Combo Post

three smaller items, didn't see the need to create three seperate threads...

Hillary Clinton's election inevitable?  From the article at Politico.com: 

Obama strategist David Plouffe released a memo last week arguing that Hillary Clinton's advantages were essentially those of incumbency, that her support was thin, and that Obama should actually be considered the front-runner.

Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist, responded today with a memo that seemed designed to bludgeon all opposition into senselessness through the sheer power of numbers (links to 40 polls showing Hillary in the lead!)

Discuss  :-)

Next:  defense topics tend to be dominated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (rightly so), but here's an article from Reuters about cruise missile defense for the Eastern Seaboard, roughly from Washington, D.C. to Boston, Mass.  I've not personally done enough research to form an opinion about the program (or a similar one) mentioned in the article, but a few quotes: 

Christopher Bolkcom, defense specialist at the Congressional Research Service, said cruise missiles were difficult to track and that Lockheed's forecast about deploying a wide-area defense was "optimistic."

"It's sort of like border security. You can put some useful measures in place, but you can never afford a fool-proof system," he said.

and:

David Kier, who formerly was deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, said the technologies needed to track, identify and destroy any such missiles launched from ships off the U.S. coastline already existed or were under development.

"It just requires a will to do it," he told congressional aides at a briefing.

My two cents:  the idea that any government, not just ours, would do anything less than the best to protect their citizens from threats is philosophically disturbing to me.  Trust me, I believe in preparing, as best as can be, for threats that are probable or even physically possible, and not wasting time, money, and effort on defenses for a threat that are marginal at best.  However, the idea that, in order to promote some idea of MAD or equality of fear or to adhere to some international treaty (START I and II, SALT I and II), a country (US, UK, France, Russia, hell, even China) would voluntarily not construct or maintain such a defense system is morally repugnant and philosophically disturbing to me.  Why would you voluntarily leave your citizens defenseless?  I don't get it.  Maybe not going up during the bad old days of SAC and the Cold War means I don't get it...

Finally, an enviromental topic:  former Vice President Gore at odds with coal miner's union over clean-coal plants.  During the Live Earth concerts this past weekend, "Gore urged fans at the concerts held around the world on July 7 to commit to a seven-point pledge to cut carbon emissions and to lobby governments and employers to do more to save the planet.  The third point on the pledge states: "To fight for a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the CO2.""  Representatives of the union (the United Mine Workers of America) said in response that "We believe it is the way to go, but we also believe a moratorium on any new plant is somewhat short-sighted as it could be years before the technology is developed, while the need for power is now," Smith said."

Whatever one believes regarding climate change/global warming, isn't the idea of refusing to build any new coal plants, even without the best of all worlds clean enviromental aids, a bit myopic?  Wouldn't building a coal-fired plant that is somewhat cleaner, relatively speaking, than older coal-fired plants help at least somewhat?  My opinion (because that's why everyone comes here :-) ) is that building new coal-fired plants that were as clean as current technology could make them, building them now, is better than waiting a significant period of time (10 to 15 years, as noted in the article by the UMWA rep)

Thanks for reading!

History Guy