Frustrate me not!

Today I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get the Redskins radio or video broadcast. Finally, I managed to secure a jerky video broadcast that...has no sound. D'oh! This sucks.

Anyway, last night, I went to my friend Evan's house. Some friends of his came over and we sat around drinking Columbian liquor and talking up a storm. Good times.

Today it's been rainy and wet, so I thought it would be the perfect day to do some cooking. I've decided that I don't get enough fruits and veggies, so my new plan is to eat a fruit salad for breakfast/lunch every day (going on 4 days straight now!). Making fruit salad lead me to a simple conclusion: Including grapes in fruit salad is just plain stupid. Either you have to cut each grape in half individually, which takes too damn long and isn't worth the effort; or, you have to struggle to spear a slick grape with your fork, an equally annoying proposition. No, grapes don't make the cut. Kiwi, however, is extremely easy to peel and slice, it's tasty and delicious (passing both tests of excellence), and it provides the green color that the grapes were really there for. Mmmm, kiwi.

For dinner, though, I was really really craving Thai food - something sweet and spicy. So I hopped on line and got a recipe for Basil-Chili Chicken. The recipe wasn't great, and I was forced to modify it a little bit, but it was a good start. I made it really spicy and the basil made it great. I now have tons of leftovers.

Not sure if everyone out there has the time or inclination to read some of the links I put up, but Talking Points Memo had a great explanation of why Bush's claim that there will be "150,000" trained Iraqi troops and policeman is a total lie. Not that deception is anything new to this adminstration (or any Republican administration in the last 40 years), but this is particularly troubling. Central to Bush's claim that the US can win the peace is the idea that Iraqi's can police themselves. That's likely to take a very long time, however, and Bush knows it. The truth (as discovered by Reuters and admitted by the Pentagon), is that they're not likely to reach 25,000 trained troops by December, not to mention 150,000. The training program for police is an 8-week course. So far, around 8100 have been trained and about 46,000 are listed as "untrained" (i.e. useless) and the Pentagon estimates that it won't be until July 2006 before those Iraqi's are trained.

Not only that, 6 of 71 army battalions have received initial training, 8 of 71 have reached "initial operational readiness", and a whopping 57 of 71 battaliaons have no training or equipment or PEOPLE (as in, on paper, Bush can say there are 71 battalions, but they have yet to recruit enough Iraqi's to make it past 20 battalions, not to mention 71). In sum, the math works out to 12,554 actual Iraqi soldiers that have received some level of training. Not exactly ready to defend their borders, are they?

Just to beat a dead horse a moment longer, the Pentagon estimates that, AT BEST, they'll have 25,000 "ready" troops, police, border guards, etc by December. And you wonder why Bush doesn't have press conferences.