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In their effort to pressure Congress, the administration is planting stories. Stars and Stripes runs a story showing the DoD is willing to terrorize the troops:

The Air Force said Wednesday [04/18/07] that it might not be able to pay its airmen in the coming months if the Pentagon is forced to shift some $800 million to the Army to fund the war in Iraq.

They are talking about shift a total of $1.6 billion to cover about two months in Iraq. If you assume that the Army is kicking in another $1.6 billion from its budget, it looks like they can operate in Iraq for under $2 billion a month, but they have asked for over $8 billion a month in funding. What in hell is going on? What are the real numbers? Where is all this money going?

So on the day that the Shrubbery’s popularity drops to 28%, the White House spokeshamster, Dana Perino, tells reporters the Senate had passed “defeatist legislation” (House [218-208] & Senate [51-46]). The “defeatist legislation” authorizes $100 billion for the Shrubbery’s elective war in Iraq as well as the real war in Afghanistan.

In a masterful stroke, Congress is going to present the bill to pResident “Sub-30%” on the fourth anniversary of Mission Accomplished.

Pardon me while I exit stage left to laugh manically for a while. [Unfortunately Maru is on vacation. She will love this.]

I’ve been contacted by a media person who is looking for information about the treatment conditions at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso or Fort Bliss. It needs to be direct information, not hearsay, the guy is looking for facts and hasn’t been having any luck trying to talk to the Army.

If you know anything, or know someone who has a direct connection, I can send you the contact information.

If the media wants to do its job, help them.

I don’t want him subjected to a “flame war” or buried with “hate mail,” or I’d post the information directly.

From Dr. Cole at Informed Comment – Iraq Casualty Numbers Doctored:

Since the Bush administration doesn’t actually have any good news on Iraq, they are just making it up. It confirms your worst suspicions. They haven’t been counting victims of car bombings when they say that violence is down in Iraq! Bush administration spokesmen and officials are just saying that fewer bodies are found in the streets, victims of death squads. But the number of victims of car bombing has actually increased in this period.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is withholding statistics on Iraqi casualties from the United Nations.

It is official: The real parts of the Iraq War are being treated as imaginary, and the imaginary parts are being treated as though they are real.

When I heard “administration officials” claiming that sectarian violence was down, I wondered what planet they were on. They have been performing some creative “surgery” on the facts to save Miss Laura from the brutal reality.

In the real world Riverbend of Baghdad Burning is preparing to leave Iraq. Things have deteriorated to the point that her family has decided to abandon their home and history.

Oh, and a cell phone.

CNN reports U.S. prison chief in Iraq charged with being “too friendly,” having tacky taste in viewing material, using White House procedures for dealing with classified, bad money management skills, and succumbing to “feminine wiles” while not being a Republan elected official [or something like that].

A lot of blogs have noted ESPN’s Pat Tillman article. Most posts, like Vastleft’s Onward, Christianist soldiers have concentrated on the interview with Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, the Ranger regiment executive officer in Afghanistan who conducted the first official Army investigation into Tillman’s death.

The reaction has been to Kauzlarich’s attitude toward atheists, and atheists have a right to be upset that this man that the taxpayers support obviously lets his religious views intrude in his decision making. The military officially frowns on politics or religion being injected into command decisions, but under the Shrubbery those rules have been sparsely enforced.

Before reading the part of the article that is below the fold, I would like to point out what Kauzlarich is implying about Christians. If you accept his view, Christians are a bunch of sheep who never question authority and wouldn’t be upset that the government lied about the manner in which their child/spouse/sibling/friend died. In Kauzlarich’s mind, no Christian would care, because their loved one was with Jesus.

The man is talking like Christianity is a death cult. Do we really want to trust our troops to a man who thinks dying is better than living?

[Read more →]

From Joel Roberts at The Skinny a brief piece, Karl Rove Under The Microscope, about the Office of Special Counsel looking in to the firing of the US Attorneys.

Sorry, but the cap will be on the eyepiece of the microscope. CREW has their opinion of the head of OSC, Scott Bloch, and his record of nonfeasance when it involves protecting government employees, the reason for the existence of the office.

