Suggested Reading
Still striving for MLK's dream in the 21st century
By Martin Luther King III
From the Washington Post
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Forty-seven years ago this weekend, on a sweltering August day often remembered simply as the March on Washington, my father delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. A memorial to him is being erected at the Tidal Basin, not far from where he shared his vision of a nation united in justice, equality and brotherhood.
This weekend Glenn Beck is to host a "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial. While it is commendable that this rally will honor the brave men and women of our armed forces, who serve our country with phenomenal dedication, it is clear from the timing and location that the rally's organizers present this event as also honoring the ideals and contributions of Martin Luther King Jr.
I would like to be clear about what those ideals are.
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Lobbyist: What stories does he have to tell?
By PETE YOST (AP)
August 6, 2010
WASHINGTON — Justice Department prosecutors made it clear in private discussions in recent months that once-prominent lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti could limit his legal exposure if he cooperated fully in a criminal investigation that could eventually spell trouble for members of Congress.
Never known for backing down from a fight, Magliocchetti refused to cooperate, people close to Magliocchetti say. On Thursday, Magliocchetti was hit with an 11-count grand jury indictment for allegedly making illegal campaign contributions.
His decision to battle it out in court means that, for the time being at least, the Magliocchetti probe isn't likely to spill over onto Capitol Hill. However, that could change if he ultimately agrees to tell prosecutors what he knows, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity about the still-open criminal probe.
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The Lunatic’s Manual
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 2, 2010
By the NY Times
The Army, to its credit, tells the story of a middle-aged lieutenant colonel who had served multiple combat tours and was suffering the agonizing effects of traumatic brain injury and dementia. He also had difficulty sleeping. Several medications were prescribed.
On a visit to an emergency room, he was given a 30-tablet refill of Ambien. He went to his car and killed himself by ingesting the entire prescription with a quantity of rum. He left a suicide note that said his headaches and other pain were unbearable.
As if there is not enough that has gone tragically wrong in this era of endless warfare, the military is facing an epidemic of suicides. In the year that ended Sept. 30, 2009, 160 active duty soldiers took their own lives — a record for the Army. The Marines set their own tragic record in 2009 with 52 suicides. And this past June, another record was set — 32 military suicides in just one month.
War is a meat grinder for service members and their families. It grinds people up without mercy, killing them and inflicting the worst kinds of wounds imaginable, physical and psychological. The Pentagon is trying to cope with the surge in suicides, but it is holding a bad hand: the desperate shortage of troops has forced military officials to lower the bar for enlistment, thus letting in people whose drug and alcohol abuse or other behavioral problems would previously have kept them out. And the multiple deployments (four, five and six tours in the war zones) have jacked up stress levels to the point where many just can’t take it.
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1 Soldier or 20 Schools?
July 28, 2010
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
From the New York Times
The war in Afghanistan will consume more money this year alone than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War — combined.
A recent report from the Congressional Research Service finds that the war on terror, including Afghanistan and Iraq, has been, by far, the costliest war in American history aside from World War II. It adjusted costs of all previous wars for inflation.
Those historical comparisons should be a wake-up call to President Obama, underscoring how our military strategy is not only a mess — as the recent leaked documents from Afghanistan suggested — but also more broadly reflects a gross misallocation of resources. One legacy of the 9/11 attacks was a distortion of American policy: By the standards of history and cost-effectiveness, we are hugely overinvested in military tools and underinvested in education and diplomacy.
It was reflexive for liberals to rail at President George W. Bush for jingoism. But it is President Obama who is now requesting 6.1 percent more in military spending than the peak of military spending under Mr. Bush. And it is Mr. Obama who has tripled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he took office. (A bill providing $37 billion to continue financing America’s two wars was approved by the House on Tuesday and is awaiting his signature.)
Under Mr. Obama, we are now spending more money on the military, after adjusting for inflation, than in the peak of the cold war, Vietnam War or Korean War. Our battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The intelligence apparatus is so bloated that, according to The Washington Post, the number of people with “top secret” clearance is 1.5 times the population of the District of Columbia.
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Task force sees Pentagon cuts key to US budget fix
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
WASHINGTON, June 11 (Reuters)
U.S. lawmakers and watchdog groups on Friday called for a dramatic revamp of the defense budget to reverse widening U.S. deficits, including termination of the $382 billion Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) F-35 fighter.
Representative Barney Frank, one of the chief negotiators working on financial regulation reforms, convened a bipartisan task force that identified nearly $1 trillion in budget savings that could be culled from the Pentagon budget through 2020.
