At the end of the last diary in the series, I promised to tell a tale about how filthy war is.  I will get to that, as it's a pretty funny story.  But today, I want to jump about a year ahead.  I told all of you how bad I was in the band, as my whole enlistment in the program was predicated on a lie, and after I returned from Iraq the first time, I had no more chops on the clarinet.  I managed to move, by sheer luck, to Combat Camera.  While being in the Marine Corps was still a bad fit for me, being a videographer was not.

So, when I left for my second tour I left with an entirely different unit.  Combat Cameramen are still POG's (person other than grunt), but they end up attached to the real thing.  I was surrounded by crude, foulmouthed, angry grunts.  While I saw no combat with the band, I saw more than I wanted to with these guys.

After reading Carnaki's excellent diary, and the Vanity Fair article that went with it, I have seen my blood pressure rise to unprecedented levels.  I have never been this angry, ever.  The ice in question, from  truck RU-89, went in my mouth.

Well, it could have.  I have no way of knowing.  Anybody familiar with my ACWS series know I was in Iraq at that time, so I very well could have ingested the cadaver flavored ice.  

All I know is that they used us.  All us veterans of this misbegotten war.  They sent us to Iraq, and then they profited from our pain and suffering and death, and then they couldn't even bother to give us clean fucking ice.

According to the AP, Penn State Scientists have discovered a way to make large amounts of hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material.

Here's the story.

I have an old Marine Corps friend who works on Capitol HIll for a Republican Representative.  I won't say which one out of respect for his privacy.  He and I go way back, and so do our political arguments.  He's as conservative as I am progressive, and we disagree on just about everything.  This disagreement extends to labor, as I am all for unions, believing them to be the guarantors of the middle class, and he believes they are corrupt and reward lazy people.

So, assuming I knew his position before hand, I asked him what he thought of the Writers Guild strike.  I reminded him that these workers were getting zero royalties from online airings of their product.  I expected him to reply that the Writers should get their whiny asses back to work.  Imagine my surprise when he responded, "If [the studios] make money off the airings then yes, they should get royalties."  

That sentence was the entirety of his response.  No complaining about the evil of unions.  No bitching about the corruption.  Just a simple one sentence response, and the correct one at that.  I was so surprised, I decided to see what other, more famous voices on the right had to say.  

Before I get into this particular movie, and why I think the community should see it, let me stress that I am not in any way associated with the production or the marketing for this movie.  I'm just the filmgeek, I swear.

However, I believe that most of what comes out of Hollywood is beneath my contempt.  No offense to anyone, but Transformers?  I liked them when I was five, sure, but a Micheal Bay flick.  Bereft of ideas much?

So I am taking it upon myself to lobby, if you will, for certain movies I am looking forward to, particularly if they have even a tangental relationship with the interests of this site.  I'm bringing the site's ethos to media: if you want better movies, you gotta fight for them.

You might have to go look for these films in your local arthouse, but at least you won't be seeing Fred Clause.  Today we're talking about Persepolis.

Previous installments of the series here.

There is an ever present enemy aligned against every military force ever mobilized.  The Marines of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea knew her very well, as did I in the deserts of Iraq.

Weather is a neutral enemy.  She does not give a damn what uniform you wear, she's just as happy to kick your ass either way.  If God exists, It makes Its opinion of war known through the machinations of the atmosphere.  

Most of what sucks about Iraq is the heat.  100 degrees is a chilly day in the summer, and wearing all that gear only makes it worse.  However, I very nearly froze to death one night, and if that doesn't prove irony is alive and well, I don't know what will.

That's right, kids.  The new host of the Price is Right has a video up on reason.tv all about medical marijuana.  In it he interviews two people, one very Republican, who have benefited from medical marijuana.

Previous installments of the series here.

Major General Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marine Division during the Iraq invasion, liked to refer to the Division as "the tip of the spear."  The metaphor was apt for Marines in general, as we have always been the first sent into a battle zone, and it was especially apt of Mattis's Division during the invasion.

But it never should have applied to me personally.

Find the first two installments here.

In every memoir about war I have ever read there is one thing all veterans, regardless of which war they fought in, all seem to agree on.

War is fucking boring.  I mean time like a blade boring.  Sure there's the occasional five or so minutes of life-threatening excitement, but then there are hours and hours of nothing to do but wonder when the next threat will come.

