Worst Airpower Loss Since Vietnam

John Hudson:

The Taliban attack on an air base in southern Afghanistan on Friday drew coverage for the way the insurgents cloaked themselves in U.S. army uniforms to gain a tactical advantage, but few have taken note of the historical proportions of the damage inflicted. John Gresham, at the Defense Media Network, has published a detailed account of the attack on Camp Bastion, in which two Marines were killed, six U.S. Marine Corps jet fighters were destroyed, and two more  "significantly" damaged. Those facts were all carried in most reports, but if that just sounds like a typical damage report from a decade-long war, you're wrong. Gresham explains the devastating damage done to VMA-211, the name of the Marine Corps attack squadron that was most affected last week, noting that it is "arguably the worst day in [U.S. Marine Corps] aviation history since the Tet Offensive of 1968." Or you could go back even further. "The last time VMA-211 was combat ineffective was in December 1941, when the squadron was wiped out during the 13-day defense of Wake Island against the Japanese."
He spells out some more of the details of the attack:

Eight irreplaceable aircraft (the AV-8B has been out of production since 1999) have been destroyed or put out of action – approximately 7 percent of the total flying USMC Harrier fleet. Worse yet, the aircraft involved were the AV-B+ variant equipped with the APG-65 radar and AAQ-28 Litening II targeting pods – the most capable in the force. Given the current funding situation, it’s likely that the two damaged AV-8Bs will become spare parts “hangar queens” and never fly again. A Harrier squadron commander is dead, along with another Marine. Another nine personnel have been wounded, and the nearby Marines at Camp Freedom are now without effective fixed-wing air support. The USMC’s response to this disaster will be a telling report card on its leadership and organizational agility.

It just goes to show how desensitizing a decade of war can be. With casualty counts streaming in the news every day, it's easy to miss historically devastating milestones that crop up.

I didn't read the story very far this week when I saw it online, but I couldn't understand how a handful of insurgents did $200 million in damages in one attack.  Now I know.  These wars have been such an idiotic boondoggle, it is just heartbreaking.  I can not believe that anyone is seriously thinking that we should start a war with Iran.  Thank God we haven't yet.

A Conservative History

Jack Hitt has a little fun with the strange things conservatives say.  Some Revolutionary era history:

1775: Paul Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure as he was riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”—Sarah Palin. 1775: New Hampshire starts the American Revolution: “What I love about New Hampshire… You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world.”—Michele Bachmann 1776: The Founding Synod signs the Declaration of Independence: “…those fifty-six brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.”—Mike Huckabee 1787: Slavery is banned in the Constitution: “We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”—Michele Bachmann 1801: “Thomas Jefferson creates the Marines for the Islamic pirates that were happening.”—Glenn Beck

There's quite a few more funny ones over there.

Damn Those Crows

Discover Magazine:

Researchers described how they tested the crows’ reasoning in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. First, they let eight New Caledonian crows figure out how to use a tool to remove food from a hole in a box. Then the experiment began. The crows watched as a human entered their enclosure and stood by the box. But this motionless figure, eyes closed and hands in a neutral position, did not pose as much of a threat as the blue cloth hanging over one side of the enclosure. Through a gap in this bird blind, a stick emerged and poked at the hole in the box 15 times. Finally, the stick stopped moving and the non-threatening observer left the aviary.
Because the birds had to turn their heads away from the bird blind—where the probing stick had emerged—in order to nab a treat from the box, they were understandably cautious after the stick withdrew. Although they gradually went back to extracting food, they first inspected the bird blind and abandoned some preliminary probes of the food box. However, the birds were less wary and exhibited less testing behavior when they saw a second human enter the bird blind before the stick started moving, and leave the blind after the stick’s motion stopped. They recognized that the hidden human was the cause of the moving stick (even though, for consistency with the single-human situation, the stick was actually under the control of an experimenter outside the enclosure).
Understanding that a human was moving the stick, and that it would stop moving in the human’s absence, is more than a knowledge of cause and effect. Because the experimenter was invisible behind the bird blind, the crows did not actually see anyone moving the stick. And yet they could still infer that the human presence was responsible for the stick’s motion, which indicates that they can recognize even a hidden causal agent. This is a very impressive ability—until now, the authors write, “Although [research had suggested] animals can reason about the outcomes of accidental interventions, only humans have been shown to make inferences about hidden causal mechanisms.”

Geez, those birds have to be stopped.  

Makers And Takers

Derek Thompson:

First, if you live in the United States, you're a Taker. It's not the 47%. It's the 100%. Government provides services and benefits that are impossible not to take, from national defense, to infrastructure, to food and drug safety. We're all beneficiaries of not getting invaded, having roads, and not getting poisoned by our dinner and over-the-counter medication.

Second, if you work in the United States, you're a Maker. It's not the 15 million -- that 10% households who owe most federal income taxes. It's the 155 million -- the labor force, not counting the millions of people who want but cannot find a job. It's true that richer people pay more. But they also earn more. The top 1% pays more federal taxes than the bottom 60% combined. That sounds outrageous. But the top 1% also makes more than the bottom 40% combined.

Here are two nice graphs, from Tax Policy Center data. On the left: This is how the income pie is sliced for each quintile. The richest 20% earns more than 50% of the income. On the right: This is how the tax pie is sliced for each quintile. The richest 20% pays about 66% of total federal taxes. Upshot: High income inequality combined with a progressive tax system means the burden of paying for government falls heavily on the top 20%.

