Vets to Receive Disability for ALS

Vets to Receive Disability for ALS

The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to provide full disability payments for Lou Gehrig's disease, tacitly acknowledging for the first time a generalized link between the fatal neurological disorder and military service.

Veterans and patient advocates have advocated the change for years, citing studies showing that former soldiers are more likely than the general population to contract the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

The VA already extends full compensation to ALS-stricken veterans of the first Persian Gulf war, who, according to a study earlier this decade, are twice as likely as other service members to contract the disease.

Learn more about the full range of your military benefits.

US Contractors Winning Their Hearts and Minds

Video of This Makes Me Sick (Contractors Shooting At Iraqi Civilians) - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Send Jane to Baghdad!

Dear John: The only way to win in Iraq is to leave:

"if I go over to Baghdad instead, I will have the entire Combined Press Information Center in the Green Zone all to myself. Plus if I went over to Iraq right now, I could send some more accurate dispatches back to poor sweet be-nighted John McCain, who needs all the help he can get.

Dear John, I would write, you ve got it all wrong. That s happening over here in Iraq right now isn t just an old-school type of war that American troops can win or lose. We already won that kind of war here, back in 2003. But in case you haven t noticed, things have changed a lot in Iraq since 2003 and we can no longer call it a war any more because there are just too many other factors involved"

Another perspective on the Cost of War

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Pentagon as Global Gas-Guzzler: "Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That's greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million -- and yet it's a gross underestimate of the Pentagon's wartime consumption.

Such numbers cannot do full justice to the extraordinary gas-guzzling expense of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, for every soldier stationed 'in theater,' there are two more in transit, in training, or otherwise in line for eventual deployment to the war zone -- soldiers who also consume enormous amounts of oil, even if less than their compatriots overseas. Moreover, to sustain an 'expeditionary' army located halfway around the world, the Department of Defense must move millions of tons of arms, ammunition, food, fuel, and equipment every year by plane or ship, consuming additional tanker-loads of petroleum. Add this to the tally and the Pentagon's war-related oil budget jumps appreciably, though exactly how much we have no real way of knowing.

And foreign wars, sad to say, account for but a small fraction of the Pentagon's total petroleum consumption. Possessing the world's largest fleet of modern aircraft, helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and support systems -- virtually all powered by oil -- the Department of Defense (DoD) is, in fact, the world's leading consumer of petroleum. It can be difficult to obtain precise details on the DoD's daily oil hit, but an April 2007 report by a defense contractor, LMI Government Consulting, suggests that the Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels (14 million gallons) every day. This is greater than the total national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland."

Juan Cole on Our New Status of Forces agreement (?) with Iraq

Informed Comment

Here is an excellent analysis of the progress on agreements on what happens after the UN mandate for US troops runs out this year in Iraq. It appears to boil down to the US demanding occupation (no constraints on troop actions and full immunity from the law for US troops and contractors) versus sovereignty for Iraq with a timetable for US withdrawal. It also appears the agreement will be "just between two guys" ie Bush and Maliki because the congresses in both countries will refuse to approve the agreement. And how legal is that (not!) and do they really care?

War.Inc Satire connects Corporate Greed and War

John Cusack: Bypassing the Corporate Media | Movie Mix | AlterNet



See it if you get a chance!
In the spirit of Smedley Butler it satirizes the connection between war and profit. After seeing it in Minneapolis, We decided that it is bound to be a cult classic because of the abundance of puns and details such as tanks with billboards and a corporate logo that could be mistaken for a crusader flag.

Reasons Democrats also support the guttingof our constitution

The Motivation for Blocking Investigations Into Bush Lawbreaking - CommonDreams.org

The quote below refers to both torture and FISA:

"Bush officials faced serious danger of criminal liability in the wake of the 2006 Hamdan ruling that the Geneva Conventions applied to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. But the Military Commissions Act, passed several months after the Hamdan ruling, took care of that problem by immunizing the lawbreakers. Jay Rockefeller was right there supporting that retroactive immunity, too — thereby helping to block investigations and prosecutions for illegal torture programs about which Rockefeller knew and in which he was complicit.
This is exactly the dynamic which Law Professor, Fourth Amendment expert, and Simple-Minded, Confused Leftist Hysteric Jonathan Turley was describing on MSNBC on June 19:

I mean, the Democrats never really were engaged in this. In fact, they repeatedly tried to cave in to the White House, only to be stopped by civil libertarians and bloggers. And each time they would put it on the shelf, wait a few months, they did this before, reintroduced it with Jay Rockefeller’s support, and then there was another great, you know, dustup and they pulled it back. . . .

I think they’re simply waiting to see if the public’s interest will wane and we’ll see that tomorrow, because this bill has, quite literally, no public value for citizens or civil liberties. It is reverse engineering, though the type of thing that the Bush administration is famous for, and now the Democrats are doing — that is to change the law to conform to past conduct.

It’s what any criminal would love to do. You rob a bank, go to the legislature, and change the law to say that robbing banks is lawful. . . .

This is a very frightening bill. What people have to understand is that FISA itself is controversial. This court issued tens of thousands of warrants granted applications for surveillance without turning down any. Only recently did they turn down two. . . .

What you’re seeing in this bill is an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It is something that allows the president and the government to go in to law-abiding homes on their word alone, their suspicion alone, and to engage in warrantless surveillance. That’s what the framers that drafted the Fourth Amendment wanted to prevent. . . ."