His brand of substance-free pussified blowhard sociopathy fits right in with the modern GOP. I can’t imagine why he doesn’t have more followers.
The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it got there: Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamuss rather visceral protest.
Let me repeat: rather than kennel his animal or make room in the car, he strapped it to the roof for a 12 hour drive. 12. hours.
Even for the KBR contractors
Samuel Walker saw combat in Iraq firsthand: He was splattered with human flesh and shrapnel in a dining hall when a suicide bomber blew himself up just a few feet away.
When Walker got back to the U.S., he brought some of the battlefield home with him. He heard phantom screams in broad daylight, smelled gunpowder that wasn’t there. A loud noise would send him into a defensive crouch. He’d been eating French fries in the mess hall at the time of the blast, and the sight of a McDonald’s restaurant now brought back violent memories.
Two doctors diagnosed Walker with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, directly related to his close encounters with violence in Iraq.
But Walker was not a combat soldier. He was a civilian recreation supervisor for KBR, the largest contractor in Iraq. And instead of getting the medical and counseling help he sought, Walker, a U.S. Army veteran, found himself caught in a morass of red tape and rejected insurance claims.
I post this for a few reasons including, inter alia, our country’s inability to treat mental illnesses as illnesses, the ridiculousness of our so-called “health-care system”, my interest in (and prediction that) the major systemic healthcare burden for our veterans (contactors included) is going to become increasingly psychology-focused rather than physicality-focused as field medical technology and other protective war tech preserves people’s bodies but leaves our minds as exposed as they’ve always been, and that the government has essentially been paying for Huguenots, but refuses to acknowledge them as such (no VA for you, buddy!)
That may be a record for longest run-on in the history of this blog. Probably.
Too bad this one is that the zombies of America have stuck us with a regressive group of misogynistic sadists on the Supreme Court.
Mr. Bowles, an Ohio inmate, challenged his conviction in federal district court and lost. The court told Mr. Bowles that he had until Feb. 27 to appeal. He filed the appeal on Feb. 26, and was ready to argue why he was wrongly convicted. But it turned out the district court made a mistake. The appeal should have been filed by Feb. 24.
The Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, in a majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, that Mr. Bowles was out of luck, and his appeal was invalid. So much for heeding a federal judge.
A special shout out to the cowardly Dems who were “keeping their powders dry” when they chose not to fight first Roberts then scAlito.
Steve Gilliard died after a long fight with illness. His cantankerous energy was always a welcome part of my reading day. He was 41.
Goodbye Steve, you will be missed.