A quick note to any Republican legislators who might be reading this blog, that as you head into the coming special session in an effort to trim another billion dollars or so from the remaining six months of the current state budget, it is important to remember that “levy equalization” equals Socialism.
There’s no two ways about it. The Local Effort Assistance program is redistribution of wealth, pure and simple, shifting the burden of financing public schools from homeowners in “property poor” districts to homeowners in districts with higher than average property valuations. And that’s Socialism.
Personally, I think assuring educational equity is a worthwhile goal, but then, as a big-city, liberal Democrat, I’m not afraid to embrace Socialistic concepts when and where appropriate, but… um… you are. So I can’t see how, as a matter of principle, Republican legislators like you can oppose slashing or eliminating LEA funding in the face of such a yawning revenue shortfall.
R or D does not matter when it comes to LEA. Most districts should be able to pass their own levies now that the passing rate has changed to 50%. Local communities and citizens should pay their own school levies, not extract it from other communities who end up paying more than their fair share. Education is important to all communities and local support is critical.
@1 That’s the point, it does matter who is supporting it because LEA is consistent with most D’s governing principles and philosophies but it is hypocritical for R’s (who generally benefit) to support it.
Of course, Washington’s blue counties have been subsidizing the red counties with our tax dollars for decades.
Damn straight!
ya think borker, of decormyeyes, is jewish?
Does it really matter if eastern Washington schools have no money and turn out students even more ignorant than the voters over there already are?
@5 Just what this blog needs — another drug-addled incoherent fool.
Facing a revolt within his own party, President* Obama called a hasty press conference today to shore up support for his rollover for the GOP on their irresponsible demands for $700 billion of budget-busting, deficit-creating, tax cuts for the rich.
Obama explicitly called the Republicans “hostage takers” and said, in so many words, he thinks it’s in the country’s best interests to pay ransom to them so unemployed workers won’t starve.
Well, it’s now clear that’s the kind of president we have: One who will pay ransom to hostage takers, thereby encouraging more hostage-taking, and there will be more, you can count on it.
Over the last few days, Obama has been blasted across the Democratic spectrum for making what most observers think is a rotten bargain, giving Republicans a massive ideological victory in return for almost nothing. He not only sold us out, he sold us cheaply.
I didn’t vote for Obama in the caucus. I voted for Clinton. I always knew Obama was a weak-kneed sissy and Republican-lite. That was obvious when he used Wall Street money to finance the most expensive presidential campaign in history. That kind of money isn’t free. The bankers and brokers — the guys who will primarily benefit from this $700 billion addition to the national debt — own him.
The problem is bigger than Obama, and won’t be solved by putting the screws on him to not run for a second term. We have to get the influence of big money out of politics or nothing will ever change. It doesn’t matter who is president as long as Wall Street owns both parties, which it does. The problem is, SCOTUS says corporations are people, and you can’t shut them up, because the Constitution says corporations have a right to spend as much of their shareholders’ money as the CEO and board of directors want to on buying politicians and dominating the political process (for such purposes as blocking legislation on shareholder rights and board of directors accountability).
So let’s make money illegal! That’s take the money out of politics. If we return to a barter economy it’ll be much more difficult for Wall Street to buy politicians with chickens and cases of tomato soup. They’ll still do it, but at least it’ll create jobs for out-of-work truck drivers, deliverymen, and warehouse workers.
* Hey trolls, read this word, and choke on it!
I’m thinking that Levy Equalization is like every other government program: Republicans love it if it works in their favor, and hate it if it works the other way. Intellectual consistency and honesty hasn’t been a hallmark of the Republican Party for quite some time.
For example, let’s just look at what has happened in the “other Washington” the last couple of weeks. Republican lawmakers promised to fight against any attempt to extend unemployment benefits unless the Democrats found matching funds from their other programs. They claimed that reducing the deficit was of vital importance, and their primary motivation in blocking any Democratic bills to emerge from the House or Senate during the lame-duck session.
