likearock

No, I think I'll wait for an answer to my question. Can you give one? Saying that Hamas can't stop shooting rockets into Israel because Israel keeps invading is like saying that a husband has to keep beating his wife because the wife keeps calling the cops. If they stop shooting the rockets, Israel will stop invading.

Right. Too bad McCain seems to have done a complete 180 on the issue.

Not if it's a Norwegian Blue, pining for the fjords. :-)

And yet, those kinds of protectionist attacks are very effective politically. Look what happened to Obama in Ohio after the NAFTA dustup. In case it's not clear, I agree that it's a bogus attack. I just wouldn't call something stupid when it can score some serious points .

Interesting sidelight: McCain's role in the waterboarding debate. Apparently, he voted with Bush on this one in spite of his past opposition to torture.

Ummm - this sounds like perfect example of the "physician as God" attitude. You're picking at the wording of her post and completely ignoring the substance of it. It must be very difficult to give a patient life-saving advice and have that advice ignored. The fact that she is not god means she has to "allow" it.

Dumb, no. Unfair, yes. We should be shopping around for the best price when it comes to big ticket defense contracts. But it's a very effective attack, especially when the US is posting ever grimmer job numbers. It will be interesting to see if McCain can stick to his guns.

Good to hear the are experienced freefliers at your tunnel. I may just make it up there some day to try some of that low speed sit. I'm guessing only the real superstars can even think about going headdown there, am I right?

You can be an accomplished freeflier without doing freefly in the sky, without ever making a jump. That's pretty obvious to anyone who's spent any time in the tunnel. However, not all tunnel instructors have the same amount of freefly skills. The question is: do any of your instructors have solid freefly skills?

Who exactly did he fight?

Wrong again. If you take a new flier to the "crappy" tunnels first, they will learn to maximize lift, regardless of suit. When they graduate to a "better" tunnel , they should excel, having already learned how to generate lift from every available surface... look at the best tunnelfliers on the planet... see where they came from... That's the point though. They are the best tunnefliers on the planet. I'm sure some of them can learn headdown at 120 mph. For those of us who are mere mortals (and may be carrying a little extra weight), it can be very frustrating and expensive to try to master freefly positions at that speed.

On the other hand, it would be the most honest choice she could make. Let's face it, if she's president, he'll be de facto VP anyway. What's the sense of having another, more inconsequential one?

Quite true. But it can be wastefully frustrating to try and learn sitfly when the speeds are low. Once you've learned it though, that's the time to challenge yourself at slower speeds.

Fair enough, but I haven't heard anyone accusing Ecuador of willfully harbouring FARC. Their is a big difference between that and having someone else's problem hiding in your jungle. Like I said, "if you can't control your borders" willfully or not. But as a matter of fact there has been some evidence of chumminess with FARC with regards to both Ecuador and Venezuela: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1719196,00.html?imw=Y http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking_news/story/444112.html

The problem with these arguments is that no one seems to inclined to doing the "how would I feel if it happened to me" exercises. If Mexico were allowing an anti-American group to shoot rockets into the San Diego suburbs or if the US condoned violent Quebec separatists conducting operations from Vermont, killing Canadians. If a country can't control its borders in order to keep out groups that are attacking another country, it deserves to be attacked itself. Every country has the right of self-defense, including Turkey, Colombia, Israel, and even the US.

Nothing. The Colombians are not starting a campaign of encroaching on their neighbours; they had a significant "target of opportunity" and they took it. Ecuador is rightly pissed, but they aren't going to do anything about it. Explain why they are "rightly pissed". How do you expect to be treated when you harbor a political group whose main purpose is the violent overthrow of a bordering country?

No argument there. Just wondering why you have an impossible, six-digit C license in your profile (see we do pay attention).

Yeah, things like tracking, atmonauti, birdman, and canopy swooping are all kind of problematic in a vertical wind tunnel. Maybe when someone comes out with a horizontal wind tunnel...

I don't have a problem with someone who was busted their ass for a good portion of their lives to get a grip on life, getting an advantage. I've got to hand it to you, you have the courage of your convictions. You will be willing to pay more taxes (because that's what will happen to those with a smaller income-consumption ratio) in order that the country has better incentives for people to become rich.

