Arriana Huffington leads off today with a take on the new Pentagon Channel. Also, columns on Medicare, press immunity, USANext, a "grizzly test" for ANWR drilling advocates, women in Iraq, and a call for a new "Freedom Legion".
Oh yeah, and of course, the cartoon of the day.
Happy Thursday!
Samples and links after the jump.
Arriana Huffington takes a swipe at the latest propaganda endeavor by the Bush regime, the Pentagon Channel, or as she calls it, "RummyTV". Huffington pipes in with her suggested version of a more true to life Pentagon programming slate:
Now, if Secretary Rumsfeld were really interested in following the network's motto--"Serving Those Who Serve"--he might want to consider a more realistic lineup. How about:
-- "The Real World: Fallujah." What happens when a group of former Abu Ghraib guards, forced to share a bombed-out, camera-filled apartment in Fallujah with a collection of their former prisoners, stop being polite? Series highlights: Lynndie England hooking up at a Green Zone nightclub with a Baathist hottie who turns out to be none other than the guy she had on the leash! Then Mohammed, one of the ex-prisoners, getting wasted, prank-calling new Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and asking him if being sodomized with a broomstick sounds "quaint."
-- "Pimp My Humvee." Xzibit, Mad Mike, Big Dane and the "Pimp My Ride" crew lend a helping hand to American soldiers forced to scrounge through junk yards in an effort to outfit their vehicles with the armor the military has failed to provide--hooking our troops up with protective plates, as well as slammin' paint jobs, state-of-the-art sound systems, and spinning tire rims able to detect the roadside explosives responsible for so many U.S. casualties. The Humvees go from wimp to pimp while the soldiers go from sitting ducks to Mac Daddies.
The Chicago Trib's Steve Chapman adds his solid analysis to the chorus condemning Bush's Social Security play and failure to address the real crisis:
The looming financial crunch in Social Security presents options that bring to mind the entrees at a prison cafeteria: Some are inedible, and some are worse. The available ideas include such appetizing possibilities as raising taxes, reducing future benefits and increasing the retirement age. And the really bad news? Social Security is not the tough problem. It's the easy one.
The tough one is Medicare. Amid the hoopla over how to support Baby Boomers in their old age, no one is paying attention to how to finance their hospital and doctor bills. But in almost every way, the challenges of Medicare are bigger and more complicated than those of Social Security. Instead of taking steps to contain the fire before it gets out of control, though, Congress and President Bush are spraying it with gasoline.
The Trib's Don Wycliff, though sympathetic to the plight of reporters Cooper and Miller, expresses objections to the notion of legislating government issued exemptions to "protect" journalists from criminal investigations:
If you think it was just by accident that Jeff Gannon, a.k.a. James Dale Guckert, got cleared to attend White House news briefings and a presidential news conference that you or I would have had to endure probing up to a body-cavity search to be cleared for, then you probably would welcome having a government Ministry of Truth deciding who gets licensed as a news gatherer.
If you think bloggers have been more an annoyance than anything else and that the journalistic universe ought to be limited to newspapers and three TV network news departments, you may like the idea of a government overseer licensing the respectable and keeping the riffraff out.
Maureen Dowd rips USANext's "hates soldiers; loves gays" attack on AARP, connecting its tactics to Bush's surrogates' attacks on Kerry and McCain. She also demonstrates the absurdity of the ad's premises:
AARP has not taken a position on same-sex marriage. But Mr. Jarvis told Judy Woodruff on CNN's "Inside Politics" yesterday that it had opposed a proposal in November to ban same-sex marriage in Ohio.
This was, of course, specious. The Ohio chapter of AARP objected to the proposal because it said the wording could affect legal recognition of any union, even of older heterosexuals living together.
The oleaginous Mr. Jarvis explained that the soldier was X-ed out on the ad because AARP does not "take a position on veterans and combat veterans' health and support an expansion of their assets. And we do." That is so lame. Just because AARP doesn't endorse a USA Next plan for veterans' health, that doesn't mean it hates American soldiers.
Surely the venality has gone too far now. Americans may look the other way when a President's goons slime another politician, but sliming senior citizens?!?
Times' guest commentator Jim Doherty survives a face-to-face scrutiny by a fammily of grizzlies in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and muses about how to evaluate those who want to open it for oil drilling:
Call it the grizzly test. Require all would-be developers to take it. If you want to drill for oil in the refuge, first you have to spend a couple of weeks roughing it there. No guns, no phones, no guides. Just you and the bears. Let them look into your heart. If they're reassured by what they see, you pass; if they feel threatened, well, according to Ave Thayer, there are worse ways to go.
Those who survive the grizzly test earn the right to submit their drilling proposals to Congress. But who knows? Perhaps a solitary stint in the refuge is enough to make even the most avaricious developers think twice. Once they've discovered for themselves how magnificent the refuge is; once they've watched caribou lope across the tundra, listened to wolves howl, beheld the mesmerizing effects of light and shadow on limestone mountains riddled with caves and turreted with hoodoos - once, in short, they understand why so many folks consider the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sacred ground, they might undergo a change of heart and decide to leave it the way it is. Which is to say, undisturbed.
The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland points out that the biggest factor in change in the Mideast may not be U.S. might or diplomacy, but the emergence of a political role for women in Afghanistan and Iraq:
Nearly one-third of the 140 winning candidates on the Shiite parliamentary list are women. Moreover, those 45 women from the list supported by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tend to be more educated, better informed and more committed to change than are their male counterparts, who include a number of political hacks.
Bush has been in Europe this week emphasizing the overall importance of the Jan. 30 elections and his commitment to transforming the autocracies of the Middle East and Central Asia into a zone of peaceful democracies.
But the president's failure thus far to highlight the success of women in the elections -- 31 percent of Iraq's newly elected 275 parliamentarians are women -- suggests that not even he fully appreciates the forces of change that he may have unleashed by toppling dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The LA Times Max Boot suggests a "out-of-the-box" idea for the military manpower shortage: recruiting foreigners and illegal immigrants with a promise of citizenship as part of the "pay" of military service. I thought the piece was going to be tongue-in-cheek, but it isn't. And apparently, its been done here before:
Similar considerations early in the Cold War led Congress to pass the Lodge Act in 1950. This law allowed the Army Special Forces to recruit foreigners not living in the United States with the promise of citizenship after five years of service. More than 200 Eastern Europeans qualified as commandos before the Lodge Act expired in 1959. There's no reason why we couldn't recruit a fresh batch of foreigners today. It would certainly be easier than trying to sweet-talk more troops out of recalcitrant allies or, these days, recruiting at U.S. high schools.
Today's cartoon, courtesy of Slate's Larry Wright: