Merry (Robot) Christmas !

Watch out, Radio City Music Hall Rockettes!
With a little more practice, these dancing robots may one day replace you in the annual Christmas Spectacular.

Fussy Eater

My older brother was like this--always hated the crusts!

Which Way To The Bank?

Oops! Guess President Obama made a wrong turn on his way to the bank! He should have Googled the directions or used GPS to locate it. Is this bank he was taking it to one of the ones that got billions of taxpayer dollars so they could give their top executives nice fat bonuses?

But don't worry--this war escalation will only cost another $30 billion or so--a drop in the bucket! It can be paid for by that income tax surcharge named the "Share The Sacrifice Act" that several top members of Congress (Mr. OBEY, Mr. MURTHA, Mr. LARSON of Connecticut, Ms. ESHOO, Mr. FARR, Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts, Mr. GRIJALVA, Ms. MCCOLLUM, Mr. MCDERMOTT, Mr. MCGOVERN, and Ms. LINDA T. SANCHEZ of California) proposed recently. The full text of this war tax is available here at the Library of Congress site.

H. R. 4130

To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to establish a temporary surtax to offset the costs of the Afghanistan war.

Afghanistan is known as the "Graveyard of Empires", because previous attempts, (from Alexander the Great in the year 372 to the Soviet invasion in the 1980's) at conquering this country have failed. An excellent article on Afghanistan's history, written by the former CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, Milton Bearden, is available here. A recent book on this subject, In The Graveyard Of Empires, written by Seth G. Jones, a RAND Corporation political scientist, is for sale on Amazon.com. I haven't read it yet, but just ordered a copy to be sent to my Kindle eBook reader. It looks to be an interesting and informative book.

Let's just hope the American empire isn't the next one to be brought to its knees, with all our military adventures and economic calamities.