In baseball, where 162 games are played in a season, a person who has no talent for the competition is quickly exposed and demoted.

For some reason, in politics, the Democratic party is stuck with a generation of people who have lost fight after fight for decades, to the point where constant capitulation to the opposing point of view is seriously advanced as not only a policy alternative, but the only possible way for the party to win anything.

If I wanted to vote for Republicans, I would simply join their party.

Most of the current generation of political "experts" on the Democratic side base all their philosophy on

a) McGovern's loss

b) Mondale's loss

c) Willie Horton

d) Clintonian triangulation

These are the people who have been so busy participating in the process the brand name of Democrats and the more generic term "liberal" into the ground that they have managed to help empower a party solely interested in helping the ultra-wealthy, despite the evident political idiocy of such a platform.

Obama, in contrast, is happy to throw away "Conventional Wisdom" and try new strategies. The Old Guard gets annoyed when he does this, because they've made a living for the past thirty years drawing lines around what is possible for Democrats, and have put their reputation on the line for the dubious goal of Lowered Expectations.

People get tired of "Let's lose by less" as a strategy

Electro Robot falls well into the trap of saying that black voters are "unthinking" if they support a black candidate.

At this point in the race, it's hard to imagine a thinking black voter signing on with Hillary. Given that, why use the word "unthinking"?

This reminds me how, every election season, Republicans bemoan the "unthinking" black vote that votes Democratic out of "blind loyalty". The reason this seems blind or unthinking to the outsider is that they have no idea what black Americans want.

FWIW, I don't think that white voters who support Clinton are "unthinking" either. Some of them are perhaps racist, but I suspect more of them are only racist in a secondary sense: they are voting against the black candidate because they think in the Fall, other people who are actually racists will vote against him. But at the end of the day, race is still the deciding factor.

And it's sad that not only is this the last arrow left in the Clinton quiver, but that she does not see just how much respect she is losing by using it. There are times and places for scorched-earth campaigns, and the primary season is neither the time nor place (so to speak).

It occurs to me I'm much more likely to use my laptop while watching TV than I would a desktop, which would be stuck in the other room.

How does that affect my total KwH usage? Fewer Watts/hour but certainly more hours.

Usage matters.

How? I have no idea. When laptops reached the point where I could do everything I needed on them, and they were no longer twice as expensive as comparable desktop PCs, I decided it was going to be laptops from then on. Of course for real high-performance computing needs, a laptop wouldn't suffice. But neither would a typical home-usage desktop PC.

Elephantman: or it's called a civil war. We invaded their country. We had no good reason to do so. So they are fighting back. Using war to justify further war is circular logic.

The vast majority of people in Iraq want us to leave. Our presence there is not helping. There is no "war" to "win" here, since we are simply at war with the civilian population. If you believe in democracy, then when the vast majority of the civilian population wants you to leave, you should simply leave.

Anything short of that is good old-fashioned imperialism.

I think a lay person seeing a Bradley driving down the street would call it a tank. It is admittedly not a real tank like an M1, but the distinction between a real tank and an armored fighting vehicle/mechanized infantry is something that will be lost on most people.

And saying it is a "personnel carrier" really does not do credit to the vehicle. It makes it sound like a truck or Humvee.

The underlying notion that any weapon, tank, ship, or anything could be impregnable to any possible attack is something I would think no serious military mind would consider. In the real world, there are no irresistable forces, no immovable objects, and no impregnable vehicles.