So the left is weak on defense? They're a bunch of pansies who cannot be trusted to defend this country? They don't know about defending this country enough to make the hard decisions to go to war?
Republicans talk the talk, but can they walk the walk...
Here's a list courtesy of Big Brass Blog and one of their readers 'An Other Geek'...
Military Service Records, prominent Democrats:
* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
* Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts.
* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam.
* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
* Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars,and Soldier's Medal.
* Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
* Chuck Robb: Vietnam
* Howell Heflin: Silver Star
* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received #311.
* Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.
* Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.
Republicans (and these are the guys sending our kids to war):
* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.
* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.
* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* John Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve.
* Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor.
* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard; got assigned to Alabama so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty.
* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.
* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.
* Phil Gramm: did not serve.
* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.
* Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although continued in NFL for 8 years.
* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.
* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: did not serve.
* Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
* Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.
Pundits & Preachers
* Sean Hannity: did not serve.
* Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst.')
* Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
* Michael Savage: did not serve.
* George Will: did not serve.
* Chris Matthews: did not serve.
* Paul Gigot: did not serve.
* Bill Bennett: did not serve.
* Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
* John Wayne: did not serve.
* Bill Kristol: did not serve.
* Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
* Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
* Clarence Thomas: did not serve.
* Ralph Reed: did not serve.
* Michael Medved: did not serve.
* Charlie Daniels: did not serve.
* Ted Nugent: did not serve. (He only shoots at things that don't shoot back.)
Oh, and thanks to my friend Gabe for elaborating on the reason Ted Nugent didn't get drafted...
In an interview for the Detroit Free Press (July 15, 1990), Nugent described how he avoided the draft: He claims that 30 days before his Draft Board Physical, he stopped all forms of personal hygiene. The last ten days he ingested nothing but junk food and Pepsi, and a week before his physical he stopped using the bathroom altogether, virtually living inside pants caked with excrement and stained by his urine. That spectacle won Nugent a deferment, he says. His quote: “ but if I would have gone over there, I’d have been killed, or I’d have killed, , or I’d have killed all the Hippies in the foxholes… I would have killed everybody.”
Monday, August 29, 2005
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Wednesday Ditzy Cam
On a lazy August afternoon, Ditzy sits and waits for the next chipmunk to scurry by...
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Buzztracker.Org
Buzztracker, from Chin Music Press, offers a realtime map of world news events based on Google News RSS feeds.
Howe it works... the larger the red dot, the more prevalent the story. The lines represent the relationship between the news event and the location of the press covering the story. The darker the line, the more publishers reporting the story.
It's pretty interesting how the MSM stays fixated on certain parts of the world. But when you are are business and sensationalism sells, you go where the sensation is....
Thanks to Jim for the heads-up on this site.
Howe it works... the larger the red dot, the more prevalent the story. The lines represent the relationship between the news event and the location of the press covering the story. The darker the line, the more publishers reporting the story.
It's pretty interesting how the MSM stays fixated on certain parts of the world. But when you are are business and sensationalism sells, you go where the sensation is....
Thanks to Jim for the heads-up on this site.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Bush's approval just keeps on sinking...
If you went off for a month-long vacation while the business you run were in crisis, how would that make you look as a leader?
If you didn't have time to meet with the family of an employee who died in an industrial accident at your company, but you had plenty of time to attend golf outings with your stockholders, how would that make you look as a leader?
Well, with Bush's month-long vacation at his Texas compound while the nation is at war overseas, along with his refusal to meet privately with Cindy Sheehan while taking time out of his vacation to meet with campaign donors, he's not looking so well as a leader...
If you haven't see the recent polling done by SurveyUSA, it's worth a good look.
Just released on 8/16/2005, it calculates Bush's approval rating to be a national average of 41%. This, if I'm correct, is his worst rating yet.
But SurveyUSA takes it a step further than other approval polls; they have a state by state breakdown. And look at Ohio...
37% Approve ; 60% Disapprove
...yep. The state that went for Bush in 2004 is only topped in their disapproval of Bush by those liberal states of New Jersey(61%), Maryland(62%), New York(62%), Connecticut(62%), California(62%), Vermont(63%), Delaware(64%), Massachusetts(64%), and Rhode Island(68%).
I should also note Ohio isn't alone. Missouri also voted for Bush in 2004 and now their approval/diapproval is 38%/58%, tied right with the blue state of Michigan.
Florida, however, still approves of him at 44%, slightly above the national average?
So why are Ohio and Missouri changing their minds about Bush?
I'm not sure about Missouri, but here in Ohio we've had some nasty scandals arise on the state level, the OH-2nd district Hackett-Schmidt house battle which severely threatened a GOP stronghold, and an economy of stagflation for the past 5 years.
