This guy looks like he’s just realized the O isn’t going to pay him for the sub… “Hey that comes outta my pay mister!”
 

That’s cool by me, as long as they’re not sparkly whiny vampires… Oh wait that’s team O, they’re the real sparkly whiny vampires. Always wondered why the O looked anemic in the light, now we know.

I wonder if Bain is going to stake the outcome of the election for team not-sparkly now…

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/05/07/us-secretly-releasing-taliban-fighters-report-says/

Just my two cents here but…

Don’t we strengthen our hand by keeping them and *maybe* releasing them for actual gains once the gains are realized?

Has no one learned that the opposition, the Taliban, is allowed/encouraged to lie to us “infidels” by doctrine/scripture etc?

Or is this something worse, sheer incompetency on display by the administration or are they actively trying to help the side that is shooting at our guys?

One can only imagine the play this gets for the Taliban:

Thank allah for putting a spell on the infidels to release you! See-we were right about our cause being holy etc etc… feel free to go back to fighting them…

or mebbe

They are that stupid! Here’s your new identity papers and bonus for trying again – go get’em!

or…

Of course they are releasing us, they do not want to win – did you learn nothing from Vietnam?

(etc ad nausea)

Voted for Santorum today… I *almost* felt like my vote meant something… until he quit the other week.

For a brief second I considered voting for Gingrich but there was an article over on drudge that said he was *considering* dropping out later this week… (which to me reading between the lines seems more like “will drop out soon so why bother”).

Took my Mother to vote, she’s registered as a democrat and was disappointed that she has to wait until the fall to vote against Obama…

Taking my Sweetie to vote after she gets off work… she’s also a democrat and miffed there’s no one on the democrat ticket to oppose Obama in PA.  I sort of mentioned the write in option and Santorum a few times to her yesterday and she seemed to warm to that possibility…

I think this is the only time I can remember when coming out of Winter that I’ve really wanted the Summer over already so November can get here…

Someone finally published images of Zimmerman’s injuries sustained when a young thug was apparently, according to eyewitnesses, bashing his head into the concrete before he defended himself from losing his own life. My only question about this is why did it take several weeks to put them out?

The prosecutor who decided to go after Zimmerman failed to disclose that information? Tsk tsk… perhaps she needs to lose her job. In a rare moment of channel surfing luck I landed on Fox news as they were announcing she was coming out to make a statement and watched her live on tv. She seemed to be like a kid in a candy store as she made full use of the spotlight to put out that she was pursuing charges against Zimmerman. Watching her I saw someone being truly evil, she relished the spotlight, relished the ability to stand there and say how she was only pursuing the charges because “something” was there and not because of the public uproar. She basically put on a good show of lying to the nation, in my opinion. There is the face of real evil – happy to wield the power of her office, defiant in the face of facts, omitting relevant facts that do not fit her narrative of pursuing the conviction of someone who committed no crime.

Mob rule = no justice

Rule of law = to know justice

The rule of law is only as perfect as the people who run it but it’s generally better than than mob rule.

Mob rule is only effective at getting what the mob was whipped up for, and that is rarely truly anything close to real justice.

If the people inciting mobs against Zimmerman had the their way Zimmerman would be killed for lawfully defending himself.  If the politically pandering official who filed charges has her way Zimmerman will be put in jail for legally defending himself.

The real evil in this case is not that a young thug died, a tragic loss in itself, but that so many can scream so loudly in the face of all evidence to the contrary of what they are screaming about and still get charges filed where there should be none filed.

I hope that the case against Zimmerman is thrown out pretrial based on the eyewitness accounts and the previously withheld photos of a bloodied Zimmerman. I hope Zimmerman’s lawyers spend the next several years suing the Black Panthers, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and everyone else who have wronged Zimmerman by screaming for his neck before the facts were fully disclosed and even more importantly go after those who continued to pursue Zimmerman after the facts have essentially cleared him of a crime.

The defining thing about the Zimmerman case is that it is a barometer that shows us how evil in a banal way some people can be when it is convenient for them/advances them or their agenda. It illustrates how some people are willing to be led like sheep by unscrupulous individuals. The other truly chilling thing it shows is how disinterested in facts people can be when the facts aren’t in their favor.

In my opinion the prosecutor needs to lose her job and the willfully negligent people in the media who doctored tapes along with any others who misled the public should all be punished for the real crime of undermining the rule of law and defaming someone who legally defended himself from being beaten to death by an aggressive adult sized want to be thug.

I backed Cain… he quit…

I backed Santorum… he just quit…

In November I’ll vote for anyone than the Obama/Biden ticket unless I’m to sick to go to the polls… If I’m dead I’ll still vote but cannot guarantee it’ll be the way I would if alive (I live in PA)

I am not happy with Romney likely winning, for a variety of reasons that run from “he’s the one the O could maybe beat” to “I just don’t trust him to be more than a politics as usual kind of guy who won’t fix a doggone thing”…

So it goes…

Last time around Romney quit early. He’s just been handed the nomination barring a major scandal or hideous gaffe that puts all the previous foot in mouth moments to shame…

sigh…

Sorry, but this is not the place for such as this. We try to stick with stuff that is at least tangentially related to politics, issues and policy. – Mgmt

In my opinion the problem with Afghanistan is very, very simple*.

