You have to love Fox’s Shepard Smith: "Now, here’s Greg Kelly, live from Saddam’s front door."  : )

Rachel has a good one about our troops over there... photos of them "resting."

The musicbox is installed, Golfy is happy, I am happy.  Go see the main page, updates page, and the new photos.

I hooked my musicbox up in my car last night, just temporarily to test it with the el cheapo DC->AC power inverter that I bought... and it runs!!  Even with the car off.  It doesn’t survive ignition, however, but I didn’t expect it to; at ignition, the car’s "12 volt" power line dips to more like 10 or even 9 volts.  So, that resets the unit.  But no big deal, and even the DC->DC power supply that I would have built would suffer from that problem.

So... woohoo!  This guy is ready to rock.  I wrote some code to randomize the music, so now when I press the "\" key, it plays a randomly-chosen album (out of the ~300 on the hard drive).  And when I press the "/" key, it creates a playlist of 100 randomly-chosen songs from all albums.  It’s so sweet.

I found out that I can send the audio signal into my head unit via the CD changer plug [which I’m not using (obviously, now  : )  ], so that makes life easier, because I can use the head unit’s volume control to control the musicbox’s volume.  All I need to do is buy the $18 cable from Kenwood, which just "converts" the 13-pin DIN CD changer plug into 2 RCA plugs.  Which means, of course, that 2 of those 13 pins are the left and right audio channels, one is the audio ground, and 1 or 2 are used to tell the head unit that there’s a CD changer present.  And that means... I don’t need no steekin’ $18 cable, I can hack it myself.  Go engineering!

Looking at the current competition in the car mp3 market, we have:

The Sony MEX-1HD.  10 gigabyte hard drive.  So going with an average of 75 megabytes per album, you can fit 133 albums into this guy.  But you can’t just copy them from your existing mp3 collection.  You have to rip each CD through the head unit onto its internal hard drive.  At 8x speed (= insanely slow).  And the display is tiny and cluttered.  For $1500.  Well, at least it’s cool looking.

Then there’s the Neo Car Jukebox.  This thing is pretty cool.  It has an internal hard drive too, and you can choose the size: 20 gig for $380, 40 for $440, and 80 for $500.  But it doesn’t mount in your dash like a normal stereo; instead it mounts under a seat like an amp, and it has a wired remote display / controller that you stick on the dash somewhere.  So that’s sort of tacky and weird, and it’s a small display too.

For both of those, you have to scroll through your music collection to find the band you want to listen to.  Scrolling on a display with 3 or 4 lines is a painful experience.  I think this is the biggest strength of my design.  Although you can scroll it just like those others, you can also go directly to the band you want just by typing 2 or 3 letters of the band’s name.  Type b e and you’re at Beastie Boys.

Most people’s initial reaction to this is "typing while driving???  that is so dangerous!!"  Well, it’s not typing as in typing your tax return.  It’s hitting 3 keys, for goodness’ sakes.  You need to have your eyes off the road for much longer in order to scroll through 100 or 200 or 300 bands, than to hit 3 keys.

Having a keyboard in your car also seems sorta annoying... I wasn’t sure how to get around this until I happened across this Gyration keyboard one day.  It’s small and thin and light, it’s wireless (radio) so you don’t have to point it or mess with wires, and it’s slick looking because it’s black.

And my display is big -- 4x40 characters -- and it fits right in the dash like a head unit.  So as far as looks, my setup is looking pretty nice.  And it was way cheaper than the Sony unit above, and even a little cheaper than the Neo.  $100 for the keyboard (which came with a mouse that I didn’t want, and a mouse charger, so it should be much cheaper), $120 for a 40 gigabyte hard drive, about $70 for an old computer, $30 for the LCD screen, and $0 for all the free software that I used/wrote for it.  So just over $300, and probably more like $270 once Gyration starts selling the keyboard separately from the mouse and charger.

Oh, one last thing... and this completely blows everything else out of the water... once I manage to set up wireless networking in Linux, my musicbox will have mobile wireless internet access  : )  Now, I won’t be web-browsing too much on a 4x40 screen (although some pages like stock scripts and news tickers... and come to think of it, blogs... would be perfectly do-able) but email and instant messaging will surely be in full effect.

