Patrol with Humvees with .50 Cals.  Kind of an updated "Rat Patrol".

Nah, I'll stick with CIWS, fully automated. Someone goes in the kill zone, it dies. Leave the body to rot.

I stopped believing in polls after the last Presidential election.  The only poll that matters is on the first Tuesday in November.

Rather than placing your doubt and mistrust on "polls", perhaps you should be placing your doubt and mistrust on the organizations that purposely tilted the polls to try to influence the outcome.

Polls conducted correctly are usually quite accurate.  We just don't see many people doing them right any more.

Here's a long one - deep personal history with Kmart - my father's only company and where his pension came from.  Plus so many bonus checks that it was embarrassing for him sometimes.  One year, his bonus was 150% of his salary.  But he managed to deal with it

My father was an incredibly successful store manager for Kmart for 35 years.  He used to say that it was a simple business...you put stuff on the shelves and people buy it.  Go into one of the stores today and see if that still holds true.  For the past 25 years, the shelves have been half empty or filled with crap you don't want.  Today, the prices are the highest of all the "discount" retailers.

When he was a few years from retirement, they closed his store and built a new super Kmart across the street.  But, new store, new blood.  They pulled him back into a rotation schedule to fill in places.  They put him at one store where the manager had quit because he couldn't make sales bonues.  Dad went into that store, fixed a few simple things and blew the bonus numbers out of the water for about 2 years - the store is one of two that are still open in Raleigh.  The super Kmart lasted about 10 years and then was closed and has been empty for years now.  They used the building as a staging area for power crews for the recent hurricane.

Then they sent him to Durham, in the bad part of town.

Need to pause here and inject - Dad's first Kmart store as manager was in DC, H street NE from 1967 until 1969.  It's not a good part of town, but he treated everyone fairly and with dignity.  When the young kids would come in to shoplift, he would see them and cut them off - they'd say "Oh man, I didn't know YOU were working today" and they'd turn and leave.  If you are familiar with history then you know that area was also ground zero in 1968 when Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.  Not to say they knew the riots were coming, but two of the area leaders came to him that afternoon and said "Mr Flynn, we have great respect for you.  But you need to not be here right now".  So he closed the store, locked it up and got a police escort out of the area.  He got home early and called his regional manager and said "here's what's going on, I don't know if we'll have a store tomorrow".  The next day, almost the entire section of the city in a multi block radius was burned EXCEPT for the grocery store, the pharmacy and the Kmart. 

Needless to say, getting a store in the bad part of town was no big deal for him.  The store was losing money and they expected to shut it down within 12 months.  Before he went in for his first day, he went in and shopped the store...easy for a 30 year veteran to identify the issues, the major one of which was no stock on the shelf...simple business.  First day he laid down the law - there is a uniform, white shirt with a red vest.  If you do not have a red vest, we will give you one.  If you do not have a white shirt, come see me.  We have a whole store and somewhere out there is a white shirt for you.  He identified the few trouble makers and got rid of them and the culture got better very quickly.  He asked his boss about cleaning up the book - hey, the inventory levels are way off because of years of shrinkage and they're going to have to be corrected before shutting down.  Got clearance to do that, but he knew better what would happen.  Once the inventory correctly showed the stock level was low, the computers kicked in and automatically generated replenishments for the store, plus allocating extra work hours to the store to receive the product and stock the shelves.  So the good people left at the store were happy because they got more hours to stock the shelves, the shelves were full and suddenly people started buying the stuff.  In 3 months the store went from deep in the red to healthy in the black (and Dad AGAIN blew away the bonus numbers).  His district manager was shocked...but it's an easy business, you put stuff on the shelf and people buy it.  That store stayed open for another 10 years after Dad left it. 

What I described here is what I think is the primary missing ingredient from the company.  I worked there too a long time ago and I'd be willing to bet that nobody there has the same appreciation for how to be successful.  It will stumble along but look for them to fail again in the next 5 years.

You be all that and more as long as you have a D after your name.

Hypocrisy is the only family value of the democrat (communist) party.

Respectfully disagree. If I were to get in good with the D’s, I’d have to love champagne, Broadway, kale salads, and genders #2 through 76. 

This reply was a couple of weeks ago, but I've been away, so...

My only disagreement is that the right to vote is a long way from a seat on the SCOTUS. There is also the "image" of the court to be considered. This is not about Kavanaugh personally, it's about the prestige and respect most of the country seems to expect the court and the justices to be worthy of. If there had been real, corroborated evidence against him, I think there would have been enough Republican nays to deny him confirmation. And that would probably have been a good outcome for the country, in the long run... IF that evidence had been found.

