Leaderboard

Buried last week on A16 on Turnberry Report: much ado about nothing.

Yes he thought Trump's method of conducting foreign policy was illegal. He went through appropriate channels and was silenced. When another investigative body comes along and asks questions, you think he should just shut up? Is that your answer for anytime a military person thinks they see someone break the law? "too effing bad"...keep your mouth shut and if you can't take it then quit? Jesus I hope you aren't in any sort of leadership position.

Bypass the recruiter. Call up their education office and request it directly. Otherwise your options are: - Do everything the recruiter wants - Tell the recruiter to shove his paperwork and just schedule it - Find a different place to do it

No you don't. You don't need one for the TBAS either.

SNCO pilots would be able to “only fly planes” just like like SNCO maintainers get to “only fix planes”.

Make sure you understand the test and its components. This site https://access.afpc.af.mil/pcsmdmz/AFOQTPrepMaterials.html is from the Air Force. Also make sure you study the table reading from that site and nowhere else.

FYI, the pilot score and nav score are made up of different sections. I think pilot is make up of Arithmetic Reasoning, Math Knowledge, Instrument Comprehension, Table Reading, Aviation Information. Nav is the same way, but I don't know which sections make it up. So to get in the 90s in the Pilot or nav section, you need to do decently in your other scores too. Sent from my SM-N975U using Baseops Network mobile app

I think the rub is that the military is inherently political, but isn't supposed to be partisan, and people often mistakenly conflate the two. Every time a service chief or a legislative liaison goes to the Hill for budget stuff, it's political. When we make tactical, operational, or strategic choices, it's political. War is politics. Clausewitz etc. etc. The issue is when you mix service with promoting a partisan candidate or cause. Likewise, impeachment is inherently political (see Federalist 65) but isn't intrinsically partisan. The founders naively thought political parties wouldn't become a thing but a decade before the first partisan presidential election (Federalist Adams vs. Democratic Republican Jefferson in 1796) they wrote impeachment into the constitution on the theory that the competing ambitions and different constituencies/time horizons of a non-partisan House (elected by the people every 2 years) and Senate (elected by state legislatures every 6 years) would equip them to keep a chief executive from abusing his power. They didn't anticipate a lot of trends that subverted that structure: the evolution of political parties, direct election of Senators, indirect popular election of the President (i.e. EC changing from a deliberative body to a ceremonial body that ratifies the results of 50 statewide presidential elections), mass media, and a series of presidents (Andrew Jackson, Teddy, Wilson, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Reagan, etc.) shifting the CG of the political parties away from their congressional wings and toward their presidents/presidential candidates. So today members of Congress are incentivized to stick by THEIR president in any impeachment proceeding, lest they offend their primary voters, and so much for competing ambitions between the executive and legislative branches... And impeachment is seen as partisan like everything else Congress does, e.g. budgeting/appropriations, oversight, confirmation of appointees, etc. All that being said, just because the budget is politicized doesn't mean the CSAF doesn't show up to testify in favor of the Presidential Budget. He's just supposed to say "Vote to fund this because the AF needs it to fulfill the NDS and execute our OPLANs," not "Vote for this to send a message that President Trump supports making our military great again and to own the libs." Likewise, if a military member gets subpoenaed to testify to what they know in an impeachment inquiry, well, they kind of have to do so. As long as it's "I saw this and heard this on this date, and then this happened, etc" and not "I Colonel So and So say Trump has to go. Medicare for All." And if it's service protocol that you testify in uniform, then you testify in uniform. Those who are talking about Vindman substituting his judgment/views over those of the head of the executive branch... Well, they would be right if we were talking about the "high criminalization and misdemeanoring" of mere policy differences. But we're not. Presidents including Trump have disagreed with the consensus of their interagency process before. Presidents including Trump have blurred the org chart before, e.g. Obama making Dick Holbrooke his Afghanistan/Pakistan guy in lieu of working through his ambassadors to those countries, = not all that different from Trump making Jared Kushner his Middle East Peace Czar or even in this case having EU Ambassador Sondland work Ukraine issues. What is new and different here is asking a country to play ball with someone outside government, Rudy G, as your personal attorney and representative of your reelection campaign, in order to receive aid that was lawfully appropriated by Congress. The key factors in the allegation are that appropriated funds were being withheld until Ukraine cooperated with Trump's personal representatives in promoting false stories about a political opponent. If Trump had said through Taylor, Sondland, Pompeo, the State Department janitor, or anyone else on the federal payroll, "I will oppose and/or veto future funding for aid to Ukraine until my Justice Department tells me you are cooperating with it's investigations into XYZ," that's in the realm of policy differences. When you circumvent your ambassadors and attorney general, and say "Get with my private lawyer and coordinate a public statement saying you're investigating Joe Biden for something that didn't happen and that you're investigating yourself for the DNC hack that my intelligence and law enforcement agencies all say the Russian Soviets did, or you can't have the money Congress appropriated and I signed into law," that's a potential abuse of power. (And remember, the Supreme Court declared the line-item veto unconstitutional back during the Clinton years, so the president does not have carte blanche to not spend appropriated funds.) A much shorter comparison: Disagreeing with your own appointees about the wisdom of selling arms to Iran to encourage Hezbollah to release hostages, not a crime. Using the proceeds to pay for things Congress banned you from paying for (Boland amendment) in a bill you signed, maybe a problem. And when that happened, military members of the NSC got called to testify about it and they testified in uniform. [FWIW... I have much less of a problem with doing accounting tricks to pay for fighting the commies in Latin America than I do with holding "fight the commies in Eastern Europe money" hostage to your reelection campaign. But that's just my two cents.]

Recently took an Uber ride in San Francisco with an Afghani interpreter who was given asylum status for him and his family a few years ago. Amazing conversation. I'd place his patriotism far above 90% of the people we drove past (which may not be saying much).