Bernie's bill would require that 75% of classes be taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty.

But keep trying to parse.

The primary problem that ultimately confounded and tripped up the Bush administration in Iraq can be neatly summed up by the following -- and rather cynical, IMHO -- quote from Andrew Card, Bush's former White House chief of staff, who told the New York Times in September 2002 (and this article certainly bears re-reading, in light of the present discussion):

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

As I said earlier, we were talking about a grave issue of war and peace -- and rather than engage the public on that mature level, the Bush administration consciously managed the discussion as though they were merely trying to sell us a new car.

And while the Bush administration undoubtedly succeeded in the short term, and as a result got the war the president and vice president so desperately craved, that cynical and disingenuous approach ultimately has had some profoundly adverse consequences for them over the long run.

There is a direct correlation between that administration's subsequent loss of institutional and personal credibility, and people's gradual but inevitable realization that they'd been had, once no WMD were found and Iraqi insurgents stepped up their violent efforts against the U.S.-British occupation.

Once the public's blinders were blown away by Team Bush's catastrophically inept response to Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, it really didn't take long for people to then revisit the subject of the Iraq War. Thus, many Americans also discovered in retrospect that the proponents' arguments for invasion were actually much less compelling at second glance, than they were three years prior when Mr. Card's marketing plan was first offered for public consumption.

Iraq is an artificial construct of the West.   In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration supported Saddam Hussein because he was a check against Iran.  Thus, the photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.

Bush I understood that taking out Saddam Hussein would destabilize the Mid-East, and so he did not do that.

Bush II and Cheney wanted a war against Iraq, and lied, yes, lied about the what the intelligence said.  So Bush invades Iraq and takes out the Baathist (Sunni) rulers.  Thus, Iran was immediately benefited.  

With the Sunni Awakening, or the Sunni Chieftains turning on Sunni Al Qaeda, a lull ensued. But that occurred while the U.S. was running the show.  After the Shias take over and start marginalizing the Sunni, the country was bound to fly apart.  Again, Iraq was like Yugoslavia--a false construct bound to fragment once the lid of military rule and dictatorship was lifted.

As to a residual U.S. force, there is no evidence that 10,000 troops (the actual number being discussed was 1,500)  would have made a difference.  Without Sunni co-operation, 100,000 U.S. troops could not keep the peace.  If we had 10,000 troops in Iraq, the most likely result given past history, would be our troops engulfed in a war, just like 2006.

That's probably because you're viewing and discussing both concepts as though they are somehow mutually exclusive, when they're actually not. Whereas, I'm offering that the Iraq War was both a serious mistake of overall conceptualization and physical execution, AND a serious war crime due to its patently false rationale and construct, and the disingenuous manner in which it was initially presented to Congress and the American people.

Sadly but hardly surprising, the war's architects and proponents within the late Bush administration and the Republican Party have thus far studiously refused to take any responsibility whatsoever for the ensuing debacle, and instead seek to deflect it elsewhere, anywhere but where it should properly be.

And at this point in time, these people have proved themselves utterly incapable of looking at the subject with any degree of rationality and objectivity, since they quite obviously have a dog in the hunt, and any admission of culpability to that effect on their part could have legal consequences.

Therefore, it's simply foolish to look to them and somehow expect that some honest answers will be forthcoming from that quarter. Your apparent attempt to rewrite that history for their own selfish purposes is the hallmark of an enabler and an apologist, which fails to cast you in a very flattering light here.

So, if you really seek the truth about Iraq as you claim to be doing, then you first need to open your eyes to the actual evidence that's laid out in front of you and follow it where it leads you, rather than continue to pound square pegs into round holes, as you're doing here.

Because for anyone who's really and truly being honest with themselves, that evidence can lead them to no other conclusion than that:

• The American people were clearly misled into accepting battle in Iraq under some appallingly false pretenses; and further
  
• The repeated deceptions we endured en route to this profound tragedy were not merely the result of some honest mistakes by the Bush administration, but were instead due to some entirely deliberate and conscious choices on their part.

Jeez, do think Hillary and the dems who voted to go into Iraq had not looked at anything other what Bush and other top people had said?

Bob Graham no slouch when it comes to intelligence, requested the 2002 NIE. When it was delivered he was one of the few senators who read past the alarmist, incorrect statements of the summary to find

that reading the full, classified 2002 NIE led him to vote against the war resolution. He had urged his colleagues to read the entire 92-page classified report prior to the vote. Graham said in a National Public Radio interview in June 2007 that he found the report to be "pocked with dissent, conditions, [and] minority opinions on a variety of critical issues."

History has proven that the conclusions of the conclusion of the NIE were absolutely false. The Senate committee that investigated found

A groupthink dynamic led analysts, collectors and managers to interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program.
Groupthink was so pervasive that formalized IC mechanisms established to challenge assumptions and groupthink were not utilized.
In a few significant instances, the analysis in the Iraq NIE suffered from a "layering" effect whereby analysts based assessments on previous judgments without carrying forward the uncertainties of the underlying judgments.

