pentagon

So much misdirected anger.

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) revisited. It is the Lee Atwater/Roger Ailes revolving door, “Willie Horton” campaign ads from 1988. It is the right blaming hurricane victims in New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 for not leaving town in their SUVs and checking into Shreveport or Dallas hotels until Hurricane Katrina blew herself out. It is conservatives blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The government, you see, forced private mortgage lenders and Wall Street to fatten themselves on CDOs built from the “liar loans” they invented and sold to shiftless poor people. In the United Kingdom, it is BBC’s 2010 “The Scheme,” a series critics described as “poverty porn,” depicting welfare recipients that London’s tabloid Daily Mail calls “welfare junkies” (Well, what do you know?) and “foul-mouthed, lazy scroungers, cheats, layabouts, drunks, drug addicts” leeching off “the goodwill of taxpayers.”

Last week, two conservative Republican Senators, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and John Barrasso of Wyoming, called for an independent probe of the IPCC -- the international scientific body that summarizes the latest climate science -- and asked the Senate to halt all climate action until that happens.

The senators claim that because there were some errors included in the IPCC's 2007 report -- for instance, how quickly the Himalayan glaciers might melt -- the entire phenomenon of climate change must now be questioned.

I am not a scientist by training, but even I know their reasoning doesn't hold up. The few errors that have been uncovered in the thousand pages or so of the IPCC report have nothing to do with the science of whether and why climate change is occurring. Instead, those errors are about a few specific projections about what might happen in the future.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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Pat posted a video that violated security, people died, he took it down.

Now he says nobody told him not to . . . but the Pentagon says otherwise.

Vote Vets calls for censure. I'd like a Congressional investigation.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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You go to war with the body armor you have or don't have - as the case may be. Usually, it is a definite LACK of body armor that is the problem.

It is a sad state of affairs when families and support groups need to be the ones buying and supplying body armor to the troops in need instead of the Pentagon. Thousands of soldiers dead and ten's of thousands wounded - many of which die to a lack of sufficient armor.

If you are a frequent reader, you know I founded BooksForSoldiers.com four years ago. Most of what we ship are books, DVDs, CDs, snacks, video games and magazines. Frequently we get requests for other items like tube socks, boots and even once got a request for IV pump batteries. It really strikes our heart when we get a request for body armor.

More after the flip...

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing


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Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing


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