10 years of refusing to comply with UN weapons inspections was reason enough for me to remove Saddam.

He obviously had possessed WMDs, and was willing to use them. Whether he still had them, I think, was and remains a moot point. Without assurance of their destruction he could reasonably be assumed to still possess them and pose a serious risk to the region and the world.

I hold Clinton responsible for not smoking his ass long before Cheney and Rumsfeld et al. got the chance to use W as their dummy.

Let's face it, W is the short, stubby, dull broken crayon of Harvard Business School. He hasn't the brains to organize a game of hopscotch.

As president, he seems to have been best at following directions.

I can only hope that soon those directions will include cleaning his cell for the remainder of his natural life.

"To some extent, these cases are forever tainted."

NCLB policies leave all children behind.

Kindergarten teachers must act as zookeepers of a large percentage of children with behavioral and developmental problems. There's no place for them other than the ordinary classroom so the teacher spends 90% of their time attempting to keep 3-5% of children from destroying the materials (that they often have paid for from their own pocket), hurting the other children and/or themselves.

Parents of those little monsters fight teachers tooth and nail to prevent them being placed in Special Ed. in order to maintain their crack-induced delusion that their child is "normal".

So the teacher must have the child evaluated by one of the system's 2 psychologists, a process that takes 6 months, if it occurs at all.

(Next school year, despite a psychologist's findings that year, if any, the process begins again at square one.)

EOY: Test scores have not improved. The obvious problem: Teachers are incompetent. Solution: Build more prisons.

or someone desperate for publicity would thus protest being dubbed a skank whore.

OTOH, being a famous skank whore often leads to your own immensely popular and monetarily rewarding TV show.

I used to have DSS, but I got promoted.

If I hadn't gotten some treatment, long after ETSing, I'd have probably killed somebody myself by now.

I kept it under control for 20 years... as far as "becoming" violent anyway, but it was clear to anybody who got to know me a little I was a powder keg with a short fuse.

Then one night I was drunk in a bar and some shitbird picked up my change and said he didn't care if it was mine, he was keeping it.

He let go of it pretty quick, along with some of his teeth.

Of course it was "his" bar, and I did get loose from the 5 guys trying to hold me, and I did inflict some more damage.

I got 100 days in jail, and some anger management training. That was OK, but I knew I needed more or I was going to kill somebody and/or myself.

I found the best shrink in the world, in Billings Montana of all places, and convinced him to see me even though I didn't have a dime. I probably paid him less than $100 over the two years he saw me. (Thanks, Doc!)

He gave me the tools to deal, but the PTSD is always there, lurking, I can just keep it quiet now.

If I were to be threatened with physical harm today, I'll probably kill that person, probably without thinking twice, and probably with no regrets. Prison? I'll just kill myself.

It's not something I think most guys can "get over" without help, and even then you just have to try to learn to live with a milder version of it.

The way this country treats its veterans is a crying shame, but it's always been like that, as far as I know.

We do love our traditions.