West Virginia Republican candidate John Raese on Tuesday outlined his focus on national defense by calling for an extensive laser-based missile defense system.
A very extensive one.
“If there is a rogue missile aimed at our country, we have 33 minutes to figure out what we’re going to do,” Raese said at an event sponsored by the League of American Voters. “We are sitting with the only technology in the world that works and it’s laser technology. We need 1000 laser systems put in the sky and we need it right now. That is [of] paramount importance.”
Obligatory Kung Fu Monkey link.
Also, I have this song stuck in my head now.
*** Update ***
Apparently he has a naval plan, too.
Carnacki
John, I have exclusive video of Raese talking about his naval defense plan.
BR
And maybe after the economy collapses after teatards take control of our government we can cook our food using any lasers that still work.
arguingwithsignposts
I suppose it is some sort of jobs program. right?
Ryan
I had one simple request here people, and that’s to have a
sharknational defense system with frikkin’ lazer beams attached to it’s head.James Hare
This mine rescue stuff is bringing a tear to my eye. It’s pretty cool to see what humans can do when we make others a priority.
kdaug
And matter-antimatter reactors to get us off of foreign oil! And solar sails to send us to Mars (bitches!). And teleporters to get our troops home and back in theater overnight (so they could spend time with their families)!
I’d also like phasers, flying cars, mind control, an adamantium skeleton (with the nifty claw thingies), and of course, time control (per the earlier thread).
Did I miss anything?
MikeJ
@kdaug: If you have to take me apart to get there, then I don’t want to go.
Clark
Will they be mounted on sharks?
beltane
Are you sure it’s not a navel plan? John Raese seems to be nothing more than a rich boy (very rich boy) who thinks video games are real. I hope your fellow West Virginians do the right thing and send him back to Florida where he will have unlimited time to indulge in his fantasies.
And don’t all of us, by definition, belong to a league of American voters? They should change the name to League of RealAmerican Voters.
Culture of Truth
Darn, I was working so I missed the “Obama iz an Assasin!” thread and the “i can haz time machine?!” thread. Is this the “Dolphinz in Space!” thread?
Littlebus
Pew, pew.
Yellow lasers FTW
Culture of Truth
We need to put Lucy in the Sky now.
With her football.
Xecky Gilchrist
we have 33 minutes to figure out what we’re going to do
And then we have to do a hyperspace jump because the Cylons show up.
kindness
Where are the lasers on the sharks heads? All I asked is for lasers to be put on the sharks! Is that too much to ask for?
This comedy material….it writes itself sometimes. You could make a stoner movie out of it except it’s already been done.
Judas Escargot
Pity that the high-powered infrared lasers you’d need to blow something up en route can’t penetrate water vapor clouds. Or thick nitrogen atmospheres, for that matter.
Perhaps our future enemies will be kind enough to launch their missiles from the Moon’s surface instead.
Clark
@Xecky Gilchrist, and on so little sleep!
Three-nineteen
@arguingwithsignposts:
Raese should alert Andy# Samberg about his appointment as Laser Defense Czar right now, so Samberg can get started attaching wings to his Laser Cats.
#Edited because it’s Andy, stupid. I can’t believe I got the last name right but the first name wrong.
ThinkBlue
Which Austin Powers movie was it where Dr Evil wanted to put a giant laser on the moon?
kdaug
@Xecky Gilchrist: Spool up the FTL!
beltane
@Xecky Gilchrist: Nah, I wouldn’t even give him that much credit. He’s really saying that there will only be 33 minutes until the next commercial break.
This guy does seem like an idiot’s version of Curtis LeMay, who was merely insane, not stupid like this.
Linda Featheringill
Really? Wow.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Culture of Truth:
Ronald Reagan would not have scoffed at the idea of wingèd dolphin angels, bearing lazer beams on their backs to defend this City on a Hill, as mere Christian kitsch, but rather seen it as evidence of a merciful God looking out for his own.
Culture of Truth
Do you want the canals or don’t you?
