Republican Christmas Tale

Palin: "Jesus Claus is coming to town to deliver colored eggs!"

Rick Perry: "And both Wise-men showed up."

Ted Cruz: "There was no room at the inn because ObamaCare costs kept them from expanding."

Obama's ISIS Strategy Spun 4 Ways By Righties

Conservative media has ignored some key factors and created slimy spin over Obama's ISIS approach. Here are four examples:

1)  Not bombing civilians early in the conflict -- US attacks on civilians has been a giant recruiting public relations mechanism for ISIS and other anti-US groups. Any tactical gain from killing civilians could easily be offset by producing more ISIS recruits via anger over civilian deaths.

Now that they have attacked our partner, France, we have justification for stronger offense. For example, if somebody on the street merely threatens to injure you or your spouse via words, then punching them would probably get you an aggravated assault sentence. However, if they strike at your spouse, then you are justified in physically retaliating.

2) Not arming the Kurds more -- Turkey is strategic NATO partner in the region. Our relations with them have been somewhat shaky of late, in large part due to our assistance to the Kurds, such that we are at risk of losing Turkey as an ally. Turkey is afraid that armed Kurds will turn on them, being they've have a tumultuous history and relationship with the non-Kurd portions of Turkey. Giving more arms to the Kurds could easily create heavy blow-back.

You may disagree with how the President has weighed and balanced these tricky factors, but it's very difficult to claim his selection of one over the other was clearly a poor decision based on the known conditions of the time. In hindsight they could indeed turn out to be poor selections, but hindsight makes all of humanity look pretty stupid. Only God has a crystal ball.

3) "ISIS is contained" remark -- It's pretty clear to me the President meant geographically contained in terms of territory occupied. One generally does NOT use the term "contained" or "non-contained" to refer to hit-and-run terror attacks (or hit-and-burst). You are welcome to interpret it differently, but it's probably due to your personal bias against Democrats such that your brain subconsciously interprets it in a way that makes the President appear to fib, because that fits your preconceived notions.

4) "ISIS is the JV Team" -- That's such a highly figurative analogy that it's difficult to measure and compare in a meaningful way. ISIS's military is hardly comparable to China's, Russia's, or even the UK's or Frances. They don't have an air-force; they don't have a navy; they don't have nuclear weapons, etc. From that perspective, they ARE a secondary power.

I don't why conservatives keep bringing up such a very indirect and colloquial analogy, other than perhaps to use repetition alone to increase the alleged embarrassment power of the statement rather than focus on substantive issues and statements. It's marketing 101: go for the shiny red ball because it's visible and easy for the audience to remember, rather than facts and logic. It's yet another way conservatives tick me off.

Blue-Balls, Terrorism, and Riots

Polygamy may be causing desperation and aggression. If some men get multiple wives, others have to get none to make the math work, and that leads to a lot of "blue-ball" rage.

Young men need realistic civilized options or they war and riot, period. A similar situation may apply to disenfranchised minorities. Many minority women will marry into a non-disenfranchised ethnic group, leaving "stranded" men who are in a similar situation to the middle-east polygamists.

If you put young men into a mate-free dog-eat-dog world, they will eat dog, and you.

Benghazi Committee Jumps the Shark

For Halloween...

For Halloween, I'm going as Karl Rove on election night.

The New Bibi-8 is Out!

Carly's Big Military

Why do Carly and friends keep talking about growing our military? Our military is already roughly 4x bigger than Russia's. Why would being 6x or 10x make any difference to Putin? He doesn't have to go head to head so far because he nibbles at the corners. The size thing is not logical, Carly. Your HP calculator needs batteries.

If we went to war directly against Russian troops, we will have roughly a 3 to 1 kill ratio. That sounds good until you realize that Russia has traditionally thrown people at war and thus we may have to lose a half million on our side for them to start to care. Dictators don't give a [bleep] about death of their subjects.

Same with China; they'll throw people at the problem and a lot of Americans will lose their life. More machines won't change the balance that much, and trigger an arms race anyhow.

All else being equal, a bigger military is better, but it won't noticeably change our relationship with Russia or China because death worries non-democracies much less.

Rick Perry Leaves the Presidential Race

Rick Perry forgot which race he dropped out of.  "Uh, Governor? Senator? VP? NASCAR? Human?"

That's too bad, he has high standards; he reminded the crowd how he's the only candidate to follow all 9 commandments.

I had a dream a Palin/Perry ticket won the 2016 election. They were last seen in the Oval Office arguing over which assistant the red button rang up.

"Daddy!"

Daddy!

Conservative Reacts to 2 Supreme Court Rulings

ACA? Marriage equality? 

Git...me...my...
Maalox

Rachel Dolezal Case, "Race" Means Nothing

"Race" means almost nothing scientifically. Race is a social construct, not a scientific one. All humans are mutts. There may be genetic tendencies revolving around the frequency of certain genes for a given region, but the variations all blur into each other and don't respect borders.

And what does "African American" mean exactly? We are all from Africa if you go back far enough.  A history of slavery has been suggested as a way to identify "black," but the ancestry and migration records of many slaves are lost to antiquity. There may be records that can prove one is related to a slave, but that's not the same as being related to somebody of African origins. Not all slaves were from Africa. Thus, there is no clean, fair, and reliable measurement for "black" or any other race.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in

GOP candidates hit the talk-show circuit.

Kudos to 2 Republicans Who are Sane on STEM and Visa Worker Bull-Stuff

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) have been fighting the good fight of exposing the "shortage" BS surrounding STEM workers (Science, Tech., Eng. & Math) in which many companies claim there is a "shortage" in order to rent more visa workers from other countries. It's an issue I've often written about.

In short, businesses lobby for more STEM visa workers, typically under the H-1B and L-1 visa programs, because such visa workers are more abuse-able due the practical circumstances they are in, because they are typically under-payed for the type of work they do, and because having the world to choose from means companies are less likely to have to train a citizen on a specific set of tools that the company happens to be using.

The STEM lie was exposed recently as Microsoft was caught hiring visa works AND laying off large counts of citizen technology workers at the same time after a slump in sales. They didn't want to bother to re-train many of their very own employees on different technologies, despite having reasonably close experience, choosing new visa workers instead. 

For example, rather than re-training PC programmers on mobile device programming (tablets and smart-phones), they let go long-time PC programmers and rented new mobile programmers under visa programs. That's not "shortage", that's cherry-picking for free. Their excuses were laughable and disturbing at the same time, revealing an almost psychopath view of the world.