Today is a great day for the Iraqi people

Not if you're dead.

Mark please control your pen flicking.

Quoting kidneystones: Imagine how many more viewers, particularly conservatives, might tune in had there been some effort made to provide a balanced, in depth, response to the events of the last week. Instead we get selective reporting that is ideologically and materially slanted. If bhtv is to survive, imho, Bob needs to quickly rectify the impression that bhtv is something other than an arm of the Democratic party.

I happen to read a diverse selection of news. I simply can't find any pro-right-wing opinion or fact anywhere on bhtv. It might be here, but if I have to scurry around to find it, I'll simply click away from the site.

Few, if any, sensible individuals are going to sit still for the sort of insult and abuse routinely heaped upon those who express views that run counter to the bhtv CW. This site is tiny, left-leaning echo chamber whether Bob acknowledges it or not. Virtually, all the links on the front page attack or ridicule the right. The US has just invested 7 years of blood, sweat, cash and political capital to bring about elections in Iraq. Newsworthy? Not at bhtv.

So says former KOS kid PUMA kidneystones - with a straight face, no less. You're truly a

The trouble with invading a country to protect those who are getting the shaft is the shaft just gets bigger. I can't think of a time in the last fifty years this rule of thumb has not played out. People around the globe who are being victimized by their government should hunt down the Western reporters who are publishing about it, kill them, and destroy their evidence. Out of self-defense. Kidneystones, this site is far from "left-leaning". It may be full of pissant "liberals", but no leftism is allowed. The Iraqis have already had one pointless election. Do we have to stop and salute every time they go through the motions?

Quoting kidneystones: Ex-Moderator Jeff writes....[...]

Thank you for referencing my 'work' at Daily Kos. I thoroughly enjoyed the critiques of the hypocrisy of folks like you made by PUMA supporters, but can't claim more to be more than sympathetic to their views.

Bob is stating clearly that he bhtv may be out of business within the year. Unlike you and the current crowd killing this site, I have maintained a close relationship with bhtv since it's inception, hence my ridiculously low UID number. Pro-Obama sites are a dime a dozen. This site once made conservatives feel as though they were welcome. That's no longer the case.

Whatever advice Bob is getting from you and the current clique clearly isn't working. Virtually all founding commenters have already quit this board. I have taken extended leaves myself because I truly do have better things to do. You and the other handful of prolific posters high-five each other while bhtv goes broke. Nobody much cares. Bob's finding that out the hard way.

I doubt you've read many of my posts that weren't direct responses to you; but I'm fairly confident that you have no idea what I believe, despite my having left a

Forget the recession, forget the collapsing advertising market, forget low advertising rates on the internet, forget the low overall traffic at bhtv, forget the costs of maintaining this site, forget the lack of a plausible subscription model. No, if bhtv fails, it will be because AemJeff is a liberal.

Quoting kidneystones: I simply can't find any pro-right-wing opinion or fact anywhere on bhtv.

Quoting kidneystones: All the more reason for BHTV to ensure the views of the right are promoted front and center for balance and for branding. That isn't happening ...

Views from the right (or at least, non-left) in the past month, and omitting from consideration Matthew Lee and several Science Saturday participants because I don't know their leanings: 30 Jan: Conn Carroll
29 Jan: Mickey Kaus
29 Jan: Ann Althouse
27 Jan: David Frum
26 Jan: Daniel Drezner
25 Jan: Will Wilkinson and Eliezer Yudkowsky
23 Jan: Conn Carroll
22 Jan: Matt Welch
20 Jan: Byron York
19 Jan: William Franklin
18 Jan: Kerry Howley
16 Jan: William Beutler
16 Jan: Robert Kagan
15 Jan: David Frum
14 Jan: Radley Balko and David Freddoso
14 Jan: Jonah Goldberg
13 Jan: Daniel Drezner
13 Jan: Ross Douthat
11 Jan: Eli Lake
09 Jan: Conn Carroll
09 Jan: Reihan Salam
07 Jan: James Pinkerton
07 Jan: Ann Althouse
06 Jan: Andrew Bacevich
02 Jan: Conn Carroll
02 Jan: Steven Waldman Now, if you mean that commenters from the right should be "promoted front and center," I can only laugh. This would be affirmative action at its silliest. However, if you're having trouble finding righty viewpoints in the forums, I'll point you to, for example, basman, bkjazfan, Bobby G, DenvilleSteve, gwlaw99, harkin, johnmarzan, Lyle, mvantony, PaulL, piscivorous, rcocean, Richard from Amherst, Salt, Simon Willard, sugarkang, and Tara Davis, as prolific and/or recently active participants. [Added: JonIrenicus is another.]

