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When you consider Yemen and other violent acts carried out by the Saudis; that money is blood money. Moreover, don't see it would lead to jobs even if we think we should deal with a nation of killers and abusers.

One word, petrodollar.

https://followthemoney.com/preparing-for-the-collapse-of-the-petrodollar-system-part-1/

The Saudis have Trump over a barrel, (an oil barrel.)

Would that be the same barrel Killary had him over? The same barrel Mueller has him over, or the barrel the MSM has him over? Barrels do not scare or stop him.

You fear, hate, and or mistrust Muslims and or Islam.

You fit the definition of the word Islamophobe.

Your criticisms can be shutdown because they don't hold water. That's usually the case when criticisms are based on emotion rather than reason.

What are reasonable expectations for STOVL aircraft to preform air superiority roles, then? It seems the bar has been lowered and or the definition of "air superiority" changed.


Is that in reference to the F-22?

Really? So what the Koran says means nothing? Is it reasonable to use the sames verses ISIS has quoted as inspiration for slaughtering people?

Your objections are what do not hold water. You know 0 about what the doctrine of Islam says very clearly. None of that can be denied it is fact and proven in actions and words. You are a dime a dozen apologist that apparently cannot read, or is just afraid to.

That works both ways. The F-35's ability to detect enemy planes in the air is abysmal, and I see little indication that this will be improved anytime soon.

Also, the only air-to-air missiles that it can carry internally are obsolete and easily jammed by modern adversaries. And if it carries different missiles externally, that negates its stealth.

These are problems that might possibly be fixed. But absent signs that they will be fixed soon, the F-35 shouldn't be regarded as an air-to-air fighter.

That will be of questionable benefit in a war against a peer power where the entire war zone will be a no-go area for F-16s.

According to this, the reason why they are keeping F-16s is because F-35 production is too slow to meet demand:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/lockheed-martins-f-16c-fighting-falcon-flying-until-2048-20155

If it can get a weapons lock in any direction and fire missiles at enemy planes without ever needing to maneuver, then a plane with low maneuverability can perform an air-superiority role.

Until such a capability is developed, no STOVL aircraft will ever be able to perform an air superiority role.

Yes.

Petrodollar conspiracy lunacy is just as goofy as that nonsense where people insist that the moon landings were faked.

The history of weaponry tells us that no one can sit tight on any offensive or defensive measure.

The US has, wisely, maintained a strategy of being miles ahead of potential adversaries in military capabilities. Unfortunately, it costs a whole lot of money to do so (and some of it is wasted).

The Chinese are not prepared to cede military superiority to us for all time and they are slowly but surely reducing the gap. If we let them, they will come close enough to a point where we have to back down. Once we back down, we are doomed.

Well it will not bother Democrats. Something like terror is anti-American and must be supported. Anyway to attack and destroy this country and Constitution.
https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2018/10/11/will-krysten-sinemas-terrorist-connection-doom-chance-win-jeff-flakes-senate-seat/

Trump Tried to Kill Obamacare by Driving Premiums Up. Instead, They Went Down.

By Jonathan Chait@jonathanchait 10/12/18

“Obamacare is finished, it’s dead, it’s gone,” gloated President Trump last year, “There is no such thing as Obamacare anymore … It’s a concept that couldn’t have worked.” Trump was highlighting the anticipated effect of his many moves to undermine the hated law that he had failed to repeal. He had withheld payments to insurers that they were owed under the law, allowed healthy customers to be skimmed out of the customer pool with cheap plans that would raise rates for others, virtually eliminated the outreach budget to enroll customers in the exchanges, and would later repeal the individual mandate. All these steps were intended to destroy the economic basis for making its individual market exchanges work.

They failed.

Yesterday, the department of Health and Human Services revealed that premiums on the exchanges for 2019 policies are actually dropping. The Department’s figures also reveal other signs of health in the exchanges: insurers who had left the markets are returning to offer plans, and the number of regions with only one insurer has fallen.

The law’s viability has been a point of intense dispute for years. Conservatives had two reasons to oppose Obamacare. Philosophically, they objected to the idea of expanding government in order to create a new social benefit. Politically, they wanted to deny credit to a Democratic president. But, since neither of these arguments had much persuasive power with the electorate — which agreed with the goal of covering the uninsured, and tends not to support politicians who openly root for the failure of the opposing party’s program — they instead settled on a different argument. They insisted Obamacare could not work.

Millions of words were spilled over the years in an attempt to establish the strident belief by — as far as I could tell — the entire conservative movement that Obamacare was a “train wreck,” conceptually unworkable. It was a monstrosity! You were forcing people to buy insurance they didn’t want! Never mind that a system almost exactly like this had already worked in Massachusetts. This is in keeping with the historic pattern of conservatives asserting every new progressive reform (from abolition of child labor, to Social Security, to the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, to Obamacare) will backfire by violating the natural laws of the unregulated economy, causing misery, and perhaps leading to full-scale socialism.

To be sure, there was a plausible mechanism by which the law could fail. The way to kill its exchanges would be to trigger a “death spiral,” in which healthy customers decided not to buy plans, so only sick people remained in the risk pool, driving up costs, and driving out more healthy people, and so on. But Obamacare was actually well-designed with safeguards to prevent such a thing from happening, And by 2016, it was fairly clear the predictions of doom were all totally wrong. The customer base and the rates were stable and profitable.

