Robski

Not hard to score points though, it's like shooting ducks in a barrel.

Cato is one of several think tanks providing corporate America and its political allies with research, "expert" testimonials, and most importantly, ideological direction. In a city thick with think tanks, these Washington-based outfits stand out for the seriousness of their opposition to union goals.

Founded in 1977 by industrialist Charles Koch and financial analyst Edward Crane, the Cato Institute presently boasts a full-time staff of 35, more than 60 adjunct scholars and a $4.5 million annual budget. Cato’s board of directors brings together heads of a variety of companies, from Holiday Health Spas to Tamko Asphalt Products. The heavyweights, though, are billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, president and CEO of The News Corp. Ltd., and Frederick W. Smith, chairman and CEO of Federal Express Corp

http://www.ranknfile-ue.org/uen_rwtanks.html#TARGET

Op-Eds for Sale

A columnist from a libertarian think tank admits accepting payments to promote an indicted lobbyist's clients. Will more examples follow?

A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients. Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley News Service, told BusinessWeek Online that he had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid '90s.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflas..._1037_db016.htm

For the third year in a row, conservative or right-leaning think tanks in 1997 provided more than half of major media's think tank citations, according to FAIR's third annual survey of major newspaper and broadcast media citations in the Nexis computer database. Think tanks of the right provided 53 percent of citations, while progressive or left-leaning think tanks received just 16 percent of total citations.

Half of the ten most-cited think tanks are conservative or right-leaning, including three of the top four. The centrist Brookings Institution held the top spot as the most widely cited think tank for the second year in a row. Three right-wing institutions--the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and Cato Institute--maintained their respective positions as the second, third and fourth most cited. The top four think tanks were each cited more than a thousand times, and provided 46 percent of all think tank citations.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1425

Right-wing think-tank hates DRM

Posted by Cory Doctorow, March 21, 2006 12:15 PM | permalink

The Cato Institute, an ultra-libertarian, right-wing think tank, has released a white paper damning the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking the anti-copying systems used to cripple digital media, like DVDs and iTunes songs.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/21/right...thinktank-.html

The Cato Institute

The Cato Institute leads the right-wing's push for privatization of government services. In 2001, the Washington Post, noting Cato’s influence, said it “has spent about $3 million in the past six years to run a virtual war room to promote Social Security privatization."

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=6182

Over the past 10 years, a huge influx of private sector money has allowed conservative think tanks and advocacy groups to grow by leaps and bounds. Not only are well-known organizations like CATO, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation more flush with cash than ever, but giving by corporations and wealthy businessmen---all of which is tax-deductible---has underwritten the rise of a new generation of smaller and often brasher conservative think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Reason Foundation. Corporate money has also fueled the explosive growth of dozens of state-based conservative think tanks, of which the Independent Institute is a prime example. In 1996, according to data I published in a report early this year by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, the top 20 conservative think tanks spent $158 million, more than half of it contributed by corporations or wealthy businessmen

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/...ahan.think.html

Jim Henley Wants a Better Right-Wing Thinktank

Specifically, he wants a Cato Institute that will inform him rather than mislead him about the business cycle:

: Are we, as a commenter wrote downblog a couple weeks ago (in rough paraphrase), "Like Argentina, a formerly wealthy country that went bankrupt, and we just don't realize it yet?"... Or is it just a matter of wringing out the excess briefly so the economy can come roaring back. And, could Cato's blog hire a non-hack economist to address the subject? No? Never mind then! (Still love you guys, my Cato foreign-policy homies! But your econ staff has not risen to the level of engagement a standard-issue Weekly Standard writer managed vis a vis Iraq in 2005. Alan Reynolds' choosing today of all days to favorably cite an "excellent economist" from Bear Stearns may go down in history as the "We're Winning" of the Recession of 2008.

Just saying! And other than that, it’s eerily quiet over there. You’ve got Tim Lee and Justin Logan and Benjamin Friedman doing their usual great work on civil liberties and foreign policy, but the site’s been a wasteland on money matters...

