Grrr

You should be thankful we have the great Governor Palin. It is through her single handed and determined defense of Alaska that Russia has never invaded the United States!

The continued existence of the United States of America? Thank you Governor Palin!

Point of order, if Russia were to try to conduct a land war versus the U.S. they would all but have to proceed through Alaska. Not that engaging in a land war with us would be wise. Any real engagement with Russia would likely end up being done with nukes, or possibly an enormous air war to establish air superiority, which due to distance from each other would really be a defensive war of attrition.

Never start a land war in Asia

Generally wars anywhere are bad

Yeah I am kind of bored right now. Thanks for asking

You’re missing a very subtle nuance, Scott; Palin is making the point that everyone else has been fooled by Russia with their missiles and their bomber flights to Cuba into thinking “Oh noes, when the Russians finally decide they want Texas, they’re going to be coming from the east!” When infact, Russians like it cold. What with global warming and everything, Alaska is the most obvious target for Russia – what they need is more frozen wastelands. Plus Alaska’s well known enmity towards Community Organizers is clearly going to set them up as the first conquest of necessity when the Russians finally decide and break the American spirit.

It will be unwise to start a land war in Alaska, or Siberia.

Alaska is the only US land soil that was invaded by Japan in the second world war, and US send in Marines to route them out.

And Alaska weather inflicted heavy causalities on both party.

@kfsone, we might be going into a Global cooling.
1. The sun has just got first spotless month:
http://www.dailytech.com/Sun+Makes+History+First+Spotless+Month+in+a+Century/article12823.htm

2. One of the first scientist who worked on global warming model has backed out …
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

And before any more war stuff, the prospect of a war between US and Russia is rapidly approaching 0% after the cold war, and even if there is conflict, no one will be crazy enough to use nukes.
3. north pole ice is dispearing, but south pole ice is growing
http://www.slate.com/id/2192730/

Well, Obama thinks America has 57 states and Biden thinks FDR went on TV in the 1930s.

@ Wowpanda
This is entirely a derail but your guy is wrong
sorry.

“He also mentioned that the Russians have moved troops and APCs in and have started policing the area.”

Of course. Those pictures make it clear that the Chukchi peninsula is a high crime area.

The financial market issues have led to an interesting congruence of opinions between liberals who don’t want Big Business getting money, and (fiscal) conservatives who don’t want money going into Big Business (especially FAILED business).

Let it burn.

I’m surprised no one has thought of using the Falkland Islands as an analogy to parallel this ludicrous claim that Russia is close to Alaska. The Falkland Islands, which is definitely a part of the United Kingdom and a wholly owned possession, is within sight of the Argentinian coastline, some majillion miles away from anyone who actually matters in either country.

>How come you haven’t asked how that free market/deregulation thing is working out for the Libertarians and Republicans among us?

How’s that “let’s force everyone to give loans to anyone who asks because otherwise you’re mean” working for the Democrats?

Honestly, I’m amazed that people keep pushing that it was deregulation that caused the current meltdown, it was people like Barney Frank, Chuck Shumer and Chris Dodd. And what a coincidence, all three are top recipients of Fannie Mae\Freddie Mac funding. Of course, Obama did manage to out-do all but Dodd in just three years.

“How’s that doe eyed Obama fanboy thing working out for you? – R 25 Sep 08 at 2:48 pm”

Since when did being a Republican or being conservative get defined as “Going through life with blinders on”?

How this for a fact:

John McCain is the Republican candidate for President and he’s done so many god damn 180′s to get the republican base’s support I’ve lost count.

His choice of Sarah Palin was just absolutely terrible. It’s not even debatable.

Why didn’t he chose Olympia Snow? He should have.

Actually it’s Canada that we worked closely with in building an air defense, our air force and Canada’s work closely together. That is because the fastest travel time to the continental US, whether by bomber or ICBM, is over the Arctic then passing over Canada.

Of course, what that has to do with the election I have no idea. Certainly Eastern European relations with us, NATO and Russia are an important point to consider. One thing is certain we shouldn’t be promising NATO membership to countries unless we’re prepared to go to war to protect them, and we obviously are not. What is that theory that peace treaties cause more wars than they prevent?

man .. what’s the political group name for people like me who just want the gov’t to back the fuck off my lawn and to get their hands out of my wallet?

@D-One, if Liberals only want to regulate Captialism, that is good.
However what happened is, the regulation gets out of hand and became a driving force.

All the trouble started with Community Reinvestment Act, http://www.epa.gov/brownfields/basic_info.htm
See how good it sounds? The problem is the banks are initially forced to borrow to un-qualified borrowers.
Then they found they could reduce the risk by dumping those to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two organizations started by the government, backed by government.
Those made out of air easy money worked on a strange market, where people who should not buy houses yet started buying, created some fake demand and everything starts going down hill from that point on.

Some sort of regulation is always needed (i.e how clean should the food be, don’t cheat your customers), but when they are trying to drive the market to a certain way to please their voters, that is BAD.

