Update: NPR is reporting that the commander of Walter Reed, presumably Major General George W. Weightman, has been replaced.  He is late to the show.  The current Army surgeon general, Lieutenant General Kevin C. Kiley, was the commander during most of the current Gulf War.  He was in charge when the deterioration started.

Anne Hull and Dana Priest of the Washington Post are not going to let the brass bury the problem: Top officials knew of neglect at Walter Reed.

They detail that the complaints go back years and were coming from soldiers, their families, people in Congress, and medical professionals. There was nothing surprising about what was going on, beyond the fact that it was allowed to continue.

The military is now attempting to cut off sources from the media, but that isn’t going to work. GIs complain; it’s grafted onto your soul in basic training. They will complain to each other over small things, but this is affecting their lives in a very basic way, so they are going to complain to the media.

The Army Times was reporting on the personnel changes and the order not to talk to the media almost as soon as it was sent out from headquarters. That was an incredibly stupid idea that is going to cost someone. Everyone in the chain of command can forget about future promotions, because there is no way the Senate will confirm them, just ask the guys at the infamous Tailhook convention.

I would say that the reporters know they have a great story, and they are not going to forget about it. I would bet that they have an archive of information that is going to be mined for a while.

The only way this is going to go away is if the Army actually fixes the problem.

Via skippy the bush kangaroo, Cap’n Dyke reports on a squirrel highjacking an airplane.

They are attempting to gain an air force!

Hmm?

First of all, I was hoping to say “Saint Bridget was taking the Eucharist a bit too far, and far too literally, Jams,” but instead of a CAPTCHA image, Blogger comments had the text, “Visual verification,” indicating their image database was down and not supplying the image. The sound version didn’t seem to work either.

The thing is, without the image or sound [you click on the handicapped symbol for the audio form] you really don’t have any idea what to put into the box. I understand why people do this, as I have been dumping hundred of spam comments a day recently, but if the database is down, so are the comments.

Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (Florida-20) is “good people”. Even though she represented the other end of Florida in the Florida House and Senate, and now the US Congress, I’ve corresponded with her on several issues that really annoyed me, and she responded. She was under no obligation, as I couldn’t vote for her, but she is interested in government, her degrees are in political science.

She doesn’t sound like a Floridian because she was born in Queens, and raised on Long Island, but she has lived in Florida since she started college at the University of Florida.

She has opinions, and you are kidding yourself if you think she’s going to alter them. She was one of the most vocal opponents of the special law in the Terri Schiavo case, and earlier opposed the Republican plan for the state legislature to create its own slate of presidential electors during the Florida 2000 election.

John Amato at wrote about her today, as did Matt Stoller at MyDD.

If she decides to run for the Senate, she has my vote and support. While she’s barely into her forties, she has paid her dues. She has also paid other people’s dues as she was the third highest money raiser among Democrats in Congress, and she spread it around.

Learn more at Congresspedia and/or Wikipedia.

Via All Hat and No Cattle, in a piece in The Guardian from Terence Hunt, AP White House correspondent, the absurdity of “unnamed sourcing”: Mystery Official Briefs Press on Cheney.

Who knew pronouns were a bunch of al Qaeda terrorists.