I feel your pain…Cleveland Indians. Even though I left Ohio for boot camp in 1969, they are – will always be – my team. Michigan of course, exists to torment expat Buckeyes.

Punishment gluttony.

130: followed by a long step outside the door of a flying Blackhawk.

As I heard it, it was a Huey, and only the first two of the lucky three departed the aircraft.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KG15Ak01.html

Pipeline deal is sweet music for Iran
By M K Bhadrakumar

How a trans-Caspian gas pipeline project came to be named after the 19th-century Italian Romantic composer Giuseppe Verdi’s famous opera Nabucco remains obscure. The opera is based on a Biblical story about the tragic plight of persecuted Jews exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. Maybe, the opera’s enchanting story of love and struggle or its tendency toward melodrama was considered an apt metaphor for the acute Caspian energy rivalry.

Moscow often poured scorn on the Nabucco project’s dim prospects by drawing apt allusions from Verdi’s opera. In the latest parody, an expert commentator in Moscow ridiculed that the “chaotic chanting” by Europeans in support of the project reminded him of the haunting chorus of Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s opera – “beautiful, yet altogether gloomy and hopeless”.

But he was mistaken, as on Monday a galaxy of European statesmen gathered under chandeliers in the banquet hall of the newly built Rixos Hotel in Ankara, Turkey, to sign an inter-governmental agreement formally launching the Nabucco project. United States President Barack Obama’s special envoy on Eurasian energy issues, Richard Morningstar, was in attendance at the ceremony, affirming in unmistakable terms that Nabucco is every bit an American political venture.

(see link above for complete story..)

1. At least Clinton had the excuse that it was a widely held belief (albeit a stupid belief in my mind) that the world was no longer a dangerous place when he took over.

2. I think Obama has even less backbone and ability to act than did Clinton. Frankly, I give 50/50 odds that he’ll either be totally frozen in the first real crisis, or could just flip out and have to be held secluded while someone else manages the crisis.

You are correct, though. Clinton could have prevented a lot of what’s happening in the world if he’d had the foresight. Unfortunately surrounding yourself with hacks like Warren Christopher and Madeliene Albright doesn’t give you a lot of options when it comes to thinking outside of the box (btw, my wife took a class with Albright at Georgetown and to this day claims she was the stupidest of her professors).

He’s talking about Al Gore’s election there. He’s frozen, can’t respond to a deadly act of war, because it might affect the polls.

Clinton couldn’t take custody of Osama bin Laden when offered the chance by Sudan because he didn’t have legal grounds to hold him.

Sorry, didn’t mean to go off on a tangent. Is this the same President Clinton who sent scads of rare, expensive SLCM’s to downtown Sudan to blow up a nerve gas factory where Osama and Saddam were cooperating (but Monica Lewinsky wasn’t?)

CNN: U.S.: Sudan plant sample contains VX nerve gas precursor
Soil sample called ’smoking gun’

But then this same President Clinton couldn’t do anything about the USS Cole because it was too close to the election?

How many real wars would we have lost and imaginary wars would we have won by now, if Clinton had responded to the USS Cole the way George Bush responded to 9/11?

I tend to believe the interpretation of status of forces agreement is to blame for this. I think General Petraeus is in agreement with that interpretation of the events opposed to the one as outlined here.
here