As Limbaugh said, Arlen Specter and Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords were moderates. So is Snow from ME.

Let’s have the catastrophe have an unsullied dem label. Muddies the waters if “republicans” have their names on it, too.

It is conceivable a Palin Presidential candidacy could get Obama re-elected, remember he has 45% support after 20 months of being in the minority of every major issue the country has faced, and demonstrating incompetence and knavery at every turn. As much as Obama’s supporters have their egos invested in overlooking his deficiencies Palin’s detractors have equal amounts invested in proclaiming hers. He could win if the independent moderates stay home.
We’ll see in November.

Sheep and sheep dogs.
If the stuff hits the fan, the sheep dogs are going to have to die hard to provide time for us to get our stuff in order. Happened before.
And they’ll die knowing it’s because the feckless sheep were self-indulgent and playing feel-good head games.
I sometimes think Tommy ought to go on strike.

And the real problem here is that in war second place is dead, you don’t get to fight another day or give it another try.

We loose air superiority and we loose our ability not just to project any will but an inability to defend against someone else imposing their will on us. There is *nothing* more important in today’s tactical operations that air superiority – it directly affects information gathering, ground support, logistics, communications – everything.

The f-22 represents the f-15 of the our future – there is not another plane on the planet that can compete with it. Yes, it costs a fortune but you have to pay for that. The f-15 has the best record of any fighter out there and is still a true air-superiority fighter but there are models from other nations (some not so friendly to us) that are going to be able to challenge that. When that happens if we have been sitting around doing nothing we are screwed.

Sadly this has never been a lesson learned from history – it is something repeated over and over and over and over and over by the superior fighting forces. They get complacent in their ability to project their will and can not see that state will someday end until it is too late.

The US is going to have some hard times and it isn’t just our current 3-d chess playing President that is the cause. Our military is still quite nimble as far as military’s go but our citizenry can not grasp the idea of a real attack/war at our borders so they see no real reason to keep the fences up. 9/11 was an anomaly and the great lengths gone to keep those fences strong can’t have had anything to do with that so lets tear them down (and those goes beyond the idea of the f-22 and encompasses the whole Open Borders idea too)! Sadly I live here and I should still be alive in the times span that I think this will truly bite us in.

You need to do more research on the F-22.

Yes, it was expensive. Yes, the reasons for it’s expense has something to do with Congress changing priorities midstream.

Let’s do this. Let’s say Congress funded a bullet train (something that could go 200 MPH) with the intent on laying 300 million miles of track and buying 100 bullet train engines.

Then after all the research and development for this new train – they cut back repeatedly on the engines and track so that it was only 1 million miles and 10 engines.

If you did the math you could say that the program was more expensive per engine than any other train or track by a factor of 100 (after all research and development is factored in).

Then you use those facts to justify cutting the program.

The fact is that this plane (F-22) has the structure and the engines to propel it at over Mach 1 without afterburners keeping it’s engine heat signature cool. It’s able to go above Mach 2 easily.

The other current fighters (F-35) do not have this capability and are not up to production yet.

Leaving us with F-15’s and F-18’s, F-14’s and other aircraft that are two generations behind.