Mark Bossingham

Palin! Great choice

Jury gives the finger to Fed prosecutors

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – A former Marine accused of killing unarmed Iraqi detainees was acquitted of voluntary manslaughter Thursday in a first-of-its-kind federal trial that ended with some of the jurors shaking hands and hugging the defendant and his sobbing mother.

Tokyo Construction Week 8

SEEING A lot more action this week as they cover the earth with steel plates so the influx of heavy equipment can zip around. Still hole digging. Not many workers yet, that will come soon enough.

Cool Barack bumper sticker

I love The Messiah's Veep pick

BARRY HAS picked Joe Biden, a Delaware senator, as his vice presidential running mate. I couldn't be happier. I was worried he might pick someone who could actually help his flagging campaign, but apparently wiser heads prevailed.

"Generation Kill" and the Gaff-O-Matic

I'VE WATCHED six of seven episodes of HBO's pejoratively titled "Generation Kill" and have seen enough to review it. The first couple of episodes were fine (to suck you in) and the producers obviously spent a lot of money to get the details right. But having the correct vehicles is pretty easy, really. And on a micro-level, except when they want to editorialize, they get the dialog pretty close.
    But on a truth level, the series fails. The writers present the Marines as tormented (some love it) baby killers, and the officers as idiots, or in one case completely insane.
     This view is a left-liberal article of faith, but reality (history) makes things tough for the writers and the viewers. If this company of recon Marines (the best that service has) was so trigger happy and incompetently led, how did it survive even its first encounter with the enemy?
    In one hilarious instance three or four humvees are stuck on a elevated road taking RPG and automatic weapons fire from both sides. We end up watching a cartoonish scene in which the enemy can't hit anything even with the grenade launchers, and the Marines can't miss. Dozens of insurgents are killed; one Marine gets a flesh wound.
    How to explain this away? After the firefight, the "smart" sergeant and the "smart" LT refer to the bad guys as "amateurs" and "college students" from Syria who would not have been in Iraq if the United States hadn't invaded the country. Somehow, the dumbest Marine manages to fend off the apparently even dumber Jihadists.
    After frequently bombing civilian villages and shooting up the odd car full of babies or three (the liberal protagonists spend so much time shaking their heads knowingly, I began to worry they might fall off), our heroes are berated for attacking Iraq "for oil" by a remarkably attractive Iraqi woman.
    I don't have the strength to go further. Suffice to say, this mini-series was made by the same type of people who would agree with the Gaff-O-Matic's comment from yesterday that the U.S. liberation of Iraq was no different than the Russian invasion of Georgia.
    One can only shake one's head and ask, are they really this stupid, or do they actually believe this stuff?

    Regardless, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal puts it better than I ever could:

    But Mr. McCain provided, in 2004, one of the most exciting and certainly the most charged moment of the Republican Convention, when he looked up at Michael Moore in the press stands and said, "Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war, it was between war and a greater threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. . . . And certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace."

'This wasn't how it was supposed to end'

THE FABULOUS Japanese softball team did the impossible (according to the ever-jingoistic U.S. sports writers) and beat an equally great U.S. softball team for the gold medal at Beijing. AP sports writer Tom Withers made it clear he didn't think the Japanese team even belonged on the same field with the Americans, mumbling bitterly that Japanese pitcher Yukiko Ueno was "...One of the few players in the field who could win a roster spot on the U.S. squad." Of course, Withers probably wrote most of his story before the U.S. lost. Clearly, the Japanese are better defensively than the Americans and catcher Yukiyo Mine would be a significant upgrade for the U.S. team. None of this is meant to imply the Americans are anything but terrific, they just hit better than they field (same with the bronze-medal winning Australians). And what is there to say about the magnificent Crystal Bustos? I don't think I would ever pitch to her. All in all, a very entertaining game to watch by two good teams. The International Softball Federation should hold its World Championship to run concurrently with the Olympics in London in 2012. You do know that the pathetic Brits had women's softball kicked out of the Olympics, the first time a sport has been delisted since 1932, didn't you? I suppose the idea of building a few ball parks near their beloved "footie" shrines/pitches was just too much for a nation to dumb to learn the rules of any sport more complicated than kicking a ball up and down a field.

Tokyo Construction Week 7

I SKIPPED last week because the workers were on their Bon summer vacation. They are still digging holes. You can see the slugs of dirt the giant post-hole diggers pull out in the foreground. Later heavy squat machines will roll in and screw giant steel pipes into these initial holes. Hundreds of them.

The Messiah hits a new, uhh, low

IN THE process of getting his ass handed to him at a mega-church over the weekend, the Arrogant one went out of his way to call the only black man on the U.S. Supreme Court an idiot. As a black man himself, couldn't he, if he had to, pick on a white guy? No. He tells us the black guy is stupid, but hey, that white guy is pretty smart. The Wall Street Journal says it a bit more elegantly:

    Barack Obama likes to portray himself as a centrist politician who wants to unite the country, but occasionally his postpartisan mask slips. That was the case at Saturday night's Saddleback Church forum, when Mr. Obama chose to demean Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
... Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat's answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn't expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn't merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court's black conservative isn't up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.

Dog still small, still ready to rumble