I found this article illuminating, "Kerry was Right: bad students are getting stuck in Iraq". Particularly these two paragraphs:

I recently spoke about this with my friend Eli Flyer, a longtime Pentagon consultant on military recruiting, who painted a grim picture of the Army's current recruiting strategy. In 2005, Flyer noted, the Army fell far short of its goal of attracting 80,000 enlistees. It managed to meet that same target last year by deploying about 1,400 new recruiters, by offering larger enlistment bonuses and other incentives, and by systematically lowering educational standards for new recruits. For example, the portion of non-high school graduates in last year's enlistee pool was 27.5 percent, up from 17 percent in 2005. In the 1990s, non-grads (most of whom do have a G.E.D.) made up only about 5 percent of new Army recruits.

There has also been an increase in the number of recruits coming in with "moral waivers" for a criminal history (a story covered last year by the Los Angeles Times). Last year, one in ten recruits had a prior misdemeanor or felony conviction. That adds up to 7,500 individuals, up from 4,000 in 2004. Meanwhile, a Hartford Courant series last year found that the military is enlisting (as well as redeploying) a growing number of mentally-troubled soldiers.

When they get desperate enough, they will waive all sorts of prior requirements to joining the armed forces.

My Dad went to Viet Nam even though he had flat feet. Later when we wanted to rejoin the army after being a civilian, they said that he couldn't because of his flat feet. He responded that if we was good enough for Viet Nam, he was good enough then and they took him back in. My dad said he knew a number of guys that were given the "jail or join the army" sentence.

Is it me or does this just show the level of desperation going on in order to feed the war machine?

I called it way back in February.

My mom and dad, working in a military base town talked how dear friends were being called up for the 3rd time. That they knew people that came close deployment after deployment to losing life and limb.

Finally.

Finally, they were tired of it. They thought that maybe an oppositional government wasn't a bad thing.

I don't think they voted for anything other than straight ticket Republican. But if they were even thinking about it showed a sea change to me.

People are tired. They want relief and the election was one to attempt to get it.

Avi Rubin, a security researcher that has done a lot of electronic voting analysis, has blogged his experience working as an election worker in a precinct that not only uses electronic voting, but (more horribly, it turns out) uses electronic check-in and verification in an effort to stop voting fraud.

My wife and I are trying to volunteer to work the polls for the next election. Not sure if we will be able to. This will be the first election that we are reuqired to use electronic voting. It's stories like these that make me shudder at the thought of what it could be like.

Don't you just love the Freedom of Information Act. Seems a law student blogger exercised his FoIA rights and got Rumsfeld's notes from soon after the Semptember 11th attacks. http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1716842,00.html.

The blog post is can be found at http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/02/dod-staffers-notes-from-911-obtained.html.

The flickr image of the Rumsfeld notes can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/66726692@N00/100545349/

What I find interesting about this, above and beyond the actual content - which is fascinating in itself - is just the transmission speed. One person makes the FoIA request and posts the results on his blog. 8 days later, it is picked up by the Guardian, then it shows up at the top of reddit.com. It's not novel or new... but I still am awed by this sort of thing. Even 5 years ago, this would be such a foreign idea. Very strange and very interesting in my mind.

I am calling it now... just to have a record. I think the Dems are going to take back the Congress.

Just a gut feeling.

I will say why when and if it happens, but has to do with a recent interaction with family.

Just saw this in JordanH's Journal.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Turn to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

"For example, if a part of your program uses different data types at different times, Psyco may generate a different version of machine code to support each different type combination."

Source: Learning Python 2nd edition, by Mark Lutz & David Ascher

I have a feeling that a lot of technical books will be in the sample if this catches on.