Sgt. David Smith will be interred at Arlington this afternoon at 3:00 pm.

No one can make you feel bad without your permission.

It was good advice, too, because it happens to be true. I watched all five of the ads, and I'm confused. I'm not seeing the "women emasculating men" aspect at all:

Ad #1: Men striding about a vacant field in their underwear. Not a woman in sight.

But perhaps one is lurking just out of camera range hoping to lure yet another big brute into the tall grass where she'll physically overpower him, snatch his trou, and send him off to warble "I wear no pants" with other similarly pantless fellows? It's the SuperBowl. Anything is possible.

Ad #2: Again, not a woman in sight. Undoubtedly they're off screen again, tinfoil-penetrating mind control rays shooting from their nipples as the narrator somberly drones on and on...

"I have no mind or will of my own, but I'll get her back by .... umm.... driving a reeeeeeally loud car."

Ad #3: "I was on my way out the door to do something fun but as every intelligent person knows, no real man can resist Lite beer."

*whistling*

Ad #4: Charming. Man and wife drive down a dark road and are waylaid by sinister thugs. Man bravely sacrifices the little woman and runs like hell.

Ad #5: Man looks back on the journey to adulthood, marriage, fatherhood and briefly thinks of slitting his wrists concludes there is nothing inherently unmasculine about having well moisturized skin.

A well stuffed marmoset to the astute reader who can identify the common theme here.

... under Obamacare Ms. Shouse would have made the same choice she actually made: choosing to risk her life to expand her business. Or she would have been denied the chance to make that choice and would have good health insurance but no expanded business. Not even Obamacare could have afforded Ms. Shouse the opportunity to do what she wanted without paying for it one way or the other.

This is the heart of my objections to Obama's governing philosophy. Over and over again he and his wife Michelle have argued that it's unfair for us to be burdened with choices about how to spend our own money. But for some unfathomable reason it's never unfair to shift the costs of our bad choices to others.

No wonder he can't seem to stop blaming Bush.

I thought (because I genuinely had no idea what the answer was) it might be interesting to look at the impact of DADT discharges on troop strength. The chart above shows annual DADT discharges as a percent of the total force strength for the corresponding year.

Note that in no year did DADT discharges reach even one-tenth of one percent of the active forces. The last two bars are interesting.

The first of the last 2 bars (TOTAL since DADT) asks the question: "What if we fired the total number of service members discharged since 1994 all in one year (2009)?". This wildly exaggerates the effect of DADT since the 2009 force is considerably smaller than it was in 1994 and we're lumping 14 years worth of discharges into one year, but that's OK.

If all the losses since 1994 were combined into a single year, they still don't come to even 1% of the total force structure. The second bar simulates the effect of firing every service member let go for homosexuality over the past 30 years on 2009 troop strength. So what's the damage? A little over 2%. Keep in mind non-deployability rates due to pregnancy in the armed forces:

This begs an interesting question:

If the military has decided it can easily tolerate having anywhere from 5-26% of our forces in a non-deployable status due to pregnancy, why are losses of under 1/10th of one percent unsupportable?

Data compiled from:

Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (1980–1996)

Defense Department (1997–2007)

Active Duty Total Force Report, Defense Manpower Data Center

Wow. Now there's something we've never heard before!

A soldier waterboarded his four-year-old daughter because she was unable to recite her alphabet.

Joshua Tabor admitted to police he had used the CIA torture technique because he was so angry.

As his daughter 'squirmed' to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.

Tabor, 27, who had won custody of his daughter only four weeks earlier, admitted choosing the punishment because the girl was terrified of water.

Stipulated: this guy is sick - AND if it turns out he really did it - he should never be allowed near his daughter again. The more interesting question is: what does this disturbing incident tell us about The Lingering Evil That Survives The BushReich?

I know! Let's ask Andrew Sullivan!

