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More on Richard Paey

Whatever respect I had for you was totally squandered by the evil troofers you have affiliated with.

Congressman Paul has repudiated the 9/11 truthers many times. I can source that if you like.

No more ludicrous than yours and Ron Paul's understanding. He was the one comparing the 3,000 deaths on 9/11 with highway death rates and you compared it to the chances of being struck by lightning. Now you're saying you think we should take it seriously. Then what is the point of your ridiculous comparisons with lightning and traffic accidents?

Saying that we should take it seriously is not the same as saying the government should be given broad new police powers.

Your second sentence does not follow from your first. Making the connection would require making an argument of some kind.

In that vein, I will refer you to the second paragraph of my comment at #146.

Does your handle refer to Dr. Frank of the Mr. T Experience? You've inspired me to break out my copy of Everyone's Entitled to Their Own Opinion. I haven't listened to that in a long time.

That's was pretty good. There's also a rap video for T. Lee Horne, III, who was the Libertarian Party candidate for Louisiana Governor last year.

T. Lee Horne, III for Governor Music Video

So that's why he throws the word "neocon" around so much. What does that word mean again?

Irving Kristol tells you here.

Yes you did. You have been saying, as Ron Paul did, that the chance of getting killed due to a terrorist attack is much lower than getting killed in an accident on the highway, getting struck by lightning, etc.

Not the same as saying that nothing should be done about it.

Before the first attack on the WTC, the chances of getting killed in a terrorist attack were zero.

Wrong. And completely ridiculous.

Then the chances went up after the first attack on the WTC in 1993, and again the chances went up (considerably this time) after 9/11/01. With each successive attack on our soil (not to mention the numerous attacks on our interests outside of this country), the chances get better and better.

This shows a ludicrous misunderstanding of probability.

Just how many American deaths does it take before we take radical Islam seriously and try to eradicate it?

We should take it seriously now. Again, no one said otherwise.

Ron Paul could also ask the question: how many should die from terror attacks before it is reasonable for us to adopt the major characteristics of a police state, as some have suggested we must do?

The only proper answer is that we will fight to the last man before we accept tyranny.

In the words of Dwight Eisenhower:

"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government."

After this happened did conservatives and Republicans demand a Patriot Act?

You're absolutely right. The USA PATRIOT act was loaded with powers that the Reno DoJ had been demanding for years, and that the Republican Congress blocked. When the actual USA PATRIOT act was proposed post-9/11, Dick Armey opposed many of its provisions saying, "One of these hotshots from the Justice Department said, 'This isn't new; we've been asking for this for a long time.' I said, 'We've been saying no for a long time.'"

On top of that, the version that came out of the Democratic controlled Senate was worse than the one from the Republican House. Why? When Grover Norquist asked Russ Feingold that question, he answered by pointing across the room at Tom Daschle and said, "Because Daschle told us to fold."

Yeah, good point. Guess we need to ignore the terrorist for awhile until they dump a nuke in Tulsa or a few bits of nerve agent in Pittsburgh or something.

When you dig up a suggestion from Congressman Paul that we ignore the terrorists, let me know.

Yeah, you’re right. We should just sit back and relax until the Islamofascists have figured out how to turn New York City into a mushroom cloud. Until then, it’s not worth worrying about.

No one suggested anything remotely like what you just said.

There are about 75 lightning deaths in America each year. That means that in 2001 you had about one chance in 4,000,000 of dying from a lightning strike. That compares to a one in 100,000 chance of dying in the 9/11 attacks, or a 40 times greater chance than dying from a lightning strike.

Yes, but 2001 is not the only year in which terrorist attacks have been used as a weapon. They've been used for a very long time, and for maximum accuracy, the threat needs to be assessed with as large a sample size as possible. The actual threat of dying from a terrorist attack is astronomical. About the same as a lightning strike - and that's when you include September 11th in the statistics.

But even if you look at only 2001, the death rate from terrorist attacks was, as you said, about 1 in 100,000. The overall homicide rate in 2001 was 5.6 per 100,000. Yet, in spite of the fact that you were five times more likely to be killed in an ordinary homicide than in a terrorist attack, no one has suggested the government be given broad new powers to deal with the homicide threat.

The list might want to see this one. In comment #48 I posted an excerpt from an article comparing the threat from terrorism to those of other remote threats.

Source?

There are many. Here's one:

A false sense of insecurity? How does the risk of terrorism measure up against everyday dangers?

