The Wire: 12/18/2012

I’m starting to wonder how many stock photos of power lines you have.

“I’d vote Mick Mulvaney or Jeff Duncan for Speaker”

Mulvaney can’t see over the podium. That is his “statue” in the House. A majority of Members would collectively say “WHO?” if either were nominated.

FITS, Daniel Inouye was not only a veteran he was a CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR receipient. Here is the Wikipedia entry describing why:

On April 21, 1945, Inouye was grievously wounded while leading an assault on a heavily-defended ridge near San Terenzo in Tuscany, Italy called Colle Musatello. The ridge served as a strongpoint along the strip of German fortifications known as the Gothic Line, which represented the last and most unyielding line of German defensive works in Italy. As he led his platoon in a flanking maneuver, three German machine guns opened fire from covered positions just 40 yards away, pinning his men to the ground. Inouye stood up to attack and was shot in the stomach; ignoring his wound, he proceeded to attack and destroy the first machine gun nest with hand grenades and fire from his Thompson submachine gun. After being informed of the severity of his wound by his platoon sergeant, he refused treatment and rallied his men for an attack on the second machine gun position, which he also successfully destroyed before collapsing from blood loss.

As his squad distracted the third machine gunner, Inouye crawled toward the final bunker, eventually drawing within 10 yards. As he raised himself up and cocked his arm to throw his last grenade into the fighting position, a German inside the bunker fired a rifle grenade that struck him on the right elbow, severing most of his arm and leaving his own primed grenade reflexively “clenched in a fist that suddenly didn’t belong to me anymore”.[10] Inouye’s horrified soldiers moved to his aid, but he shouted for them to keep back out of fear his severed fist would involuntarily relax and drop the grenade. As the German inside the bunker reloaded his rifle, Inouye pried the live grenade from his useless right hand and transferred it to his left. As the German aimed his rifle to finish him off, Inouye tossed the grenade off-hand into the bunker and destroyed it. He stumbled to his feet and continued forward, silencing the last German resistance with a one-handed burst from his Thompson before being wounded in the leg and tumbling unconscious to the bottom of the ridge. When he awoke to see the concerned men of his platoon hovering over him, his only comment before being carried away was to gruffly order them to return to their positions, since, as he pointed out, “nobody called off the war!”

This country and freedom loving people everywhere will miss this man many, many, many times more than ANY blogger that ever lived. You should be embarrased.

The State newspaper is running an article about future funding at USC. In it it states that USC is developing a new computer system that will allow students to do several things like register for courses and manager their financial aid. It’s called OneCarolina. You need to do some digging into this. It’s been in the works for several years at the cost of 10’s of millions of dollars. They released it on a beta test for a small section of the university, but they’ve run into a snag which could require them to start over because they can’t get it to work for the rest of the university. Rather than buy an off the shelf proven program used by several other universities for much less than they already have into this program they tried to build their own to sell to other schools to generate revenue. It’ll never happen, because they’ll never get this project to work.