7/25/2007: "Guard's Border Mission to be Halved" -- The number of National Guard troops along the Arizona-Mexico border will be trimmed in half by the end of next month. As the presidentially mandated Operation Jumpstart mission begins its second year in support of the U.S. Border Patrol, the number of troops is being reduced as planned. It will be trimmed from 6,000 to 3,000 nationally and from 2,400 to 1,200 in Arizona, said National Guard Capt. Kristine Munn. The pullout began July 1 and is scheduled to be completed by Sept. 1.

The story is going to be buried (U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ’05), and our country will once again be left stupefied, wondering "what happened", as the Pulitzer Prize winning book Ghost Wars by Steve Coll (BUY IT!) will be followed up with a much needed sequel, leaving me and apparently the CIA and US Army Special Forces wondering what blows up next.  It is a replay of the late 1990s in the Afghan-Kush region, only instead of the political implications of a blow job and how a failed raid against al Qaeda would "play" for the administration in charge back then, it is the political implications of already having embarked on a remarkably naive clusterfuck of historic precedence in Iraq, and because the childish codgers who brought us that one were looking to make up for it by doing the same exact thing in Iran as soon as they could,

(deadissue) This post is on behalf of a soldier in Iraq, but also to provide the readers here at KOS a close-up on what is going on with some soldiers who are currently enlisted.  There are support networks in place for these people, but having one reach out prior to going AWOL or suffering from a breakdown is rare for the most part.  They're going to put the screws to this soldier, regardless of how successful the community's advocacy strategy turns out.  But because he reached out when he did, he could come out of this alive.  Because it is exposure that cripples the machine, and in situations like this, it will spit out a cog or two rather than risk the effect that prying eyes can have.   Posted on Soldier Voices Forum - this is a soldier who is in need of some help.  

(OriginalPost) I was told so often during my life that the United States was a great country. In grade school the USSR became Russia, and in junior high we saved Kuwait from a bad man. Over time I struggled with the notion that most of what I thought about my country during those years was bullshit. Howard Zinn then informs me that most of what I learned about US history was bullshit as well. This made me a proud version of what a lot of Americans love to hate. In fact, so many of the people who voted for George W. Bush twice but are now hating his guts over immigration, are those same people who looked down on me for criticizing the guy when we invaded Iraq. Which has me wondering now, whether this defection has now turned the virtue of dissent into bullshit as well. Perhaps I’m simply coming at it from the wrong angle though, as bullshit is really an inherent facet of politics and history and people anyhow.

(Source) Wolf Blitzer is moderating in New Hampshire, and  he asks the entire crop of potential GOP candidates for '08 to raise their hand if they believe that gays should be allowed to serve in the military.   Not one hand went up.   This is called 'stroking the Republican base like it needs to be stroked'.   There is no other way to arouse the voters who show up to cast ballots in a Republican primary, but with a dominant grasp of the issues, along with the magic words that'll bring them to attention.  It is a formula that can only be ignored in those rare instances when the voter is faced with star-fucking as an alternative.

(deadissue.com - note: 'Napoleon' is a right-wing participant over there) Napoleon's words sent me into one of my research kicks, and so I've been digging around a bit, reading a lot of material from the first quarter of the 20th century.  There's a lot I could cite, but this one here was really good, as it deals with the position of strength US workers found themselves in during WW1, when the country depended too much on production to have management doing its thing.  

Today’s NYTimes editorial page features a letter by Holt, touting his legislation to make paper trails mandatory for voting machines, as was endorsed by the Times on May 16th. Having read this endorsement on the day it ran, my first thought was that ‘hope is audacious after all’.

The link on the front page reads ‘Hamas militants fire rockets into Israel’, and the article has a different headline that reads ‘Deadly infighting rages in Gaza’. The battle is one sided, with Hamas sending mortar rounds into the compound of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is a member of the Fatah party. Fatah was voted out of power in favor of Hamas, and the Palestinian state has since been cut off from international aid. Israel’s wall continues to zig and zag its way through the West Bank, and the checkpoints continue to prevent Palestinian Muslims and Christian citizens from engaging in the commerce that allows them to live. New Israeli settlements in Gaza continue to be built.

The United States Army is continuing along in Iraq, with as healthy an appreciation of self as your average heroin junky or to be even more precise, a hardcore gasoline huffing aficionado hunkered over its favorite can.  Woozy, deteriorated and schizophrenic, this urge-driven beast has absolutely no sense of reality at this point, and is continuously having its face pushed down into the brain-cell destroying fumes by a never ending succession of glory whores who want to be the next Dwight Eisenhower.

So here we go again - I posted the following at Control Congress on 3/19/07:

Gingrich after Columbine: "I want to say to the elite of this country - the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton...of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created." (Source)

(Posted on 9/13/2004) Nature has been racking up a significant body count recently in the form of hurricanes, but with the new rapid-fire bullet propulsion toys about to hit the streets, I have no doubt that humans will be on top again before too long.

Since right-wingers are focusing on repeating over and over that the security situation within Iraq is improving, I’m quite sure that Democrats will continue to repeat over and over that a political solution is necessary to achieve any positive result.

Pay close attention to the coverage of this most recent shooting-spree in Virgina, as the witnesses are interviewed, the tears brand our brains permanent in puffs of smoke and agony, like the "bad news" from Iraq never seems to accomplish.

Invested in this hyped stock with everything he's got.  Money, possessions, bodily organs and hope all down on the idea he had a few years back, developed over some serious unmet needs pertaining to relevance.  How could he manage to somehow matter in this life? The inspiration began showing up in newspapers, television and was overheard several times around town, discussed by adults he looked up to; passionately like nothing he'd heard before, these words coming out of these heads that hadn't shown him a hint of anything close to what they were absolutely certain of now.  Some he figured hadn't voted once in their lives, suddenly all political and full of proclamations.  Heroic thoughts sprouted from all this lofty widespread agreement raining down, as the dim glow of promise in what surrounded him seemed to grow smaller by the day.  

The active duty military personnel who signed the 'Appeal for Redress' are being featured on 60 Minutes tonight at 7PM.  One of those is a soldier whose website 'Soldiers Voices Forum' I've highlighted on deadissue recently.  A bona fide 'Support the Troops' moment if there ever was one, I urge everyone to tune in and to also help spread the word by posting on your own websites, sending out emails, etc.

We’re already experiencing the novelty of a post-Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon in the form of a Joint Chiefs of Staff that has suddenly found its voice after having been neutered since before our initial invasion of Iraq.  The point of view expressed by "the generals" has always been a political scrap to President Bush, tossed out whenever the catapult for propaganda needed repairs, and until now the military had been effectively tied to a board and submerged the moment a flower of dissent appeared to be budding.  Careers ended, missions changed, grown men in smart outfits covered with shiny and colorful medals hunched over Rumsfeld’s lap for a spanking, the patronizing "I listen to what the generals on the ground have to say" comment always available to the President, is now more or less a non-factor as the dictator whose paddle he once relied on is no longer there, and in the void that remains, dreaded honesty is expanding.

(6/13/2005) Throughout my teenage years I was a born-again Christian. Now in my twenties, I’m not. Without getting overly dramatic or focusing on every detail, the primary reason for this change was an extinguishing of the belief that everyone but me was going to hell. Make no mistake about it, the people of this faith believe that they are in store for an afterlife of bliss in heaven and non-believers will toil in hell for all eternity. This dynamic caused me to live through most of my teenage years in fear of what would happen if I were to question it, as to do so could mean I was volunteering for damnation. It was fear that stunted my natural inclination to question the world around me in terms of religion.