Who do you believe?

We got two polls out this morning.  Reuters, and Gallup.  Reuters scores Obama at 37%, where as Gallup has him much higher, at 46%. Both Reuters and Gallup have good reputations going back 80 years or more.  Both base their results on small samples of the population, 1000 to 1500.  It takes great care and skill to select a representative sample.  Select an unrepresentative sample, say at a Tea Party meeting or a ACLU gathering, and you can get just about any results imaginable. 
   I like the lower Reuters number myself, but perhaps it is too good to be true. 
   So what does one believe? 

Fox News Joins Nanny State

They are hard at it right now.  Cops are investigating a Silver Spring MD couple who allowed their grade school age children to walk home alone from a park, about one mile.  Fox has a couple of lady commentators raving about how terrible this was, it's cold, a mile is too far.  Yackety Yack.
    When I was in grade school we all walked home after school.  It was a mile. No school buses in that town. I walked that mile to school and back from school, every day, rain or shine.  That was in Saxonville, a medium tough working class town.  This was Silver Spring MD, a silver spoon bedroom community. 

Prisoners of War are not Criminal Defendants.

The prisoners at Gitmo are enemy soldiers.  They were captured on the battlefield bearing arms against US troops.  They are not criminals, they didn't commit robbery, murder, rape, arson, or other crimes.  They just fought against our soldiers.
   No American court, military or civilian is going to convict enemy soldiers just for being enemies.  The hundred or so prisoners left in Gitmo need to stay there, otherwise they will go back to fighting for Al Quada.  They haven't committed any recognized crimes, but you cannot turn them loose.
  US criminal law doesn't recognize prisoner of war.  In US jurisprudence,  only a court can convict a defendant to jail or worse.  Arrests cannot be made until the perp has committed a crime. The Gitmo prisoners haven't committed a crime, haven't been convicted by a court, but we are holding them in jail.  There is a good chance that if they were brought to the US, some bat brained judge (we got plenty of those) will order them turned loose.  That's why we parked them at Gitmo in the first place.
  Just to confuse the issue further, to be a prisoner of war, you have to be a soldier of a recognized nation-state.  Al Quada isn't a nation-state, it's a bunch of raghead terrorists.  We have international agreements about treatment of prisoners of war.  Things like "name, rank, and serial number" mean no interrogation of prisoners of war.  So we don't call them prisoners of war, we call them detainees.  And we used to interrogate them, harshly, but Obama lacks the stomach for this, so we don't anymore.  In fact, Obama has ordered the troops to take no prisoners, kill them all instead. 
  In short, the Gitmo prisoners need to stay in Gitmo.  Giving them trials won't solve anything, it will mostly turn them loose.  Bringing them to the US is quite dangerous, some judge may turn them loose. 

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

We got 3.5 inches of  fresh powder last night.  It's 2 below zero this morning, and colder is promised for tomorrow.

Don't get mad, Get Even.

Obama has spent his last 6 years trashing every one in Europe.  It started when he returned a bust of Winston Churchill, continued with tapping Angela Merkel's phone,  dropped plans for an American anti-missile system in Poland, sucked up to Vladimir Putin, and wimped out in Syria.  Nobody on europe owes him anything, and a lot of people in Europe would like to get even.
   So, when the Europeans set up a big solidarity parade in Paris, I'm thinking that nobody bothered to tell the Americans about it.  We have demos and parades all over the world, every day.  Somehow the news that the Paris one was bigger and more important than average, and that lack American representation would be noticed bigtime, never reached the White House, at least not in time.  That's what White House underlings are leaking to TV newsies today.
    Sounds plausible to me.  I didn't know the Paris demo was gonna be all that big until it was underway.  Unless someone told them, the White House wouldn't know much more than I did.  

Troops in the streets

Won't keep us safe against Islamic terrorists.  You need informants who will finger the terrorists before they open fire.  Terrorists have to live somewhere, they have to eat somewhere, they have to travel, they have to communicate.  Someone sees this.  The landlady at the apartment, the counter person at the greasy spoon, the car rental clerk, the cell phone salesman.  If you could talk to that someone, you could arrest the terrorist before he strikes.  We need undercover cops to develop contacts inside the terrorist neighbor hoods, inside the mosques, anywhere we think terrorists might be. 
   We also need laws that allow us to imprison terrorists BEFORE they have done anything bad.  Right now the criminal justice troops only work on crimes that have been committed.  No commission, no action.  Innocent until proven guilty. 

Saga of SS Contessa, from Rick Atkinson's "Army at Dawn"

Operation Torch in WWII was somewhat incredible.  An invasion army boarded ship in Norfolk Virginia, steamed across the submarine invested Atlantic, and landed in North Africa.  To provide air support after landing, an airfield was located, near the sea and on a river bank.  Shallow river.  The call went out for a freighter of less than 17 foot draft to get up the river.  The only ship meeting this requirement was a aging banana boat, SS Contessa.  She was duly ordered to Norfolk.  When the crew discovered that their new cargo was to be avgas and 1000 pound bombs, they all promptly jumped ship.  The skipper took some Navy guards with riot guns and paid a visit to the Norfolk city jail.  After some explanations to the warden, including the fact that anyone volunteering would not be back in Norfolk anytime soon, the skipper recruited 37 experienced seamen who decided that risking torpedoes was a better deal than an extended stay in the Norfolk jail. 
   Meanwhile the Navy drydocked Contessa, repaired the worst of her leaks, and slapped a fresh coat of paint on her bottom.  Then they started loading bombs and avgas.  This took longer than it should have, and Contessa sailed two days after the main Torch fleet sailed.  She managed to cross the Atlantic by her self, all in one piece,  without encountering an enemy sub.  She turned up in North Africa on time, and with a local pilot, made it up the river and was unloading at the airfield before any aircraft arrived. 
  Just one of the cool stories Rick Atkinson tells.