Hammer Mill Days

Okay, kids. Line up for lunch. No, we're not going outside. Rainy day schedule today. Break out the coloring books and the tunafish sandwiches. If you're anything like me, that was your favorite kind of lunch hour in grade school. No going out on the playground and putting up your dukes against whatever red neck wanted a piece of you that particular day. Why the reverie? Not sure. I guess all that rain beating down on the roof of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill has made me think of some of the other sprawling, musty barns I've inhabited for years at a time. Other squat houses, apartments, schools, lean-to's ... hell, submarines, even. Don't knock it! It can rain all it wants, and no leaks (unless you opt for the screen door). What's up this week? Just toiling away in the vineyards of Big Green-ville, scratching out weird new numbers, honking noisily into microphones, tapping away at Ned Trek scripts. Mostly just making stuff up on the fly - that's wha...

Obama now has something like 1,000 American military personnel "on the ground", as they say, in Iraq. The situation for the Yazidi families, while serious, was not as dire as the government had suggested apparently, as thousands had been escaping their mountaintop exile every night, according to the NY Times . Just yesterday, NBC's Brian Williams characterized their plight as "a modern Exodus," though I don't recall him using that terminology to describe the thousands upon thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes in northern Gaza under withering Israeli fire (that would have been all his job is worth). Still, the U.S. military action will continue in Iraq, sans dramatic justification. Neatly done. And we will continue to provide arms to the people fighting those other people we provided arms to. There's a foreign policy for you. What's even more worrying than that, though, is the degree to which our military have been providing arms, armor...