooray! If even the threat of reform makes this kind of thing possible, I’ll take that as actually doing something. I don’t mean that to sound bitchy either. I seriously enjoy that. But who here couldn’t complain about insurance companies all day, right?
you are just part of the same tired old crowd.
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but now that Obama says we can’t end it,
at least not right away,
is OK with that.
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most of the anti-war crowd are ignorant flower children who thought we could just have a big group hug, put everyone on a plane and leave and who are now defending Obama’s inexplicable failure to order any such thing because we are loath to criticize our hero, who can do no wrong in our star struck eyes. Wrong on all counts, Barron.
🙂
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I understand that’s not the same as Iraq, but the opponent in Iraq is not the Soviet Army; it’s guys with rifles and IED’s.
I’ve also been the Logistics Officer/ S-4 (supply & transportation) for an Infantry Battalion (at Fort Carson.) I have some idea of what it takes to move a unit.
We could be out of Iraq in 60 days. If the CINC gave the word, we would be out.
That’s not just me talking;
Gus Pagonis, who was the DISCOM Commander at Fort Carson when I was on active duty, was in charge of leaving after the first gulf war. He said in a Mother Jones article last year that, if we just abandoned the broke stuff, and stuff like CHU’s that aren’t worth retrieving, we could be out that quick.
Per the GAO report quoted by WaPo above, Obama plans to pull out in 6 months, NOT 19 months. But he plans to wait until next March, a year from now, before he starts pulling out.
(He will pull 2 Brigades out of Iraq before then, because he needs them to be in Afghanistan ASAP.)
You can joke about group hugs and SSG Dan can joke about saying we’re just going out for a smoke break, but gee whiz —
what do you think the Army is ? The Air Force ?
For lack of a better description, it’s a lean, mean fighting machine.
Things like PX’s and hospitals, and yes, Air Force units, take a while to move. That’s why it will take 6 months instead of 2. But if we abandoned those types of activities, 2 months is realistic.
By the way, when I talk about getting out of Iraq, that’s all I mean. I mean crossing the border into Kuwait, or Jordan, or Turkey. I don’t mean getting everyone back to where they came from, whether that’s Fort Hood or Grafenwoehr, Germany.
……
Droll is right when he/ she says that Obama inherited the mess: the SOFA, Petraeus, Odierno, the complete failure to rebuild either infrastructure or governance. Worst of all: the failure to prepare an indigenous authority with sufficient force (or legitimacy) to maintain security after we are gone.
But now that he’s in charge, he can fix things.
The SOFA doesn’t require us to stay until 2011; that’s the longest that we’re allowed to stay. Obama has said that he will pull combat troops out way before the SOFA requires, but he also says that he will leave about 1/3 of the combat forces that are there today, and relabel them as trainers.
The differences from the Bush approach are just sleight of hand.
If you believe, BlueCat, as I do, that conducting a hostile occupation of a foreign land hurts us,
then you too would be impatient that Obama is delaying the withdrawal for a year while he gets his bearings.
What reason has he given for staying the Bush course that has earned your support ?
Odierno has said we need to stay through the elections, which might be in December 2009, or might be later. But Odierno has also said that we will be there long after 2011.
Are he and Petraeus to set the national policy ? If so, watch out Nepal and Botswana.
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to shout at me for pointing out, again, that we’re being forced out of Iraq. Instead I get you assuming I’m a hard core Obama fan. What’s up with that?
…and still have a lot of friends in now. I still even have a copy of FM 100-5-1 in the basement. (and yes, that is sad…) But I can also talk bad about COBRA II because of it…
Yes, we could be out in 60 days – but we’d leave EVERYTHING behind, including all the contractor shit we shipped in for KBR and AAFES.
And we’d take some nasty casualties as the convoys drove out of Iraq, got snarled in traffic at the Kuwaiti border, and were attacked at every stop. The OPTEMPO for the air units would be so high, we’d probably suffer some casualties from dumb shit like missed maintenance and aviator fatigue.
6 Months, starting in March? If every swingin’ Richard started packing shit now, we started contracting every available ship afloat, and someone at CENTCOM has already made the decision on what stays, what goes and and what gets blown in place.
BTW, this is the time we need to use to plan for some in-transit R&R to help the troops decompress, and seek some mental health counseling before they get back to the world.
I say we do a reverse REFORGER – everybody gets flown into the CEGE sites, sits tight for two weeks, and gets free leave to drink in Germany, shop in Amsterdam, and sleep and relax.
This on top of Specter’s opposition to EFCA must be causing union boss heads to implode and ALCU heads to explode.
Where is your justice and which of you will defend her? Why hasn’t Secretary Solis done more in her short time; why can’t she articulate the administrations position that EFCA is needed? Would a video to Osama help defeat the need for the renewal of the Patriot Act?
Coming in, accusing Obama of being worse than a European country violating the Maastricht Treaty (happens at 3%).