In many conflicts when the strategy shifts from “winning” to “not losing” losing is pretty much the end result. Whether you study history or just apply the concept to your home game (whatever it may be) it’s a startlingly obvious thing to those who never noticed it before.

Original objective: Destroy AQ there and depose the Taliban for harboring them. Accomplished. The two moved across the border and at least the Taliban are literally taking a page from the Vietnam War lesson and using the artificial border as a refuge to continue it’s insurgency to regain power in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile it seems the US has adopted a “don’t lose” mentality against the cross border insurgency.

The current administration claims the operation that took out Bin Laden was the most audacious plan in 500 years… despite the fact that Biden was opposed to it and the POTUS was essentially cornered into making the decision and took what, like 10 hours plus to greenlight it? It’s easy to be snarky about that comment. Anyone who has any grasp of history can tear it apart, but really it was a political statement meant o play to the stupidest of the O’s/Biden’s political base.

The war in Afghanistan will be won in one of five** ways:
1. The US packs up and leaves, claiming “Victory with honor” as we did in Vietnam. This allows the Taliban to become resurgent and try to take over on heels of claiming they drove out the invader etc. I won’t predict a Taliban “victory” since their odds go down the longer we stay there, in my opinion.

2. The US stays for another twenty something years, vigorously applying counter insurgency measures etc and eventually the Taliban support dries up and they cease to be unless propped up by other outsiders…

3. The US decides Pakistan is a failed state, isolates/captures/destroys Pakistan’s nukes and applies the same treatment to Pakistan it gave to Afghanistan for harboring AQ (and this time also harboring the Taliban). Move US Forces from Afghanistan into Pakistan. (not the best option in my opinion)

4. Pakistan decides it is time to clean house and “invites” the US to clean out the Taliban and AQ hiding in Pakistan… this could bring out the fanatics to “fight the infidel” and allow them to be reduced in power if not eliminated for decades by Pakistan. Of course it would mean a civil war for Pakistan but the perfect idea in this sort of thing is a rare thing.

5. The US and Allies cripple Iran’s nuke program, destroy Iran’s export capability, destroys Iran’s economy somewhat and essentially destroys Iran’s ability to export terror both financially and logistically. Import into Iran real support for an insurgent action against the Mullahs and apply similar tactics to any other country sending support to the Taliban as needed until they have no money to pay people and no imported weapons/munitions/logistic to add to the fight. Eventually they will dry up and be in the dustbin of history. hOpefully regime change could be ironically brought to Iran without an invasion.

6. A meteor hits Pakistan turning the region into lava. Depending on the size of the space rock the rest of us might/might not consider a victory in Afghanistan a priority at that point.

Personally I’m all for #4 with a good healthy touch of #5. #2 is the next best if we could apply some of #5 along with it to cripple the logistics of the enemy.

Note that none of the above include “nation building”. In my opinion Nation building is something that the people of the Nation mentioned need to step up and do because they want to. We can set the example but people tend to get into their mindsets because of how they have lived and those attitudes/mindsets are hard to change once they are set. If we go with option #2 and stay AND educate the next several generations of Afghans then they *might* have a mindset that steps above tribalism/corruption/religious intolerance. No guarantees.

Note that none of the above includes “put someone in charge in the US who wants to win” etc… I’ll point it out here for those who need it said: How can we expect to have a winning strategy of any sort when the person(s) running the show at the top levels didn’t want the war in the first place and have a history of saying wars can never be won if the US was looking at being involved in it?

The current empty suit of a President, before he ran for POTUS and when he was running kept saying the real war was in Pakistan. But that changed when it’s perceived as politically inconvenient and offensive to his base to expand the war effort once he’s in charge. Wars can’t be won this way, but the can be lost or prolonged.

*and yes, lots of it can be very complicated on local/operational level etc.
**#6 isn’t really a win, more of a cancelled/draw due to natural disaster…

As if we don’t have enough problems that help gas prices go up…

Pennsylvania economy getting flushed

Oh-and it’ll hurt the whole northeast as well… good thing it’s happening right now in an election year and all – maybe some opportunist narcissistic politician will fix this to score points before denying the keystone pipeline… oh wait… that would assume that someone is on our side… never mind…

Just got in a little bit ago and saw the current results for Alabama and Mississippi… it looks strong enough to hold on for Santorum to win both.

Previously Romney won his “home” state, the one where he was raised in, by essentially one county going mostly for him and Gingrich/Santorum’s splitting of overlapping voters.

Gingrich has clearly lost his home state and the other in play in the South tonight. Romney looks to be third in both.

Barring someone finding a buch-o-ballots-in-a-trunk-somewhere* or some totally weirdly skewed final returns in my opinion it’s time for Gingrich to take one for the conservative team, step aside and endorse Santorum. Or at least step aside.

*not that Dems might stoop that far to help Romney but it’s a possibility…

update: facepalm applied… for some reason that probably involves me not working at nuclear powerplants or being the guy assigned to call in artillery fire back in the day I switched Newt’s home state fight into tonight’s race… sigh…