The only sad thing about this adoption?
No breast feeding.
*** Update ***
Cwealm (8:50:41 PM): Heh
INDCBill (8:53:41 PM): good thing those two ugly bastards aint passing on their genes
by John Cole| 12 Comments
This post is in: Humorous
The only sad thing about this adoption?
No breast feeding.
*** Update ***
Cwealm (8:50:41 PM): Heh
INDCBill (8:53:41 PM): good thing those two ugly bastards aint passing on their genes
by John Cole| 20 Comments
This post is in: Sports
Big one tonight, as the Steelers take on the Colts.
I wish I had a better feeling about this, but the Colts are tough, and the Steelers have looked shaky lately.
*** Update ***
I am watching the pre-game on NFL Primetime on ESPN, and I can not be the only person giggling at Michael Irvin’s “That was my friend’s crack pipe they found in my car” defense.
/snicker
This post is in: Outrage
Ted Rall, self-styled ‘patriot’, always eager to ‘support the troops!‘
By defaming them:
Like a genital Herpes virus that lies dormant for a spell before reasserting itself at awkward moments in an outbreak of ragged penile lesions or vaginal discharge, cartoonist Ted Rall manages to crash univited into the parlor of civilized cultural discourse from time to time, whereupon he immediately insults the hostess and dips his grubby fingers directly into the clam dip.
Disgusting. Too bad he couldn’t manage to work in a WP/chemical weapon/war crime smear.
And, for those of you who have never had the pleasure, a flashback to this, the finest ‘fisking’ the internet ever offered- ‘Let’s Rall!’
by John Cole| 37 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
‘Duke’ Cunningham has resigned after pleading guilty:
Representative Randy Cunningham of California resigned from Congress today after admitting to a federal judge that he had taken $2.4 million in bribes from a military contractor.
Mr. Duke, 63, made a brief and tearful announcement to a group of reporters outside a federal courthouse in San Diego after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. He admitted taking money from a military contractor in exchange for his supporting the contractor’s efforts to secure Defense Department contracts. The eight-term Republican congressman, one of the most highly decorated fighter pilots of the Vietnam War, also pled guilty to charges of mail fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion for underreporting his income in 2004.
“The truth is I broke the law,” Mr. Cunningham, and “disgraced my family.”
“I forfeited my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions,” and, he added, his voice breaking, “most importantly, the trust of my friends and family.”
“I can’t undo what I have done but I can atone,” he told reporters.
Sentencing was set for Feb. 27.
Prosecutors said Mr. Cunningham admitted to accepting at least $2.4 million in bribes paid to him by several conspirators through a variety of methods, including checks totaling over $1 million, cash, rugs, antiques, furniture, yacht club fees and vacations.
Normally, I have no feelings for these people that do things like this, and I honestly can’t remember if ‘Duke’ is one of these wingnuts who sends me up the wall, but for some reason I am a little sad. I always hate it when something like this is done by our military heroes.
I guess what I am trying to say is I have no sympathy for what he did, but I am a little sad for the man. Put another way, I don’t feel the same type of glee I would feel if this were DeLay or one of the folks who spend all their time moralizing and butting into my personal business. Or pretending that Terri Schiavo is really just Governor’s pardon away from a game of volleyball and that gays are the root of all evil. You know what I mean.
*** Update ***
Yes, he pisses me off and sometimes make me think I am going to have a heart attack he makes me so damned mad. But sometimes he is right.
by John Cole| 20 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Just got my new recumbent exercise bike put together, and man did I work up an aerobic sweat putting that bad boy together. Tunch, of course, was NO help, jumping in and out of boxes, attacking pieces, etc.
At any rate, the damn thing is up and put together. I do not know why companies that send things like this do not label the actual pieces, but want you to rely on little diagrams. is it too hard to just label each piece, so when it says “Insert seat carriage frame into rear support rod,” i will know what the seat carriage frame and support rod actually are, rather than what I think they are from a dinky little picture?
And another thing. If I ever run a company, I am going to make sure we intentionally ship double the nuts and bolts needed for assembly. As usual, I was one bolt short. Just ship double-triple the bolts needed, for goodness sakes, and put a little warning in the book:
“NOTICE- DON’T FREAK OUT. After assembly, you might have some screws, nuts, and bolts left over. We sent you twice what you need, because we know this crap always gets lost in transit or lost during assembly. Just our way of thanks for buying our product.”
Seems to me you did that, word of mouth would get around and you would increase sales The profit margin can’t be that tight that five nuts or bolts will break the company.
Here is a pic:
You can get one at the “O” for a couple hundred bucks.
by John Cole| 95 Comments
Interesting piece in the CS Monitor on how the troops view the war. Hint- it ain’t the same way many in the media do:
Like many soldiers and marines returning from Iraq, Mayer looks at the bleak portrayal of the war at home with perplexity – if not annoyance. It is a perception gap that has put the military and media at odds, as troops complain that the media care only about death tolls, while the media counter that their job is to look at the broader picture, not through the soda straw of troops’ individual experiences.
