Give more for Les. Care less for more?

Some Louisiana State football fans have decided to stand by their man, Coach Les Miles.

Actually, they’re going to march for their man Wednesday. Of course, that’s pretty much a no-brainer when your guy’s team is 10-1 and in the hunt for a national title. And when Michigan just might be breathing down your neck . . . and whispering sweet nothings in your coach’s ear.

FOX NEWS LOUISIANA reports:

LSU fans are planning a rally to show their desire to keep Les Miles in Baton Rouge. The head football coach of the Tigers is likely the top candidate to replace Lloyd Carr at Michigan.

Miles is a former Michigan player and assistant coach and has a passion for the maize and blue. But he has also made it clear that he loves LSU.

The “March for Miles” is set to begin at 6 pm Wednesday from Tiger Stadium. Supporters plan to walk from the stadium to Walk On’s, which is the site of the coach’s weekly radio show.

THAT’S SWEET. No, really. It’s a sweet, albeit self-interested, gesture.

I would imagine that would give pause to a coach if his alma mater were to come calling, offering him the chance to make his dreams come true. Back home. Do you stay where you’re appreciated, where folks want you to stay?

Or do you try to buck Thomas Wolfe and go home again? Go home to whatever uncertainty might await you there.

You know, if I were in Baton Rouge — instead of an 1,100-mile drive away, sitting in my studio on a cold, damp and blustery Nebraska night — I might be soooooo there Wednesday evening for the march. LSU needs to hang on to men like Les Miles. Even if they’re Michigan Men.

BATON ROUGE NEEDS to hang on to a Michigan Man like Les Miles. Baton Rouge needs more men like Les Miles — disciplined, smart, driven, upright, successful.

Baton Rouge has a funny damn way of trying to do that.

See, to keep men like Miles — to attract more men and women like Miles — my hometown needs to quit begging and start doing. Make Baton Rouge someplace that people like Les Miles would be crazy to leave . . . no matter how loud the siren song of home and how full the pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow.

Instead, a parade of U-Hauls snaking toward the state line testifies that a lot of born-and-raised Louisianians think it’s kind of nuts to stay.

Maybe that has something to do with Baton Rougeans and other Louisianians being motivated enough to organize a “Please Stay Les” march on, literally, a moment’s notice but almost entirely uninterested in their crooked government, soaring crime rate and crumbling, ineffective public schools.

That testifies to some seriously messed-up priorities, people.

THINK OF IT, if Baton Rougeans were as interested in education as LSU football, Baton Rouge Magnet High School wouldn’t be falling apart before their eyes. And around their kids. Talk about a school full of overachievers — kids Louisiana is eager to hold on to but hard-pressed to keep.

They are the Les Mileses of education, business, industry and the arts. And most of them are going to haul butt, even without a multimillion-dollar contract as motivation.

Furthermore — that is, if people cared — East Baton Rouge Parish public schools would be a model system for the nation, not a failing morass of struggling students, fetid facilities and demoralized educators. One that’s becoming blacker, and blacker, and blacker still with every passing school year.

For some insane reason, middle-class whites there are content to pay an astronomical “private-school tax” to keep their children out of the under-resourced and horribly mismanaged East Baton Rouge system, as opposed to paying the taxes and exercising the civic vigilance necessary to ensure a first-rate public system.

What was it the Supreme Court said about “separate and unequal”? That’s what exists in Baton Rouge — and across Louisiana — today.

And anyone could tell you that a good public-school system is the foundation for building a better city. A city the likes of Les Miles would be crazy to leave, no matter what.

SO, GO AHEAD. March for Les. Beg him to stay. Perhaps he’ll take pity on you and do what you ask.

But do you think you could spare a couple of hours, and a little concern, for your own children — or for somebody else’s not-so-fortunate children — and have a little march for them, too?

Preferably one utilizing pitchforks, torches, tar and feathers.

Saudi Arabia: Defending the indefensible isn’t just a cheap slogan, it’s a way of life

News item from Reuters:

Saudi Arabia defended on Tuesday a court’s decision to sentence a woman who was gang-raped to 200 lashes of the whip, after the United States described the verdict as “astonishing”.

The 19-year-old Shi’ite woman from the town of Qatif in the Eastern Province and an unrelated male companion were abducted and raped by seven men in 2006.