I wonder how often this happens. I wish I had a chart comparing deficit spending by percent of the GDP. Oh, I do.
Obama’s numbers are impressive, definitely, but maybe instead of making stupid comparisons, Rep. Ryan could put more effort into fixing the problem.
http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?ind…
…not as good as when he did beer-bong handstands at the Delta’s Jungle Party last year, but still he totally rocked it! Although, at the Jungle Party, he elaboraed much more on about why the US is bound by Europe’s rules. He totally had a boner for the Geneva Conventions, etc.
This MEP could (and should) come give this speech to President Obama. How totally appropriate.
should give budget advice to Obama? Wow.
Anyway, I can’t bring myself to defend Brown, I just hate him so much, but I know what the Blair response would be.
Go back to pre ’97 and look at the inflation rate, unemployment, the state of the NHS, crime statistics, etc., etc., in the UK and you’ll get how ridiculous it is for a Tory to complain about how poor the country’s position is. With the Tories in power, the UK would be much worse off. Boom and bust doesn’t work.
Is a matter of perspective. Ebb and flow is the natural cycle of economics. Government trying to intervene narrows the curve but only because it eliminates everything above the horizon line under the auspices of trying to help everyone below it.
massive boom and catastrophic bust?
I almost let the richest part of get by! The bit about governments saving. Great idea, I wholeheartedly support rainy day funds. We should tap into our national one. I imagine from 2000 to 2006 it grew alot.
How to Arrest a Terrorist
Probably wouldn’t do it here, fear of being sued or something.
And the officer in the car was very brave to do what he did. He could have been – and maybe was – severely injured.
Reminds of an incident back in my LA days. Police were chasing a cycle on the Ventura Freeway. He exited and hoped to shoot across the surface street and back up the on ramp.
Meanwhile, coming along under the overpass, was an RTD bus……….. Splat.
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Lundberg is using old-school cue cards.
He should have rehearsed.
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Couldn’t they have started over when he stumbled over the words?
making several “points,” responding to almost any question, until he runs out of time and/or turns. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him stutter and I’ve rarely seen him use notes.
I guess he’s not that interested.
It’s like the newscast theme for a porn channel.
from HuffPo Cantor skipped the Obama press conference for…
Britney Spears dude?
If I was a betting man, I’d be inclined to wager that Churchill’s going to come out winning the case.
and unfortunate as it is, David Lane has done a pretty damn good job in demonstrating that CU was out to get Churchy fired for SOMETHING, and that the committee that recommended firing him was biased from the start.
CU’s lawyers haven’t scored many points at all.
Ward makes me want to throw up. I’ll be happy when it’s over.
That’s right. Sounds like Churchill has been able to turn the answers to several of the questions directed at him by CU’s attorney back against the attorney and CU. So much for interrogating Churchill.
Looks like Churchill just might get his job back. Or potentially a seven figure settlement, according to the Post. Ah, the legacy of Bill Owens…
But they never cared about his qualifications prior to the essay. It’s ridiculous to claim this isn’t all about the essay.
Everyone involved in hiring this idiot, probably because they were so pumped about having a Native American on the faculty (he most likely has zero Native American ancestry on top of everything else), ought to be fired. They’re the ones who really screwed up.
(I’ve only followed the trial, not the crap before) does it really matter why they looked into his qualifications? In my mind it’s the tough shit rule. If you’re going to piss people off, make sure there’s nothing to go after. Plagiarism=fired. Seems to me that’s all they should have to prove.
Again, new to this and tenure rules, so feel free to explain why (if) I’m wrong. 🙂
It’s a “fruit of the poisonous tree” theory — that CU ought to be punished for its witch hunt occasioned by outrage over Churchill’s Eichmann essay, by unwinding the results of that witch hunt — same as law enforcement is punished for forcing confessions after suspects assert their right to remain silent.
If the jury agrees the witch hunt was improper, then, Lane hopes, they’ll reverse whatever CU did based on that chain of events. After all, Churchill’s “scholarship” wasn’t hidden all those years and no one bothered checking it out.
about Ward but your poisonous tree theory is very apt. I just think that the geniuses responsible for hiring him in the first place ought to be fired, whatever the outcome for Ward. If they had done an even halfway decent job of checking his credentials and scholarship in the first place he never would have become a professor at CU. He doesn’t even have a real doctorate. He’s only there because of their negligence.
He was hired as a prof in 1990 and given tenure a year later so firing people for what can be seen as a mistake 17 years later (he was fired in 07) is a little ridiculous. Are the people that hired him as a prof still around?
With the exception of one example, all of the academic misconduct he committed (per the committee report) happened after 1990, the year he was hired as a professor. His credentials, while meager, were fine when he was hired. He had a relationship with the University and it’s not like there were many Ethnic Studies PhDs floating around looking to come to Boulder…
The argument that he shouldn’t have ever been hired is an easy one to make now, but at the time there was a pretty compelling case to give him the job.