Yet as perceptions about Iraq have neared a tipping point in Congress, some soldiers and marines worry that their own stories are being lost in the cacophony of terror and fear. They acknowledge that their experience is just that – one person’s experience in one corner of a war-torn country. Yet amid the terrible scenes of reckless hate and lives lost, many members of one of the hardest-hit units insist that they saw at least the spark of progress.
“We know we made a positive difference,” says Cpl. Jeff Schuller of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, who spent all but one week of his eight-month tour with Mayer. “I can’t say at what level, but I know that where we were, we made it better than it was when we got there.”
Read the whole thing. The question I have is whether we can attribute this to something other than media bias (which I hate doing)? is it possible that the reporters get only a small glimpse, or go for short stays, and therefore do not witness the slow progress that a unit sees over the course of the year. Is it that the media’s acces is restricted? is it that many of these soldiers have been deployed to Iraq 2-3 times, and are seeing vast differences from when they first were depoyed?
I don’t know.
*** Update ***
From the comments:
I’m an Iraq veteran…….I think you’d get a thousand different perspectives from our troops, but here’s my two cents.
1) The media is driven by a profit motive that is best fed by reporting bad news. From murders to child abductions to war deaths, bad news sells. Nothing partisan or betraying a notion of “liberal bias”. It’s just that – unfortunately – what gets ratings is what will be broadcast. Broadcast media especially has lost all semblance of having any responsibility to educate or journalize; we have degenerated into infotainment.
2) Before and after I was in Iraq, I did my best to educate myself on “the big picture”. But while you’re in country and doing your job, you don’t have the time or inclination to engage in broad policy analysis. I think it’s natural for individual soldiers to speak favorably about how they think “things are going”, but the soldier-level view is not the proper lens for strategic decisions.
3) On a related note, this notion that we’re “making a difference” is not a valid justification of our overall policy. Of course I believe that my unit and my fellow servicemembers “made a difference” to Iraqis and to each other. We could plop down American troops in most any country and “make a difference”. But that doesn’t answer important questions such as: What vital national security interest are we accomplishing by our presence? Is nation-building in Iraq really an effective strategy in the War on Terror?
It’s a complex situation there, and while I would like to see more in-depth discussion and analysis from “the media”, I don’t expect to see it anytime soon.
He has a point about the perspective of the individual soldier. Even from a unit level, when we would do company level AAR’s it was amazing how disjointed just the different perspectives from the four platoons in my unit would be. let alone a soldier trying to take his perspective and analyze those experiences in regard to the overall war effort.
This post is in: War, Democratic Stupidity
I guess the “Bush lied” or “I was fooled” line is not working, so the Democrats are trotting out a new meme:
Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator from South Dakota, remembers the exchange vividly.
The time was September 2002. The place was the White House, at a meeting in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed congressional leaders for a quick vote on a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.
But Daschle, who as Senate majority leader controlled the chamber’s schedule, recalled recently that he asked Bush to delay the vote until after the impending midterm election.
“I asked directly if we could delay this so we could depoliticize it. I said: ‘Mr. President, I know this is urgent, but why the rush? Why do we have to do this now?’ He looked at Cheney and he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face. And he said: ‘We just have to do this now.’ ”
Daschle’s account, which White House officials said they could not confirm or deny, highlights a crucial factor that has drawn little attention amid rising controversy over the congressional vote that authorized the war in Iraq. The recent partisan dispute has focused almost entirely on the intelligence information legislators had as they cast their votes. But the debate may have been shaped as much by when Congress voted as by what it knew.
Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, did not call for a vote authorizing the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm election. But the vote paving the way for the second war with Iraq came in mid-October of 2002 — at the height of an election campaign in which Republicans were systematically portraying Democrats as weak on national security.
I guess the new line is “I only voted for the war for political considerations!”
That ought to go over well, and really rally the anti-war base.
*** Update ***
Regarding Bush 41’s decision to ‘delay’ the vote to ‘depoliticize’ it, John Henke notes:
On August 6, 1990, President Bush deployed “U.S. armed forces to defend Saudi Arabia in an operation named Operation Desert Shield.”
President George HW Bush didn’t “put off the debate”. He’d already decided: “in October 1990 [Bush] settled on military action if Iraq’s troops had not left Kuwait by the 15 January 1991 deadline.”
Read the whole thing.
I am still not sure how the Democrats think “We only voted for the war because we thought we wouldn’t get re-elected otherwise” is somehow the sort of campaign slogan that inspires confidence. “Vote Daschle! I’m too gutless to vote my conscience!”
That seems like a real winner, guys.