Hey A,

I’m playing around a little with your streamer script, and it only seems to update the first stock on the list, while the others remain unchanged and at the time the script was started.  What’s up with that?

Hi honey,  Grandpop Mack is here and we’re checking out your webpage and discussing your stand in support of our troops.  He wanted me to write to you and tell you how very proud he is that you are so involved in these current affairs and that Fox News Network (the 7:00p.m. to 9:00p.m. shows are his favorites as are yours.  (following p.s.is direct quote from Grandpop Mack):  Saddam is soon going to see what the ’mother of all battles’ REALLY looks like!

I got really into this band called "In Pieces" a few weeks ago, and their album "Learning to Accept Silence" is one of the most exciting albums I’ve heard recently.  It’s just so darn moving, it rocks, hard.  Their song "The Anchor" is my song of the week; go take a listen (also available on my music page).  It starts out all BOM BOM BOM CHA... BOM BOM BOM CHA... and then they switch up the timing halfway through the first verse and it catches you off guard and it sorta swings... then it gets really hard and dangerous, and more rocking... and then halfway into it, it gets nice and slow and quiet and you’re like "Ahhh so peaceful and pretty" but then it’s time for BOM BOM BOM CHAAAAA!! again and and . . .  well just listen to it!

So this music-playing computer that I’m about to put into my car, I mean, it’s awesome, but now that it’s about to be done, the full power of its coolness is just starting to hit me.  I’m going to be driving around with three hundred albums just a button away.  No more messing with CDs in the car.  That will be so nice.  And also, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I’ll write some code to do random playing... so every song could be random, like the radio except all the music doesn’t stink, or I could have it do whole albums at random... I’m just so excited about this.

Oh, and one last thing, the cheat is not dead.  This is the best one in a long time  : )

Bill Whittle’s latest essay is online.  It’s a must-read.  Here is an excerpt:

I have often wondered, what if this history, the one we know as reality, was the one gone horribly wrong? For example:

In the fall of 1999, the Clinton Administration took the hugely unpopular decision to invade Afghanistan to root out Islamic terrorists organized by a largely-unknown fanatic named Osama Bin Laden. Operation Homeland Security cost the lives of almost 300 servicemen, and did long-lasting damage to our relations with NATO, the UN, and especially Russia. President Clinton, at great political cost to himself and the Democratic Party, claimed to be acting on repeated intelligence that Bin Laden and his “phantom” organization – whose name escapes me – planned massive and sustained terrorist attacks against the United States. Peace protestors gathered between the towers of the World Trade Center in September, 2004 on the five-year anniversary of the illegal and immoral invasion, calling on President Gore to pay the UN –ordered reparations to the Taliban Government.

Wo.  I got slashdotted.  : )  But fortunately the link was pretty far down on the page, so apparently it didn’t knock my server offline at all.

So while I’d like to think that it’s normal for me to have 500+ visitors a day, it’s a lot more like 200.  The "real" record is still 230something, set just a few days ago.  There’s normally about 10 visitors per hour; today there were over 200 from 1pm-2pm alone!  Thanks slashdot!

Finally got back to working on my car mp3 player aka "musicbox."  It’s close to done... I can’t wait to get it into my car.

Unfortunately it’s SNOWING all of a sudden, after a summery week of warmness, so I won’t be putting it into my car today.  They’re calling for up to 5 inches.  Ugh.

I also worked on this messageboard / blog script: I added the ability to edit posts after they’re posted (for administrators only, of course).  So if you were an administrator like me, you’d see a link next to each post that says "edit this."  So now I don’t have to use FTP to manually edit posts when one needs to be edited -- I can do it right through the web browser.  And don’t forget, you can have this script for your very own, if you’d like.

And some other schmo on Hannity & Colmes said something about the US "bombing women and children" in Iraq.  Boy, was that ever a mistake -- Hannity wouldn’t let that one go for the rest of the conversation.