For all the attention it evokes, terrorism actually causes rather little damage and the likelihood that any individual will become a victim in most places is microscopic. Those adept at hyperbole like to proclaim that we live in "the age of terror." However, while obviously deeply tragic for those directly involved, the number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism is generally only a few hundred a year, tiny compared to the numbers who die in most civil wars or from automobile accidents. In fact, in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.

Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

If you could stop pointing and shrieking long enough to pay attention to what's being said, you might learn something. You're about as likely to be killed by a lightning strike as by a terrorist attack. The government's post-9/11 legislation was an overreaction and we do need to keep it in perspective.

Time to bring em home.

An excellent blog by a soldier just returned from Iraq, Army of Dude describes his arrival back home:

It has been a week since our triumphant return to the states, to America, the first world. And as it wasn’t quite like I imagined in June, it was every bit as wonderful and surreal as I thought it would be. Every moment leading up to the march to the gym was met with cheers and hysterical laughter. Getting off the plane, turning in our guns, getting on a bus…at every step we got closer to seeing loved ones. You could feel it in your face and hear it in the voice of anyone you talked to.

We took a bus to the base gym, where our friends and family waited for us. We stopped short to get lined up nice and neat so we could march in with our backpacks and laptop cases around our necks. Near the entrance there were people already holding signs and clapping. Someone yelled, “hey, Horton!” but luckily I wasn’t met with a barrage of cabbage and apple cores. A few more steps and we entered the gym. By the crowd’s reaction, it’s as if we won the Superbowl. We stopped in the center and it was still so loud no one heard the shortest speech of all time given by a general. “Good job etc, proud of you all yadda yadda, be safe and so forth.” On that note, it became a mad house as people rushed from the bleachers and into the scattered formation. Foregoing all military discipline, I looked around the room while at attention to locate my family. As the gym started to clear out I found Bryan, also family-less, and we agreed to look together. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of my dad running up, with my mom not far behind and with her, Lauren.

One of the first things I said to my dad after a big hug was, man, that was a long twelve months.

Seeing my mom get teary-eyed almost made me let loose, but I held my composure by making a point to. Lauren told me she wasn’t going to be there, as to make it a family event. But she decided to come and we’re both glad she did. A beautiful moment with a beautiful woman. Yes, this is what I’ve been missing.

One of my favorite bloggers, Jim Henley, commented on this, and I really encourage everyone to read the whole thing:

Make no mistake, if the Congress “votes against money for the troops” and the angry antiwar “base” forces a precipitous withdrawal, you’ll see this nightmare scenario replicated on bases all over America, even in Western Europe and East Asia - a hundred-fifty thousand little “defeats.”

Sorry, SJackson is absolutely correct in his assertion that Ron Paul is “advertised as a regular columnist for the American Free Press”. In support of this claim I provide the following link: http://www.americanfreepress.net/Media_Kit_Ad_Sizes_New.pdf

Yes, I have seen that quote before. SJackson has used it several times. The problem is that, as I said, these aren't columns written for the AFP. They're merely reprints of uncopyrighted columns from his House website. Yet, SJackson continues to imply that they were written for the AFP by using that misleading quote.

BTW, if you use the google search engine on the AFP home page limiting the search to AFP, you’ll get 144 hits on Paul and 51 on Ron Paul within that website.

Nearly all of those are articles which merely mention Congressman Paul at some point. Only a couple appear to actually be written by him.

About the only defense remaining to you and GWB would be a claim that Ron Paul has not authorized them to use his name or his work. That is a rather weak defense open to attack along these lines: “Why hasn’t Ron Paul denied an organization of this nature, the use of his name or works?”

He hasn't specifically authorized them to do so. I don't know whether he could deny them permission to use his columns while maintaining their status as uncopyrighted works, so having them reprinted in some undesirable places is the price you pay for having the columns distributed as widely as possible.

>>>UH OH. So Ron Paul is a columnist for a white supremacist publication? It’s not just his misfortune to have these people as followers, he actually is one of them? It’s going to be a little harder for him to disassociate convincingly.

Let’s give Paul the benefit of the doubt that he had no background on what this site was really about when submitted articles to them.

Congressman Paul is not, in fact, a columnist for the American Free Press. All that publication does is reprint the columns from his House website (which are not copyrighted).

SJackson has been corrected on this point in the past (I encourage you to read George W. Bush's condemnation in post 99), yet continues to insinuate that Paul writes for them by using misleading phrasing (as in post #384 - "But yes, Ron Paul is advertised as a regular columnist for the American Free Press").