The US Military And Two And A Half

It gets said the US military can fight at most two and a half wars at any one time. What does that mean?

That is a statement of military capability. That is not a fiscal statement. Fighting two and a half wars non stop would be a surefire way for America to go bankrupt.

War is meant to be a weapon of last resort. It is not just because of democracy and diplomacy and peace and bloodshed and the ugliness and the unintended consequences. It is also dollars and cents. Wars are terribly expensive.

From the macro perspective, considering America was already fighting two wars in the Bush era, it was but inevitable that America would step back in the Obama era. The pendulum needed to swing.

America's costs in Iraq and Afghanistan ran into the trillions. That was one of the three or four reasons why the 2008 financial meltdown happened. Money is not free.

So how many wars can America fight at any one point in time? Two and a half.

But ideally America should fight zero wars. America should keep the powder dry, just in case. But, for the most part, America should work extra time to exhaust all other options first. Armies are almost like nuclear weapons, not meant to be used.

But when you do use them, you want to make sure all peaceful options were exhausted first, and they are in top shape, and the mission is well defined and achievable, and you are in and out. Open ended wars are not even wars.

America's founding mission is a total spread of democracy. Organizing immigrants and giving them voting rights in at least the big cities would go a long way. The "hombres" can be soldiers of democracy. The forces of democracy are proving less aggressive about using digital tools to spread democracy than those who would use the same to suppress peoples. Taking microfinance to two billion women would further the cause of democracy like few other things.  Grassroots political organizing is the best way to spread democracy. It is also much less expensive than wars. And if you handle immigration right it is all paid for. People do it themselves. Remittance has done way more for the Global South than foreign aid ever did. Stop demonizing people.

Russia And NATO

In the early 2000s Russia actually expressed interest in joining NATO. Russia apparently was rebuffed. That is mind boggling from the peace perspective.

It can be imagined the military industrial complex in America did not like the idea. When you don't have an enemy it is hard to justify a large defense budget.

On the other hand Russia has not exactly gone down the path of democracy. And it does not seem to have discovered some alternate path to putting its economy on a sound path to rapid progress.

Russia is Second World.

Be that as it may it is for Russia and America as the two leading nuclear powers on the planet to take the lead to creating a world free of nuclear weapons. Why keep weapons that everyone knows can never be used? Why leave the options open for false alarms that might end human civilization?

And while the two powers figure out their mutual dynamic, Syria suffers. The innocents in Syria suffer. It is a sad situation.

America could have done a much better job of winning the Cold War. It did not do enough to help Russia in the aftermath. It did not do a good enough job of face saving of a defeated rival.

And it is not too late for Russia to choose the path of democracy as the only available way to rapid economic progress and true greatness.

Letting go of Assad would be a good small step in that direction. Assad is irredeemable. Assad is deplorable. This guy has attacked his own people like Hitler attacked people in other countries.

The Comey Attack

What drives people? When your professional obligation is to uphold the laws and the constitution but you helplessly undermine your chain of command and your department guidelines and your heart says to not obey because your boss is a black woman (that don't look right) and you are moved by the ideologies of racism and sexism as certainly as the electrons are moved by electric forces and you are okay with Huma Abedin being a Hillary Clinton surrogate but a Pakistani Indian American is getting too close to the president for your comfort, what do you do? You make one last ditch effort. You would rather a madman near the nuclear code than a Pakistani Indian American near the President Of The United States.

The FBI did it to John Liu, who is born in New York City. He looked too Chinese to possibly occupy the second most powerful office in the country.

This is how you know racism in America's criminal justice system is a very real issue.

On Clinton Emails, Did the F.B.I. Director Abuse His Power?

Trump And The Bomb

his former GOP rival, Marco Rubio, repeated his earlier concerns about Trump only this week, saying America can't give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual."

In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time. 

would be free to launch a civilization-ending nuclear war on his own any time he chose.

The only real protection against nuclear disaster is total elimination of nuclear weapons.

Ronald Reagan expressed incredulity that he would be allowed only six minutes to decide whether to trigger Armageddon based on blips on a radar screen. 