Elizabelle
I hope someone does a commercial, soft tones and nice music, of Mr. Raese’s daughters walking (or being driven) to school.
In Palm Beach.
Where they live.
Can they find no acceptable school (public or private) for the little Raeses in a whole state?
His wife is a (allegedly) Florida resident and can’t even vote for him.
If she would want to.
http://www.wvablue.com/diary/6267/poor-lil-john-raese-of-florida
El Cid
If he’s not willing to put 1,000,000 lasers in the sky, then he’s not serious. I don’t know what he means by ‘put in the sky’, but it could mean attaching it to the spherical firmament layer just above us, but under the one in which the cutout hole which we call ‘the Moon’ spins around in.
Bob L
I assume those a freemarket lasers. I don’t want to be defended by any socialists anti-ballistic missile lasers.
You know who else launched missiles?
soonergrunt
lasers in space. Yeah. Cause that’ll be something we can afford to accomplish after three decades and a couple of trillion dollars of research that hasn’t produced a single reliable laser design.
Can we put John Raese on a rocket with a pair of binoculars and a slingshot and shoot his dumb ass into Low Earth Orbit instead?
It will be more likely to shoot down a non-existent nuclear missile from China than anything the USAF has wasted thirty years chasing will.
IronyAbounds
I live in Arizona so I can’t throw stones, but holy cow, how the hell can West Virginians vote for that guy instead of a popular Governor. What the heck is in the water there?
Linda Featheringill
@kdaug:
No, no. I get the skeleton, along with its accompanying beastie.
[purrrrrrrr]
Culture of Truth
Reagan was President in “Back to the Future”
Coincidence?
mikefromArlington
Sounds like Missile Command.
Have him contact Atari for the technology.
Lolis
So John, do you think Manchin will win? We need some on the ground perspective please.
Carol
Lasers. Meanwhile our real adversaries smuggle in bombs or encourage folks to carry out terrorist actions using nothing more than dynamite or bullets.
IronyAbounds
Kick John Wilkes Booth in the balls, really hard, before he entered Ford’s Theater.
Suck It Up!
Someone should tell him he’s not running for president.
soonergrunt
@Linda Featheringill: I don’t know. I saw a village in Afghanistan that did some pretty nifty stuff with water wheels and DC electric generators. Those people sure didn’t worry about nuclear bombs dropping on them from outer space.
beltane
@Carol: Box cutters were pretty effective, too. I also hear machetes can do a lot of damage in human hands.
John Bird
Man, I hope the Republicans just reel out as much rope as they can on this issue. I hope they make it their number one issue of the next two years, bringing Star Wars back.
Bill White
“Raese said the system would cost $20 billion.”
Wow! That figure is too far off to even be wrong.
Cain
Get his opponent on reddit!
cain
fasteddie9318
What does Raese propose we do when the North Korean Warbirds start firing disruptors at us? Hmmmm? Not so easy now, eh?
Eric F
Why 1000? That seems like a a lot. A thousand? Really?
Couldn’t we make do with, like, 500?
El Cid
What if we had just one really, really, really big laser? Maybe with a picture of Chuck Norris on the side.
sherifffruitfly
Can we have a collective laugh at Hilary supporters now?
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/10/13/biden-says-obama-has-already-asked-him-to-run-again-as-veep/
“Oops, another hole in the Hillary Clinton-may-replace-Joe Biden-as-President Obama’s-running mate-in-2012 story. Biden says Obama has already asked him to “run again” as vice president.
“I tell you what, there’s a real trust, that’s why he’s asked me to run again,” Biden told the New York Times between campaign stops in Pittsburgh Monday. “Look, he said, ‘We’re going to run together, are you going to run?’ I said, ‘Of course, you want me to run with you, I’d be happy to run with you.'””
Violet
The 80’s are back, baby!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Violet: that time machine thing is working? thank god. this whole “middle aged” thing wasn’t working out for me.
