Crap Throwing Monkey

Actually, he's an anti-Semitic Nazi... Scraps, are there any epithets you haven't been called yet?

I.e. to indoctrinate them. I'm not saying right or wrong either way...but call it what it is.

Yeah...couldn't really decide who I was trying to insult when I typed that: BF or the autistic kid.

Is this the story about BF hitting three-pointers again?

Of course, compared to you Pat Robertson's a raving leftist loonie...

And if they're not part of the curriculum, why do them?

Round.

You forget, I was standing right there watching you and the one cat gaze deeply into each other's eyes. Good thing for you she moved before I could snap the picture.

You're just jealous because they can reach the doorknob without a ladder. (They can, too. Little !@#$ers are opening doors now.)

Actually, I think that phrase "when called into action..." specifically refers to state militias. The phrasing preceding that says quite simply: the President commands the US Army and Navy, period. But like you said, it's an interpretation. Specifically in this case, it's an interpretation of a comma. And it's also interesting to note that, according to the strict constructionist view of the Constitution, no one commands the Air Force...

And is the law proactive or reactive?

We need a "primal scream" emoticon.

My cats know more than Barry Melrose.

I'm willing to be Christianity is the majority religion in Missouri. So what? "Majority" does not equal "official".

Here's a nice analysis of the document the blogger's whining about. Here's the document, "The Information Operations Roadmap", itself. Please show me in either where the blogger's complaints are detailed.

Don't forget the Pledge of Allegiance. I used to have a teacher in high school who said the Pledge while giving a Nazi salute to the flag. He was a member of the communits party as well. Somehow, the most indoctrinating part of that class was the Pledge itself...

And thus we get back to what I've been saying for years: this administration sucks at marketing. I.e., you'll get no argument from me. Although, in truth, I think part of the problem is that your average American sees things like Jack Bauer driving across LA in ten minutes on a regular basis, so how are they ever going to understand or accept that moving a few tens of thousands of rescue workers into a drowned city is going to take a little longer... I don't know how anyone competes against that constant bombardment of sh--...

That's actually not quite what the bill says. Actual text of bill. It doesn't literally declare Christianity the official religion; it declares that expressions of Christianity in the public arena (e.g. prayer in school) do not violate separation of church and state, in that the founding fathers were Christian. And it's a stupid and not even remotely constitutional bill (how in the hell can a state pass a bill interpreting the First Amendment?). Just not quite for the reasons the originally linked article says.

FEMA didn't build the levees. FEMA wasn't responsible for maintaining the levees. FEMA didn't consistently delay rebuilding and improving the levees for decades. Blaming the levees breaking on FEMA is stupid in the extreme, as 1) the levees weren't FEMA's responsibility, and 2) the events leading to the failure of the levees predate FEMA's actual existence. And the people who drowned apparently didn't give a rat's ass about the MANDATORY EVACUATION ORDER either.

I've never heard of any request beforehand...though if there were, they didn't carry the same desperate impact (for the simple matter that nothing had happened yet), and they sure as hell weren't to DoD, as DoD involvement would have violated a couple dozen laws (and probably did once they did get involved...which I'm kind of surprised no one outside of Cindy Sheehan's jumped all over yet.) But again...f'ed up how? What the federal government did NOT do is meet public expectations. All I'm saying is that those expectations may very well be wrong. Putting it in terms I'm familiar with (namely: military), the reality is that the relief effort was the equivalent of deploying two full divisions across 150 miles to a desolate swamp - literally, as New Orleans had roughly the infrastructure of a swamp at the time, and the surrounding area was smashed. And they did it in three days. Public expectation seems to be that it should have happened quicker, which is frankly impossible (or worse, that it should have happened before the storm, which is frankly stupid, as you don't preposition your relief in the rescue zone, because then they become victims themselves. ) Public expectation also seems to be that the feds should have stepped in early - very early, apparently. I seem to be hearing arguments that federal authority should have been assumed, and local authority preempted, the very moment the mandatory evacuation was declared. And again, that gets back to my point: is that something the federal government's supposed to do? What, exactly, is wrong here, the government's actions, or the public's expectations? It's very easy to simply dismiss arguments "apologizing" for the federal response when people don't even know what the response is supposed to be. Guess you haven't seen any of his State of The Union Addresses. When has Bush ever not looked silly and incompetent? Largely because New Orleans' trauma was televised, hence New Orleans sucked up forces that could have been deployed elsewhere. Forty-some FEMA emergency medical teams to New Orleans' airport (by Wednesday morning...36 hours after the levees were reported breached. Lousy response that. ) That's something like three times as many as FEMA deployed to ALL hurricanes in 2005...which was a bad hurricane year.

Money and fast cars. Of course, I've seen your car...so you're manipulative...

I forget...was it you who said you didn't trust the military to criticly look at their own performance? Whoever it was should read this book. Yes, it's chock-full of lots of "Hoo-ah, we're the Army!" ass-patting...but the book in no way shrinks from pointing out flaws or ineffeciencies or outright !@#$-ups. It just happens to do it in an oppressively optimistic "Hoo-ah, we're the Army, we can do better than this!" manner.

I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood. I thought we were talking about what they knew and did before the storm, not after. I've never heard a thing about requests for troops before the storm hit. And as a point of fact: the National Guard are state, not local forces. Although the NG can be federalized into the Army, the federal government can't do so to send the Arkansas NG to Louisiana; the governor of LA has to make the request to the governor of Arkansas. Blaming the federal government for not deploying state assets for something that's the responsibility of a municipality in a completely different state is disingenious at best. Again, are we talking about the response, AFTER the storm? Or the preparation BEFORE the storm? In the examples you quote (and I have vivid memories of both as well), I don't recall the federal government being any more prescient or responsive than they were with Katrina. Ditto hurricane Andrew, which my wife went through (and the response to which was also roundly criticized as a total !@#$-up). In fact, as I recall, all the initial response was at the local and state level; it took a considerable amount of time for any federal resources to get into the region. I know it took a considerable amount of time with Andrew, because that storm did roughly the same thing Katrina did: smash the surrounding infrastructure, to the point where simply moving from place to place was problematic. It took about 7-10 days for relief to get over dry land to the worst-hit locations after Andrew went through...in New Orleans, they moved about twice as much twice as fast into the middle of a swamp. Yet the effort for Katrina is now perceived as being worse than that for Andrew. And that seems somehow sensible to people? And all that blather is aside from the issue of the role the federal government is supposed to play in these situations. Never mind what we think the government should do, what we think they're capable of, what we think the elected officials are capable of understanding, and answer one simple question: what is the role of the federal government in a natural disaster such as a hurricane? Not "what should their role be"...what is it? A lot of the criticism lobbed at the federal government for Katrina seems to be nothing more than "the government didn't do what I think they should do", with no consideration given to whether or not what one thinks they should do is their actual job. That, I think, would be a good place to start...drop all the whiny bull sh--, and figure out exactly what was and was not the federal responsibility. After that...then we can figure out if the !@#$ed up or not, and even talk about whether or not they should take on more responsibility.

Compared to me, you're a party animal. While the wife's upstairs watching a movie, I'm down here reading the official Army "OIF lessons learned" book. And I call that "fun". Needs more acronyms, though. The authors accidentally use actual words in some places.

Great! I'd like to liquidate my ownership stake, please. Want to buy it from me?