Month: May 2008

If my dad were alive, I know he’d be hanging the flag in front of our house, where it would stay for the remainder of the weekend. A veteran of two wars, Korea and Vietnam, my father was fiercely patriotic. Yet, displaying the flag on Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day was as much a show of loyalty and respect for those he served with, and — I think — an acknowledgment of that they each carried home a part of those wars inside of them. I learned early on that my father carried his experiences in Vietnam and Korea with home him.

One of the earliest rules I remember learning as a child was how to wake dad up from a nap. Don’t touch him or shake him, I was told. He might be dreaming about being back in Vietnam, or the defensive reflex required to survive there might kick in and the reaction might be violent. So, when it was time to wake him up, we would stand at the door and call to him until he responded, even well into my high school years. Looking back, in think it was a way of not releasing the war inside — the war he carried with him — into our home.

I never knew what my father experienced in Vietnam, or what he re-experienced sometimes when he closed his eyes to sleep. We never talked about it. Even when I wrote a one act play about Vietnam for a high school literary competition. Two of my classmates and I interviewed Vietnam veterans we knew, and placed classified ads to reach more veterans willing to share their experiences. I was surprised by how many were willing, even eager, to talk to three high school boys about what they’d experienced.

But I never interviewed my dad. I was in charge of distilling the interviews into an initial script of monologues that my classmates and I would perform, after they offered their input and edits. But I don’t remember my dad ever reading the script. We performed the play at our county literary competition, and won the chance to perform it at the state competition. But I don’t remember my dad ever seeing the play, or even talking to him about it.

Years later, when my parents came to visit me in Washington, D.C., I took my dad to the Korean and Vietnam war memorials. I watched him walk the length of the Vietnam memorial, stopping at the names of the men he’d known. I witness his silent tears at each stop. Yet, we never talked about his experience. To this day I don’t know what he saw, or what he brought home from those wars.

I think that’s because, though he’d brought home his experiences from the war, he wanted to keep the war — the war inside — out of his home.

Though he passed away just over two years ago, I thought of my dad, and all he kept inside of him when I read about two of the most recent Iraqi veterans to commit suicide. Recruiter Nils Aaron Andersson, who suffered PTSD, shot himself at two o’clock in the morning, on the top floor of a Houston parking garage. Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, who wrote about his PTSD experience, fatally shot his brother and then himself after a cross-state car chase.

News stories about their suicides were published the same week news broke that of a Veterans Administration employee’s email suggesting that veterans with PTSD be diagnosed with disorders that carry a lower disability payment.

An internal e-mail message written by a Veterans Affairs Department employee suggested that the agency avoid giving a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder for veterans and instead consider a diagnosis that might result in a lower disability payment.

The message, dated March 20 and titled “Suggestion,” said: “Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that we refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder, R/O PTSD.” R/O stands for “rule out.”

“Additionally,” it said, “we really don’t or have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD.”

News of their suicides — Andersson was one of 16 recruiters to take their own lives since 2000 — came one week before documents released by the VA gave further evidence of the agency’s failure to address veterans’ mental health needs.

New VA documents obtained exclusively by VCS using the Freedom of Information Act indicate the VA is only paying disability benefits for PTSD to 33,247 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, although 67,717 have been diagnosed with PTSD. According to Sullivan, VCS is calling for an investigation into this apparent discrepancy.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in September 2007 stated that the VA’s "lack of early identification techniques" led to "inconsistent diagnosis and treatment" of PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. According to the GAO, early diagnosis is essential in preventing PTSD’s consequences – which could be deadly.

It’s bad enough that we sent men and women overseas to fight a war founded disinformation, in insufficient numbers, and with inadequate equipment. But, when they come home with deep psychological wounds from that war, and we give them less than the treatment they need, Memorial Day celebrations and speeches ring hollow.

Let’s all pay lip service to Support Our Troops. But if we want to be honest, we should edit those yellow-ribbon bumper stickers to say Support Our Troops — As Long As It Doesn’t Cost Anything.

Let’s acknowledge that this new generation of soldiers and Marines is amazingly motivated and talented. They’re expected to be good killers, good diplomats and ambassadors of American goodwill who operate under impossibly complex rules of engagement in impossibly dangerous and deadly environments.

But if they come home wounded, their brains rattled by the huge IEDs of the new way of war, and if they suffer the horrors of PTSD nightmares and flashbacks, let’s dump them on the streets with the least amount of help and benefits possible, as cheaply as possible.

