But I don't see that Slado's comment is in any way demeaning to Veterans.

The treatment that Veterans are accorded by the government and society at large - that I find demeaning - an ongoing shame through successive administrations.

It was Republican imperialism that brought about the tragic overthrow of the heretofore friendly Hawaiian monarchy, and the islands' subsequent 1898 annexation by the United States.

It was Republican adventurism which led President McKinley to renege on his promises regarding the Philippines' independence following the five-month-long Spanish-American War of 1898, which proved the immediate catalyst for the tragic three-year long Philippine-American War (1899-1902), which ultimately cost fifteen times as many American lives as did the war with Spain, and killed nearly a quarter-million Filipinos.

It was Republican political obstructionism in the U.S. Senate that prevented the United States from ever ratifying the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which President Wilson had personally negotiated with the Allies and Germany to bring about a formal end to the First World War.

And it was Republican isolationists who vigorously contended during the 1940 elections that Nazi Germany could not be beaten militarily, and who pressed President Roosevelt to abandon Great Britain -- unsuccessfully, thank heavens! -- and instead negotiate a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, much as the Soviet Union had done in July 1939. Then, they actually denounced their own party's presidential candidate, Wendell Wilkie, that same year when he went on record to support FDR's Lend-Lease program to aid the British war effort.

Suffice to say that the historical record belies Republican contentions regarding their collective political judgment in foreign policy. I've long argued that with rare individual exceptions, the Republicans in general have been loathe to lead from the front on almost any major issue of historic importance since Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Civil War.

But my oh my, how quick they are to rewrite that history and claim for themselves the lion's share of credit for those accomplishments, once the smoke finally clears and the matter is settled. The GOP, first and foremost, is the party of revisionism.

It shows to me that they simply don't give a damn or are incompetent.  

I thought Obamacare was in trouble for all sorts of other reasons but I would have never dreamed this supposedly brilliant tech savvy president couldn't build a website.

lentinel: "[I]t's not as if the US was not prepared and armed and even itching to enter the war before the attack on Pearl Harbor. [...] It is not necessary to resort to such hyperbole in order to be convincing about the stupendous incompetence of the gummint in Warshingtin."

Jeez, what sort of history classes did YOU take? Here are just a few things you should know about the United States military effort during our country's first six months of involvement in the Second World War (Dec. 1941-June 1942):

(1) 21 ships, constituting nearly 20% of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, were either sunk or very badly damaged in the Japanese attack on Oahu, including seven of its eight battleships. Fully 90% of our Pacific air forces on Oahu and in the Philippines were completely incapacitated or destroyed within one week of the initial Japanese assaults upon American forces throughout the Pacific region. It was purely fate that our carriers were on maneuvers two hundred miles south of Honolulu at the time of the attacks, and were not also bobbing at anchor in Pearl Harbor or Lahaina that Sunday morning.

(It was then not uncommon for the U.S. Pacific Fleet to sometimes anchor in the "Lahaina Roads," or the channels between Maui, Molokai and Lanai. The attacking Japanese task force sent scout planes over both West Maui and Honolulu in the hours just prior to the attack to determine the fleet's exact location, and was fully prepared to assault Lahaina had the American vessels been found there, rather than at Pearl Harbor.)

(2) At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, fully one-quarter of the U.S. Army's entire standing and mobilized ground forces were then based in the Philippines. That entire command was subsequently lost when Bataan and Corregidor were surrendered to the Japanese in April and May, 1941.

Again, that defeat could have been an incredible long-term disaster. Because had the Japanese actually had designs on either Hawaii or California at that point, there was really very little if anything that would've stood in their way, save for a patchworked Pacific Fleet then desperately trying to shield Hawaii from what was assumed to be an inevitable Japanese invasion.

We were indeed lucky that Japan's immediate war aims proved to be much more limited in scope and range than we might have otherwise anticipated, given the overwhelming totality of initial Japanese victories over the first few months of the war across both the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

(3) The German Kreigsmarine (submarine fleet), which had already been inflicting significant damage upon our lifeline to Great Britain, began to redeploy to stations immediately off the eastern U.S. seaboard at Hitler's formal declaration of war on Dec. 8, 1941. The United States, having had no previous and direct experience of modern naval war on its own shores, did not impose a black-out of east coast cities for four months, which allowed the U-boats to pick off ships almost at their leisure as they exited American harbors at night, silhouetted against city lights.

