dt_3pin

That shop is awesome.

Wilderness.

Yeah, Oct. 14 is the big day. The cupcake was the first sugar wee man ever had. He was pretty stoked.

Good job Kevbone. Henry turned one yesterday That cupcake took him for a ride . . .

I know companies are outsourcing their manufacturing to awesome places like Burma and China and Vietnam on account of those little kids working 15 hours a day in the sweat shops have the coveted "combination of good judgment, long-term vision, and problem-solving ability to adequately protect the employer’s interests" Silly me, I thought it was a cost cutting measure . . .

Great thread!!! Anyone have a snowsuit for a 12-18 monther. Henry's looking to poach yer stashes this winter, but needs to stay warm.

Well stated billcoe.

Good lord, that's awful.

Off the hook would be by "15 minutes"! No Kevbone. Climbing the Nose in 2:48:35 is off the hook.

Pay your bills on time and you shouldn't have too much of a problem. Works better than indignancy. Except when there is a snafu, and a burden of prooving innocence to get it corrected. True dat. Do you think the government would provide better services than the private sector with respect to credit scoring?

Pay your bills on time and you shouldn't have too much of a problem. Works better than indignancy.

Nice one. JM is the deal.

When getting fucked by a corporation, which orifice is (((correct)))? 8D

Lynwood? Damn, that hurts man. Tvash, I understand your point. I think illuminating light on the gruesome underbelly of war is important, and the role of private contractors and the general outsourcing (aka tax farming) of traditional military duties deserves more attention than it's getting. While we likely agree that the use of military contractors is dubious, and the lack of legal accountability is repugnant, there is no guarantee that the situation in that square would have been any different were it regular grunts, special operators, or private contractors. Sure, we should point to that incident to frame the question "what the fuck are we doing over there - what are we accomplishing?" Pointing to that incident to say that BW or any other private contractor outfit is bad kind of missess the point. Enlistees and contractors alike (but not all) are doing fucked up shit. If they start a draft, conscripts likely will as well. I guess I feel there are bigger fish to fry and this is but another distraction that benefits the Bush team by drawing fire away from the real policy debates about our involvement in the middle east. Reasonable minds, of course, can disagree.

THat is not what happened, according to reports. If you're going to take the time to post your opinion, at least make sure it's informed. The Iraqi doctor was shot first, then his car drifted (not hurtled) towards the convoy...because he was dead and his weight was still on the accelerator. The convoy then opened fire in all directions at everything that moved, including those trying to flee. Hardly a trained, professional response. Boy, if informed opinions are a prerequsite for posting on cc.com, they might as well shut this place down. I'm aware that the Dr. was shot and the car kept heading towards the convoy, and I apologize if my post didn't make that clear. In a context where vehicles are regularly used as moving weapons, I think their reaction was perhaps not all that unreasonable. I wasn't there, so I'm a bit hesitant to pass judgment on people's actions under the duress of combat. You suggest that wasn't a trained professional response, but I wouldn't be to sure, and I wonder how you would react in the same situation. Again, nitpicking the responses of individual combatants is pretty meaningless in the end. The war, and the larger policy decisions that caused it, are the problem. Unfortunate killings are simply the result. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

Well done dinomyte and ericb. Those are some cute kids. I'll second the ergo pack endorsement. Those things are really comfy and wee Henry likes it way more than the bjorn.

can I have a poster of that for my wall? Thanks for the new avatar pic.

Uh, okay

Christ, if Neo from the Matrix and Yoda somehow spawned a retarded love child, I suspect it would sound a lot like V7.

This post hits the nail on the head, kind of. It's easy to criticize without offering pragmatic solutions, and I haven't heard any good proposals from the Left on how to withdraw without conflagrating the chaos that is contemporary Iraq. On the otherhand, the Right has left me unconvinced that the current approach will result in a favorable outcome and avoid the worst-case results KK identifies above. As I see it, the lack of good options from either side of the debate brings one word to mind - quagmire.

Perhaps not.... Despite my concern about military contractors, nepotistic war profiteering, and the US fiasco in Iraq in general, I have a hard time with criticisms of Blackwater's actions. What happened is really fucked up and its sad that innocent people were killed. But innocent people are slaughtered every day in Iraq, whether by suicide bomb, guided bomb, or Blackwater. Who knows why the first Iraqi was shot, but I suppose I would react the same way if I saw a car hurling at my convoy. It's a pretty fucking high-threat enviornment those folks are operating in, and shit happens. It doesn't sound like they lined the Iraqis up and mowed them down, Mi Lai syle. Instead, it looks like, IMHO, they were responding to a legitimately percieved threat. I'm not really willing to second guess individual troops on the ground in a combat environment. The problem isn't so much what Blackwater or US troops do in any one specific instance, on account of those are just symptoms of the bigger foreign policy blunder. These hearings seem kind of like a forest for the trees issue.

Damn, that sucks balls. Who was the Judge? That'd be good beta for folks who find themselves in the same situation.

as a REMF, right? Better a REMF than a chickenhawk.