Unless, of course, it’s a tax cut for the wealthy that’s involved. They promised to shut down government unless the 2% of the highest earners, some 316,000 households (out of about 150,000,000 households total), got their tax cuts extended. They didn’t even pretend to find a way to pay for it, they just insisted that nobody was going to get anything – the unemployed weren’t going to get benefits extended, the middle class workers weren’t going to get their own much more modest tax cuts extended, unless the richest of the rich got theirs first.
So Obama caves in, and in return gets a promise to extend unemployment benefits for a little over a year, and the rich get their tax cuts for at least two more years.
Funny, the deficit isn’t so important any more, as long as the rich get their tax cuts.
How can anyone defend such hypocracy? If I had the talent to be a cartoonist, I would draw the Republican leadership as a gang of wild west outlaws, clutching the middle class family and unemployed worker with guns to their head, as they taunt Obama: “Give us the tax cuts for the rich, or the townsfolk get it right in the head!”
Of course, after this, Republicans will have no credibility whatsoever when they talk about deficit reduction.
Not that they ever did.
The answer to why Republicans can justify this particular distribution of wealth is simple: Republicans are all full of crap.
@9 Sometimes you have to sacrifice the hostages to get the hostage takers. After World War 2, Jewish groups criticized the U.S. government for not bombing the Nazi death camps, even though the bombs would have killed Jewish prisoners. I’ve always thought Jimmy Carter should have sent B-52s, not a surgical operation, after the Tehran crowds surrounding the U.S. embassy. Or, better yet, a tactical nuke. He would have lost the hostages, but nobody in that crowd would have ever chanted “Death to the U.S.!” again, and everyone else thinking about fucking with a U.S. embassy would have thought twice or three times before trying it. The Hiroshima bomb killed some U.S. POWs, but sometimes you’ve just gotta accept that you can’t save them all.
@12 Personally, I think they’re just plain greedy. That’s how they got rich in the first place.
Roger: Another name for Ethanol is White Lightnin’ (Wite Liten in the South).
We have a strong customer base for this product south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Visualize this. A foreign government-sponsored mob bursts into a U.S. embassy, takes the American diplomats hostage, ties their hands behind their backs with cords and blindfolds them, and parades them with bowed heads in front of TV cameras. Outside, an orchestrated mob of 25,000 people wave placards, burn U.S. flags, and chant “Death to the U.S.!” and … BOOOOOM!!!!
There’s a flash. A tremendous roar that echoes off the surrounding hills for several minutes. A mushroom cloud boils 60,000 feet into the sky. The fires burn for days, and it’s a week before the smoke clears enough to see Ground Zero. There’s nothing there but a blackened crater of earth about a quarter mile across and 200 feet deep. There’s no sign of the embassy, the hostages, or the 25,000 Iranian demonstrators. The dust of their mortal existence is being carried by stratospheric jet streams to fall on the Ukraine and Uzbekistan. The people of Iran are shell-shocked and the mullahs calling themselves their government are in disarray. Within 24 hours, regime change happens.
Yeah, you lose the hostages, but the fuckers will never do it again.
@15 Yeah, I know. Back in the good old days, before the state bureaucracy got so uptight about everything, one of my co-workers brought a Mason jar of Wite Litenin to the office. It was, like, 190 proof meaning 95% alcohol and burned your tongue off and would kill you iffen you drunk it too fast. You could pour it directly into the wing tanks of an F-16 and fly the thing. Or if you wanted to strip the paint off your old car down to the primer all you needed was a rag.
So a disenfranchised minority that wants “extra” help is a socialist drain on society. A poor rural hick who needs more money for his school because their “lifestyle choice” didn’t leave them with enough money to pay for it themselves, that’s just fair. Right.
Poor minority = socialist
Poor rural white = fair
Just because you choose not to get an advanced degree and get a high paying job in the city, why should I have to pay? Why should I have to pay EXTRA to your rural school because of your “lifestyle choice” of wanting to play cowboy and choosing to live in a tiny rural town that’s not self sufficient. If you wanna play cowboy or live in the middle of no where, that’s fine! But don’t expect me to pay for your cable, school, water treatment and roads just so you have live out your little frontier fantasy lifestyle choice.
Goldy–
Once again, why are you advising R’s??
