There is an old expression that goes like this: "When the clients are in agreement, the lawyers are jack asses."
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From: jonwendt@cox.net
From a lawyer…Profound ? Here's an excellent explanation of why our political system has difficulty working together
"As an attorney, I hesitated to forward this as it can be considered to be an indictment against my profession. But I believe there is much truth to the article below. Very thought provoking. Lawyers are adversarial and are trained to try to win at all costs. May work in litigation ----- but does not work well when governing our nation in Congress. Trying to win at any costs creates the polarization and hatred that now fills our country....Leaves no room for common sense or legitimate debate."
Every Democrat presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate – Biden (no surprise) was at the bottom of his class). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Barack Obama was a lawyer. Michelle Obama was a lawyer. Hillary Clinton was a lawyer. Bill Clinton was a lawyer. John Edwards is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards was a lawyer. Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is a lawyer. Former Senator Harry Reid was a lawyer.
The Republican Party is different. President Trump is a businessman. President Bush 1 and 2 were businessmen. Vice President Cheney was a businessman. President Eisenhower was a 5 star General. The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor. Dick Armey was an economist. Ex-House Minority Leader John Boehner was a plastics manufacturer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon. Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against actor Ronald Reagan in 1976. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers. This is very interesting. I had never thought about it this way before.
The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Trump, Bush, and Cheney, or who heal the sick like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich. The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America . And, so, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, we have seen the procession of official enemies grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, which, in this case should be the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side. Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation.
When politicians, as lawyers, begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.
Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
The United States has 5% of the world's population and 66% of the world's lawyers! Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits. This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party. When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association go to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high.
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Ukraine has decided to bleed them Russian suckers.
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Why Kyiv’s ‘thousand bee sting’ strategy is costing Russia dearly
By Max Boot
If you want to understand the Ukrainian way of war, you could do worse than to pick up, as I recently did, a 1954 book called “Strategy” by the influential British military thinker Basil Liddell Hart. Having been gassed during the 1916 Battle of the Somme, where much of his battalion was wiped out, Captain Liddell Hart had developed a burning hatred of brutish generals who led their men to slaughter in frontal and futile attacks on the enemy. He called this the “direct approach,” and he attributed it to the great nineteenth-century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who held that “only a great battle can produce a major decision.”
Rejecting Clausewitz, Liddell Hart embraced the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote, “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” In tracts that he began publishing in the late 1920s, Liddell Hart surveyed thousands of years of military history to argue that the key to victory was to strike where least expected, dislocating the enemy psychologically and materially and making possible a relatively bloodless victory. He cited examples ranging from Hannibal’s march across the Alps to Sherman’s march across Georgia to demonstrate “the superiority of the indirect over the direct approach.”
Many historians have critiqued Liddell Hart for twisting history to make every conflict fit his argument. It’s true that no single theory can possibly explain all military outcomes over thousands of years. Yet Liddell Hart’s thinking seems quite applicable to the war in Ukraine. The Russians have pursued a brutal, unthinking direct approach that hearkens back to World War I, while the Ukrainians have outsmarted them with the indirect approach that Liddell Hart claimed was the hallmark of “Great Captains.”
The war began on Feb. 24, when the Russians mounted an armored and air assault on Kyiv. Remember the 40-mile Russian column headed for the Ukrainian capital? Rather than counterattack with their own tanks, the Ukrainians used hand-held missiles such as the Javelin to carry out pinprick strikes, targeting trucks carrying supplies in particular. Before long the column ran out of fuel and food, and the Russians were forced to pull back. Kyiv was saved. This was the indirect approach par excellence.
The Russians regrouped in mid-April using overwhelming artillery fire to clear their path in Luhansk province just as World War I generals did. That offensive forced the Ukrainians to stage a fighting withdrawal in early July from Lysychansk, the last major city they had held in Luhansk. But they inflicted such heavy casualties on the attackers that the Russian offensive has stalled without having secured the whole of the Donbas region.
Since then, Ukraine has been using U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to take out Russian command posts and ammunition dumps far behind the front lines. This strategy has impeded the flow of shells to Russian batteries and greatly slowed the bombardment of Ukrainian positions.
On Aug. 9, a Russian air base in occupied Crimea was rocked by at least six explosions that destroyed or heavily damaged at least eight warplanes. Then on Tuesday another blast hit a large Russian ammunition depot in Crimea. Ukrainian officials did not comment in public but privately told reporters that both blasts were the work of their special forces.
Now, the Ukrainians are using the indirect approach to squeeze the Russian garrison in Kherson, the largest Ukrainian city under enemy occupation. Rather than mounting a direct assault, which would result in heavy casualties, the Ukrainians have been using the HIMARS and other systems to target the bridges across the Dnieper River that deliver supplies to the Russian forces in Kherson. The Ukrainians claim to have damaged all four bridges, leaving the Russian troops in danger of being stranded.
Ukrainian officials said Russian commanders have already evacuated to the east bank of the Dnieper, and some analysts predict the entire force may be forced to pull out of Kherson due to lack of supplies or risk of being captured. A similar Ukrainian strategy of interdicting logistics previously forced the Russians to evacuate Snake Island, a strategic chokepoint in the Black Sea.
“We do not have the resources to litter the territory with bodies and shells, as Russia does,” said Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov. “Therefore, it is necessary to change tactics, to fight in a different way.” Another Ukrainian official told the Wall Street Journal they are inflicting “a thousand bee stings.”
Australian retired major general Mick Ryan has written that the Ukrainians are pursuing a strategy of “corrosion” that seeks to erode “the Russian physical, moral and intellectual capacity to fight.” Another name for this strategy, as Ryan notes, is “the indirect approach” championed by Basil Liddell Hart.
The problem is that it can be hard to achieve a decisive result with indirect attacks. Sooner or later, if the Ukrainians want to liberate their land, they will have to attack and drive the Russians out. But they are being savvy in doing everything possible to weaken the invaders before that happens.
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