First is the recruitment of a 76 year old to rejoin the National Guard. Bob Kotterman is the man's name:
Kotterman is 76.
He's a cancer survivor with diabetes and a bad eye. "Too old to chase girls anymore," he said yesterday.
He was discharged from the National Guard in 1949. He was only in 18 months. His job: running the movie projector. "I ran films about people getting gonorrhea and syphilis, that kind of stuff," Kotterman said.
Sure, later it notes that this may have been the result of a prank by a friend of Mr. Kotterman, but it sure looks stupid. If this is the military we went to war with shouldn't someone in the Administration have wondered whether it was ready for this war?
Perhaps more serious is the Christian school in Schaumberg, IL that is requiring corporal punishment. Little Chandler Fallaw, just six years old, was acting up in class. He chewed gum. He talked in class. And the school decided that his mother had the choice of suspension of spanking. She chose to pull him out of the school, and good for her, too.
"We don't believe corporal punishment is overboard," said Randy Thaxton, administrator for the Schaumburg Christian School.
He says parents are never forced to spank kids, but if bad behavior escalates they may be given a choice between suspension or spanking.
"It's an opportunity for them to make progress in the behavior of their child in a Bible-based situation. In other words, the Bible supports what we are asking the parents to do there."
Schaumberg is soccer Mom country. I can only wish this is a sign that soccer Moms are beginning to reject the Right Wingding party line on at least some things.
Finally, Matt Drudge leads off alarmingly concerning Warren Buffet's recent opinion concerning deficit spending and the trade deficit. MAKES BILLIONS BETTING AGAINST DOLLAR... he says, but links to a mild article that hardly features Buffet's investment strategies except in context with the dire issues he comments about. Looks like Drudge got a memo from Mr. Rove, huh?
Surely Buffet's actual quotes should be leading this story, given his record over the years at wisdom concerning investments and also the state the Bush Administration is driving our country to. What state is that? Alabama?
Mr Buffett stepped up his warning about the US trade deficit and the need to finance it with foreign investment, devoting more than two full pages of the annual report to the topic.
“This force-feeding of American wealth to the rest of the world is now proceeding at the rate of $1.8bn daily, an increase of 20 per cent since I wrote you last year,” he said. “Consequently, other countries and their citizens now own a net of about $3,000bn of the US”
In particular, he warned that this meant a sizeable portion of what US citizens earned in future would have to be paid to foreign landlords.
“A country that is now aspiring to an “Ownership Society” will not find happiness in – and I’ll use hyperbole here for emphasis – a “Sharecropper’s Society,” added Mr Buffett. “But that’s precisely where our trade policies, supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, are taking us.”
End of post. Time to spit.