Horrifying. No doubt Marc Thiessen will object that since she wasn't strapped to an actual board and only dunked three or four times, rather than 183, and her father wasn't in the CIA, she wasn't really "waterboarded" as the professionals do it. But do you notice how a foreign newspaper uses plain English to describe torturing victims by use of near-drowning: the "CIA torture technique."

Translation, if we arbitrarily redefine the definition of waterboarding, we can wax horrified over how CIA mind control rays are causing whack job parents to abuse their helpless children (something that never happened before George Bush made torture a household word). All it requires is a little flexibility with the facts! Never mind that:

1. She wasn't strapped to an actual board with her head lower than the rest of her body.

2. Her face wasn't covered with cloth or cellophane.

3. Water wasn't poured over her face, the expected result of which is that - unlike what happens when one's face is submerged in water - the gagging reflex is triggered.

Let's focus on the takeaway here. Other than the fact that what was done to this little girl has NONE of the distinguishing characteristics of waterboarding, a foreign newspaper called it waterboarding! Which, as we all know, trumps anything so pedestrian as facts that contradict the desired narrative. And if you refuse to call it waterboarding, you support the torture of 4 year old girls who refuse to recite the alphabet!

But wait! There's more of this cogent analysis!

No US paper has yet to report the story. Why am I not surprised?

No U.S. paper? How does Andrew know that? How is it that British journalists were the first to learn of an incident that occurred in Tacoma, Washington, a place where - apparently - large bands of bored foreign correspondents roam in packs hoping for a juicy story that will allow them to editorialize about psychotic vets and the ravages of jackbooted American imperialism.

And don't even get me started on "crib notes" and "cheat sheets" that don't contain any answers. Truly, journalism is re-defining the English language.

CWCID: McQ.

Interesting question of the day: Can you imagine a funny commercial that showed half nekkid women of a similar attractiveness level to the men in this video? Yeah. Me neither.

Just confirms my longstanding observation that most of the time men are shown in a state of undress, the selection criteria are... how shall I say this delicately ... skewed in the other direction? Too funny.

I never realized this before, but my Mazda CX7 looks like a buffalo:

8: 35. Scoop up the Dorkhound, carry him outside to do his business. He is not amused.

8:47. Back outside to begin shoveling a path up the stairs and out to the street.

10:39. Shoveled a NARROW path from my front door, up the stairs, down the driveway to the buffalo at the end of my driveway. Was met at the front of my buffalo car by my neighbor, who came to my rescue with his snow blower. He cleared out a wide swath big enough for me to get my car out to the road.

I tried to get him to go back inside where it is warm, but he would have none of it. He said it was the least he could do since my husband was deployed.

Men rock. I can't even think about it without feeling my eyes fill up with tears. A few pix from early this morning:

The path from my front door.

The woods from my bathroom window.

12:33. Incroyable. It's still coming down like gangbusters.

Al Gore can kiss my rosy pink tuckus.

Noon, taken from my office window.

For reference purposes, what lies under the snow in the foreground is the path that runs along the front of my house. The snow is about 6" beneath the window sill right now.

2:08. Still coming down, but seems slower. Just completed the 2nd shoveling run and am really feeling my age.

Why men rock, the sequel.

And yes, I am a Goddess:

In a sane world I would be naked on a beach with an obscenely large drink in my hand.

I am just way too busy to write, right now. What are your plans for the snowstorm?

“In the almost 17 years since the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ legislation was passed, attitudes and circumstances have changed,” General Powell said in a statement issued by his office. He added: “I fully support the new approach presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen.”

There's just one problem with Powell's well timed change of heart. "Attitudes and circumstances" may well have changed in the last 17 years but human nature has not. So before we turn Powell into the standard bearer for repealing DADT, it makes sense to examine the objections cited by the nation's most trusted retired officer two decades ago.

And when we do it seems fair to ask, "How has any of this changed?":

[In testimony before Congress on gays in the military], I said, “I think it would be prejudicial to good order and discipline to try to integrate gays and lesbians in the current military structure.” Congresswoman Pat Schroeder quoted a 1942 government report and claimed that the same arguments used then against racial integration in the military were being used against gays today.

