Dudu,
Well sure, the 8th AF and RAF could have kept on bombing Germany until they were only bouncing rubble, and let the Soviets do the heavy lifting of destroying the German army. Of course, we would have been looking at a Soviet occupied Europe up to the French border, and a seriously pissed off Stalin behind his armies.
Terry,
While the Typhoon was no doubt the best CAS aircraft the western Allies had, the P-47 wasn't a slouch at it either, even before rockets were added. It could carry several thousand pounds of bombs and had 8 heavy MG's, and was a very rugged aircraft capable of surviving hits that would have brought down a lesser built plane.
BTW, there were quite a few escort carrirs in the Atlantic at the time of D-day. Most were on ASW roles and others were ferrying planes, but IIRC none were at D-day because they weren't needed. As you said, land based airstrips could handle far more planes than a carrier or two off the coast (btw, Essex class carriers are the big ones, not CVE's).
If the school demands the students' passwords, then the students should demand the administrator's and teachers' passwords in return. Sauce for the goose, you know.
Failing that, a strong reply in the negative is called for by the students as well as their parents.
The insurance companies are more than willing to spend billions of their (our!) dollars if it means they can keep their healthcare monopoly.
Yes, it's a monopoly. How many health insurance plans does your employer offer? I'll bet the answer is one. You have two choices, take it or leave it. Oh there may be different options, but it's still the same plan.
A government backed program would introduce competition that the insurance companies could not influence or absorb; they would be forced to rethink their entire philosophy of "how much can we gouge the businesses/employees for?" while reducing coverage. Of course they are fighting this, with their willing allies the GOP.
Here in NC, insurance premiums have doubled since 2000, and are expected to double again by 2015. Our wages have increased only by less than 20% in that time period (mine a lot less than that); how much more of our money are we willing to give them before we say "enough is enough"? 30%? 50%? 75%?
That's not even addressing the lack of portability, the tendency to get dropped for the slightest reason, the failure to pay for services they said they'd cover, or women who find that pregnancy is not covered by their policy. The costs are going to eat us all alive; small businesses can't already afford the premiums. Soon that will be larger ones as well if something isn't done.
My wife's company dropped her from their health insurance in January of this year due to rising costs. In defense of them they did raise her hourly rate to help us pay for her going on my health plan, but now they've been told that their insurance costs are going up 50% next year, up to around $750/month per person. It's a very small company with about a dozen employees. Already some of the employees are blaming Obama for the higher premiums.
These kinds of problems aren't just for small businesses, though; my employer is the largest in NC (I'm a state employee) and the premiums for us are not much better than what my wife's company pays, and ours are going up too. We've been told to expect lower coverage and higher premiums for the forseeable future; oh, and for some reason our provider has a no competition contract with the state, and legislators don't seem to have a problem with that...
I know a single mom who was pregnant a few years ago, without any healthcare insurance at all (she's a waitress). She worked multiple shifts, saved every penny, and when she needed the more basic pregnancy checkups she either went to a clinic or the ER (that was for when she had to walk 6 miles to pick up her car while she was 4 months along, started bleeding).
She worked herself to exhaustion right up to the day she went into labor, worried herself sick that she wouldn't be able to pay her utility bills, and still ended up paying only part of the bill for the C-section and hospital stay.
One of our Representatives held a town meeting last night in Rocky Mount, NC. The opposition complained he held it in a Democrat-heavy area to "bias the audience" and whined that there wasn't enough room for all of "them" to attend.
From the media reports, though, it certainly appeared that enough of "them" showed up to turn the meeting into a very confrontational situation. We had elderly men nearly crying over their fears of being told they had to die from a "death board", younger men yelling that the plan was going to insure illegal aliens, and others telling the Representative that if he wouldn't take the new plan, why should they?
These town meetings need to be restricted to the representatives' voters only; let them show proof of residence or something and keep the others out. At least then the wharrgarblers and Astroturfers would get excluded (except for the locals, of course).