Like so many other statements being made about the war, this one requires that the speaker be either clinically brain-dead or deliberately lying.  If this war was about bombing women and children, or "exterminiating Iraqis" as the Iraqi UN represenatative recently said, it would have been over in one day.  We would have simply carpet-bombed Baghdad and every other major city in Iraq, reducing the entire country to a pile of rubble.  Because we most certainly could have done that.  We could do that right now.  It would reduce the risk of allied casualties to near-zero and it would cut costs dramatically too.

The reason that hasn’t happened is because that isn’t the plan.  The reason there have been so remarkably few Iraqi civillian deaths, and so remarkably little damage to non-military facilities, is because we want it that way.  Because it is our will for that to be the case.  We are in control.

Arnaud Thieffry, some French government official, was on Hannity & Colmes tonight.  I feel like my dad, sitting here yelling "Liar!" at the TV.  He said that if we "give up" on the UN, then there’s going to be "anarchy everywhere."  This guy is either a blabbering imbecile, or he’s a liar.  The UN does not and has not done a darn thing to keep peace anywhere.  In fact there are notable examples of the UN having failed to do just that.  It’s absolutely ridiculous to say that giving up on the UN will cause anarchy.

He also said multiple times that "Europe" disagrees with this or that, or "Europe" feels this or that about the US.  It’s a farce.  France is not Europe, and Europe is not France.  There are quite a few European countries who support the US.  France is painting this as "the US vs. the world" when that’s not even close to the case.

Further, he said he doesn’t know why France has been singled out as the focus of the US’s frustrations.  Which is, of course, a blatant lie -- he knows exactly why.  He made the ridiculous argument that the US should not punish France economically because of their actions, and asked the straw man question "Why doesn’t the US do that to Mexico, Canada, etc.?"  There’s a difference between disagreeing with the US (Mexico, Canada) and actively preventing the enforcement of UN resolutions, making a mockery of that organization, and painting the US as unilateral when that’s an outright lie (France).  So point #1 here is that France’s role was unique and entirely different from that of other countries in this situation.

Point #2 is that it’s ridiculous to suggest that we should not economically punish France, or should not treat them less warmly (to say the least) than we have in the past.  Nearly 80% of Americans support this war, and you can bet that a good portion of those people are upset about the circus Chirac has created.  You can bet a lot of Americans are upset that France not only isn’t supporting the US, but is acting directly against us and against the enforcement of UN resolutions.  Of course France doesn’t have to support us in any way.  The point is that that gate swings both ways -- we don’t have to support them either.  France has been the leader of the weasels, and they will pay for that.  And it’s not about revenge, it’s about making an example of them.  The US needs to send a message to the world that it’s not cheap and easy and fun to treat us like crap, as the French have.  Every action has consequences; it’s as simple as that.

I get email from REI (the outdoors / sportinggoods company) about specials and such, since I’m a member... this was in the mail I got today, one of "Ten Ways to Lighten Your Load":

Share gear with your partner. There’s no need for both of you to have stoves, water filters, knives, pots, first aid kits, and a host of other items. But before you marry your gear, be sure you both are committed to staying together for the duration of the hike.

One would hope!

"Stay brave, stay aware, and stay with Fox."  : )  I love Fox news.

Meanwhile, over on LGF:

It’s been obvious for sometime now that "peace" protests are actually little more than a kind of public therapy for people with serious mental problems:

Paranoia: The Government is run by a cabal of oil companies. The FBI is spying on me through optical cable in my dental floss. The CIA was behind 9-11.

Dementia: The media is right-wing. The rest of the world is ruled by France. Baked hippies can stop bulldozers with their bare hands.

Schizophrenia: Protesting that the government has robbed them of their right to protest. We can’t afford this war and we should spend the money on health care instead.

Delusional Disorder: They look at Bush and see Hitler.

Alzheimer’s Disease: They think it’s still 1968.

Antisocial Personality Disorder: They think they can win allies and influence public opinion by calling opponents fascists and vomiting in public .

