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The Heat are looking like pretty good candidates to repeat. They've just added Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis, both deadly from 3 point range. This will open up the floor a bit for Wade and LeBron to operate.Oklahoma City are also top candidates. The Thunder are a very talented team, and more than that, they're very young, with lots of room for improvement and growth.For a third pick, I'd go with the Lakers. It's yet unclear how well Steve Nash will mesh with the team, but he should make life easier for Bynum, Gasol, and Kobe.If Derrick Rose is able to stay healthy, I'd put the Bulls ahead of the Lakers.EDIT 8/10/12: Now that Dwight Howard's on the Lakers, and Bynum is going to the 76ers, the Lakers are looking really good. (I've always thought that Bynum is a bit overrated anyway.) I'd now give equal odds to the Heat and the Lakers to win it all. I'd maybe even give the Lakers a slight edge.

There are a lot of misconceptions about Pearl Harbor, especially about the damage inflicted by the Japanese. So, let’s look at just what the Japanese did.The primary targets were the battleships moored at Battleship Row at the northern side of Ford Island. These included the Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Maryland, West Virginia, California, and Tennessee. Pennsylvania was in dry dock. These ships were of pre-WWI to immediate post-WWI vintage. All were virtually obsolete, and their replacements were already being built.Of these ships, Arizona and Oklahoma were sunk outright, Arizona suffered a magazine explosion, while Oklahoma turned turtle because of port-side torpedo damage. Neither of them could be salvaged and returned to service. Nevada was heavily damaged while trying to escape. She managed to get underway but beached herself to avoid sinking. West Virginia and California were sunk at their moorings in shallow water and were salvaged. Tennessee, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were lightly damaged and returned to service quickly. All except the first two mentioned were ultimately rebuilt and modernized, returning by 1944.In other words, the United States Navy had the time and resources that enabled it to take its time with getting these survivors back on the line. The New Fast Battleships of the North Carolina and South Dakota classes were all in service between the attack and the first nine months of 1942. Additionally, the first two Iowa class ships were on line by the middle of 1943.So, the ships damaged at Pearl returned to service while six new battleships were operating in the Pacific in less than a year.No aircraft carriers were present at the attack. The Japanese ignored the submarines across from the battleships. The carriers immediately began taking the war to the Japanese by staging the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April, 1942, Coral Sea (May, 1942), and Midway (June 1942). The submarines followed suit. The first six months saw the tide of the war begin to change against the Japanese not because of the fast repair of ships, but by the fortunate escape of the carriers and submarines at Pearl, the pre-war building program which saw the almost immediate replacement of the damaged ships by newer and better more powerful ships, and the U.S. shift in naval tactics from the battle line to fast carrier strikes and submarine warfare.

No. Not at all. I sometimes forget which nation I live in (Chickasaw) because, as a person not of any Native American ancestry, that fact has almost no bearing on my life as a citizen of Oklahoma.What the nations describe are better understood to be extremely formalized ethnic organizations, where the tribe has modern elected institutions to govern their assets and disperse their earnings to through the tribe as best they can.For example, here the “National Headquarters” of the Chickasaw Nation is in a town not far from mine called Ada, Oklahoma. The main source of income, however, is a massive “Indian” casino, the largest of its kind in the world, Winstar, just on our side of the border from Texas on interstate 35. The Chickasaw take advantage of the fact; even though Oklahoma and Texas don’t allow casinos, tribe lands get treated differently. It’s an impressive strategic move from the tribes.Anyway, Winstar takes in ungodly amounts of money. Seriously, Google it and see that it blows whatever idea you had of what an “Indian casino” could be like. A huge amount of those earnings goes back to the nation, as in, Chickasaw Nation. They use it to give out free medical care, scholarships, and other aid to the card carrying members of their tribe. It can afford to be this generous because it doesn’t provide for defense, infrastructure, or governance of any kind, which means that you really have to understand the definition of nation has a completely different context in this case.I suppose the Cherokee run their nation the same way. All tribes in the US are run differently, as they all signed different treaties guaranteeing them different privileges today, which has affected the culture they evolved into.That said, to answer the question completely, no, the nation that is associated with my part of Oklahoma has no jurisdiction over my life as a non-member of the tribe. The casino is so large that it affects the town’s economy, but there is no governance going on. The town just knows they should plan around the casino and its operations. It is a sort of shared coexistence.