The Dems created this fiscal trainwreck and are still in charge.
Gregoire wants a few more R’s in there to help share some of the blame on the cuts I guess.
She should have dealt with this long, long ago.
In other words Goldy, Get F’d.
8. Roger Rabbit spews:
Wow, Goldy’s NW Division of Lunatic Moonbat’s parlamentarian is even pissed off at his messiah, the ImamObaMao!
Hostage takers?? How does that help the situation. Once again, ImamObaMao proves incapable of real leadership.
TOO DAMN FUNNY!!
All he cares about is getting re-elected and he needs to salve the wounds with you idiots with words like “hostage taker”.
Make you feel better and back in his camp?
Obama could have handled this when he had a supermajority in the House and filibuster proof Senate….but he didn’t.
So how does Obama’s inaction make R’s “hostage takers”?
Your guy is playing you KLOWNS.
You have been and continue to be his USEFUL IDIOTS!
Keep up the bad work KLOWNS!
Roger, nuke fantasies are the Right’s toys, and while I think they’re necessary to keep on hand until they aren’t, using them demands a difficult trigger for employment. Especially as a terror weapon as you imagine using them.
That said, saying at a press conference that negotiation with terrorists is acceptable is damned unwise for any number of reasons.
re 20: No, you are wrong. This ‘train wreck’ of an economy has been brough about by 40 years of Republican misrule at the Federal level.
It was Reagan who defunded many social services that were partially funded by Federal dollars with the explanation that it was the state’ responsibility to fund these things all on their own.
Unfunded ‘mandates (no, that’s no pun) = Republicans
Oh look, speaking of terrorists, we’ve been joined by a sympathizer. Look out, his finger is on the cap lock.
re 21: Your guy is playing you KLOWNS.
Wrong again, penis breath. Obama did the best that he thought was politically realistic in achieving healthcare reform and financial reform. It’s a question of how good a job he did.
Playing voters is making them fearful of guns, gays, and abortions — while never actually doing ANYTHING about these issues.
Now, that’s real cynicism, isn’t it?
Just wondering where some of these folks on this thread got their information about Iran…maybe a history lesson might give you another take on it all. Once again, the victim mentality of my fellow citizens runs into reality, something usually ignored so that big “BOOMS” can shock and awe them. I’m exhausted by all the tough-guys out there. Read a book, please.
re 24: Are you suggesting that U.S. military retaliation for another county’s misdeed is itself terrorism?
re 26: So, are you saying that Truman’s bombing of Nagasaki was ill considered? Just another yokel-inspired ‘boom’?
re 26: There are a lot more books to read than the one that you did.
Republican legislators might do a better job of proposing spending cuts, than some of Governor Gregoire’s hare-brained proposals.
The most ridiculous are proposed Medicaid cuts — because the federal government pays 50% to 90% of the cost, depending on the program. Why cut $1 of state spending, when it is bringing $1 to $9 of matching federal money into the state — i.e. between 2 times and 10 times the total financial benefit.
Gregoire wants to cut prescription drugs for adults on Medicaid. So if you have cancer or AIDS that can be treated with expensive chemotherapy or retroviral treatment — TOO BAD! MEET YOUR MAKER SOONER! If you need psych needs to keep your job, stay out of jail, or avoid the mental ward — TOO BAD!
By the way — although prescription drugs are “optional” for adults under the Medicaid program, no other states have ever eliminated this coverage.
Most ridiculous is that Gregoire wants to eliminate DSHS coverage of birth control and family planning for poor adults not otherwise qualified for Medicaid. The federal government pays 90% for this program, so state savings would be minimal.
However, if a woman gets pregnant due to lack of birth control, DSHS will still pay for the expenses of pregnancy — which are far higher than those of birth control. This includes elective abortions — which the federal government does not contribute a penny to whatsoever.
