justbarkingmad.com

If you can pull off the “It’s for the Kids” speech you have it going on. Rubio has it going on.

Nasty earthquake in Turkey. I’m sure Mr. Robertson has something stupid to say.

Luckily the quake struck just after the faithful had risen for prayers. Wonder what the douchebags like Robertson and Phreddy Phelps will have to say about that!

Meanwhile it is cold in those areas of Turkey. Much like Northern Europe because there is no Gulf stream to bring warm high pressure to those area. Warm during the day but way cold at night. This time of year most will be near freezing for large portions of the day, if you look at a weather map it looks much like the South Central US.

Meanwhile, winter is coming on in Chile.

Senator Maria Cantwell…admittedly a GILF…seems to be rolling in the clover with CNBC Washington correspondent and New York Times writer John Harwood.

Harwood has made a plea to fellow journalists not to report it. We’ll see.

Mrs. QM has scrimped and saved enough to get a new computer. It should make things a lot easier to post. She’ll be hooking it up soon.

I think anyone who has fired a grenade laucnher wondered about nailing a fuel truck.

In the Miles Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold, she writes of a fictional planet in which all young people receive birth control implants when they reach puberty. There are strict requirements before the implant is removed and a person is allowed to have a child.

While possibly a Draconian measure, there are people in this world who make me wish that we had this technology now. I was heartbroken to read in the news today about a South Korean couple who were so busy raising a virtual child on the internet that their real-life, flesh and blood daughter starved to death at 3 months.

The girl was initially well cared for by her grandmother, but her health deteriorated after she moved back in with her parents.

Police tried to arrest the parents, but they disappeared after the baby’s funeral.

Authorities caught up with them Tuesday and charged them with child abuse and neglect.

The couple told police of their guilt after their arrests.

“Due to our sense of guilt, we have not been to a PC gaming room over these five months,” they said.

Mrs. QM

Congratulations, ladies you can now be just as big a sports thug as the men and get the same sorts of punishment.

New Jersey’s Governor Chrisite gives a barn burner of a speech completely off the cuff. (video here)

There’s no time left. We have no room left to borrow. We have no room left to tax. So we merely have room left now, to do this. We are all reaching the edge of a cliff. And it reminds me a bit of that part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the had a seminal decision to make. So what did they do? They held hands and they jumped off the cliff.

We have to hold hands at every level of government, state county, municipal, school board. We have to hold hands and jump off the cliff.
...

It’s time for us to hold hands and jump off the cliff. It’s time for us to do the difficult things that need to be done and to stop playing the petty politics of yesterday, of lying to the people telling them they do not have to pay for it because someone else will.

What a man. Go get ‘em Fat Man!

I forgot about this when it came out

Not all of Washington, D.C. was shut-down recently because of snow. At the Tomb of the Unknowns, members of “The Old Guard” continued to walk post; just like they have every day, every night, during rain, snow, freeze, and even during a hurricane a couple of years ago. They never stopped walking, they never stopped their vigil, they never stopped honoring and remembering.

There’s 27 members of that platoon…15 are badged the others are training. Since 1958 there have been less then 600 men who have earned the right to guard the Unknowns.

Army Spc. Mathew Brisiel of Spring, Texas, on Friday followed his brother, Staff Sgt. Jonathan Brisiel, when he became the 578th soldier awarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Identification Badge since 1958.

The 24-year-old said it was the toughest thing he’s ever done. Sleep only averaged about four hours a night after 20-hour days of work, studying “tomb knowledge,” shining shoes and perfecting uniforms.

The job entails guarding the tomb at Arlington National Cemetery all hours of the day, regardless of weather. The soldiers pace silently and deliberately 21 steps in front of the tomb and pause facing the tomb for 21 seconds. Each walk lasts a half-hour in the summer months and an hour in the winter.

Snowmagedon just another day on the Watch:

The Pentagon spent nearly one billion dollars designing a covert mini-sub for Special Operations only for it to be a miserable failure. A US company stepped up and built one that just might work for ten million.

It dives deeper and goes further then the Pentagon’s ASDS.

The S301 saves a lot of money by skipping lots of the high tech sensors, and “additional features” that some admiral or contractor tacked on for no particular reason (but that increased the cost, and complexity, of the system a lot.) The regular warship builders and defense contractors dismiss something like the S301 as a “civilian toy,” but the troops have some input, and they are definitely interested.

In a dramatic last minute desperation shot Sidney Crosby blindly flipped the puck into the net to win the Gold for Canada.

“I just threw it at the net. I wasn’t really aiming for anything.”

Well, for a nation where most children begin playing the game at age three even a Blind Pig goal must be satisfying.

This makes them three for four in gold for their National Sports with only the Canadian Women failing to win a Gold in Curling. Which, I think sets a new record for Winter Gold.

I meant to post this yesterday congratulating Canada for defeating Slovokia and advancing to getting the Silver.

Good Job!

See you on Sunday.

From Political Wire

“This is going to come as quite a shock to people up here that I can write a book, much less read one.”
—Former President George W. Bush, quoted by Mike Allen, addressing a Bush-Cheney reunion breakfast. Bush’s memoir is due in November.

On the other hand did Obama actually write any of his own books or are they both by Bill Ayres?

Today President Obama announced his last selections to the supposedly bi-partisan Debt Reduction Task Force. While I’m sure people like Glenn Beck and others are going to go nuts about SEIU boss Commissar Andy Stern the telling appointment is Rivlin.

Rivlin was the first chief of the Congressional Budget Office and was appointed by Jimmy Carter. She was vociferously opposed to Reagan’s tax cuts. She is an avowed Keynesian.

She believes in large public debt. She believes in higher tax rates.

There are still nine more members to be named but the addition of Stern and Rivlin indicate that there will be little actual recommendations for reducing the spending and size of government.

For over a decade Lamar Alexander has been rattling around the GOP Presidential Hopeful corral. I’ve heard people praise him but I never knew why. I’m a relatively informed viewer of the political scene and he never struck me as a contender. Until now.

He stuck the boot in Da Won’s face. Where has this Lamar Alexander been for the last fifteen years?

Earlier this week the Dallas Tea Party extended an invitation to Keith Olbermann to attend their next event. This was done, primarily, because of Olbermann’s unhinged rant stating that if you went to a Tea Party rally and looked around you would see no diversity. The Dallas Tea Party begged to differ.

Mr. Olbermann, emerging from his bath tub, announced that he couldn’t attend because his dad is still in hospital and besides there still is no diversity in the tea party. And, by the way, we have plenty of lackeys of color at MSNBC.

While I’m not exactly in charge of this, and I’m not going to drag people into this by name when they were not the ones attacked, that will probably be a surprise to one of our regular daytime news anchors and one of our nighttime newscasters, and the two part-time newscasters, and the dozen minority anchors and reporters who often join us from the broadcast NBC network, and the seven salaried contributors to MSNBC, to say nothing of the regular guests.

Well, gee, good on ya Bath Tub Boy, nice to know that your network has, well, the liberal equivalent of Uncle Tom. To assuage your guilt, as you assault others as being racist, your Lilly White line up has substitutes who are of color. So you can pop them in there occasionally as pepper in the gravy.

They should be ashamed of willingly being used and you, sir, should resign your show in favor of a Person of Color. Actually, sir, you should resign because you are a hysterical hack who coarsens the debate for your own monetary interests.

From Tam:

Some good questions.