Outrageous... if true

Another one of those "blogosphere only" stories, I don't have time right now to look into it further, so take it with a grain of salt, but check out this link.

It alleges that the U.S. Army is now demanding that soldiers who are injured in Iraq, thus rendered unable to fulfill their commitment to serve, are being asked to return the signing bonuses they were given for signing up.

I hope this is one of those "someone made it up something because it makes someone look bad" stories. But it makes me mad enough (if true) that it was worth passing along with caveats. Hopefully someone who reads this will have the time I don't at the moment to verify or refute the veracity of the story and post a comment.

Liam.

P.S. For those who insist I do not support the troops based on my position of wanting them out of Iraq, I just want to mention that during our torturous flight home from vacation last week, I offered to give up my seat for a soldier on leave from Iraq whose flights had been screwed up and who was desperately trying to get home to surprise his parents. The airline would not allow it, but fortunately someone else didn't show up for the flight so they were able to squeeze him on, but I just thought you should know.

Political Field Reports

And While I'm Here...

I've been to three more political candidates appearances since I last posted. Mitt Romney and John McCain over the weekend (although fortunately not the McCain appearance I just posted about) and Barack Obama on Monday night. This brings to 5 the total of candidates I've seen and 6 the number of events I've gone to. Senator Obama was a repeat for me, but since he was the first I'd seen, the only one I'd seen outside, and I'd seen him on a day when it was raining heavily and he was very late due to a late vote on the Senate floor, I felt I should give him another chance to make a good impression, since he did not the first time.

ROMNEY

But in order... First Mitt Romney. We saw him at the Hopkinton town hall, the same place we'd seen John Edwards a few weeks back. I must say, if you want to see a political campaigner, this is a great place to do it! Romney is a smaller man than I'd thought, with a HUGE head. Not that this matters, but my first impression of him was almost that of a toddler, whose head makes up 25% of his total body height.

However, substance should matter over form, so here's my impression of Romney on substance: He seems like a personable enough fellow, an engaging speaker and quick with a joke or two. My wife, Janet, asked one of the very first questions (about his vetting process for Supreme Court nominees) and he kind of non-answered it, but impressively at the end of the event as he was shaking hands, he apologized to me for not taking MY question (on the grounds that he couldn't take them all and he felt one per family was fairest), and I commented that I didn't feel he'd really answered hers, and he made a better attempt at it, without having to be reminded which question it was.

He also stuck the mic in front of Liam (the toddler, not the immature 42 year old) and asked if he had anything to say. For the record, he didn't. :-)

But overall, my impression is that Romney is someone who will get things done, but not any of the things I feel are most important to the country right now. His agenda doesn't do enough (or really, anything) to restore the image of America in the world, nor to correct the mistakes we've made over the last seven years. It's predominantly social conservative issues combined with more of the same in Iraq. In as much as I've never denied the fact that my social leanings are more liberal and my fiscal leanings more conservative, there's simply nothing there to feel good about in a President, for me.

MCCAIN

So, later in the afternoon, on we went to John McCain, whom we saw in Rochester, NH. McCain also had a lot of jokes and funny stories, at some points it almost felt like he was confusing campaigning with stand-up comedy.

McCain's supporters are, in much higher percentage than anyone else I've yet seen, veterans. This makes sense, he being one of the few veterans currently running and the only bona fide war hero and ex prisoner of war. However, being held the day before Veteran's Day, this made for an extremely military-heavy speech. Nothing wrong with this, of course, just noting my impressions.

I was again passed over during the question and answer section, but Janet asked a variant of my favorite question: What would you do to help restore some of the balance of power between the Feds and the states that has shifted significantly away from the model specified in the Constitution? He said something about being a Federalist. I don't remember the exact answer, but it seemed to me the same sort of non-answer posturing you get from a lot of people.

