Many of the troops in Iraq fought in urban settings, unlike what we (I) fought in the Nam.
PTSD is a strong influence on returning troops and there are no jungles in the US. Re-acclimatisation is very hard under the best of circumstances.
On the other hand, the returnees are not met with name calling, feces throwing protesters reviling them and politicians rejecting them because they served.

Rasmussen’s poll reports:

28% Say Today’s Veterans Face More Challenges Than Vietnam Returnees

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of adults nationwide believe that veterans of today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan face more challenges when they return home than veterans of the Vietnam War.

However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that another 24% believe veterans of today’s conflicts face fewer challenges when they arrive home compared to those who served in Vietnam.

The plurality (42%) believes the challenges veterans from both eras have faced are about the same.

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of adults nationwide believe that veterans of today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan face more challenges when they return home than veterans of the Vietnam War.

However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that another 24% believe veterans of today’s conflicts face fewer challenges when they arrive home compared to those who served in Vietnam.

The plurality (42%) believes the challenges veterans from both eras have faced are about the same.

Twenty-seven percent (27%) of those who have served in the military say today’s veterans have it worse, while nearly the same number (28%) say they face fewer challenges than those who fought in Vietnam. [snip]

There is no clear answer to this. What do you think?

Vermont’s newest office, the Progressive Office for Sustainability, declared that all of the increase will go toward Whirligigs and rooftop hotplates. Oh yeah, and subsidies too.

Vt’s Largest Electric Utility Seeks To Raise Rates

CVPS Wants 5.9 Percent Rate Hike

RUTLAND, Vt. — Vermont’s largest electric utility is asking for permission to raise its rates by 5.91 percent.

Central Vermont Public Service Corp. President Bob Young said the money raised by the increase is needed to offset increased power and transmission costs and reliability improvements to the utility’s system.

If approved by the Public Service Board, a residential customer who uses 500 kilowatt hours of electricity a month would see their bill go up by $4.40. [snip]

Raise the rates, ratepayers cut back.
This is what the sustainability crowd wants.
They believe in the great socialist principle of the zero sum game, if I win, you lose. Consequently, to have equality, everyone has to lose. So, it will be.

Conservation for artificial reasons kills the targeted business, particularly those regulated by governmental fiat.
After this increase, ratepayers will conserve to save on their monthly cost, leaving CVPS with the same base line costs but lower revenues, once again to raise rates triggering more consumer cutbacks.
There is a finite limit to how much of a cutback ratepayers can make in usage before they either go bankrupt or get subsidized by the taxpayers.

Keep the utilities from increasing the rates results in infrastructure disrepair; we finally subsidize the quasi-public utilities with taxpayer funds.

Isn’t socialized meddling helpful? Marxist economics is such a pure system so well grounded in logic.

The hog trough is more orderly!

This Senator will save the US from a sure fiscal collapse; the government take over of more private sector economy which, thanks to LBJ, has cost the consumer and is bankrupting health care.
HE’S CERTAINLY DOING MORE THAN VERMONT’S PAIR OF INEPT BOZOS!

Sometimes you have to like a man’s spine!

Joe Lieberman: I’ll block vote on Harry Reid’s plan

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Tuesday that he’d back a GOP filibuster of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care reform bill.

Lieberman, who caucuses with Democrats and is positioning himself as a fiscal hawk on the issue, said he opposes any health care bill that includes a government-run insurance program — even if it includes a provision allowing states to opt out of the program, as Reid has said the Senate bill will. [snip]

All Harry Reid will deliver is Catamount Health Care on a national level. That went belly up rather fast for the greatest idea for Vermont since the discovery of Camel’s Hump.

The opt-out bit is just road apples. The states cannot opt out of paying the taxes into this one-size fits all garbage pit.

Here’s National Health Care from the people that can’t even get the Piggy flu vaccine here on time.

RIIIIGHT!

All photos by J. Kirk Edwards-courtesy of the Eagle newspaper, Addison County- All rights reserved

I thank Mr. Edwards for sending these photos of the Crown Point (Champlain) Bridge to me and graciously allowing their use.

