From the Rolling Stone Article that got General McChrystal in hot water:

The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo’s  platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram’s death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal’s new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. “These were abandoned houses,” fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. “Nobody was coming back to live in them.”One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,” the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that make any f–king sense?” Pfc. Jared Pautsch. “We should just drop a f–king bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself:  What are we doing here?”

via McChrystal’s real offense | Washington Examiner.

This incessant bi-partisian practice of running to the nearest TV Camera and saying “we have to do something” when anything remotely bad happens is the cause of, not the solution to, most of our problems.

The only thing I want most politicians to do is resign.

Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson agrees:

What good did all the airport legislation achieve? None. It simply means that you and I now must get to the airport six years before the plane is due to leave and arrive at the other end with yellow teeth, smelly armpits and no nail file. Did it prevent a chap from getting on board with exploding underpants? No, it did not.

Happily, however, I have a solution to the problem, a way that normal human behaviour can be preserved. It’s simple. We must start to accept that 5% of the population at any given time is bonkers. There are no steps to be taken to stamp this out and no lessons to be learnt when a man with a beard boards a plane with an exploding dog.

Government officials who are questioned on the steps of coroner’s courts must be reminded of this before they speak. So that instead of saying the current law is “not fit for purpose” and that something must be done, they familiarise themselves with an expression that sums up the situation rather better: “Shit happens.”

via What a daft way to stop your spaniel eating the milkman | Jeremy Clarkson – Times Online.

The US State Department agent asked to see my passport, and the concierge explained that I was a Somali refugee. So she looks at her computer screen and says, “um, I’m afraid there’s a problem, this passenger’s name is on a watch list.” Oh, great. Looks like my dad is playing Mr. Buzzkill again, just because I took that semester off from Oxford to go backpacking in Yemen. So I showed her my official State Department visa.

So I’m like, “honey, do I look like I’m a US military veteran?”

“No.”

“Do I look like I’m some sort of right wing anti-tax teabagger?”

“No.”

“Do I look like anybody else on the DHS terrorism danger list?”

“No, but…”

“Then I suggest that unless you want a nasty anti-discrimination lawsuit on your hands, you’d best give me an aisle seat. With extended legroom.”

Before it became a bad word, boondoggle was an innocent, humble craft. But that all changed on April 3, 1935: At a hearing in New York City on how New Deal relief money was being spent, a Brooklyn crafts teacher reluctantly testified that he was paid to show the jobless how to make “boon doggles,” a braided ring used to hold a neckerchief, particularly in scouting. The outcry was swift and a new, more sinister meaning was born – the word came to signify government make-work, later referring to wasteful government projects in general. Source: Cato Institute

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will run a successor institution, IndyMac Federal Bank FSB, starting next week, the Office of Thrift Supervision said in an e-mail yesterday. The regulator blamed U.S. Senator Charles Schumer for creating a “liquidity crisis” after a letter on June 26, in which he expressed concern that the bank may fail.

Mayor Dave Heilmann said the Illinois Department of Transportation determined the signs violated the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. He said had Oak Lawn not removed the signs, the city could have lost federally funded projects.

The public safety campaign to cut down on speeding through stop signs began in September 2007. Slogans such as “right there pilgrim,” “and smell the roses,” “do not pass go” and “means that you arent moving” were placed near or under 50 stop signs.

At the time, Heilmann said he thought the remarks would get motorists to pause, if for nothing else, to read the phrases.

Baby tax needed to save planet, claims expert:
A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus “baby levy” at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

I like this idea. Instead of taking money out of a tax payer’s wallet to support dead-beats who have kids, we’d slap them with a fine/tax instead. Get rid of the assinine incentives created by LBJ’s “Great Society” for poor people to have more kids they can’t support so they get more money from the government.