For sure we don’t want to improve their chances, better their future prospects, by offering them the same college benefits we gave their grandfathers six decades ago. God help us if they all get college degrees and figure out what we’ve done to them.

If my father were alive this Memorial Day, he would still display the flag. But not without anger, if he knew how today’s veterans are abandoned to fight the war inside — the same one he fought when he came home — on their own.

How does this make you feel?

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) is seen in a video that has surfaced on the Web saying that Democrats “sort of stretched the facts” in the 2006 elections about their ability to end the Iraq war.

In a video, posted to YouTube on Thursday, Kanjorski reflects on the Democrats’ approach to the war in 2006 and said they pushed the rhetoric “as far as we can to the end of the fleet — didn’t say it, but we implied it — that if we won the congressional elections, we could stop the war.

“Now, anybody who’s a good student of government would know it wasn’t true,” he said. “But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress — we sort of stretched the facts.”

The video was dated Aug. 28, 2007, by the person who posted it. The remarks are not placed in a larger context.

Refreshing candor or maddening duplicity?

When your number one theme in a campaign is ‘change’, you don’t nominate someone to be your running mate from a previous administration. That is about as basic as anything can get. That doesn’t mean that Barack Obama should ignore the high level of support that Hillary Clinton has had in this nominating process. But it does mean that, contrary to what Bill Clinton thinks, Hillary has not earned a meeting to discuss joining the ticket. It’s not a matter of ‘earning’ a meeting, it’s a matter of the whole topic being a non-starter. Obama ran on sidelining lobbyists and changing the way Washington works. He can no more have Clinton on his ticket than he can have Dick Cheney. It would destroy the rationale for his candidacy. It has been a close contest, but the change candidate prevailed, and he needs a running mate that fits in thematically with his message.

The problem for the Clintons is that their defeat leaves them sidelined from power and with no obvious avenues for regaining it. Perhaps that is why they are latched on like a pit bull to the calf-meat of the Democratic Party. But no one gets a pit bull off their leg by offering them a better deal. You take a pool cue to their skull and whack them until they let go. There is no other way.

The problem is not so much dispatching the pit bulls, but doing so in such a way as to not alienate their supporters. Yet, once we start looking at this, it becomes obvious that the pit bulls do not care about their supporters. That’s why this looks so ridiculous:

The growing discussion about a ticket of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton is largely being fueled by Clinton supporters, although it is a suggestion that Obama supporters do not dismiss…Prominent supporters of Mrs. Clinton also are sure to be included, like Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio.

Does anyone think the Clintons would feel better about how things turned out if Evan Bayh or Ted Strickland are on the ticket? For that matter, do any of Clinton’s core supporters (other than corporate interests) give a crap whether Bayh or Strickland are on the ticket? No.

For the Clintons and their core supporters this has been about two things: the Clintons, and the historic possibility of a woman as president. It does nothing for those two goals to nominate a man not named Clinton to be on the ticket.

What we’re currently dealing with is a form of blackmail, where the Clintons have the ability to do severe damage to Obama’s electoral chances by delegitimizing his victory. He has no incentive to reward their bad behavior but he does have an incentive to get them to stop their bad behavior. So, what should he give them?

They don’t want the vee-pee slot for one of their allies. They can’t have the vee-pee slot for themselves. The Senate will never give her power now that most of them have endorsed Obama and are blood enemies of the Clinton family. And she’s proven herself temperamentally unfit for the Supreme Court or, really, any position of real responsibility. Or, perhaps this last bit is too harsh. Maybe she will calm down in time and return to acting like someone with an ounce of integrity. We can hope. Nonetheless, it is not obvious how Obama can responsibly appease the Clinton family. And, yet, he needs to come up with something.

Maybe we should make a list of things that make you stupid. Here’s a start: cocaine.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on May 21 that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has proposed to speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi that “a naval blockade be imposed on Iran as one of several ways to pressure Iran into stopping its uranium enrichment program.”

Hmm.  By whom did Olmert propose this naval blockade be imposed, I wonder?  Israel’s navy could no sooner get to the Persian Gulf than Iran’s navy could charge up the Red Sea to assault the Israeli naval base at Haifa.  Both maritime forces would sink of natural causes before they got anywhere close to each other.  