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/03/jim-henley-want.html

From DMI's Year In Review, "a hawk’s eye view of what the think tanks on the conservative right are up to." Read the full report on the year in politics and policy on our website.

Cato Institute

The libertarian Cato Institute has always toed a consistent line: America would be better off without most of the laws, regulations, and public goods we have today. The privatization of everything from schools to Social Security is part of the plan. Accordingly, Michael F. Cannon, Cato’s director of Health Policy, wants you to trust free markets with your life. Cannon advocates cutting the public safety net out of health care altogether. He makes the case against “conservatives [who] have been seduced into thinking we can achieve universal coverage in a free-market way,” arguing that “a free market would not provide health insurance to all; some people are uninsurable…” And with that, Cannon is off organizing the “Anti-Universal Coverage Club.” That’s the last we’ll hear from him about the “uninsurables”—mostly very sick people with expensive medical conditions, who certainly cannot afford to pay for the care they need out-of-pocket—because those of us who think that sick people ought to have access to medical care are “lefties and rent-seeking weasels.” But Cannon needn’t worry: while millions of Americans are still without adequate health coverage, and medical expenses are a leading contributor to personal bankruptcy, they’re not feeling the squeeze at Cato, which declared assets of well over $22 million last year.

From the late 1970s until today, by spawning and funding numerous “government downsizing” think tanks the Koch foundations, based on the multibillion dollar Koch Oil fortune, have changed the terms of policy debate in the areas of environmental protection, corporate regulation and civil rights enforcement. These think tanks include Americans for Tax Reform, the American Legislative Exchange Council (the “ideas” home of state level corporate pork barrel spending and deregulation), the Cato Institute, FreedomWorks, Institute for Justice, National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Reason Foundation and Claremont Institute in California (for more on the latter two see my report just published by the Center on Policy Initiatives in San Diego,

http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/newsletter6/story2.html

Believe me I would like to hear some good news, but you have to ask in who's interest is this article.

That remains to be seen. From my point of view, I read an article (any article) and validate the facts/sources separately to ascertain if 1) the basis of their arguement has foundation and 2)Whether the arguement has merit. That includes people on thai Visa who may or may not have expertise in this area but put forward a cohesive arguement. Unfortunately, I have not seen a reciprocal arguement from yourself as yet.

I think you are only trying to convince yourself of that.

The links you put forward come from right wing blog spots, hardly impartial.

In fact I have slightly more respect for Khun Jean as at least he is stating his own opinion.

But like Suphat Vongvisessomjai flying in the face of the UN panel on climate change, you are both deluded.

I've seen this kind of argument develop on many forums and it follows a similar pattern.

Ok a simple question for you both.

Do you agree that the Greenland and Arctic ice sheets have receded and continue to recede further than we have seen in recent history?

Please take the time to look at the link I supplied regarding the Thames flood barrier.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/c...ier-799303.html

It's relative to the situation in Bangkok.

Two low lying capital cities laying on major river estuaries.

The UK realised a long time ago that sea levels are rising and that it why it undertook such a huge engineering project.

Now there is a possibility that prevention measure will not be enough to hold back the increasing magnitude of future sea level rises.

Coupled with heavier rain and storm predictions, this could mean a major catastrophe for London.

Also take the time to read the original post, the claims of Suphat Vongvisessomjai are in contradiction to the findings of the United Nations' Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

Perhaps the cost of building prevention measures are considered too high for the rulers of Thailand.

I'm sure Khun Jean can speak for himself. I'll take a look at the links though thanks.

Link one didn't work.

Link two http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monit...rticle10866.htm

shows a decrease in temperature over one year, do you claim that as proof that global warming isn't happening?

If you look at the graph it shows a dramatic drop over a one year period, yet the rest of the graph shows a sporadic but nevertheless upward trend.

I think if this was put into a scale covering the last fifty years the drop would look even less dramatic.

Do you know who Daily Tech is funded or owned by? It might give some validation to it's credibility, or not.