He spent a lot of time talking about cutting out programs that don't work, cutting down the bureaucracy in Washington by pruning out older versions of programs that have had newer, better versions added but never had the older, non-functional versions de-funded. Which worked to his detriment when someone asked him whether he'd support “Abstinence First” instead of “Abstinence Only” sex education, since studies have clearly shown “Abstinence Only” programs do little to curb teen pregnancies and the spread of disease, while “Abstinence First” programs do. He said he absolutely did not support any sex education that wasn't “Abstinence Only”, at which point he went (in my mind) from a crusader looking to rid us of ineffective programs to a partisan who only wanted to get rid of the ineffective programs he didn't politically agree with.

In the end, my impression was that McCain is an old man. I don't mean necessarily physically (he was introduced by his mother, in her 90s, which does kind of put the “He's old” thing into a little bit of perspective), but mentally. Although the phrase is often used to justify some things I think are indefensible, no one can deny that the war against al Qaeda is a new and different kind of war. Traditional tactics used when one country is fighting another don't work when the enemy does not have lands you can take away or a fixed infrastructure you can attack. And yet my strong impression of McCain is that he's so mired in his military history that he's simply unable to have the mental agility necessary to adapt strategies. As badly as President Bush has bungled the war, taking his eye off of bin Laden and the countries he gets most of his support for in favor of a bogus and ill-conceived war in Iraq, I think a President McCain would do far worse, never quite understanding why years of military theory wasn't playing out the way it always has in more traditional wars.

OBAMA

Which brings us to Barack Obama. As I alluded to above, I have not been impressed with Obama up to this point. He has struck me as being long on rhetoric, short on actual answers. He's a pretty good speaker, getting people fired up, but in the end there's a lot of “We need to support our working people” and “We need to support our teachers” and “We need to support our veterans” and “We need to restore our image in the world” talk, with very little substance on how he thinks we could actually accomplish any of those things.

He was better this time.

I should say, both times I've seen Obama, it's been in a much larger setting. I don't know if he doesn't do the kinds of small, intimate campaign stops most of the other candidates have been doing, or whether I've simply not caught any of the right ones, but for the second time I was in a crowd about an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the candidates were in. This setting may work well for him, since there's a sort of “old time revival preacher” aspect to his campaigning, and it's a lot easier to get a large crowd whipped into a frenzy than 50-75 people sedately questioning you in a town hall somewhere.

But this time, Obama had some answers that I quite liked. I liked the fact that he answered my standard question without having been asked (recall that my standard question is about Constitutional balance of power, either between federal and state governments, or more relevant to Presidential candidates, between the Executive branch and the other two branches). While answering a question about the make up of his cabinet, should he win, he said that he wanted independent people who would feel free to disagree with him, and he made a point of stating that the Attorney General is the people's lawyer, not the President's, and that his first directive to his Attorney General will be to go through 8 years of Bush executive orders to identify every one that expands executive power so that he (Obama) can rescind them all.

He also gave one of the best answers I've heard anyone give as to why he doesn't support gay marriage. Essentially, he says, the word “marriage” is tied too strongly to religious principles, and so he supports a strong civil union law which conveys the same rights, benefits and responsibilities as marriage, but leaving the word “marriage” out of it. He says that when you ask people if they support gay marriage, a lot of people have a gut negative reaction, but if you ask whether they support civil unions with equal rights for gay people, a lot more are supportive. He then says it would be up to the various churches whether they recognized and supported gay marriage.

I'd take his answer one further and say that we should split the definition of marriage into two parts and make all government unions “civil unions” and make “marriages” what is performed by a religious or social group. The legal rights and responsibilities would come from the governmental union (the civil union), which is what you'd have if you went down to the justice of the peace and got hitched, while the marriage would be the blessings of God (or gods or whatever your particular religion believes) on your union, as it has traditionally been. That would remove the “separate but equal” aspect of it and also untie the religious aspect of marriage from the legal aspect.

He also pointed out that he, alone among the entire field (on both sides) has a truly fresh perspective on a lot of things. He's black, his grandmother still lives in a remote village in Africa without electricity, and although Christian, he lived for several years as a child in Islamic countries. This gives him a lot more credibility with minorities, the poor and Muslims than anyone else out there, which is probably a good thing.