At 27-29–I guess I didn’t get to color in the books I have, they’ve got words. Nagasaki? Are you insane? What kind of tough-guy argument are you attempting now? Justification for all the fire-bombing, killing of innocents in Japan, Germany, the American heartland (you remember, indigenous people?)? OK, you roll with that one. Man, this crowd gets thinner and thinner every time I bother to light here…I guess you’re just an exceptional guy livin’ in the exceptional country…
@28, no. This isn’t a thread to discuss the matter in the depth it deserves, and our host might well and justly invoke ground rules; but my considered opinion is that our weapons usage at the time was justified, but that the interveining years have raised the bar for their employment- if for no other reason there are considerably more waiting to be used.
And, back to the topic at hand- heck, when I want to talk about socialism in our system, I cite my favorite government service, the Fire Department. Government is inherently inefficient and bad for freedom? Then you’re against funding Fire Departments at the very least, and you’d better hope your favorite deity is on the job looking out for you if they are thrown out with Norquist’s bath water.
I’m sure that if Carter had bombed Tehran, he would have been re-elected, even if it had resulted in the deaths of all the hostages.
But the myths continue to be circulated about the events surrounding the release of the hostages. Just the other day I heard someone say that the hostages were only released after Reagan threatened to bomb them. But Reagan never made such a threat – he was still delivering his inaugural address when the plane holding the hostages was given clearance to depart Tehran’s airport.
And there are those troubling rumors about back-channel negotiations to the effect that Iran’s situation would be favorably viewed by the incoming Reagan administration, but only if the hostages were not released until after Reagan came into office.
does roger take geritol, get a buzz, and then write like 10 posts in a row, then fall asleep?
@33. rhp6033 spews
The reality was Reagan called the Iranians spineless yellow cowards, I saw that on the news. The reality was they were going to pay in blood if the hostages were still there when he took office. This entire nation knew and expected this and so did Iran!
A few more deserving socialist programs that should be cut before schools: Roads, crop subsidies, power subsidies, water subsidies, revenue sharing, and a thousand other little payments the E. Washington counties need to balance their budgets. Then we can talk levy equalization.
@21 The whole Democratic universe “is even pissed off at his messiah” and this isn’t news to anyone except you.
@28 That’s a really interesting question. British military historian Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, argued the A-bombs were unnecessary and created the Cold War. He pointed out that Japan was a maritime nation and with 98% of its shipping destroyed its surrender was inevitable. A significant number of scholars and historians are in the same camp. We know Truman never considered not using the bomb. In context, it was understandable; he saw it as a godsend that would end a war which had taken 50 million lives. It’s been argued the real reason he dropped it was to make an impression on Stalin.
@31 The terror bombing of German and Japanese cities was Curtis LeMay’s brainwave. In context, American military strategists didn’t really know for sure what it would take to defeat Germany and Japan. They were guessing to a certain extent. In retrospect, they probably guessed wrong in going after the cities and civilian populations. In all probability, all that did was harden resistance and prolong the life of the Nazi regime. You can’t really justify it in terms of destroying war production, because the statistics are against you; German war production peaked in 1944, at the height of the strategic bombing campaign. The damage inflicted by the bombs created mountains of rubble that hindered the advance of allied troops. Most people who have analyzed the World War 2 bombing campaigns have concluded that clubbing the enemy nations in this manner was militarily ineffective. I’m not a military professional, but I think it’s obvious that current doctrine is to go after specific targets with surgical strikes. Nobody believes anymore that you can win wars from the air; you have to take ground and that requires going in with ground troops. Ultimately, wars are still fought by infantry.
@34 Not really, but I have to take fuck breaks now and then, to keep the rabbit population up.
@35 For you reality is always a slippery concept.
@36 Yeah, I’m with it. Almost everything in eastern Washington is subsidized by city dwellers — mail service, phone service, rural electrification, schools, roads, irrigation water, electricity to run irrigation pumps, fire departments, sidewalks, you name it. Let’s take it all away and see how they like self-sufficiency.
erratum @42: “with you” not “with it”
@38 – OK, so Truman decides not to use the bomb which has already cost enormous amounts of wealth. What happens when the country discovers that this wonder weapon wasn’t used in order to save the Japanese people unnecessary horror? The invasion of Japan would have made Okinowa look like a playpen. Many families lacking fathers, brothers, and sisters would have felt emotions we couldn’t imagine. Senator McCarthy would have become President. The Japanese people would have meantime been starved or bombed or shot in numbers beyond those run up by the mushrooms, no real gain there. The military were prepared to overthrow the Emperor to prevent his radio speech, surrender as not going to happen at all as long as they were in charge. Stalin was already working at gaining his own bomb, so Cold War not off the program either. What is lost is the world wide horror at the use of these weapons and the taboo of their use while still few in number. Those burned Japanese died in the cause of World Peace, and they should be honored for their supreme sacrifice.
