Rant On? Rant Off.

[copied from dland]

I got a rant in me, but I'm not sure if it's ready to come out yet. Let's give it a couple of minutes.

In the meantime, I just noticed that my wedding ring is slipping on and off somewhat easily. I don't know if it's a sign of anything (weight loss, people! Not troubled marriage! Sheesh!) but I haven't been able to do that in a while, not easily anyway, so I'm thinking it's a good thing.

I had my typical Saturday of accomplishment, but when that was all over by like noon, or maybe before, I had no motivation whatsoever to do anything else. I futzed around on the computer here and there, or slept off an on. I didn't even watch a movie; I only found out after the Hubs came home around 4:30 that The Bridge Over the River Kwai was on earlier and I could have watched that. By that time, Lawrence of Arabia was on, and I've successfully avoided that one for more that 40 years now, so I wasn't going there. Not that Peter O'Toole wasn't a cutie pie and all, not to mention Omar Sharif, but I could never get into it. I may watch A Man for All Seasons later, which oddly enough, I could get into, and have seen several times, even though there's practically no action or activity or plot in it, but I like British history.

Our crockpot today yielded a vegetable stew, which was okay. It didn't set the world on fire, but it was okay. Tomorrow I'm making a variation of the split pea soup I made earlier in the week, but this time with green split peas and parsnips. For some reason, I like parsnips.

They're predicting weather for tomorrow. I don't know what that'll do to school on Monday, or how bad the driving will be all over. It's another we'll-see thing.

My rant is about our government and how it has decimated our military. An odd subject for me? It started when I read an article yesterday -- I can't find the link now -- about the number of civilians in service to our country who have been killed in Iraq, quite a large number. These are people who provide the support services, like transportation, and food, and cleaning, and vehicle maintenance, and so on. They are employed by Haliburton and a few other companies, and they make excellent salaries for being there. In some cases, people make nearly $100,000 a year for doing the same job that an Army private does for much less, like maybe $25,000 a year.

Excuse me?

I am horrified and I am appalled. This is why, apparently, we can sustain a volunteer military: if we don't have enough soldiers (to use a generic term) to do the job, we pay huge money for some outsiders to do it. And I guess we have to pay those people whatever they ask because if we don't, our troops are out in harm's way without food or gasoline.

This is not the way to maintain a strong military, Mr. President. The military must be self-sufficient. They must have motor pools and cooks and laundries, enough to support whatever the fighting troops need. No wonder Haliburton has the power it has. They want some no-work big-money contracts for work in New Orleans that they're never gonna do? We have to give it to them. They have got our government by the short hairs, as it were.

I think this is just another example of the exceptionally poor treatment the members of our military are receiving at the hands of our government. They already don't get the right body armor and they have to buy their own socks. And we have the temerity to pay someone else who didn't volunteer to risk his life four times more for doing the same work?

Hell approaching. Don't bother to check your hand-basket for brakes.


WATCHING BILL MAHER ON DVR :: ENTRY #1385b