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POPSWomen Warriors The Army inserting women in direct combat without consent from Congress is a practice that's been going on for a number of years now, she says. "It's gotten worse," Donnelly said. "It's the policymakers I fault in this. They are the ones responsible for deciding who goes where. The field officers are having to deal with problems like pregnancies, evacuation, sexual misconduct, romantic hostility. Right now people aren't discussing," she said. Women sleep in separate quarters, and use separate bathrooms. However, female troops are much more likely to face the additional threat of sexual harassment and assault. Almost 15 percent of female Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have gone to the Veterans Administration for care have experienced sexual assault, according to "Women Warriors" study released this month by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
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POPSThe Best Reason Ever for Health Care Reform.
Excerpt: (It's a heroic story... How is it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability ins. and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.) An alarming article; in my own experience I can count family and friends who have died or almost died due to hospital irresponsibility and negligence. My father developed the clot that killed him while in a hospital. My mother died of the mastectomy before she could die from the cancer. My father-in-law died after hospital staff yanked out his lung and put him in regular care instead of an ICU. A friend died in child birth because the hospital anaesthesiologist did not realize she was regurgitating and put her under while she was drowning in her own vomit. I wonder, is this sad enough to make the townhallers come to their senses? NO
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POPSLand of the Weak and Home of the Wussy
Most of us bitch about taxes and pay little attention to the fact that our nation is deeply mired in two wars. We refer to our military personnel as heroes (for fear of not seeming patriotic?) but want nothing to do with the consequences of those wars. I agree with the author on some points and not on others. He speaks a realization that few of us want to face, for instance: the lie that we fight the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here. I also agree with this statement: we Americans have been living off the rest of the world's misery. We are stealing oil from the people of nations like Iraq and Nigeria. We know our toys, our electronic devices and our fancy name-brand running shoes are being made by people who cannot afford to buy them themselves. We know that for decades we have been overthrowing elected governments and propping up fascist dictatorships to keep the exploitation going so that we can buy cheap goods and extract cheap resources.
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POPSCivilians Pay Price of War from Above But it was a sign of just how terrible the Afghan slaughter was that the powerless President Hamid Karzai sounded like a beacon of goodness yesterday appealing for "a higher platform of morality" in waging war, that we should conduct war as "better human beings"
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POPSAnti-Obama Taxpayer Tea Parties steeped in insanity
The original Boston Tea Party was caffeinated by a very simple injustice: American Colonists refused to be taxed by a government that lacked any popular representation. That was remedied a few years later in a heroic struggle that stretched from Concord to Yorktown. So, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, what's the beef behind today's protests? The Obama administration is cutting taxes for all except the very richest of Americans. Reduced withholding is already showing up in millions of paychecks. Then again, this rash of tea parties is being organized not only by the pseudo-journalists at Fox News (with Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto and Sean Hannity actively stoking the flames) but also by FreedomWorks, a conservative lobbying outfit headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. I suppose it was Armey's constitutional if morally dubious privilege to have built an entire political career out of defending the wealthy. But are common folks actually going to dump Earl Grey into
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POPS The Battle Of Corrigedor E.G. Anderson took a boat trip during this week in February many years ago to the scene of a famous early battle of World War II. In that February, Anderson and a group of Americans disembarked near the shores of a small, tadpole-shaped island at the mouth of Manila Bay in the Philippines. A band of courageous allied troops and Filipino citizens had fought back a ferocious Japanese attack on the island before surrendering on May 6, 1942. That defeat, bitter as it was, became a symbol of perseverance and bravery. To this day, however, Anderson finds it hard to think of the tiny, outjutting rock as the scene of an heroic defeat. When he landed on Corregidor Island, 33 years ago, there were more than 4500 Japanese soldiers defending the rugged harbor fortress. When he left, there were none. Anderson's story, the retaking of Corregidor http://corregidor.org/rock_force/taromen/anderson.html
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POPSWar Zero Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War Between one and two million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were sent to their deaths by a succession of presidents and Congresses–fed to the flames of greed, hubris, and stupidity. The event used to justify starting the war–the Tonkin Gulf “incident”–never happened. The Vietnam War’s ideological foundation, the mantra cited to keep it going, was disproved after we lost. No Southeast Asian “dominos” fell to communism. To the contrary, the effect of the U.S. withdrawal was increased stability. When genocide broke out in neighboring Cambodia in the late 1970s, it was not the U.S., but a unified Vietnamese army–the evil communists–who stopped it. Not even General Wesley Clark, shot four times in Vietnam, is allowed to question the McCain-as-war-hero narrative. “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” he argued. The Obama campaign, which sells its surrogates down the river with alarming regularity, promptly hung the former
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POPSWill America Be The Next Nazi Germany? Everyone likes to say, "Hitler did this", and, "Hitler did that". But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class tyrant, but the evil actually done by the Third Reich, from the slave-labor camps to WW2 was all done by German citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.
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POPSGreetings From the Red Zone - Lawrence Korb's visit to Iraq Lawrence Korb visited Iraq on behalf of the National Academy of Public Administration. His account of his five-day visit (April 7th through April 121th) talks about an Iraqi government that is totally paralyzed and beset with corruption; and the US officials there are out of touch with reality. Contractors are willing to say the place is a mess, but only as long as they don't have to go on the record. Via Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly
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POPSHillary's Breasts An excellent article on Hillary Clinton and why she strokes our deepest fears and darkest hatreds.
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