Maybe he’s just confusing North Korea and China. They’re pretty similar. Right?
Oops. Thanks!
The use of SS survivors benefits for college was repealed under either Reagan or Bush, and although it was brought back under Clinton, it wasn’t retroactive for the orphans who turned 18 during the inactive time. Ryan was born in 1970, so he probably wasn’t eligible for any payments after he hit 18.
But I weep not for him, because from his Wikipedia entry it appears that his late father was a lawyer and a direct descendent of the founder of a largish construction firm called Ryan Incorporated Central. In light of that, I strongly suspect that the SS benefits were just another drop in the bucket of family money.
I also really resent the entry’s tone that implies that young Ryan was somehow morally superior because he saved those benefits. Most orphans don’t get to decide what is to be done with the benefits: their surviving parent or guardian does. And most surviving parents or guardians do not get to decide to stash them away, because they need the money to, you know, feed and clothe the kid. As the benefits are intended to do.
He’s disoriented.
Hey, it was simply the sort of occidental error any of us might make. 
Chinese fixed land based missiles are normally unarmed: that is to say, the nuclear weapons are stored separately from the missiles, unless the leadership anticipates a crisis will develop.
There are several reasons for this: command and control structure is not very robust, the leadership does not trust the junior officers to handle nuclear weapons themselves, nuclear policy in the PRC is strictly about deterrence, not MAD (first strike use of nuclear weapons is a no-no in their book), etc.
Last I read, IRC, the PRC has between 200-300 nuclear land-based sans nuclear tipped missiles along with four nuclear ballistic missile submarines (don’t have the numbers, but only one or two are on patrol at any give time) (YMMV since I don’t stay current on these issues anymore).
Cain should be losing sleep over Russia’s nuclear forces. And our own (e. g., theBent Spear incident in Minot, ND).
I would not expect Cain to know this, BTW, because he’s been a businessman all of his life, not a nuclear foreign policy wonk. Assuming he’s grandstanding, this is no big deal–once you get into the White House, wishful thinking is converted to hard reality.
Expect Cain to blunder on bigger, more pertinent issues. But I concede that it does remonstrate Cain’s off-the-top-of-his-head grasp of foreign policy issues has been found wanting.
This is the same guy who said a few weeks ago that when people started asking gotcha questions, like “who’s the president of Ubekibekistan”, that he’d say “I don’t know.”
So not only is he wrong about China, he was wrong about admitting when he was wrong about things.
“I would not expect Cain to know this, BTW, because he’s been a businessman all of his life, not a nuclear foreign policy wonk. Assuming he’s grandstanding, this is no big deal–once you get into the White House, wishful thinking is converted to hard reality.”
I don’t know, that didn’t work so well with the Bush neocons and Iraq…
Since they created their own reality as they went along, to them it worked just fine.
Except to the rest of us, it looks suspiciously similar to psychosis…
That’s only because you’re reading the reality-based DSM IV.
Is that the heretical one where the Iraqis didn’t greet us with flowers?
Maine Republican Party: Same day voter registration is a Gay and Lesbian Conspiracy!!
With early returns in, this measure is going down to defeat.
Yep the Maine GOP Chairman, Charlie Webster, talked to the press to explain ‘it wasn’t gay bashing it was educational.’
In other news, Mississippi Republicans’ idiotic “a fertilized egg is a person” initiative is going down in flames.
Thank god. I think more people really need to learn what the word “miscarriage” means.
I am utterly shocked by this. In a good way, of course. But I expected this to pass easily in Mississippi and then be challenged in court (and found unconstitutional).
Lee Terry (R- NE) wants to allow robocallers to dial mobile phones for “informational calls”. Cite. Note that one of the nine cosponsors is a Democrat, so it’s arguably only a 90% Republican stupid idea.
I’m officially saying they can’t do that.
Somebody let them know, okay?
sigh here we go again…
Seriously, is it unreasonable to question their motives at this point? Or rather, is it reasonable NOT to?