Brent, If You're Going to Keep Her, You Have to Feed Her

Apparently, in an effort to save money, Brent has not been allowing his wife, Ashley, to eat. He has also taken a job as a puppy assassin just to make ends meet. Life is tough, bless their hearts. I was talking to Brent this afternoon, and Ashley fought her way to the computer to try to get someone's attention to get help, but it was only me. Here's the pertinent snippet:

Brent: brent has to go cuz i'm starving
Brent: he doesn't feed me ever
Me: alright
Brent: hahahaha
Me: well, that doesn't seem very nice
Brent: ok, you hear the woman, i gotta go, ill talk to you later

Barely two months married and he's already starving her. I can't imagine how bad it will be once he moves her away from her family and up to D.C.

I remembered my forgotten rant topic from last night. I was about to go to sleep when I did, so I didn't feel like editing the post or adding an addendum. Let me start with a quote:

"The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States . . ."

This is from Article 2 of a little document called the United States Constitution. Now another brief snippet:

"Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who chairs the House panel that oversees military spending, said he plans to introduce legislation that would end Bush's plan by setting limits on which troops can be sent and would prevent them from being sent back too soon or too poorly equipped. Troops going overseas for another tour would have to stay in the United States at least one year before being redeployed."

Let's take a look: the President is commander in chief, which means what he says goes when it comes to the military. Congress doesn't get a vote. It has come to be that they have some control when it comes to funding issues, but the Constitution says if the President tells the military to do something, they do it. Funding worries come later. Rep. Murtha is going to set limits on troop numbers and when they can be deployed. I'm going to ignore for now that this is a monumentally STUPID idea, and present the argument that this is ILLEGAL. He certainly doesn't have the power to do this by himself, his committee doesn't have the power to do this, the House of Representatives doesn't have the power to do this, and the whole of Congress doesn't have the power to do this. The Congress can declare war, but the President is in charge of the military whether they do or not. The only way Congress can legally stop the President on military matters is to impeach him and remove him from office (which gives them Dick Cheney, who I'm sure will play nice with Congress' wishes). This, of course, requires that the President break a law, you know, other than committing perjury. (Anyone else notice that when Clinton lied UNDER OATH, it was an endearing quality, and when Bush presented bad information that everyone else in the world also believed to be true, he's worse than Satan for lying? Also, Iraq did have WMD. Saddam used chemical weapons in the past, and several caches of chemical weapons were found after he was deposed. If it were just nuclear weapons, we'd say just nuclear, but WMD means nuclear, chemical, and biological.) This Murtha guy has been trying to single-handedly lose the fight in Iraq for several years now. The worst thing we could do in Iraq right now is to pull out a significant number of troops. I want them to come home and spend time with their families, too, but you know what? They VOLUNTEERED for MILITARY SERVICE. No one doesn't understand that you've signed up for the Army (Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps). We didn't draft them. They aren't slaves. They agreed to do this, and many are getting some decent deals out of it - college tuition and more. Yes, war is hell. I don't want to get shot at myself, which is why I didn't volunteer. Every person over there did. What happens if we bring them all home, as Murtha wants? We get another Taliban, just like Afghanistan before 9/11. How'd that turn out for us? Oh, right, they harbored a terrorist who planned the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. That sounds like a fun government to have around, especially so close to the Israelis. What I really don't get is how this guy is a Marine and championing retreat. Frame it however you want, but pulling all of your troops out of an area where there is still work to be done is a retreat.

Something else I was thinking about, remembering really, is what Orson Scott Card said in his column on The Ornery American. President Bush is a terrible speaker. I generally like his ideas when I read about them or hear them explained by his press secretary, Tony Snow, but hearing his ideas from him makes me dislike them somehow. It's not the nuclear / nucular stuff, either. I had a chemistry teacher who said it the same way the President does, and he's not the only one I've known to pronounce it that way. I'm not sure why he's such a bad speaker, either, but he is, and I think that has hurt him more than any issue in Iraq or domestically.

Back to boring current events, i.e. my life and what I did today. Since I'm considering a cruise trajectory for my tactical missile, I'm altering my code to include that capability. I spent some time deriving the equations I need to include thrust along an angle to the body's velocity. For the non-technical readers: the missile wants to fall out of the sky, I need to push it upwards while sending it towards the target. It's a tricky calculation because of how I want the program to handle it, but I think I've got it. I haven't updated the program yet because I was lazy this afternoon, but that shouldn't be too hard now.

I would like to thank John Kerry for stopping by to leave a comment this morning. I feel much more enlightened now. More tomorrow.