Air America Bankrupt!

[Not Afraid]

Originally Posted by €uroMeinke

heh - before I read the whole thread I thought this was about another bankrupt airline

Yeah, I never flew them.

[Nephythys]

Do you really think the dems will make themselves popular on a platform of tax hikes, cutting military spending (cut and run) and impeachment proceedings-

heh- I'd love to see them try to sell that one.

They're bankrupt-that says something.

[JWBear]

Originally Posted by Nephythys

Do you really think the dems will make themselves popular on a platform of tax hikes, cutting military spending (cut and run) and impeachment proceedings...

Try something original, dear. Those arguments are old and trite.

[wendybeth]

Michael Savage has the most annoying radio voice, hands down. He also mangles the English language to an appalling degree and is a freaking psycho, but the voice thing trumps all the other negatives.

I never listened to Air America. I form my own opinions with regards to my political ideology. I do listen to Hate Radio on occasion, sometimes for the entertainment value and also to discover what new and sleazy things they might be up to. I'm also reasonably sure Sean Hannity's inflated head is going to reach the breaking point and he's going to explode on-air. Don't want to miss that event!

[Alex]

I agree about Michael Savage. But I'm so appalled by what he is saying that I don't have time to be turned off by his voice.

Whereas with Franken I don't have a problem with what he is saying so have plenty of time for his voice to grate on every last nerve.

[Tref]

Well, with or without a witness, I stand by the eloquence of my previous statements (that is, if I may be so bold as to paraphrase the great, Blackford Oakes, during his run for the NY mayorship)

Time was co-started by the great fascist and short order cook, Henry Luce. And Henry, boy, he was a Republican of some reknown -- what! His scent still marks the pages of Time. Its true, I tells ya! For I myself have smelt the glossy pages of the magazine. I have pressed my nose to the paper. I have breathed in the pain. Just as an animal brought to slaughter is thought to secrete its final moment of agony into the meat (and through the meat into our souls), so did Luce leave his tortured secretions into the inner workings of Time Magazine. The neo-cons call it the liberal media because the conservatives feed off deception. What is black is white and what is white is all right with the U.S. Senator from Virginia. Deception! ... Good gracious, man, why else would Fox news list Foley as a (D) on the bottom news scroll? And why would anybody support a news organisation that would do so? I ask this not as a Democrat but as a human being, Ladies and Gentleman of the jury.

Amen. Can I get a witness?

[scaeagles]

Perspective is an interesting thing....Time is a right leaning magazine? That cracks me up.

[innerSpaceman]

Time is an extremely pro-business magazine, with liberal politcal leanings. So which is it?

In any event, despite gaffes here and there, some big, some small, the overall, over-the-decades repuation for certain press entities allows them to be considered legitimate and mainstream ... no matter what Leo may think of them personally.

So like it or not, Leo, Time Magazine is mainstream media. And The Lancet is about as prestigious a journal as you can find. On the conservative side, we accept The Wall Street Journal as mainstream. But we do not have to accept Fox News. It does not have that reputation attained over the decades.


And so I will continue to quote Time and The New York Times and The Lancet and, yes, The Wall Street Journal as authoritative journalism. I have plenty of far-more-left-leaning press sources that I do not trot out here. But disputing - on face, with no evidence - reports in Time or the NY Times or other mainstream, reputed journals of record bespeaks only a pathetic bankruptcy of real argument.

[Alex]

Many people on the left do not accept the WSJ as legitimate because of the conservative position of its editorial page.

The Lancet is certainly an authority and respectable publication. But that does not mean that everything it prints has the golden glow of received truth. The 2004 version of the report (published in The Lancet as well) certainly did not and had significant issues.

I read the whole article earlier today and feel better about some issues. One issue I have is that in the caveats section the authors seem to ignore, dismiss, or overlook some significant motivations for lying or exaggeration by interviewees and the report also says that 92% of the reported deaths had death certificates in support but then doesn't explain why these official documents are not part of the government agency death counts.

I did learn more about where their number for the pre-war mortality rate came from. It is from the same survey results but would be subject to some of the same reporting biases (that is, exaggeration of post-war fatalities would likely go hand-in-hand with minimization of pre-war fatalities) and the authors do not address why their resulting pre-war mortality rate (5.5/1000/year) is so much lower than the results of similar quantifications done before the actual war (generally 6.5 or higher).

It is also confusing in that it simultaneously mentions that the biggest cause of violent death recently is car bombs but then offhandedly mentioned that coalition forces are reported to shoot indiscriminately on crowds.

One thing that gets overlooked in the Right's rush to denounce is that the report lays most of the blame on the insurgency and terrorism. The authors obviously feel that this is the fault of the coalition as well but the Right does not and I would think much political hay could be made (at least in Iraq) by emphasizing just how much damage the insurgency has done to Iraqi civilians.

I still have problems with what I read (where are the 600,000 bodies, or more since the authors feel their results are conservative, that they think have died that doe not show up in any official counts. That is a lot of bodies). But they are somewhat muted from this morning and do address several issues I had with the first survey.

[Alex]

Whoops, got confused by the Lancet reference and put that here instead of the random political thoughts thread.