Palestinians rejoice at Saddam’s "victories".  This is unbelievable.  No, strike that.  It’s perfectly believable, but it’s nothing more than racist, brainwashed propaganda.

There were many smiling faces in Ramallah Monday as Palestinians celebrated the capture of American and British soldiers by the Iraqi army. ... "This is a big day for the Iraqi people and all the Arabs and Muslims," says a mustachioed Palestinian policeman in green uniform at Yasser Arafat’s battered headquarters in the city.

Translation: even though the Iraqi people have been wishing for this war for 12 years, and want nothing more than to see Saddam removed from power, we extremist Arabs and Muslims sure are glad to see coalition casualties and POWs because the white man is the devil.

"...This is a big blow for Bush and Blair. I don’t believe they will be able to continue with the war now that many of their soldiers are being killed or taken prisoner."

Translation: I am a crack smoking lunatic, and I think that a few dozen casualties is a "big blow."  Nevermind that the coalition has thousands of Iraqi POWs and current estimates say there are a few hundred KIA Iraqi soldiers.

"The Iraqis are much better at war because they have more experience."

Translation: I can’t be troubled with "facts" and "statistics."  We killed an American!!  We are better!  We are winning!

"This is unbelievable. The Americans are losing the war. Iraq is going to be Bush’s Vietnam."

Translation: "The Americans" have secured the majority of Iraq and are closing in on the capital, in less than one week of fighting.  Man, are they ever losing badly.

"Oh Saddam, we love you, why don’t you annihilate all the Jews."

Translation: Now our true colors come out.  We’re knee-jerkingly anti-American no matter what the situation.  We hate America because America supported Israel when us Arabs tried (twice) to eradicate their country, and when we failed (twice) even though our forces massively outnumbered theirs.  All Jews must die.  It doesn’t matter that the only piece of Earth that they (rightfully) claim as their own is about one-onethousandth the size of all our Arab lands -- that is too much for the Jews, and we can’t live without that tiny piece of land.  Gosh, where’s Hitler when you need him?

"The only dictator is Bush, who has waged a war against the Arabs and Muslims."

Translation: because we are extremists, we lack the capacity to understand the details of any given situation.  America is evil and everything they do is evil, so let’s just call everything they do "war against the Arabs and Muslims."  Nevermind that they’re busy freeing our Iraqi brothers and sisters from a dictator who has killed untold numbers of Arabs and Muslims, far more than America ever has.

"The Americans and the British can’t put up with the losses," he explains. "They will have to end the war ahead of time because they are losing too many soldiers."

Translation: I am so brainwashed that I honestly believe the crap that my Arab oppressors leaders feed me.  A few dozen casualties out of 300,000 is far too many, they’ll never be able to carry through with this war.  I’m so glad that Saddam’s defecting and surrendering underfed forced-into-fighting troops army is so powerful.

Somethings been put on the heart of me and some of my friends.  We’ve been talking about this for a few days now and we came to a conclusion that we need to let other people know.  Of course, we are at war.  There are a lot of protesters out there, but there are also a lot of people for the war.  Yes, I agree that we need to be there, but there is a point that a lot of people are missing.  Yes, Hussein is our enemy and a very evil man, but he needs our prayers.  I know the odds of him ever changing are slim, and the chances of him converting are even slimmer, but I believe that God can reach even the deepest seeds.  Most people want him dead, I don’t believe that is right.  I do believe we need to stop him and get him out of there, but all I’m saying is to pray for him and the members of his reigm.  God ask us to love our enemies and this is just another case of that.  Just a really extreme case.

Hrm not much to say today, compared to these last few days.

I’m sorta tired of warblogging, but I need to say one thing.  A lot of people are acting ridiculously and saying ridiculous things regarding this war.  Ridiculous is being surprised that there are casualties and POWs.  Ridiculous is being surprised that the Iraqi regime violates laws and human rights of our POWs -- they’ve been doing those things as long as anyone can remember.  Ridiculous is asking if the war is a failure, or asking if we are "getting off track," because there have been casualties and POWs and human rights violations.  Ridiculous is asking "what’s taking so long" 5 days into the conflict.  Ridiculous is being willingly ignorant of all history and logic, because that is the only way a person can ask such questions.  It is mind-boggling how supremely unreasonable people can be.

