Economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warned over the weekend that Fox News had damaged the Republican Party by creating a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves.

In his paper "How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics" published earlier this month, Bartlett theorized that watching the network was essentially "self-brainwashing" for viewers, making them believe that the United States was a more conservative nation than it actually was. And so the Republican Party had responded by running radical conservatives that representative Fox News viewers, but not the true state of the electorate.

"Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people," Bartlett told CNN's Brian Stelter on Sunday. "When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily."

But not one member of my class died there.

One returned to civilian life, only to die a few months later while fishing, when a wave swept him off a rock.

Memorial Day is not about why they fought and died. Tomorrow is time enough for politics about the wars.

So you say.
But what you wrote is a political statement.

It is telling us that we should shut up and grieve, and not talk about those responsible for their needless deaths.

You add, "The dead don't argue about what a President said or make claims of who lied." So we shouldn't either is the gist I gather.

You may believe that.
Your thought might even have merit, although I disagree strongly with it.

There is this mystical, mythical quality to Three Pines, but the books, the storylines, are grounded and sometimes quite gritty.

I also like this glimse of life in modern Quebec, the conflict between its split culture- French and English. and how that plays out today.

When someone or ~16k die while on the job in a war, a lot of people want to throw a flag at the problem and call them heroes, then get their undies in a bunch when someone suggests they may not have had to die to begin with.

The only people dishonoring their deaths are the ones insisting that they had to die, not the ones who want to ensure another group isn't sent to the front lines because _____.  

Fill in whatever the republican excuse du jour is for Iraq.  Because to date, there have been at least 10 reasons and none of them pass what I think most of us would consider to be a valid reason to go to war in the Middle East.

I still do not know why we invaded Iraq, and that to me is dishonoring living human beings who died for reasons most of us still do not know.

I know what Jim will say, what republicans in general say.  Intelligence, blah, blah, blah... But why did they really go it, why did they fix the intelligence, why was war predetermined by GWB ?  I want the question Cindy Sheehan posed, answered honestly.  

Oh, you mean in your non dangerous job on the flight deck...instead of that dangerous job  of chopping corn on the farm..

lol

And if you actually worked on the flight deck during flight ops my hat is off to you because that is one dangerous job and place to be.

Carrier Flight Deck - One of the Most Dangerous Jobs in the World?

And here's a site that will help you understand a bit about Naval Aviation.

So here's to you. You should go over to the Naval Aviation museum at Pensacola. Super interesting.

And no. I have said the same thing for years and years. No more. No less.

The idea that Officer Brelo could jump on the trunk or the hood of a dangerously moving car is laughable.  The car was stopped.  The victims were already morguebound.

But the Brelo decision raises an interesting question.

"So Brelo, afraid for his life, stepped onto the Malibu's hood and fired the night's final 15 shots through the windshield."  He further found that Brelo reasonably believed the suspects to be armed.

Ohhh Please --

No sane person and no cop in his right mind would do such a thing if he believed the suspects to be armed.

We fared fine, it's fairly new part of town.  But I did wake up a couple times, once my dog jumped on my bed because she is deathly afraid of thunder so I let her stay and rubbed her belly so she could sleep.  The other time the windows were rattling.  I sleep like a brick so for me to wake up is odd, but then I got it in my head that the tree next to my bedroom could come down and that would really suck to get rained on.  Today once awake I realized rain would be the least of my problems if that tree came down.

The flooding is because the old infrastructure in the older areas that are between west Houston and the gulf.  So all the water from my area ends up in their area compounded with many other areas and the infrastructure that is designed for 100 year flood is dealing with 100+ year flood about every 15 years.  But no fear, Jim tell me it is all a gigantic hoax.

Houston is extremely flat as it used to be under the sea.  So there are no real river, just manmade bayous that do a great job so long as we don't get nearly a foot of rain overnight.

It is a mess out there.  When it's night and raining, people think they can make it though shallow water, get in and before they know it, it's not shallow and the car stalls.  I bet there are a thousand cars on the freeways alone, stalled out.  I used to have a Range Rover, and I loved it when it was like this as I go through three feet of water no problem.  Now, it's scary so I stayed home until I knew it was clear.