Believe me I would like to hear some good news, but you have to ask in who's interest is this article.

Link three http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Tropical...Shifts_999.html

uses data from ice cores in glaciers in the Andes, this wouldn't be as reliable as

samples from the Arctic. The data recorded on;ly covers the last 2,00 years and actually one scientist says;

""And in that same record, you can clearly see the 20th Century and the thing that stands out - whether you look at individual cores or the composite of all seven - is how unusually warm the last 50 years have been"

If we are talking about rising sea levels, and that is what this thread is about, you have to be able to look at data much older than 2,000 years.

You have to make comparisons with periods where glacial periods begin and end and the only reliable source for data that old is in the ice cores of the Arctic.

It may or may not be man made warming, but there is a definate shift going on in the worlds weather and the ice caps are retreating further than we have ever known, that water must go somewhere.

I think I can see where this is leading and I'm not convinced, I'd like to be but I'm not.

I'd like to check out the information and the sources of these links further, but I have to say that the weight of evidence and credibility still lays with those that say the planet is warming and with it melting glaciers will raise sea level.

Funny? The weather in the arctic is seasonal just as it is everywhere. I'm merely contending your previous point.

It's a valid argument, perhaps you would like some data on the research sites and the science behind the data that is being gathered.

If you want to shrug it of with humour and disregard the point as irrelevent, how can you expect me or others to take your side of the discussion seriously?

Why are you only interested in data for the last 100 years?

Whichever side of the argument a person is on, they could not base a credible argument on such a small amount of data.

Perhaps you could provide some links to your sources of information, so you can persuade me that you have an opinion worth regarding.

I mentioned co2 many times because that is the hoax. As another member mentioned the focus now very slowly goes to methane and it is not called global warming anymore but climate change. All 'signals' that the whole global warming hoax is falling down. Losing face is also in the west very difficult.

Think about that chart for gore again, the one showing c02 levels compared to samples found in ice core from many many decades ago. Then think of how co2 would be trapped in ice? Wouldn't a hot climate melt ice and erase those 'records' from history. And would a cold period not be with less co2?

Seems it's not only the ozone layer that's full of holes.

Ice cores are collected from deep within the Arctic and Antarctic, where snow and frost deposists occur every year regardless of the temperature of the rest of the planet.

Well you'd expect an expert to understand that would be the best place to take samples from.

The last measurments of sealevels show that seas are not rising. Why are many ignoring that FACT!

Inconvenient facts?

Inconvenient facts indeed...

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/c...ier-799303.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/c...and-429764.html

http://www.terradaily.com/2006/061221015453.078uvrt9.html

http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pa...ising-seas.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/03/asia/pacific.php

An 8 year old kid is home alone, and a salesman comes to the door.

The kid answers, and he's got a porno in one hand, a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other and a cigar in his mouth.

The salesman goes, "Hi, little boy, are your parents home?"

The kid goes, "What the <deleted> do you think?"

I haven't heard of any banks going BK, because of bank heists. Should I go rob a bank?

Yes, please do and take a gun with you.

The problems require changes that the elites simply are unwilling to make.

PB, you make that sound like the "elites" are a unified entity pulling the strings. Kind of like "the man."

You mean... ..they don't know each other...

You couldnt be more wrong

Oh I think probably could if I really tried.

I recently read 'Fiasco, the American military adventure in Iraq' by Thomas E. Ricks.

More a cronology than a critique (the citicism virtually writes itself), it's a very enlightening book about the situation in Iraq.

There were two or three key events where the US could have secured Iraq, but they dropped the ball.

The situation there is very unstable, but there is a possibility that a concerted long term effort could stabilise the region.

Without this sustained effort the area will disintegrate into a catastrophe even worse than that which is already occuring.

The implications are obvious, a failed state, civil war, international conflict between neighbouring states and a training ground for further and posibbly greater Islamic terrorism. The psychological effect of the US being seen to be beaten would ignite feelings throughout the whole middle east.