I feel better having gotten that out.  Den Beste has an in-depth analysis and explanation of all this, and after reading that I felt the need to comment.

It was really nice out today, about 60°, and I rode my bike 11 miles.  It never fails to amaze me how happy I get from just riding around to places I’ve never been.  I ended up in this really awesome neighborhood with big, beautiful houses.  All custom, too, not like the suburban-sprawl-induced clones that are springing up like weeds everywhere.  Most of them were on about 2 acres, some on 3 or 4 or 5, and all the lots were partially wooded, with big, tall, old trees.  And the neighborhoods were hilly, which gives them so much more character.  I suppose it was still State College out there, about 6 miles from my house, probably greater State College.  You certainly don’t see real estate like that in State College proper.

I had 231 visitors today!  The old record was 190something.  That’s exciting.  Lately I’ve noticed that when Google indexes my webpage, it often indexes nodivisions.com/ directly, instead of indexing a post like nodivisions.com/?197.  So when someone finds my site that way, the post they’re looking for may well have gotten pushed off the main page because there are newer posts.  So I added a search box at the top of the page, from which you can search this whole blog/messageboard.  Hopefully that will help some people out.

"There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein’s youngest son] personally supervise these murders."
...
Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: "Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation."
...
For more than 20 years, senior Iraqi officials have committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This list includes far more than the gassing of 5,000 in Halabja and other villages in 1988. It includes serial war crimes during the Iran-Iraq war; the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in 1987-88; the invasion of Kuwait and the killing of more than 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians; the violent suppression, which I witnessed, of the 1991 Kurdish uprising that led to 30,000 or more civilian deaths; the draining of the Southern Marshes during the 1990s, which ethnically cleansed thousands of Shias; and the summary executions of thousands of political opponents.

Many Iraqis wonder why the world applauded the military intervention that eventually rescued the Cambodians from Pol Pot and the Ugandans from Idi Amin when these took place without UN help. They ask why the world has ignored the crimes against them?

All these crimes have been recorded in detail by the UN, the US, Kuwaiti, British, Iranian and other Governments and groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and Indict. Yet the Security Council has failed to set up a war crimes tribunal on Iraq because of opposition from France, China and Russia. As a result, no Iraqi official has ever been indicted for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. I have said incessantly that I would have preferred such a tribunal to war. But the time for offering Saddam incentives and more time is over.

"I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam," says Daniel Pepper:

I wanted to join the human shields in Baghdad because it was direct action which had a chance of bringing the anti-war movement to the forefront of world attention... So that is exactly what I did.
...
I was shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad - a taxi driver taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was American and said, as we shields always did, "Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good". He looked at me with an expression of incredulity.

As he realised I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam’s regime. Until then I had only heard the President spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq’s oil money went into Saddam’s pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family.
...
Of course I had read reports that Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein, but this was the real thing. Someone had explained it to me face to face. I told a few journalists who I knew. They said that this sort of thing often happened - spontaneous, emotional, and secretive outbursts imploring visitors to free them from Saddam’s tyrannical Iraq.
...
"Don’t you listen to Powell on Voice of America radio?" he said. "Of course the Americans don’t want to bomb civilians. They want to bomb government and Saddam’s palaces. We want America to bomb Saddam."

We just sat, listening, our mouths open wide. Jake, one of the others, just kept saying, "Oh my God" as the driver described the horrors of the regime. Jake was so shocked at how naive he had been. We all were. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that the Iraqis might actually be pro-war.

The driver’s most emphatic statement was: "All Iraqi people want this war." He seemed convinced that civilian casualties would be small; he had such enormous faith in the American war machine to follow through on its promises. Certainly more faith than any of us had.
...
[After returning from Iraq] I went to photograph the anti-war rally in Parliament Square. Thousands of people were shouting "No war" but without thinking about the implications for Iraqis. Some of them were drinking, dancing to Samba music and sparring with the police. It was as if the protesters were talking about a different country where the ruling government is perfectly acceptable. It really upset me.

