Saturday, September 17, 2011

USS Milwaukee (1864-1865)

I didn't know it, but there was a double turret monitor during the Civil War named for the city of Milwaukee. According to the Naval Historical Center:
(I)n 1864, she went to Mobile Bay, Alabama, where she spent the rest of her service career bombarding Confederate positions, clearing mines and supporting operations to isolate and capture the city of Mobile. On 28 March 1865, while engaged in an attack on Spanish Fort on the Blakely River, Alabama, USS Milwaukee struck a "torpedo" (as mines were then called) and sank. Her wreck was raised and scrapped in 1868.

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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Obama: Centrist. Perry: Hitler

Obama: Centrist. Perry: Hitler. That seems to be the analysis on the Left. Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, speculates in the Huffington Post about the US if Obama loses the 2012 election:
We can imagine intensified assaults on Social Security and Medicare, more moves to turn America into a theocracy, and the courts will be lost for a generation. More deregulation and privatization, too....

So, going into 2016, the Republicans will own an economy in protracted depression. And as opposition party, progressive Democrats will be full-throated, no longer in the awkward position of being upstaged by their centrist president.

Assuming the Republicans don't find a way to cancel the 2016 election, a Democrat would have a good shot at winning. And a progressive Democrat (if one can be found) would have a good chance at being nominated.

Let me be clear here. I am not saying that we'd be better off if Obama lost in 2012. The risks of that course are simply too great. In the 1930s, German leftists adopted the slogan, "After Hitler, Us." It didn't work out so well.
I wonder what Hubert Humphrey would say.

"more moves to turn America into a theocracy"? "Assuming the Republicans don't find a way to cancel the 2016 election"? What world does this guy live on? Is the left just plain unhinged?

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Monday, September 12, 2011

The Unorganized Militia

Randy Barnett, quoting Section 311 of US Code Title 10: "The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and...under 45 years of age...the unorganized militia....consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.”
Here is the cold hard fact of the matter that will be evaded and denied but which must never be forgotten in these discussions: Often — whether on an airplane, subway, cruise ship, or in a high school — only self defense by the “unorganized militia” will be available when domestic or foreign terrorists chose their next moment of murder. And here is the public-policy implication of this fact: It would be better if the militia were more prepared to act when it is needed.
The passengers and crew aboard United Flight 93 were members of the unorganized militia. They were quick, and far more effective than the military, the police, or the National Guard precisely because they were the ones on the spot.

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