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@33 you are misinformed. Like most reagan lovers. “The reality was Reagan called the Iranians spineless yellow cowards, I saw that on the news. The reality was they were going to pay in blood if the hostages were still there when he took office. This entire nation knew and expected this and so did Iran!”
No. The reality was Carter tried a rescue mission, force, it didn’t work. Carter then seized all Iranian assets. This was billions, many billions. Then Carter worked quiety with the Iranians for a negotiated solution. this was the deal that was made: They give hostages back. We put their seized assets into trust at the bank of england. Our companies then get to sue Iran for claims and recover judgments out of the bank of england holding of iranian assets. Their companies get to sue us, too, and they get paid out of the fact the USG had received down payments from the shah worth billions for weapons — which of course we never delivered. There was rough balance here, in that their side and our side had claims worth billions. These were to be resovled in an international tribunal, which took more than a decade to hear all the claims. MEanwhile, on agreeing that was set up, they agreed to give back the hostages. They had one more condition: hostages are freed only when Reagan takes office.
so the fact that “Reagan got the hosages back” is a lie; Carter did. Thru that negotiation. That negotiation which Reagan selfishly took the p.r. fruits of. And that negotiation was not force. It was diplomacy. International law. Internatoinal transnational cooperation, stuff like that ? Even courts and arbitration tribunals.
Learn some history then form opinions, okay? You have been played for a fool.
just as bush bailed out the banks.
Dear Gold,
As a socialist, I am distressed by the call to end a socialist program. The Legislature should man up and pass even MORE socialist programs targeting specifically the rural poor.
If you can’t win hearts and minds….buy them.
As a socialist, I am distressed by the call to end a socialist program. The Legislature should man up and pass even MORE socialist programs targeting specifically the rural poor.
Goldy,
Sorry for the typo. Remember, there are fewer of them (rurals)than there are of us (urbanites). This brings the unit cost down.
This brings the unit cost down.
Wrong. Too much wine. The unit costs are higher, but aggregate cost is relatively low. Go figure.
RR: “Yeah, you lose the hostages, but the fuckers will never do it again.”
Well, this is simply not necessarily true, and they haven’t.
@7…you mean another besides you?
Pyrtie,
Then you would agree that income tax is socialism since its taxed a different rates…
@48
yep, “just buy em”…..thats the old progressive strategy…its worked with inner city blacks for the last 40 years.
throw ’em a couple bucks, keep them sucking on the govt tit, which keeps people poor, and tell them that they are victims(so they refuse to take any responsibility for their own actions) = guaranteed vote
nice.
I have a funny recollection that Ronnie Raygun traded arms for hostages.
i.e. he did bidness with terrorists.
Oh well who could ever credit a right winger with being consistent? Other than being consistently wrong that is.
@42 – I think some west-side legislator should propose it, if for no other reason than to watch those fucking hypocrite east-siders froth at the mouth over losing their fat government subsidies.
@45 – You’re a real prick.
@55
I have a funny recollection that Ronnie Raygun traded arms for hostages.
i.e. he did bidness with terrorists.
Oh well who could ever credit a right winger with being consistent? Other than being consistently wrong that is
oh yeah, you mean like former massachusetts congressman joe kennedy buys oil from hugo chavez, and then, even though its a nonprofit, draws a 300k salary? you mean like that?
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@46. seriously spews
Are you 19 or 20 years old? I was there. Carter could not even arrange flowers without asking for Amys help. This man was lost in the ozone…..