The concept of this story is laughable enough, but the way the once respectable Haaretz told it is enough to make you spit your martini across the room.  
Bad Examples

Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times set the brave new world standard for government toadying journalism when they wrote the infamous Nigergate article in September 2002.  The piece supported the claims of Dick Cheney’s cabal that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking nuclear weapons by citing anonymous “officials” an astounding 30 times.  In some passages, they went so far as to indirectly quote what unreliable anonymous third parties told unnamed officials (Iraqi defectors who once worked for the nuclear weapons establishment have told American officials that…), which amounts to triple secret hearsay.

Haaretz managed to outdo Miller and Gordon in their “Let’s you and them fight” piece.

Right after it implied that Olmert and Pelosi had agreed between the two of them on the best way to start World War III, the piece said that the White House “denied a published report that U.S. President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term in January.”  It quickly added, though, that the Bush administration “is said not to have ruled out entirely the possibility of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

The “published report” was “A story in the Jerusalem Post,” and the possibly of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was said by “an unidentified official as claiming that a `senior member’ of Bush’s entourage to Israel last week made the statement about attacking Iran in a closed meeting.”

So we’ve got the so-called moderate Israeli paper quoting the Israeli neocon/likudnik rag (the 2003 Jerusalem Post Man of the Year was Paul Wolfowitz) paraphrasing what faceless Thing A claimed faceless Thing B said about attacking Iran in a meeting that, for all we know, was so closed that no one was at it except Thing A and Thing B.  You have to wonder why Thing B didn’t allow himself to be anonymously paraphrased directly.  Maybe he’s just shy, huh?

It gets better.  The person at the White House who said the neocon/likudnik rag article about what Thing A said that Thing B said was “not worth the paper it’s written on” was White House press secretary Dana Perino.  (Dana Perino said the administration prefers to deal with Iran through diplomatic means, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more!)

AND… “Israelis who spoke to Bush and his entourage while they were in Israel last week said they had the impression that the military option `is on the table,’ and that the president felt a sense of deep obligation to overcome the Iranian threat.”

What Israelis who spoke to Bush?  Jerusalem school kids?  Hookers from Haifa? What did Bush do or say that gave them the impression that the military option is on the table and made them feel a deep sense of the deep sense of obligation Bush feels?

Bad Company

The schwerpunkt of the Haaretz piece, though, is its characterization of the meeting between Olmert and Pelosi in Israel. “The present economic sanctions on Iran have exhausted themselves,” Haaretz said Olmert told Pelosi.  I guess we can take Olmert’s word for that.  He’s been right about everything so far, especially that woebegone war he got his army in with Hezbollah that Dick Cheney goaded him into.  

Haaretz also said that Olmert told Pelosi “there was a great deal of space between the present sanctions and military action” and that, as Haaretz paraphrased, “Aggressive action could be taken that was not violent.”  I’d guess that aggressive action that isn’t violent would fall under young Mr. Bush’s notion of “appeasement.”  Maybe that’s why Olmert told Pelosi about it instead of Bush.  

Olmert proposed two kinds of non-violent aggressive action to “isolate the Iranian regime.”  First is the naval blockade, which Olmert admitted would have to be performed by the U.S. fleet.  For the record, a naval blockade is not a non-violent measure.  It is an act of war that denies the target nation its inalienable right to access international waters.  A blockade only works if when it comes time to shoot, you shoot.  If the time to shoot comes and you don’t shoot, you’ll spend years and maybe decades squeezing the egg out of your nose pores.  

The other non-violent measure Olmert wants according to Haaretz is “limitations on Iranian aircraft.” “Iranian businesspeople who would not be able to land anywhere in the world would pressure the regime,” Olmert said.

There are only two sure ways to keep business air travelers from reaching their destinations: shoot them down or bomb them before they get on the airplane.

The real objective of the article, though, was to frame Olmert’s crack talk as something he “told Pelosi,” as if they were carrying on an intimate conversation even though, if you read the story closely enough, there were at least a dozen if not scores of other people in the room at the time.  The bottom line message is that if the U.S. goes along with Olmert’s bull goose Iran strategy, it was Nancy Pelosi who agreed to it, not Dick Cheney.  And if America ignores Olmert’s wishes and something bad happens to Israel, it’s Pelosi’s fault, not Olmert’s.

Either way, now that Olmert has touched Pelosi in a public forum, it’s just a matter of time before her nose and fingers fall off.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword .  Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) is on sale now.

“Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served.” — Publishers Weekly

“A remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight.” — Booklist

View the trailer here.

This is what it’s like to be in a position of healthy finances and a strong party identity:  screwing with the other side regarding their intra-party battles.

Democrats are stirring it up in the raging family feud of a GOP primary in South Jersey’s Third Congressional District.

