Things That Just Piss Me Off

This just goes on and on. How would you like to be able to get away with shooting someone? Just join blackwater.

State Dept. Plans Tighter Control of Security Firm
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: October 6, 2007

The State Department, seeking to retain its relationship with Blackwater USA while trying to bring the company’s armed guards under tighter control, said Friday that it would now send its own personnel as monitors on all Blackwater security convoys in and around Baghdad.

The department will also install video cameras in Blackwater armored vehicles to produce a record of all operations that could be used in investigations of the use of force by private security contractors. The State Department will also save recordings of all radio transmissions between Blackwater convoys and military and civilian agencies supervising them in Iraq.

Blackwater is one of three private companies providing security services to the State Department in Iraq, running heavily-armed escorts every time a prominent American civilian leaves the protected Green Zone. The requirement for ride-along monitors does not apply to the other two security contractors, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the State Department said. Blackwater runs roughly 60 security convoys a week in central Iraq.

The State Department was facing new questions on Friday about its handling of another case, involving a former Blackwater guard who is suspected of shooting a bodyguard to an Iraqi vice president while drunk last Christmas Eve.

The former guard, Andrew J. Moonen, now lives in Seattle after being dismissed from Blackwater and sent home from Iraq 36 hours after the shooting, with the approval and help of the State Department.

But within weeks of losing his job at Blackwater, Mr. Moonen was hired by a Defense Department contractor and sent to Kuwait to work on logistics related to the Iraq war, a spokesman for the contractor, Combat Support Associates, said Friday. Mr. Moonen worked for the company from February until August of this year, said the spokesman, Paul Gennaro.

The company apparently did not know that Mr. Moonen had lost his job because of the December episode in Baghdad. Mr. Moonen’s lawyer said that his dismissal was based on reports that he had handled a weapon while drunk, not for shooting the guard, for which he has not been charged.

Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the Democratic chairman of a House committee investigating Blackwater, raised the matter in a letter to Ms. Rice on Friday. “I am writing to express concern that the State Department may have failed to report important facts about a private military contractor’s killing of a guard for the Iraqi vice president and thereby facilitated the hiring of that individual to work on another contract in support of the Iraq war only two months after the homicide.”

Mr. Waxman noted that Erik D. Prince, the founder of Blackwater, told the House committee on Tuesday that he would see to it that Mr. Moonen’s security clearance was revoked and that he would not be allowed to work in any further security or war-related capacity.

What? No one at the state department or at blackwater thought of revoking his security clearance and disallowing him to work on more contracts until now? The shooting someone while he was drunk thing wasn’t enough?

Let’s just bring the troops home and give blacwater a bigger contract. Let’s leave them in Iraq and bring everyone else home. We can even include a budget for more booze for the blackwater guards.

We can spend billions of dollars to pursue the bush war in Iraq, but not on heathcare for children. Our childrens is learning more about bush every day.

Bush Vetoes Child Health Bill Privately
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and CARL HULSE
Published: October 4, 2007

President Bush on Wednesday made good on his promise to veto a bill that would have expanded government health insurance for children. He added, “If they need a little more money to help us meet the objective of getting help for poorer children, I’m more than willing to sit down with the leaders and find a way to do so.”

Awww, he does care, see? He’s willing to give poor children a “little” more money. I guess if those children that need healthcare would sit on the whitehouse doorstep with a little cup, he’d put some spare change in there everytime. Such a compassionate guy.

The veto, only the fourth of Mr. Bush’s presidency, is a politically difficult one for the president, and he issued it in private Wednesday morning, without the fanfare and White House ceremonies he has employed when rejecting embryonic stem cell legislation and an emergency war spending bill that set a deadline for troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Yes, he hoped the public won’t even notice that he would rather spend more money in Iraq than he does on the needs of children here in the US.

Still, he sounded a bit uneasy. “My job is a decision-making job, and as a result, I make a lot of decisions,” Mr. Bush said, adding that he had come to “explain the philosophy behind some of the decisions I’ve made.”

Your job is a decision making job so you make a lot of decisions. We are so glad you explained that Mr. President. Thank you from all of us hicks out here that didn’t understand that a decision making job would require you to make a lot of decisions. Bush does this a lot. He’ll say that Iraq was a state sponsor of terriorism, then say, in other words, they sponsored terrorism. He is trying to be helpful because he just knows we cannot understand him when he says it only once.

The last part of the quote above is really fascinating. Bush explaining the “philosophy” of anything. I just want him to spell philosophy once.

I visit a lot of webmaster forums and visit blogs about SEO as well as write some blogs of my own about SEO, Article Marketing, and Blogging. I learn a lot by visiting other people’s blogs and forums and learn a lot by sharing that information with others.

But one thing bothers me about what I read on most forums and blogs. People are obsessed with Google. There are forums where they refer to Google as just “g” because they seem to be afraid someone at Google might read their post and not like it.

This Google obsession borders on lunacy. Webmasters seem to be convinced that without a good ranking in Google and without Google’s seal of approval, page rank, they cannot be successful on the web.

Let’s think about that for a moment. If Google folded tomorrow, not likely, but if they did, suddenly they just weren’t there. Google.com did not resolve, page cannot be displayed, what would you do?

Would it be like the stock market crash of the 30’s? Would webmasters be jumping off buildings? Would everyone just stop doing business on the web because Google was gone? Would the forums be full of grieving webmasters with nowhere to turn? Would they erect a statue of Matt Cutts and hold memorial services for the CEOs of Google? Would you light a candle for Google?

The point I’m trying to make is that business was being done on the web before Google became a search portal, before adwords and adnonsense, before Matt Cutts had a blog, and before Google hired an artist full-time to keep making cute little Google logos. Before there was a Google toolbar, page rank, Google images, Google stores, and Google pay, we made money on the Internet.

Yet, people write articles, blogs, and forums posts that start with things like, “If you do business on the web, you have to pay attention to Google”, like that was a fact etched in stone.

If you are someone who builds a lot of websites, try an experiment. Ignore Google for just that one website. Focus on other search traffic and other ways to get business done. All without using anything Google. Just try it once. I’ll bet if you really try, you will still have success with your website, without visiting Matt Cutts’ blog even once. Just make it a game, see if you can make money on the web without Google.

Or do you have the Google habit so bad that you actually believe the web could not actually function without Google? It’s like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet. We know he didn’t. Neither did Google.