The problem with any tax system is that someone is going to take a beating. For some reason, punishing industrious, self motivated people seems to be all the rage. It's like punishing you in school if you strive for excellence, and rewarding you, if you choose to be a dumb ass. If you go from an tax based on income to a tax based on consumption, who do you think would benefit? Wouldn't it be those whose income-to-consumption ratio is highest? Wouldn't that tend to be the richer people? CEOs making 8 figures are probably going to spend a much smaller fraction of their income than someone making 50K. And none of the elaborate rebate/prebate nonsense is going to make a big difference in that basic pattern. The richer you are, the proportionally less you'll have to pay in a consumption-based tax. You may want to discount the guy making 50k as a dumb ass but there are a lot of them out there, many with families. The "fair" tax gives them the shaft.

AH! Thank you rock! You rock! 1) It's a zero sum game only if you assume no economic growth as a result of the switch. I don't. And no responsible economist would assume such a result. I think it's been abundantly evident over the recent past that tax policy has at best a limited effect on economic growth. So I repeat the question, assuming that we have a fixed amount of revenue that has to be raised by taxes, and assuming that our rate of growth with be more or less comparable to past experience, who exactly would be better off and who would be worse of by switching to FairTax? The difference is people are not taxed on what they buy now, at least not on the level they would have to be for the FairTax to support a multi-trillion dollar federal budget. No matter how you cut it, raising taxes on consumption will act as a disincentive to consumption and will work directly against stimulating the economy.

it took the markets (say sp500) about a year to return to the level of early 2002 where they hovered until into 2005. For reference, the early 2002 level is roughly the same mid 1998. So this pattern obviously falls *way* short of historical expectations of market growth - bubbles or not - and "shooting up" is a bit much spin and flattery. I'm not sure where you get your data, but here's where I get mine. As you can see, from the time of the beginning of the Iraq war in March, 2003 to sometime in the middle of 2007 there's been a consistent, substantial rise in the S&P index. BTW, I can't seem to find any confirmation of your original claim: The value of the S&P on 9/28/01, the last business day of the month, was 1,040.94. Quite a bit lower than its current 1,330.

Actually, it's not a myth. Lower taxes result in higher revenue, because of the positive effects on the economy. Revenue has been at an all time high, but unfortunately, so has spending. Yes, the war is expensive, but so are 2 million rubbers a day shipped to Africa, and thousands of other stupid vote buying schemes. But, we're missing the point. THe FairTax is actually being sponsored by both Dems and Republicans. It's a way to create revenue without penalizing hard work/smart work/entrepreneurial talent. I have two questions for the FairTax proponents: 1) Assuming that we have a fixed amount of revenue that has to be raised by taxes, who exactly would be better off and who would be worse of by switching to FairTax? Taxes are a zero-sum framework. There's no way for everyone to benefit. 2) Since the heart of the FairTax is to tax people on consumption and spending, won't that be the ultimate de-stimulus for the economy?

Well judging from the profile (USPA C 270819 license), I'd say most likely. I don't think we've broken into 6 digits yet!

And the NASADAQ is at half the level it was in 2000. i chose the Sept 2001 mark since that already factored in most of the usual excuses (9/11, .com-bubble, Clinton in general, ...) But if you want to factor in 9/11, you have to take the price after 9/11 took full effect on the markets. The better comparison would be with Oct 4, 2002, when the S&P was at 800. It's still up 66% since then. the down spike of 9/11 was recovered after about 2 weeks. As much as 9/11 was a tragedy -- in huge economy like the US with a $14Triliion GPD the attacks themselves and the destruction of a handful of buildings is a drop in the bucket. in October 2002 war was looming already -- and what stock markets hate even more than war itself is the uncertainty of a war on the horizon. The markets may hate the uncertainty of war but they definitely didn't hate the war itself. All major indexes shot up considerably during the early years of the Iraq war. But there was no baisse following late 2002. October 4 marked the rock bottom and things went up from there. I do agree with you that Iraq wasn't a necessary consequence of 9/11 however.