Stoker

Ah, gotcha, you want the lobbyists and interest groups to run things even more than they already do. Because I'm telling you, there are very few people who know how to write a serious piece of legislation and then get it passed, and almost all of them are employed on K Street. Mr. Smith does not go to Washington and actually get anything done. Ever. Part time Joe the Plumber politicians do about as well in Washington as a Pop Warner all star would do in the NFL. And for what it's worth, the 1st United States Congress was in session for 18 months out of the two year term. Not exactly part time, especially considering weeks of travel to and from the districts. And that was managing a government that was far smaller and less complex.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has approximately 50,000 nominations to review and confirm each year. If the Senate works six days a week, year round, twelve hour days, they will have approximately 4.6 minutes per nominee to review and vote. Given that a lone holdout can still force a roll call vote that will take far longer than 5 minutes, you will effectively accomplish nothing. The system is designed so that most people get blanket approved, but there is ample opportunity for serious discussion if there is any Senator who feels there's a need for it. It's a super common misconception that Congress is only working when it's in session - there's a lot more going on behind the scenes.

We already effectively have a two-state solution in historical terms, given that Jordan was carved out of Mandatory Palestine with the intent of being Palestine for the Arabs. Jordan also ruled the West Bank until they made the catastrophic decision to invade Israel a second time. Make no mistake, any solution that gives up more territory to Palestinians will eventually be followed by demands to make Israel solely consist of land a Jew is actively standing on.

It's not feasible in today's environment to hold a hearing and vote on every individual Senate confirmable office. Removing the big ones (SECAF, CNO) from the backlog will mean less pressure to confirm the ones lower down the food chain.

It's easy, you just put in charge the people who were responsible for the destruction of the Jewish communities in every single Muslim-majority country over the past seventy years. Remember, one religion gets thirty ethnostates, the other gets zero, or you're a racist.

Before they invaded Europe, they weren't a threat to Europe. And before he got shot in the head, President Lincoln really enjoyed the play.

Then why'd you go to the FSDO in the first place? 😁

At least write your congressional representation to let them know. One thing Reps and Senators can be relied on for is to be angry at federal agencies that screw their constituents.

Hard to cover with a single source, but here's one that talks a little bit about the tensions: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-census-ethnic-minorities-undercounted/32256506.html Basically the Russian Empire wasn't able to expand into overseas colonies like the rest of Europe, so they expanded eastward and south into Ukraine and Asia. There's always been a very real divide between places view as really Russia (basically, Moscow and St. Petersburg and their suburbs) and the colonies. It's telling in how the Russians did their conscription process when they needed more cannon fodder. Basically districts were told to each generate X number of soldiers, regardless of population disparities between districts. So you had non-ethnic -Russian areas grabbing half the men of fighting age off the streets, while the same raw numbers of conscription in the big cities was barely noticed. Russia's fine with spending the lives of non-Russian peoples, they don't really matter in their strategic calculus and it might even be a bonus (if all the Chechen men die in Ukraine, they can't cause problems for us in the future).

And the countries taking massive casualties in WW2 had far healthier demographic structures at the time. This war is the end of Russia for practical purposes. Lose half a million young men you absolutely cannot spare, cripple another half million, and drive another million to flee the country (and those fleeing are probably the best educated), and combine that with crippling demographic echoes from WW2 and the fall of the USSR... they're toast. It doesn't help that the Russian government views a large and growing portion of its population (anyone not ethnic Russian) as not real Russians.

Their stated youth unemployment rate is 21%, compared to ours at 9%. And it's probably worse than that behind the CCP's lie machine. That's a disaster. That's tens of millions of people in the most formative years of their lives, disassociating from the system. It's a human tragedy in and of itself, but it's also a recipe for absolute chaos in the future.

People spend years of their life pursuing the goal of becoming an Air Force pilot, and then the Air Force does its level best to make you regret it. It isn't the individual's fault that many (most?) people who go this route end up disillusioned with the bureaucracy they work in. If you had a genuine, WW3 crisis that directly threatened the US, I think you'd have lines out the door of people willing to leave their airline jobs and put a flight suit back on.

If NATO expansion is a legitimate reason for Russia to invade sovereign nations (it isn't), why did they invade one of the countries that explicitly wasn't on a path to NATO membership? Russia saying they don't want NATO to expand, and then invading only countries that haven't joined NATO, is incoherent and self-defeating. Putin is the greatest NATO salesman since Khrushchev.

Again, Russia does not have the right to dominate the lives of 300 million people outside its borders. We "provoked" Russia by letting democratic states align with us instead of Russia? That's like a wife-beater saying his victim provoked him by trying to leave the trailer park.

The only thing that wouldn't have "provoked" Russia to war is letting them reconquer the entire former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact. That's a couple hundred million people who have made it emphatically clear over the past couple centuries that they DO NOT want to be ruled by Russia. I don't think it's the US' right, power, or in its interest to tell those people crying for freedom that it's too bad, they need to submit because we don't want to offend the Russians and then have to kill them. Europe tied it's entire energy sector to Russia to give them a reason not to have a conflict - and that didn't work, either.

I can't tell from this article if there's actual allegations of fraud, or if it's just bitching that we're spending money in general. If it's the former, there are avenues to address that and they don't include "Cut Ukraine loose, let the Russians roll through Europe and upend the free world order." If it's the latter, well, it's time to grow up and realize the US Government is a vehicle for shoveling money out the door to accomplish policy goals. And at ~$300 per American to stop a genocide and cripple a major threat to US foreign policy for decades, it's pretty cheap. We spent on COVID bailouts about 45 times as much as we've spent on Ukraine. It's a rounding error in the budget.

I'm saying the Western electorate is a lot more ok with you murdering your own people than they are with you crossing borders. I'm not saying I agree with that stance, but is the default stance of democratic nations since circa 1917.

If the murderous dictators are only murdering "their own" people and not invading neighboring countries, it becomes a lot easier to justify not getting involved. Recall that WW2 started over Poland, not Kristellnacht.

I mean, Taiwan doesn't explicitly support Taiwan's independence. If there's one lesson we should take away from our involvement in Afghanistan and Ukraine, it's that we should only commit to helping people who are willing to die for their cause.

I thought the whole point of a MBCBP is that it isn't subject to the 401k limits. It's basically a funded pension pretending to be a 401k, but it's not actually in an account you own.

Eh, I get it. People were getting legally persecuted for being gay less than fifteen years ago. I've been to retirement ceremonies where someone brought their partner - who they had to hide for the first ten years of their career or their career would have been over. That's sad, and the scars from that don't go away overnight.

China and Japan are the largest foreign holders of US debt. Japan owns slightly more than a trillion, China slightly less. So about 5% each.

The idea of countering Russia has been US foreign policy since 1946.

They're army helicopter captains, they're already not flying.

The fact that Minihan isn't on the short list for CSAF is why he sent that memo out. If you're not winning the game, try to play a different game.