Iraq Updates by Cake

So we have a mandatory range to burn up our ammo tomorrow. I'm sure you can all assume what that means.

Here's a puppy one of the soldiers in the next pad over has:

He's giving him to someone who works with AAFES though since some CSM got on his ass about having it.

Things are winding down for my company here in Iraq. We just had the redeployment medical screening today. I naturally have started thinking more about my plans when I get home. Now that we've been 1st Cav, we're allowed to wear a Stetson/Boots/Spurs for our formal on April 30th.
Here's my getup:
The Cavalry III style Stetson
The smooth black leather cowboy boots
The spurs

I think it'll end up looking better that just wearing the stupid class-A's with dinky shoes.

Everyone besides us 1st Cav guys are getting 2 free beers at our chow hall right now. It's a special Mardi Gras event put on for the 256 guys from Louisiana. 1st Cav guys would be eligible for it but they don't have a representative there to tally people. Yeah, sucks.

Anyway, for your pleasure, here is a quote from FDR himself about Social Security:

In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

I don't see why this is being made into a partisan issue. This last year I've read "The Coming Generational Storm" by Kotlikoff and Burns; and "Running on Empty" by Peterson. The first set of authors seemed to be Democratic while Peterson was a lifetime Republican. Each book showed how Social Security would become unsupportable (with different estimates), and each was against the Bush tax cuts because of the present-value liabilities Social Security entailed. The proposed reform seems extremely reasonable to all parties from my end - even with the one-time expense of setting it up.

Here's another quote, although unrelated to SS reform, which I really enjoyed from Orson Scott Card's webcolumn:

Great achievements aren't made by feeling good about yourself. They're made by boldness, originality, hard work, painstaking attention to detail, long practice, self-effacing cooperation, reliability, and a host of other attributes and actions.

He's ranting about self-esteem boosting without truthfulness is extremely atrocious.

This post wasn't so much related to Iraq but it was fun anyways. Adios.

For all you midwesterners - starting March 1st, you are entitled to a free yearly credit report from each of the three credit reporting agencies. Full info at this link:
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/creditreportfacts.pdf#search='free%20credit%20report%20fcra'

We pulled long hours, including a 20 hour shift on election day, but everything went well.

For the first part of everything, we were searching houses and making sure no-one was storing any election day surprises.




Towards the end, we spent a lot of time with local Iraqis. Without much traffic going on besides pedestrians on election day, the locals seemed to feel pretty comfortable being out and about.
Someone mentioned how they thought dogs in Iraq would look different than Clyde, so

I tried to get a few more pictures of local animals. There weren't too many dogs out during the day though.


It sounds like elections were a success in most other areas too so hopefully things really are starting to cool down. I suppose the indicator will be what happens during this next week.