Although no president during the atomic age appears to have ever lost his grip on reality to such an extent that an insane nuclear act might have resulted, top advisers to President Richard Nixon tried to constrain his launch authority during the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced his resignation. His secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, quietly instructed the Pentagon war room to double check with him if Nixon contacted it to order up a nuclear strike. Nixon’s mental stability, and his heavy drinking, caused concern within his inner circle that he might behave erratically out of despair and depression. Alcoholism in a future nuclear monarch is of course quite beyond the pale.

about three serious false alarms in the United States and three in the Soviet Union/Russia that could have led to a very bad call by their leaders have occurred.

Both Putin and President Barack Obama are reminding each other, to a degree we haven’t seen since the Cold War, that they have nuclear buttons at hand.

As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded.

There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.

a common expert view that the bomb is slowly but surely spreading around the world, and that proliferation may be unstoppable unless ALL nations including the nuclear-armed countries get serious about universal nuclear disarmament.

the double-standard of the nuclear “haves,” cigarettes dangling from their lips, lecturing the “have nots” to give up smoking is unsustainable over the long term.

Altogether only 15 minutes would elapse before 850 land- and sea-based missile warheads would take flight. There would be no stopping, no recall, no turning back the salvo. In all likelihood, a return volley of Russian missiles would be triggered. The scale of the ensuing disaster defies comprehension. In a large-scale nuclear exchange, hundreds of millions of lives would be extinguished in a few agonizing hours. A global humanitarian catastrophe would ensue to seal the fate of civilization itself.

So far, most respected Republican advisers have boycotted the Trump campaign.

Trump certainly has not yet made a convincing case that we could sleep soundly with him at the helm.

2016 Is Democracy Vs Fascism

we’re in genuinely uncharted territory with Trump: we’ve simply never seen a candidate with this much disregard for typical Constitutional values get this close to the White House. There’s no precedent for what might happen if he got there. For another, if you look at how our system of checks and balances is really built, it has relatively few resources to stop an authoritarian president from violating the Constitution and getting away with it. And the third reason may be the most unsettling of all: In a democracy, the final brake on the tyrannical exercise of power is public opinion. And polls suggest the American public has never been as skeptical of democracy or as open to authoritarian alternatives like military rule as it is right now. If a President Trump really blew down the walls of our system, a worryingly wide swath of the public would likely stand behind him.

Even Richard Nixon, as close to an out-and-out crook as the White House has known, finally resigned when Congress moved to impeach him. It’s simply not clear that Donald Trump would do the same.

If he wanted to close down mosques, or have his cronies prosecute political opponents, he probably could.

The Supreme Court's role as arbiter of what’s constitutional is ultimately just a matter of tradition, and Trump has already proved his willingness to flout tradition when it happens to suit his interests.

impeachment requires both a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Considering how scared most GOP officials have been of taking on a Presidential candidate with authoritarian tendencies, it is far from certain that many of them would prove more courageous in the face of an authoritarian President. And by the time the will to impeach him has built, and the highly complex proceedings completed, it would in any case be far from clear how much of the republic there would be left to save.

countries like Hungary, Russia or Iraq did have carefully designed institutions with intricate checks and balances; but because the politicians who inhabited these systems had little commitment to liberal-democratic norms, they failed to protect democracy.

it isn't primarily the legal genius of the Founding Fathers that has made American democracy uniquely stable, but, at least as importantly, the deep commitment of ordinary Americans to liberal norms like the separation of powers. It is the people's love for democracy, not the protections their democracy affords them on paper, that is the final check on the tyranny of the majority which the founders so feared.

the Constitution cannot save us from our politics

GOP Civil War Round The Corner?

Now the party of Ronald Reagan is being led by a man with no discernible ideological leanings, save for an affinity with some of history’s ugliest. 

“The likelihood of the Republican Party surviving this, of there being another Republican president in the future, is small,” said one movement conservative who served in the Bush White House. “I don’t think the party survives.”

Far from the halls of the Hoover Institution and big Washington policy shops is a force they cannot control: the Trump campaign, a small collection of social-media gurus, Breitbart alumni, and Trump family members who have managed to capture the majority of Republican voters in the U.S., and who may use their new power to launch a media network, or take over as the new axis of the GOP, or both. And as the old establishment looks on in horror, the civil war in its ranks has already begun.