Quoting kidneystones: ... and if it doesn't bhtv will go broke, imho.

Looking at the recent saga of Pajamas Media, and thinking also of Culture11, not to mention the mood of the country as a whole (see fig. below), I'd have to say

Quoting kidneystones: I've never been much interested in trading barbs with you or anyone else here on a personal level.

Your choice of subject line hardly supports this assertion.

Quoting holyworrier: The trouble with invading a country to protect those who are getting the shaft is the shaft just gets bigger. I can't think of a time in the last fifty years this rule of thumb has not played out. People around the globe who are being victimized by their government should hunt down the Western reporters who are publishing about it, kill them, and destroy their evidence. Out of self-defense.

Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia is an obvious one. NATO invasion of the former Yugoslavia area. The Tutsi RPF invasion of Rwanda. There are a lot of blurry lines in that question, so I'm not sure what all would count. Of the types of things that journalists cover as 'humanitarian disasters', foreign intervention's probably been successful as often as not, so IMO it's pretty silly to complain about people simply reporting on it.

Quoting kidneystones: bhtv has three forum moderators. These thugs, we must assume, attack dissent with the blessing of Bob Wright. For some strange reason, the 'Moderator' tag has been removed from their user names.

This site is going broke while the bhtv choir sings 'we do no wrong'.

Not one balanced conservative moderator in the mix.

Who'd a thunk it.

Once again, for the record, and for the benefit of new visitors to the site, AemJeff, TwinSwords, and I have been given moderator privileges for the sole purpose of deleting spam comments. Spam is an ongoing problem on this forum, as with almost any other site that allows user input; I'd say we delete an average of 10-20 spam posts and threads per week, and we've seen peak days where spam is posted at a frequency of an order of magnitude larger. We are acting as assistants to the site administrators in this regard, both so that they can spend their time doing more useful work, and to provide better around-the-clock coverage. Think of us as the janitorial night shift. Jeff, Twin, and I have never deleted a non-spam post, whether because of its language, ideological viewpoint, or anything else to do with its

Quoting kidneystones: You have to giggle.

The bhtv brownshirts, two of the thug moderators who are usually among the first to hurl feces at guests and board members not singing from the 'Obama is my savior' choir, argue that bhtv welcomes conservatives.

That's the level of disconnect we're talking about. The handful of conservatives that actually post on this board are subject to venal attack. Conservative guests are insulted, attacked, and abused.

The fact that Bob has so far refused to acede to demands by the bhtv brownshirts to ban conservative guests, never liberals, is then cited as evidence that bhtv is a conservative-friendly environment.

Funny.

To the issue of "thug moderators," see here. As to "insulted, attacked, and abused," well, yes. It does happen. I'd say, however, that these flow in both directions (note kidneystones's use of words like "brownshirts" and "thugs," for example), that most of the attacking is directed at the ideas as opposed to the individual, and that there have been many discussions between people of opposite viewpoint that are not at all marred by invective. I'll also say that to some degree (not up to "venal"), having one's opinions attacked is part of nature of the public

Quoting kidneystones: Rather than confront the thug moderators and take them to task for attacking guests and peers the bhtv management team simply conceals from public and potential advertisers where Bob's sympathies lie.

Given that Bob has a decades-long body of published written work, I'd say there's no doubt about his political leanings. Given that he spent several minutes in his most recent diavlog asking for civility in the comments, I'd say there's no doubt about his views on behavior. Given that you are allowed to post your non-stop stream of insults and wild exaggerations, I'd say there's no doubt about his tolerance for letting all points of view stand. If you, or anyone else, can't deal with blowback after mouthing off, there are plenty of other places to express yourself on the Web. You, for example, have a blog that does not permit commenting, so I'm sure you understand this.

I think this is unfair to the site on multiple levels. My first foray to this sight was stumbling on a debate between Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart, I learned they moved to bloggingheads so I came here to check out more on them. One of the things I like about them is that they are not the types that concede NOTHING. I agree more with Jonah, but I appreciate the fact that Peter seems more honest than many liberals that speak on issues, he is not above ceding battles, ground, if not the entire war. Types like Rachael Maddow and Ann Coulter are the opposite, the other side never has a point, ever, shore up the nuggets that support me, brush aside the nuggets that do not. Peter is not that way, I do not mind listening to anyone so long as I consider them logical and honest. David Frum I had heard on the radio and I find the guy pretty compelling. What I liked about him was that he almost always comes across as more thoughtful than many of the more frivolous conservatives. It's like certain talk radio shows. Hannity vs Michael Medved, both are conservative, but the latter

Quoting kidneystones: Conservative board after conservative board member complains that the atmosphere is simply too poisonous to participate.

I'd say first that some of them, you included, contribute mightily to the problem. I'd say second that at some point, the complaints strike me as being at the level of griping simply because their ideas and general point of view are vigorously disputed. I'd say this is more an indication of their thin skin, or possibly, some realization that their point of view doesn't stand up very well to challenge.

Quoting kidneystones: The three bhtv thug moderators are politically indistinguishable and among the most abusive and prolific posters on the site.

That we are moderators is immaterial, as explained here. As to "politically indistinguishable," I suggest you review, for example, the recent threads related to the Israeli/Palestinian issue. As to "abusive and prolific," I'll just refer you to the story about the pot and the kettle.

Quoting kidneystones: Unless Bob makes some effort to ... curtail the abusive personal attacks by the thugs on this board bhtv is going to go out of business.

I'm glad you take at least this small amount of personal responsibility.

Quoting kidneystones: The fact is Bob can't find anyone willing to pony up any more cash for this enterprise. No matter how smart, witty, appealing, or right you and the other bhtv thugs believe yourselves to be, very few outside your tiny circle seem much interested in reading your junk.

[...]

But in a site that needs both traffic and investors, your relentless personal attacks on individuals, rather than ideas. may not be helping.

[...]

Investors, Bob reports, simply shrug and walk away.

If I am really a significant barrier to Bob's attracting outside investors, I expect that he would say something to me about it. He knows how to reach me.

Quoting kidneystones: I pride myself on my patience and restraint and don't take your barbs seriously.

I will treasure this howler forever.

I don't think comparing Rachel Maddow to Ann Coutler is a very accurate comparison. Whatever you think of her positions, Maddow is respectful of her GOP guests and genuinely approaches discussion based on premises of logic rather than slander. She also seems to actually listen to her guests as well.

Bob you better call in Carl Zimmer or some of the other Sci-Sat boys. We seem to have a frightening outbreak of Right-wing Persecution Syndrome!!

Quoting kidneystones: I've enjoyed watching you tie yourself in knots during this exchange, although I'm not at all sure whether anyone else finds this the least bit entertaining.

I am happy to have served solely as entertainment for you. Don't worry so much about what others think. They'll let us know, one way or the other.

Quoting kidneystones: I especially admire your suggestion that your 5,990 odd posts serve as the 'pot' to my 'kettle', which might total 10% of that figure, deleted posts included.

I was speaking more of the "abusive" nature, but I'll cop to my larger number of posts, although I would observe that lately, there's no disparity in this regard, either. Sorry that the total number bothers you so much, but I'm convinced that it's not a legitimate complaint. No one is forced to read my comments. There is even an "ignore" function available.

Quoting pampl: Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia is an obvious one. NATO invasion of the former Yugoslavia area. The Tutsi RPF invasion of Rwanda. There are a lot of blurry lines in that question, so I'm not sure what all would count. Of the types of things that journalists cover as 'humanitarian disasters', foreign intervention's probably been successful as often as not, so IMO it's pretty silly to complain about people simply reporting on it.

Of the three examples you cite, only one is applicable to the discussion. Yugoslavia. The other two were, in the first case, a war based on historical animosity, and in the second, a civil war in which the RPF was an antagonist. The State Department claimed its intervention in Yugoslavia was "humanitarian" in nature, but NATO had controlled events in the region since 1990, and the intervention, justified by Srebrenica, which was allowed to happen, was the final phase of what was, in fact, an economic structural transformation. This intervention increased the chaotic nature of the situation and chaos is its continuing legacy.