"We are looking down the barrel of record deficits that threaten our national security," Laura Peterson, policy analyst with Taxpayers for Common Sense and a task force member, told a news conference. "There's plenty of fat to cut from the military budget without compromising our safety."
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Congress to Gates: s**** You. Again.
By Nathan Hodge
May 20, 2010
From Wired.com's "Danger Room"
The U.S. military is bracing for lean years, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has warned that the past decade’s “gusher of defense spending” is coming to an end. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011, passed last night.
Among other things, committee members approved a second engine for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a direct thumb in the eye to Gates, who has said he would recommend that the president veto any bill that includes a second JSF engine.
Over the past few years, Congress has approved continued work on an alternate F-35 engine, a move that would break Pratt & Whitney’s lock on the JSF engine market by funding a competing engine made by a GE/Rolls Royce team. Supporters say a second design would ultimately yield some cost savings, but that argument has failed to move Gates, who has said that things don’t need to be any more complicated than they already are for the troubled F-35 program.
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GOP critics vs. the Pentagon
May. 20, 2010
By Robert G. Gard Jr
From the Lexington Herald-Leader
A distressing trend has developed in relation to the politicization of U.S. nuclear weapons policy - President Obama is criticized, while Pentagon support for the president is ignored. In short, there is a pattern emerging of selective and misleading outrage, with partisan critics caricaturizing Obama's policies while neglecting to mention or acknowledge that the policies he is advancing enjoy the strong support of the nation's military leadership.
The trend began in April 2009 when Obama delivered a speech in Prague calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Despite the fact that Ronald Reagan had the same objective and gave more than one speech with that theme, Obama was swiftly ridiculed on the right as "naive." The speech created an opening for all U.S. nuclear weapons policy to be similarly attacked in a larger effort to brand negatively the president's policies. These criticisms play politics with our national security and deliberately misrepresent the facts.
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Tax Day and America’s Wars
What the Mayor of One Community Hard Hit by War Spending Is Doing
By Jo Comerford
From TomDispatch.com
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.
That counter will offer a constantly changing estimate of the total price Binghamton’s taxpayers have been paying for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. By September 30, 2010, the city’s “war tax” will reach $138.6 million -- or even more if, as expected, Congress passes an Obama administration request for supplemental funds to cover the president’s “surge” in Afghanistan. Mayor Ryan wants, he says, to put the counter “where everyone can see it, so that my constituents are urged to have a much-needed conversation.”
In doing so, he’s joining a growing chorus of mayors, including Chicago's Richard Daley and Boston's Thomas Menino, who are ever more insistently drawing attention to what Ryan calls the country’s “skewed national priorities,” especially the local impact of military and war spending. With more than three years left in his current term, Ryan has decided to pull out all the stops to reach his neighbors and constituents, all 47,000 of them, especially the near quarter of the city’s inhabitants who currently live below the poverty line and the 9% who are officially unemployed.
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Disciplining defense while supporting troops
By Gordon Adams and Matt Leatherman
From TheHill.com
04/27/10
As it has been for the last decade, the defense budget continues to be sacred on Capitol Hill. Congress routinely genuflects at the idea that votes for historically high levels of defense spending are the same thing as supporting the troops in the field. They are not the same. Indeed, we neither should nor can afford to treat them as such. In an era of yawning deficits and debt, it is time for defense to be subjected to the same scrutiny and discipline as the rest of the federal budget.
Our national tab for defense has doubled during the past decade and, at more than $700 billion, is at levels unprecedented since World War II. Yet the Senate Budget Committee buckled last week and accepted the Obama administration’s request to exempt the Pentagon from a budget freeze. Apparently, the only place for fiscal discipline in the entire arena of discretionary spending was in the far smaller diplomacy and development budgets, which the committee cut by nearly 7 percent.
There is no reason the defense budget should be excluded from our collective belt-tightening. In fact, the pending request contains so little discipline that a freeze could be imposed without any negative effect on our national security.
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US report says arms programs face overruns, delays
* Overall affordability must be addressed
Mar 30, 2010
Reuters
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The Pentagon and Congress have taken meaningful steps to reform chronic cost overruns and schedule delays on big weapons programs, but the government still needs to downsize existing weapons programs, eliminate them, or both, a new congressional report said on Tuesday.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the research arm of Congress, said 42 programs it assessed in depth had shown continued improvement in terms of technology, design, and manufacturing processes, but most programs still lacked the levels of knowledge needed for best management practices.
That put them at higher risk for cost growth and schedule delays, the report concluded.
A majority of programs had also seen changes in military requirements, software development challenges, or workforce issues, or a combination -- all factors that could affect program stability and execution.
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