So not only has the Army changed advertising firms for its annual quarter of a billion dollar ad budget, but the Air Force suddenly felt the need to update its mission statement.

Both the timing and the content of the new mission statement trouble me.

Sims Red? Sims Blue? Which do you vote for? More after the break...

I've still got some steam venting from me over the last piece I just did...

Rarely can people imagine how they will look to people in the future.  In fact, rare are the people who can imagine that there is even the possibility that the future might view them as anything other than heroic and noble and, most of all, RIGHT.

But lets face it, when we look back at the past, what we mostly see is a series of immense delusions, deceptions and screw-ups, all committed by people blithely unaware at the time that they were anything short of perfect.

So here's an attempt to imagine how the future will view us during "now"--the early part of the 21st century.  My Top Ten possible titles of 22nd century texts examining the early part of the 21st century:

A few threads back, yours truly did a pretty mean bit about how neocons are basically worse than parrots, "echoing" the comments and ideas of others, without using their own brains....

In this 21st century, can there really be any doubt that everything--tangible objects, intangible ideas, and anything else that can "exist" in some sense--is a potential product to be shaped, framed, formatted, positioned, and, ultimately, sold to the consumer.

Remember the stories of Army recruiting be down?  Really down?  Well in 2005 that doesn't mean your national military policies are wrong.  Nope.  Means you need a new ad agency.

From Army Times:
December 09, 2005

Army to switch ad agencies, By Michelle Tan
Times staff writer

Oh puhleeze. Ann Coulter, the reigning...well, whatever...was about to set loose yet another rightist/fascist/American Taliban tirade and...

Congressman Joe Pitts (R, Pa) has never really been known as an intellectual.  And since he broke his promise to abide by the term limits in the old Gingrich Contract with America, even the Republicans don't think too much of his honesty.

Add me to the list of people who feel that way.  Here's the honorable Mr. Pitts on the venerable Town Hall web site:

"It is also important to understand why these brutal killers have chosen to make Iraq the central front in the war on terror.  Having lost their base of operations in Afghanistan due to the exemplary success of coalition forces in Operation Enduring Freedom, the terrorists are now seeking to find safe harbor elsewhere."

It's too easy these days to get the idea that all Christians are wild-eyed extremists who want to replace the Constitution with their personal interpretation of the bible.

Not true, any more than it's true that all Muslims can't wait to commit suicide to hurt the infidel west.

This is a re-post of a very articulate statement from American Dreamer, a poster on another site who has consented to this re-post.

I was going to post this as a comment to a diary entry from Number 6, but that entry seems to have disappeared.

Just wanted to point out 2 things about our Declaration of Independence:

It specifically says "That to secure these rights [life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."  Notice that it doesn't say that government is derived from GOD.

There was an experiment years ago in which some people had the Declaration of Independence typed up on ordinary paper.  They took it to a supermarket parking lot as if it were a petition, and randomly asked people to sign it.  Almost all refused, and many got very angry at these commie/revolutionary ideas.

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