Numbers like these aren't permanent though, but if this is the omen of things to come in the 2006 congressional elections, things are looking good for the Democrats...
If you didn't have time to meet with the family of an employee who died in an industrial accident at your company, but you had plenty of time to attend golf outings with your stockholders, how would that make you look as a leader?
Well, with Bush's month-long vacation at his Texas compound while the nation is at war overseas, along with his refusal to meet privately with Cindy Sheehan while taking time out of his vacation to meet with campaign donors, he's not looking so well as a leader...
If you haven't see the recent polling done by SurveyUSA, it's worth a good look.
Just released on 8/16/2005, it calculates Bush's approval rating to be a national average of 41%. This, if I'm correct, is his worst rating yet.
But SurveyUSA takes it a step further than other approval polls; they have a state by state breakdown. And look at Ohio...
37% Approve ; 60% Disapprove
...yep. The state that went for Bush in 2004 is only topped in their disapproval of Bush by those liberal states of New Jersey(61%), Maryland(62%), New York(62%), Connecticut(62%), California(62%), Vermont(63%), Delaware(64%), Massachusetts(64%), and Rhode Island(68%).
I should also note Ohio isn't alone. Missouri also voted for Bush in 2004 and now their approval/diapproval is 38%/58%, tied right with the blue state of Michigan.
Florida, however, still approves of him at 44%, slightly above the national average?
So why are Ohio and Missouri changing their minds about Bush?
I'm not sure about Missouri, but here in Ohio we've had some nasty scandals arise on the state level, the OH-2nd district Hackett-Schmidt house battle which severely threatened a GOP stronghold, and an economy of stagflation for the past 5 years.
Numbers like these aren't permanent though, but if this is the omen of things to come in the 2006 congressional elections, things are looking good for the Democrats...
Monday, August 15, 2005
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Defective product? Or new innovation?
If it's green, it's biology, If it stinks, it's chemistry, If it has numbers it's math, If it doesn't work, it's technology
- Unknown
From Ars Technica and PRNewsWire..
The Committee to Fight Microsoft ("CTFM"), the first civil rights and consumer action organization in cyberspace, will hold a San Francisco news conference Tuesday, August 9th to announce that it has begun a campaign to block Microsoft Corporation fromreleasing Windows Vista to the general public unless and until Microsoft offers a general and unconditional warranty to purchasers that the program
does not include "bad code."
The Washington, DC-based CTFM celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.
"Bill Gates sells the public defective products," says CTFM Executive Director Andy Martin, "And then expects us to spend years being his guinea pigs, while he corrects the myriad of defects and vulnerabilities in his defective code. This is mass consumer fraud. It is unacceptable corporate behavior. Over four (4) years after Windows XP was released I still receive regular 'updates' and 'bug fixes,' which reflect a product that was originally scandalously defective.
"Windows 95 was a disaster; it took three years to correct the major deficiencies. But the 95 fix, Windows 98, only created new vulnerabilities, and required yet another round of fixes for Windows 98. On and on it goes. No other company in America gets away with selling defective products and then expecting its customers to wait years for proper product operability.
"When computers were a tool for techies, bad code may have been understandable. Today computers are a mass consumer product. The idea that hundreds of millions of people should have to have a similar 'XP' as users of Windows XP is unacceptable.
"Two other unacceptable scams that Microsoft has used over and over again are to encourage people to 'upgrade' unsuitable old computers, and to
encourage manufacturers to sell underpowered computers. XP was authorized for 128 RAM, which was clearly inadequate. Who would buy an inadequate TV set? Or an inadequate stove, that didn't get warm enough? Or an inadequate refrigerator that didn't get cold enough? No one. Why should someone buy or 'upgrade' an inadequate computer on Bill Gates' say-so? The Committee to Fight Microsoft is launching a legal action effort to bar such practice, in advance, for Windows Vista. Bill Gates, you are on notice."
Adjunct professor of law Andy Martin created the legal theories that led to litigation by state attorneys general against Microsoft. He founded the CTFM during the second round of federal litigation against Microsoft, and was an opponent of the original 1994 settlement.
...imagine that! A consumer movement to demand, of all things a warranty?! Why... this is (in my best blustering FoxNews® voice) a shining example of the travesty of frivolous lawsuits!
I ask, what is so wrong about demanding that a product work? If your DVD player needed to be reset every now and then because it locks up when you hit the menu button, we call that a defective product. But if your DVD player is a PC, well, that's just a fact of life...
Consumer advocates should be on Microsoft like white on rice... the end users need to stop paying for Windows patches with cool names like 'Vista', or 'Windows98'.
And have you heard anything about Vista, like the system requirements? 512MB RAM minimum... I tell you, it makes the most loyal Wintel fan reach for a Apple.
Having said that, I think my next PC is going to be a Mac Mini...