Morbo
Funny, the title got this running through my head. Also a pretty perfect summation of how Randians with means think.
John Bird
@kdaug:
Unfortunately, the claws have not come with the skeleton since 1993.
Suck It Up!
You go Raese! Lasers! that’ll show Manchin. Manchin can shoot up paper, you can destroy the world.
beergoggles
Someone needs to ask him if he knows how
lasersjesus rays work.Martin
Why not just mount the lasers on trucks and shoot everyone with an IQ over 80 and save themselves the ethical turmoil of deciding whether to put the gun in their mouth or in their ear?
1000 lasers in the sky we have money for. But deficits! But out-of-control entitlement spending! But government can’t spend money wisely! But tax cuts! $272B in tax dollars out the window this year just in interest on the national debt!
No, we can’t seem to find the money to fix roads and build trains and bus routes to help people get to jobs to, you know, provide a decent tax base to pay for this stuff, but we can find money to mount lasers on flying sharks to shoot down imaginary missiles coming over Alaska from Putin’s mouth.
I fucking swear to god half the country has contracted zombie syphilis.
PaulW
How are people still impressed with a laser defense system when A) all of the attacks on our nation the last 50 years did NOT involve missiles and B) a cheaper defense system would be for us to simply bribe Russia and China to not fire at us?
fasteddie9318
Anyone who proposes the development of less than full Death Star technology is fundamentally unserious.
NobodySpecial
Is this guy related to Matt Millen?
freelancer
Josh Marshall:
:D
Obligatory West Wing link
John Bird
@sherifffruitfly:
If instead of “Hillary supporters” you mean “people without lives who believe everything they hear on TV” . . .
I think E.J. Dionne’s hunch is likely correct: that the only Hillary backers advancing this rumor were ones who knew very well that it wasn’t true. Then again, maybe both he and I don’t read the right websites.
Violet
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
By your name, I’m guessing you’re male. If the 80’s are back, that means you have to wear the short shorts. I, meanwhile, have to have big hair and don shoulder pads. Or I could just go with the look Robert Palmer made famous.
trollhattan
Problem for him is developing a coal-fired laser
to bring home some bacon foraddress his constituency.“Clean space-coal!”
PaulW
@Martin:
It’s not half the country. It’s less than half the country’s voters, which puts the actual population figures of the zombie infectees around 45 million or so. If we can just get 65 million uninfected voters to the booths this midterms like we did in 2008, we might have a shot at stopping them…
Menzies
I think this is just pissing-contest stuff. Manchin shot the cap-and-trade bill with a rifle? A rifle? Well, I’ll shoot it with one thousand lasers! FROM SPACE!
John Bird
We sure could use a better-funded space program, though.
Like loading all the people who whine about scientific progress taking food out of children’s mouths and shooting them into lunar orbit. (RIP Ted – I did like you anyway and wanted you to be President even though I was born in 1984.)
kdaug
@John Bird: Wait – you can still get them as an option, right? I mean, even if it’s not standard, I’m sure Raese’ll kick in the cash for the upgrade.
But seriously, Raese is off his meds. What we really need is a pinprick black hole generator to fire off in LEO just over the US in case of any incoming ballistic missiles. They get close to us, and it just sucks them in. So what if it gets a little bit bigger? And who cares if we can’t actually, you know, turn it off? What’s it really going to do, anyway?
The Dangerman
From the link:
Bullshit. What the fuck is he smoking?
I was involved in two state of the art direct broadcast satellites circa 1990; total production and launch costs? Between a half a billion and a billion dollars.
I won’t even venture a guess what it would take to place a 1000 lasers in space, along with command and control, but he is off by at least a couple orders of magnitude. 2 Trillion might only be a down payment. He’s full of shit.
John Bird
@Violet:
Short jean cut-offs are pretty raging right now, and have been for the last five years or so, easy.
I’m a fan b/c it lets me feel like I’m showing my prodigious junk off to everyone.
dmsilev
I think we should deploy an array of Republican politicians and candidates in low Earth orbit. Their heads are so hard that any enemy missile running into them will just prematurely detonate.