The ominous heavy flapping of gallinaceous wings bodes ill for the remnants of Vermont taxpayers.

Scrawny starved AOT chickens coming to roost are clogging bridges, closing them to traffic. Following them are the heavily wattled, bloated body turkeys of the Legislature crashing into the feeding trough, stealing more tax dollars acutely needed to clear out the roosting, defecating birds.
Successive years of stealing funds from the AOT budget, these turkeys in the Vermont Legislature will find out that Civil Engineering is far more important than Social Engineering.

Oh the pain, the pain of this lesson, since the tax dollars are not extant and the children will truly suffer.

How will the state shell out for the bridge and road repairs? More taxes on fuel should especially appeal to business and the growing number of the unemployed. Tourists, provided they’re able to find a way into the state that won’t destroy their vehicles, ought to be thrilled. Maybe an extra 8% R & M tax to elevate Vermont’s Vermontness! You know, make it “special.”

What will Chummy Shummy and the Progs tell the kids of the families who were laid off in West Addison when the bridge closed. Maybe that great line the liberals use will work, “It’s for the children.” Yeah, that sounds good, “We shut down the businesses just for you!”

So is Vermont open for business? Remember that dunbass slogan?

Companies from below Middlebury to Ferrisburgh have employees from NY State using this bridge; one business, the Dock Doctors manufactures in Ferrisburgh and does major work through their showroom in Lake George.
Vergennes and Middlebury businesses such as Goodrich and Porter Hospital as well as The Bridge Restaurant are feeling the brunt. These are just a few of many. This isn’t the only problem facing this state but it is the biggest as of now. Ask them how they like their tax dollars at work! This will do wonders for them.

Other Vermonters work in Fort Ti at IP. Vermont will be collecting higher fuel taxes plus with the increase in driving. Maybe the Addison County Jackass Party can give them hints on how to conserve on their fuel costs!

Ask Senator Ayer what to do. Since she was elected, she hasn’t done a damn thing except meddle in Nanny state BS and vote to spend more dollars on social engineering instead of civil engineering.

They fix one bridge while another bridge over Rte 2  closes. Bridges over the Winooski River are bad. A bridge over the New Haven River on Rte. 116 south of Bristol is single lane since Silent Cal left office.
Vermont is quite far behind the curve on repairs; that doesn’t cover regular maintenance on the other structures, roadways, culverts and mowing.

The entire eastern side of Vermont avoids the sales tax by shoping in New Hampshire; that will continue until the bridges over the Connecticut River rot and fall into the water.

I suppose we’ll see the Bennington-Hoosick fault shift creating a rift valley with Champlain flowing to Long Island Sound. That will stop westward migration, leaving Massachusetts as a way out.

Why would anyone want to go there?

This came in from somebody who wants an answer about the beheading photos I posted. Yeah they’re nasty, but not as nasty as the perps.
I want his comment up here for all to see, not buried way back long ago So Mr. M, here you are.

Can you estate which part of Quran mention killing of other human beings as a duty? You are not only arrogant with biased views and with very little knowledge. I don’t know the nature of the crime but its very shocking. P

See: So Vermont, what do you know about torture?

“I don’t know the nature of the crime but its very shocking. P” If you read the posting to the bottom pigpuss, you would have known what her “crime” was.

The crime was not wearing a sack, being female, Christian, alone and GETTING AN EDUCATION. All crimes against Islam!

The part of Quran calling for the killing of other human beings as a duty is the one that demanded flying planes into towers killing innocent people, beheading the girl because she was a Christian, stabbing Theo Van Gogh, calls for the stoning of women because they won’t wrap themselves up like a bag of laundry.

Additionally, the Q’oran, as far as I can tell, calls for using children and mentally disabled as human bombs against soft targets, targets tourist hotels for bombings and shootings, then has the Arab street jumping in glee when images of civilian deaths show up on TV.

This section of the  Q’oran is the same one that has other Muslims playing with themselves, condoning all this, instead of tracking down and killing the al Qaeda porkers who lead this batch of human defectives.
This is the same section of the Q’oran calling for women to be whipped because they were raped! That’s a light sentence, stoning is preferred.

