Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

After having spent the entire weekend (starting with Friday night) totally unable to post to Blogger, I’ve kissed them off and am running Movable Type on my unix server. Hope to have this box registered in DNS soon.

And this just plain pisses me off. Shooting is too good for this SOB.

is probably due to having read Peggy Noonan’s WSJ column this morning. I confess that I cried. Our boys deserve better than to be told to shove off by petty Afghan warlords.

Afghan Governors Demand U.S. Seek Operations Clearance, Plan Military Force
Personally I’d tell ’em to go fuck themselves. My messenger of choice would be a Predator with a Hellfire missile aimed right up their ass.
Can you imagine what we would have said if, oh, the French had told us this after we threw the Germans out of their country back in ’44?

Sick, tired, worked nearly to death…but nobody’s reading this anyway so who cares? 🙂
The short of it:

1. Baseball games do not end in ties.
2. Arafat must go!
3. ICC must go!
4. Iranian theocracy must go!
5. Bush rules…most of the time.

I think that covers the last week.

This Washington Times article talks about VRE and MARC attempting to find ways to avoid using Amtrak services. Both MD commuter lines either run on Amtrak rail (MARC) or use Amtrak employees to run trains, take tickets, etc. (MARC and VRE).
Why not sell Amtrak to one or more of the airlines? They need the revenue and they’d probably be willing to upgrade the system to the point at which it might make a profit. And I’ll guarantee they wouldn’t stop in every podunk town in America along the way, which is in my view the biggest problem with trains like the Cardinal. (I’d actually take the Cardinal from Indianapolis to Washington if it didn’t take 18+ hours to get there. I can drive it in 10. But I don’t stop in every little town in Kentucky and West Virginia on the way.) Time and money are lost every time a long-haul train stops.
Airports have been wildly successful being located in large urban areas; some people may have to drive an hour to get to one of them, but it’s just not efficient to land a 757 in, oh, I don’t know, maybe Kokomo, Indiana. Intercity trains need to follow the old express model (now used successfully by the big airlines) and not the milk-run model in order to be profitable. Regional rail can take up the slack by serving outlying towns and rural areas, just like it did fifty and sixty years ago (and just like commuter jets and turbo-props do now).
(Some might wonder why I care about MARC and VRE since I live in Indiana. I spend far too much time in the DC area, that’s why 🙂

Farrakhan tells of U.S. Muslims’ support
Iraq’s state-run media has quoted Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as saying during a visit to Baghdad that American Muslims are praying for an Iraqi victory in a war with the United States.
Sounds like a good enough reason to deny him re-entry to the United States…
AFTERTHOUGHT: Or charge him with treason.

I wish I was half as good as this guy.

has surfaced on InstaPundit today (and it’s nice that Glenn is back, I’ve been in InstaPundit withdrawal for a week). If al-Qaeda are such a bunch of badasses, why is 9/11 their only claim to fame? Because we’ve kicked their asses back into the Stone Age, that’s why!
Anyone who thinks Osama is still alive is out of their minds. Read Mark Steyn’s July 4 column and see if you don’t agree. al-Qaeda, except for their PR machine, are history, and they know it. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be playing Osama’s Greatest Hits over and over.

the New York Times for this timely disclosure of American military secrets. There’s not a whole lot here to work from but obviously there is a big fat leak or six over at DOD.
I don’t believe in government censorship, but out of patriotic duty, newspapers simply shouldn’t print this sort of thing in time of war; they should have enough sense to self-censor this kind of material. I’m sure the Times in its wisdom (?) doesn’t want the US to go to war against Iraq. But some of the blood of our soldiers who will die there in the process can now be charged to the Times’ account.