The state Democratic Committee financed a brochure, which began arriving in Republican households in Burlington County yesterday. It attacks candidate Chris Myers of Medford, sending a signal that Democrats are picking a preferred opponent for the fall – Ocean County Freeholder Jack Kelly.

Rather than sitting back in our foxholes, patiently waiting for the inevitable attacks to be lobbed our way, we’re able to take the fight and the PR battle to them.
Yes, indeed, more like this, please:

While Democrats readily took credit for the attack piece, spokesman Rich McGrath said Myers “has such a failed record, we acted to communicate just some of those facts with the voters because they have a right to know.“

Happy to be here…just wanna help the team.

Democrats are playing hard for this seat. Their candidate, state Sen. John Adler (D., Camden), has raised over $1 million for his race and has no primary opponent in the contest to succeed retiring Congressman Jim Saxton, a Republican.

Adler took the early support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which believes that the demographics have changed enough in this traditionally Republican district that Adler can win.

As Republicans have been wrangling, Adler has been quietly trying to build up himself among voters. The district includes his home of Cherry Hill and runs through Burlington and Ocean Counties.

Yes, that’s right Rich.  “The voters…have a right to know” these guys are battling over who can hate brown people harder, too:

So far in this race, Myers and Kelly agree on most issues and have attacked each other’s character.

On the one issue they do disagree on – building a fence between the United States and Mexico – Kelly found a way to attack Myers’ character.

Kelly wants to build the fence. Myers says because illegal immigrants will find a way under or around the fence, there should be a high-tech monitoring system to keep an eye on the border.

Kelly says Myers is really trying to favor his employer, Lockheed Martin, which developed a monitoring system. Myers flatly denied that and adds that Boeing Co. – and not Lockheed Martin – got the monitoring system contract.

To push the immigration issue even further, Kelly announced yesterday that his hard line on illegal immigration earned him the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, founder of the sometimes controversial civilian border patrol group called the Minuteman Project.

Sounds like it’s already time for another mailer!

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing

click to enlarge

As some of you may know, I founded Books For Soldiers, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that sends books, DVDs and other care package items to any US Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine – for free of course.

Some of those books are college text books. Some soldiers want to work on their college education while deployed to the Middle East but some of them can’t get access to their education benefits while deployed. So BFS steps up and donates the textbooks for their classes.

We have been doing this for five years now and it is a national disgrace that charities are needed to supply college materials to our men and women in uniform. We have also picked up the slack in other areas like body armor, land mine resistance boots (thanks Wellco) and even tube socks.

Here is how it works.

Troops can go to BooksForSoldiers.com and fill out the form and one of our volunteers will see if they have the book on their shelf and they will then pack it up and ship it off to the soldier.

I got the idea back during the first Gulf war when friends of mine from college were sent off to Saudi Arabia. After the 4 day war, most were stuck in the desert for months on end with nothing to do. I rounded up all my sci-fi books that were collecting dust and then raided my civilian friend’s book collections and sent them to an Army hospital in Riyadh where my military pals were stationed. They then handed out the books to the soldiers on the base. I was receiving letters from strangers a year later, thanking me for the books. They were a good break from the boredom.

When the War On Terror started, I figured our troops would be home in a matter of weeks after Baghdad fell. I erroneously thought the Pentagon had an exit strategy and Books For Soldiers would be a nice six week project then on to something else. I knew I had to reach more people than I did during the first Gulf War – I just couldn’t do it all myself. So I put together a self-serve website and BFS was born.

Due to the cluster fuck now known as Iraq, BFS celebrated our 5th year anniversary this past Spring.

The economy has been rough this year for charities. Local food banks are reducing services, women’s shelters are closing – those 1000 Points Of Light that Bush Sr. proudly yapped about are being hit hard by the crushing economy. Financial contributions to BFS this year disappeared almost completely. I think the reason is partially because of the economy and the other part is the lack of MSM coverage of the war in Iraq. I can track rises and falls of traffic on BFS directly to the amount of coverage the war gets. When the statue of Saddam fell, traffic started to tank. By the next day we lost 90% of out traffic and it took almost a year to build back up to the initial level.

Starting at the first of this year, BFS started a robust fundraising campaign here in North Carolina. We contacted small companies and some large companies you probably have heard of. To date, we have received a stack of letters that begin with “we deeply regret not being able to donate this year.” From our corporate donation campaign we have received a tad under thirty dollars from a philanthropy grants group in Winston Salem, NC. That was it, nothing else.

