Key Provisions of the 25th Amendment

 This is discussed a good bit so maybe there's a moment to review the 'rules'.

First, there are only three ways for the 25th to be drawn into play.  The President can just say he's go health issues and it's a simple process.  

Second, the VP stands up and has the support of the majority of the cabinet.  If you don't have the full support of the cabinet?  Then you are left to the third method....the House (acting as the 'body').  

The House in this case....would have to present 'evidence' and then gather for a vote.  Presently, with the Democrats managing the situation....it's Pelosi's situation.  It's anyone's guess if she has the votes to manage this.

How many days, if the House is managing this?  I'd go and speculate that you could wrap this up in three days.  But I'd also suggest that one-third of the Democrats would refuse to vote, or vote against this. 

Does Harris have support of the majority of cabinet officers?  That's another problem.  Fifteen cabinet position, and some might be die-hard pro-Biden fans.  You might also have two or three who see Harris as lacking the skills to be President.  

If Harris had the eight letters attesting to 'issues' with President Biden....then this would go rather quickly (I would speculate) and it might be over in one to two days, with the House just agreeing.....without a lot of discussion.

If the 25th started to fall into play....would President Biden just resign?  He probably would go to several of the cabinet officers and ask them in a blunt way how they were going to 'vote'.  Could he fire them if they voiced a problem?  Yes, without any doubt.  But I would suggest that Biden hasn't shown much history in firing people.  

Is this goof-up in Afghanistan the only visible mistake of the Biden administration?  Well....that's the key question....you don't know.  The news media should have made comments over problems, but generally, they've failed at their responsibility.  So you have no idea how bad the situation might be, or how successful Biden has handled problems.

Should they just wait to get out of this mess, and hope to continue on?  At this point, the lack of common sense is openly discussed and you have to wonder if more mistakes will be committed over the next year.  When you arrive in the fall of 2022...with the mid-term election....could these mistakes be made into a dozen Republican campaign ad's and massively destroy the Democratic chances?  

Then finally.....does Harris really want the job?  I would argue that she's gotten a glimpse of incompetence within the White House staff, and probably 50-percent of what went wrong here.....were simply incompetent people around Biden.  If you don't fire them, you end up committing the same mistakes as Biden made. 

One footnote, after Harris moves up to the Presidency, she would select her new VP.  Both the House and Senate has to agree to the person.  The Senate, with Harris as VP?  Well...the Senate is currently 50-50.  You would need at least one Republican to flip and vote along these lines.  So I don't think Harris would be able to select a Senator, or some far-left idiot.  The new VP will end up as a very likeable individual (my take on this).  

Observations Over Afghanistan and President Biden

 My ten thoughts:

1.  When the President said there would be retribution upon ISIS.....he's basically saying that we will do some retribution, then they do some retribution, and we get back into the regular terror business. 

2.  This Q-and-A episode with the President last evening....didn't really give you any confidence.  He looks like he's been up for twenty-four hours straight, and there's just not much confidence that comes via these sessions.

3.  Will President Biden show up at Dover AFB as the cargo plane brings the Marines 'home'?  I doubt it.....it'll likely be the Secretary of Defense at best.  I don't even think the VP will show.  

4.  Where do you go after Friday?  If you were with the Pentagon or CIA....anything requiring a Presidential 'OK' will trigger a meeting and it's a 50-50 chance if the President can select the better of choices.  If he says he needs 24 hours to make a decision....is he really making it himself, or does have some oddball character giving him advice (like Hunter, or his wife)?

5.  If I were the DNC and looking ahead.....2022 mid-terms really look like crap. You can't use the President for campaign episodes to help anyone much.

6.  Will the Taliban end up having to treat the ISIS folks like Hitler treated the Brownshirts?  There's a point where contracted-soldiers aren't that much value to your organization.

7.  If you were Macron of France and just sat there for an hour or two....thinking about what just happened in the past ten days.....could you rely upon anything that President Biden said?  You'd probably write a memo to the various ministers of France and just say 'do as little as business with the US as possible'..  

8.  The pressure to use the 25th Amendment to remove President Biden?  I would imagine Pelosi has twenty phone-chats per day with people, who want the situation drawn out and used (rather quickly).  But within this chatter.....the idea of who becomes VP....probably gets brought up as people realize Harris has to select someone, and the Senate has to approve that person (hint, it won't be a Senator selected). 

9.  The same people who goofed up on Afghanistan.....also manage a thousand other issues, and it ought to make you sit and ponder.....what else are they getting wrong?

10.  All this worthless assessments from May, June and July?  Well....you could have gotten better information from a bunch of 5th-grade kids in Kabul.  

If There Were Another 'Office' Show

 I've noted a lot of chatter over the past six months of this idea of something 'like' THE OFFICE being re-introduced.  Same people?  Well...no.  The idea is the production team would be brought back.

So these are my seven ideas for the new show.....if it were to be brought back into some new reality:

1.  Close the door on the paper industry, and make this a small strip mall (five shops in some small mall facility).  One steel building, and a parking lot with lamps that continually blink.  The building was originally a Dunder-Miffin paper store which went out of business, was remodeled by a Lebanese millionaire who married a former 'Bay of Thunder' TV show blonde gal. 

2.  Introduce in episode one a mall-cop, and at the end of the season....admit the fact that the mall management never hired a mall-cop, and this guy is an escapee from a mental institute...who sleeps in the maintenance back-closet.

3.  Allow one of the shops to be a zero-profit business, and admit it's more of a money-laundering operation than a legit business.

4.  Have four retirees to have rotating episodes where they make trouble for the mall.

5.  Allow one of the shops to fail every four episodes and a new business to arrive and fail four episodes later as well....over and over.

6.  Allow the coffee shop to be run by cannabis enthusiasts who secretly sell their product under special names.

7.  Act as if the whole thing is a reality show.  

News Topic

 I sat and read through a piece on Newsbusters today.

Topic.....when news is NOT news.

The Media Research Center went reviewed the top three cable news networks.  

What they found in the end....around a quarter of what you see on the air...would be simple old-fashioned regular news.  By that, I mean a regular story with five or six facts, and just a plain outline of the event.  

The rest?  Non-news.  It could be speculation, slanted news, biased opinion, or some moderator leading four folks to say 'something'.

Fox does it.  MSNBC does it.  BBC does it.  NBC, ABC and CBS do it.  PBS does it. 

For about twenty years, I've hyped on this issue...that news isn't really news anymore.  

It reached a point last year with CNN...where you got basically four minutes of news per hour, and the rest was talk-show format, biased slant, or taking four facts into a 30-minute long drawn out discussion.  

One of these networks will eventually wake up and realize they are losing viewers, and invent some new format....where they invent the term 'real news' and limit themselves to only 15-minutes of news per hour.  

Ten Observations Over Afghanistan

 1.  If you watch a good bit of footage, seems to be an awful lot of people walking around without a mask, in a Covid-rich atmosphere (I'd say 1-percent of folks appear to wear a mask).  These Taliban 'bosses'?  They are all over the age of fifty and prime-candidates for Covid (religious ideas forbid use of vaccination).  If you ask me....there's serious Covid times about to arrive on the landscape. 

2.  Once Biden's crew leave the airport, if you add up Americans and Europeans....I'll bet a minimum of 5,000 never get a 'rescue-deal'.  It'll be curious if the Taliban agree to regular airline use and allow them to leave.  Some idiot with the History Channel will probably start a reality series entitled 'Stuck in Kabul'.  

3.  Unlike the 1990s when the Taliban took over after the Soviets left.....there's a fair bit of Taliban propaganda that is generated daily by use of Twitter/Facebook in Afghanistan.  The general question I'd ask....who 'friended' up with Taliban on social media? What happens if you 'unfriend' them?

4.  Chatter started up yesterday that among the several thousand 'rescued' Afghans who were airlifted out....that a minimum of a hundred of them are on some watch list (either via the EU or the US).  You typically don't get on a watch-list for selling fake watches, or running a unhealthy grill establishment.  All of this leading to another catastrophic event in six months?

5.  White House Press Spokesman (Psaki) said that she just wasn't sure if the escaping Afghan President did arrive in Dubai with $169-million in cash.  It'd be more impressive if the guy had eight Hunter Biden oil paintings in his possession....that might be worth more at this stage.  

6.  If you opened up the doorway.....just to go anywhere (even Turkey)....out of the 39-million Afghans, I would suggest that a quarter of the population would just opt to leave the country.  In a economically downward spiral that you have in Afghanistan, maybe the Taliban ought to 'help' them leave.  Whatever economic progress they made over 20 years....it's not going to be much to discuss over the next twelve months.  The Taliban don't have any Harvard business degree members.

7.  At the conclusion of yesterday's WH press conference....some NBC reporter threw a question out there....as Biden was leaving....that triggered him to halt and attempt to answer (in a laughing sort of way).  WH technicians killed the mic system and so you never got the comment.  It's reaching the point where it'd be better on these WH Q-and-A episodes that they should just hire some actor to read what Biden would have said.  

8.  Taliban spokesperson said yesterday that there is NO proof that Ossama bin Laden was ever connected to 9-11.  I would imagine that the WH team will be impressed with this Taliban spokesperson and ask if he were interested in a new job (with them).

9.  In the midst of evacuation efforts yesterday....the Brit cargo plane took out some Afghans and Brits, but the last thing loaded on the plane was a Brit embassy SUV.  Naturally, this irked a ton of Brits.  

10.  If you believe the general propaganda of the Taliban.....they believe that they deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for 'saving' Afghanistan.  Somewhere in the nomination process....there's probably one single idiot who will nominate them.  

When Space Ghost or Deputy Dawg Would Be a Better Leader

 At one point in my military 'life', I ended up working in an organization that was foundering (serious morale problems, leadership issues from several individuals, and a continual negative trend).  

We reached a point (third commander in a year) where the new guy came in and gave us a pep-talk.  I wasn't so much impressed by the 'pep', as I was over the alternate reality that he discussed.....we needed to find a positive reason to just accept a new reality because....frankly, the current trend was crap.  Once you grasped that....you just sat there with no real thrill for the current trend or the pep-talk trend.

From that point on, for the next thirty-odd years....I was stuck in a skeptical state of mind (probably still that way today).

Part of me looks at the continual poor leadership crisis in the country....going across political lines, economic lines, business lines, and even religious lines.  There are instances where you view some example of leadership, and realize that a 12-year old kid or fictional character like Deputy Dawg/Space Ghost could probably do a better job.

The idea of leadership changing, and a recovery is on the way?  Don't count on it.

The Truth About Afghanistan

 Long ago, the nature of Afghanistan was that it was along a trading route....the 'Silk Road', and people came through....watered-up, got fed....then proceeded on.  Traders had a 'road-map' and Afghanistan was simply a stop-off point.  It's a 18-day venture across the middle of the country.....if you were doing twelve hours a day.

Lets also be honest and admit that it has been a tribal nation since day one, and remains mostly a tribal nation today.  Some might argue that the past fifty years has changed things, but the majority of residents live in a tribal mentality.

There are a minimum of ten ethnic groups....of which the Pushtuns make up around 40 to 45 percent of the population. 

The modern era?  There are three British-India-Afghan wars....the first starting in the 1839 (going to 1842).  The general fight over?  It's generally discussed that the Tsar folks from Russia had come into Afghanistan....stirred up tribal units, and the Brit-India folks got reactionary.  When the assumed leader of Afghanistan died in 1839, a follow-on leader became bogged down.  In simple terms, a civil war erupted and the Afghans lost heavily but got the Brit-India folks to agree on leaving.  

Around 1878, a second war occurred....same game (Russians, Brits, Indidans, and Afghans).  This war lasted until 1880.  

The 100-odd day war in 1919?  This was going by the same script.....getting any British influence out of the country.  The final result was that Afghanistan was recognized as a independent country, with no outside influence.

In the summer period of 1926, Afghanistan installed a 'king' and moved toward a 50-year period of stability.

In the summer of 1973....the King was kicked out and the country evolved into a 'republic'.  Some will argue over this five-year period that followed, and that a lot of outside influence arrived, with a 1978 coup occurring, and a socialist Afghanistan state then existing.

This peaceful era of the new state?  It basically lasted around 18 months.  Pro-Islam groups gathered up, and a new civil war started.  The state would have fallen....except the Soviets decided in December of 1979....to enter the conflict (staying for nine years).

The pro-Islam state that came after the Soviets left?  It marginally existed because of continual conflicts with the warlords of various tribal districts.  

If 9-11 had never occurred.....a continual civil war would be going on for the past twenty years and the two groups still fighting each other.

Afghanistan has never seen much of anything....except for conflict, and outsiders barging into the middle of a mess.  The new Islamic Emirate?  You can start the clock to ticking....this probably has no more than three to five years before they fall into some revolution and some new warlord rises to be 'supreme-leader'.  Then some third generation Taliban crew will arrive and restart the clock to ticking once again.