Another brisk morning here (and pretty much everywhere in the north from the midwest to the east coast). It was about -10 out our way (at least according to the thermometer in Granny’s car – my sister had -11 over at her place). It’s still well below zero, though there are hopes that we’ll hit double digits (barely) later on. Definitely keeps the beer nice and frosty. I have 4 tons of pellets coming tonight, which is good ‘cuz we’re down to about 20 bags, and that won’t last us 2 weeks if it stays this cold. Though they say we’ll be up to 40 next week, which will be nice.
It’ll also be nice to get today over. I have this thing where I sleep until about 2:00 or so, and then I’m awake (or in some state that’s somewhere between being awake and being asleep) for the rest of the night. It makes it easy to come into work early, but the day sure starts to slow down by about eleven o’clock. That’s why working from home is nice – I can get some work done while my brain is actually engaged.
Speaking of engaging my brain, I guess I’d better get back to work.
Stay warm.
Four years ago Senate Minority leader declared ‘my number one priority is making sure president Obama’s a one-term president’. Remember that repug/rovian tactic of attacking your opponents strength regardless of any basis in truth or fact. Just make it all up or lie about it if necessary. The right wing and tealiban echo chambers will drive the lies and the propaganda to the mindless faithful.
Just keep that in mind when you hear Boehner and other repugs with a camera/microphone talking about Obama’s mission to ‘annnihilate the republican party’. It’s all a head fake and more false equivalence. “Look over here and don’t pay any attention to our modus aperandi whenever there is a Democrat in or nearing the White House. Look at the hatchet job they attempted yesterday on their former favorite Dem, Hillary Clinton.
Watching the John Kerry confirmation hearings only convinces me more. Kerry would have been a far better PotUS than Bush/Cheney and we’d be in a far better place now if this above mentioned MO hadn’t resulted in his ‘swift boating’. Then again, there was that shoe thing.
:tap:
I wonder, do the cops keep the “evidence” in storage after the trial?
I’m only grateful for two things: this is in New Mexico, and not NY. And Rep. Brown isn’t a man.
We had too many errands today and so I didn’t watch the Kerry confirmation hearings. I’ll have to wait for Rachel to bring me up to date. I enjoyed Hillary yesterday. She did a good job with those Rethugs.
:slap: Her expressions could be priceless. Her silence was often most condemning. Now she’s got all of the old enemies fired up but her standing is so much greater outside of the fraction that follows the echo chamber.
I have to admit, my favorite moment was when Rand Paul (the pompous jerk) asked Hillary about weapons being smuggled from Libya to Turkey. She looked as if a kid had just asked her at what age reindeer learn to fly. And yet she managed to be polite.
Arms and the Women
By GAIL COLLINS
Women in the military are going to get to serve in combat. They killed the Equal Rights Amendment to keep this from happening, but, yet, here we are. And about time.
“I think people have come to the sensible conclusion that you can’t say a woman’s life is more valuable than a man’s life,†the retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught once told me.
Vaught is the president of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation. She retired from active duty in 1985, so she remembers a different era entirely. “I went to Vietnam, and when I found out I was going, the first thing I wanted to know was if I’d be trained in weapons. They told me I didn’t need to be. That’s unheard of today,†she said on Wednesday when I caught up with her on the phone.
“And,†she added, “I wore my skirts.â€
Now they wear fatigues and tote rifles. So the Joint Chiefs of Staff have bowed to reality and told Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that “the time has come†to stop excluding women from combat positions. The transformation won’t happen immediately, and it might not be universal. But it’s still a groundbreaking change. When the recommendation became public Wednesday, except for a broadside from the Concerned Women for America (“our military cannot continue to choose social experimentation and political correctness over combat readinessâ€), the reception seemed overwhelmingly positive.
It’s hard to remember — so many parts of recent history now seem hard to remember — but it was the specter of women under fire that did more than anything else to quash the movement for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in the 1970s. “We kept saying we hope no one will be in combat, but, if they are, women should be there, too,†recalled Gloria Steinem.