“I’ve never seen so many really smart people at a loss for what to do,” says the head of one prominent conservative think tank. “They’re pulling their hair out, to the extent they have any hair left.” 

“We’ve known the cause of death while the patient was still alive on the table.”

There is pretty universal agreement in conservative circles that the immediate cause of death was blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object.

there is wide disagreement as to whether this was a sudden, unpredictable trauma—a piano falling on you as you walk down the street—or the result of deep-seated, sclerotic disease. 

“The ugliness of those forces is real. The number of people who supported Trump is alarming. 

Some among them just think it’s time to start over. “If you can’t resurrect the Republican brand with less than half a billion dollars and spending four to eight years to get it done,” Glover, who is on the board of Roy’s new think tank, said, it might be time to think about starting something new. 

The party she envisions is one with “a Jeb Bush platform but with a 21st-century bolt on acknowledging climate change, gay marriage and campaign finance reform that’s First Amendment-compliant.”

Trump could only have happened to a party that was already paralyzed by an identity crisis—one that still has to be dealt with in addition to the secondary identity crisis wrought by Trump.

three disparate factions that find themselves squabbling under the Republican tent—the Trump fans, the stand-pat establishment, and the conservative Jesuits—

What the orange dragon chooses to do after the drubbing Republicans are sure he’s going to get might be the difference between the final nail in the GOP coffin, and a revival. And again, few really believe in the latter, not even the stalwarts. “I have a feeling no one’s going to learn a lot from this campaign because of the unique nature of Trump,” says the think tank head. “I’m one of the people who is feeling a lot of angst.” If he starts a media company, says Ayres, “It will be far harder to heal the wounds that he opened up, and far harder to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

“It’s in Trump’s nature to continue to want to be relevant, to have people come to Trump Tower to lick his boots for years to come,”

As for the people who hope Trump will simply melt away on November 9 and remove the threat of collapse from the Republican Party? “I appreciate but do not share their optimism,” says Soltis Anderson. “I feel like we are in for a pretty long civil war.”

Talk Of Trump Victory?

This is confounding, to say the least.

Et Tu, Texas?

New Electoral College Ratings: Texas and North Carolina Shift in Clinton's Favor

Arkansas 1980

“I cannot tell you the number of times they would say to me, ‘If your husband wins, are you going to keep his last name?’ ” she told me. “I heard it over and over and over.”

Arkansas

The Road Trip That Changed Hillary Clinton's Life 

After they made their way deeper into Arkansas, bypassing Little Rock and curving through the Ozarks, the women stopped at a ramshackle restaurant for lunch. Mrs. Ehrman was growing more alarmed as she took in the surroundings.

“I said to her, ‘Hillary, you’re never going to get French bread here. You’re never going to get Brie,’ ” she recalled in a final plea, but by then Mrs. Clinton had made up her mind. “She wasn’t even listening to me at that point,” Mrs. Ehrman said.

They arrived in Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas, on one of the rowdiest weekends of the year. The hilltop town, with its canopy of oak trees, had become a swarm of drunken football fans, their faces painted red and their heads covered with hats shaped like the university’s hog mascot. The Razorbacks were playing a major rival at the time, the Longhorns of the University of Texas.

“It was then that I broke down and cried when I thought, ‘She’s going to live here?’ ” Mrs. Ehrman said. “I just cried. I just absolutely cried.”

Mrs. Ehrman took a plane back to Washington and paid someone to drive her Buick home. “I thought, ‘I’m getting out of here tomorrow morning. I don’t belong here,’ ” she said.

Texas Blues

Texas Republicans are slowly coming to grips with the unthinkable: Hillary Clinton has a shot at winning the nation’s most iconic red state.

Texas is the beating heart of the modern Republican Party, and the cornerstone of any GOP nominee’s electoral strategy. It’s also home to the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush, and to two serious recent GOP contenders for the White House, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry.

And Texas is where the party’s most prominent donor base is clustered.