Dear Sarah Chayes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Chayes
Are you trying (now) to tell us you didn't know back when Dubya was sitting in those photo ops with Hamad Karzai, that he was a warlord?
I don't have a Harvard degree in history, but this midwestern housewife knew.
Gee Whiz.
NPR = conduit for propaganda.

It might be fun wearing a turban in Afganistan but Flint, Michigan is a dangerous place with a depressed population and Flint needs a soap cooperative too. Come to Flint and work here and I won't believe you're another American mole meddling in the rest of the world.
Why do we need to go to the Mideast to do charity work?

Helliburton in Burma, or wherever the pipelines go, you get repression

For days I've been away from the computer and depending on the television for my news. Gawd. Watching minute clips of monks protesting somethin-or-other in Myanmar. But listening to the MSM, do you think they'd actually EXPLAIN what's going on? (no)
I was wondering if we weren't just watching pretty color film at 11 about another color-coded so-called "revolution" (I hate quotation marks too but I just am inexplicably compelled to use them, ignore and read on, please.)

So today, I get mail:

Dear Activist,

Stand against oppression

I've watched in horror all week.
In Burma, Buddhist monks, marching against tyranny, are reported to have been disrobed and shackled. Many detained, many killed. They marched against injustice and oppression, and their actions were met with a cruel and ruthless crackdown.

You can take a stand against the oppression of these peaceful monks. Take action today.
The death counts vary wildly. But you can be sure that the military junta has brutally beaten and possibly murdered many more than we'll ever be able to confirm.

Please take action today for the people of Burma.
As you know, Amnesty International has been working for decades to protect human rights in Burma (Myanmar) and to support the pro-democracy forces' right to peaceful dissent. When the people of Burma last staged mass pro-democracy protests back in 1988, the military junta murdered thousands. But history does not have to repeat itself."

.... and so on, from Amnesty USA, via Bob Fertig who wrote...

It's been 17 tragic years since Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was elected prime minister of Burma - only to have the military junta nullify the election and place her under house arrest ever since.
In August, the junta doubled fuel prices and created enormous hardships. The Burmese people have taken to the streets for peaceful protests, but the junta has responded with naked brutality.
Please join me in urging the United Nations Security Council to immediately send a mission to Burma.
Bob Fertik

Then I read this and put 2 + 2 together, it's just like the phony 'war on terror', it's all about them oil pipelines... and Dirty Dick Cheney's Helliburton who always makes a buck dealing with criminal governments, and making business opportunities for the security industry.

Okay, that said, how much of the background story have you heard on the mainstream media? Zip.

an old woman calls CSPAN and says WE Gotta do What we GOTTA DO

So afraid of "terror" she is, that she has murdered her own conscience.

Post under "cost of war":

Move decimal place 4 positions to left to see how many families could be fed for a year.
Move decimal place 5 positions to left to see how many homes could be converted to run forever on solar power.
Move decimal place 6 positions to left to see how many people could have basic health coverage without deductibles or co-pays for a lifetime.
For roughly twice the number above, the United States could replace its entire liquid fuel needs from wind power, and could do it in less time than has elapsed since it invaded Iraq.

Eventual Cost
Scott Wallsten, senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, AEI-Brookings and American Enterprise Institute, former economist at The World Bank, and staff economist at the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers, argues for a figure of $1 trillion in today’s dollars. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion.

I understand the Bush Dynasty's War on Iraq has cost more than a million Iraqi lives.
For what?

I understand super sensitive superpatriot Americans are still referring daily to September 11.

"Parallels" a.k.a. Vietraq
Big Brother makes Universal Soldiers of our sons to stoke the corporate war machine.



But (irony alert) I guess these young men are "fighting over there so that they don't have to fight someone over here". As in... WHO would they be fighting?

And they are "fighting for my freedom to say what I think." (Just be careful what you say, and who you say it to, and how you say it, even in what used to be called the privacy of your own home. Because if you wear a Casio watch, that could be proof enough for the Gonzales Star Chamber to declare you a terrorist, and you could be disappeared.)

That old woman with the pragmatic view of the valuelessness of the Bill of Rights just put ZERO value on the lives of the boys fighting over there.
Unless she meant we have to have them there so she can fill her tank on her Wallymart paycheck and still have something left to pay for food.
We're No. 1!

In the movie we say "This isn't Us."
Isn't it?

Nuke 'em Day

Today the Japanese remember insanity.
They were victims of our nukes.
The only country to experience, first hand, the truth about nukes.
We nuked 'em.
The only country to ever use nukes on other human beings.
The biggest owner of nukes, the proliferator of nukes, the country who recently allowed it's Imperial Leader to negate the nuke treaty.
We need more and newer nukes, our old nukes are too... well, old. (What is the shelf life, er, half life of a nuke? only Dubya knows.)

How can any human being even consider this to be an option? When I hear a man say "nuke 'em" (and now candidate Hiroshima Hillary is spouting that filth) I think that man is not a human being, he is a koolaide drinking death-cultist, a cannibal with an ideology.



This is the day the Japanese recall insanity.

Dear Mainstream Media

I wake up a few days ago to hear on the radio that Condoleeeza is offering 44 Billion of my taxpayer dollar bills worth of arms to countries in the Mideast.
Then I hear the figure 20 Billion, Today it is 60 Billion. What the hell are you doing with this reporting? What figure can I quote when I'm painting my signs and writing my letters? What the hell figure can I quote when I'm expressing my rage?
I'm having some "cognitive dissonance" here, folks. Help me out.



Seize the Day is a British group, but the sentiment is the same.

We have 60 Billion taxpayer dollars to supply more carnage, but we don't have money to insure our children, or fix our bridges, or pay our fruit pickers a living wage...
in this great moral self proclaimed Christian nation.

prophecy doesn't belong exclusively to pandering television christian fundamentalists

the future - it's murder
Leonard Cohen, prophet


everybody knows he's way too cool


democracy is coming to the U.S.A. I hope it gets here sooner rather than later...

why I love Michael Moore

a hometown boy does good, damn good

How many people can you name in the mainstream media who have been as correct, right, prescient, and humane as Michael Moore?

Why are we in Iraq when Flint Michigan looks like a bomb dropped?

There is an alternative.

"Let's get out of Iraq and rebuild America first."
--Merle Haggard

a little alarm clock music

Rage against the machine singing a little American history.
Wake up.


Antiflag reminds you why you gotta go to work to pay them bills.
One trillion dollars.


Dedicated to the NeoCons, the Neolibs, and the MIC.
I actually heard the meme change from a mouthpiece on NPR- we are now fighting in Iraq to protect our way of life.

So ... we're being bled dry so we can have our stuff.

There is an alternative, you know.



Wake up. Get up and go to work, people, but work for something else.
There is an alternative.

Nice Job, NPR - exposing another powerful twit

Morning Edition made me fall out of bed laughing this a.m.