@45
20% of the power used in Western WA comes from a coal fired plant outside of Centraila, the Cushman power plants, and other dams in Western WA ( there’s a bunch) provide a bunch more power. A lot of the power generated in Eastern WA powers CA. Power use in CA is going down, not up (and they’re building solar and wind farms down there). The city of Seattle uses about the same amount of power today as it did in 1995. You really should try learning something about power generation before making your silly arguments.
All Goldy is saying is that we should exactly what the Republicans from Eastern WA have asked for. If you don’t like it you should take up the issue with eastern WA Republicans.
@45
Actually your power supply argument isn’t so much wrong as it is 50 years behind the times, which makes you a pretty standard issue Republican, I guess.
@45
And one last thing, those dams and wind farms, a good chunk of them are owned by Western Washington utilities.
@59
What part of his Argument is factually inaccurate?
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@64
Um… You show up here using different names on different days, call Goldy’s daughter a cum dumpster (call Goldy what you want, but leave his kid out of it), make not a single valid claim, don’t refute Goldy’s idea of why we should go ahead and do what the Republican’s want us to do, and make, by my count ten spelling errors, I’m not even going to try and count the grammar and punctuation errors, and you think I should answer to you? Fuck that shit.
Oh, and little man, you didn’t even understand the argument I was making.
Come back when you’ve learned something.
@64
What’s your point?
The power is paid for, employees are paid, and then they pay their taxes. Are you saying we need to pay their taxes for them as well?
@66
He’s come on here under a few different names yowling about how we in Western Washington get power from Eastern Washington. He hasn’t made a valid argument yet.
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Oh im from western washington i just happen to understand there is more to this world then Pugetopolis.
wow Michael that really set you off i bet Goldy’s small dick will make u feel better
The population has gone up by about 20%, overall power usage has stayed about the same. I’m not going to go to bed rather than look things up for a belligerent idiot like you.
Judging by the crap you post it’s better than yours! I have an AAS degree, I took a few 300 level accounting and finance classes, and have a few medical certs. I can run a gill-netter, I’m a hack welder, a good cook, a decent baker, a good gardener, an award winning photographer, and I spend part of my week helping run a group-home for autistic adults.
The world’s not going to go dark and power rates aren’t going to spike because people’s property taxes go up a little bit. Ending levy equalization would hurt poorer school districts and schools across the state, not just eastern WA schools.
Med’s and counseling help, you should look into them.
I’m in Gig Harbor. I spend a lot of time in Eastern WA & I lived in Spokane for several years. It sounds like I know a lot more about the place than you do.
Please get help for your issues. Really. I’ve worked around enough people with mental health issues to know that you’re struggling and that counseling and medications work wonders.
Here’s a good place to start.
http://www.kingcounty.gov/heal.....ealth.aspx
Oops, got the wrong part in the block quote.
Judging by the tone of your voice and the explosion of typos, I’d say that you’re the one that’s been “set off.”
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@72 nope i just dont care to put that much time into spelling when im making faggy liberals cry.
The reason that I brought up Truman and the dropping of the BOMB, is that it is a historical instance where overwhelming force did convince a country set on a disastrous couse of war and empire to change their minds.
After all, the Japanese were not afraid so much of dying as of losing. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced them that further resistance was futile. There was no honor in being vaporized.
I’m generally for the diplomatic solution, but wouldn’t you all admit that several surgical airstrikes in North Korea would ultimately go a long way in stabilizing Asia?
Mr Cynical @ 20
Interesting analysis for a guy who doesn’t have any beliefs.
You can’t even answer one simple question.
Just don’t have the stones.
@73
Only took I couple of minutes to write my post. I was doing other things.
You asked me who I was, I told you. That’s not going to excess.
I
Nope, done it all my life. My dad was a commercial fisherman and my parents grew huge gardens. Between what we grew caught and shot we pretty much fed ourselves.
