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Rep. Mike Rogers was given a free ticket to another term in the House of Representatives, where he can continue with stupid like this, because of some very shifty sleight-of-hand tactics in Michigan's 8th district. (Details here)

MIKE ROGERS: When you think about any of the operations of a soldier in the field that's released could lead to their death, that is an act of treason. And an act of treason is a capital offense and it should be,

You have to stop this culture of disclosure. It's dangerous. It gets people killed.

CENK UYGUR: So would you have supported execution of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers?

ROGERS: Well, I don't know all the circumstances around it. If it was information that certainly put soldiers at risk in the field and he was convicted of treason, absolutely.

I have my own opinions about WikiLeaks' responsibility with regard to releasing names. But I don't have an argument with them releasing documents, nor do I believe it is an act of treason, nor do I believe anyone should be executed as a result, including Afghans working with the US government.

But this man, Mike Rogers, was just granted another term without any effort. Lance Enderle did not receive enough votes to get onto the November ballot as the Democratic candidate, leaving the ghost rider, Kande Ngalamulume as the non-resident Democrat running for office in that Congressional District.

I don't usually make it a point to slam Democrats, but this begs for it. There is no excuse for the DCCC to have ignored this race and allowed such nonsense to prevail. For all the money they spent sending me little birthday cards to sign for the President along with my $50 donation, they could have actually spent the time to vet this candidate and look for a contender.

Instead, they just ignored it completely. They ignored the fact that a lunatic who thinks executing people for leaking documents is a good thing will now be the de facto winner in November. How hard would it have been in that state to find one candidate -- ONE -- who could have actually gotten something done?

The DCCC misses the point of its sheer existence when it allows nonsense like this and likewise, the DSCC in case of the monumental hairball in South Carolina with Alvin Greene.

For starters, it appears arrogant and entitled. It appears as though Democrats don't really care all that much about districts where they can't get high profile bang for their buck.

But mostly, it's undemocratic. That's all. It's undemocratic to allow stupid to take the place of democracy.

Lance Enderle received 9% of the vote as a write-in candidate. That's not so bad, given that write-ins almost never get even 1%. We made a difference, but not enough of one, given the time and money constraints. And so, Mike Rogers will now represent a district that has just about an even split of conservatives and liberals in it.

Undemocracy at work. Good job, DCCC.

(Brainwrap on Daily Kos has more to say about the MI-08 debacle, too)

Swifties Slime Again

Dowd

Instead of trying to destroy AARP, Republicans should be signing up the seniors' lobby to find Osama.

AARP's super-relentless intelligence network is certainly better than that doddering C.I.A's. Osama has to have turned 50, and AARP somehow knows where everyone who has turned 50 lives.

It began with an almost comically hyperbolic Internet ad that briefly ran on The American Spectator's Web site, painting AARP as pro-gay sex - even though it's tough to think of AARP and steamy lust in the same hot breath - and anti-soldier. It showed a soldier with a red X across him, and two gay men kissing at their nuptuals, with the headline "The REAL AARP Agenda."

(Mr. Jarvis, who used to be executive vice president of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, also urged his Web site readers to "support Mel Gibson's 'The Passion.' " The group's national chairman is Art Linkletter; it seems that aging right-wing trash-talkers say the darndest things.) read on

U.S. investigating Marine for killing a wounded Iraqi!

Video

A U.S. marine shot a wounded Iraqi in the head at close range, and is now under investigation for his actions. The man was among a group of wounded men found inside a Fallujua Mosque. The soldier was then told that the man had been there the day before and the soldier said that he did not know that.

We believe the wounded man in the foreground was not shot and CNN did not release the full video because of it's graphic nature.

Gene Lyons in Salon on the myriad forces that insist we can't afford health care, but just as strongly assure us that $6.73 trillion for the war in Afghanistan is perfectly doable. (That's $1 million per soldier, per year.) Go read the whole thing:

For all its brutality, the Taliban rebellion is mainly a localized, nationalist effort to expel foreigners -- one reason Gen. McChrystal hopes to be able to pacify them, as his mentor Gen. David Petraeus bought off Iraqi insurgents. With winter approaching, Taliban fighters will soon be forced into semi-hibernation. Any U.S. buildup will take at least a year to complete.

