...you might as well have it stuck in yours, too.
I just tried to import an AutoCAD .dwg file into Microsoft Visio. Epic fail. It told me it could do it and then ended up with a blank drawing. I did the same thing with Adobe Illustrator and ended up with an editable drawing.
Adobe 1, Microsoft 0.
What do you suppose property and casualty insurance rates were like in Tokyo during the days when Godzilla used to attack?
David Brooks has a very good thought piece that I don't think I can improve on.
Meanwhile, our Precentor of Measurements has a similar post with an anecdote that reinforces David Brooks.
Here at the expansive and luxurious editorial offices of The Scratching Post, we feel for our poorer cousins over at the New York Times. Recently, they've suffered enormous financial losses and are looking towards layoffs across the board. No doubt they've also had to cut back on lunches and snacks. It is the low blood sugar levels resulting from these austerity programs that we believe is to blame for their recent decision to reject John McCain's editorial response to Barack Obama's editorial of last week.
Some have claimed that this is just another example of the MSM swooning over Obama like drunk sorority girls in the presence of the football team, but we know better. We know that their journalistic professionalism would never let them prostrate themselves before Obama as if he were some kind of New Age Messiah.
To help them in this dark time while they find something to eat and restore their senses, we're linking to the DrudgeReport page that has Senator McCain's editorial printed in its entirety, an editorial we feel certain that the NewYork Times would have run had they had sufficient food to eat.
Or if Senator McCain had been a Democrat.
Whatever the cause of their omission, here's an excerpt.
Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military's readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.Read the whole thing.
No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.
But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.
I finally broke down and paid an $80 or so premium and bought a Wii off of Amazon. Here's what convinced me I wanted one for our family.
With all the superior graphics on the XBox 360 and the PS3, there is no beauty to their games at all. That's why I'm getting a Wii.
I'm not creating any new content today, I'm just posting videos and images. I feel lazy. We had another hectic, yet fun weekend and I'm just out of psychic energy.
...on Wednesday.
Today's San Diego Union print edition has a huge banner headline screaming that "Iraqi Prime Minister Endorses Obama's Withdrawal Plan" or something like that. Of course, Prime Minister Maliki has come out and said that he's been completely misquoted and said nothing of the sort, but the headline is out there on every newsstand.
Obama was totally wrong about the surge, the surge has worked better than we had hoped, the war is won despite Obama's complete misunderstanding of the situation, we can now remove victorious troops ahead of schedule and what is the conclusion by the MSM?
Obama was right all along.
The MSM is simply the propaganda wing of the Obama campaign.
Yesterday, my fiancee and I spent some time clearing brush at a Catholic retreat where they were installing a beautiful new statue of Mary. Being the rugged sort (my biceps bulging from all the clicking I do with a mouse), I brought my beaten up old 1984 Nissan pickup. The thing has rust holes all over the bed. It used to be red, but years ago I had it painted white by Earl Scheib where they did not remove the original color. Consequently, the white is chipping away all over the place making the thing a hideous beast of a truck.
It's also great for hauling things because you can't possibly scratch or dent it in any way that will make it look worse. Everyone else in the work party showed up in their SUVs and sedans. I had the only truck capable of hauling the brush, wood and rocks we had cleared away. Of course, my trusty pickup and I leaped into action while the others were all doing something else. (I think it was texting each other about which yoga classes they were going to attend or which macrobiotic yogurts were the best.*)
All I could think of at the time was what a difference 130 years makes. Way back then, out in the Old West, you needed to fend off the Apaches and tame the wilderness. I had the kind of mount you'd want when you needed to ride off to Fort Bridger for reinforcements.
I can't think of anything else to title this post. I'm truly at a loss for words to describe their latest article on winning the war and withdrawing our victorious troops. I guess it's because they don't report that.
WASHINGTON – President Bush and Iraq's prime minister have agreed to set a “time horizon” for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as part of a long-term security accord they are trying to negotiate by the end of the month, White House officials said yesterday.I give up. I simply give up. I wish I could say that these two are the dimmest of the dim bulbs in the MSM, but I can't. You know I can't. Almost to a man, the MSM must be the home of the lowest watt bulbs in the country.
The decision, reached during a videoconference Thursday between Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, marks the culmination of a gradual but significant shift for the president, who has adamantly fought – and even ridiculed – efforts by congressional Democrats to impose what he described as artificial timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces.
I got this from a friend and thought I'd share.
