RADIO TIDBITS

I caught a re-broadcast of a Rusty Humphries show and he talked about Ayn Rand. Rand's attitude toward religion and her sexual ethic¹ Rusty found objectionable BUT that did not mean that he should ignore her other facets. This is interesting because it's one of the few times I've heard a wingnut gasbag not speak in strict "with us or against us" terms.

This afternoon, in what also seems to be a re-broadcast, Mike Gallagher claimed that the media was ignoring the Greensburg tragedy because the victims were WHITE(!!!). Gallagher also claimed that in the aftermath of Katrina, no one spoke about the equipment shortages of the National Guard. He's wrong again and here's an article that refutes his claim:

For Guard, equipment falls short
A stepped-up role for National Guard
units has sent them scrambling even more than usual for materiel.
By Mark Sappenfield Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the September 27, 2005 edition

WASHINGTON – The National Guard's deployment to the Gulf Coast, which began amid worries about overburdening citizen soldiers already spread from Mississippi to the Middle East, has instead underscored a different - and perhaps greater - challenge: a chronic shortage of the equipment that Guard members need.

Though the head of the National Guard says he had more than enough troops, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum acknowledges that trucks, bulldozers, and communications equipment "all were in short supply for Katrina." He met the needs of the recovery by shifting resources among states, but the strain hints at a broader concern about the military's mechanical workhorses - both here and abroad.

Much of the Guard's equipment is in Iraq, and the war there has battered the helicopters and Humvees of every service, wearing them out five times faster than normal, by some estimates. The Pentagon says it will take at least two years to return the force to full strength after the war.

¹"Rejecting communist economic and social ideology but not its opposition to religion--Rand abandoned her religious heritage first for secular agnosticism and later for militant atheism... Even her longtime affair with her young disciple Nathaniel Branden did not lead to separation or even public estrangement.
Rand met Branden in 1950, when as a UCLA student he wrote her a fan letter. He became first her adoring pupil; then in the mid-1950s, despite his own marriage to Barbara Weidman, her lover; and finally manager and spokesman for her philosophical movement." SOURCE: American National Biography