The big rush, in other words, has less to do with military necessity than with Washington political theater: specifically, the war lobby's ability to force President Obama's hand. Actually, "war industry" might be more apt. It's both more concise than the "military-industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned against and it takes into account the "privatization" of military jobs once done by soldiers -- such as driving supply convoys (Halliburton), guarding embassies and other U.S. facilities (Blackwater) and training Afghan soldiers (DynCorp International).

[...] Following upon David Barstow's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times exposé about blatant conflicts of interest among Pentagon-coached retired generals posing as disinterested "military analysts" on every TV news network you can think of, Americans can no longer afford to be blasé about the war industry.

They're selling us endless war the way they sell cellphones and Viagra.

The question is: How much is President Obama buying?

Mock, Paper, Scissors: Tengrain Presents the End of the Recession!

WetMachine: Benchmarks and the Broadband Ecology

Rawrahs: Thank you, Jimmy Carter

Susie Bright's Journal (not work-safe): Socialist is the new Black. And while we're doing the not-work-safe stuff, Alabama is still outlawing the sex toys. I'm so outta there forever.

Wonkette: Waitaminit, Judge: 'Saying something is so, does not make it so?' There goes the modern Conservative Movement.

BG filling in today and tomorrow for Mike, who's jamming.

The Havana Note: Joe Lieberman will seek a pardon for a convicted terrorist who led a bombing spree across Manhattan

DownWithTyranny! While we're on the subject of dangerous Republicrats...

Cogitamus: A Republican soldier caught in a lie? That's Unpossible!

Blue Girl, Red State: According to the Associated Press, this is what "winning the war" looks like: The enemy we have been fighting--and that has been killing Americans--has now been integrated into the government that we have been supporting with our blood and treasure.

HOLY CRAP: McCain's Catholic problem...Postcards From God...Jesus-crazed Republican legislator discovers wife-beating is unpopular...Iowa GOP (see:Evangelical) delegation blackballs Charles Grassley...The Great Desecration...Evangelical Christian tyranny is rife in the Military...Democratic National Convention to open with interfaith service led by Pentecostal minister...Methodist minister arrested in Karl Rove protest...Church v. State, Immigation Edition...How Archaeology killed Biblical History...White guys telling us what we need and deserve

The Zen Cabin: Anyone who has followed the FISA fight is probably familiar with James Cicconi. Let's give Mr. Cicconi the attention he deserves - we'll start just before things went to Hell in America.

Crackpot Press: Scientologist speaks out, fears being "suicided"

PERRspectives Blog: With the Republican nomination now safely secured, John McCain, the self-proclaimed "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution," is trying to reverse the hard right turn he took in the GOP primaries.

The Road to Surfdom: This should be a scandal because it reveals how the media's whole coverage of the Iraq invasion and occupaton - not just the opinion pieces but the so-called news as well - has been heavily shaped and dominated by the US military as part of a calculated and sustained campaign of misinformation...and American taxpayers foot the bill!

Roger Ailes: Making abstinence fun.

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Ali Eteraz, The Unapologetic Mexican, MetaFilter, Naked Politics

VetVoice:

The Pentagon has provided $30 billion in contracts to KBR during the Iraq War. Apparently that's just the Basic Troop Support Package, however, because it's not enough money to keep the contractor from electrocuting a dozen troops in showers and elsewhere throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. [..]

The New York Times piece goes on to explain:

The Army has provided little detailed information about the electrocutions, other than to say late Friday that 10 soldiers had been electrocuted in Iraq. A House committee has also reported that two marines died similarly.

One former KBR electrician was quite frank about what's going on:

And Mr. Bliss, who saw a soldier standing next to him in Qalat, Afghanistan, receive a severe shock from an electrical box that was not supposed to be charged, said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues. They were "not giving the Army what it needed," he said, "and not giving the soldiers what they deserved."