Anyway, I've been writing this for about an hour now, and my eyes are starting to go crossed, and I'm having trouble remembering some of the other things Obama had to say, but suffice it to say that I feel a lot more strongly about him as a candidate than I did previously. I still haven't decided whether to support him or Edwards in the primary (or even whether I'll vote instead in the Republican primary for Ron Paul, an option I have in NH because I'm a registered independent, and so can choose on primary day which primary I want to vote in).

Still outstanding, I really want to get out and see Clinton and Guiliani, although so far I have not seen many campaign events from either of them that didn't take place during the work day.

Plus, I have an opportunity on Friday to hear Bill Clinton speak, and like him or not, you have to respect that he's a heck of a public speaker and I think it'd be nice to attend. On the other hand, we're currently forecast to have 3-4 inches of snow on Friday, and the event is about 2 hours drive away (without snow), so it may not be in the cards.

Liam.

More Ado About Nothing

Lying awake at 4:30am, I wanted to weigh in on the latest little flap surrounding John McCain and CNN's Rick Sanchez: Give It A Rest, people!

For those who missed this non-story, at a McCain campaign stop a couple of days ago, a McCain supporter who apparently thought she was being cute, asked Senator McCain “How do we beat the bitch?”. Clearly, this was a reference to Hillary Clinton, and the buzz among Democratic-leaning blogs is that this proves that McCain's talk about civility and higher discourse is bogus, and that he's just as rude as the rest of us.

But let's put it into perspective: There's no evidence that McCain staffers planted the question. McCain (and all of the candidates) are going around the country speaking to thousands of supporters at hundreds of campaign stops, there are going to be people who, in highly pro-candidate crowds, will ask questions in “cute” ways.

So what were McCain's options in this case? He could immediately put the supporter in her place, which would serve subtly to tell his supporters that he didn't really have their back the moment he disagreed with them. He could ignore the form of the question and answer the substance. Or he could momentarily forget that with YouTube, there's no longer such a thing as a completely private room and laugh it off with some of his die-hard supporters, answering the question and making sure to get in a line about his respect for Senator Clinton to make it clear that he was not referring to her as a bitch, without alienating any of his supporters.

Senator McCain is not winning right now but is on an upswing, and took the opportunity to point out (correctly) that in recent polls, he's the only major Republican candidate who shows any real chance of defeating Senator Clinton in a hypothetical match-up. For him, it's a much better strategy than one that might push even a few votes away from him.

This is just another in the long list of cases (in every walk of political life) where someone slimes an opponent by pointing to something one of their supporters says and then saying “And he/she didn't denounce it”. If we really expect our political candidates to robustly denounce anything said by anyone among their supporters, in their party or sharing their ideological views, our presidential candidates will spend all of their time issuing condemnations of extreme positions.

Liam.

Again with the Torture.

Every so often, there's a news article that makes me glad I have a blog and sorry it's not more widely read, because the article so badly deserves to be read.

This is one such article.

The article describes torture and extraordinary rendition. Not as abstracts or theoreticals, but in ways that we're actually doing it, and not in some philosophical way but in a way that gives lie to much of the official story we're given.

It has everything, specific techniques used, proof that the information garnered via torture isn't worth anything and a pretty good indication that the “extraordinary rendition” program supposedly shut down when our “high profile” detainees were moved to Guantanamo Bay is still going on.

Read the whole article, but here are some highlights.

In this secret facility known to prisoners as "The Hangar" and believed to be at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, al Libi told fellow "ghost prisoners," one recalled to me for a PBS "Frontline" to be broadcast tonight, an incredible story of his treatment over the previous two years: of how questioned at first by Americans, by the FBI and then CIA, of how he was threatened with torture. And then how he was rendered to a jail cell in Egypt where the threats became a reality.

In his book, officially cleared for publication, Tenet confirms how the CIA outsourced al Libi's interrogation. He said he was sent to a third country (inadvertently named in another part of the book as Egypt) for "further debriefing."

A prisoner in our custody, confirmed by the CIA, is rendered to a secret site where we know that prisoner will be tortured. It doesn't make me feel any better about our country that we ourselves didn't actually do the torturing. When the Romans threw Christians to lions, it did not remove any of the guilt because the Romans didn't do any of the rending, killing or eating of the flesh.

Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. ("I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda," Powell said. "Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.")

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a "foreign government service" (Egypt) that: "the next topic was al-Qa'ida's connections with Iraq...This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."

So, one of the prime rationales for the Iraq war, a war which has consumed a significant fraction of a trillion dollars, thousands of American lives and tens or hundreds of thousands of damaged American troops (to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, according to some estimates) was based on false information obtained under torture.

This is one of the strongest arguments against torture. Not only is it abhorrent, illegal and completely against what we stand for as a nation, but it doesn't even work, meaning that there isn't even a legitimate “ends justifying the means” argument to be made in its favor. This can't even be framed as a “being willing to do what we must to bad people in order to keep America safe” argument, because far from being safer, that false information and other similarly disproved information formed the basis for a war which has cost us heavily in money, in lives, in lost world good-will and in future terrorism from another generation of children who will grow up believing that there is no higher purpose than to martyr themselves in glorious attacks against us for our war against Islam.

It doesn't matter if it's true. A man I used to work for used to say that we at that company delivered products, but we SOLD stories. Our product had to be good quality to keep the customers, but we could have the best product in the world and if we couldn't tell a compelling story about it (or if our competitors could tell a convincingly compelling story against it), we'd never sell any.

The same is true here. It doesn't matter if our motives are truly pure and just badly executed or not, if the appearance is that we're at war against Islam (an appearance that will not be helped by invading a second Islamic country that had nothing to do with the events of 9/11), that's what will inspire a generation of future Jihadists, the next generation of Osama bin Ladens.

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators ... "placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches]."  ... for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to "tell the truth." When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that "he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back." Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then "was punched for 15 minutes." (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Seventeen hours in a 20 inch by 20 inch box. Just imagine it.

Although there have been claims about torture inflicted on those rendered by the CIA to countries like Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan, this is the first clear example of such torture detailed in an official government document.

The information came almost one year before the president and other administration members first began to confirm the existence of the CIA rendition program, assuring the nation that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." (New York Times, Jan. 28, 2005)

So by all accounts, we did it, and then were assured by those who did it that “we don't do that”. And people wonder why I don't trust anything that comes out of the Executive branch these days.

And finally:

Meanwhile, al Libi, who told fellow prisoners in Bagram he was returned to U.S. custody from Egypt on Nov. 22, 2003, has disappeared. He was not among the "high-value prisoners" transferred to Guantanamo last year.

So apparently the much touted transfer of the ghost prisoners to Guantanamo was a PR move only. They moved a few, publicly, so that they could lend credence to the idea that they had stopped the questionable program. But if this article is true, where is al Libi today? And if we don't know the answer to that, who knows what's being done to him today, or what further false information he may be giving that we're continuing to act on as if it were true?

And, one has to wonder, does it even matter to the Administration that it isn't true, or is it more important to have a steady stream of plausible sounding information on false plots that we can scare the populace with by claiming to have “uncovered” and “defeated” them than to actually have good, actionable, TRUE intelligence that might actually keep our nation safer.

Liam.

Debate Moderator Bias

[UPDATE 11/9, 6:45pm: See my latest comment, while I'm still offended at the Russert torpedoing of Dennis Kucinich, the timer situation was far more fair in the earlier rounds than in the later ones that I noticed. And the candidates in the later rounds who were more forcefully cut off when time expired were the same ones who went the most over in the earliest rounds. Also, the application of the on-screen timer kind of went out of kilter after a bit of an interruption in the middle during the Clinton "I support the governor in what he's doing, but I don't agree with it" stuff, earlier on it was much closer to fair. --Liam]

I finally got around to watching the Democratic debate I had TiVo'd last week, and I'm really quite offended at the bias shown by the moderators, especially Tim Russert.

It's subtle, but it's clear that the whole event was aimed at the big three candidates instead of letting each candidate have an unbiased shot at getting their message out.

I'm sure there were a lot more examples, but let me just give a few of the more glaring ones I spotted.