The BFS Board of Directors have discussed this problem for some time and have decided to have another go at fundraising. The Board set a goal of $70,000 to raise by November 1st of this year. If that amount is not raised, the site will close on December 31st, 2008.

If we cannot make the fundraising target, the Board will seek to sell the site to another qualified 501(c)(3) or close. We would also stop accepting new books requests from soldiers on December 1st, 2008.

Below are some ways of how you can help

1. Office party fundraiser – Coordinate a “Save BFS Day” at work and urge, beg, cajole your co-workers into coughing up something for BFS.
2. Have your company cough up some cash. We will send your company a formal donation request, just send us the company name, contact name and address and we will get it out right away. Send these requests to me personally (storm@booksforsoldiers.com).
3. Have your place of worship pass the plate (hat, kippah, whatever) for BFS. Consult with your church’s leader about holding a “Save BFS Offering” one day this month. Checks should be made out to “Books For Soldiers.” If they have any questions or concerns, please contact me directly to set up a call.
4. Visit our donation page and give what you can.

http://booksforsoldiers.com/donate.php

or by check

Books For Soldiers
2008 Fund Drive
353 Jonestown Rd #123
Winston Salem, NC 27104

Yesterday, my sister called me. Why? To let me know she was okay, despite the giant “mile wide” tornado that missed her house in Northern Colorado by about a mile or two. What tornado?!! I asked. Well she was talking about this one:

Her power was out all day, and when it came back on she called to let me know she was all right, not knowing that I was completely unaware of her plight. The tornado was barely covered in the national news (a better NBC video of the tornado can be seen here), but it could have killed my sister or destroyed her home had it taken a slightly different path. She got lucky.

(cont.)
The aftermath:

Because of the proximity of the Rocky Mountains tornadoes along the front range of Colorado and Wyoming are rare events. And I’ve never before heard of any tornado the size of the one that just missed my sister’s house. Not in Colorado, anyway. Not this violent with winds up to 200 mph, and not this large. And it was just one of a series of tornadoes that struck the area.

Here is a video of a tornado in Cheyenne, Wyoming that was spawned by the same storm:

Tornadoes and violent storms also hit Southern California yesterday, as well:

A tornado flipped a big-rig truck, derailed a freight train and clogged a major interstate for several miles Thursday as a wild spring thunderstorm hopscotched across Southern California dumping hail, rain and snow.

The most severe damage was reported in Riverside County, where dark, towering funnel clouds spun across the communities east and west of the 215 Freeway corridor. In Orange County, walls of water, mud and debris — some 8 feet high — battered eastern canyons that had burned in last year’s wildfires, leaving behind a muddy mess but little major damage and no injuries.

It has been a particularly violent tornado season so far this year, one that some are calling unprecedented in its scope.

There were 368 documented U.S. tornadoes in January and February of this year. The previous record for that two month span? 243, in 1999.

February 2008’s 232 tornadoes was also a record.

And that was only for the first two months of the year. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tie any of these specific weather events directly to the phenomenon of global warming, but one of the predictions that most climate change models make as the result of increased warming of the planet is an increase in the number of severe storms during all seasons of the year.

NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth’s climate warms.

… The model developed at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies by researchers Tony Del Genio, Mao-Sung Yao, and Jeff Jonas is the first to successfully simulate the observed difference in strength between land and ocean storms and is the first to estimate how the strength will change in a warming climate, including “severe thunderstorms” that also occur with significant wind shear and produce damaging winds at the ground. …

Maybe its time to start taking the scientists who study global climate change seriously. Past time, even. My sister is alive and well today, but many other people are not. And we are a developed country with sophisticated warning technologies in place. In parts of the world like Myanmar, where such warning systems are not in place, the effects of one severe storm (in this case a cyclone) killed tens of thousands of people earlier this month.

This time the effects of severe weather hit very close to home for me. Next time, it might be your turn. And by the way, when you fool with Mother Nature, as we have been doing by pumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each and every year, she doesn’t distinguish between those who accept the reality of global warming and those who willfully choose to deny it. The pain and suffering which will result from the massive changes we as human beings are making to our planet’s climate will know no distinctions, based on political affiliation, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or faith in any particular God.

Maybe someone ought to tell our political leaders about this. Because while they fiddle around with their oppo research, smear attacks and all the other trivial and typically ridiculous campaign crapola that will be forgotten by most of us in a few years, the world is burning. And none of them is seriously trying to put out the fire.