Anyone with half a brain must see that Saddam has to be taken out. It is extraordinarily ironic that the anti-war protesters are marching to defend a government which stops its people exercising that freedom.

That makes me want to go find every anti-war American I know and punch them in the face and scream WAKE UP!  This is about the 80th example I’ve seen of how horrible life is for Iraqis.  It’s not propaganda coming from "educated" sissy college students, nor from blind-to-all-logic leftist liberals... it’s coming from IRAQIS.

What the heck is wrong with people?  I’m hearing reporters and spokespeople saying we are "slowly but surely" winning this war.  Since when is securing the vast majority of a country and reaching its capital within a week considered "slow"?

I am watching war on live TV.  Some Iraqi infantrymen are returning small-arms fire on a coalition tank.  A stinking TANK.  It’s futile, but it does waste our troops’ time effectively.

Here’s the situation.  At Umm Qasr, there’s a handful of Iraqi soldiers in a building.  They fired on our troops with small arms, so we sent a few tanks down a road next to the building, the road maybe 50 or 100 meters from the building.  On the other side of the road, maybe 200 or 300 meters back, a dozen or so marines are laid out with their weapons trained on the building, some with binoculars.  This is where the cameraman is.  He’s talking to one of the marines to learn the situation, and he’s filming the whole thing.  We’re watching the tanks receive fire (and watching it bounce off), watching the tanks fire back, watching these marines lay patiently on the hot ground in the hot desert, and listening to one of them give the play-by-play on the situation.  This is so surreal and amazing.  It’s been going on for over 2 hours now and I’m riveted.  I can’t turn away.

I saw and heard some funny stuff in the past day or two.

Method Man and Redman did a commercial for Powerstripe deodorant.  It’s not "ha, ha" funny, but sad-funny.

Saw a Navy commercial that said, "Life. Liberty. And the pursuit of all who threaten it."  Very cool.  It even had decent music.

On David Letterman last night, the Top Ten list was "Top ten ways Kim Jong-Il [the murderous North Korean dictator] can improve his image."  One of the ways was "Goodbye weapons of mass destruction; hello cookies of mass tastiness."

On All Things Considered Wednesday, there was a commentary by Andrei Codrescu about a talking fish recently reported in the New York Times.

I don’t subscribe to cult news letters, so I have no idea if signs and miracles have been multiplying out there.  So when a Hebrew talking carp made the New York Times front page, I paid attention.

The carp was about to be chopped up by two fish-mongers, a Ecuadorian and a Jew, when it started spouting prophecies.  The Ecuadorian heard it first, and couldn’t understand what it was saying so he thought it was Satan.  But then his Jewish colleague listened, and it was saying Biblical things.

Despite their differences as to the import of the voice, they chopped up the talking carp anyway and sold it.  I can understand the Ecuadorian getting a little spooked because the carp wasn’t talking Latin or Spanish, the two main languages of non-human miracle messengers.  But what’s with the Jew?  He knew both what the carp was saying, and what a talking carp might be worth whole.

The New York Times report was kind of jocular too, and I didn’t like that.  Catholics have been receiving messages via tortillas, trees, and sheep for years, so the Jews get one turn through a fish, and the world laughs?

What gets me is that unaware people ate the carp.  I mean, there are people out there now with a piece of talking Gefilte fish in their bellies.  Everybody listens when their stomach rumbles.  But now they’ve got to listen extra carefully because the message, which was apocalyptic as I understand it, has gotten scrambled like a Dada poem and it’s all bits and pieces among the gurgles and growls.

The Jews say that thirty-six just men keep the world going.  Now there are thirty-six bellies out there, each one holding part of the message, and it’s a matter of some urgency that they be found, sat next to one another, interviewed by Rabbis, put in the right order, deciphered, and translated, first into Latin, then into English.  The Jews don’t have a Pope that can certify the message, but we can put it to a vote, and then have Joe Lieberman introduce it to the world.