The worst was Russert's question to Dennis Kucinich about UFOs. What, exactly, did that have to do with anything? It was a question designed and intended from the start to feature Kucinich's reputation as a whack-job candidate... and he may well be that. Nevertheless, his policy stances should be what drives people to decide how seriously to take him.

And by the way, that one goes further. Kucinich answered honestly and tried to deflect it by turning it into a joke, which it really was, and Russert (who let a lot of more serious and substantive stuff stand) decided to go for the jugular. Completely inappropriate.

Another subtle but clear problem was the "speed round" questions, in which candidates are given 30 seconds to give their answers. These things should be scrapped. 30 seconds aren't enough time to give a proper answer to most questions as was clear when candidate after candidate went over, not with puffery or overly expansive answers, but while trying to give a complete answer to a complex question. If you want to have "speed round" questions, make sure they're questions that can reasonably be answered in 30 seconds.

But the biggest reason why these 30 second time limit questions are clearly a source of bias is in the timing. Watch the clock closely. When the question is asked of the fringe candidates, that timer starts instantly when the question is done being asked. When the question is asked of one of the candidates considered more "main stream", the candidate often was speaking for four or five seconds before the timer popped up on screen and started ticking down from 30.

And watch who was most forcefully interrupted when their 30 seconds ran out, too. When it was a main stream candidate, the moderators waited until they were just about done speaking and then, in their most obsequious and apologetic of voices, said that they were going to have to be more strict with future answers. But when it was one of the fringe candidates, the second that clock hit zero there were audible interruptions.

Now, to all of this you could argue that there have already been a lot of debates and a lot of water under the bridge. You could point out that the first primaries are about two months away and that perhaps it's reasonable to start hearing more from the candidates who have a real chance of winning the nomination.

And arguably you'd be right, although it'd be a fine line to walk, because while that might be appropriate in this late debate, if they'd done it during the earlier ones they would have created an unfair and non-level playing field in the early parts of the process.

But still, in my view it should be the party who decides which candidates are worthy of taking part in the debate and the moderators' job to see that each person on that stage gets a fair and balanced set of questions and time to answer them.

In the end, it's supposed to be us, the citizens, who decide which candidates will represent us in the election and which nominee will become our next President. It should not be up to the news media to make that choice for us (and while I know it's idealistic to believe it won't happen, at least it should be done with more artistry than this ham-handed display of favoritism).

Liam.

More on Rhetoric (Moron Rhetoric?)

And while I'm up writing and posting tonight... When will we, as a nation, stop falling for the cheapest of rhetorical tricks? It's amazing to me how readily so many of us fall into the trap of letting the President (and others) misdirect us with debating tactics which would be disallowed in any Logic and Argument 101 class or debate club in any high school in the nation.

Today, in specific, I'm talking about President Bush's response to the hold up on the confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Mukasey. General Mukasey has been asked a fairly simple question: Does he believe the technique known as “water-boarding” is torture? So far, he has refused to give a definitive answer to this question.

President Bush's response to this is that it's unreasonable for Congress to expect General Mukasey to comment on the tactic because he has not been fully briefed on whether we're using it or not, and that if he had been briefed on it, it wouldn't be reasonable for him to give away state secrets by testifying about it.

But think about the question that was actually asked, and let's change it slightly. If General Mukasey were asked “Is putting a prisoner's eyes out torture?” does he need to know whether we have a policy of blinding people in our custody in order to render a legal opinion on the topic? Heck, if he were asked “Is this a nice tie?”, does he really need to know whether we ever intend to wear it before he can give his opinion on the aesthetics of the tie?

President Bush goes to every length he can to make Congress appear unreasonable, but if you actually pay attention to the logic, it is HE who is unreasonable, expecting Congress to rubber stamp yet another Presidential nominee who refuses to answer an important question.

And by the way, while we're sort of on the topic of water-boarding, to those who don't think it's torture, would you feel the same way if it were done to our soldiers? Would it be just hunky dory with you if we found out that when our soldiers were captured they were held down and had water poured over their faces to simulate drowning? What about extreme temperatures, being subjected to very cold temperatures naked, or sleep deprivation for days on end? And if you STILL think all that's OK, do you mind if we do it to you?