Quoting kidneystones: Squeals to the contrary, the thuggish insults of the Moderators and their personal attacks on guests and board members signal to potential investors and advertisers exactly the loutish behavior tacitly approved of at bhtv.

Rather than confront the thug moderators and take them to task for attacking guests and peers the bhtv management team simply conceals from public and potential advertisers where Bob's sympathies lie.

There are no conservative Moderators on bhtv because there are no conservatives on this board Bob either trusts or respects. The lack of trust likely cuts both ways.

Feces-hurling moderators shame bhtv, so bhtv pretends the feces-hurlers have no connection to the site. Neat, huh?

The nice thing about a post like this is that it's either self-evidently true or false. If it's false, the person responsible for it has rather neatly discredited the source. Thank you.

Quoting holyworrier: Of the three examples you cite, only one is applicable to the discussion. Yugoslavia. The other two were, in the first case, a war based on historical animosity, and in the second, a civil war in which the RPF was an antagonist.

The State Department claimed its intervention in Yugoslavia was "humanitarian" in nature, but NATO had controlled events in the region since 1990, and the intervention, justified by Srebrenica, which was allowed to happen, was the final phase of what was, in fact, an economic structural transformation. This intervention increased the chaotic nature of the situation and chaos is its continuing legacy.

You can assign ulterior motives to anything. You could say that there have never been humanitarian interventions and that Iraq was about oil or WMDs and Kosovo was about stability or 'shock therapy'. The fact is that both examples you consider illegitimate are foreign or diaspora fighting groups invading and ending a genocide. Your view of the war in the former Yugoslavia action is simply fantasy. There wasn't even any NATO presence before 93. During the time that NATO was 'controlling events' around 100,000 people were killed and nearly 2 million made refugees while so-called "safe zones" were

Quoting nikkibong: Forget the recession, forget the collapsing advertising market, forget low advertising rates on the internet, forget the low overall traffic at bhtv, forget the costs of maintaining this site, forget the lack of a plausible subscription model.

No, if bhtv fails, it will be because AemJeff is a liberal.

nikkibong, I'm tempted to take that last bit as my tagline.

All the details I could relate to you in the context of your three examples of humanitarian intervention would be a waste of time if you are not aware, pampl, that when a government, any government, your government, proclaims a moral crusade to liberate the oppressed that extreme skepticism is called for. Do you not imagine that such a moral crusade is meant to construct a justification for intervention? Here's a tip. Governments on crusades to liberate the oppressed don't drop cluster bombs. Bosnia and Herzegovina : From Recovery to Sustainable Growth
by World Bank Staff (1997) Summary: Peace and reconstruction efforts in 1996 dramatically altered the landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina and brought many tangible benefits to its people. These efforts have already led to improvements in the areas of health, education, unemployment, and infrastructure repair. Sustaining and broadening the positive developments of the past year will be the key task for the country and the international community in 1997-98. This country study examines the near-term reform issues that are essential to generating employment and providing a firm institutional and policy foundation for reconstruction and sustained economic growth. The main areas

Quoting holyworrier: All the details I could relate to you in the context of your three examples of humanitarian intervention would be a waste of time if you are not aware, pampl, that when a government, any government, your government, proclaims a moral crusade to liberate the oppressed that extreme skepticism is called for. Do you not imagine that such a moral crusade is meant to construct a justification for intervention? Here's a tip. Governments on crusades to liberate the oppressed don't drop cluster bombs.

Bosnia and Herzegovina : From Recovery to Sustainable Growth
by World Bank Staff (1997)

I agree that it would be a waste of time relating details to me on this cases, because you'd have to spend a lot of time looking them up on Wikipedia just to eventually realize I'm right. I don't care what motives you consider skeptically and which you don't, those are three examples of foreign intervention leading to improved lives for the formerly oppressed people. That's why your attitude towards reporters is so wrongheaded. Yes, reporting on humanitarian disasters is useful for propaganda purposes leading to military action. Military action that's being judged by the

Quoting kidneystones: Conservative board after conservative board member complains that the atmosphere is simply too poisonous to participate. And those are the ones who bother to post at all.

The three bhtv thug moderators are politically indistinguishable and among the most abusive and prolific posters on the site.