We were in Kuwait a month before invading Iraq, so we had a lot of time on our hands and scant little to fill it with.  It was some of that scant little that got me into a ridiculous amount of trouble.

This diary is the second part of an ongoing series, written whenever the mood strikes me.  The previous installment resides here.

There is no doubt that the entire crux of the Iraq biscuit was WMD.  All the justifications for war we hear today, such as spreading democracy or fighting Al Qaida, is just so much cheap lipstick applied to a very ugly pig.  

We attacked Iraq because our leaders said Saddam had illegal chemical weapons and the intent to use them on us or our allies.  Now, one could ask if our leaders acted on faulty intelligence, or even whether or not they believed the dire proclamations they were making.  I, however, believed every word of it.  Once I set foot on the plane that would take me to the war zone, I thought for sure Saddam must have had the weapons.  After all, the US wouldn't start a war unless it was a "slam dunk," right?

The New York Times reports of a stop Rudy "9/11" Giuliani made in Iowa in which he hemmed and hawed like the worst of politicians when asked a tough question.

I was going over my diary history, and I realized I promised this community the story of my service in the Marine Corps Band as a clarinetist.  The great injustice of that period in my life is that my entire enlistment, until I moved from the band in late 2003, was predicated on a lie, and not one of the usual lies that nabs most people out of high school, but a super-duper lie.  Couple that with the fact that the 1st Marine Division Band has the most ironic of all jobs when deployed, and we have one singular tale.    

Please, Harry Reid.  I don't know what it will take to get you to pull your head out of your ass, but if lowering myself before you will help in any way , I will do it.  I'm begging you, Harry Reid, down here on my virtual knees.  Do your fucking job.

Now, I know what your thinking, Mr. Reid and I can assure you that: a) Your head is, in fact, entirely up your ass, and b) You do have the power to get a timetable for withdrawal on the President's desk.  Just make the Republicans filibuster the damn vote, please, Harry Reid.  I prostrate myself before you.

One of the great by-products of the 2006 elections is that we don't hear about "Intelligent Design" nearly as much.  But, as any net-savvy person has seen in that clip from The View, the forces of ignorance are not defeated, but merely banished.

What is it about such an elegant and almost intuitive theory that religious zealots hate so much?  One could argue that they resist evolution, going so far as to re-write the natural history of the Earth to fit their twisted view, because it challenges their belief in a divine creator.  However, this view is overly simplistic.  The real reasons for their disdain is far more complicated.

President Bush,

Today's regrettable news that our Attorney General has tendered his resignation allows us a moment of reflection. Many here say Alberto Gonzales  made a mockery of his title. They say he was dishonest, flailingly incompetent, and partisan to a fault; that he leaves a black mark on the office that no amount of stain remover will ever erase.  However, it is not likely you will nominate a person much different than his predecessor.  

So, with that in mind, I would like to throw my name into the hat to fill the soon to be vacant Attorney General position.

To all you Hillary Clinton supporters out there: I mean that title in the least disparaging way possible.  I like the Junior Senator from New York a lot.  She is a good Democrat, and I'm proud she's in my party. But she cannot be our nominee for President.  I'm sorry, but it's true.

I just turned 24 last week, and it got me to thinking about the presidents under whose terms I'd lived.  I was born in 1983, which sadly put me in the middle of the Reagan years ('83 - '89), then Bush Sr. ('89 - '93), Bill Clinton ('93 - '01), and finally the current nightmare ('01 - present).  If anybody's keeping score, that means I've lived roughly 77 percent of my life under either a Bush or a Clinton.  If we elect Hillary Clinton and she serves two terms, that percentage will be 82.

How can we claim we want change if we allow that to happen?  

Today, in North Carolina, a Democratic presidential candidate suffered a terrorist attack.  John Edwards' campaign headquarter was evacuated today after the office received an envelope of white powder.  AP story through the International Herald Tribune here.  Kossack chuckles1 broke the news here.

You may be wondering, "Why the International Herald Tribune, a foreign newspaper?"  I'll tell you why.  I could only find this story on one of the major networks fucking website, and that link was hidden better than Jimmy fucking Hoffa.

Screen grabs, and angry words, after the flip.

Dear sweet Meta-Jesus, our cup runneth over.

Boston.com

WASHINGTON -- A US grand jury in Guam opened an investigation of controversial lobbyist Jack Abramoff more than two years ago, but President Bush removed the supervising federal prosecutor, and the probe ended soon after.