And just in case your outrage meter is running low,

Mark Benjamin has another article up in his excellent series on how the administration respects the troops - by shipping injured and traumatized soldiers right back overseas.

April 9, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- On March 9, Army Spc. Thomas Smith was ordered to board a plane from Fort Benning, Ga., to deploy back to Iraq, even though he was known to be suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder from a previous tour there. Only weeks prior, military doctors determined that Smith should not be allowed around weapons because of his PTSD symptoms, which included bouts of sudden, extreme anger. Smith's medical records, obtained by Salon, also show that doctors had "highly recommended" that Smith not be deployed because of his condition.

But that did not stop Smith's commanders from ordering him to Iraq as his unit, the 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, was rushing to move out as part of President Bush's so-called surge plan for securing Baghdad.

"I was told to have my bags in at midnight that night," for the flight, Smith said. "I was sitting there looking at these letters in my hand from my doctors," he recalled in a telephone interview. In order to follow the doctors' recommendations, Smith said, "I had to check myself into the hospital." He avoided the flight by just a few hours. Smith's condition was serious enough that the doctors there kept him hospitalized for nearly two weeks...

Read and weep. You know the drill. How is it that the families of soldiers have the restraint not to storm congress and the White House in their fury?

Back in the U.S.S.R...

Check out this Carpetbagger post:

‘Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that’

It's clear why when Bush first looked deep into Putin's eyes he liked what he saw, one autocrat to another.

We've hit a new low, people.

And it's rock bottom. Mark Benjamin in Salon:

...As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records...

It's pretty freaking obvious at this point that the Bushies look upon our armed forces as a disposable resource. It's also freaking obvious that the administration is so populated with sociopaths that the fact that our soldiers are human beings has escaped their notice.

Don't miss this heartfelt and incredibly moving op-ed by John J. McSheffrey Jr. in today's Boston Globe. In fact, it might be a good idea to email it to every single member of congress in case they need some help remembering to do the right thing.

Thank you, Patrick Fitzgerald.

Sydney Schanburg, via Christy at Firedoglake:

Day by day, witness by witness, exhibit by exhibit, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the trial of Dick Cheney’s man, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, is accomplishing what no one else in Washington has been able to: He has impeached the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Of course, it’s an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its documentation, be inerasable. The trial record—testimony, exhibits, the lot—will be there, in one place, for investigators, scholars, reporters and Congress to pore over. It goes far beyond the charges against Mr. Libby. It is, instead, a road map to the abuses of power that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their shadow government of neoconservatives have committed as the neocons carried out what they had been planning for years: an invasion of Iraq—and other military excursions—for the purpose of expanding American dominion.

How bad was Cheney's week? Some speculated that his mad dash around the world was mainly inspired by an intense desire to be out of the country when the jury announced its verdict in the Libby case. Sidney Blumenthal details Cheney's No Good, Very Bad Week.

Was the suicide bomber attack at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on Tuesday an attempted assassination of Vice President Dick Cheney or a horse's head in his bed?

In addition to the Schanberg link above, the New York Observer is full of interesting stories this week. Highly recommend a visit.

Recipe

Ingredients:

• One deep-pocketed Bush donor looking forward to a few cushy years in Belgium.
• One late (October, 2004) $50,000 donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Lying Their Asses Off
• One ex-prosecutor with a serious axe to grind
• One Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee with a chairman willing to let it all play out

Stir.

Revenge can be sweet, but the sweetness of this particular moment had less to do with revenge and more to do with calling someone who had personal responsibility to account for the way facts were ignored during the 2004 presidential campaign in favor of politically expedient lies.

Kerry: So, again, I ask you the question, do you think now that you and others bear responsibility for thinking about where we put money in American politics? What we're saying, what we present to the American people -- is truth important or isn’t it?

Compassionate Conservatism

The Carpetbagger:

The research from Sanders’ office included some rather startling revelations about Bush’s plans for the elimination of the estate tax, at a cost of $442 billion over the next decade, and how, exactly, the president plans to pay for them.

Sanders’s office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation — some of the world’s evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D’Ivoire — if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That’s more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:

* Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts

* Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630 million cut

* Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut

And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.

Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and newborn children.

I'm trying to wrap my brain around this, but I just can't.

Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

This, in the week of the Walter Reed patient overflow scandal. It freaking boggles the mind.

delinquent blogging

Plenty of outrage, but every once in a while one gets tired of spitting into the wind. In any case I could never express my utter disgust with the display the Little Prince put on for the press corpse yesterday one tenth as well as The Rude One does. He smirked, he joked, he preened. (And they giggled.) What a charmless ass we have squatting in the White House. Here's a brief array of self-referential quotes which display a degree of arrogance and self-absorption unacceptable from anyone over the age of two.

People want to live in peace; they want to grow up in a peaceful environment. And the decision I made is going to help the Iraqi government do that.

What's different about this conflict than some others is that if we fail there, the enemy will follow us here. I firmly believe that. And that's one of the main reasons why I made the decision I made.

And to say it is provoking Iran is just a wrong way to characterize the Commander-in-Chief's decision to do what is necessary to protect our soldiers in harm's way. And I will continue to do so.

Listen, I want our troops out of there as quickly as possible. But I also want to make sure that we get the job done. And I made the decision I made in order to do so.

I could go on - and on - but you get the point. Has any national leader ever used the word "I" as much as this one does??