No, really. It is. Seriously.

Download | play Download | play (h/t JL)

Today's testimony before the House was not quite as riveting as yesterday's Senate session for Petraeus, but I did catch this little tidbit that had me wondering. Rep. Buck McKeon asks Gen. Petraeus to speak to troop morale and this is what he had to say:

Congressman, first of all, let me just say that …I don’t want to start off by generalizing about morale…I want to start off by explaining morale is an individual event. And morale depends from soldier to soldier, and for me as well, on the kind of day that you’re having out there in the theatre. And it’s a roller coaster existence. Now, having said that, as there is actually something called “The Mental Health Assessment” which is done every year, the last one in the late fall, I believe it was. And after several years of a generalization of morale as going down, morale actually went up.

Really? Up??? Five years in, a backdoor draft of stoploss and 3, 4, and 5 tours of duty and the troops are feeling better now? Well, that didn't compute for me, so I had to go find this "Mental Health Assessment" (.pdf) and sure enough, on page 24, there's the statistics Petraeus quoted:

Soldiers ratings of unit morale were significantly higher in 2007 than in 2006 after controlling for sample differences of (1) gender, (2) rank, and (3) months in theater. Figure 2 shows the raw percentages (top graph) and adjusted percents (bottom graph). Notice in the bottom graph that the adjusted percent of Soldiers who rate unit morale high or very high in 2007 is close to double the estimate from 2006.

Ah, there's the rub. If you factor out the women, the NCOs and those who have done multiple tours of duty over several years, things are looking great! By the way, I admit I was never a math major, but that last sentence about the morale being close to double this year...well, that's true if 7.4% was half of 13.1%. Either way, that's only 1 out of every 7 troop members who consider their morale high. Is that something to celebrate?

Or maybe Petraeus wanted to get out in front of this NY Times article:

Army leaders are expressing increased alarm about the mental health of soldiers who would be sent back to the front again and again under plans that call for troop numbers to be sustained at high levels in Iraq for this year and beyond.
Among combat troops sent to Iraq for the third or fourth time, more than one in four show signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey of soldiers' mental health.[..]

Among the 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, more than 197,000 have deployed more than once, and more than 53,000 have deployed three or more times, according to a separate set of statistics provided this week by Army personnel officers. The percentage of troops sent back to Iraq for repeat deployments would have to increase in the months ahead.

The Army study of mental health showed that 27 percent of noncommissioned officers - a critically important group - on their third or fourth tour exhibited symptoms commonly referred to as post-traumatic stress disorders. That figure is far higher than the roughly 12 percent who exhibit those symptoms after one tour and the 18.5 percent who develop the disorders after a second deployment, according to the study, which was conducted by the Army surgeon general's Mental Health Advisory Team.

And that doesn't even begin to talk about happens when they finally do return home. That's why it's so important for us to support Sen. Jim Webb's Dwell Time Amendment. Hear that, McCain? You want them to stay until the job is done, you have to take care of them to do so.

Topeka Capital Journal: (h/t J & BillW)

A federal judge in Maryland on Thursday ordered liens on the Westboro Baptist Church building and the Phelps-Chartered Law office.

If the case presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Richard D. Bennett is upheld by an appeals court, the church, at 3701 S.W. 12th, and the office building, at 1414 S.W. Topeka Blvd., could be obtained by the court and sold, with the proceeds being applied toward $5 million in damages Bennett imposed on church members for picketing a military funeral.

The $5 million penalty is the result of a lawsuit filed against three of the church's principals by Albert Snyder, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder, whose funeral was picketed by church members. Read on...

It's too early to know how this will be resolved, but I'm hoping the appeals court upholds the ruling and the family of the fallen soldier prevails. These vile people drag their kids along to picket soldier's funerals and spread hatred around the country. For a good laugh check out this brave dude who Rick Roll'd the Phelps clan as they attempted to get their hate on.