The thimbleful of intellectual value that debate on this site once carried has been diluted over the last year by a handful of verbose interlopers in love, it seems, with their own dull observations.

A number of viewers, I suspect, capable of offering interesting diverse points of view don't.

The quality of the guests is first-rate. Unless Bob makes some effort to improve the diversity of board members and curtail the abusive personal attacks by the thugs on this board bhtv is going to go out of business.

That's Bob's message to his thugs, probably too little and probably too late.

Hey Bob, Howz about clearing the air on this moderator point that ks keeps stirring the pot with. Brendan has explained it numerous times for the uninitiated, but the ks is using it to degrade the commentary on your site and

And while you're at it Bob, why don't you clarify which comments/commentors you were adressing in your plea for civility (you could even message the offending parties privately.) Ever since your somewhat ambiguous statement, a handfull of right-wing commentors have declared victim status and simply won't shut up about the tyrannical liberal regime on this comment board. It's a tired old meme that started roughly on Day One of Bloggingheads, so it's hardly surprising. But it's nonetheless obnoxious when taken into account the fact that you very well may have been referring to comments that THEY made or at the very least that they provoked. I would suspect that you were referring to comments by people from all sides, not just one, but unfortunately without further clarification, you're just feeding into delusional conspiracy-theories of persecution. Hardly the kinds of threads investors will be thrilled about. I don't know about the rest of the readers, obsessive threads on Brendan's post #'s and JFK-esque "Moderator" oppression theories are a complete waste of time/space.

Quoting pampl: I agree that it would be a waste of time relating details to me on this cases, because you'd have to spend a lot of time looking them up on Wikipedia just to eventually realize I'm right. I don't care what motives you consider skeptically and which you don't, those are three examples of foreign intervention leading to improved lives for the formerly oppressed people. That's why your attitude towards reporters is so wrongheaded. Yes, reporting on humanitarian disasters is useful for propaganda purposes leading to military action. Military action that's being judged by the standards set by humanitarian excuses, though, has been beneficial. NATO may have been in Kosovo to kidnap babies but they said they were there to stop genocide and so they did.

Your quoted text is completely irrelevant. No one's going to buy that reforms taken across ALL the former Soviet territory, completely unrelated to NATO's activities in a slice of the former Yugoslavia, are evidence that NATO was greedy to take charge of an economy worth less than a single bomb. That doesn't even make sense within its own paranoid world view.

The Vietnamese/Cambodian War was

Paul Kagame had been attempting to overthrow the Rwandan government for eight years. That the slaughter in that country was arrested by his invasion was incidental. It may actually have been Kagame who shot down the plane on which Rwanda's and Burundi's presidents were flying, which led to the onset of the killing.

Quoting holyworrier: The Vietnamese/Cambodian War was a dispute about the Mekong Delta. Do you call a ten-year occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam with 30,000 dead on either side "beneficial"? It was beneficial to Russian and Chinese arms dealers. Do you think the campaigns and sanctions by the US-led coalitions against Iraq since 1991, which have killed possibly three quarters of a million people, can be called "beneficial" because of a couple of staged elections? It was beneficial to hundreds of private contractors. And smugglers. And Iran.

Hmm, 30,000 dead versus the continuation of a regime that had already killed millions. You're now taking the Chomsky route and becoming an apologist for the Khymer Rouge just because the alternative would be to admit a hole in the fabric you weave your lunatic theories of politics from. And no, the US policy towards Iraq has been mistaken, but not starting in 1991. If you had heard of the Iraq-Iran war you wouldn't think the benefits to Iran's security were simply a negative.

Your "reforms" taken all across the former Soviet Union were also taken in Russia itself, and led to a six to eight-fold increase in

For f--k's sake I don't want to silence reporters. What I wrote about the oppressed killing reporters was sarcasm. Good night. Pleasant delusions.

Quoting kidneystones: Imagine how many more viewers, particularly conservatives, might tune in had there been some effort made to provide a balanced, in depth, response to the events of the last week. Instead we get selective reporting that is ideologically and materially slanted. If bhtv is to survive, imho, Bob needs to quickly rectify the impression that bhtv is something other than an arm of the Democratic party.