Steve Inskeep's interview with Doug Feith reveals our most innerest insider, highest super duper secretest know-all, Wizard of Oz to be a dweep of a twit.

Mike Moore exposed Paul Wolfowitz for a comb licking twit before the war.
William Krystol exposed himself to be a twitchy twit in his frequent talking head appearances on the MSM.
Rummy Rumsfield exposed himself to be a lyrical twit in his press briefings.
Rush Limbaugh's sexual twitdom was found in his bag at the airport.
Karl Rove rapped himself into pillsbury doughboy twit status forever at the press dinner.
Shrub has always been a frat boy twit.
I always wonder why Republican women look like mean, unhappy mothers.
Because Republican men are, basically, twits.

and No One Ever explained Jeff Gannon/Guckert.
I think he was Cheney's boytoy.

The GOP is perverted in every sense of the word.
These are your leaders, people. Rich Twits with Power.

Now for the cost of not believing the real experts:


Iraq: the hidden cost of the war
Andrew Stephen
Published 12 March 2007

America won't simply be paying with its dead. The Pentagon is trying to silence economists who predict that several decades of care for the wounded will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion.

They roar in every day, usually direct from the Landstuhl US air-force base in the Rhineland: giant C-17 cargo planes capable of lifting and flying the 65-tonne M1 Abrams tank to battlefields anywhere in the world. But Landstuhl is the first staging post for transporting most of the American wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan back to the United States, and these planes act as CCATs ("critical care air transport") with their AETs - "aeromedical evacuation teams" of doctors, nurses and medical technicians, whose task is to make sure that gravely wounded US troops arrive alive and fit enough for intensive treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, just six miles up the road from me in Washington.

These days it is de rigueur for all politicians, ranging from President Bush and Ibrahim al-Jaafari (Iraq's "prime minister") to junior congressmen, to visit the 113-acre Walter Reed complex to pay tribute to the valour of horribly wounded soldiers. Last Christmas, the centre was so overwhelmed by the 500,000 cards and presents it received for wounded soldiers that it announced it could accept no more.

Yet the story of the US wounded reveals yet another deception by the Bush administration, masking monumental miscalculations that will haunt generations to come. Thanks to the work of a Harvard professor and former Clinton administration economist named Linda Bilmes, and some other hard-working academics, we have discovered that the administration has been putting out two entirely separate and conflicting sets of numbers of those wounded in the wars.

This might sound like chicanery by George W Bush and his cronies - or characteristic incompetence - but Bilmes and Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist from Columbia University, have established not only that the number wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is far higher than the Pentagon has been saying, but that looking after them alone could cost present and future US taxpayers a sum they estimate to be $536bn, but which could get considerably bigger still. Just one soldier out of the 1.4 million troops so far deployed who has returned with a debilitating brain injury, for example, may need round-the-clock care for five, six, or even seven decades. In present-day money, according to one study, care for that soldier alone will cost a minimum of $4.3m.

However, let us first backtrack to 2002-2003 to try to establish why the administration's sums were so wildly off-target. Documents just obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show how completely lost the Bush administration was in Neverland when it came to Iraq: Centcom, the main top-secret military planning unit at Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, predicted in its war plan that only 5,000 US troops would be required in Iraq by the end of 2006.

Rummy's deputy Paul Wolfowitz was such a whizz at the economics of it all that he confidently told us that Iraq would "really finance its own reconstruction". Rumsfeld himself reported that the administration had come up with "a number that's something under $50bn" as the cost of the war. Larry Lindsey, then assistant to the president on economic policy at the White House, warned that it might actually soar to as much as $200bn - with the result that Bush did as he habitually does with those who do not produce convenient facts and figures to back up his fantasies: he sacked him.

From official statistics supplied by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, we now know that the Iraq war is costing roughly $200m a day, or $6bn every month; the total bill so far is $400bn. But, in their studies, Bilmes and Stiglitz consider three scenarios that were not even conceivable to Bush, Rummy, Wolfowitz et al back in 2003. In the first, incurring the lowest future costs, troops will start to be withdrawn this year and be out by 2010. The second assumes that there will be a gradual withdrawal that will be complete by 2015. The third envisages the participation of two million servicemen and women, with the war going on past 2016.

Estimating long-term costs using even the second, moderate scenario, Bilmes tells me: "I think we are now approaching a figure of $2.5 trillion." This, she says, "includes three kinds of costs. It includes the cash costs of running the combat operations, the long-term costs of replenishing military equipment and taking care of the veterans, and [increased costs] at the Pentagon. And then it includes the economic cost, which is the differential between reservists' pay in their civilian jobs and what they're paid in the military - and the macroecono mic costs, such as the percentage of the oil-price increase."

Let me pause to explain those deceptive figures. Look at the latest official toll of US fatalities and wounded in the media, and you will see something like 3,160 dead and 23,785 wounded (that "includes 13,250 personnel who returned to duty within 72 hours", the Washington Post told us helpfully on 4 March). From this, you might assume that only 11,000 or so troops, in effect, have been wounded in Iraq. But Bilmes discovered that the Bush administration was keeping two separate sets of statistics of those wounded: one (like the above) issued by the Pentagon and therefore used by the media, and the other by the Department of Veterans Affairs - a government department autonomous from the Pentagon. At the beginning of this year, the Pentagon was putting out a figure of roughly 23,000 wounded, but the VA was quietly saying that more than 50,000 had, in fact, been wounded.

Casualty conspiracy

To draw attention to her academic findings, Bilmes wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times of 5 January 2007 in which she quoted the figure of "more than 50,000 wounded Iraq war soldiers". The reaction from the Pentagon was fury. An assistant secretary there named Dr William Winkenwerder phoned her personally to complain. Bilmes recalls: "He said, 'Where did you get those numbers from?'" She explained to Winkenwerder that the 50,000 figure came from the VA, and faxed him copies of official US government documents that proved her point. Winkenwerder backed down.

Matters did not rest there. Despite its independence from the Pentagon, the VA is run by Robert James Nicholson, a former Republican Party chairman and Bush's loyal political appointee. Following Bilmes's exchange with Winkenwerder - on 10 January, to be precise - the number of wounded listed on the VA website dropped from 50,508 to 21,649. The Bush administration had, once again, turned reality on its head to concur with its claims. "The whole thing is scary," Bilmes says. "I have never been conspiracy-minded, but watching them change the numbers on the website - it's extraordinary."

What Bilmes had discovered was that the tally of US fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan included the outcome of "non-hostile actions", most commonly vehicle accidents. But the Pentagon's statistics of the wounded did not. Even troops incapacitated for life in Iraq or Afghanistan - but not in "hostile situations" - were not being counted, although they will require exactly the same kind of medical care back home as soldiers similarly wounded in battle. Bilmes and Stiglitz had set out, meantime, to explore the ratio of wounded to deaths in previous American wars. They found that in the First World War, on average 1.8 were wounded for every fatality; in the Second World War, 1.6; in Korea, 2.8; in Vietnam, 2.6; and, in the first Gulf war in 1991, 1.2. In this war, 21st-century medical care and better armour have inflated the numbers of the wounded-but-living, leading Bilmes to an astounding conclusion: for every soldier dying in Iraq or Afghanistan today, 16 are being wounded. The Pentagon insists the figure is nearer nine - but, either way, the economic implications for the future are phenomenal.