And, as a bonus, in space no one can hear you -scream- rant, so we immediately improve the quality of discourse back here.
dms
John Bird
@kdaug:
It turns out it’s genetic and you know when you hit adolescence and kill your friends while playing “lean your full weight against my knuckles”. It’s like being gay but pointier. They put this in the terrible new movie.
geg6
@soonergrunt:
Well, you know this is just more sucking of Zombie Reagan’s dick.
If Zombie Reagan said we need lasers, then dammit, Jim, we need more lasers!
/my Dr. McCoy voice
Jim, Foolish Literalist
on topic: I don’t know which is more depressing, that this won’t get him laughed out the race, or that his “I made my money the old fashioned way: I inherited it” didn’t already get him laughed out of the race
ruemara
at least the fuckhead didn’t spill the beans on our new lightsabers.
Martin
@Bill White: They couldn’t even launch one for $20B. We’ve already spent $20B on an airborne laser program that Gates describes as such:
kdaug
@beltane: Ohhh, that sounds cool – “BOX CUTTERS IN SPACE!!”. Maybe we can make them robots and have them swarm around and slice missiles into pieces (or at least seriously scratch their paint)!
Lev
Quick, John, please stop making fun of John Raese for being an insane person. It’s cynical and based on resentment, and Andrew Sullivan says that Obama should run on how the Republicans are deficit frauds.
‘Cause that message never fails.
John Bird
We have to start looking at other reasonable ways to stop a nuclear missile program that might not exist and doesn’t actually threaten us. The only solution I can see is to bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb; bomb Iran.
SpotWeld
Republicans for Skynet… why choose a lesser evil
John - A Motley Moose
This is pretty funny. What isn’t so amusing is his unqualified support of eliminating the minimum wage. That’s something the voters in WV might actually think about when pulling the voting lever.
Sorry for the link to Huffpo. It’s where I first came across this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/12/john-raese-minimum-wage-eliminating_n_760445.html
kdaug
@SpotWeld: Hella that! If your gonna go evil, go big!
How about a machine that sucks the atmosphere right off of the earth?
Or even better, how about just using existing machines to cloud the atmosphere with gasses that trap the sun’s rays, just like Venus, so you can kill them all off with droughts and famines!
Oh. Wait….
geg6
I have come to the conclusion that the Teabaggers are just a front so that the GOP can put up batshit, totally crazy assholes like Angle and Raese and McDonnell and Iott as candidates so as to take attention to away from the just crazy assholes like Pat Toomey.
I mean, really. Does Toomey seem all that nuts in comparison with these people? I know that he is, but he isn’t batshit enough to let anyone see it.
suzanne
Fucking lasers, how do they work?
Comrade Dread
Lightsabers. When you absolutely, positively must kill every mother****er in the room, accept no substitute.
He’s not familiar with how the military industrial complex works is he?
By the time you factor in complete fantasy underbids by defense contractors, waste, outright fraud, distribution of project components and research into key congressional districts, cost overruns, delays, testing, requested improvements and revisions, more cost overruns, delays, and testing, we should have a price tag of about 20 billion per unit if we’re lucky.
Add in the fact that they’ll only roll a few units off the line every year, and we can add more to the price tag, as the contractor, congressmen, and the defense department keep trying to keep the program alive forever, even if it becomes a zombie program that’s no longer wanted or needed by the Pentagon.
And then, Al Qaeda or some other splinter group piece of crap will hit us with some low yield dirty bomb or chemical weapon crap in a suicide attack, and we can all sit back and thank God that at least we’ve got it maybe covered if Al Qaeda ever becomes a state with ICBMs.
whetstone
GIANT LASER SPACE FRISBEES!!!
It’s Bloom County’s world, we’re just living in it.
Corner Stone
@kdaug:
What the heck is a Law Enforcement Officer gonna do from space?