Furthermore the financial and political cost of having to return to the region to finish the task after a premature withdrawl would make the cost of todays conflict seem minor in comparison.

This is not an anti US rant.

I am concerned, as I'm sure many in the US miltary and government are, that financial pressure will cause a political kneejerk reaction that will be catastrophic in the long term.

Please read the book it's extremely insightful and I'm sure you will enjoy it.

http://www.puffincatalogue.co.uk/lo/press/...;catalogueId=20

The paperback edition was £14.

500 million Indians make $1 a day.

Makes no difference what anyone wants.. It simply boils down to 'if that happens is it better to become very rich when it happens or to not be very rich' ??

Even if the world does become a less nice place to live, I am sure it will be much worse to be in that same world with less money ?? I dont make the rules, just play the game.

Very true, if you are very rich or indeed very poor it won't make too much difference, recessions are just like elections!

The long term consequences are much graver than ever they were in previous recessions for the US at least.

And if reactionary politics force an American withdrawl from Iraq before it is stabilised, the consequences for all our futures could be catastrophic.

For the US it could be the end of an era, for the rich it's just another gravy train coming over the horizon.

I was thinking more along the lines that a failing economy would create pressure on the armed services and their role both finacialy and politically, which may bring about a premature withdrawl in Iraq creating massive problems in the future.

I believe that Iraq is a mess, but would hope that whatever the cost the US would stay until the situation is stabilised whenever that may be.

This is really gutter journalism.

Hardly surprising for a town that is a gutter. Not exactly lifestyles of the rich and famous in soi buakaow.

How can the US continue a prolonged and expensive war if the economy collapses?

It may be more than just a financial crisis the US is facing.

It gets worse.

Oh dear not again. Perhaps Thai Visa should start running an obituary. RIP

wherever the white man goes ruin will surely follow.

Hitler 10 million dead.

Stalin 30 million dead

Mao 70 million dead

I don't think we got anything to teach them that they don't already know.

How much do you want to help? Its £500 for an airfare. How determined is she to go home?

I'd like to recommend this book to the guys on this forum that were involved in the conflict in Vietnam

and also to all of you that are interested not only in the conflict, but in the history and culture of Vietnam.

It's an oral history and comprises insightful introductions with short recollections of people involved in all aspects of the conflict on both sides,

covering the military and political aspects of the war, but also it's social, cultural and psychological effects.

It's a well reserched and presented book that is fascinating, revealing and moving.

ISBN: 978 0 09 101012 9

£14.99 paperback.

Reviews:

Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides, by Christian G Appy (Ebury, £14.99)

Appy means that subtitle about "told from all sides". His North and South Vietnamese contributions I expected, though the enduring duration of their fight and captivity always awes (a commando said goodbye to his 10-year-old son before a sortie that ended in imprisonment: when he next saw him, his son had an 11-year-old son of his own). More surprising are the Pentagon brass who started out gung-ho and stayed that way - nothing neo about his conservatism; and the US army nurse who told her son during the first Gulf war that if there was a draft he would be a conscientious objector since "if anybody's going it'll be your old mom". This covers the whole catastrophe, from the US's creep into the mission circa 1962 to "Taps" played on a tape recorder by such geezers as remember too much - and the Saigon manufacture of fake Zippo lighters, engraved with slogans and handcraftily vintaged, to sell to tourists. Overall, notwithstanding Oliver North's recollections of the sound and fury of defending Firebase Burt, I was left feeling distant and calm, possibly the only response to such waste, absurdity and political-military-industrial lies. Vera Rule http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2257063,00.html

VIETNAM: The Definitive Oral History Told from All Sides

by Christian G Appy

Ebury £19.99 pp574

Vietnam is a long time ago, and most young people today know the war — one of the great traumas of American history — only through Hollywood or as thousands of names on the black granite wall of the Vietnam war memorial in Washington. But for those who served and suffered, Americans and Vietnamese alike, communist and non-communist, it will always be a defining moment of their lives.

