Author: TSO

Got back from Vegas last night (having lost 10/12 bets, and the two I won were for other people) and the first thing I am greeted by is this piece of shit television commercial from VoteVets. Please watch it at least twice, and try to figure out what this numbnuts is talking about:

Just off the top of my head, this commercial is completely assinine for a number of reasons.
1) You didn’t take a “pledge” before you deployed to Iraq, you took an Oath to support and defend our country. You only changed it to “pledge” to try to make a dopey argument that doesn’t even work on its merits.
2) “Richard Mourdock sees pledges differently.” Dumb, unsupported by facts. See #3.
3) Um, Mourdock didn’t take a pledge to save all Indiana jobs. If you had him making such a pledge and breaking it, that would be a commercial.

Let’s look at how idiotic such a pledge would be. Back in the mid 1700’s and early 1800’s, Massacusetts streets (Boston, other cities) were lit by Whale Oil lamps. Each night dutiful employees of the Commonwealth would set out and light these things so that shady characters couldn’t do nefarious things in the night. Now, what happened to those whale oil lamp lighters? Do you mean to tell me that all the people engaged in that occupation in Massachusetts have been let go? Are you kidding me? We put all those people out of jobs? Why does the Mass State Gov’t have a historical hatred towards their workers?

Well, it was no longer financially efficient to use whale oil lamps. We went with lightbulbs. Is this idiot really saying that Mass should still employ the same number of lamp lighters?

What about carriage folk? Should Mass have banned the automobile so that these hard working homosapiens and their equine coworkers could still have jobs?
4) Mourdock opposed the Chrysler bailout because when you look at the cost/benefit of it, we come out in the red. Why have people working in occupations that on the whole end up costing money for the society?

During the evenings of late I have been listening to the book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright. (Highest recommendation for those interested in history and social science.) In it he talks about how the societies that adapted most quickly to new technologies were the ones that have historically “Won.” He talks about China and how the Ming Dynasty tried to shut itself off from the world, and they suffered for 400 years because of it. Once you are plugged in, unplugging will only lead to your demise as a society. China has played catch up ever since.

Now, if other cars can be made or purchased for less money, relieving the stress on the purchaser, but putting some folks out of work, wouldn’t it stand to reason that society as a whole should figure out the most cost effective way to get those people employed? If Japan can fish for 1/2 of what it costs Australia, and Australia can produce wood for 1/2 of what it costs Japan, doesn’t it make sense for Japan to import wood and export fish? (Just an example, I am not an Australian import/export specialist).

If Chrysler is losing money hand over fist, and taking the taxpayers with them, why the hell should we continue on? Isn’t the economy dynamic enough to find something else that these people could do?

Isn’t that what the free market all about?

I was initially ambivalent on the Indiana Senate Race. I wanted Lugar gone, because I just find him to be wretched. I don’t much care for my other GOP Senator either. But this ad is so idiotic and panders to morons that Mourdock just locked down my vote.

Yes, Veterans need jobs. But we aren’t training them to light whale oil lanterns because that doesn’t serve the purposes of the country. How about we find occupations that have some viability in the long term for these folks, instead of shoving them into a business that is costing the American taxpayers money?

This article makes my point for me. Wonder how many Vets were employed making batteries no one could afford.

UPDATE: Shame on me for not looking up VoteVets’ crappy research. Here is the article they use as a source on their claims. I’ll highlight part of it:

State Treasurer Richard Mourdock is reviving his dormant effort to call the Chrysler bankruptcy proceedings into question.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a June bid by three Indiana funds to block a deal that Mourdock, a former Vanderburgh County commissioner, said would break from ordinary process and cost Indiana funds millions of dollars.

On Thursday, Mourdock’s office asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the questions he raised about the federal government-backed sale of the bulk of Chrysler’s assets to Italian automaker Fiat.

Mourdock, a Republican, argues that Chrysler’s sale was unfair to secured creditors, such as Indiana’s Major Moves transportation fund and state pension funds for teachers and police officers, which his office estimates lost $6 million in value in the sale.

Instead, unsecured stakeholders, such as the United Auto Workers union, received more value.

So, there you have it. Mourdock was being a steward of the public funds, and trying to get that money for actual Hoosiers like me who pay their taxes, and instead VoteVets goes after the unemployed veterans (number unknown.) Here’s an idea, how about spending the money that went to the UAW on veterans training instead? I assume VoteVets would fight against that as well, because let’s be honest, they care much less about veterans than they do doing attack ads against Republicans.

How do these guys get away with claiming they are non-partisan?

There’s a lot of idiotic blogs out there. Hell, I’ve written my fair share of idiotic crap. But I think what separates us from other shitty blogs is that at the least we aren’t intellectual cowards. If there is a thing I loathe it is when you comment on someone’s blog (when they are talking specifically about us) and they cowardly delete the comments when you have them by the short and curlies. So, today I would like to award the “Intellectual Coward of the Day Award” to this positively absurd post by Michael Cummings.