So far, more than 200,000 veterans from the current Iraq or Afghanistan wars have been treated at VA centres. Twenty per cent of those brought home are suffering from serious brain or spinal injuries, or the severing of more than one limb, and a further 20 per cent from amputations, blindness or deafness, severe burns, or other dire conditions. "Every person injured on active duty is going to be a long-term cost of the war," says Bilmes. If we compare the financial ramifications of the first Gulf war to the present one, the implications become even more stark. Despite its brevity, even the 1991 Gulf war exacted a heavy toll: 48.4 per cent of veterans sought medical care, and 44 per cent filed disability claims. Eighty-eight per cent of these claims were granted, meaning that 611,729 veterans from the first Gulf war are now receiving disability benefits; a large proportion are suffering from psychiatric illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

More than a third of those returning from the current wars, too, have already been diagnosed as suffering from similar conditions. But although the VA has 207 walk-in "vet centres" and other clinics and offices throughout the US, it is a bureaucracy under siege. It has a well-deserved reputation for providing excellent healthcare for America's 24 million veterans, but is quite unable to cope with a workload that the Bush administration did not foresee.

The unknown unknowns

There is now a backlog of 400,000 claims from veterans and waiting lists of months, some of which "render . . . care virtually inaccessible", in the words of Frances Murphy, the VA's own deputy under-secretary for health. Claims are expected to hit 874,000 this year, 930,000 in 2008. Casualties returning from Iraq meanwhile outnumber other patients at Walter Reed 17 to one, and many have to be put up at nearby hotels and motels rather than in the hospital beds they desperately need. Suicide attempts are frequent; often the less wounded end up having to care for the more seriously wounded.

Since I researched this piece, the Washington Post has published a series of articles outlining the chaos at Walter Reed and elsewhere. Undercover reporters found soldiers suffering from schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress and other brain injuries, occupying rooms infested with mice and cockroaches. The ensuing furore resulted in the sacking of the general in charge. Even Bush says he is "deeply troubled" by these "unacceptable" conditions at Walter Reed, but his government has carefully avoided the issue of how much it will cost to put right these wrongs. The failure to look after returning, often traumatised troops leads to yet further hidden costs to the US economy: the consequences of unemployment, family violence, crime, alcoholism and drug abuse, for example.

The projected $2.5trn price tag also includes the costs of replacing and replenishing military equipment in use. Nearly 40 per cent of the army's equipment, according to the Washington Post, is currently deployed in Iraq; as long ago as March 2005, Rumsfeld conceded that tanks, fighting vehicles and helicopters were wearing out at six times the normal rate.

Significant quantities of equipment are being destroyed, too. The Washington Post reported last December that the army alone has lost more than 280,000 major pieces of equipment in the combat zones; the Army Times reported as long ago as February last year that 20 M1 Abram tanks, 50 Bradley fighting vehicles, 20 Stryker wheeled combat vehicles, 20 M113 armoured personnel carriers, 250 Hum vees, hundreds of mine-clearing vehicles and the like - plus more than a hundred aircraft, most of them helicopters - have been lost. Those figures have increased considerably since then as fighting has intensified. Add something between $125bn and $300bn for these unanticipated long-term costs, say Bilmes and Stiglitz.

Yet another gargantuan White House miscalculation was over the price of oil. Before his departure, Larry Lindsey told the Wall Street Journal in September 2002 that "the successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy"; the WSJ echoed his thoughts in an editorial the same day, arguing that "the best way to keep oil prices in check is a short, successful war on Iraq". In 2002, the average cost of a barrel of oil was $23.71; today, it is hovering around $50. Dick Cheney's chums in firms such as his own Halliburton - or ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron - have profited enormously, but Bilmes estimates that even if only $5 of the oil-price increase can be attributed to the Iraq war, that alone adds $150bn to the cost of war.

There are also countless imponderables that add to the bill. The deployment of hundreds of thousands of reservists depletes the economy. At present, 44 per cent of US police forces, for example, have members deployed as reservists in Iraq, and their duties have to be performed by others in America; the same goes for firefighters, medical staff, prison wardens.

Then there are the future illnesses that may well unfold. For instance, nobody knew that the notorious Agent Orange defoliant, used by the US in Vietnam from 1961-71, would turn out to have had carcinogenic and other effects on US troops. Today, there is mounting evidence that exposure to depleted uranium - used for firing anti-tank rounds from US M1 tanks and A-10 attack aircraft - can cause cancer, diabetes and birth defects. Many veterans are returning to the US with their health apparently in ruins from adverse reactions to anti-anthrax injections and/or consumption of experimental pills to counter chemical warfare agents. The long-term costs of looking after the likes of them make the cost of the actual war dead pale by comparison: spouses of deceased soldiers receive a "death gratuity" of $100,000. Troops are also given the opportunity to take out subsidised life insurance policies for up to $500,000 for dependants. In the dispassionate way economists assess such things, Bilmes and Stiglitz estimate the additional cost to the economy of the death of a young soldier - typically 25 years old - to be $6.5m.

Bilmes has become a marked woman to the Bush administration. She was invited to participate in a VA seminar on the cost of war, to be held on the last day of this month - but then was suddenly uninvited. She is no raving lefty, though, and her economic credentials are unimpeachable: she was responsible for an annual budget of $9bn in the Clinton-era commerce department. Like none other than George W Bush, she, too, holds an MBA from Harvard.

It is sobering to think how the money going down the drain in Iraq could otherwise have been spent. "For this amount of money, we could have provided health insurance for the uninsured of this country," Bilmes tells me. "We could have made social security solvent for the next three generations, and implemented all the 9/11 Commission's recommendations [to tighten domestic security]."

That kind of list goes on: the annual cost of treating all heart disease and diabetes in the United States would amount to a quarter of what the Iraq war is costing. Pre-school for every child in America would take just $35bn a year. In their main paper, Bilmes and Stiglitz come up with an even more intriguing possibility: "We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might have succeeded in winning hearts and minds."

What a historic triumph that would have been for Bush. Instead, his legacy to generations of Americans will be a needless debt of at least $2.5trn, what his own defence secretary describes as a four-way civil war in Iraq, dangerous instability in the Middle East, and increasingly entrenched hatred of the United States throughout the world. Alas, we are likely to hear the daily roar of those C-17s as they approach Andrews Air Force Base for years to come.