In one three-week period from January 13-February 6, 1942, five German U-boats sank nearly 200,000 U.S. shipping tonnage off the east coast between Boston and New York without suffering any corresponding losses, before temporarily withdrawing to their bases in occupied France to reprovision and reload.

Within three months, Nazi U-boats were at our throat, sinking American shipping faster than U.S. industry could build the replacements, which threatened to strangle our country's war effort before we could even get started. (Some 25,000 American sailors would eventually lose their lives in the Battle of the Atlantic.)

Now, does that sound like a country fully prepared for war to you?

FDR actually did his best to ready the country for the coming conflict in the year prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he could only do so much in the face of a recalcitrant and isolationist Congress, and a grievously divided public opinion which based much of its opposition to intervention in Europe upon some serious misconceptions and wishful thinking regarding the true nature of the looming Axis threat.

Ultimately, the United States triumphed in World War II because of our large population, our overwhelming industrial capacity and logistical capabilities, and the fact that save for several Japanese military attacks on Alaska and Hawaii, the bulk of the war's fighting occurred overseas and left our country physically unscathed.

But all that capacity and potential would have been rendered essentially meaningless, had not our allies been able to shoulder the brunt of the fighting against the Axis for nearly 30 months, which allowed us to quickly and effectively re-boot our industry from civilian use to military production, while also mobilizing some 16 million men and women in our armed forces for the war effort.

We further spent the better part of 24 months in undertaking an enormous overseas deployment of ships, planes, weaponry and personnel, which ultimately proved itself to be an overwhelming and unprecedented projection of military power in that world conflict. By May 1944, we had nearly three million (mostly untested) armed personnel in southern England being primed for the invasion of France. Another 800,000 were massed in Hawaii for the invasions of the Marianas, the Philippines and Okinawa. And a further 500,000 sailors were either serving on or in support of over 6,000 U.S. Navy and merchant ships tasked to carry out these American initiatives.

Once our country's full weight was brought to bear upon both Germany and Japan in the summer of 1944, the outcome of the war was no longer really in doubt. And I very seriously doubt that any government so "stupendously incompetent" -- as you so snidely and smugly suggested FDR's administration was -- could have pulled off such a remarkable logistical feat to bring two world powers to their knees simultaneously.

But on this Veterans' Day in particular, we should also acknowledge and recognize the very heavy price our soldiers, sailors and airmen paid in a relatively short period for that near-singular ability to tilt the scales so decisively, because nearly 70% of all U.S. casualties in World War II were suffered in that final intense year of fighting.

That both you and Jim enjoy a right to say the sort of sometimes unfathomable nonsense you respectively offer here, is immediately and directly due to the costly sacrifices they made on behalf of us all.

This may sound lame, but, I'm dead serious. Please, please give me the formula for making perfect, easily peelable hardboiled eggs.

First, a note: I used to always have a half dozen perfect hard boiled eggs in the fridge at all times. But, something happened three, or, four years ago, and, everything changed. Now, for the life of me, I can't get the darn things out of their shells without butchering them all to he!!.
Here's what I used to do, and, they always came out perfect. Simple, boiled eggs for about 20 minutes. Then poured out hot water, and ran ice cold water over the eggs for a couple of minutes, Then, when I cracked them, I peeled them under running cold water, and, they always came out easily, and perfectly whole.

But, now, something happened, I don't know if they raise the chickens differently, or feed them some kind of wacky food, or, whatever.
Anyway, I've googled half my life away trying to reproduce what I used to have, but, no luck. No matter what method I try, it's like they crazy glued the whites to the inside of the shell.
I'm not a newcomer to the world of hardboiled eggs. I've tried everything printed out there.

Nothing works!

Please, tell me something I haven't tried yet. I will be indebted to you for the rest of my life. Wouldn't you like to have a little "shooter doll" all to your own? Trust me, I have no shame when it comes to hardboiled eggs.

Maybe that'll slow down the growth.