@ Tamtucphat: And I'm sure you know that as fact, considering that you spent time with Gen. Clark at SHAPE, meeting with him alongside two of his predecessors while he was preparing for and conducting Allied Force... Oh, wait... that was me. I guarantee you that some of the things Clark said on the state of NATO and our allies (and the impersonations while saying them) behind closed doors would make your head explode.

@ T. Suarez: Well, considering that he didn't make Major until 1974, and he was a tanker, I'm not shocked that he spent a brief time in a "combat command," as you refer to it (incorrectly, I might add). I guess he's just not as manly as you are -- I'm sure you'd have remained in the field after being hit by four 7.62 rounds and still managing to maintain effective command.

I also said who made the comments to me, I just didn't use his name, as I do not have his permission, nor will I request it. Name dropping is the sin of politicians, wonks and wannabe-know-it-alls. Besides, I didn't earn the respect and confidence of so many senior flag and general officers by causally dropping their names on anonymous internet message boards. Like I said, if he wants to voice his opinion and have it connected with his name definitively, he can do so himself.

HRC may refer to:

• Human Rights Campaign
• Hillary Rodham Clinton
• Hard Rock Cafe
• Harrisburg Regional Chamber
• C-scale of the Rockwell hardness scale
• Hitachi Remote Copy, deprecated in favour of Hitachi TrueCopy
• Herbicide Resistant Crop
• Harmonically-related carriers, a cable TV modulation technique
• United Nations Human Rights Council, or (before it was disbanded) the United Nations Commission on Human Rights
• Honda Racing Corporation
• High Rupturing Capacity for electrical fuses
• High Resolution Control, a feature Brother printers have
• Human Resources Command of the United States Army
• House Rabbit Connection, a rabbit rescue organization
• Hot Rod Circuit, an indie rock band from New Haven, CT
• Highly Reflective Cloud, a measurement used to monitor convection

Okay? It's pretty clear that Salon was talking about Hillary Clinton (or, maybe, the Indie Rock Band).

The important thing is that the Straight Talk Express is going in circles and eating its young (who are mostly in their mid-50s), while Obama's campaign seems to be making intelligent, appropriate decisions regarding its staffing.

I think that the perfect running mate would be the recently-interred corpse of Jesse Helms -- he's got that youthful pallor; you don't have to worry about him wavering on conservative positions -- especially now that he's dead; you're guaranteed that he's not a secret Muslim/secret homosexual/secret Catholic/secret female/secret living person, and it'll provide the opportunity to re-use the "hands" commercial, which will make John Fund a happy man.

Surprisingly, millions of passengers carry deadly weapons on flights every week, without the least bit of scrutiny by security screeners.

The deadly weapon most commonly found on these would-be secret muslim al Qaeda terrorists: 22¢ Bic Stic pen. Dear lord, they sell these harbingers of death and destruction for $1.37 a dozen!

I thought that this was an urban legend until talking CQB to some instructors at USAJFKSWCS (similar information was provided by instructors at Quantico). There's five or six ways that an unmodified Bic pen can be used to quickly kill or incapacitate, and a couple more, if you have a rubber band. Seriously.

McCain should probably also avoid books, as they're "all fact; no heart."

Alex, while well-meaning, it took you 595 words and six paragraphs to say what amounts to: Bill O'Reilly misrepresents facts in a sensationalist manner to suit his own personal narrative (which isn't news -- Stephen Colbert has been point it out for two years, now, Al Franken, even longer).

The actual title will be "Supreme Chancellor of the Republic and President of the Senate." And, after exhausting all diplomatic avenues with the separatist elements in Oregon, on the outer reaches of the continental rim, he will have no choice but to carry the burden of "Emperor of the Republic," temporarily, until such a time that peace and order are restored, making the country safe for the return of democracy.

I wouldn't waste my time trying to appeal to NBC with rational arguments about scheduling and commercial interruptions.

Bear in mind that this is the same group that flipped off Apple and yanked all of its shows from iTunes, because it "only" made $15 million in pure profit, without much more invested than providing DVDs of the shows to Apple. I'm curious how much less they've made from Hulu and Amazon Unbox (assuming they've made anything, at all.

Network executives, like airline and automotive CEOs, alike, have repeatedly demonstrated breathtaking stupidity, whether it involves canceling popular, critically-acclaimed shows (NBC killed Quantum Leap, Scrubs and Farscape --they run SciFi, to name a few) while greenlighting mind-numbing dreck (My Dad is Better than Your Dad, America's Got Talent, American Gladiators, Deal or No Deal are but a handful of recent examples) or trying to fight a losing battle against online distribution, rather than embracing it and developing an effective business model. What makes you think that's going to change anytime soon?

Woflson is in la-la land, along with the rest of the PUMAs, as best explained by
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/why-howard-wolfson-is-out-of-job.html :

The thing about Iowa, however, is that unlike virtually any other electoral contest, second choices matter, since Democratic caucus rules dictate that a voter may caucus for her second-choice candidate if her first choice does not achieve the 15 percent of the vote required for viability...

...an average of several surveys in December showed that she was the second choice of about 20 percent of voters, as compared with 25 percent for Obama and Edwards...

So the odds are that, if John Edwards had dropped out on the morning before the Iowa caucus, Obama would have won by more points rather than fewer. [emphasis mine]