Christian Appy, an American history professor, has written an oral history of the conflict. It is an extraordinarily compelling and powerful book, disorientating to read when American and British forces are embroiled in another bloody and troubled conflict in a faraway land. I read it just a few days after President Bush admitted the possibility of an Iraq comparison with Vietnam, and it gave me distinct moments of déjà-vu.

Frank Maguire, for example, was an American army major who liked Vietnam, served three tours there and believed in the cause. He recalls how, when he first went home, he made speeches telling people that Americans were not just killing people but building and trying to improve their lives. In the end, though, the Americans failed miserably to understand the Vietnamese.

“I think it’s a national trait that we always feel we know what’s better for everybody,” says Maguire. “It was an attitude of misguided benevolence — that we know what’s good for them and they don’t really understand what’s happening. We really wanted to win their hearts and minds, except we could never find one or the other.”

Such benevolence, 32 years on, is one of America’s problems in Iraq. A senior state-department official controversially and publicly confirmed as much last weekend. There are obvious differences; no insurgent force in Iraq can be compared to the Vietcong; Saddam Hussein is not Ho Chi Minh; nobody can confuse Baghdad with Saigon. The current cost in lives is far lower than Vietnam, too. Although this October has been one of the bloodiest months since the 2003 invasion, with the deaths of at least 87 American servicemen and hundreds of Iraqis, these rising casualties are less than one day’s combat at the height of the Vietnam war. Then, 400 Americans were dying each week.

Yet just as the Vietnam era of the 1960s started with huge American self-confidence that it could put the world right by intervening against communism, the Bush presidency began, too, with grandiose, naive ideas of saving the Middle East through Saddam’s overthrow. Bush and the neocons saw the invasion as the critical fulcrum for creating democracy in a region of oppressive, corrupt regimes that is of vital importance to America. Three years on, America is preoccupied with many issues familiar to those who lived through Vietnam: an unwinnable war started on false pretences and with little knowledge of the history of the country it was invading, mounting casualties and atrocities, no clear exit strategy, all leading to disillusionment with the White House leadership.

Senator Edward Kennedy has called Iraq Bush’s Vietnam, and fewer and fewer Americans are disagreeing.

But Appy’s book is not a history of the Vietnam war or the policies that led to it, though there is a bit of that. It is a riveting portrait of what happened to some 135 Americans and Vietnamese, northerners and southerners, communists and non-communists. Their voices provide vivid, illuminating and often harrowing insights from a host of different angles.

The breadth of Appy’s interviews is the strength of this book. He talks to some of the key military players, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military genius, and General William Westmoreland, the US commander, among them. The CIA operative Frank Snepp tells how he is so wrapped up trying to save his Vietnamese agents as Saigon falls that he neglects to evacuate a former girlfriend despite her threat to commit suicide. Later, he learns to his shame that she killed herself and their child rather than fall into the hands of the communists.

There are interviews with Senator John McCain, America’s most famous prisoner of war, and the survivors of My Lai, and the brave American helicopter pilots who intervened to try to stop the massacre. There is Mrs Thieu describing how, trapped beneath a pile of bodies, she was drowning in their blood. There is Larry Colburn, an American helicopter pilot who talks of his crew wading waist deep through the dead to rescue one child who was moving. The two are reunited many years later.

These stories really bite. Some are amusing. Bobbie Keith, the weather girl for Armed Forces Television in Saigon and the GIs’ pin-up, sometimes makes up the weather data just as American troops made up body-counts to convince their generals that they were winning the war. The rock star James Brown insisted on sporting a .45 and a US army uniform when he gave a show, to look like a GI. He said even the Vietcong had a ceasefire during his shows. They liked the funk, he tells Appy. “Then they went back and reloaded, boy. They were very smart.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...ticle612173.ece

Back to double pricing, how would you feel if you were charged more for electricity because you have white skin?

But we're not are we?

I can't believe I had to explain that to you

ZzZzZzZz......

Again the comment that this wouldn't happen in another country.

Name one country where discrimination doesn't exist.

Then move there.