And like Toodles says, how many of those folks are even still around? The former, and soon to be again, interim Chancellor, Phil DiStephano, was, IIRC. But any role he played in getting Churchill hired 20 years ago is easily dwarfed in his role getting him fired.
When Churchill was hired it was against the recommendation of the faculty hiring committee. Even then his weak credentials were obvious to those in his field.
But the administration decided they wanted a minority, etc, and thus hired him and gave him tenure.
This is what happens when university administrators micro-manage. Frankly, we need to reduce the influence of business expertise in those who run institutions of higher education.
The administration made a lousy decision and now they are hoping for a chance to get the toxic asset off their books; a bail out, so to speak.
an expectation of privacy, I think that’s the other argument from above, so I’ve been wondering about the “academic misconduct.”
Without getting into a huge thing, in your opinion (as a so far professional student :)), are the findings as bad as plagiarism makes them sound, or are they reasonably explained away for the jury?
The fact that the investigation stemmed from his 9/11 article doesn’t really matter. Well, it doesn’t matter to the State…the ACLU disagrees, in part…
I think the most important part of the “academic misconduct” Churchill committed isn’t the plagiarism, but the four counts of “falsifying information.” I mean, come on…he was basically just making shit up! It wasn’t a matter of interpretation or stating something as an opinion, he invented new, cold hard facts…and used other people’s research to back them up!
With the plagiarism charges, he has what some would consider a plausible explanation for what he did in one of the cases. But the other example, he just clearly copied someone else’s stuff and put his name on it.
Is that offense, of itself, enough to dismiss someone? It depends on who you ask. But I’ll tell you this, if you give the same 7 counts of AM to another professor who’s actually popular and hadn’t written a controversial 9/11 essay, I’d be willing to lay some pretty good cash that more often than not they’d be suspended, not fired.
The things he did were absolutely wrong, but even the committee was split on whether or not he should be fired.
http://www.denverpost.com/sear…
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http://www.denverpost.com/sear…
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Recommended column by Mike Littwin:
http://www.denverpost.com/sear…
an expectation of privacy, I think that’s the other argument from above, so I’ve been wondering about the “academic misconduct.”
Without getting into a huge thing, in your opinion (as a so far professional student :)), are the findings as bad as plagiarism makes them sound, or are they reasonably explained away for the jury?
I didn’t even hit “post.”
They also were aswoon with the chance to hire a Native American. Not a shred of evidence that he’s really that either.
I meant the above as a reply to Dabee’s comment before the last: “I’m not sure that’s the case…”
http://www.denverpost.com/sear…
“No”? No further interrogation by CU’s attorney on that point to hammer home a point against Churchill? OK, then…guess that’s not too important to the case, CU seems to be admitting.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t recall people who get honoraries being addressed as if they had a real degree.
And who is this “they?” Fred’s University and Pizza Parlor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H…
I’ve certainly heard of them given out to all sorts of people for righteous as well as nebulous reasons: e.g., Regis University gave Regis dropout Bill Murray, the actor, an honorary degree as a doctor of humanities.
The point is, though: Wouldn’t you have asked that of Churchill, pressed it further, if you happened to be CU’s attorney and you wanted to score points with the jury?
Just shows they were the ones who went ahead and hired him on the strength of shaky credentials. My brother and his wife are professors and they will tell you it is NOT easy getting tenure under the best of circumstances in recent years, much less without a real degree. Just shows how silly they were to jump at this guy.
Not saying he had NO degree
In that case, maybe the attorney for CU shouldn’t have brought Churchill’s “doctor” status at all if it doesn’t help CU’s case.
….has twenty, so the preponderance is that he qualifies! 🙂
As to ole Ben, he wasn’t in academia.
My recollection is that Ward was hired with a masters degree and everyone knew it. In fact, probably hadn’t received his honorary degree at that point.
I see from the Wiki that he got his BA and MA from Ivy League, highly acclaimed Sangamon State University and his honorary from Alfred University after giving a lecture.
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not sure what you meant
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parsing was being sarcastic.
much less a tenured Prof heading a dept. (did he head Ethnic Studies?) is almost unheard of without a PHD. Not saying it NEVER happens.
I don’t know how the law addresses it, but even if it was a political motivation, the stuff I read makes it pretty clear that Churchill stands guilty as charged of plagiarism. I can’t see the termination being wrong as long as that’s a demonstrable fact.
So what if the upper poobahs wanted him gone for just the old fashioned reason “We don’t like him?” It was good enough to get me pushed out of the door at my last job.
Plagiarist? Gone.
until that crap came out. Say whatever you want, liberal or conservative, but when you violate the basic tenets of academic work–then I have no sympathy for you.
If CU can’t prove that, then they deserve him back.