Ruling according to Saudi Arabia’s strict reading of Islamic law, a court had originally sentenced the woman to 90 lashes and the rapists to jail terms of between 10 months and five years. It blamed the woman for being alone with an unrelated man.

Last week the Supreme Judicial Council increased the sentence to 200 lashes and six months in prison and ordered the rapists to serve between two and nine years in jail.

The ruling provoked rare criticism from the United States, which is trying to persuade Saudi Arabia to attend a Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland next week.

A State Department spokesman told reporters on Monday that “most (people) would find this relatively astonishing that something like this happens”.

The court also took the unusual step of initiating disciplinary procedures against her lawyer, Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, forcibly removing him from the case for having talked about it to the media.

“The Ministry of Justice welcomes constructive criticism … The system allows appeals without resort to the media,” said Tuesday’s statement issued on the official news agency SPA.

It berated media for not specifying that three judges, not one, issued the recent ruling and reiterated that the “charges were proven” against the woman.

It also repeated the judges’ attack against Lahem last week, saying he had “spoken insolently about the judicial system and challenged laws and regulations”.

Dear Saudi troglodytes,

You seem to misunderstand the Western world’s criticism of how your judiciary sentenced a rape victim to 200 lashes of the whip and six months in prison.

We do not question that you followed Saudi law and the court’s procedures to the letter. I would imagine your attention to the law and to detail was exemplary.

What we question is your adherence to your idiotic Wahhabi flavor of Islam, which terrorizes the world in the name of God and thinks it acceptable to lash and imprison a 19-year-old woman because she dared to be seen in public with a man not her kin. This after she had been gang raped.

Not big on mercy, are you? What, in the name of “Allah the merciful,” you get to act like devils?

Frankly, what we object to is that you are a bunch of Neanderthal goons who treat women as property and “infidels” as fair game for whatever sadistic idiocy you’ll infect the world with next. We posit not that you are unfaithful to your twisted image of Allah but that, instead, you dour, sour Wahhabi fanatics have been slavishly faithful to a warped, grim and demented conception of the Almighty.

What horrifies us — well, some of us, at least — is that when you attack the dignity of an innocent young creation of the living God, you thereby offend the dignity of Him who created her.

And, as you profess to believe, God — Allah — is not mocked.

Have a nice day, and go sit on a minaret and spin.

The Pentagon Rag

Click on photo for video.

Come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
He’s got himself in a terrible crack
Way down yonder in ol’ I-raq
So put down your books and pick up a gun
We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun

And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop might be I-ran
And it’s five, six, seven, call up the collections guy
There ain’t no time to wonder why, too bad we didn’t die.

(Apologies to Country Joe and the Fish.)

WHERE IS COUNTRY JOE McDONALD, anyway? Particularly when you need him to write a new protest song about the vermin we’ve put in charge of running things in this country, 40 years after he wrote about the then-vermin we put in charge of running this country.

But I don’t know that the old vermin had anything on the new vermin, who are pulling crap like this:

After two combat tours in Iraq on a “quick reaction team” that picked up body parts after suicide bombings, Donald Schmidt began suffering from nightmares and paranoia. Then he had a nervous breakdown.

The military discharged Schmidt last Oct. 31 for problems they said resulted not from post-traumatic stress disorder but rather from a personality disorder that pre-dated his military service.

Schmidt’s mother, Patrice Semtner-Myers, says her son was told that if he agreed to leave the Army he’d get full benefits. Earlier this month, however, they got a bill in the mail from a collection agency working for the government, demanding that he repay his re-enlistment bonus, plus interest — $14,597.72.

Schmidt, 23, who lives near Peoria, Ill., is one of more than 22,000 service members the military has discharged in recent years for “pre-existing personality disorders” it says were missed when they signed up.

“They used these guys up, and now they’re done with them and they’re throwing them away,” Semtner-Myers said.

Her frustration extends to Capitol Hill, where the stage is being set for a confrontation between Congress and the Pentagon.

Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, calls the treatment of these troops “disgraceful.”

“If they have personality disorders, how did they get in the military in the first place?” Filner asks. “You either have taken a kid below the standards, in which case you’ve got obligations after you send him to war, or you’re putting these kids’ futures in danger with false diagnoses. Either way it’s criminal.”