Some related readings:
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=307228725989304 Failure To Be Real Capitalists Caused Crisis
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/the_rest_of_the_meltdown_story.html The Rest of the Meltdown Story

Now they started to bail those corrupted organizations out, with our money. First Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, then AIG now 700 billion …
This is all against market, we should take the pain, dump the rotten banks and let the market correct itself.

All this under a republican president too, it just shows either the republicans nor demos care about anything. Libertarian is the way to go http://www.lp.org/

Hmm. Whenever I send troops from Alaska into Chukchi they all die from attrition. :/

Stupid thing to say. It’s a republican talking point designed to create unregulated markets… You know like how we got in to this mess? Oh and it works because Clinton did approve some Republican Bills for deregulation. Under Clinton how did Big Business do? When did he sign those republican deregulation laws?

Liberals want Capitalism to be regulated. That’s all.

Bush wants the markets to regulate themselves unless of course his buddies are going to lose money. then he wants to socialize their loses and he will too.

Not quite. The problem here wasn’t DEregulation. There’s several causes but the two biggest so far have been regulations… namely

1. Gov encouraging bad loans. Granted, the bankers were stupid enough to make them but, hey, we’ll just sell them to Freddie and Fannie and be okie dokie! Freddie and Fannie are abnormal in that the money they made made their directors wealthy but when they went belly up it was the public who assumed all the risk.

2. Really REALLY stupid mark-to-market rules. Let’s say you own $1B in securitized mortgages. They’re not subprime and they’re not delinquent. Just a bunch of average joes you snapped up for your diverse portfolio. Enter Joe’s Mortgage Shack. They’re in trouble. BIG trouble. They need cash, like, yesterday so they dump their subprimes on the market for 25% of their market value (called a “fire sale”). Thanks to Enron, who made these types of shell games devastating, the new rules say that you must mark your perfectly good mortgages down 75% as well because that’s what the market is doing. Now let’s say you have some loans yourself. What exactly do you think your creditors will do now that you have lost $750M on paper? Thus you have companies like AIG that were fine one day and nearly ruined the next.

As John Nance Garner once said, the vice-presidency ain’t worth a warm pitcher of piss. Presidential candidates have been choosing their running mates to pander to constituencies since the day they stopped giving the spot to the runner-up. This is nothing new. Furthermore, the president himself (or, given a particular set of circumstances in the next four years, herself) doesn’t just get handed the helm with an “aye aye, captain,” he still has to play politics to get his agenda through. If an idiot VP gets to be president, he’ll simply be a lame duck from the get-go, minimizing the damage he can cause to some (admittedly still bad) baseline level.

“If Russia ever attacked America, it wouldn’t be through Alaska… they do not have a sufficient supply corridor in that direction for a sustained assault.

The logical route would be across the Atlantic, through northeastern Canada. It has a better supply route, and no one would really care about the invasion. It wouldn’t even get a mention or spin-off game on G4.”

I’ve actually worked in Northern Ontario, specifically a small town called Kashechewan which had the unfortunate luck to flood when the three meter thick slabs of ice clogged the river during breakup. On the flight there, I was informed by a Lieutenant Colonel in the reserves that the Canadian Military had actually considered the area as a possible point of invasion but dismissed it as any mechanized infantry attempting to traverse the boglands on the way south would all invariably be swallowed alive by the peat giving way under the weight of vehicles, which supposedly can extend several dozen feet downwards and has a similar tendency as quicksand to liquify once weight is applied to it.

“The Canadian citizens would probably even welcome the Russian troops for bringing in cheaper cigarettes and booze.”

I’m not a fan of Vodka. I could live with an invasion by any of the nations on the British Isles though.

@
Boanerges

“2. Really REALLY stupid mark-to-market rules.”
Have to agree with you there. However I think it is a bit more. I watched “Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room” this past weekend. Boy did it seem REAL familiar!
A very interesting point though was that a lot of investment banks had gotten stock from Enron and then helped them hide their losses. I can’t help but wonder if what we are seeing now is just a continuation of the bad business practices that they engaged in.

Guys, it’s actually quite funny to read your ‘land war’ musings. I live in Moscow. It’s got 10 million citizens. In case of war I won’t even bother going to the army sign-up point – I won’t have the time to get through the paperwork. I suppose I’ll have about half an hour from war actually beginning till it’s all radioactive dust many kilometres in any direction. Same is true for any of you living in million+ cities. You just can’t evacuate that many people. Sorta like Defcon, you know?

Oh, and by the way. We don’t any war with you. We’ve just started to recover from the crash of USSR, both economically and politically. What I’m really afraid is, YOUR government may consider it a good idea to solve economical issues you bestowed upon yourselves with a war. It’s done before. I’m really afraid that we have year 1913, Internet-age version.

I don’t wanna be radioactive dust, and neither do you, I suppose. Please choose your president wisely. I’m pretty safe with ours, but can’t say the same about yours.

Good point, Sheepherder. I like your analogy

I’d love to believe in your other point, that of ‘only an idiot would think war is possible’. Unfortunately, I can’t. History tends to repeat itself with inhuman precision and greater force each time around. But at the same time, I do hope that you’re right.