The unknown price that Britain is paying

No one is counting the long-term costs of caring for injured British troops, reports Sam Alexandroni

The cost to Britain of the Iraq war, according to the Ministry of Defence, will hit £5bn at the end of this financial year. This is the figure given for direct spending on fuel, ammunition, repairs and transport; the real bill is certainly much bigger. The greatest of the uncounted costs is the financial and human toll the war is taking on the mental and physical health of British personnel serving in Iraq.

The government has not attempted to calculate the long-term cost of caring for the injured, and official statistics offer little guidance. Four thousand eight hundred personnel have been evacuated from Iraq on medical grounds but only 144 were classified as "seriously" or "very seriously" injured. What about the rest? Nobody in the MoD or NHS was able to say how many personnel who served in Iraq are being treated in Britain, or how many will require long-term medical care. The treatment costs of servicemen at NHS hospitals such as Selly Oak in Birmingham - home to the Royal Centre of Defence Medicine - are passed on to the MoD, which in turn bills the Treasury Reserve, but once a patient leaves the armed forces, ongoing treatment is paid for by the NHS.

Mental health offers similar uncertainties. So far, 2,123 troops who served in Iraq have been diagnosed with mental health problems, 328 with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); but cases take 12 years on average to surface and there is no sure cure. "We won't know for many years after the Iraq war is over how many former servicemen are suffering from psychological problems," says Toby Elliot, chief executive of the charity Combat Stress. "The MoD doesn't provide all the funds we need by a long way. We have to make up 40 per cent of our funding ourselves, and that's a problem."

Nor has anyone tried to quantify the indirect economic effects. The surge in the price of Brent crude oil from $31 a barrel at the start of 2003 to $60 today has been driven largely by increased demand, but Middle East instability affects the market and "Iraq has been factored in for years", according to the oil analyst Jean-Luc Amos. The extent to which the Iraq war has exacerbated the domestic threat of terror and made Britain less safe remains similarly ungauged. Then there are other costs barely considered. In 2002 a study commissioned by Ken Livingstone, the city's mayor, estimated that war in Iraq would cost the London economy £1bn in lost tourism alone, though there has been no post-invasion follow-up.

That no one in the British government has even attempted these calculations is worrying, but perhaps any cost-benefit analysis of the war misses the point. "In the end, if the Iraq war had brought the Iraqis a better life and us greater security, then - whatever the costs - it would seem 'worth it'," says Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College London. "Because it has been such a screw-up, then, even at a lower level of calculated costs, it seems like a waste."



Iraq War: Key Dates
Research by Sarah O'Connor

20 March 2003 US and Britain invade
1 May 2003 Bush announces "mission accomplished"
13 December 2003 Saddam Hussein is captured
28 April 2004 Images of US troops abusing prisoners emerge from Abu Ghraib
November 2004 US assault on Fallujah insurgents
30 January 2005 Eight million Iraqis vote in elections
July 2006 Deadliest month in Iraq: 3,438 civilians are killed
30 December 2006 Saddam Hussein is executed
10 January 2007 Bush announces 21,500 troop surge to Iraq
21 February 2007 Blair announces the withdrawal of 1,600 British troops


Iraq 2007 by numbers
Research by Rebecca Bundhun

l57,805 minimum number of Iraqi civilians reported killed since the 2003 invasion, according to the Iraq Body Count website
33% of Americans in a March 2007 poll approved of George Bush's Iraq policy
80 US soldiers killed in Iraq last month
7,100 number of UK troops currently in Iraq
135,000 number of US troops currently in Iraq
134 number of British soldiers killed in Iraq
21,500 additional troops Bush plans to deploy in the "troop surge"
28 percentage of Americans in the March poll who said the US will probably or definitely win the war

Crafting a new story for the attention deficit nation

Iraq
- q + n= Iran
- n= IRA

The news of the Iranian roadside bombs in Iraq that kill our troops you are being innundated with is just another new BS story.

I predict is another Jessica Lynch- Pat Tillman Potemkin type propaganda story, crafted to rouse the Attention Deficit Nation.
Don't trust anything the War Party says on the War Media.
Don't you remember, the story has been hinted around for months now.
I recall hearing it mentioned briefly by the ABC writer- embedded reporter on Diane Rheme's show last week.

But the REAL story is that it is another covert provication to war on Iran.

Dubya is spending millions on propaganda aimed at you and me. Are you awake enough to catch it?

Just Google it for yourself... IRA and IED. These are the same bombs that covert Brit and US spooks taught the IRA to use in their violence, as reported in the Guardian newspaper.

kool stuff

neocon wall chart 1 and neocon wall chart 2, theocrat edition from http://oddlots.digitalspace.net/ARX/downloads/neoconned.html
For lots of info to elucidate the charts, check out the accompanying downloads.

saturday nite dance music

from a perennial favorite, Depeche Mode...

Dear Joe Republican

Your perception of your hard-earned middle class lifestyle is the result of a lot of hard work by Liberals throughout American history.
On his radio show recently, Thom Hartmann read this piece (link) by John Gray that says it well.
I suggest you thank the next liberal you meet.

Why the bad guys always will win

One thing the Reptilians in the GOP have that the Democrats will never have is what some call audacity, but which most of us call "balls".

Gingrich Had Affair During Clinton Probe
By BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writer
Thu Mar 8, 8:04 PM

WASHINGTON - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."

Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.

"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."

Widely considered a mastermind of the Republican revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 elections, Gingrich remains wildly popular among many conservatives. He has repeatedly placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign.

Gingrich has said he is waiting to see how the Republican field shapes up before deciding in the fall whether to run.

Reports of extramarital affairs have dogged him for years as a result of two messy divorces, but he has refused to discuss them publicly.

Gingrich, who frequently campaigned on family values issues, divorced his second wife, Marianne, in 2000 after his attorneys acknowledged Gingrich's relationship with his current wife, Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide more than 20 years younger than he is.

His first marriage, to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, ended in divorce in 1981. Although Gingrich has said he doesn't remember it, Battley has said Gingrich discussed divorce terms with her while she was recuperating in the hospital from cancer surgery.

Gingrich married Marianne months after the divorce.

"There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them," he said in the interview. "I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I'm ... not proud of."

Gingrich's congressional career ended in 1998 when he abruptly resigned from Congress after poor showings from Republicans in elections and after being reprimanded by the House ethics panel over charges that he used tax-exempt funding to advance his political goals.

On the Net:
Focus on the Family interview (to be posted in full Friday): http://listen.family.org/daily/

ronnie reagan's chickens

Are the Republican economic chickens coming home to roost?

PERFECT STORM HERE / DOW TUMBLES AS MARGIN DEBT PEAKS
[Authored by Allen L. Roland*]
swiped from the Political Junkie blog
As investing on margin hits an all time high on Wall Street, and housing foreclosures hit record highs ~ all the ingredients for the perfect storm are rapidly falling into place. In 1999, total outstanding household debt was $6.4 trillion. As of the end of the second quarter of 2006 total outstanding household debt was $12.3 trillion ~ the day of reckoning has arrived and the stock market is just beginning to take note.