Blix more than anything wanted more time to confirm his initial findings that there were no WMD.  But for Cheney saying that Iraq already had nukes, the American people would have waited for a few more months (Blix said he could finish within a year.) Then we would have known for sure there were no WMD at all, let  alone nukes.

If he was so damn sure, what didn't he speak up louder and more clearly?
...
Why didn't he speak more forcefully?

His job was not to convince anyone, his job was to inspect Iraq for WMD's and put it in a report. He did his job, the people who ignored his reports did not do theirs.

Green, it is painfully obvious you are not interested in the truth.  The rational you are using is wearing thinner and thinner, to the point of blaming the inspector for not speaking louder and more forcefully.

Repack Rider: "Uncritical thinkers like yourself and everyone who thought invading Iraq was a good idea are what put our country in the mess it is in. Thanks for nothing."

... you're not talking to me. I opposed the Iraq War from the very moment it became readily apparent in the fall of 2002 that the Bush administration was not at all interested in determining conclusively whether or not Saddam had WMD and nuclear capability, but were instead determined to invade and occupy Iraq in any event.

The Gallup Poll in March 2003 showed that Americans by and large not only supported the Iraq War but did so by a rather unambiguous and decisive margin. That is a basic and well-documented fact of history. Let's please not engage in a rewriting of that history for whatever our own political purposes, lest we show ourselves to be no more honest than the wingbats we decry.

So, either you live in some exclusively liberal enclave that's just this side of Nirvana, a magical place where everyone thinks and believes just as you do, or many of the people with whom you're presently conversing are probably not being honest with you about the subject, perhaps because they've instead chosen to rationalize their own initial feelings subsequent to the event, in order to recast themselves in a more flattering intellectual light given what actually happened in Iraq.

And that's no small wonder, since few people will readily admit in public without some prompting that they totally got it wrong back then, and / or acknowledge that they willingly got taken for a spin by our own president. That's why so many declared and prospective Republican presidential candidates are presently twisting themselves into pretzels while trying to explain their own respective positions regarding Iraq.

So really, the notion that EVERYBODY you knew back then opposed the war and didn't believe the Bush administration's arguments for invasion is just this side of preposterous, IMHO. And that's because the odds of that actually being the case simply do not correlate statistically with the numerous public polls that were conducted on the question, both prior to the March 2003 invasion and after the seizure of Baghdad by U.S. forces and President Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" less than two months later.

72% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So, if you honestly don't know ANY of these people, then as best as I can surmise from such an admission / claim:

(1) You've been keeping some remarkably exclusive company during these past many years, since all your relatives, friends and acquaintances are members of that remaining 28% demographic; or

(2) You have been and are currently living an extraordinarily cloistered existence, politically speaking; or

(3) You've consciously or unconsciously chosen to block out everything and everyone that doesn't comport to your particular worldview.

I think that the idea that "the whole world thinks he has WMDs" canard has always been overstated. There was plenty of skepticism in most intelligence agencies. The "common wisdom" of the time was more politically driven then based on  any kind kind of hard intelligence.Obviously there was never any hard evidence of a program that didn't exist.

Bush and Cheney kept insisting that they had hard evidence that did not exist, they knew it, they used it even after it was debunked. They lied.

And because the facts as later presented by the special counsel clearly showed that Libby and Rove were at the very heart of the scandal, the fact that both men had lied to Bush about the matter is supposedly why -- according to these same insiders -- he refused to grant Libby a full pardon, even as he commuted his sentence, and why Rove was pressured / asked to resign.

While such contentions are quite obviously self-serving in Bush's case, they also sound perfectly plausible.

You know, maybe it's either due to my age (54) or my own personal reticence on such matters, but I've never really totally understood or gotten the appeal of cybersex, sexting, etc. But given how many people engage in those sorts of activities, and while it's certainly not my place to judge others in that respect, I honestly don't think many of them quite grasp the potentially adverse consequences of their online proclivities, even in the wake of Anthony Weiner's dicpix, etc.

I had to talk to my then-18-year-old nephew a few years ago, because he had foolishly posted a photo of himself from some high school party, holding a rolled-up dollar bill to his nose with his face bent down toward a mirror and several lines of coke, all in plain view. (And he should consider himself lucky that it was me who discovered that particular online post, and not my brother or sister-in-law.) That's why I always warned the girls to be very careful and fully cognizant of what they chose to post online to Facebook, et al.

Because the following bears repeating, even here: Once you throw this stuff out there into the ether, it's going to be floating out there in perpetuity even if you eventually delete it from your page, thread, etc. And it can come back to haunt you at some future date and inconvenient occasion, when you neither expect nor welcome someone else perusing your personal retrospective of private times past.

Well, except for the part where the occupant of the van winds up dead as a result of a severed spine that didn't sever itself.

Rich, white family: victims

Poor, black man: oh, what's the difference?  He dies now or someone shoots him dead or he dies of a drug overdose later - who cares? if the cops "helped" the process along, we should probably be thanking them, not charging them.

Does that make him legit or the rich guy a thug?