I never heard of this guy before, never read his blog, and really couldn’t give a Senegali diarrhitic turd what he thinks about us, but you’d think that a guy with a CIB would have the courage of his convictions to actually address a comment without just deleting it, especially since I didn’t use any profanity. Alas no. So, since discourse at his shop isn’t working, I’ll just address it here.

Obviously with a title like “Our Politically Correct Communist Milblogs” the author was just trolling for us to link to him. It’s a great tactic, since apparently no one reads the thing anyway, and he’s achieved his goal. Bravo!

Without rehashing his entire argument, he says that Milblogs are hypocritical for bemoaning political correctness in the military, and then attacking Chris Hayes from The Nation for saying that he was uncomfortable with calling our brothers and sisters killed in combat “heroes.” If you don’t get the argument, you aren’t alone.

Here’s the crux of his argument:
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Apologies if Jonn already posted, but fug me….this dude had a bad day.

Well, actually maybe you can guess.

Bear in mind that he’s now been tossed from the Special Forces Association for being a weapons grade asshole and a liar, but this myth of his, by hook or by crook he’ll keep repeating it until you believe it.  It’s downright Orwellian, wouldn’t you say?

Once a day I check in on him at his multitude of haciendas, just dying to hear what is going on in his dreadfully important life.  Has he painted the house?  Posting pictures of the kids he ignored for year?  These are the questions that plague me.

So I was happy to note that he now has a 5th website I can track his insanity on, the http://stolenvalorhuntershomophobes.weebly.com/index.html. 

For the record, I am not a homophobe, just ask any of the guys at St Jacquestober fest last weekend when I was handing out hugs like Wittgenfeld hands out candy in his windowless van down by the creek.

 For those who are not retarded, kindly compare MOS 18E with MOS 05B.

 

Holy Sheep Shit, get a load of this “No shit there I was story….”

 

You know what this calls for?  A Claymore-esque style phony war story competition. 

There I was on the path, wearing facepaint and a banana hammock with only my AK47 standing between me and certain death……

OK, now you finish it.

Crossposted from my Paying Home.

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I have the best job in the world.  That’s what I tell everyone who asks, and I stand by it.  I’m the only person that can come off a two week business trip, and be excited enough to go to work to tell everyone about it.

My Embed in Afghanistan from the July issue of The American Legion magazine went over really well seemingly with Legionnaires who read the article, as I only got about 5 complaints.  One I rejected as sort of insane (he hates the National Guard, which was off topic since the unit was not NG), and the other 4 played right into my hands.  “Why”, my readers asked, “do you always cover the Army and not other units?”

Fair enough.  The reality is I speak Army fluently, but the other services not as much.  I actually don’t know much about what the Marines had going on to even know what to write about.  So I wrote to a friend, Colonel Will (first name, don’t want to out him totally) and asked him what I should cover.  He answered straight away, “SPMAGTF.”

Now, this might mean something to someone, but to me it was just letters arranged in a manner that I couldn’t make out.  So, I googled it, and came up with this article from the Marine Corps Times:

A select group of Marines is quietly battling terrorism across a wide swath of Africa as part of the first wave of what could become a long-term mission for the Corps.

The 180 members of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force 12 are serving in the Trans-Sahel region of Africa, stretches across the center of the continent’s north along the Sahara Desert. The unit has also deployed farther east, in countries such as Djibouti.

“There are al-Qaida affiliates operating in and around this area,” said Maj. Dave Winnacker, executive officer for SPMAGTF-12. “This definitely is the next frontier as far as there is the opportunity for expansion for both ourselves and for violent extremists. Essentially, we’re trying to beat them to the punch.”

The unit, made up mostly of reservists, is focused not on combat but rather team-building with militaries scattered throughout this region, said Winnacker, a member of 4th Force Reconnaissance Company, which provided the command element.

So anyway, a week later I heard from a Public Affairs Officer from the SPMAGTF, and it was game on.

Now I am back, and while I don’t want to give everything up, since it will be a cover story in December, I did owe you something since I have been gone for two weeks. 

[Deleted video you guys already saw.]

So yeah, no “terrible land.”  I am a total wimp around snakes, so discussions about black mambas and such made me a little nervous.  And they said some sort of lizard come out of one guys toilet, and that story did little to help a stomach not used to malaria medicines and a full seafood diet.  But “terrible land” it was not.

So anyway, some pictures.

Chief Blakely was the main US Navy guy, and gives an impressive class.  This one was on various troops leading procedures involved in Riverine operations.  Blakely is a Master at Arms, which I am led to believe is essentially a Navy MP.  Gave one of the better classes I’ve seen in my time in the military.  The other gentleman is our interpreter, since the English skills of the Senegalese present varied quite a bit.  (They all speak French.)