I happen to read a diverse selection of news. I simply can't find any pro-right-wing opinion or fact anywhere on bhtv. It might be here, but if I have to scurry around to find it, I'll simply click away from the site.

Few, if any, sensible individuals are going to sit still for the sort of insult and abuse routinely heaped upon those who express views that run counter to the bhtv CW. This site is a tiny, left-leaning echo chamber whether Bob acknowledges reality or not. Virtually, all the links on the front page attack or ridicule the right. The US has just invested 7 years of blood, sweat, cash and political capital to bring about elections in Iraq. Newsworthy? Not at bhtv.

You're not here for the hunting, are you?

You guys are great! Really cooking out there....You both along with Glenn Loury, Ann Althouse and of course the ever sensible Jonah Goldberg make this blog site the absolute best...Chapeau!

Leave the poor guy alone. We all know how hard it is for right wingers to process dissent. He no doubt imagines that every challenge to the claims he makes constitutes a personal attack, because his world view, culture and identity are so thoroughly enmeshed. It is only natural for a person who identifies ideology so strongly with in-group/out-group designations to assume that what rhetorical difficulties he might have would be solved if only he could surround himself with more people who already believe the things that he believes.

Quoting testostyrannical: Leave the poor guy alone. We all know how hard it is for right wingers to process dissent. He no doubt imagines that every challenge to the claims he makes constitutes a personal attack, because his world view, culture and identity are so thoroughly enmeshed. It is only natural for a person who identifies ideology so strongly with in-group/out-group designations to assume that what rhetorical difficulties he might have would be solved if only he could surround himself with more people who already believe the things that he believes.

In general, I'd agree. However, kidney is a special case. He frequently comes here just to spread lies, as with the claim he made recently about moderators deleting (non-spam) posts, and he was out of control for the last few months of the presidential campaign. Sometimes it's important not to let such things stand.

Kidney et al. need to move past the simple dual (and false) dichotomy of "conservative" vs. "liberal." The level of sophistication of this site requires a more advanced worldview than one of the "Red Team vs. the Blue Team." It's stupid and reductive to call this site 'biased' after tallying up the supposed 'conservatives' and 'liberals' who comment and appear here. Most of the commenters (and quite a few of the contributors) present much more nuanced views than Kidney et al. give them credit for. I will take myself as a humble example: a reluctant Obama supporter, a complete social liberal, a supporter of big government welfare and social programs, yet a doubter of anthrocentric theories of 'climate change' and a supporter of a muscular (maybe even 'neo-con'!) foreign policy. (Except where Israel is concerned.) So does that make me a 'liberal' or 'conservative' in the closed worldview of kidney et al.? This is simply silly.

Marxist!! Atheist!! Left Coast Elitist!! That's what you are. Sorry Bob, I can't just shut off the sarcasm overnight. One other thing I don't understand about Bob's comments cry. No matter how I look at it, the comments section here is FAR more civil, nuanced, substantive than your ordinary average blog. Even with more or less free reign, I think we commentors here have done a pretty commendable job of being courteous and keeping the name-calling to a minimum. Any sponser who looks at this site should see that relatively quickly. And as a fan of feedback and openness I would think that Bob would value the fact that when somebody says something out-of-line, we the contributors usually provide the feedback by either calling out the offending party, or better yet ignoring them the way Bob ignores (tries to) the likes of Ann Coulter. As far as the guests themselves, I just don't see why coming on BHTV opens them up to any more painful potential ridicule than writing an Op/ed (and being slammed in a letter to an editor), writing a book (bad reviews in papers and Amazon), posting a blog (comments sections) or doing a tv/radio interview (imagine

I'm confused about these threads. Lee brought up a kind of devastating critique of the moral basis of R to P legal principles, and I would like to hear a defense of them. Why is it so urgent to protect and/or save certain humans from war crimes/natural disasters/atrocities that it necessitates undermining the central precept of the UN (sovereignty), and yet, in other cases (Somalia), equivalent human suffering does not even necessitate political or logistical inconvenience? If this suffering is so important that we can justify overthrowing or overruling sovereignty, then it should at least be important enough to create a more muscular UN mandate for forces in Somalia, where no such overruling is needed. Without dealing with this contradiction, R to P is simply another mechanism to exact a political toll on less powerful member states at the hands of the P5 (natch US).