I assume that on Monday, “Monday Night Football” wil give equal time to the Democrats, or whoever, to assert that football epitomizes the classic American virtues of “Teamwork to take advantage of another’s individual skills; Sacrifice for the good of the team, not one’s own obsession; and the Determination to realize that though the goal is good: ‘This shit ain’t workin’.”
OK, I’m dreaming. Though if it’s halftime, it must be time to regroup and rethink. I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a football commentator state that a team that is getting their ass kicked has the opportunity to regather and change the game plan.
I’m sorry, the President’s speechwriters did not thing the football analogy all the way through. Kind of like the adwriters that wrote the commercial that sings the Beatle’s phrase “It’s getting better all the time” ignoring the fact that the next line is “It can’t get much worse”.
Perfect. Today I learned that some federal employees (I am talking about administrative personnel is a few specialties) are being asked to volunteer for stint in Iraq.
Now this is not unusual, quite a few have volunteered to go over there and I know some who have gone and since returned. There is a lot of administrative shit involved in setting up a democracy in the Middle East, processing all that contractor work etc.
What is interesting about this situation is that the employees are being told that if they don’t “volunteer” - they will get what is called “mandatory deployment” in other words, go or be fired.
This “mandatory deployment” has been kicked around for months with various management people in Department of Defense questioning the legality of something like this.
It is now a real possibility for career civil servants (note that these people are not reservists, have no military obligation etc -although many are veterans).
In initiating these “mandatory deployments” not only will individual rights be ignored, but statutory union rights will also be ignored/violated.
It will be interesting to see whether the federal government will in fact go thru with this - if so, I expect you will see at least some news coverage.