The amount of margin debt hit a record 285 billion on January on the New York Stock Exchange. The last time margin debt hit this level was at the height of the dot-com boom in March 2000 ~ just ahead of a two year decline in stock prices.

We are at the top of this four year easy money housing inflated Bull market and debt is increasing as the Dow begins to crumble in face of mounting consumer debt and severe poverty.

" Debt is only a problem on the way down " said Alexander Paris, economist and market analyst for Chicago-based Barrington Research." There's alot of margin debt out there, and with the S&P shooting for its ninth-consecutive month up ~ you haven't seen this kind of run since 1926. It's a warning flag”

Against this grim backdrop of wishful thinking, The U.S. stock market plunged [yesterday], wiping out about $600 billion in market value and erasing all of 2007's gains, after a sell off in China spread globally and sparked the biggest rout in four years.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 416.02, or 3.3 percent, to 12,216.24. The S&P 500 retreated 50.33, or 3.5 percent, to 1399.04. The NASDAQ Composite Index dropped 96.66, or 3.9 percent, to 2407.86.

With margin and personal debt so high ~ there is really no foundation to keep this market from free falling to new lows especially with a more than soft housing market, rising foreclosures and durable orders in a marked decline.

All the ingredients of the perfect storm are here but many are already hurting such as 200,000 U.S. veterans who are homeless, including approximately 500-1,000 who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On top of all this, the percentage of poor Americans in severe poverty just reached a 32 year high. The aftermath of this perfect storm ( like New Orleans ) will be a poorer and disenfranchised America ~ the true legacy of the Cheney/Bush administration's reign of economic hubris and military terror where the rich got richer and the poor, frail and elderly got screwed.

__________

*Allen L. Roland served five years as a Navy fighter pilot and ten years as a stockbroker. He has earned a masters degree in psychology and now works as a therapist with an active private counseling practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.

President Bush Spits on American Children for the 6th year

And Congress, in a bipartisan gentlemen's agreement, comply.
Go look at the budget proposal.
Cut the inheritance tax for the Richie Rich heirs of wealthy capitalist families who haven't done pre-emptive tax planning.
Cut the budget for poor children's medical insurance and the supplemental food programs that supply hungry folk with groceries (dollars spent locally, eh? on produce from American farmers, eh?), and heating oil for low income Americans, and most things you expect would be worth supporting in a moral nation...
An already bloated, and yes, earmarked, budget that borrows from your children to pay for today's spending.
A tax redistribution, from the pockets of the middle class, who pay tax, to the military contractors and the top percent of the population, most of whom FRANKLY, aren't worth it, didn't earn it, and were just lucky.

"Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat." The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. ... I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day."- Amos 8:4-10

President Bush Spits on Returning Soldiers

...figuratively speaking, of course.
He can't spit on returning soldiers in the Vet's hospitals if he doesn't visit them.

Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility
By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 18, 2007; A01


Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.

They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially -- they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 -- that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

Not all of the quarters are as bleak as Duncan's, but the despair of Building 18 symbolizes a larger problem in Walter Reed's treatment of the wounded, according to dozens of soldiers, family members, veterans aid groups, and current and former Walter Reed staff members interviewed by two Washington Post reporters, who spent more than four months visiting the outpatient world without the knowledge or permission of Walter Reed officials. Many agreed to be quoted by name; others said they feared Army retribution if they complained publicly.

While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.

On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

Soldiers, family members, volunteers and caregivers who have tried to fix the system say each mishap seems trivial by itself, but the cumulative effect wears down the spirits of the wounded and can stall their recovery.

"It creates resentment and disenfranchisement," said Joe Wilson, a clinical social worker at Walter Reed. "These soldiers will withdraw and stay in their rooms. They will actively avoid the very treatment and services that are meant to be helpful."

Danny Soto, a national service officer for Disabled American Veterans who helps dozens of wounded service members each week at Walter Reed, said soldiers "get awesome medical care and their lives are being saved," but, "Then they get into the administrative part of it and they are like, 'You saved me for what?' The soldiers feel like they are not getting proper respect. This leads to anger."

This world is invisible to outsiders. Walter Reed occasionally showcases the heroism of these wounded soldiers and emphasizes that all is well under the circumstances. President Bush, former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and members of Congress have promised the best care during their regular visits to the hospital's spit-polished amputee unit, Ward 57.

"We owe them all we can give them," Bush said during his last visit, a few days before Christmas. "Not only for when they're in harm's way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service."

Along with the government promises, the American public, determined not to repeat the divisive Vietnam experience, has embraced the soldiers even as the war grows more controversial at home. Walter Reed is awash in the generosity of volunteers, businesses and celebrities who donate money, plane tickets, telephone cards and steak dinners.

Yet at a deeper level, the soldiers say they feel alone and frustrated. Seventy-five percent of the troops polled by Walter Reed last March said their experience was "stressful." Suicide attempts and unintentional overdoses from prescription drugs and alcohol, which is sold on post, are part of the narrative here.

Vera Heron spent 15 frustrating months living on post to help care for her son. "It just absolutely took forever to get anything done," Heron said. "They do the paperwork, they lose the paperwork. Then they have to redo the paperwork. You are talking about guys and girls whose lives are disrupted for the rest of their lives, and they don't put any priority on it."

Family members who speak only Spanish have had to rely on Salvadoran housekeepers, a Cuban bus driver, the Panamanian bartender and a Mexican floor cleaner for help. Walter Reed maintains a list of bilingual staffers, but they are rarely called on, according to soldiers and families and Walter Reed staff members.

Evis Morales's severely wounded son was transferred to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda for surgery shortly after she arrived at Walter Reed. She had checked into her government-paid room on post, but she slept in the lobby of the Bethesda hospital for two weeks because no one told her there is a free shuttle between the two facilities. "They just let me off the bus and said 'Bye-bye,' " recalled Morales, a Puerto Rico resident.

Morales found help after she ran out of money, when she called a hotline number and a Spanish-speaking operator happened to answer.

"If they can have Spanish-speaking recruits to convince my son to go into the Army, why can't they have Spanish-speaking translators when he's injured?" Morales asked. "It's so confusing, so disorienting."

Soldiers, wives, mothers, social workers and the heads of volunteer organizations have complained repeatedly to the military command about what one called "The Handbook No One Gets" that would explain life as an outpatient. Most soldiers polled in the March survey said they got their information from friends. Only 12 percent said any Army literature had been helpful.

"They've been behind from Day One," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who headed the House Government Reform Committee, which investigated problems at Walter Reed and other Army facilities. "Even the stuff they've fixed has only been patched."

Among the public, Davis said, "there's vast appreciation for soldiers, but there's a lack of focus on what happens to them" when they return. "It's awful."

Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, commander at Walter Reed, said in an interview last week that a major reason outpatients stay so long, a change from the days when injured soldiers were discharged as quickly as possible, is that the Army wants to be able to hang on to as many soldiers as it can, "because this is the first time this country has fought a war for so long with an all-volunteer force since the Revolution."

Acknowledging the problems with outpatient care, Weightman said Walter Reed has taken steps over the past year to improve conditions for the outpatient army, which at its peak in summer 2005 numbered nearly 900, not to mention the hundreds of family members who come to care for them. One platoon sergeant used to be in charge of 125 patients; now each one manages 30. Platoon sergeants with psychological problems are more carefully screened. And officials have increased the numbers of case managers and patient advocates to help with the complex disability benefit process, which Weightman called "one of the biggest sources of delay."

And to help steer the wounded and their families through the complicated bureaucracy, Weightman said, Walter Reed has recently begun holding twice-weekly informational meetings. "We felt we were pushing information out before, but the reality is, it was overwhelming," he said. "Is it fail-proof? No. But we've put more resources on it."

He said a 21,500-troop increase in Iraq has Walter Reed bracing for "potentially a lot more" casualties.

Bureaucratic Battles

The best known of the Army's medical centers, Walter Reed opened in 1909 with 10 patients. It has treated the wounded from every war since, and nearly one of every four service members injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The outpatients are assigned to one of five buildings attached to the post, including Building 18, just across from the front gates on Georgia Avenue. To accommodate the overflow, some are sent to nearby hotels and apartments. Living conditions range from the disrepair of Building 18 to the relative elegance of Mologne House, a hotel that opened on the post in 1998, when the typical guest was a visiting family member or a retiree on vacation.

The Pentagon has announced plans to close Walter Reed by 2011, but that hasn't stopped the flow of casualties. Three times a week, school buses painted white and fitted with stretchers and blackened windows stream down Georgia Avenue. Sirens blaring, they deliver soldiers groggy from a pain-relief cocktail at the end of their long trip from Iraq via Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and Andrews Air Force Base.

Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon, 43, came in on one of those buses in November 2004 and spent several weeks on the fifth floor of Walter Reed's hospital. His eye and skull were shattered by an AK-47 round. His odyssey in the Other Walter Reed has lasted more than two years, but it began when someone handed him a map of the grounds and told him to find his room across post.

A reconnaissance and land-navigation expert, Shannon was so disoriented that he couldn't even find north. Holding the map, he stumbled around outside the hospital, sliding against walls and trying to keep himself upright, he said. He asked anyone he found for directions.

Shannon had led the 2nd Infantry Division's Ghost Recon Platoon until he was felled in a gun battle in Ramadi. He liked the solitary work of a sniper; "Lone Wolf" was his call name. But he did not expect to be left alone by the Army after such serious surgery and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had appointments during his first two weeks as an outpatient, then nothing.

"I thought, 'Shouldn't they contact me?' " he said. "I didn't understand the paperwork. I'd start calling phone numbers, asking if I had appointments. I finally ran across someone who said: 'I'm your case manager. Where have you been?'

"Well, I've been here! Jeez Louise, people, I'm your hospital patient!"

Like Shannon, many soldiers with impaired memory from brain injuries sat for weeks with no appointments and no help from the staff to arrange them. Many disappeared even longer. Some simply left for home.

One outpatient, a 57-year-old staff sergeant who had a heart attack in Afghanistan, was given 200 rooms to supervise at the end of 2005. He quickly discovered that some outpatients had left the post months earlier and would check in by phone. "We called them 'call-in patients,' " said Staff Sgt. Mike McCauley, whose dormant PTSD from Vietnam was triggered by what he saw on the job: so many young and wounded, and three bodies being carried from the hospital.

Life beyond the hospital bed is a frustrating mountain of paperwork. The typical soldier is required to file 22 documents with eight different commands -- most of them off-post -- to enter and exit the medical processing world, according to government investigators. Sixteen different information systems are used to process the forms, but few of them can communicate with one another. The Army's three personnel databases cannot read each other's files and can't interact with the separate pay system or the medical recordkeeping databases.

The disappearance of necessary forms and records is the most common reason soldiers languish at Walter Reed longer than they should, according to soldiers, family members and staffers. Sometimes the Army has no record that a soldier even served in Iraq. A combat medic who did three tours had to bring in letters and photos of herself in Iraq to show she that had been there, after a clerk couldn't find a record of her service.

Shannon, who wears an eye patch and a visible skull implant, said he had to prove he had served in Iraq when he tried to get a free uniform to replace the bloody one left behind on a medic's stretcher. When he finally tracked down the supply clerk, he discovered the problem: His name was mistakenly left off the "GWOT list" -- the list of "Global War on Terrorism" patients with priority funding from the Defense Department.

He brought his Purple Heart to the clerk to prove he was in Iraq.

Lost paperwork for new uniforms has forced some soldiers to attend their own Purple Heart ceremonies and the official birthday party for the Army in gym clothes, only to be chewed out by superiors.

The Army has tried to re-create the organization of a typical military unit at Walter Reed. Soldiers are assigned to one of two companies while they are outpatients -- the Medical Holding Company (Medhold) for active-duty soldiers and the Medical Holdover Company for Reserve and National Guard soldiers. The companies are broken into platoons that are led by platoon sergeants, the Army equivalent of a parent.

Under normal circumstances, good sergeants know everything about the soldiers under their charge: vices and talents, moods and bad habits, even family stresses.

At Walter Reed, however, outpatients have been drafted to serve as platoon sergeants and have struggled with their responsibilities. Sgt. David Thomas, a 42-year-old amputee with the Tennessee National Guard, said his platoon sergeant couldn't remember his name. "We wondered if he had mental problems," Thomas said. "Sometimes I'd wear my leg, other times I'd take my wheelchair. He would think I was a different person. We thought, 'My God, has this man lost it?' "

Civilian care coordinators and case managers are supposed to track injured soldiers and help them with appointments, but government investigators and soldiers complain that they are poorly trained and often do not understand the system.

One amputee, a senior enlisted man who asked not to be identified because he is back on active duty, said he received orders to report to a base in Germany as he sat drooling in his wheelchair in a haze of medication. "I went to Medhold many times in my wheelchair to fix it, but no one there could help me," he said.

Finally, his wife met an aide to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who got the erroneous paperwork corrected with one phone call. When the aide called with the news, he told the soldier, "They don't even know you exist."

"They didn't know who I was or where I was," the soldier said. "And I was in contact with my platoon sergeant every day."

The lack of accountability weighed on Shannon. He hated the isolation of the younger troops. The Army's failure to account for them each day wore on him. When a 19-year-old soldier down the hall died, Shannon knew he had to take action.

The soldier, Cpl. Jeremy Harper, returned from Iraq with PTSD after seeing three buddies die. He kept his room dark, refused his combat medals and always seemed heavily medicated, said people who knew him. According to his mother, Harper was drunkenly wandering the lobby of the Mologne House on New Year's Eve 2004, looking for a ride home to West Virginia. The next morning he was found dead in his room. An autopsy showed alcohol poisoning, she said.

