Day: February 12, 2020

The Best Of The Best Of The Best

Closing Thought–12Feb20

That would be how many view the troops that serve in our special forces in the different branches….

But recently there have been many reports of these “special” soldiers acting like frat rats and criminals and murderers….so bad that the new commander has commissioned a review of the whole system….even getting promoted while accused of a crime…..that alone should force some sort of review.  In case you missed my post…..https://lobotero.com/2020/01/30/as-a-reward-for-taking-a-life/

There are a number of high profile incidents that have captured the attention of the U.S. public, the media, and Congress. A quick summary of these incidents include:

  • an Army Special Forces Major accused of murdering an unarmed Taliban bomb-maker in Afghanistan
  • two Army Special Forces NCOs convicted of smuggling cocaine from Colombia into the United States
  • a Navy SEAL and two Marine Raiders accused of murder / manslaughter of an Army Green Beret in Mali
  • a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes while deployed with his SEAL platoon in Iraq
  • Navy SEAL platoon having a drunk fest in Iraq on the 4th of July and getting sent home
  • Army Special Forces NCOs stealing money from operational funds
  • numerous incidents of sexual assault, sexual mis-conduct, and drug use

The United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has released a 69-page report entitled United States Special Operations Command Comprehensive Review. USSOCOM was directed by Congress to conduct a review of its culture and report back to it with its findings.

The USSOCOM report, dated 23 January 2020, is the result of a review by USSOCOM “. . . that gathered insights and observations from across the force, at all levels, . . .”

https://sof.news/pubs/USSOCOM-Comprehensive-Ethics-Review-Report-January-2020.pdf

This report had little “good news” for the operational portion of the review.

The report recommends 16 actions to address the findings by the review. A strong implementation plan is recommended and the adoption of the will to execute it. The report says that if “. . . implemented correctly, the comprehensive review will make USSOCOM better as a more credible, capable and precise force.”

These soldiers are not supermen nor can they walk on water…..they need to be held to the same rules as the rest of us…….and the re-introduction of discipline.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Those 2020 Presidential Hopefuls

Sorry but this is a draft that I overlooked…but it still has some points to make.

It is February and the 2020 voting season is about to explode onto the national conscience…..this is when the voter starts making up his/her mind on which lying toad they will vote for….

To help my readers if they do not have a candidate as of yet then maybe this article will help them find someone they can support.

The 2020 presidential primary campaign field has started to winnow down, but there are still new candidates jumping into the race with just weeks to go until the first states vote.

Any Democrat with dreams of occupying the Oval Office can see Donald Trump is a vulnerable president who hasn’t broadened his appeal beyond his base. A lot of them are running for their party’s nomination next year to be its standard-bearer in the 2020 election.

There is a clear top tier of four candidates: former Vice President Joe Biden — the early, if unimposing, frontrunner; Sen. Bernie Sanders with his solid base of left voters; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who rose to join the top of the field; and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose polling numbers have declined lately after he jumped to an early lead in Iowa.

After an early boomlet, Sen. Kamala Harris sank in the polls and in early December became the first once-major contender to drop out. Sen. Cory Booker, who was long viewed as a potential force in the race but never gained traction, dropped out in early January after failing to qualify for a second debate. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, billionaire Tom Steyer, and entrepreneur Andrew Yang have been in the fray for months. A fair number of candidates have left the race, including former US Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/1/18246059/2020-election-top-democratic-presidential-candidates-cory-booker-drops-out

Please find a candidate and for god sake vote…..matters not who you vote for…….just please exercise your right and VOTE FOR SOMEONE!

Like I wrote…it was written before all the voting began but there is still some useful info in there.

Learn Stuff!

VOTE!

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

2020 Dems–Another One Bites The Dust–#14 And #15

New Hampshire is in the bag…..and the Dem field has lessened by two because of a poor showing…..Yang and Bennet…..

The final results in New Hampshire are not in, but two candidates have seen enough: Tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet have dropped out of the 2020 race, reports Politico and the Denver Post.

  • Yang was headed toward a sixth-place finish at best. “I am a numbers guy,” Yang told the Washington Post before breaking the news to his supporters. “In most of these [upcoming] states, I’m not going to be at a threshold where I get delegates, which makes sticking around not necessarily helpful or productive in terms of furthering the goals of this campaign.” No word yet on whether Yang will endorse another candidate. His main campaign theme was a pledge to give every American a monthly stipend of $1,000.
  • Bennet, who performed anemically in the polls and didn’t qualify for the recent debates, called it quits after seeing he was on track for a disappointing finish. “I think it’s fitting that we end the campaign tonight,” he told supporters. “Tonight is not going to be our night. But let me say to New Hampshire—you may see me once again.” He had just 0.3% of the vote in early returns.

The field is tightening up and as I predicted the “corporatists” are closing in on Bernie…..with the media help they will win.

We bid them a fond goodbye in the tradition of IST….. I will show the political exit door to these candidates with the music of Queen….

On to Nevada and see who will go to the House after that vote….any predictions?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

2020 New Hampshire Results

Now we can say that the voting in 2020 has actually begun in the first in the country, New Hampshire…..

Results in the vote are as follows……let me start with the results for Trump…….

There were no surprises in the Republican primary in New Hampshire Tuesday as President Trump cruised to victory by a wide margin over challenger Bill Weld. With almost 90% of precincts in, Trump had 85.7% of the vote, Weld had 9.1%, and assorted write-in candidates had 2,5%, the Union-Leader. That gives Trump all 20 delegates and the biggest margin of victory for an incumbent president in the state’s GOP primary since Ronald Reagan, who scored 86.43% in 1984. Trump’s total vote count in the New Hampshire primary is higher than that of any previous incumbent president, reports the AP.

