Sunday reads.

Remember all the gnashing of teeth about the detainees at Gitmo being held as 'enemy combatants' without trial, etc. Just like POWs are held during a period of war?

Here's why you hold guys like that:

Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar, reportedly a former inmate at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, died in a gunbattle Saturday night in Pishi, a village in the southern province of Uruzgan, said Jan Mohammed Khan, governor of Uruzgan.

This one is dead now. See you teeth-gnashing, hair-tearing, hair shirt wearers?
This guy would be alive now - if we had kept him like we could have...

Hat tip- Hell in a handbasket!

Alphapatriot (does that mean he's the lead missile?) discovers that John Kerry was at the signing of the cease-fire agreement at Safwan Airfield back in 1991. Oh, and remember the Buddhist Temple in the last campaign?

Over at No Pasaran, Erik documents the French are slowly coming to realize that militant Muslims are not their friends... and the first instinct is to retreat. Who knows, mebbe some of the Ghosts of Verdun will rise up and infuse some spine into French elites.

The Commissar covers the NYT's coverage of blogs. You'll all be happy to note that the Left Wing Blogs Rule! Traffic is Up! The Nastier the Blog the Better! (See, yer right, Jack!) Go read the comments on those sites, and go read the comments on the big right wing sites... whose sites are swarmed with high school and college kids... I assume most of my readers have jobs... not that I don't' say anything worth commenting on... 8^D Allah is on the job, too. For that matter - so is Michelle Malkin - but from a different angle.

Captain Ed has dispiriting news of the location of Saddam's nuclear program. And where it might be heading. There's an airplane flight one hopes will have a problem.

Owen at Boots and Sabers asks an important question.

Over at Grim's Hall there are two worthy reads... one regarding the return of Da Grunt, Jarhead Dad's son (and the opinion these young warriors have of John Kerry - and above it, a nicely book-ending piece on a couple of old warriors, Democrat warriors, and their discussion of John Kerry. For the record, while I'm not conflicted about who I'm going to vote for... I'm with Rodney Coleman.

Over at Mostly Cajun, a new resident. Of course, that just balances against the impending departure. We do like the A=B reference! We identify with the Cajun's household here at Castle Argghhh!.

The Queen of All Evil is out to scare one of her frequent commenters...

Jay Tea at Dean's World Wizbang has an interesting discussion of SAT scores, student performance, and dollars spent on education.

The other day I heard this press release from the College Boards mentioned in the news. Apparently, employers are complaining that too many job applicants are lacking the basic writing skills needed to perform most jobs for which they are hiring.

This story hit me at several levels. 1. Damn, in comparison to these kids, I had hellacious SAT scores (7-hundred something verbal, 6-hundred something math) to go with my 2.7 high school GPA... and I'm a product of 12 different schools in twelve years (gotta love being a military brat). 2. One of my jobs when I was on the faculty of the Field Artillery School was teaching remedial english to Lieutenants and Captains. College graduates all. Many of who could not write a concise, clear piece of written communications. Which is a critical skill in order writing, much less generic staff work. And most of 'em were pissed that we thought their skills were inadequate, and that 'it wasn't important, anyway'. We told them that they would spend the bulk of their careers after company/battery/troop level command as staff officers - whose major product would be written - even if it was in Powerpoint slide form. Hell being clear and concise in Powerpoint is an art. I went around post to all the Colonels and Generals and solicited pieces of original writing from each of them to use as examples. I then also asked each of these leaders for representative pieces of writing from their subordinates - ones that they thought had the potential to make stars, and ones who were gonna be lucky to retire.

The students who couldn't write liked that comparison even less.

3. We're paying for college for one kid, and helping with another. Even in adjusted dollars, Good Son's cost to attend a major state university is a hell of a lot more than my cost to attend a major state university. There are lots of cool things on campus that we didn't have, but on the whole, the students are doing the same things we did. And while Andy is getting a decent education, (if only because he's in a hard math/science program) I don't see that the general quality of the overall experience is better, much less the education. It just costs more. In a sense, this is a perversion of capitalist economics. The schools have to compete to get students... so they have to spend more on eye-candy - which does nothing to improve the product (education) and may in fact detract from it. And so it costs more, and you in fact get less. Because collectively we and our kids aren't putting the emphasis on the true product (the education) but rather on the eye candy. It's like buying a Jaguar-built body and interior (with a killer stereo) that's been hung on an old Chevy Nova chassis.