She had her logic wrong. I responded, “Skin color is a benign, nonbehavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument."

His words bear repeating. They also deserve an honest attempt to grapple with an inconvenient truth he wasn't afraid to speak when the tide of public opinion supported him. Unlike skin color, human sexuality - whether female or male, heterosexual or homosexual - is a fundamental and extremely powerful driver of human behavior. To elide past this basic truth requires an almost willful act of blindness.

My own opinions about both women and gays openly serving in the military have undergone a radical shift during the last thirty years. I began by seeing no reason why both women and gays shouldn't be able to serve anywhere they wished to. What changed my mind over the years, contrary to the bigoted assertions of close minded individuals who refuse to entertain ideas that challenge their world view, was not misogyny or fear of Teh Gay.

It was over 30 years of observing real human behavior. What changed my mind were repeated demonstrations of a basic fact: in real life (which is a very different realm from the utopian, best case scenarios of would be reformers), people don't always behave well. And though most people are good, decent, and responsible it takes only a small number who behave otherwise to cause significant problems for the rest of us.

Agents for Britain's MI5 intelligence service have discovered that Muslim doctors trained at some of Britain's leading teaching hospitals have returned to their own countries to fit surgical implants filled with explosives, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Women suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaida are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery. The lethal explosives – usually PETN (pentaerythritol Tetrabitrate) – are inserted during the operation inside the plastic shapes. The breast is then sewn up.

CWCID: The Armorer

... The quest for ever-more and ever-better prosperity subverts itself. It might be better to tolerate more frequent, milder recessions and financial setbacks than to strive for a sustained prosperity that, though superficially more appealing, is unattainable and ends in a devastating bust. That's a central implication of the crisis, but it poses hard political and economic questions that haven't yet been asked, let alone answered.

- Robert Samuelson

Fire department officials said an out-of-control inflatable gorilla was blamed for a rooftop blaze at a Houston shopping center ...

Although the Fire Chief's name was a stroke of good luck.

Arni Hole remembers the shock wave that went through Norway’s business community in 2002 when the country’s trade and industry minister, Ansgar Gabrielsen, proposed a law requiring that 40 percent of all company board members be women.

“There were, literally, screams,” said Ms. Hole, director general of the Equality Ministry. “It was a real shock treatment.”

Even in this staunchly egalitarian society — 80 percent of Norwegian women work outside the home, and half the current government’s ministers are female — the idea seemed radical, if not for its goal, then for the sheer magnitude of change it would require.

Back then, Norwegian women held less than 7 percent of private-sector board seats; just under 5 percent of chief executives were women. After months of heated debate, the measure was approved by a significant majority in Parliament, giving state-owned companies until 2006 to comply and publicly listed companies until 2008.

I think we all know where this is going. Like the storied Camelot of olde, 'tis a silly place:

Nearly eight years on, the share of female directors at the roughly 400 companies affected is above 40 percent, while women fill more than a quarter of the board seats at the 65 largest privately held companies. To many feminists, this is the boldest move anywhere to breach one of the most durable barriers to gender equality.

Indeed, the world has noticed: Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws, with a 2015 deadline for compliance. The French Senate will soon debate a bill phasing in a female quota by 2016, after the National Assembly approved the measure last week. Belgium, Britain, Germany and Sweden are considering legislation.

But as the dust has settled, researchers are grappling with some frustrating facts: Bringing large numbers of women into Norway’s boardrooms has done little — yet — to improve either the professional caliber of the boards or to enhance corporate performance. In fact, early evidence from a little-noticed study by the University of Michigan suggests that the immediate effect has been negative on both counts. And the sixfold increase in women as directors has not yet brought any real rise in the number of women as chief executives.

Well now there's a shocker for you. Who'd a thunk that massive, government sponsored social engineering projects would fail to benefit the intended beneficiaries?

Fortunately, having learned from past experience we'll never do anything that dumb again. And I am so going to Hell for snickering at that woman's last name.