Not much surprise here with the exception that about 12% of Repubs voted against a GOP president…..that should be worth a bit of look….

Now on to the battle for the Dem nomination…..

Bernie Sanders has won the New Hampshire primary, reports the AP, Politico, CNN, and the Washington Post. The final tally isn’t yet in, but it appears Pete Buttigieg will finish in a close second and Amy Klobuchar a strong third. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden trailed that trio by quite a bit. “This victory here is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump,” Sanders told his supporters. Meanwhile, tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet have dropped from the race. With 93% of results in, CNN has the percentages as:

  • Sanders, 26%
  • Buttigieg, 24.4%
  • Klobuchar, 19.8%
  • Warren, 9.3%
  • Biden, 8.4%.
  • Sanders (who also won New Hampshire in 2016) and Buttigieg had been 1-2 in the final polls. The bigger question was who would finish third, and Klobuchar’s campaign should get a boost out of the night’s results. “We have beaten the odds every step of the way,” she told supporters, reports the Wall Street Journal.
  • Warren and Biden, however, will have serious assessments to make, given that neither will hit the 15% threshold necessary to earn national delegates. Still, both told their supporters Tuesday night that they are very much still in the race. “I am here to get big things done,” said Warren, reports CNN. “We’re just getting started,” said Biden, per NPR.
  • Addressing his own jubilant supporters, Buttigieg declared, “Now our campaign moves on to Nevada and South Carolina and across the country, and we will welcome new allies to our movement at every step,” per the AP.

Two down…..now on to Nevada….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

View From The Middle East

The US has finally released their super duper peace plan….and it sucked!

https://lobotero.com/2020/01/30/deal-of-the-century-is-a-complete-dud/

The Middle East is being contested as it was in the early days of the Cold War……

Trump’s mindless edicts on the Middle East is driving the region into the open arms of China and Russia…..

By the series of actions in recent months in Iraq and across the Middle East, Washington has forced a strategic shift towards China and to an extent Russia and away from the United States. If events continue on the present trajectory it can well be that a main reason that Washington backed the destabilization of Assad in Syria, to block a planned Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline, will now happen, short of Washington initiating a full scorched earth politics in the region. This is what we can call unintended consequences.

Unintended Consequences: Did Trump Just Give the Middle East to China and Russia?

I see a vacuum forming in the region……a vacuum that the US cn ill afford….

As the world has learned in recent weeks, events in the Middle East are notoriously hard to read.  On the surface, it seems that the U.S., after a period of withdrawal, is recommitting to the region, with a robust military response to events triggered by Iran.  A more assertive U.S. has successfully defended its Baghdad Embassy, and audaciously took out Iran’s Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike at the Baghdad Airport.

Beneath the surface, I see a different U.S. policy taking shape. In the midst of these military responses, I am witnessing what seems to be a fighting retreat.  Expect a strong U.S. response only when U.S. lives are lost or under imminent threat.  As the President’s National Security Advisor said on the Sunday talk shows:  “The President said we want to be out of the Middle East.  But what we need to do is leave on our terms….”

As the U.S. recedes, Russia advances. In the wake of the Suleimani drone strike, Russian President Vladimir Putin is crisscrossing the Middle East, meeting with Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, and stopping in Ankara to broker a cease-fire in Libya.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/01/24/geopolitics_abhors_a_vacuum_why_americas_withdrawal_from_the_middle_east__and_russias_rise__may_make_war_inevitable_114992.html

What was old is new again….and again……

In 1958, U.S. leaders stood at the threshold of an American era in the Middle East, conflicted about whether it was worth the trouble to usher in.

A year earlier, in the context of the emergent Cold War and fading British and French power in the region, Dwight Eisenhower had articulated and received congressional approval for what became known as the Eisenhower doctrine. The United States had for the first time staked out national interests in the Middle East—oil, U.S. bases and allies, Soviet containment—and declared that it was prepared to defend them with military force.

Sixty-two years before President Donald Trump dispatched a drone to Baghdad to kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, this is how American combat missions in the post–World War II Middle East began.

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/01/america-has-come-full-circle-middle-east/162655/

We use to have a clear path for the region and its neighbors…..but years of wealth and gluttony has turned the region into a a piece of crap that no one person can predict…..take the Arab League…..

The foreign ministers of the member state of the Arab League unanimously adopted a resolution on Saturday rejecting the Trump Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, and said that “it does not satisfy the minimum of the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people.”

Why it matters: The Trump administration was counting on a coalition of Arab countries it has built over the last several years to prevent such a resolution and press the Palestinians to go back to the table. Those efforts did not materialize.

https://www.axios.com/arab-league-foreign-ministers-reject-trump-peace-plan-612f8cde-c8cc-4955-8504-7b6e6142c103.html

The Middle East will be the location of the start of the downfall of American exceptionalism in the region….to avoid this decline the US needs to cut loses and leave the Middle East….

What we very much need to do, however, is to acknowledge the futility of our failed policies in the region over the past two decades, recognize that military power is never going to produce a positive outcome for our country, and withdraw our troops from both Syria and Iraq. Failing to do so guarantees continued failure and may lead to an all-out war with Iran.  We dare not wait for such a catastrophic and entirely predictable outcome. 

Withdraw our troops now.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/rocket%E2%80%99s-red-glare-trump-must-withdraw-middle-east-its-too-late-120546

Do it now and avoid any embarrassments.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”