day of family

[davemerrill]

Nice to see that our new budget-conscious House Of Reps is trying to kill funding for Planned Parenthood and PBS, but is determined to keep millions of your taxpayer dollars going to NASCAR. The sponsor of a bill that would have ended the Pentagon's sponsorship of Ryan Newman's NASCAR racing has even recieved death threats. Stay classy, guys!!

Some questions:
1. Shouldn't the super-patriotic I Love America NASCAR be giving ad space to the US Army free of charge? It's not like they need the money. They could write it off on their taxes as public service announcements or something.
2. Should Ryan Newman have to at least pass basic training if he's going to parade around with "US Army" on his shirt?
3. Death threats. Really? That's how you want to handle that?

Today is Family Day in Ontario, which is basically designed to give everybody a mental health break right when winter is on your last nerve. Friday and Saturday it warmed up quite a bit, though we never got the rain they were promising. Yesterday it cooled back down and started to snow again. Today there isn't much on the agenda; I need to do a little more carpentry and try to get ahead of the curve on Mr. Kitty updates. We might need to get some more milk, which is a trick as all the stores are closed.

I did pick up something kind of awesome out in the sticks on Saturday that I need to post a photo of, and there's a new Zero Fighter page up that I drew and inked and scanned and then decided stunk, and so I redrew it and rescanned it and am more pleased with. Also I wrote a movie review for the CPF site and got it off to Matt, and there's another one in the pipe I need to finish for Collection DX.

I've been reprinting old Anime Jump columns as reviews on Let's Anime and it's working out pretty well so far; the material is good and it ought to be out there for people to read, and it gives me a chance to go back in and rework some of the pieces. I mean, some of those things are five, six, seven, eight years old, and they could use a little streamlining, a little clarification in some areas. I should have a all new Let's Anime in a week or so though. Got one in the works that's kinda cool, so stay tuned.

Comments

[shadzane.livejournal.com]

I don't get this whole NASCAR controversy at all. In America, we have an all-volunteer army. To keep that up, we need to advertise, to remind possible soldiers that the army is still hiring. Whoever runs advertising for the army has decided that sponsoring a NASCAR racer is a good investment of their advertising funds. Are they right? I don't know, and I doubt Rep. Betty McCollum or NASCAR fans know either. So everyone just STFU and let the army spend their advertising budget as they see fit (as long as they aren't lying or anything like that. That would be a proper place for the House of Representatives to step in.)

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

The controversy is that the House is proposing de-funding Planned Parenthood, NASA, PBS, and a host of other useful programs that help Americans and make the country a better place in which to live - while at the same time the House has decided to continue to spend money on advertising the Army via NASCAR.

Well, and the death threats, those are controversial.

It's all at the links... I'm not making this stuff up.

[shadzane.livejournal.com]

No, I'm sorry, I'm not denying that it is controversial, I just don't understand why it is...

The Army has 10 million dollars* to spend on advertising. They decide to spend one million dollars* on sponsoring NASCAR.

Rep. Betty McCollum thinks it looks bad to spend money on NASCAR when important things like NPR are being unfunded, so she wants to pass a law to prevent the Army from sponsoring NASCAR. She says it will save money, but I'm not sure why the Arny couldn't spend that million on some other advertising, like infomercials or direct mail...

NASCAR fans are angry that a racing team is loosing a sponsor, but if the team is any good they should have no trouble finding a new sponsor, and if they are bad then the Army shouldn't have been sponsoring them in the first place.

So it seems to me that everyone is over-reacting.

*Numbers made up for illustrative purposes

[(Anonymous)]

"everyone" isn't over reacting, just the people making death threats. Trying to minimize that by going "whoa those people who don't want to spend a portion of the Army's advertising budget on nascar are acting crazy too!" just makes you look like your moral compass is completely broken.

[shadzane.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can agree with that, sort of. The people making death threats are hundreds of times more irrational than the no-NASCAR folks. But that doesn't mean the original proposal was well thought out.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

Since Congress is the body that decides on where the defense budget gets spent, it's entirely within their rights to debate and decide upon this issue. In fact, it's their job.