Joseph recently pointed me to radioU.com which, unlike most internet (and other) radio stations, is actually pretty good.  But the best thing about it so far is that they have 2 interviews with the brothers Chaps, creators of HomestarRunner.com.  (If you’ve never been there to see Strong Bad emails, your life is not complete.)  And these interviews are stinking hilarious.  Here’s the page they’re on, and here are direct links to the first interview and the second one.

Finally, Protesting the Protesters is really funny too.  My favorite answer to the "real reasons for the war" question was that it’s for the control of water in the middle east.  Ahh, of course, how sinister!

Charlie Daniels speaks his mind!

We received a press release from Charlie Daniel’s people regarding the issues in Iraq. Read on...

for immediate release March 4, 2003

An Open Letter To The Hollywood Bunch:

Ok let’s just say for a moment you bunch of pampered, overpaid, unrealistic children had your way and the U.S.A. didn’t go into Iraq.

Let’s say that you really get your way and we destroy all our nuclear weapons and stick daisies in our gun barrels and sit around with some white wine and cheese and pat ourselves on the back, so proud of what we’ve done for world peace.

Let’s say that we cut the military budget to just enough to keep the National Guard on hand to help out with floods and fires.

Let’s say that we close down our military bases all over the world and bring the troops home, increase our foreign aid and drop all the trade sanctions against everybody.

I suppose that in your fantasy world this would create a utopian world where everybody would live in peace. After all, the great monster, the United States of America, the cause of all the world’s trouble would have disbanded it’s horrible military and certainly all the other countries of the world would follow suit. After all, they only arm themselves to defend their countries from the mean old U.S.A.

Why you bunch of pitiful, hypocritical, idiotic, spoiled mugwumps. Get your head out of the sand and smell the Trade Towers burning. Do you think that a trip to Iraq by Sean Penn did anything but encourage a wanton murderer to think that the people of the U.S.A. didn’t have the nerve or the guts to fight him?

Barbra Streisand’s fanatical and hateful rankings about George Bush makes about as much sense as Michael Jackson hanging a baby over a railing.

You people need to get out of Hollywood once in a while and get out into the real world. You’d be surprised at the hostility you would find out here. Stop in at a truck stop and tell an overworked, long-distance truck driver that you don’t think Saddam Hussein is doing anything wrong.

Tell a farmer with a couple of sons in the military that you think the United States has no right to defend itself.

Go down to Baxley, Georgia and hold an anti-war rally and see what the folks down there think about you.

You people are some of the most disgusting examples of a waste of protoplasm I’ve ever had the displeasure to hear about.

Sean Penn, you’re a traitor to the United States of America. You gave aid and comfort to the enemy. How many American lives will your little, "fact finding trip" to Iraq cost? You encouraged Saddam to think that we didn’t have the stomach for war.

You people protect one of the most evil men on the face of this earth and won’t lift a finger to save the life of an unborn baby. Freedom of choice you say?

Well I’m going to exercise some freedom of choice of my own. If I see any of your names on a marquee, I’m going to boycott the movie. I will completely stop going to movies if I have to. In most cases it certainly wouldn’t be much of a loss.

You scoff at our military who’s boots you’re not even worthy to shine. They go to battle and risk their lives so ingrates like you can live in luxury. The day of reckoning is coming when you will be faced with the undeniable truth that the war against Saddam Hussein is the war on terrorism.

America is in imminent danger. You’re either for her or against her. There is no middle ground.

I think we all know where you stand.

What do you think?

God Bless America! Charlie Daniels

<warm-fuzzy-feeling>I just saw something really awesome on Fox news: footage of a US soldier in a recently liberated Iraqi town [update: it was Safwan].  People were gathered around him, all with giant smiles on their faces, shaking his hand, giving him hi-fives.</warm-fuzzy-feeling>

Also saw this headline: "Surrenders coming as fast as we can handle them."

I worry about Baghdad though.  During the weeks before the war, there were rumors about the Iraqi army digging trenches around the city and filling them with oil.  Who knows what’s true at this point, but I’d hate to see our troops walk into a trap when they enter the capital.