That’s the part of the Q’oran I’m talking about in the posting. I care less if you’re insulted. If you want to feel better, go kiss a pig!

Finally, I have myself ensconced in the new Wyoming abode, all the gizmos working and the telescope trained east.
It’s tough to distinguish Vermont through the miasma of socio-economic wreckage of Michigan or New York . Vermont is blending into the murk.

Douglas realized wisely, that letting the Donkeys own this mess is the only way to sort it out. With no one else to blame but themselves, they’ll have to offend their constituents in part or whole. Serves them well!

Vermont does stand out in one area-banning religion in public schools and places. Except for the approved Progressive  Religion of Global Warming Climate Change which in mandatory course work in all grades. That’s going to get them jobs in-uh er-the field of- ah- flat surface horticulture.

Getting the state wired for the 19^th Century is going to be a chore with Fairpoint going toes up. Don’t need them anyway; everyone has cell phones. Those cell towers are annoying; the legislature has to do something about them, so unsightly!

Closing Vermont Yankee and reintroducing overshot waterwheels, Aldis lamps, windmills should speed the move. Chuck in a couple of Quixote Luddites roaming the mountains and Vermont is a veritable tourist trap.

I’m wondering whether to leave this blog up and comment on my native state or let it close and say good-bye.
Tough choice to make.

This may be last posting, I’m moving to Wyoming in a couple of weeks. I leave you with this image from the Woodchuck.

To the few fiscal conservatives left, Good Luck!
To the Loons and Moonbats, get ready to spend your own money!

Over at the Vermont Tiger there’s a bit of discussion ongoing about wind turbines, measurements and such with the usual words tossed around without meaning. Perhaps this posting will knot some knickers, one can only hope.

One individual, self titled “The Gooch” who has a more than passing grasp of he terminology; he used the slip stick properly, not to tease the hoyden in the next row. He might be one of those scoundrels, a closet engineer.

None of what passes for information in the Free Press ever discusses power-line and substation locations or power line loss (transmission distance). Nor do they talk about what those ridge lines are going to look like with the gashes cut into them for maintenance roads and the power lines themselves.Tracked vehicles are going to rip up the soil during all seasons; service cares not about mud nor Thumper’s love life.

The photo below is to give an idea of the size of these turbines.

Hard to hide  or disguise these as maple trees.

If the sustainable crowd want to use some of the wind energy to pump water up hill for later release through turbines fine, please select the energy set aside for that purpose.

I get the eerie sensation of the search for the Holy Grail of Perpetual Motion.
Any other person experience that same intuition

Wonderful news  from OZ, yes that neat place in Maryland, where all laws are suspended except the one on Gravity.

That law confounds them.

Read this note of economic cheer from the Castle of the Audacious Hope, surrounded by the moat of I-495. Change Auto to Health Care!

Taxpayers face heavy losses on auto bailout

Taxpayers face losses on a significant portion of the $81 billion in government aid provided to the auto industry, an oversight panel said in a report to be released Wednesday.

The Congressional Oversight Panel did not provide an estimate of the projected loss in its latest monthly report on the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. But it said most of the $23 billion initially provided to General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC late last year is unlikely to be repaid. [snip]
The shares “will have to appreciate sharply” for taxpayers to get their money back, the report said.

For example, GM’s market value would have to reach $67.6 billion, the report said, a “highly optimistic” estimate and more than the $57.2 billion GM was worth at the height of its share value in April 2008. And in the case of Chrysler, about $5.4 billion of the $14.3 billion provided to the company is “highly unlikely” to ever be repaid, the panel said. [snip]

“We are not trying to be Warren Buffett here. We are not trying to squeeze every last dollar out,” Steve Rattner, who led the administration’s auto task force, said before his departure in July. “We do want to do well for the taxpayers but the most important thing is to get the government out of the car business.” [snip]

This is not the same as getting the TAXPAYERS OUT OF THE CAR BUSINESS!
As Byzantine as Vermont economics.

Our Senators got behind the dairy farmers in Vermont, prodding them, raising their hopes of getting more money. Farmers got everything but kissed!

So how’s that all working out?