Free Republic

Pasadena's Asymmetric War on Un-Affordable Housing is Un-Winnable -and Unmeasurable The Pasadena Pundit - Aug. 5, 2007 A frequent refrain heard especially by those on the political left is that the Iraq War is not winnable, in part because there is no metric by which to measure what a win would mean. Likewise, the war for affordable housing in California has no measure by which to judge success because the number of arriving immigrants in poverty grows daily, the proportion of renters who desire to be homeowners is endless, and the affordability of apartment rents is unknowable. The homeownership rate...

Think about this from another perspective. Nothing seems what it really is. First, civilians and military people are really the same people—citizen and soldier. And not all “soldiers” wear uniforms. Many of our Revolutionary soldiers, for example, came as is. Were they “enemy combatants”? May be to the British. The military is always composed of the nation’s citizens unless they hire soldiers-of-fortune. Civil wars (an oxymoron, I know) are called “civil” because they are composed of civilians and military who take sides in a domestic divide. Sometimes they wear uniforms and sometimes they don’t. This is why the Viet Nam...

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, likened the war in Iraq to Vietnam yesterday and said, ''The idea that the United States is going to win the war in Iraq is just plain wrong," comments that drew immediate fire from Republicans. Alerts In an interview with WOAI-AM in San Antonio, Dean criticized what he called President Bush's ''permanent commitment to a failed strategy" while saying, ''We need to be out of there and take the targets off our troops' back." Dean suggested ''a strategic redeployment" of US troops over the next two years. ''I wish the president had...