Don't fall for the rhetoric. When the President says that without the immediate passing of the supplemental funding bill, soldiers will go without armor, remember that this is the same armor his own Defense Department has been woefully inadequate in supplying over the course of this war, and that far from immediate, the supplemental funding won't kick in until the current funding actually runs out, which isn't likely to be until the second quarter of next year. And when the President demands that Congress send him a “clean” bill without any attachments, remember that in his forty plus billion dollar request there's at least two billion of unrelated spending, so it's not just Congress attaching things to war funding.

And really, when the President says that it's unreasonable for Congress to expect a legal opinion out of a nominee for the position of Attorney General, wonder if he also thinks it's unreasonable to ask him if he likes pizza before he's been briefed on whether you plan to offer him any.

If you learn nothing else from my blog, learn to see through the rhetorical tricks and think for yourself. Learn to go beyond the mere mantra that politicians can't be trusted and actually try to see through their words and think for yourself. Don't let anyone do your thinking for you. Not Rush Limbaugh or MoveOn.org. Not Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann. Not news outlets or bloggers. Not even me. Think critically, and don't let lying tactics win by being too lazy to give even the most cursory examination into the veracity of the things you're told.

Liam.

True Patriotism

Something my wife Janet said to me recently struck a chord and has been ruminating in my brain for a few days, so I thought I'd write about it.

I don't remember the specific conversation or comment well enough to quote it, I only mention the source to give proper credit for some of the ideas.

The context is the recurring theme from our President that it is worth giving up a few of our freedoms and values to increase his power to keep us safe from terrorists. Of course, he never phrases it in quie that way, but it's rather hard to characterize torture, extraordinary rendition, increased Presidential power, petulant refusal to accept any Congressional oversight, and indeed the entire Iraq war (and, if signs are to be believed, the coming Iran war) in any other way.

But here's the thing: The uber-patriots among us like to talk about laying down our lives for our country. We're taught to revere our brave soldiers who are willing to die for this country (and rightly so), and we convince ourselves that we would do the same if the need became great, or we demonize our enemies by implying that they wouldn't.

So here's the question: If our freedoms and our values and our nation are worth dying for, then why is it only worth deaths on the battlefield? Why is it only worth our SOLDIERS dying for it? If our country's values are worth dying to protect then the possibility of further terrorist attack is just one of the ways we may die to keep our country great. And if we do not consider our country's values worth dying for, if we do not feel it is worth the risk of dying in a terrorist attack if that is the cost of preserving our rights and freedoms so hard won and carefully laid out over 230 years ago, then how is it worth sending our soldiers to die for the same cause?

As our President and his cadre are so fond of reminding us, this is a different kind of war. We're not talking about an enemy we can ever entirely defeat (like we could a dictator or a country). This isn't an enemy like any we've ever faced before, because we're fighting an ideology, not a specific people or group or country.

And so we really have two choices: We can decide that our values are worth dying for, worth risking death for, then hold our heads high as we continue our lives knowing we never sacrificed our principles, or we can decide to erode our principles one by one in the name of protecting ourselves, until there's really nothing left to protect but the memory of past glory, until we're a nation of Paris Hiltons, spoiled little brats born on third base and convinced we hit a triple, even though we've no idea how to even hold a baseball bat.

I don't want to die in a terrorist attack. I don't want my family members to, or my friends, or almost any American (although I may make an exception for the next person who tries to dismiss a dissenting opinion by asserting that the opponent “hates America”). But for better or for worse I've got the patriotism bug, I've grown up believing this country is great and that the reason it is great is the values it has. And I think it'd be far more in keeping with the spirit of true patriotism to die in a fiery conflagration with my children and my friends, knowing that those who survived would continue to be free and maintain their basic human rights, than to send our children off to commit atrocities in our names and slowly erode away our freedoms in the name of preserving something that we far more effectively kill ourselves than any terrorist enemy ever could.

Take a stand. If you think this country is worth dying for, be willing to die for it (or at least risk dying for it), here at home, in order to keep it great. If you're not willing to take that risk, there's simply not enough left here to be worth fighting for. We've already lost.

Liam.