New GI Bill blows through House with overwhelming majority

Now it's on to the Senate. The final version of the bill attached to the war supplemental adds full WWII-type benefits as well as benefit-transfers to spouses. Huge. The administration had been promising a veto, but with a final count of 416 to 12, the writing apparently was on the wall.

Personally, I'm going to give mine to my wife for Christmas so she can pursue her Masters.

June Practical Shooting Match

This weekend my father and I went to the monthly USPSA practical shooting match at the Mill Creek Practical Shooting League in DeSoto. Here is the video from the match.

Looking back at early video from February and comparing my performance to the June video, the improvements are there. I'm using the grip technique better and more consistently. I still have the problem of my right thumb holding down the slide release and preventing it from locking back after expending the last roung.

More practice will solve that. I really need to work on my shotgun reloading, but that also will come with time. I did shoot the match with no misses or penalties, something that continued from the last month. Now I need to start getting faster.

Does Defense Spending Matter?

I understand the title of this thread is obtuse, but more and more I hear folks talking about all this money we're going to save by pulling out of Iraq and lowering the national debt. At the bottom there is a link to an excellent, non-partisan presentation that should shed light of how our government spends its money, how we build debt, and how the amount we spend on the War on Terror is going to be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Huh? I do not believe a lot of people understand how we build public debt, where defense spending falls in the grand scheme of discretionary spending, or how defense spending impacts that national debt. The short answer is that it does, but only a little.

The long answer is in 2011 the baby boomers start to draw their retiree benefits from Social Security and Medicare. From there the amount of workers paying into the system drops precipitously and the government starts paying out more in benefits than it is collecting from its workers.

Where does defense spending fit in this? Defense spending is the historical victim anytime our elected officials in Washington want to save money. If we redeployed from the War on Terror today, tomorrow there would be politicians lining up to take the 'peace dividend' from the War and chuck it into other programs, usually anything but Social Security and Medicare. Doing that would completely ignore the upcoming costs of modernization, especially upgrading the Air Force's aging fleet.

Here watch this slide show courtesy our old buddy Ross Perot, it puts everything in painful perspective:

Entitlement Crisis

It's long, but the narrative is excellent. Make sure you stick through to the end and get the 'so what' of the presentation.