He said “lasers”, not “tasers”.
meh
bleh beat me too it
Corner Stone
And BTW, that fucking Bing ad is now both on top and bottom of the screen. So one time it will pull you down, the next put you back on top, and sometimes leave you dangling with nothing.
It’s like a bad relationship without the sex.
Bill White
$20 billion might cover the powerpoint presentations needed to deploy this system.
Maybe.
kdaug
@Corner Stone: My God, man! Cops in space! That’s the best idea yet!
They can simply pull over any incoming missiles, ask for identification, and if they’re undocumented… well, you know what happens next.
Back home for you, Mr. Ballistic!
brent
@Bill White:
Yeah. It seems like we are missing the lede here. This guy actually believes a missile defense system with 1000 lasers would only cost $20 billion dollars. That is genuine evidence of someone whose brain doesn’t work properly. Setting aside the fact that purchasing such a system would be as easy as purchasing 1000 unicorns, $20 billion isn’t just “not in the ballpark.” It isn’t even in the vicinity of the state where the ballpark is located. $200 billion would be a laughably low estimate. This is a person that is actually trying to make the case that he should be given real world responsibilities? Seriously?
Omnes Omnibus
@John Bird: Didn’t you see the earlier thread? We have a time machine. It would be easy to go back to 1993 to get the one with claws. Duh.
jrg
@brent: Don’t worry. They’ll lease them out for Pink Floyd concerts. The lasers will pay for themselves.
John Bird
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think you’d have to go back and spike your mom’s grapefruit with plutonium or something. Which was the whole point of the Litvinenko thing; they were going to put carbonadium tentacles in his kid’s wrists and raise him right, with a bitchin’ long ponytail.
The Dangerman
@brent:
Well, isn’t he from the party that said the Iraq War would pay for itself? We’d be welcomed with Flowers and Candy?
These people don’t live in reality.
I’ve done a back of the envelope calculation and figured a 1000 lasers space system, fully operational, would be the first budget item that would approach whatever the next big word after trillion (quadrillion?).
kdaug
@brent: No, no, no. We can pay for it with tax cuts!
Omnes Omnibus
@The Dangerman: Funny, my McEstimate for 1000 space lasers is $156.98 plus tax.**Easily affordable.
**Not available on some planets. Void where prohibited. Certain restrictions apply.
Nellcote
So I can weaponize the laser in my cd player?
Suffern Ace
We need this right now? Who is firing missles at us?
John Bird
I still think that it would be pretty funny to just show some bloated pasty nerdy politician from Nowheresville and play a legally truncated sample of the beginning of the Star Wars theme extremely loudly over him doing stupid stuff like dancing at a cultural festival. Maybe throw a couple lines of text in there and you have a political ad.
Bill White
Rasmussen shows the WV-Sen race at 3 points
There had better be some “Lasers in the sky, with diamonds” ads, real soon.
Cermet
@Judas Escargot: I believe the laserr is a UV wavelength system (if memory isn’t too far gone, it is a K-I laser mounted in a 747) and it can kill a missle (one shot only) and the missle had better not be bigger than a sidewider (which is a very, very small missle used as an anti-aircraft weapon).
Redshift
By all means, let’s go back to 2000, when the National Security Advisor couldn’t be bothered to worry about terrorism because missile defense was the really important priority! That worked out well…
Tonal Crow
Suggested ad:
———————————————–
We’ve identified an incoming missile right now.
We know who sent it, about when it will arrive, and a lot about its payload, most of which is very bad (read: biowar agents).
And we know that it’s worth any and every effort to prevent even a 1% chance of a terrorist strike of 1/1000th this magnitude.
Finally, we know exactly what to do to stop it in its tracks.
Are you chickenshit traitorous Republicans and Blue Dogs gonna let it explode just because it’s called
CLIMATE CHANGE
?
JPL
@The Dangerman: He’s going to have them built in China.
jonas
Holy shit. What’s next, Christine O’Donnell asking why we can’t solve our energy problems by building a power line to the sun, but doing it at night so it doesn’t burn up first?
demkat620
Anybody bother to ask this clown how Russia and China would react to this idea?
