A killer 80s playlist...

Rather than let things just go randomly, I actually played personal DJ and followed a mood where it felt like going, and this has been the playlist over the last couple of hours:

• Fleetwood Mac - Straight Back (Stevie Nicks tune from Mirage)
• 'Til Tuesday - What About Love
• Madness - My Girl
• The Cure - Fascination Street (extended)
• The Cars - Heartbeat City
• The Kings - Do it Again
• Robert Plant - Heaven Knows
• Robert Plant - Ship of Fools
• Pet Shop Boys - Love Comes Quickly
• A-Ha - Living a Boy's Adventure Tale
• Bruce Hornsby - The Red Plains
• Dire Straits - Calling Elvis
• Lindsey Buckingham - Wrong
• Genesis - Man on the Corner
• Rush - Mission
• Peter Gabriel - This is the Picture
• Sting - The Wild Wild Sea
• Pete Townshend - Face the Face

and still to come in the queue

• Pete Townshend - Slip Skirts
• Alan Parsons Project - Stereotomy
• CSN - Shadow Captain
• King Crimson - Sheltering Sky
• Yes - Shoot High Aim Low
• U2 - Indian Summer Sky

(yeah, 1 70s and 2 90s songs in there - so what? i'm in a mood...).  Yeah, the "hits" of the 80s are cool, but when in my deep 80s moods back in the day, THAT is the kind of stuff I was cranking out on my walkman...

This is "support"?

WCSH6.com - National Guard Troops Denied Benefits After Longest Deployment Of Iraq War:

MINNEAPOLIS, MN (NBC) -- When they came home from Iraq, 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard had been deployed longer than any other ground combat unit. The tour lasted 22 months and had been extended as part of President Bush's surge.

1st Lt. Jon Anderson said he never expected to come home to this: A government refusing to pay education benefits he says he should have earned under the GI bill.

"It's pretty much a slap in the face," Anderson said. "I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership... once again failing the soldiers."

Anderson's orders, and the orders of 1,161 other Minnesota guard members, were written for 729 days.

Had they been written for 730 days, just one day more, the soldiers would receive those benefits to pay for school.

"Which would be allowing the soldiers an extra $500 to $800 a month," Anderson said.

That money would help him pay for his master's degree in public administration. It would help Anderson's fellow platoon leader, John Hobot, pay for a degree in law enforcement.

"I would assume, and I would hope, that when I get back from a deployment of 22 months, my senior leadership in Washington, the leadership that extended us in the first place, would take care of us once we got home," Hobot said.

Both Hobot and Anderson believe the Pentagon deliberately wrote orders for 729 days instead of 730.

This is, of course, yet another wonderful example of this administration's dedication to "supporting the troops".

Grokked from Dispatches.

Oh the hell with it...

You can not, under any stretch of the word "original", say that a movie that is a basic re-imagining of a franchise that is 25 years old is "the most original movie of the year".

You just can't.

Damn, it's time to get another irony meter.