The Pentagon defends its policy.

“No military in the history of the world has done more to identify, evaluate, prevent and treat the mental health needs and concerns of its personnel,” Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith said. All cases of personality disorder discharges are diagnosed by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, and troops receive some benefits including health care, life insurance and education, she said.

Filner isn’t buying it.

“These young people are being lied to and manipulated,” he said. “We deny them proper classification so they can’t get benefits, then they get this bill for a prorated signing bonus.”

In the Senate, Missouri Republican Christopher “Kit” Bond, along with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is leading an effort to force the Pentagon to change its practice. Bond says it appears worse than the scandal earlier this year over poor conditions at Walter Reed hospital.

“This is a very sad story,” Bond says. “We are fortunate enough to bring many severely wounded soldiers and Marines home, but we’re not dealing with their mental health problems. They need help, not a discharge because some phony pre-existing condition is brought up.”

NOT TO MENTION related crap like this:

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.

He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.

Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.

A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.

“I tried to do my best and serve my country. I was unfortunately hurt in the process. Now they’re telling me they want their money back,” he explained.

It’s a slap for Fox’s mother, Susan Wardezak, who met with President Bush in Pittsburgh last May. He thanked her for starting Operation Pittsburgh Pride which has sent approximately 4,000 care packages.

He then sent her a letter expressing his concern over her son’s injuries, so she cannot understand the U.S. Government’s apparent lack of concern over injuries to countless U.S. Soldiers and demands that they return their bonuses.

While he’s unsure of his future, Fox says he’s unwavering in his commitment to his country.

“I’d do it all over again… because I’m proud of the discipline that I learned. I’m proud to have done something for my country,” he said.

I DON’T KNOW what I can say about something this mind-numbingly dishonorable and wicked — except this: A country that mistreats, uses and abuses those few who have sacrificed so much while so many engage in idle (and idol) pursuits is wholly unworthy of that sacrifice.

Wholly unworthy.

Judgment Day is coming, people. Judgment Day is coming.

Next up: Waterboarding Tommy Tuberville

This just in: Nick Saban goes nuts. The Associated Press witnessed the Alabama coach’s descent into madness . . . and into total loss of perspective:

Citing the 9-11 terrorist attacks and Pearl Harbor, Saban said Monday his team must rebound like America did from a “catastrophic event.”

In this case, that would be an embarrassing 21-14 loss Saturday to Louisiana-Monroe, dropping the Tide’s record to 6-5.

“Changes in history usually occur after some kind of catastrophic event,” Saban said during the opening remarks of his weekly news conference. “It may be 9-11, which sort of changed the spirit of America relative to catastrophic events. Pearl Harbor kind of got us ready for World War II, or whatever, and that was a catastrophic event.”

Alabama’s just getting ready to face No. 25 Auburn, its biggest rival, on Saturday.

A Saban spokesman said the coach chose the 9-11 and Pearl Harbor references to illustrate the challenges facing his team.

“What Coach Saban said did not correlate losing a football game with tragedy; everyone needs to understand that. He was not equating losing football games to those catastrophic events,” football spokesman Jeff Purington said in a statement to The Associated Press. “The message was that true spirit and unity become evident in the most difficult of times. Those were two tremendous examples that everyone can identify with.”

GET A GRIP, NICK. After Pearl Harbor, the United States had to rebound — or, in the spinmeister’s terms, evidence “true spirit and unity” — in the wake of losing something like 2,700 lives and most of the Pacific Fleet.

After 9/11, the country had to bounce back from . . . well, you know what we’ve had to bounce back from. Do you think losing a (expletive deleted) football game compares in any way to the difficulty of overcoming either of those two horrific events?

What, is Saban now going to have some goons snatch Tommy Tuberville off the streets of downtown Auburn, Ala., and apply “enhanced interrogation” techniques until he gives up the Tigers’/War Eagles’/Plainsmen’s game plan? All so the great elephant god, Crimson Tide, might prevail in the Iron Bowl and, thus, ignorance, hunger, poverty and violence be banished from the Gret Stet of Alabammer forever and ever, amen?

Lawdamuhcy, that Saban done lost his mind. Maybe he ought to run for president. He’d probably fit right in.