In other news - Army Strong (or not)

I am supposed to run 10 miles on Sunday in the Army 10 Miler.
I stopped training last Sunday when I ate pavement on my shortboard. My knee still hurts like a... a lot.
In an attempt to get back in the swing of things I ran 6 miles tonight and it was not pretty.

I saw a buddy down on the mall. We were waiting for a red light right before the World War II memorial. He said, 'come on, run with me'. To which I responded as I was getting a drink, 'no, you go ahead, I'll catch up'. Which in running lingo is the international phrase for 'you are WAY faster than I am, and there is no way in hell I'm running with you because I will die.' I saw him sprint past me on his way back... I was still a football field from the Lincoln Monument.

So, I made it, but oh my knees hurt. But, as my good Army COL buddy says, 'You can do anything. It just matters how bad you want to HURT the next day.'

I think I'm going to run on Sunday. But I am prepared to hurt really bad come Monday morning.

As they say in the Army, Hooah.

To bail or not to bail...

Well the House rejected the bailout...because America was mad and we didn't do a good job explaining the solution (better than the disease, if only by a little)... and the dow dropped more than 770 points.

By way of not so nifty trivia, that is the LARGEST POINT DROP in HISTORY. (The week after 9/11 we lost 722 points.) We are going to come back on Thursday after the holidays and try again. (Happy New Year to all my Jewish friends - btw.)

So what's the bottom line? Let's put it like this, it's either infuse the market with fresh cash and warm everyone up so they will lend again, or go get your cash out of the bank (if you have any left), put it under your bed and break out the food storage.

House Rejects Wall Street Bailout
September 29, 2008, 2:36 p.m.
By Jennifer Bendery
Roll Call Staff

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The House voted 228-205 on Monday to reject the financial sector bailout, sending stocks into free fall and dealing the Bush administration a devastating defeat.
Leaders held the vote open as they leaned on rank-and-file Members but failed to change votes. Members appeared to be looking for a strategy to bring up the bill again, though the details were uncertain. Democrats said the GOP had to deliver more votes.

Democratic leaders secured 141 votes for the bailout, which was in the ballpark of what they were predicting. But Republican leaders dug up only 64 votes, far short of the 100 votes they were seeking.

President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had lobbied for the$700 billion package and warned of economic peril if it failed.

The bill was crafted over the weekend by a bipartisan group of House and Senate negotiators. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) all had urged Members to support the bill.

The bill, however, was opposed from the left and the right, as well as by vulnerable lawmakers who noted the public opposition to it.

Conservative Republicans opposed a massive government rescue of financial institutions and sought other plans. Progressives were unhappy with its lack of foreclosure provisions and with handing over hundreds of billions of dollars to the Bush administration.

Party leaders asked lawmakers to hold their noses and pass the bill in the name of averting a Wall Street meltdown.

“You want to go home, so I’m not going to list all of my concerns that I have with it,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi blasted the administration for waiting until the last minute to demand $700 billion and “czar-like powers” to stem a Wall Street crisis that crept up “so silently, almost on little cat’s feet.”

The administration’s original proposal was “almost arrogant and insulting,” said Pelosi, who pinned the meltdown squarely on the president’s “failed economic policies.”

Boehner made a last-minute plea to Members to support to the bill, saying shortly before the vote that the likelihood of it passing was “in serious doubt.”

“Nobody wants to vote for this. Nobody wants to be around it,” Boehner said. “But we have a product that may work if we can get the votes to pass it, which I don't have to tell any of you is in serious doubt.”

Boehner, who enlisted other GOP leaders to support the bill, called the proposal is a “mud sandwich.”

“These are the votes that separate the men from the boys and the girls from the women,” Boehner said. “These are the kind of votes that we have to look into our souls and ask, ‘What is in the best interest of our country?’”

Even Financial Services ranking member Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), a bill skeptic, said he would vote for the bill because he was not willing to put peoples’ pensions and college funds at risk.

“I’m not willing to put that bullet in the revolver and spin it. I’m not willing to take that gamble,” he said.

Asked about the next step, Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said it would be up to those who opposed the bill.

Love the pink lipstick Katie.

My Reading List for the Evening

Nuclear Posture Review Report
Nuclear Deterrence, Then and Now
Israel and Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East
A Revolution in Warfare
The Transformation of War (Chapters 2 and 3)
On War: Lessons to Be Learned
The Utility of Force (Part One)

Want to take bets on how long I stay awake???

Bunnies in Green

Kitty in Blue

Pictures from my phone... a retrospect

Weber State Football (go Wildcats, beat Utah!!)