"I can't understand how they could have let kids under the age of 21 have liquor," said Victoria Harper, crying. "He was supposed to be right there at Walter Reed hospital. . . . I feel that they didn't take care of him or watch him as close as they should have."

The Army posthumously awarded Harper a Bronze Star for his actions in Iraq.

Shannon viewed Harper's death as symptomatic of a larger tragedy -- the Army had broken its covenant with its troops. "Somebody didn't take care of him," he would later say. "It makes me want to cry. "

Shannon and another soldier decided to keep tabs on the brain injury ward. "I'm a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army, and I take care of people," he said. The two soldiers walked the ward every day with a list of names. If a name dropped off the large white board at the nurses' station, Shannon would hound the nurses to check their files and figure out where the soldier had gone.

Sometimes the patients had been transferred to another hospital. If they had been released to one of the residences on post, Shannon and his buddy would pester the front desk managers to make sure the new charges were indeed there. "But two out of 10, when I asked where they were, they'd just say, 'They're gone,' " Shannon said.

Even after Weightman and his commanders instituted new measures to keep better track of soldiers, two young men left post one night in November and died in a high-speed car crash in Virginia. The driver was supposed to be restricted to Walter Reed because he had tested positive for illegal drugs, Weightman said.

Part of the tension at Walter Reed comes from a setting that is both military and medical. Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, the squad leader who lost one leg and the use of his other in a grenade attack, said his recovery was made more difficult by a Marine liaison officer who had never seen combat but dogged him about having his mother in his room on post. The rules allowed her to be there, but the officer said she was taking up valuable bed space.

"When you join the Marine Corps, they tell you, you can forget about your mama. 'You have no mama. We are your mama,' " Groves said. "That training works in combat. It doesn't work when you are wounded."

Frustration at Every Turn

The frustrations of an outpatient's day begin before dawn. On a dark, rain-soaked morning this winter, Sgt. Archie Benware, 53, hobbled over to his National Guard platoon office at Walter Reed. Benware had done two tours in Iraq. His head had been crushed between two 2,100-pound concrete barriers in Ramadi, and now it was dented like a tin can. His legs were stiff from knee surgery. But here he was, trying to take care of business.

At the platoon office, he scanned the white board on the wall. Six soldiers were listed as AWOL. The platoon sergeant was nowhere to be found, leaving several soldiers stranded with their requests.

Benware walked around the corner to arrange a dental appointment -- his teeth were knocked out in the accident. He was told by a case manager that another case worker, not his doctor, would have to approve the procedure.

"Goddamn it, that's unbelievable!" snapped his wife, Barb, who accompanied him because he can no longer remember all of his appointments.

Not as unbelievable as the time he received a manila envelope containing the gynecological report of a young female soldier.

Next came 7 a.m. formation, one way Walter Reed tries to keep track of hundreds of wounded. Formation is also held to maintain some discipline. Soldiers limp to the old Red Cross building in rain, ice and snow. Army regulations say they can't use umbrellas, even here. A triple amputee has mastered the art of putting on his uniform by himself and rolling in just in time. Others are so gorked out on pills that they seem on the verge of nodding off.

"Fall in!" a platoon sergeant shouted at Friday formation. The noisy room of soldiers turned silent.

An Army chaplain opened with a verse from the Bible. "Why are we here?" she asked. She talked about heroes and service to country. "We were injured in many ways."

Someone announced free tickets to hockey games, a Ravens game, a movie screening, a dinner at McCormick and Schmick's, all compliments of local businesses.

Every formation includes a safety briefing. Usually it is a warning about mixing alcohol with meds, or driving too fast, or domestic abuse. "Do not beat your spouse or children. Do not let your spouse or children beat you," a sergeant said, to laughter. This morning's briefing included a warning about black ice, a particular menace to the amputees.

Dress warm, the sergeant said. "I see some guys rolling around in their wheelchairs in 30 degrees in T-shirts."

Soldiers hate formation for its petty condescension. They gutted out a year in the desert, and now they are being treated like children.

"I'm trying to think outside the box here, maybe moving formation to Wagner Gym," the commander said, addressing concerns that formation was too far from soldiers' quarters in the cold weather. "But guess what? Those are nice wood floors. They have to be covered by a tarp. There's a tarp that's got to be rolled out over the wooden floors. Then it has to be cleaned, with 400 soldiers stepping all over it. Then it's got to be rolled up."

"Now, who thinks Wagner Gym is a good idea?"

Explaining this strange world to family members is not easy. At an orientation for new arrivals, a staff sergeant walked them through the idiosyncrasies of Army financing. He said one relative could receive a 15-day advance on the $64 per diem either in cash or as an electronic transfer: "I highly recommend that you take the cash," he said. "There's no guarantee the transfer will get to your bank." The audience yawned.

Actually, he went on, relatives can collect only 80 percent of this advance, which comes to $51.20 a day. "The cashier has no change, so we drop to $50. We give you the rest" -- the $1.20 a day -- "when you leave."

The crowd was anxious, exhausted. A child crawled on the floor. The sergeant plowed on. "You need to figure out how long your loved one is going to be an inpatient," he said, something even the doctors can't accurately predict from day to day. "Because if you sign up for the lodging advance," which is $150 a day, "and they get out the next day, you owe the government the advance back of $150 a day."

A case manager took the floor to remind everyone that soldiers are required to be in uniform most of the time, though some of the wounded are amputees or their legs are pinned together by bulky braces. "We have break-away clothing with Velcro!" she announced with a smile. "Welcome to Walter Reed!"

A Bleak Life in Building 18

"Building 18! There is a rodent infestation issue!" bellowed the commander to his troops one morning at formation. "It doesn't help when you live like a rodent! I can't believe people live like that! I was appalled by some of your rooms!"

Life in Building 18 is the bleakest homecoming for men and women whose government promised them good care in return for their sacrifices.

One case manager was so disgusted, she bought roach bombs for the rooms. Mouse traps are handed out. It doesn't help that soldiers there subsist on carry-out food because the hospital cafeteria is such a hike on cold nights. They make do with microwaves and hot plates.

Army officials say they "started an aggressive campaign to deal with the mice infestation" last October and that the problem is now at a "manageable level." They also say they will "review all outstanding work orders" in the next 30 days.

Soldiers discharged from the psychiatric ward are often assigned to Building 18. Buses and ambulances blare all night. While injured soldiers pull guard duty in the foyer, a broken garage door allows unmonitored entry from the rear. Struggling with schizophrenia, PTSD, paranoid delusional disorder and traumatic brain injury, soldiers feel especially vulnerable in that setting, just outside the post gates, on a street where drug dealers work the corner at night.

"I've been close to mortars. I've held my own pretty good," said Spec. George Romero, 25, who came back from Iraq with a psychological disorder. "But here . . . I think it has affected my ability to get over it . . . dealing with potential threats every day."