Instead of using Regents University grads to fill all the positions, OSC gets its people from the Ave Maria School of Law, which achieved full accreditation in 2005.

Can you say “stalling to run out the clock”? I thought you could. Will the White House say, “can’t comment on current investigations”? Of course they will.

When I went to the post office last week the flag was at half staff. We have a lot of flags flying down here, but that was the only one at half-staff, so I wondered who had died. I looked in Google and discovered that the Shrubbery had ordered flags at Federal facilities lowered to half-staff until this past Saturday to honor the people who died at Virginia Tech.

I know he jumped on the tragedy immediately, after all this was a disaster that wasn’t his fault, a rare thing indeed, but then I had another thought – this wasn’t really a national tragedy. This was a tragedy in Virginia, not the nation. This didn’t involve Federal employees or a Federal facility. Why was the Federal government intruding?

Then I had another thought, but it is better expressed by a member of the armed forces serving in Afghanistan – Soldier: Why half-staff for Va. Tech, not troops?

Why, indeed? Members of the nation’s military killed on active duty in combat ordered by the Federal government, but that government avoids honoring them in any way. Their bodies are shipped back to the US in the dead of night, and no pictures of the flag draped coffins are permitted, but there is the “Commander in Chief” of the US military flying in for a memorial service for people who were murdered on a college campus, and then he orders the the flags at half-staff, even at military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don’t guess the 9 members of the military killed in a single incident in Iraq today are worth the trouble of showing a little respect. This is how he supports the troops.

Reading the ignorant attacks on atheists over memorials at Virginia Tech reminded me of the old comment about foxholes. If you check the Veterans Administration listing of Available Emblems of Belief for Placement on Government Headstones and Markers you will see the atheist “atom” at number 16 and the Humanist “H” at number 32. No atheists in foxholes – hell, that’s where a lot of them are created.

As Melissa noted Wicca is now on the list at number 37. Pretty quick work for the VA.

There is no single answer for grief, everyone deals with in their own way, and no one really knows how anyone else feels, even if they experience the same type of loss. The best you can do is give people the support and space they need to deal with it. If they want to talk, listen. If they don’t, respect their wishes. Give them time, but don’t lose touch.

Via ‘Noz a clear case of recycling while brown.

Keep in mind that ROTC is “Reserve Officer Training Corps.”

By now everyone should have heard that chocolate is actually good for you, in moderation. Both dark chocolate and milk chocolate have health benefits.

Now we learn that the strawberry daiquiri is a health food. Apparently alcohol increases the natural benefits of berries, but in moderation.

There are reports that one of the F/A-18s of the Blue Angels has crashed during an air show in South Carolina. The local coroner has said that the pilot died in the crash.

The Blue Angels are stationed at NAS Pensacola, 35 miles West of me.

Culture Ghost wonders about this decision regarding Limbo by the Catholic Church, and most people just missed it. If you have never discussed the abortion issue in a group that included pro-Choice Catholics, you might not understand the importance of this: the Church leaders are plugging a major vulnerability in their justification for their stance on abortion.

Limbo has been a very hurtful thing for centuries for the parents of children who died before baptism. The Church held they were not going to Heaven because they had not been cleansed of their “original sin,” therefore they could not be buried in consecrated ground nor have the last rites performed. Such children were consigned to Limbo.

Many convents got around this policy by creating a “garden of innocents” on their grounds, which lead to major misunderstandings when convents were sold and the remains of multiple newborns were found buried on the premises during construction work. Sympathetic priests often “overlooked the technicalities” and baptisms were given to “unusually well behaved newborns.”

The fact remained that the Church was saying you were not a member until you had been baptized, but you were a human being at conception. The question was simple, if the unborn were valued, why weren’t they eligible for the Sacraments until after they were born and had been baptized. If they were children of G-d, why did G-d’s Church reject them?

Couples have left the Church over this issue, so it isn’t as insignificant as it seems to outsiders. The Church needed to “fix” this gap in its argument, and they are doing it. I hope they will forgive those of us who believe this has more to do with politics than theology.

Via Scorpio at Eccentricity I located Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Moderation Certificate Program at Making Light.