Kennedy Center from the Georgetown water front

Driving from St. George, Ut to the Vegas airport

Snow Canyon, Utah...love me some red dirt
Hallway in the Capitol, trying to find my boss

Arlington Cemetary, after a funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq

Nats,Nats, Nats - they won this game thanks to my lucky pink W hat.

So do something already.

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality"

-- Dante Alighieri

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA....

McCain Decides to Participate in Debate

Senator John McCain’s campaign said Friday morning that he will attend tonight’s debate with Senator Barack Obama at the University of Mississippi, reversing his earlier call to postpone the debate so he could participate in the Congressional negotiations over the $700 billion bailout plan for financial firms.

OH! I'm SO glad a Senator who has never had anything to do with fiscal issues or the finance committee in the Senate and who admitedly is 'not an expert on the economy' has decided that those folks who ACTUALLY know what is going on, have the situation under control.

Oh I'm so glad. Thanks Senator. Really glad you decided that you messed up BIG TIME and could not have skipped the debate ANYWAY. Have fun getting your TRASH kicked by Sen. Obama.

UGGGGGGG

This has been the longest week of my life. Every issue I do has been voted on this week. We have done major legislation that would normally take days and days and days and days. We have done multiple appropriations and authorization bills, there was a briefing I put on and now the financial bail out of America ... all me. It is crazy.

I am hungry and would really, really, really like either a 5 Guys burger, or field greens with goat cheese and a light raspberry dressing. Additionally, I would like a nice fish dish with heircot vert and rosemary potatoes. Then, I would like a BIG FAT CHOCOLATE SHAKE.

Ok. That is all.

also of note...

I was attempting to ollie on my short board today. I've never tried to ollie before. I'm more into coasting in the bike lane on East Captiol on my long board.

But my skateboarding 'Yoda' is in town, so I decided to hit him up for a lesson. So I was "going really fast" (because everything works better when you go fast, and as I was instructed to do by Sk8Bord Yoda) with my foot on the backish of skateboard getting ready to ollie and as one is apt to do if one is working hard enough on a skateboard, ate some pavement...HARD.

I was going, again, "really fast" and probably looked down - I don't remember, actually, all I remember is thinking 'this is going to hurt'.

And it did.

I tore my jeans and have a nice, nope - two nice scrapes on my left knee. As I sit here and type, goo (thanks to my antiseptic of choice, Bag Balm) is seeping down my leg - yeah baby. Also, I have a small scrape on my right hand and the pads of my hands are a wee bit raw...

I have learned two things thanks to my scrapes: one, if you don't bleed a little, you probably aren't trying hard enough and two, I really miss snow.

A whole lot of balls

I have seen 3 baseball games and played in two softball games in the last 64 hours and we (the Nationals or me) LOST.
All in all, I ate one hot dog, two servings of dippin' dots, three bags of peanuts and a various assortment of beverages in a variety of flavors.

Good times had by all.

Eek.

A little partisan message from our friend Teabelly

HRC and Sarah Palin as Tina Fey

SO FUNNY.

9/11 take two

I was standing in the hall talking to an Army friend of mine who happened to be in his nice uniform with all his ribbons and patches and shiny shoes and all and a man came up to him and said 'thank you for your service' and shook his hand.

I saw that my friend, who is a Colonel (about 25 years in) so not exactly new to the Army uniform or the Army for that matter, was gracious but looked a little curious. I broke in, 'what about me!?' and then we all had a nice laugh and the man in the suit walked down the hall. I said to my friend, 'I'm sorry, I hope I didn't offend you'. He is a good natured guy and just laughed at me for apologizing.

So, I asked my COL friend how things like that made him feel. Did he appreciate it, or was it just weird? He said that it made him feel more awkward and that he never really knows how to respond.

It is a strained and somewhat misplaced thanks we often give those who defend our country. We want to thank them, but are not sure how.

A marine was killed in Iraq from my district on Tuesday. I got the casualty announcement today. He was 29.

Well, it's officially September 11th

I'm learning about chaos theory in my geopolitics class... it's all about how small actions like a butterfly in Brazil flapping its wings can create hurricaines off the coast of Florida etc. It is nothing you can predict or anticipate. It just happens and you are left to manage the consequences as you can.

9/11 was such and event. 19 guys got on a plane and flew into some buildings. It completely changed how the current world superpower operates. It was a watershed moment. They don't come along very often.

How in the world did we all get here?

I went to one class on 9/11 before the news hit and the world changed; literature.

Appropriate, don't you think?

Veep veep

...from Frank Rich's column in today's NY Times...

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

Go Tigers!

I went to see The Eagles in concert the other day with some friends. I am not a huge Eagles fan or anything, but it was a group event and lots of fun.

Turns out that one of my favorite songs is sung by Don Henley who happens to be a member of the Eagles. (I told you I was not a huge fan.)

Being at the concert brought back memories of when I ran for Student Body President in high school. I forgot what the point was, but I talked my friend Josh into putting on the school mascot costume (we were tigers, so the mascot was Tyrone the tiger) and allowing me to drag him down the isle of the high school auditorium to the tune of Don Henley's Dirty Laundry.

Again, I don't have the slightest idea what the point was...needless to say, I lost.

Baking powder???

Ok, so I printed off my first assignments for school over the weekend and started reading...

"A part of the difficulty in debating the geoploitics lies in the absence of consensus over definition. Many scholars bring a hostile attitude to the subject, so that even fairly innocous seeming definitions of geopolitics provide a thin disguise for assumptions that are not conducive to open-minded scholarship."

And as if that didn't make enough sense...

"If only the principal sources of international conflict truly were attributable in noteworthy part to obsolete thinking, including geopolitics. In that happy event we could set about constructing a global security community in the wake of the more advanced processes of globalization."

...happy event indeed.

I'm going to have to read this fabulousness twice.

RUDY, RUDY

I actually like Giuliani.

Just a word about the Republican backdrop. Sorry, I'm not a hater, but BORING. But for Giuliani, the backdrop shows NY City. Very nice.

and he begins...

"You are hiring someone to do a job, which relates to your safety (don't let the terrorists win), you have two applicants with different experience (one of these folks will let the terrorists win) one man has been tested (against terrorists) he is a true American hero (and became so by fighting terroists)... roll McCain story in Vietnam here...

The other applicant is a gifted man with an ivy league education, community organizer (ok, the Rs laughed at that... blood boiling) chicago machine politics (whatever) state legislator (I'm sorry do the Rs have something against state legislators??) you have to make a decision in the executive branch (and not vote present - ok, that is compelling- damit) runs for the US Senate... no leadership, no legislation (really, really??) it's the kind of thing that can only happen America. (Yes, friends, that is the point)."

Rudy is a compelling, funny, and comfortable speaker. He did a good job, I have to admit. I'll give props where props are due. Good job Rudy.

ALL BUT THE LINE WHERE HE SAID, "OUR COUNTRY WILL BE SAFE WITH JOHN MCCAIN". Because if you vote for Obama then clearly the TERRORISTS WIN.

Nation states, organic systems and chaos

So I'm in school trying to be all I can be and get my learn on.
I took the summer off, but tonight was my first night of class.

I was a little worried about my professor. I have had professors in the past who power pointed me to death. I actually was supposed to take a class on Thursday nights, but when I learned who the professor was, I switched to Wednesdays (which are much, much harder as far as leaving work on time goes).

So I showed up to my Geostrategy class this evening and the professor at the front of the room was wearing a navy pinstripe suit, pink tie, pocket square and a pocket watch. BLOODY HELL.

Professor G is British of Hungarian descent and has taught all over the world. He is awesome. We talked about geopolitics and strategy, the Treaty of Westphalia (I know, right?)nation states and monopolies of force.

It is going to be a very challenging 12 weeks. First on the agenda, brush up on Hedley Bull....

Know thy enemy, know thyself

I'm watching the Republican convention. It is painful, but I'm doing it.
I just watched my boy Mitt talk about...I don't actually know. But, he sure is purdy.

I don't know if I can stay up for Palin. But I'm sure if I do, I won't be able to sleep after she is finished...grrr

The Farmer and the Cowman can be friends?

This politics stuff is getting a little out of hand.
I am friends with quite a few conservatives and more than a handful of republicans.
It is becoming more and more difficult to talk with them about the election.
I don't know if that means I am becoming more liberal or just that the stakes are getting too high and too personal for me.

I waited in nearly 3 hours of security to get into Bronco's stadium to hear Obama speak. It was worth every minute. I believe in Obama. I believe in his message and I believe in what he and an Obama administration will do for America. I am not a hater and I don't think all republicans are evil I just think America is indeed better than this.

Furthermore, I have just had enough with the policies of fear, and secrecy and pandering and baiting - of all sorts. As I told a friend today, I handle defense issues, I know there are bad guys out there who want to get us. But the only attack that didn't work on 9/11 was Flight 93 because the people on board were informed. They took control and saved the day.

We all need to be in this together, and I'm just not convinced that John McCain has gone all in on this one. It's just not who he is, it doesn't mean he's a bad person, it just means that he isn't getting my vote.