I pay just over $600/month for my wife's and my health insurance. This on a program that insures all state employees, a group numbering over 100,000. You'd think the state could get a better deal than that, wouldn't you?
Well, a lot of us have been asking that question; it seems that BCBS (the insurer) has entered into a really nice, lucrative, exclusive contract with the state of NC; they get to administer all the health related costs and issues, and in return the state pays them several million dollars a year, PLUS a cut of the premiums we all pay.
Every year their contract gets renewed, under a no competitive bid agreement. That's right, BCBS gets to set the price and the state accepts it.
And we state employees wonder why our premiums keep going up while our coverage covers less and less...
Well WV did illegally secede from the Confederate States; you know how South Carolinians feel about that.
Although there's a lot of people in SC who are disgusted from Sanford's behavior, the majority of voters are hardcore Bible thumpers who will swallow any explanation he uses to rationalize his marital transgressions, especially if he wraps himself in the "God did this to test me" whargarrbl.
The legislature is solidly far right wing and unlikely to try an impeachment that would become a public spectacle; they'd really like Sanford to just STFU and sit out the rest of his time since that lets them avoid having to judge one of their own (you know, that old 'he who is without sin can cast the first stone' type of thing). There's plenty enough support for Sanford still (think Swaggert's "I have sinned" speech a few years ago) that I doubt he's going to be impeached unless he does something else stupid.
I realized something was fishy with Sanford when the media started quoting his wife saying "I don't know where he is, I'm being the mother of his kids while he is gone". That sounded like a woman who has had it up to HERE with her husband's behavior, and wasn't going to take it anymore.
What's interesting is she knew about the affair for several months, had already thrown him out of the house (probably their private residence, not the Governor's), and was probably the one to have "leaked" to the local paper the news they were sitting on until just recently.
There was a photographer down in Texas recently that got added to the Terrorist List just for walking out on an airport tarmac to take pictures of a WWII B-24.
He had permission to do so but didn't have an escort, so the airport security confronted him with guns unholstered when he stepped into the "no public allowed" area.
Even though he wasn't arrested or charges pressed by anyone, he was ordered off the airport property and was later told he was added to the list as a routine procedure.
Close air support during an amphibious assault is nearly impossible. The two combatants are too close together, there's too much confusion, and smoke/haze/dust obscures everything from the air. The fighters did what they should have been doing; interdicting supplies and reserves from reaching the battlefront, attacking artillery positions behind the line, and assisting the paratroopers in taking their objectives. Having the airforces provide CAS to troops on the beach would have just caused more Allied casualties.
The only naval gun support that was really effective came from the destroyers that risked grounding and came as close as they could to the shore to deliver point blank, --aimed-- gunfire at some of the strongpoints holding out along the beach at Omaha. The battleships fired interdiction missions once the troops were on shore, and helped break up the armored counterattack by 21st PzDiv in the British sector that afternoon.
Charles #42,
There was very, very little consultation between the Overlord planners and their Pacific Ocean counterparts. Certainly there had been opposed landings in the Pacific by 1944; the thought process in the Overlord planning team was "Germany is different", even though the basics would remain the same, and they didn't ask for advice or assistance even though it was offered.
But, nowhere in the Pacific did the Japanese ever fortify a beach with the kind of defenses the Germans had at Normandy, nor did the Japanese ever have a strong reserve available for a counterattack.
ajay #35,
Not entirely true. A full battalion of Shermans (32 tanks) was scheduled to land on Omaha BEFORE any of the infantry waves would make it to the beach. Most if not all of them were to get there via DD apparatus, but only two actually made it and they were late. The ones that did land made it because their LST's kept them on board and dropped them right on the beach.
That, plus the 352nd' Infantry Division manning the Omaha defenses, made the infantry nothing but shooting ducks that morning. The specialized tanks ('funnies') were designed to deal with obstacles on the British/Canadian beaches; against what was on Omaha they would have been fairly ineffective. The pillboxes were on bluffs out of the reach of flamethrowing tanks and petard mortars, there weren't any seawalls or AT-ditches that needed filling, and with the rising tide and narrow beach there just wasn't room, available shipping or time to put more vehicles on Omaha.
Charles #31,
Remember, the Allies didn't have a whole lot of experience in making opposed landings against the Germans. The one landing that was similar was Salerno, and they did learn a lot from that one.
Political time constraints forced a lot of compromises all over the plan. Shortages in landing craft and specialized vehicles, weather conditions, shipping, etc, all helped shape the entire landing plan as well.
Not knowing that the 352nd ID was occupying the Omaha beach defenses was probably the worst mistake made, closely followed by launching the DD tanks too far out. Bombers missing their targets should have been expected and planned for, but close air support when the two forces were yards away from each other? In that situation only accurate, direct gunfire is going to do the job, not some fighter/bomber pilot travelling 350mph 6000' above the target.
The entire Overlord plan was overly optimistic in its first day goals, but it did succeed. By the afternoon the Germans had little realistic chance to stop the invasion, and even then only if Hitler had authorized a full-scale counterattack by all his available reserves.
Some of our departments where I work have voicemail, some don't. My office doesn't, so the secretaries are always asking me to take a phone message for my supervisor when he's not available (they don't because we're a big department and they're nowhere near us).
When I tell them he's not available and 'would you like to leave a message', more often than not they say "oh I'll just email him with my question then". Well, why didn't you do that INSTEAD OF phoning him in the first place?
OTOH, if I have to leave a voicemail for someone at our department who has it, 9 times out of 10 I never hear back from them anyway.
It's always been understood that Vulcan had little planetary defenses, as befitting their scientific and non-aggressive manner. Nero would have had little trouble in attacking the planet with his futuristic mining ship.
Against Earth, however, he needed Pike to give him the deactivation codes for the planetary defenses.
The Nerada used modern Romulan plus Borg technology the future Romulans got their hands on.
Now, why the Romulans fitted it to a mining ship is another story, though.
I was glad to finally see the screenwriters use ALL of the Enterprise's phaser banks, instead of just the ones on one side of the main hull. I thought the scene of the crew loading the photo torpedoes, though, was ridiculous; we're talking about weapons that can tear a ship in half with one hit, and they're loading fire extinguisher sized weapons in a rotating magazine?
Didn't mind the reboot of the series; this is an alternate timeline, not the original one, so yes, things will be slightly different. However, having Spock Prime here will help Kirk avoid some possible problems:
"Spock, we found this ship called Botany Bay; did you guys find it before?"
"Yes Captain, just use it for target practice or tow it into the sun"
or,
"Spock, we've found a ship that's eating planets."
"Captain, place an antimatter warhead on an asteroid and throw it into the ship. Oh, and don't let Decker on board the Enterprise."
Of course, I don't expect Kirk in any universe to actually ask for advice prior to any scenario taking place, since that would mean he's thinking before acting...
The Weeksville Naval Air Station, just east of Elizabeth City, NC, used to have the world's largest wooden structure. It was a blimp hangar and had 7 acres of covered space inside it. Unfortunately it completely burned back in 1995 when a welder's sparks ignited one of the doors.
There's still a steel clamshell blimp hangar there, owned by a company making aerostats (tethered surveillance blimps). I got a tour of the interior several years ago but they refused to let me take photos of the amazing structure, for fear of me getting some of their precious aerostats in the pictures.
http://www.elizcity.com/weeksnas/wnas03.htm
Minor correction to my post #16; the company that was trying to build a zeppelin port a few years ago at Elizabeth City was Cargolifter. Their zeppelin would have been the largest ever built, capable of hauling 160 tons of cargo across the Atlantic, but they failed to get enough funding and went bankrupt.
It still would have been cool to have seen such a huge object coming in to dock, though.
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