- Unknown
From Ars Technica and PRNewsWire..
The Committee to Fight Microsoft ("CTFM"), the first civil rights and consumer action organization in cyberspace, will hold a San Francisco news conference Tuesday, August 9th to announce that it has begun a campaign to block Microsoft Corporation fromreleasing Windows Vista to the general public unless and until Microsoft offers a general and unconditional warranty to purchasers that the program
does not include "bad code."
The Washington, DC-based CTFM celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.
"Bill Gates sells the public defective products," says CTFM Executive Director Andy Martin, "And then expects us to spend years being his guinea pigs, while he corrects the myriad of defects and vulnerabilities in his defective code. This is mass consumer fraud. It is unacceptable corporate behavior. Over four (4) years after Windows XP was released I still receive regular 'updates' and 'bug fixes,' which reflect a product that was originally scandalously defective.
"Windows 95 was a disaster; it took three years to correct the major deficiencies. But the 95 fix, Windows 98, only created new vulnerabilities, and required yet another round of fixes for Windows 98. On and on it goes. No other company in America gets away with selling defective products and then expecting its customers to wait years for proper product operability.
"When computers were a tool for techies, bad code may have been understandable. Today computers are a mass consumer product. The idea that hundreds of millions of people should have to have a similar 'XP' as users of Windows XP is unacceptable.
"Two other unacceptable scams that Microsoft has used over and over again are to encourage people to 'upgrade' unsuitable old computers, and to
encourage manufacturers to sell underpowered computers. XP was authorized for 128 RAM, which was clearly inadequate. Who would buy an inadequate TV set? Or an inadequate stove, that didn't get warm enough? Or an inadequate refrigerator that didn't get cold enough? No one. Why should someone buy or 'upgrade' an inadequate computer on Bill Gates' say-so? The Committee to Fight Microsoft is launching a legal action effort to bar such practice, in advance, for Windows Vista. Bill Gates, you are on notice."
Adjunct professor of law Andy Martin created the legal theories that led to litigation by state attorneys general against Microsoft. He founded the CTFM during the second round of federal litigation against Microsoft, and was an opponent of the original 1994 settlement.
...imagine that! A consumer movement to demand, of all things a warranty?! Why... this is (in my best blustering FoxNews® voice) a shining example of the travesty of frivolous lawsuits!
I ask, what is so wrong about demanding that a product work? If your DVD player needed to be reset every now and then because it locks up when you hit the menu button, we call that a defective product. But if your DVD player is a PC, well, that's just a fact of life...
Consumer advocates should be on Microsoft like white on rice... the end users need to stop paying for Windows patches with cool names like 'Vista', or 'Windows98'.
And have you heard anything about Vista, like the system requirements? 512MB RAM minimum... I tell you, it makes the most loyal Wintel fan reach for a Apple.
Having said that, I think my next PC is going to be a Mac Mini...
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Ditzy's Night Out
Last week I helped my boss with his IGU conference. From Tuesday to Friday I was gone from 8am to 11pm every night. My cat was not happy being left alone. Then, on Friday, as soon as I finished the conference I went to visit my family in Canton for the weekend, leaving Ditzy alone with a big bowl of food until I returned on Sunday night.
Well... cabin fever must've set in for the little guy, because while I was on the phone when I got back sunday night, Ditzy managed to open the screen door and take off! I didn't notice he had got out until he was clean out of sight.
From 1am to 5am I went out looking for him, but with no success. I watched some Tivo and continued searching ever 10 minutes or so.
By 5am I was dead tired and had given up. I wouldn't find him until he was good and ready. As I turned off the lights and went to shut the back door, Ditzy popped his head from around the corner and gave a questioning "meow?"
He was wet, muddy, and covered with little cockleburrs... and he looked tired too.
...he didn't even wipe his feet.
I had to give him a bath the next day. He wasn't happy about it, but he didn't fight me.
I guess I'm going to have to make sure to always lock the screen door now.
Stupid cat... no.. the problem is he isn't stupid at all...
Well... cabin fever must've set in for the little guy, because while I was on the phone when I got back sunday night, Ditzy managed to open the screen door and take off! I didn't notice he had got out until he was clean out of sight.
From 1am to 5am I went out looking for him, but with no success. I watched some Tivo and continued searching ever 10 minutes or so.
By 5am I was dead tired and had given up. I wouldn't find him until he was good and ready. As I turned off the lights and went to shut the back door, Ditzy popped his head from around the corner and gave a questioning "meow?"
He was wet, muddy, and covered with little cockleburrs... and he looked tired too.
...he didn't even wipe his feet.
I had to give him a bath the next day. He wasn't happy about it, but he didn't fight me.
I guess I'm going to have to make sure to always lock the screen door now.
Stupid cat... no.. the problem is he isn't stupid at all...
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