By Barry Hastings
As of April 8, polls indicate a “no” vote on the sales tax increase the legislature wants you to vote for next month (so they won’t have to wrestle with the pothole problem they’ve avoided for eight years) is in at least a little bit of trouble. My advice is to keep working on your friends, work associates, and neighbors to put the cowards in a hole they cannot climb forth from.
It’s nothing more or less than attempting to set up voters with blame for condition of our roads and highways, despite the fact it’s been their duty to handle the matter since they sought and won their (ir)responsible jobs in Lansing. Everyone in Michigan knows which segments of highway users do most damage to roads, but legislators know those folks are the big businesses and big agribusinesses, to whom they always cater, genuflect and kiss ass (at expense of working people and the poor). No more. NO MORE. NO MORE. Vote ‘no’ on Proposal 1.
A former ‘Coastie’s lament:
Well now, at last, one of these murdering cops has been caught on film, and charged with murder, as so many of them have deserved, for so many years. It makes me sick to know the twerp is a former Coast Guardsman. (That’s what I am – a former Coastie, and I hate this SOB and others like him, with a passionate hate.)
The North Charleston (S.C.) police chief (Intelligent Design bless him) didn’t waste a minute firing him, or charging him. Getting him convicted in the state that fired first shots against the Union, however, might well be much more difficult. In the race for the title ‘World Champion Racists’, S. C. is right up front with Alabama, Texas, Mississippi; and another large pack follows close on their heels.
Do not fear Iranians bearing nukes
Shifting to another matter, for a moment. Do not let GOP (and a few Democrat) national legislators frighten you on the Iran nukes issue. I don’t think the deal is likely to work-out well in the end, myself, but I can assure you the Supreme Ayatollah, and his minions, do not – repeat, DO NOT want a war with the USA, and will go to great lengths to avoid such an event. The agreement to a “deal” to come-up with a “real deal” is not really a deal at all, but a framework for an agreement.
Institution and compliance will be very closely monitored by at least a dozen nations, none of which trusts the Supreme Ayatollah any further than I do. And believe me, a nuclear attack on Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel (any U.S. Ally for that matter), would leave Iran smoking (for months) like Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in 1945.
“You may rely upon it” (as admiral Lord Nelson always said).
As we go marching through Baltic
Moving on. Two weeks ago U.S. Soldiers marched across Europe in the longest trek our forces have made there since Georgie Patton’s III Army in 1944. Lt. General Ben Hodges (see my last), commander of U.S. Forces in Europe, got the idea from a British army friend moving troops to North Africa, who marched his men across Spain and France, with equipment, rather than by sea and air transport.
Hodges, as I earlier reported, has been warning NATO (and his superiors) about his perception of Russian military plans for future assaults on European allies/friends. He told the N.Y. Times, “the idea came to me slowly, over several months.” He described it as part public relations event, part training exercise, and, “[P]art shot across the Russian bow.” Hodges decided to make the move as a three month deployment of Americans in Poland and the Baltic region was ending.
Usually such deployments end with equipment loaded on railroad cars and shipped west, while troops board aircraft and are flown back to German bases. This time, however, They drove 120 armored vehicles, and marched 500 soldiers on an indirect, meandering hike through six nations, totaling 1,100 miles. They stopped in towns, villages, cities in all six nations, meeting the locals, making friends, offering reassurance. The General said the journey would demonstrate to Putin, “and anyone else,” our capacity to move quickly across great distances and across national borders.
It was the longest march by U.S. Soldiers since General Patton detached part of his arm to relieve Bastogne, during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. The outfit marched through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland. The Czech Republic, and Germany. Hodges described the reaction of citizens of all six nations as, “reminiscent of scenes of liberation of people in Holland and France circa 1944.”
“No one has given us the finger yet,” he said. A local mother pushing her eight month old baby, told a Times reporter, “Yes, it makes me feel safer to see the Americans here, but it’s not enough – we need more and more of them – I am very afraid of this conflict and what could happen to my little ones. Who knows what Putin might do?”
As most of us my age have noted for years (and despite failings of commanders like Westmoreland, Petraeous, Bush, Reagan, Nixon, and Johnson), our best diplomats, on the person-to-person level, are our armed forces.