I'm okay with how it turned out. I only hope Kavanaugh turns out to be more impartial and less partisan than some of his comments during the hearings implied he might be.

Kavanaugh was completely impartial and non-partisan during the hearings. Those ended 3 weeks ago.

In the Trotskyite show trial two weeks ago, where he was accused of attempted rape, rape, rape rooms, indecent exposure, and other filthy and pathetic, completely unsubstantiated claims, he was fighting with the ferocity of a man fighting for his reputation, his girls, his wife, and his career. He fought as an innocent man should fight, with passion and anger, and partisanship where necessary, and it was extremely necessary.

To have democrats then claim that he didn’t have the temperament for the bench is as pathetic and low-life as the Menendez brothers appealing for leniency because they are orphans, notwithstanding that these filthy pieces of shit murdered their own parents with a shotgun.

He posted he'd be gone for a bit on a trip.

I'm back for now

We went to West Virginia for several days and hiked about a dozen trails.  Lewisburg WV is a small town but it has some surprisingly good restaurants.  And the scenery was tremendous.  And I had some of the best "store bought" martinis I have had anywhere.

Then we flew to Mallard's Landing (Air park south of Atlanta) to visit some friends for a few days.

Then on to Panama City where my sister and BIL recently built a new house on the water and just moved in.  Today they sent me a text of a 5 day forecast of a hurricane that will be giving them a house warming party in a few days.

Then yesterday, we flew to St. Simons Island to have lunch those same friends from Mallards Landing at the King and Prince resort.

Then we got home last night around sunset and had some wonderful homemade martinis.  Perfect ending to a great trip. The Bonanza performed flawlessly.  I love flying over I-95 at over 200 mph.  I don't get passed by cars like I occasionally used to in the C-172.

It's good to be home, but I am now trying to figure out what our next trip will be.

To be honest, I was utterly on the fence about this until I saw the guy in his Senate hearing.  The dude in that hearing has no business being on the Supreme Court.  The dude in that hearing has no business being in a courtroom of any sort.  The dude in that hearing was a whiny little shit who deserved nothing more than to be bitchslapped by a big buxom biker chick wearing a Hillary mask and lots of leather.

Like I said, appoint him.  The Blue Wave could use a good push.

Well, alrighty. I was on the fence at the time he was chosen(way, way before Ford) due to his "baggage"(literal quote). Not knowing that the Dems would have this kind of attack going. Also, I was ready to stick a fork in him when I saw his character on display at the start of his testimony. But then I realized pretty quickly that I was the one being unfair, and biased. That I sat and listened to the accuser, and I commiserated with her, and I thought that she likely was the victim of some kind of teen attack or assault. Notwithstanding, that her character was about as disgusting as I've seen in a 15YO girl. i.e. - way underage drinking, wanting to screw 56 MEN before college, slutty pictures, etc. So - it was hypocritical that I not offer the same hearing, and deliberation to Kavanaugh. I got off to the same kind of start that you are displaying now, after they've both been heard.

Which leads me to assess - that you were never really on the fence. You were willing to hear what he said, but not the content of his testimony, just as you(and I) fully bought into the testimony of Ford. You've been blinded as I was by the weakness and effete behaviors. Would I have been the same, given those circumstance? Would I have been domineering and forceful? Hard to say, I've never been in that kind of position.

If you were, as you say objective at the start, it's a sad thing to say that his demeanor during the testimony has swayed you away from him. Under the typical conditions of a lawyer, or jurist, or judge, where jurisprudence is to be weighed in the absence of passion, I guess I see your point. But - we are NOT talking about his jurisprudence here! We are talking about a personal attack of the most venal kind, filled with personal rancor, passion, rhetoric, argument, invective, and yes - political partisanship designed to use the nastiest form of male denigration short of murder. 

In short, I don't like whiny men either. But - if he is guilty of what she said, then the Dems have taken the wrong turn at every step of the way to induce impartial and judicious or objective results. Ford sending her letter to the leading political member of the committee, refusing to be acknowledged, waiting until the end of advise and consent, leaking, assigning highly partisan lawyers to the victim, publishing rumor and hearsay, failure to research, shoddy testimony, and a dozen other ways the left has mucked this up. If you can't see that, and you still have a problem with his emotions on the stand - no one can help you.

This is the penultimate result of #MeToo, gone overboard and awry. Hope he gets through it.