Honest to god, this is a level of crazy and stupid that is beyond embarrassing.
Tonal Crow
@jonas: Good one.
trollhattan
@jonas:
FTW (although too plausible for me to actually laugh out loud).
How do you know she’s a witch?
She has a laser strapped to her!
birthmarker
This missile defense nonsense/boondoggle has gone on since Nixon. I am not a good linker but google Nixon and Safeguard. The 5 billion dollar program was mothballed in 1975, 5 months after it became operational.
I had a neighbor who worked on Star Wars during the Reagan admin, who told me at the time it wouldn’t work.
People in the town I live in are STILL getting rich on some version of this. IT CANNOT DIE. Talk about welfare for the wealthy.
If teapartiers were truly the grassroots org the media thinks they are, this is the type of thing they would be marching in the streets about. Big War. Not the inheritance tax, which none of then pay anyway.
Xecky Gilchrist
We need 1000 laser systems put in the sky and we need it right now.
We’ll get the money by scrapping the Subject-Verb Agreement Initiative.
Ruckus
@Martin:
I fucking swear to god half the country has contracted zombie syphilis.
So that explains it. It’s always the simple stuff in the end.
Tonal Crow
@Xecky Gilchrist:
Yeauh. Tht wuz uh libtard ehghed thng to, yu betya. Wer th besst! YuSA! YuSA!
debbie
No, what this really reminds me of (and since it is WV we’re talking about) is that episode of The X Files with the family who’d practiced incest for generations and were so far gone that the sons kept their limbless mother on a dolly underneath the bed and just brought her out to have sex with her.
That’s what the Republican Party has become.
Sad_Dem
Can the lasers vaporize welfare queens and illegals?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@arguingwithsignposts:
Jobs program? Of course Raese and his Republican friends will be more than happy to create more jobs with this new program. This is a great way to support businesses and help them create new jobs!
In China.
Mike in NC
Anybody remember back when Dubya briefly flirted with a ridiculous “Mission to Mars” program and building a base on the moon? That was before he found an easier and faster way to bankrupt the country.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Bill White:
It’s a McEstimate. Properly translated, it’s more like $20 trillion. Like MM, his calculator doesn’t go that high.
debbie
No, what this really reminds me of (and since it is WV we’re talking about) is that episode of The X Files with the family who’d practiced [email protected] for generations and were so far gone that the sons kept their limbless mother on a dolly underneath the bed and just brought her out to have sex with her.
That’s what the Republican Party has become.
Ed Drone
@Omnes Omnibus:
If conditions persist, see your physician. Contents may settle during shipment. Returns must be accompanied by original receipt. Side effects may include sudden death.
Ed
Teddy Salad
A thousand points of light?
Now I get it!
Chris
A thousand lasers? Really? How about protecting each domestic airliner from ground-based missile attacks, which would cost about $40 billion over the next twenty years (hm, $2B/year to make sure that nobody destroys air traffic as we know it? Why, that’s almost as dumb as paying for fire insurance or firefighting!).
Asshole.
Cermet
@Mike in NC: And if we had done that instead of the war of choice, we’d saved close to a trillion dollars and maybe proved (or disproved) that alien life exists or did exist on Mars AND we’d have created a huge science infra-structure that would encourage a lot of people to go into engineering and maybe compete with China in the economic front. A good deal … that and unicorns … .
Josh
John Rogers’s insights notwithstanding, I still remember having seen in the NYT late in 2001 the full-page ad put out by James Woolsey, Bill Bennett, Paul Bremer, Ruth Wisse, et al, with an eight-point plan that included Missile Defense as one of the necessary responses to the 9/11 attacks. When your eight tools include a hammer, every problem looks like . . . something-or-other.
Daddy-O
“Because. Of. Rain.”
I haven’t enjoyed a chuckle quite as much as since I read these simple three words.