Howdy, Mikey.

Another thing worth noting: adding Bishop also could serve as a hedge in case DQJ doesn't thrive in Horton's 3-4. But with the talented beef in front of him, I think he will.

Bishop's only a year older than the Browns' recent high-priced FA additions. Sure, he comes with more injury risk but also would be cheaper -- I'm guessing he'll sign a one year prove-it deal -- and could provide big help at a position that wasn't addressed in the offseason.

Robertson looks like a player, but he's excelled primarily on passing downs. For now, he may be better off as the first guy off the bench/nickel sub. And if D'Qwell goes down, what else do you have there? Depth could become a major issue if, as Pluto indicated, JMJ's on the outs.

@vaportrail said:

I know that there are many Iranians that don't like the regime, but are there enough of them? At this time, I would have to say no. Seems like the Arab uprisings have all sort of cooled down except for Syria.

Tough to say. The protests in Iran got pretty real in '09. Unfortunately, the depressing (lack of) results from them may have hurt the cause, but ya never know.

And the commentariat's incredibly bad at predicting these things. After the Tunisian gov't fell, many pundits insisted that the same couldn't possibly happen in Egypt. A google search of "Egypt is not Tunisia" yields 175,000 results.

Guess we need a Nate Silver of political revolutions.

Via Chuck Todd:

Given my remedial math & science skills, I'm not really in a position to argue about where the tech's heading, but I do know that past predictions regarding the inevitability of nuke-seeking have proven inaccurate.

Realists in the early 90's predicted that the absence of a shared Soviet threat would lead to a power struggle in W. Europe in which Germany would seek to reduce its relative weakness by developing nuclear weapons. John Mearsheimer argued that the US should just hand over nukes to Germany because a conflict over their program otherwise was inevitable.

Ultimately, that prediction proved to be kinda crazy because the region had changed so much since the years when Britain, France, and Germany bombed the shit out of each other. Germany didn't "need" nukes, which would have made spending so much dough on 'em irrational.

With that in mind, it seems like the best course of action would be a short-term plan to strongly discourage Iran from developing nukes, coupled with a long-term strategy to eliminate their desire to acquire them: either by changing the political dynamics in the region or the economics of it. Working towards Mideast peace could help with the former, depriving them of all that oil money could help achieve the latter.

Or the Iranian people could do us a solid and rage against their own regime, this time successfully.

Iran's got enemies other than the US & Israel who'll freak out if they get nukes. I bet Saudi Arabia would want to go nuclear, a very bad idea for a gov't that could get toppled by crazies.

If Pakistan, Iran, and Saudia Arabia all have nukes...I don't particularly like our odds of the shit never hitting the fan.

Calling whole groups of people uncivilized is a very 19th century thing to do, but it's the older cousin of a sentiment shared by many Israelis who oppose the continued occupation of the West Bank: why should the kid of a tech executive in Tel Aviv be forced to raid homes in the middle of the night in Tulkarem or the keep the whole city of Hebron under lockdown because the Israeli settlers there are batshit insane? Those actions make young Israelis do things a "civilized" person wouldn't normally engage in.

Unfortunately, that's a problem unlikely to be resolved anytime soon because of the mess in Gaza.

@westside-steve said:

Not nearly as odd as someone getting a boner over

The destruction of the only civalized spot in the region.

WSS

Edit: Removed the image and replaced it with something more appropriate.

It's odd that someone who rages against the welfare machine fails to see how foreign aid could breed complacency.

By that theory, President Clinton was the only recent non-corrupt commander-in-chief, at least if you count the Lebanon conflicts in '82 and '06.

Also, to clear something up from my posts above -- just because I believe we're pretty much locked into our current aid policy re: Egypt & Israel doesn't mean it's a good one. In fact, I think we've been bad friends to Israel by insulating them from the costs of the occupation -- it's helped entrench a policy that's fundamentally at odds with Israel's identity as a Jewish & democratic state.

Yup, pretty much. Both Egypt & Israel get wicked oversized shares of foreign aid, but I don't know if the US gov't can pull the money without creating a Romney-playing-Jenga sitch. Probably something that has to happen little by little over eons.

Another massive Israeli-Arab war is highly unlikely, perhaps impossible due to US sway in the region. Unlike in '67 & '73, there aren't separate US & Soviet spheres of influence in the region. And even then, countries were peeling away from the Death to Israel coalition -- Jordan stayed home in '73.

Also, it's important to note that those things weren't always clean sweeps. The Israelis were caught off guard in '73 because the military hierarchy assumed its strategic advantage guaranteed no Arab countries would be willing to go to war. The surprise, less decisively won conflict stunned many Israelis and, at least according to some historians, helped pushed the Israeli right towards a US-brokered deal with Egypt.

The huge amounts of aid and military-to-military relationships that have stemmed from that agreement make it unlikely, whatever the political situation, that Egypt's military would go to war against the United States' bud.

I'm pretty sure Jill Kelley is Lana Del Rey's real mother. That, or they share the same stylist.

More importantly, I don't believe I've ever seen someone troll as hard as @IDFSpokesperson did today. One good example.

Well, that's, um, interesting.

Did Petraeus mistress reveal new Benghazi details?

Very unfortunate. Hopefully, he wasn't sleeping with Nicholas Brody.

@the-cysko-kid said:

If benghazi didn't get your blood up you never served.

I didn't serve, and it still did. But I also try to be informed about an issue before I spout an opinion.

@the-cysko-kid said:

Hey alo, I was a serviceman sometimes you get upset over shit like that. And yes, fuck Israel, if they want us to fight the wars they want won for them. You cherry pick stuff obviously, where were you when we talked gun control and abortion?

Busy. But now I'm home sick so I have time to troll.

Is wanting to execute the entire Libyan gov't based on what turned out to be false information a "true moderate" position? Or that one of our foreign policy tenets should be "Fuck Israel"?

Sometimes, it seems like folks mistake their inchoate political opinions for being part of some sensible, vital center. It sure isn't.

Agreed, DH. Not a panacea but also not a big deal, except for the people who wouldn't needlessly be locked up. I bet the decline in prison costs would be more significant than any added tax revenue.

And we're fortunate that corruption is low enough that more than a few folks would shift to the legal market -- I don't think the same would be true in all countries.