Nominee Alito/Vietnam War-Iraq War Issues/Monolithic Domes and Taxes

Gary C Gibson. - 06:22pm Oct 31, 2005 EDT God ordered Noah to save all endangered species--and more than half of the ship was reserved for animal habitat

It would have better pr with Pricilla Owens as the nominee, yet the President's recalcitrance about appearing to have p& v made his selection logical.

It reminds me of the screenplay synoptic about an aging Montana motorcycle auto jumping champion that becomes set up by a corrupt federal politician from a southern state looking for a fall guy to advance his reelection...the aging jumper/former special forces dude hops and skips the U.S.A. to reach former contra colleagues in Nicaragua that help him return to break up the drug importation financed coup de main.

Actually there aren't many good movies out now, so I made that up.

Sen. Reed backed the loser for the first try to fill justice O’Connor’s seat, and he may lose again by seeking to filibuster the nomination. Since Tip O’Neal left his job as Speaker, the Democratic fortunes have continued a downhill slide...they just can't seem to pick winning issues, and won't save their ammo for battles they have a chance of winning.

The Democrats in Congress definitely should not filibuster and require the Republicans to invoke the nuclear option. Blocking lower court nominees is different than blocking Supreme Court appointments by an elected President and supported by a majority of congress. The Democrats should just sign off on Alito as the Republicans did on the very unconservative Ginsberg nomination, and respecting democracy cut their losses and look to 'next week'.

Democrats since the Clinton era haven't been able to evaluate with accuracy the chances of getting legislation through. They pick issues that are out of season or unfruitful, and hold onto them long past the time they would do any good. It’s rather remarkable how silly the Democratic leadership is sometimes.

Two political parties can be as useless as just one party in conserving the liberal rights of democracy it seems, and the nation may develop a resemblance to the former Soviet Union's statist fake democratic society in time in neo-corporatist or socialist garb.

If President Bush rally was serious about someone with no Judicial experience for the court, he should have just nominated Letterman or Leno, and got them to take crash legal courses to fill in until they could pass the bar in two or three years. Neo-Corporations have no need for real equal protection of laws, sound legal reasoning of a democratic society, or free expression by private citizens on internet blogs when they dissent with neo-corporatist brainwashing, so they might at least have enjoyed the humor of some college graduates, or alternatively, some public defenders that handle a dozen cases a day in D.C. might have understood the challenges the poor experience in a neo-corporatist, semi-statist society better than that highest social milieu of Dallas.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051031/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/vietnam_intelligence

Why the timing on this article? I read a fairly comprehensive report on the problems with the Gulf of Tonkin 'incident' a year or two ago. Does this article add much information that wasn't known already. That article alleged that a navy was required to go out and fabricate an icident that never really happened...if I remember correctly.

Certainly the Bush administration falmmed up the wmd issue in order to sell the public on the 2003 war with Iraq so there are parallels with the Gulf of Tonkin Incident...but not many.
Vietnam was a war that was unwinnable if the Southerners wouldn't defend it themselves ultimately with the Laotian border and security problems as they were, while the Iraq conflict to terminate a regime allowing a democide to occur was a just cause, even though it upset 1000 contractors paying billions of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein in the oil for food program and was thus contentious in the U.N.

Gary C Gibson. - 09:00am Nov 1, 2005 EDT

Orde Wingate's mission had not been going 'several years' berfore he perished. It had been only operative several months. He was of course working against the Japanese occupation force with success. Often his specially selected people walked about.

Blogger did discern one point...the Vietnam War was perhaps classifiable as a 'loss', and as history it cannot be reversed in that context except through revisionism, where Arnolf Swarnetnagger defeated the forces at Dien bien Phu led by droids.

The Iraq war of 2003 was as the President declared a bit show-boatishly, a victory. The post war events are in a different nation building process that is already fundamentally successful.
With Soviet military support for the North Vietnamese rebels, and the legal impossibility of invading and occupying the north, stopping the war in the south wasn't likely, especially with the Ho Chin Minh trail of incursion improving in spite of operation igloo.

To 'win' the Vietnam war would hadve required an almost impossible border defense durting the cold war era. The object of the war in the L.B.J. administration was instead to intimidate the communists with shock and awe into quiping...a policy that continued during the Nixon administration as he began the regular withdrawl of American and U.N. forces simultaneously complied.

The Vietnam War was a proxie cold war casualty in the world battle against communism. If the Soviets and Americans had not been protagonists, perhaps Ho Chi Minh would have led the war against colonialism in a different direction.

The Orde Wingate query was simply a test question to demonstrate the sillyness of making substantive or lengthy replies to polemicists that havern't a meaningful historical; contribution to make on a subject such as that...Admiral Nelson and Vietnam Mark associated (what horse pitching inaccuracy)!

---

In case anyone missed the new planet discoveries...

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050729_new_planet.html

Gary C Gibson. - 11:47am Nov 1, 2005 EDT

Taxes are sometimes used to encourage or discourage public policy. In Alaska the majority voted to prevent homo marriages, while the Supreme Court of Alaska retaliated by giving full health benefits to state employees homo live-ins. In effect the Alaska Supremes recognized de facto common law homo marriages. Courts can in effect veto public policy expressed by the majority, while taxation can be used to put intention upon public policy.

In Florida hurricane damage that is preventable with a little executive leadership or legislative foresight year after year piles up redistribution of tax dollars so people can buy storm shutters or whatever...new roof, fence, fruit trees, trailer through FEMA and other agencies while homeless people can just sort of marvel at how the haves get more.

Yet the failure of the state government to have adequate ecozoning and building design measures broadly available along with home-power alternate energy sources such as wind, solar and fuel cell generators is a consequence of the neo-corporatist drift of establishment inflexibility that cumulatively stagnates alterity; change is bad for already producing business technology.

When ossification through neo-corporatism becomes too pervasive even extending to broadcast media attack on Internet start-ups and government complicity dumbs down the free market through lack of renewable invention and innovation in technology on the largest scale budget deficits and foreign borrowing to fund a dysfunctional economy ensue.

Sound taxation would tax home energy consumption, and fuel consumption from fossil fuel based sources in order to encourage domestically produced alternate, independent energy generation.

Sunday I had 16 spare points so I advertised my poem 'Three Bolts More' on allpoetry.com for one click. I'd written the poem after watching a lightening storm from a Baptist Church porch during heavy rain in Florida (I was riding a bike). I'd just finished the bulk of painting a non-Baptist Church, unlike the Baptist Church I couldn't finish in West Texas last October because they kept changing the color, the weather got cold, and it wasn't possible for me to charge more (I did not want too). The paint line reached halfway up the wall to the colored glass and the dove/spirit of God. When the Baptist minister was electrocuted in Waco in a Baptismal font yesterday I was surprised-yet it seemed a remarkable coincidence.

Electricity need not be such a strange thing with ongoing power outages from WILMA in Florida...some independent home power should be encouraged.

Square metal buildings in the south that become solar toaster-ovens without vast volumes of centrally produced electricity for air conditioning should be taxed more than monolithic concrete domes with an effective r-value of 80. Even monolithic domes with a cost of just 85 dollars per square foot should have alternate, independent power supply to power low wattage fans to bring in outside air if they are used for storm shelters. With a 100 people in a non-air conditioned hotbox the atmosphere become unbreathable very fast as the oxygen is depleted by all that lung air intake.

Automobiles that run on non-fossil fuels and that don't require any foreign fuel of any sort to operate should be exempt from taxes entirely.