Some people are on the side of civilization.
Some people are not.
Update: I found the perfect music video for this post. It's by a pack of fat, drug-addled toads who helped push the whole idea that's killing these communities. I saw these creeps in concert. It was easily the single worst concert I have ever been to. They had less stage presence than a damp mop. They were actually angry with the audience because we weren't buy enough of their CDs. Enjoy.
...and I can't find even one out there to buy. It's also the most popular gaming system in the country now.
These posts are getting easier and easier to write. Confederate Yankee notes that the tenth province has been handed over to the Iraqis and the former center of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq is about to go over soon as well.
How well do you think we'd be doing if we had followed Mr. Hope n' Change's marvelous judgment and run away a year ago?
Of course, had we done that, we could have saved about $100B and spent it on the hopelessly bloated public education industry or maybe thrown more of it at ethanol subsidies for the massive corporate farms in the Midwest. Do you think that would have been a better use of our time and money than turning one of the world's oil superpowers into a friendly democracy and removing a murderous tyrant?
Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find out. As soon as the money from Iraqi Freedom is made available following our successful withdrawal, you can be sure it will find it's way into the departments of Education and Agriculture. It always does.
So I've decided to install Ubuntu Linux on one of my machines. At work, I was given a newer PC which was about ten times faster than my old one. I brought my old one home and am trying to turn it into a Lunux server so I can test out all the things I bloviate about at work.
On the advice of some friends, I decided to try Ubuntu. Going to their site, I downloaded both the server and the desktop versions. My connection turned out to be very fast, over 1MB per second on the download. From there, I followed the instructions and burned an installation CD for each.
Neither worked.
The server CD won't boot and the desktop CD has an error in one of the files. I'm blogging right now from the desktop version - it will boot off the CD, but it won't install onto the hard drive. All I've managed to do so far is wipe out everything that used to be on the hard drive. I'm guessing (read: hoping) that the problem was a write error when I burned the CD, so I'm doing it all over again, using my laptop to download and burn the new CD.
On the plus side, Ubuntu screens feature a cheerful orange color.
More later as events warrant.
Update: Making a new CD with the laptop worked. I've now got Ubuntu desktop installed. As I play with it, I'll post what I learn. I like the price in particular. It's free.
The Heavily Armed Tourist has an outstanding post on victory in Iraq. Here's a tidbit.
Yesterday I found inspiration in the tears of joy on hundreds of faces at the graduation for the Iraqi Military Academy at Rustimiyah as 252 young men graduated from the one year course of instruction and were commissioned as 2nd Lieutenants in the Iraqi Army and Air Force...
The stands were overflowing with their families and friends frantically waving as they spotted their sons, brothers and friends in the formation...
the ceremony kicked off with a bang as the entire corps of cadets sang the Iraqi national anthem, which on its own is a powerful song, but when sung by almost a thousand young soldiers at the tops of their lungs with joy and pride you can’t help but feel a chill along the back of your neck without needing to understanding a single word.
As soon as the formation marched forward to the graduation line the candy started raining down. It is an Arabic tradition to give sweets at joyous occasions and at the military academy graduations this has taken the form of handfuls of candy being flung from the stands by women at the cadets and all of us gathered on the floor. I have never seen such huge smiles on Iraqi faces in my five years here. One wonderful older woman had a huge purse which she emptied at all of us on the floor before giving me a wink and transitioning to a basket at her side with another barrage.
Michael Yon, the most capable and competent journalist in Iraq had this to say a few days ago.
14 July 2008Thanks to the outstanding professionalism of our armed fources, the courage and tenacity of President Bush and the leadership and vision of people like John McCain, we've won.
The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.
Here's a picture of an old salt I took this weekend while on our beach mini-vacation. Click on it for a better version.
John McCain's staff made sure to add this to their list of videos on the McCain dot com YouTube channel. You can't say he doesn't have a sense of humor!
Our Missionary to the Frozen, Northern Wastelands was right. The Democrats are stupid enough to keep borrowing in the face of insanely huge mountains of debt.
House Democrats want to inject at least $50 billion into the economy through another economic-stimulus bill, which is likely to include a second round of checks for middle-income people.So let's review, shall we? We're paying farmers to grow corn so we can burn it, we're paying the public education industry to, well, do something or other, we just sent rubber checks out to taxpayers who don't pay the taxes, we're promising to back the preposterous loan portfolios of the two largest mortgage holders in the country and now we're back to mailing cash to everyone.
