!#*% The Draft!

I'm showing my age but those of us who are old enough to remember what happed when this country had The Draft(conscription.) It seemed like a dead issue but the growing use of women in combat in the US armed forces has led to calls for women to register with the selective service. We've had the current system of registration without induction since 1980 when Jimmy Carter was trying to send a foreign policy signal. Some people think that if Carter had been re-elected in 1980 he would have proposed bringing back the Draft. It would have been a tough sell, less than a decade after the end of the old Draft, with its inequalities.

The Pentagon brass doesn't want the draft. It seems that they believe that most future wars will be of the "brushfire" variety, to which conscript armies aren't suited. During the past decade, there were people who had enlisted in the National Guard to finance their education, and then found themselves being "inducted" against their will. Multiply that by a million and that will give you an idea of what the Draft would be like.

The best thing would be to simply end registration and stop all this nonsense before any more people are killed or injured.

The Ivy League Pollyanna

With the conventional wisdom now declaring that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for President, and the attendant calls for Bernie Sanders to "stop dividing the Democratic Party and bow out. Of course, the Democrats as a party have performed so badly in recent years that it's hard to see how Sanders is making matters worse. The problem for the Dems is that they have abandoned their constituents and the ascent of HRC is the worst sing of that. The HRC campaign thinks that many "nice, decent Republicans" will vote for her instead of Donald Trump. If the Dem. leadership knew anything, they would realize that there are no nice decent Republicans, and that furthermore, however much certain Repubs may dislike or even detest Trump, they'll probably vote for him out of spite anyway. Because that's they kind of people they are.

But let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that HRC really does become President. That would mean that in America, the political spectrum no longer runs from Liberal to Conservative but from Conservative to Fascist. That means that instead of a Democracy, we are living under a closed political system where the corporate power rules absolutely.