Cutting a deal after calling him crazy.

Hard to do.  The Obama administration released/leaked an intel document where in a buncha shrinks diagnosed Putin with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism.  They based the diagnosis on looking at pictures of Putin, which sounds a little flaky to me.  But they did it and they released it to the public press.
   Good luck trying to negotiate with Putin after calling him crazy in public.  Either Obama is too stupid to understand the insult, or he doesn't care cause he doesn't plan on doing any more negotiations. 

Avoid getting Hacked

I'm talking about home machines or small office machines.  Big company setups, like Sony, are a whole different kettle of fish.  But for us home users, there are some simple things that will improve your odds.
1.  Turn the machine off when not in use.  It cannot catch a virus off the internet if it is powered down. 
2.  Never, ever, click on an email attachment.  No matter who the email is from.  Your best friend may have been infected by a virus, and virii, will use the address book in the infected machine to email themselves far and wide.  Attachments can contain malicious code that executes as soon as you click.  If you just have to see what is in the attachment, save it to disk, and inspect it with a low speed text editor, like notepad, or wordpad.  Word itself contains a powerful BASIC interpreter that can do all kinds of damage when presented with malicious code in an attachment.
3. Run a virus scanner now and then.  There are a lot of 'em.  Avast is good, and so is malwarebytes.
4. Run Windows Task Manager now and then.  Check the "process" window.  Processes are programs running on your machine.  There should not be more than 30 processes running.  Check out strange processes, or processes that seem to be taking up too much CPU time or ram.  Click on the CPU or Memory Usage columns and Task manager will rearrange the display with greatest CPU or Memory Usage at the top.  Google on the names of ramhogs or CPU hogs to find out what they are.  When you get a solid ID, such as "well known virus" go after  it.  Find it on disk and zap it.  Find any references in the registry with Regedit, and zap them. 
5.  Music download sites are virus infected. 
Good luck.

Funding Homeland Security Dept

Part of the recent budget deal, that funded the Federal government until September, was to stiff arm the Dept of Homeland Security, over Obama's legalizing 4 million illegal immigrants by executive order.  Homeland Security needs to get more funding authorized by the end of February (this month) or shut down.  The idea was to defund Obama's massive amnesty program.  Obama went along with this, and signed the budget deal, probably figuring that Homeland Security would eventually get it's funding, after some political posturing in Congress. 
  Some parts of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard being the shining example, deserve  funding 'cause they do a lot of good.  Other  parts like the Secret Service need heavy duty reform.   Yet other parts, like the Science and Technology Directorate, we could probably do without.  And the Transportation Security Agency ought to be disbanded.  We don't need federally funded goons groping women as they board airliners. 
   And, Homeland Security does the federal flood insurance program, a terrible money sink, that  pays off landowners who build on flood plains.  They get flooded on a regular basis, paid off, they rebuild on the same site, get flooded again, get paid off again.  No commercial insurance companies will touch flood insurance because of the massive and predictable losses.  The government picked it up because of the wailing and crying from the real estate community, realtors, builders, and banks.
  Hopefully, Congress will fund the needed parts of Homeland Security and give the unneeded parts a severe haircut. 

$250 million for Commuter Rail to Manchester

They are still talking about this down in Concord.  As late as the 1960's there was rail service to Manchester and Concord.  It was abandoned in the '60s 'cause nobody was riding the train.  Manchester is only about 25 miles from Nashua, so they are talking about $10 million a mile to fix up the abandoned right of ways.  That's pricey.  And that is just to get the track into useable shape.  Actually operating the trains is more money. 
The NHPR piece mentioned an estimate of 600,000 riders.  Which sounds like a lot, but one person riding the train to work daily for a week counts as 10 rides, five inbound in the morning, and five more outbound in the evening. There are about 200 working days in a year, so divide that 600,000 tickets sold by 400 and and you get about 1500 actual people who use the train every day.  That ain't many people to justify spending $250 million on trackwork. 
  No mention of schedules, how fast the train would go.  There is fairly decent bus service to Manchester and Concord right now.  No mention of  what the fares might be, or if the train trip would be faster than the bus.
  No mention of the fact that most of the commuters down I93 to MA are working out on 128, where the train doesn't go.  You need your car to get to the company parking lots off 128.  Not that many people have jobs in downtown Boston. 

All the news that fits, we print

Good old unbiased NHPR this morning.  Reporting on a strike by United Steel Workers against some Louisiana oil refineries.  They did give a union spokesman air time.  They did not give the issues of the strike, as in how big a raise is the union asking for and how much do its members make right now.  Probably they are making pretty good money now, and are asking for a lot more, but revealing that might weaken the union's position with the public.  There was a mention of safety issues, by which they might mean overtime, but again NHPR didn't give any numbers.  Probably because their staff can't count beyond ten with out taking off their shoes. 

How to stop a Blitzkrieg

That's a chapter title in Paul Kennedy's WWII book "Engineers of Victory".  The German Army was all conquering at the beginning of WWII.  They smashed the Poles, the Norwegians, the Belgians, the French, the British and the Russians, bang, bang, bang. The Germans were unstoppable, they beat all comers, hands down.
   Clearly, one of the things the Allied had to do to win WWII was beat the German Army.  Kennedy goes on to some not very satisfactory explanations as to how the Allies finally managed to pull off victories at Stalingrad and El Alamein. 
   Looking at the problem with modern eyes, we would say that the answer to beating the Germans was to use combined arms.  Infantry with tank support, and artillery support and air support.  Not pushing a lone infantry or lone tank unit into action unsupported. 
   Rick Atkinson in his "Army at Dawn" gives examples.  He is telling the story of the US Army in North Africa.  The Americans had recognized the effectiveness of the German Panzer divisions and had organized their own army into well balanced divisions combining infantry, armor, and artillery under a single commander. 
   But in the early days of operations in North Africa, Atkinson tells of repeated disasters after a higher command (corps command usually) would order lone infantry regiments or tank regiments into action, unsupported by division, bypassing the division commanders.  Only later, after about a year's bad experiences like Kasserine pass, would US divisions be ordered into action as intact formations.  And the combined arms divisional operations were much more effective, i.e. they pushed the Germans back, rather than just getting shot up. 

Measles, vaccination against

Lot of talk about a tiny measles epidemic starting at Disney land.  Lot of alarmist talk, including from Obama.  Lots of TV newsies talking about it.
  They didn't have those vaccines when I was a kid.  All kids had a case of measles about the time they started public school.  We all survived it, along with chickenpox, mumps and whooping cough.  Part of growing up. 
If the vaccine is as good as they say it is, then if your kid is vaccinated, he/she won't catch measles from the few kids who are not vaccinated. Does not increase the risk to anyone except those grownups, who aren't vaccinated and who didn't catch the disease as a child.  In an adult, those childhood diseases are a lot more serious, in some cases fatal. 
  Far as I can see, those parents who don't vaccinate their kids only put their kids at risk. And it ain't much of a risk.  Used to be, we all ran the same risk, and we all survived.   I don't see how it affects or harms the general population.  So if people want to do stupid things that don't harm others, let 'em.  That's what a free country is all about.