After Spec. Jeremy Duncan, 30, got out of the hospital and was assigned to Building 18, he had to navigate across the traffic of Georgia Avenue for appointments. Even after knee surgery, he had to limp back and forth on crutches and in pain. Over time, black mold invaded his room.

But Duncan would rather suffer with the mold than move to another room and share his convalescence in tight quarters with a wounded stranger. "I have mold on the walls, a hole in the shower ceiling, but . . . I don't want someone waking me up coming in."

Wilson, the clinical social worker at Walter Reed, was part of a staff team that recognized Building 18's toll on the wounded. He mapped out a plan and, in September, was given a $30,000 grant from the Commander's Initiative Account for improvements. He ordered some equipment, including a pool table and air hockey table, which have not yet arrived. A Psychiatry Department functionary held up the rest of the money because she feared that buying a lot of recreational equipment close to Christmas would trigger an audit, Wilson said.

In January, Wilson was told that the funds were no longer available and that he would have to submit a new request. "It's absurd," he said. "Seven months of work down the drain. I have nothing to show for this project. It's a great example of what we're up against."

A pool table and two flat-screen TVs were eventually donated from elsewhere.

But Wilson had had enough. Three weeks ago he turned in his resignation. "It's too difficult to get anything done with this broken-down bureaucracy," he said.

At town hall meetings, the soldiers of Building 18 keep pushing commanders to improve conditions. But some things have gotten worse. In December, a contracting dispute held up building repairs.

"I hate it," said Romero, who stays in his room all day. "There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water. . . . I told my platoon sergeant I want to leave. I told the town hall meeting. I talked to the doctors and medical staff. They just said you kind of got to get used to the outside world. . . . My platoon sergeant said, 'Suck it up!' "

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report

Dubya direct quote: Money Trumps Peace

Money Trumps Peace...Sometimes
02/15/2007
Guest ContributionBUZZFLASH
by Cindy Sheehan

It is always painful to watch George stumble his way through press conferences. He can't get through a sentence without at least two-three "uhs," his eyelids flutter up and down in what my daughter Carly calls the "liar's blink." It is painful that a human like that is ostensibly the leader of the free world. There is always a plethora of things that he says, does, or screws up on to write about but this time what caught my attention happened during the Q&A. George was asked if he thought the economic sanctions on Iran would work because so many European nations trade with that country.
He stopped to collect his thoughts with what he thought must've looked like a studied and careful demeanor, but more like someone with a sour tummy, and said: "well, let's put it this way...money trumps peace, sometimes. In other words, commercial interests are very powerful interests throughout the world."
It is always interesting with people who frequently play fast and loose with the truth, such as the liars in BushCo, once in a while if they talk long enough, they tell a truth.

"Money trumps peace" is the fundamental reason for the invasions and subsequent gory and violent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Richard Behan's excellent article "From Iraq to Afghanistan: Connecting the Dots with Oil," he brilliantly follows the history of the oil-money trail in these countries that are 1) rich in oil, and 2) well placed for the transportation and delivery of oil.
Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan, or their leaders or governments had anything to do with 9-11, but they were in the way of oil and other industries that profit from oil, so they had to go. Money trumped peace in those countries and they are destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghanis, and Americans have been slaughtered because they were blocking American imperialistic profiteering.

"Money trumps peace" is the underlying reason for all wars as two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner and highly decorated Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote in his reflective, prophetic work, "War is a Racket":
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many. Out of war, a few people make huge fortunes.

During the short booklet that every prospective parent, current parent, and every teen should read thoroughly and often, he keeps referring to World War I as the "World War" because he was writing directly after the "Great War" -- the "war to end all wars." There was no World War II...yet.
General Butler was no unwashed, hippie peace-nik. He was a warrior who, as often times happens when men face the horrors of war ("War is hell" -- General Sherman), saw the futility of killing as a diplomatic tool that kills and maims our young people for "the benefit of the very few."

"Money trumps peace" should be the rallying call of all the Democrats and Republicans who are exploiting our tired and wounded soldiers in the field to justify handing BushCo more money to complete his mission of totally decimating the Middle East for the oil companies, construction contractors, and defense industries.
How many times have we heard: "We have to vote for the emergency funding for the troops."
That money is not for the troops, never has been for the troops, and the troops in the field wouldn't need any support if they used the money that was already in the pipeline to bring our soldiers and Marines home from the killing deserts.

I talked to a young lady at a university in Minnesota whose good friend was a Marine in Iraq who just got home and one of the only things that he shared with her was that he had to eat ants. If you don't believe me, just ask Mr. "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want." Our troops have never been supported in this monstrous mistake of a war and they have never received the tools they need to survive, let alone be successful in their so-called mission.

The money goes to one thousand dollar a day mercenaries -- not our two thousand dollar a month grunts.

"Money trumps peace" when while asking for tens of billions of more dollars for war, George is balancing the budget off of the backs of vets who have served this country honorably by cutting back on VA benefits.

Many times I am asked: "What would you say to Bush if you were to meet with him now?" I think my first question would be: "How the hell do you look at yourself in the mirror?"
How dare he?

"Money trumps peace" is one of the reasons why true peace won't be possible when our country is misgoverned by people who are beholden to and entrenched in the military industrial complex. K-Street palm greasers have an easier passage in the Halls of Congress than do activists with petitions, or a Gold Star Mother wearing a "protest shirt" do.

"Money trumps peace" is the problem when some leaders of Congress, who should be working day and night to bring our troops home to save Iraq and the lives and souls of our brave soldiers and Marines, are out raising money for presidential campaigns that are still a year away.
Sometime between now and the first primaries in 2008, we will be holding vigils for the 4,000th troop killed in Iraq and thousands of Iraqi families will be overcome with grief and pain while the talking head shows are already consumed by election fever.

"Money will always trump peace" unless BushCo are impeached, removed from office, and imprisoned for leading our military like lambs to the slaughter to die for Raytheon, Halliburton, and Blackwater Security.

"Money will always trump peace" until we the people demand that our tax dollars remain in our communities, schools, and families and not directly funneled from the Treasury Department to the Pentagon, so that our children do not have to offer themselves up as these human sacrificial lambs.

Peace can and should trump money, but only if we are willing to stand up and challenge the continuing and immoral perception that "Money trumps peace."

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan who was killed in Bush's war of terror on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families for Peace and the Camp Casey Peace Institute.
She is the author of three books, the most recent is: Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism.

a musical interlude

For all my Patrio-Christo-Fascist friends who think there is Somethin' Basically Wrong with Muslims, especially the camel jockey ragheads sittin' on OUR OILfields, and who along the same Reptilian lines think a budget that feeds Lockheed-martin and Caci and Blackwater and Halliburton and Bechtel, but which takes food and medical care out of the hands of children in the State of Michigan is "compassionate" conservatism... this vid is for you.