Yesterday's Ft. Worth Star-Telegram had an article saying that my old company, Lockheed Martin in Grand Prairie, is laying off 50 engineers. That is probably to be expected, given the cost of the war in Iraq and the uncertainty in funding fron Congress. Sales of hardware increases during a war, but funding for RDT&E usually declines as the war winds down. (Or, in the case of Iraq, as our involvement winds down.) Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid say that want to stop the war. It is not clear how they will accomplish that since it takes two sides to stop a war, and it seems unlikely that our leaving Iraq will cause the Jihadis to stop attacking us. Muslims have been at war with everyone else in the world since the seventh century, and it seems unlikely that our leaving Iraq would encourage them to cease their war on us.