The law, meanwhile, has become popular as Republicans tried to kill it:

And yet the Trump administration’s extensive efforts to sabotage Obamacare administratively and legally were potent enough that many health policy analysts thought the administration could actually reach the intended effect. Republicans could trigger the death spiral they had predicted, and then would argue it was Obamacare’s fault and was going to happen anyway. Indeed, Trump was arguing this.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Obamacare continues to fail. Humana to pull out in 2018. Will repeal, replace & save healthcare for ALL Americans. https://origin-nyi.thehill.com/policy/healthcare/319538-humana-to-drop-out-of-obamacare-marketplace-at-end-of-2017 …

6:50 PM - Feb 14, 2017

Humana to drop out of ObamaCare at end of 2017
The insurer said the market has not stabilized enough to participate next year.

thehill.com

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Death spiral!
'Aetna will exit Obamacare markets in VA in 2018, citing expected losses on INDV plans this year'http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/aetna-will-exit-obamacare-markets-in-virginia-in-2018.html …

8:28 AM - May 4, 2017

Aetna will exit Obamacare markets in Virginia in 2018, citing expected losses on individual plans...
Aetna announced earlier this year that it was exiting Iowa's market in 2018.

All the uncertainty around Obamacare fomented by the administration, and the repeated steps to undermine it, had their effect: premiums shot up during Trump’s first year. States that took steps to counteract the sabotage have seen their premiums drop sharply — in New Jersey, for instance, a state controlled by Democrats, premiums will fall by 14 percent. If Democrats regain control of government, they could implement similar steps very quickly and bring down rates.

But even in the majority of states, where Republicans have blocked such action, premiums are largely stable. There is no death spiral. Obamacare has lived. And conservatives will have learned no lessons from their failed predictions.

So young healthy people are happy paying for others. Gruber did say Americans were stupid, and Obama agreed.

Well, that's how insurance works, CJ.

Get over it.

Not before Obama fooled with it. The government should not have the last say in 20% of our economy, it is what the free market is for.

Again, get over it.

Pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, pregnancy or even medical handicaps should not force people into poverty for healthcare.

Republicans plan to cover them. Do not lie about that.

Plan to....

After it guts a policy that already DOES.

How extremely benevolent to give back what they took away. That's the truth.

Pay-to-protest: How Trump reportedly plans to crackdown on White House demonstrations
Trump wants to bar demonstrations outside parts of the White House and the National Mall

OCTOBER 12, 2018 8:17PM (UTC)

President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers have repeatedly accused — without evidence — that some people who protest the GOP agenda are paid protesters. Most recently, Trump dismissed the countless number of sexual assault survivors and their advocates who converged on Capitol Hill ahead of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court by baselessly accusing liberal billionaire George Soros of paying the demonstrators.

In an unprecedented turn of events, the Trump administration has proposed a policy change that would require citizens to pay to be able to protest — a policy change that civil liberties groups have slammed as an infringement to freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of The Constitution.

According to a proposal introduced by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the Trump administration is looking to restrict access to a 80 percent of the sidewalks surrounding the White House and on the National Mall. The proposed rule changes also suggest charging "event management" costs for protests and putting new restrictions on spontaneous demonstrations.

Zinke submitted the policy change on behalf of the National Park Service, a bureau at the executive agency that administers the areas. The bureau is currently able to recover costs associated with special events, but not spontaneous demonstrations, similar to the ones that regularly emerge on the White House sidewalk; Lafayette Park to the north of the White House; and the Ellipse or the President's Park South, to the south of the White House grounds, according to the proposal. These fees could include "direct costs associated with event management, set up and take down of structures; material and supply costs such as barricades and fencing needed for permitted activists; costs for the restoration, rehabilitation, and clean-up of a permitted area such as sanitation and trash removal; permit application costs; and costs associated with resource damage such as harm to turf, benches, poles, and walkaways."

The policy change also requires that applicants submit permit applications at least 48 hours in advance of any demonstration or special event.

"Adding this statement would provide more flexibility for spontaneous demonstrations, while allowing the Regional Director to ensure that the NPS and the U.S. Park Police have the law enforcement capacity to safely manage events that are requested with less than 48-hours notice," the proposal says.

Civil liberties groups have strongly condemned the proposals, saying they're a violation of the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment of The Constitution. The ACLU noted, "fee requirements could make mass protests like Martin Luther King Jr’s historic 1963 March on Washington and its 'I have a dream' speech too expensive to happen."

During the Vietnam war, the federal government attempted to impose similar restrictions on citizens freely assembling in protest near the White House and were sued by the ACLU. As the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found in their ruling, the "use of parks for public assembly and airing of opinions is historic in our democratic society, and one of its cardinal values."

The court also noted that the White House sidewalk, Lafayette Park, and the Ellipse are landmark sites for the exercise of the right to peacefully assemble, and therefore could not "accord deference to an executive approach to use of the White House sidewalk that is rooted in a bias against expressive conduct..."

The National Park Service has attempted to defend the policy change by emphasizing that large demonstrations, like the Women's March and the March for Our Lives, drain their resources and place a heavy financial burden on the federal government.

The public has until 15 October to comment on the plans.