Air Force Arms Lab Reports (Front Matter) Now includes a second batch of title pages and tables of contents from 1960s technical reports on chemical, biological, psychological and other weapons then in the US arsenal.
Air Force Arms Lab Reports (Front Matter) Now includes a second batch of title pages and tables of contents from 1960s technical reports on chemical, biological, psychological and other weapons then in the US arsenal.
I hesitate to criticize Hugh Hewitt's Weekly Standard articles, not because they're awful on the merits, but because it’s practically a blogging cliché. It’s almost too predictable to bother. Hewitt's latest, however, was too offensive to ignore....read on
Indeed, the piece is filled with ad hominem attacks against Americans United and it's director, the Rev. Barry Lynn. (Like too many conservatives, Hewitt finds it easier to make personal attacks than persuasive arguments.) Hewitt's argument follows a certain child-like reasoning: Lynn is bad, Lynn is presenting an argument, therefore the argument is bad.
It's a shame Hewitt didn't think this through a little more. It's not Lynn and Americans United who have gone after the Air Force Academy; it's current and former cadets who’ve been the victim of discrimination and are looking for help. It’s not “hearsay” if the cadets have seen — and been the victim of — the harassment fist hand....
This is an important story, but as usual Hewitt is incapable of sustaining an intelligent argument...whoops...I started an ad hominem attack...Steve is right. It is pretty easy to do.
WASHINGTON - Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush (news - web sites)'s Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts.
For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972. The regulations also required commanders to confirm in writing that Bush received counseling after missing five months of drills.
No such records have been made public and the government told The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it has released all records it can find.
The President had a big victory this week when the Senate voted to strip funding for additional F-22 fighter jets, which the Pentagon and the Air Force didn't want, which haven't been flown once in Iraq or Afghanistan and which are apparently vulnerable to rain. It was a small step toward breaking the stranglehold of the military-industrial complex. The lobbyists were out in force to keep this alive, and a lot of lawmakers who have parts of the F-22 made in their district wanted to keep the gravy train going, but eventually, sanity prevailed. The military budget is increasing this year, and eventually we have to end a circumstance where we spend more on the military than every other country in the world combined, but if we couldn't cancel the F-22, we would not be able to cancel pretty much anything. So it was a good step toward lessening the power and influence of military contractors. Robert Farley has a great roundup of opinions.
Naturally, John Cornyn (Bugfuck Crazy-TX) doesn't agree. In fact, he thinks we have to use the F-22 to counter all sorts of threats. Including... India.
"It's important to our national security because we're not just fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," Cornyn says. "We're fighting -- we have graver threats and greater threats than that: From a rising India, with increased exercise of their military power; Russia; Iran, that's threatening to build a nuclear weapon; with North Korea, shooting intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of hitting American soil."
I wasn't aware that we were at war with India. In fact, I don't get over there much, but I'm pretty sure we're an ally. In fact, Hillary Clinton just spent four days there this week. We just completed a civilian nuclear power agreement with them last year.
I guess being Republican means "never having to say you're sorry to an allied country for calling them an enemy." Remember when John McCain thought we were at war with Spain?
The Air Force's senior civilian official and its highest-ranking general were ousted by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday following an official inquiry into the mishandling of nuclear weapons and components, senior Pentagon officials said.
The Air Force secretary, Michael W. Wynne, and the service's chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, were forced to resign after the inquiry found that both leaders were responsible for "systematic and cultural failings in how the Air Force carried out its important mission to assure the security of the nation's nuclear arsenal," according to a senior Pentagon officials.
Never before has a defense secretary ousted both a service secretary and a service chief, according to senior Pentagon officials. Since taking office 18 months ago, Mr. Gates has made accountability of theme of his tenure. He has also fired senior Army officials, after disclosures of shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the service's premier medical facility for wounded soldiers.
The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nosecone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March - a year and a half after the erroneous shipment.
Most troubling, the senior Pentagon official said, was that little had been done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure after it was disclosed last year that the Air Force unknowingly let a B-52 bomber fly across the United States carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.
This story just reeks of propaganda and a sneaky agenda. The article mentions that these consultants were paid in part from private donations, and it would be interesting to know just who that is, because I have a feeling that would make clear the agenda working here.
I just hate how fundamentally dishonest this is with the people who will likely be risking their lives in the Middle East in the near future. I know Karl Rove tried to make it an insult that liberals wanted to "understand the terrorists", but personally, I find trying to lie to these students and make it harder for them to understand far more insulting.
The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists.[..]
Petrelis Files: In announcing Bill Kristol's new gig, and 'disclosing' his political activities and other journalistic endeavors, the NYT neglected to mention Kristol's $8000 in GOP donations.
Who says we aint got good taste buds? Steven Hart of The Opinion Mill and a guest blogger here at MBR, has a new book which is getting some well-deserved attention.