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Dude, totally badass trip, and I take back most the bad things I ever said about USMC. Dudes were awesome. My one thing I’ve always had against the Marines was the rigidity to their rank structure, refering to someone by the full “Staff Sergeant Joblo” and such. Well, that doesn’t happen in a Recon unit. You got a task that takes 3 people, it’s the first three guys to jump up. No shirkers, no figuring out who the low three men were etc. The Major in chanrge of this unit was straight up badass all around. Incredibly smart (WAY smarter than me) and about as frenetic an individual as you will ever meet. A guy on the ride down referred to the Major (He has a team of 15 USMC and 4 USN guys) as a “True Believer.” He was that, in all the good ways.

How I managed to do 2 embeds with two amazingly awesome units is beyond me. I did two deployments with knuckleheads in charge. If I’d deployed with this Major (will release his name later with my story) or Captain Stewart from my A-stan embed, I never would have gotten out.

Anyway, our video guy made this up this morning. The song was his selection, and is incredibly tongue in cheek, since it wasn’t a “terrible land” in any way, shape or form. In fact, want to know how bad I slummed? Take a look at the pictures of the resort that I stayed in.

Embed with high speed US personnel AND I get to stay in a private thatched roof cabana? Yes please.

A special thanks to my PAO and fellow Citadel Alum, LT Pitrone for making this happen. Others as well, but I will get to them in my article.

What up Two Bobs? (That is apparently local slang for idiot white guys.)

Made it in safely, at the Hotel in Dakar now, preparing to head south to the Marine outpost in Toubakouta. My Marine PAO is a good dude, got to meet with embassy staff this morning, and set up an interview hopefully with the Ambassador for later next week.

For now, fricken exhausted. Judging from the size of the seats, people from South Africa must be tiny homunculous people. So, just about drooling on myself, and the local breakfast has eaten a hole through my stomach, so I have that going for me. My luggage made it, so I have a camera, but it isn’t charged yet, so you get no lovely sea scape pictures out the window.

Hope all is well back in the land of the big PX.

TSO out.

Cross posted from Burn Pit, but since everyone here also followed the story when it first went down, felt the need to share it here. This had me pretty pissed off last week, but more revelations seem to be coming out, and I now suspect that the Salon.com guy who wrote this is the same one who lost his job over the initial report. Looks like he might have tried to get even with Rehbein.

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I don’t read Salon.com, but this article was emailed to me last week. Obviously with convention going on I was a little busy to respond, but the attack is so ridiculous as to actually warrant dedicating some time this week to dissecting it.

Entitled “Assassins in the Army?!” it resurrects the old Southern Poverty Law Center canard about how there are droves of right-wing lunatics and murderers in the Army. We’ve been down that road before, and it wouldn’t usually necessitate any response were it not for some idiotic tie-in with Past National Commander Rehbein and The American Legion that author Daryl Johnson just sort of throws into the middle of his piece.

I’m going to skip the bulk of his piece and address it some other time, as it is literally a rehash of the nonsense that came up with the discredited Homeland Security report that Mr. Johnson gamely tries to defend. But then he starts taking shots at us:

In his letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, dated April 13, 2012, David K. Rehbein, national commander of the American Legion, stated that “the American Legion passed Resolution 407. It resolved, in part, ‘… we consider any individual, group of individuals or organizations, which creates, or fosters racial, religious or class strife among our people, or which takes into their own hands the enforcement of law, determination of guilt, or infliction of punishment, to be un-American, a menace to our liberties, and destructive to our fundamental law.’” Rehbein further stated in his letter to Napolitano that he believed the DHS report was incomplete and politically biased.

Let’s start off with the various inaccuracies here. First off, the letter to Napolitano was from April of 2009, over three years ago. At the time PNC Rehbein was commander, but even a quick google search, or a cursory knowledge of The American Legion would reveal that he hasn’t been our commander for the past three years, where we have been represented by commanders Fang Wong, Jimmie Foster, Clarence Hill, and currently by James Koutz. By changing the date, Johnson seems to be implying that we’re still fighting this fight. Well, we aren’t, since at least as far as the DHS is concerned, we were right, as noted by Secretary Napolitano in a meeting at the time:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met with the American Legion on Friday to apologize for a right-wing extremism report written by her agency, and the veterans group walked away from the meeting mollified.

Napolitano blamed one of her agency’s analysts for prematurely sending out the intelligence assessment to law enforcement, according to Craig Roberts, an American Legion member who attended the meeting. The report says veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan could be susceptible to right-wing recruiters or commit lone acts of violence.

“She essentially admitted fault within her office,” Roberts said.

In a statement after the meeting, Napolitano said, “I pledge that the department has fixed the internal process that allowed this document to be released before it was ready.”

So, as you can tell from Napolitano’s statement, it wasn’t just PNC Rehbein or The American Legion that thought that it was incomplete and politically biased; the Secretary felt that way too.

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