They are saying it's worse than tropical storm Allison as far as in the city.  Allison was much larger but did not drop the rain as quickly.  And the local news likes to let everyone know they need them.  I don't think it's as bad, but it's bad.

The good news, at 10 when I left home, only one fatality.  But that could change as many cars are still under water that may have people in that could not get out.

The bayou behind me at work is the highest I have ever seen it and it stopped raining about 7 am.  I am the only one here, which really sucks, I could be at home.

Of course weather is varied, that's part of the definition. If you look at any year by year weather graphs, no matter what parameter, you will see wild variations, including some remarkable outliers.

Climate change predicts increasing  weather anomalies just like the record the 2013 fewest tornadoes, just like the 2011 most, weird weather indeed.

I would think as a Naval Aviation veteran your science knowledge would be more acute especially your "weather eye".

Here's a graph that you don't need a degree in climatology, or even medicine, to understand.

Oh, and BTW, there's a massive meltdown taking place in the Antarctic:

Stable Antarctic Ice Is Suddenly Melting Fast

Sea levels worldwide will rise higher than anticipated, thanks to a new once-stable region of Antarctica that is suddenly melting, and at a fast rate. Analysis of satellite data shows that although the massive ice sheet on the southern Antarctic Peninsula, made up of multiple glaciers, was rock solid from 2000 to 2009, since then it has begun to melt rapidly. The glaciers, stretching along 750 kilometers of coastline, are shedding 60 cubic kilometers of ice into the ocean each year--about 70,000 Empire State Buildings of ice annually.

The onset of such rapid loss "came as a surprise to us," says Bert Wouters, a fellow at the University of Bristol in England, who led the analysis, published in the May 22 Science. In just a few years, he says, the dynamics of the region "completely shifted."

The surface of some of the glaciers is dropping by as much as four meters each year, as measured by remote-sensing instruments on the CryoSat 2 satellite. The ice loss is so great it is also causing changes in Earth's gravitational field, which have been detected by GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites.

Wouters says the glaciers' quick disappearance is not caused by a reduction in annual snowfall or by warmer air temperatures. It is caused by thinning ice shelves; bulky glacial sheets on land transition into large, flat ice shelves that float on the ocean. When the shelves are thick, they slow or even stop the glaciers they are connected to from gently sliding into the sea, at the mercy of gravity. But if the shelves thin too much they can no longer hold back the enormous ice mass on land, and the glaciers accelerate their march into the ocean. This mechanism already has allowed glaciers in other regions of Antarctica to speed up their progress toward the sea.

From The Intercept:

But there's one rather glaring omission in this article: the many hundreds of civilian deaths likely caused by the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria. Yet the only reference to civilian deaths are two, ones which the U.S. government last week admitted: "the military's Central Command on Thursday announced the results of an inquiry into the deaths of two children in Syria in November, saying they were most likely killed by an American airstrike," adding that "a handful of other attacks are under investigation."

Completely absent is the abundant evidence from independent monitoring groups documenting hundreds of civilian deaths. Writing in Global Post last month, Richard Hall noted that while "in areas of Syria and Iraq held by the Islamic State, verifying civilian casualties is difficult," there is "strong evidence [that] suggests civilians are dying in the coalition's airstrikes."

Among that evidence is the data compiled by Airwars.org, a group of independent journalists with extensive experience reporting on that region. Last week, the group reported:

   To May 13th 2015, between 587 and 734 civilian non-combatant fatalities had been reported from 95 separate incidents, in both Iraq and Syria.

    Of these it is our provisional view -- based on available reports -- that between 370-465 civilian non-combatants have been killed in incidents likely to have been conducted by the coalition.

    A further 130-145 claimed deaths attributed to coalition airstrikes are poorly reported or are single-sourced, while an additional 85-125  reported fatalities resulted from contested events (for example, claims that the Iraq military might instead have been responsible.)

    In addition, 140 or more `friendly fire' deaths of allied ground forces have been attributed to the coalition, with varying levels of certainty.

The answer is shocking.