The fear of putting women in the trenches has been dispelled on two fronts. One, of course, is the change in the way the American public thinks about women. The other is the shortage of trenches in modern warfare, when an officer on the front lines is not necessarily in a more dangerous position than a support worker. Shoshana Johnson, a cook, was shot in both ankles, taken captive and held for 22 days after her unit was separated from a convoy crossing the Iraqi desert. Lori Piestewa, a Native American and, like Johnson, a single mother, was driving in the same convoy full of clerks and maintenance workers. She was skillfully steering her Humvee through mortar fire when a truck immediately ahead of her jackknifed and her front wheel was hit by a rocket. She was fatally injured in the ensuing crash.
The biggest safety concern for women in the military is actually not so much enemy fire as sexual attacks from fellow members of their own service. Because the crime is so underreported, it’s impossible to say how many women suffer sexual assault while they’re in uniform, but 3,192 cases were recorded in 2011. Allowing women to get the benefits of serving in combat positions won’t make that threat worse. In fact, it might make things better because it will mean more women at the top of the military, and that, inevitably, will mean more attention to women’s issues.
The military’s idea of what constitutes a combat position is more about bureaucracy than bullets. Today women are on armed patrols and in fighter planes. But they can’t hold approximately 200,000 jobs officially termed “combat,†which often bring more pay and can provide a stepping stone for promotions. The system is complicated. But cynics might wonder if some of the military brass fear women’s upward mobility more than the danger.
“We only have one four-star general who’s a woman,†said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who cheered the recommendation from the Joint Chiefs. It was, she said, “a great step forward for our military,†and one that wasn’t really expected. Only recently, Gillibrand recalled, she and her allies declared victory when they merely got language in the defense authorization bill requiring the Defense Department to study the question of women in combat.
Women now make up almost 15 percent of the American military and their willingness to serve made the switch to an all-volunteer Army possible. They’ve taken their posts with such seamless calm that the country barely noticed. The specter that opponents of the E.R.A. deemed unthinkable — our sisters and daughters dying under fire in foreign lands — has happened over and over and over. More than 130 women have died and more than 800 have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House of Representatives includes a female double-amputee in the person of the newly elected Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a former military pilot who lost both her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq.
We’ve come a long, sometimes tragic, heroic way.
Was someone wondering about Oily Taintz?
I always worry about Oily. She seems to be a not so competent con artist. Until now she has been able to raise money with her unflagging crazy. But, now that Obama has been sworn in, it would seem like the end for poor Orly. And, if Orly can’t work her scam, and if her dentistry is anything like her lawyering, I fear for her patients. Perhaps Fox Noise will give her a spot.
Sooner or later I imagine she’ll have her license yanked. That NM Rep woman who wrote such an incredibly stupid law on fetuses is also a lawyer as are some of those wackadoodle folks at the Westboro “church.” At some point one would hope personality and mental health testing would become mandatory entrance requirements in our nations’ law schools. :40:
Catholic Hospital Claims a Fetus Is Not a Person To Protect Itself From a Lawsuit
Oh great. Then the Catholic Health Inititiative goes after the grieving widower and single dad for 100+k in attorney fees and the man has to file bankruptcy.
Our losing gubernatorial candidate, Carl Palidino, is running for Buffalo school board with a vow to fire all the administrators and replace them with “real” professionals.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/25/carl-paladino-buffalo_n_2552542.html
Just mentioning Paladino makes me think of a lot of things including attending a Giants game once with Johnny Ramone (a repug, doncha know?). Not to mention that I went to a show the other night at which Giants 3rd base coach Tim Flannery performed (a fine musician) with Steve Wozniak, producer of the US Festival and co-founder of a computer startup sitting down in front.
Palidino has no pleasant associations for me. Because of Palidino, Cuomo had to do nothing to win election.
Johnny Ramone was also a voracious collector of baseball memorabilia. I went to the game with him and a couple of friends who played in a most of the time all-gurl tribute band called The Ramonas.
The friend of mine who passed away last month was the brother of their lead singer. They played last night at a rawkus celebration of Jeffro’s life which was abundantly attended and a great sendoff. The 4 hour affair included a set by Polkacide as well as other sets by most of the bands Jeff played in or loose aggregations of former band mates.
In heaven, there is no beer.
🙁 :pup: :40: :gate: