Assuming K to be .85, figuring y to be around .5 (although it may be considerably higher if you drink heavily, or slightly lower if you don't drink at all), estimating z to be around .15, and putting b at around a two out of three chance...
Posted on 04/03/2004 9:12:08 PM PST by Utah Girl
Things Bob Actually Does Know About Women #27
or, The Math of Phone Numbers
Given all of this, the odds of successfully attaining a date based on a phone number attained at a bar can be expressed by the following equation:
Assuming K to be .85, figuring y to be around .5 (although it may be considerably higher if you drink heavily, or slightly lower if you don't drink at all), estimating z to be around .15, and putting b at around a two out of three chance...
Going by those numbers, you need to ask for about twelve numbers for every date you expect to get.
Hollywood's Foreign Policy:
Air Force One was a pretty decent big-budget Hollywood Action flick. So much so, in fact, that most people probably don't remember the speech President Harrison Ford gave during the movie's opening moments. The setup isn't that important; there's enough context in the speech itself:
What a difference an administration makesThe dead remember our indifference. The dead remember our silence.This was greeted by a rousing standing-O from the assembled multitudes, with the exception of the President's stodgy staff. In the limo ride away from the speech, the President's National Security Advisor was beside himself. "The allies are going to be very upset they weren't consulted about this." The Chief of Staff wasn't thrilled either: "It might come back and bite us in the ass in November."I came here tonight to be congratulated. But today when I visited the Red Cross camps overwhelmed by the flood of refugees fleeing from the horror of kazakhstan, I realized I don't deserve to be congratulated. None of us do. Let's be clear. The truth is, we acted too late. Only when our own national security was threatened did we act. Radek's regime murdered over 200,000 men, women, and children. And we watched it on TV. We let it happen. People were being slaughtered for over a year, and we issued economic sanctions and hid behind the rhetoric of diplomacy.
How dare we?
The dead remember. Real peace is not just the absence of conflict; it's the presence of justice.
Tonight I come to you with a pledge to change America's policy. Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate, and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid.
The President shut them both down: "It's the right thing to do. And you know it."
I realilze this is just a movie. However, it was a mainstream liberal Hollywood movie, starring a mainstream liberal actor as a mainstream liberal heroic President. It was made in 1997, when Golden Boy Bill Clinton was in office (they even have a Dee Dee Meyers lookalike as Press Secretary). And in this mainstream liberal fantasy, we see a heroic President who pledges to overthrough tyrants who brutalize their people, wherever they may be, regardless of whether our allies like it, and regardless of whether those tyrants pose an imminent threat to our national security.
And this was a good thing.
Again, I realize that this was just a movie. But I found it impossible to watch it without finding the movie eerily prescient. Hollywood got their liberal dream President. And his name is George W. Bush.
If Bush can be faulted (and he can), it's because he's not aggressive enough in pursuing the sort of truly liberal foreign policy advocated in the film. But that's not the criticism we hear from Hollywood these days.
So what changed?
Oh yeah. The party in the White House.
He's trying to steady himself because he's shaking from fear.
(BTW did you know he considered the priesthood?)
I'll bet he considered it for about as long as I retained the story after I read about it.
"So, the Kerry people can say, 'Why are you picking on John Kerry when there are a host of Catholic politicians who are worse, but who are still receiving Communion?' The outrage seems to be selective."
Gosh Kerry people, your boy is the only one running for president of the United States. Character is a good thing in a man who wishes to be president.
I bet Dodd can't name two things Byrd ever has accomplished in the course of his illustrious career (funneling money to W.Va. to get buildings and highways named after him doesn't count).
Ugh, the things that must swirl around inside Kerry's head.
The Joker disguised as his alter ego John Kerry enters the arena to wow his minions.
"Kerry didn't leave boarding school a popular man. Forty-two years after the fact, many of his classmates still mock him. They chide him for being a teachers' pet and a selfish hockey player. ("What you need to remember," says Macdonald, "is that John never passed [the puck].") In fact, they dislike him so much that they've frequently helped his political opponents."
John Kerry fills us in on HIS plan to complete the job in Iraq:Ain't he sumpin'!Kerry:
Secure the broadest coalition.
Secure the broadest support for a transitional Iraqi government.
Minimize the risk to American troops.
And minimize the cost to the American people.
By trying too hard to win audiences, he is said to project a phony persona. As the political consultant Donna Brazile told The Washington Post last year, "It's like someone put him in clothes that don't fit."
No Donna, Kerry doesn't fit into his own skin (but that's what you really wanted to say, eh?).
There's an irony in this criticism of Kerry. In their profiles, journalists attribute his "aloofness" to his Brahman heritage and chalk up his "stiffness" to his patrician style. But this diagnosis misunderstands the true nature of the elite nurtured by places like St. Paul's. The media actually wants Kerry to become more patrician, not less; to discover his inner WASP; and to adopt a carefree attitude.
I can of summed up Kerry in one word, POSER. Kerry should know this teminalogy since he's into rap and the like.
Yikes! Run away! It's the SCARY KERRY!
These accusations of selfishness trailed Kerry wherever he went, especially in sports. Kerry's enemies contend he was a disaster in the hockey rink and on the soccer pitch -- a puck and ball hog who cared more about looking stylish than scoring. Pell says, "You couldn't get that kid to pass the salt. A ball or puck delivered to John Kerry was into a black hole. It never came back again."
Most damningly, as Resor describes, Kerry used to take "big rink turns." Playing hockey requires quickly switching directions on the ice, shifts that require an expenditure of considerable energy. But this wasn't Kerry's preferred tactic. Instead, he refrained from suddenly changing his course and took more circuitous, less efficient routes to find his way back to the action.
In other words, he just wasn't a very good hockey player! But I'm sure he never fell down. He doesn't fall (unless some SOB gets in his way).
What was I thinking??!! groan
..."In this administration," he said, "truth is the first casualty of policy," whatever that means. The Associated Press reports that Kennedy said, "This president has now created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon." And: "He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people."
Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment. [zing!]
Osama bin Who?
In the wake of the Richard Clarke kerfuffle, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testifies Thursday on pre-Sept. 11 terrorism policy. A report in today's Washington Times gives more reason to doubt Clarke's new version of events, according to which terrorism was the Clinton administration's top priority:
The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress--45,000 words long--makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times. . . .
The Clinton document, titled A National Security Strategy for a Global Age," is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly available, though no U.S. media outlets have examined it in the context of Mr. Clarke's testimony and new book.
A hat tip to blogger Edward Morrissey, who has some interesting additional analysis, for tracking down the document online. Then there's this April 3, 2001, report from The Wall Street Journal (link for WSJ.com subscribers):
U.S. counterterrorism experts began warning during the latter years of the Clinton administration that invoking Mr. bin Laden's name too often could be counterproductive. But getting senior officials to restrain their rhetoric proved impossible.
"We totally failed in the last administration to get the cabinet-level people to stop saying 'bin Laden,' " says one U.S. official. "That greatly contributed to his image as the great white whale." In one of her last interviews before leaving office, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said of Mr. bin Laden: "He clearly is viewed as one of the major threats to the way the rest of the world operates."
That view was, and still is, what officials believe. But National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard Clark[e], who held the same job during the Clinton administration, has been urging Mr. Bush's national security team not to talk about Mr. bin Laden in such alarmist terms, preferably not at all.
Last week, as we noted, the Washington Post reported on a speech Rice was to have given on Sept. 11, 2001, which "contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups." The implication was that Clarke was right, and the Bush administration was asleep at the switch.
But note this, from the April 2001 Journal report: "Neither Secretary of State Colin Powell nor National Security Council adviser Condoleezza Rice have [sic] mentioned Mr. bin Laden since taking office, according to a database search of their public statements. That may be due more to the press of other events than anything, aides say. But the shift in emphasis is sure to please Arab and European governments, which long have complained that the U.S. was fueling the bin Laden mystique."
In other news from Page Six:
DON'T be surprised to see T-shirts soon blaring, "Free Teresa!" Conservative radio host Monica Crowley has launched a grassroots campaign to loosen the bonds on Democratic Sen. John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the Heinz ketchup heiress raised in Mozambique who was known for her candor before the presidential campaign began.
"This is a very smart, opinionated and outspoken woman, which is a good thing - unless your husband is running for president of the United States," the WABC Radio personality told PAGE SIX yesterday.
"The Kerry campaign is afraid Teresa will turn into Martha Mitchell," said Crowley, referring to the dipsomaniacal wife of Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell. Martha had a habit of calling reporters late at night with vivid quotes until she was committed to a mental hospital.
"The Kerry campaign has Teresa under house arrest," Crowley said, "with a guy named Chris Smith assigned 24/7 to make sure she doesn't say anything that wasn't agreed upon first."
Meanwhile, in response to Kerry's recent confession that he likes hip-hop music, Crowley conducted a contest to find a suitable nickname for the liberal senator. Among the winning monikers: Taxmaster K, Flip-Flop J and 50 Percent - "That's how much he'd tax you," Crowley explained.
Crowley went to work for Nixon in 1990, at age 21, as his foreign policy assistant until his death on April 22, 1994. In the new issue of Avenue magazine, Crowley tells columnist Richard Turley the ex-president wrote to Bill Clinton in 1992 to congratulate him on "a very well-run campaign." After three months without a reply, Nixon commented: "What do you expect? They're Arkansas dogpatch."
When the Clintons solicited bipartisan support for their health care reform in 1993, they invited Nixon to the White House. Upon his arrival upstairs, there stood Hillary Clinton, who in 1973 had been a lawyer for the House committee advocating Nixon's impeachment over Watergate. Crowley relates to Avenue that without a word of greeting, Hillary blurted out, "Your health care reform legislation in 1973-74 was so good that we are using it as a blueprint for our own package. Had you survived in office, you would have been light years ahead of your time."
Nixon later fumed, "Had I survived in office! Maybe I could have if she hadn't been working to impeach me."
"In the new issue of Avenue magazine, Crowley tells columnist Richard Turley the ex-president wrote to Bill Clinton in 1992 to congratulate him on "a very well-run campaign." After three months without a reply, Nixon commented: "What do you expect? They're Arkansas dogpatch."
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