Yes I did.
http://www.kingcounty.gov/heal.....ealth.aspx
O’ and I missed this one @68
I never said that. The Western Power is mighty big and power flows all over it. What I did say was that Western Washington produces a hell of a lot of juice.
http://www.npr.org/templates/s.....=110997398
@75- kicking the hornet’s nest in Korea might work, sounds like a bad idea to me, though. Might I recommend this analysis: la-riposte.blogspot.com/2010/11/true-cost-of-war-in-korea.html
H/t LTM
Re: Bomb. The country may or may not have been convinced of the futility of the war, but the news was neither well understood nor widely reported. As Japan was not at all a democratic state, it hardly mattered. Hirohito was convinced, and it was fortunate for the allies and Japanese both that he was able to put his surrender message over the radio before the army leadership staged a coup in order to continue the war until terms acceptable to the military could be reached. In short, despite the widespread destruction, atomic and conventional, Japan was lead by fanatics willing to destroy their country rather than admit defeat. All kinds of lessons to learned from this episode of human history, for those that care.
Wiki on the coup attempt : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_Incident
Christ on a corndog, did Mr Cyn hire that nitwit troll to make him look reasonable? I missed the part where Eastern Washington did a dam-raising and built the Grand Coulee all by themselves. Seems to me that big bad can’t do anything well Federal Government did that, back when liberals were in charge. In those brave days this was The Soviet of Washington, and TransCascadia was glad of it.
And there’s no reason for anybody in 2010 to be in the closet. Come on out troll, if not for your own happiness then for everyone around you that you’re driving up the wall.
RR @ 38, 39: A couple of points about the A-bomb discussion:
1. The fire-bombing of Dresden and other German cities was actually the work of British Air Marshall “Bomber” Harris. Curtis LeMay copied the strategy when he was assigned to bomb Japan into submission. He thought that fire-bombing was particularly applicable to Japan, because so much of it’s parts production was dispersed into small cottage industries, and the wood-and-paper construction of Japanese cities made it vulnerable to such an attack.
One particularly gruesome aspect was the alternating use of high explosive, incindiaries, and fragmentation bombs. The high explosives were intended to create “kindling”, the incindiaries were supposed to start the fires, and the fragmentation bombs were supposed to drive the fire-fighting and rescue personnel back into their bomb shelters.
Of the Japanese I’ve spoken to who have a memory of the war, they hold more of a grudge about the fire-bombing than they do of the A-bombs. The personal stories told by survivors are horrifying.
2. With all due respect to Basil-Hart (and he is a great historian), the idea that Japan would have surrendered after it was cut off and beseiged by air and sea is a mistaken notion. The Japanese were already starving, yet they were training their civilians (women, aged men, and children) to fight with sharpened sticks against American troops. They had been losing the war for over three and a half years, no longer had a fleet, and were making airplanes out of wood and fabric piloted by hastily-trained suicide bombers, yet they still refused to surrender. Experience since WWII has proven that bombing campaigns alone do not compel an enemy to surrender, that we need “boots on the ground” to accomplish that result. So we were facing a very costly invasion (and the Allies found out afterwards that they had under-estimated the Japanese resources available to fight the planned landings).
One amateur historian pointed out that on a psychological level, only the atomic bombs could have compelled a surrender. The Japanese believe that their emperor is directly descended from the sun-god, and the nation derives it’s strength from the sun. When the Allies figured out how to harness the power of the sun, it was all over. They could fight against mortals, but who could fight against the sun? It was this dynamic which compelled Hirohito to “bear the unbearable”, as he put it.
re 80: Professor Barnaby Tidwell points out that the Japanese suicide pilots was also a myth. They were simply Asian pilots who flew planes much the way they pilot automobiles — badly.
It’s very easy to defend LEA in the face of the ‘yawning revenue shortfall’. Since education is the ‘paramount duty’, LEA should be discussed as soon as spending on DSHS is at zero. As in nothing. Since the spending for all kinds of crap that is not the ‘paramount duty’ is still well above zero, there’s no reason to cut any education funding.
Here’s a mental experiment for you. Imagine a State budget that was 80% education, at the expense of all your socialist crap like giving away health care, housing, cell phones, tires, etc. And imagine that we used that money to dramatically expand education opportunities, like everyone is welcome to get a HS diploma, or go to college. I think our State would be a better place to live.
P.S. Can someone please explain to me how bombing other countries has anything to do with the topic at hand?