 I fall into that top 20%, and there is no way in Hell I would want to trade places with the bottom 20% for any reason, but especially so that I wouldn't pay any federal taxes.  Maybe I'm a fool, but I'm not going to complain about being wealthy enough that I have to pay a significant amount of taxes.

Chart of the Day

From the Dish:

Not extremely progressive.  What percentage of his income does somebody making $25 million a year like Romney pay in gas tax or sales tax.  I bet it is a very, very small amount.  Also, while we are on the subject of taxes and the wealthy, how come Mitt Romney doesn't move to Texas or Florida or another state with no income tax?  Why have his most recent homes been in California and Massachusetts?  It makes one wonder about the long-pushed Republican talking point that the wealthy will choose to reside in a state with a lower tax rate.  I know one thing, I will never live in Indiana or Kentucky no matter how much lower their taxes are than Ohio.

Will The Campaign Get Uglier?

Charles Pierce thinks so:

We are coming rapidly toward a devastating confluence of two colliding panics. The Romney campaign is panicking about itself, and the Republicans are panicking about the Romney campaign. He cannot come back from this, honestly. This is who he is. This is what he believes the world to be. Half the electorate already thinks he's a fake, which means he's not a very good one. There's really only one campaign left to him now.
Unfortunately for American politics, that means only one thing. It's going to get extraordinarily dirty extraordinarily fast. There is going to be pale birtherism and barely covert racism. The body of Ambassador Christopher Stevens is going to be exhumed and used as a bludgeon. There is going to be poor-baiting, and gay-baiting, and ladyparts-baiting, and probably baiting of things I haven't thought of yet. The polite part of the campaign is going to be Romney's effort to convince You that he was really talking about Them when he was calling people moochers and sneak thieves. He wasn't talking about Your Medicare or Your Social Security. Naw, he was talking about Their greed for what You have. That's going to be the polite part of the rest of the campaign, reinforced in the lower registers by a few million in ads to make sure You remember who They are.

I'm not sure what will be uglier, the rest of the campaign, or the aftermath of an Obama victory?  I'm leaning toward the aftermath.  All the people I've heard berating the President have taken for granted that, now that his "socialism" has been exposed, he's bound to lose.  When he doesn't, I think they will react very poorly.  But don't get me wrong, I think the rest of the campaign will be much uglier than the nastiness raised by Sarah Palin's "Real America" campaign in 2008.

Will Folks Find This To Be Satire?

Or will they think it is just what they are thinking?:

Wow, Sully Is Pissed

The Dish:

The offense was calling 47 percent of Americans moochers, and saying that Obama's voters were simply voting for more money from the makers. And this horrible, callous, contemptuous, Randian sentence:

"[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

He did not say: "I'll never convince them they should vote for me." He accused 47 percent of Americans of choosing not to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives." He's describing half the country as parasites, bleeding the productive half dry. Half the country. He includes me, an Obama supporter, who pays three times the tax on my income that Romney does, who immigrated at 21, whose parents never went to college, and whose blog now employs six other people.
You know what, Mitt? Fuck you.

Mitt's getting a little personal?  You would think the anti-gay marriage issue might piss him off too.

Look Out For 2013

Businessweek, via Ritholtz:

Whether it’s Barack Obama or Mitt Romney taking the presidential oath of office in January, someone will have the misfortune of overseeing an economy that looks a lot like the one we have today: low growth, persistently high unemployment, and huge amounts of debt. Depending on what happens with the “fiscal cliff,” there’s at least a chance the U.S. will be in recession. The mere threat of $600 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts is already delaying business spending. Yet even if Congress does broker a deal and the worst of the fiscal cliff is postponed, 2013 is shaping up to be a rough year.
Big economic forces, both domestic and abroad, are combining to dampen growth. Fundamentals such as demographics and household finances that helped spur past recoveries are now slowing things down. These trends aren’t affected much by policy, so fixing them will be beyond the immediate grasp of an Obama or Romney administration. “No matter who wins the election, from a truly economic standpoint, 2013 will be an extremely challenging year,” says David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff + Associates.

Things are going to suck ass, and the gridlock in DC will make things worse.  We're going to get punched in the gut, and then we'll have to listen to four more years of idiot Republicans saying things suck solely because of Obama.  I'm afraid I'm going to punch John Boehner before things are over (I'd much rather punch Jim Jordan, but he was an NCAA champion wrestler, so the only way I'd take him on would be with a pickax handle from the blindside).

Another Romney Lie

Mark Thoma:

When Romney talks about the people who don't pay taxes and tries to make you believe that 47 percent of us are moochers living off the system, it's important to recognize that the people who don't pay federal income taxes are mostly the elderly and students. And notice how narrow the category is -- it's only federal income taxes -- but there are lots of other types of taxes. When all things are considered, "nearly 100 percent of Americans pay taxes in some way, shape or form"

So Romney says all those old folks are voting for Obama, because they are moochers?  I think he underestimates the racial acceptance of the elderly. Romney is a lying sack of shit who is most likely going to lose big.  Unfortunately, Republicans won't understand that it isn't just Romney that voters don't like, it is the entire Republican party.