Dan Choi is a well-decorated combat veteran who was dismissed from the military because was gay. His message at the National Equality March rally was simple and compelling. Choi made it clear that he is done asking and he is now telling. Don't ask, don't tell must be repealed immediately.
How paranoid have we become? Here's what Allison Kilkenny of Alternet has to say:
The culture itself is sick, which is why America has a military budget that is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined, and is over nine times larger than the military budget of China, and yet Americans feel more afraid, and more paranoid, than ever. Everyone is against us, we're told. Everyone hates our freedom, and our amazing culture. China wants to overtake us. The entire Middle East wants us dead. Europeans laugh at us, and think we’re stupid. Emperor Penguins are plotting something. Canada is about to attack. And then there's Iran. Don't even get us started on Iran. Until Americans decide to break this addiction to "The List," this cycle of irrationality will continue into the foreseeable future.And see this post, for the best friend of America's politicians: peddling nightmares.
Put on your psychologist hat and figure this one out. Terry Holdbrooks, one of the Guantanamo guards converted to Islam six months after being assigned to guard duty there. While working at Guantanamo, he was ostracized by the other guards because he was too nice to the prisoners. He didn't have a very good impression of them either, claiming that they often "indulged in alcohol, porn and sports":
"I didn't have a very high impression of my colleagues," he says. Many of them were "ridiculous Budweiser-drinking, cornbread-fed, tobacco-chewing drunks, racists and bigots" who blindly followed orders, and within months he had stopped talking to them altogether.Holdbrooks was discharged from the military, still practices Islam, but seems to be struggling with life. This article presents an interesting personality profile.
Occasionally, items in the news make me sit up and take notice of how far from a constitutional republic we really have come. Like this:
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.That's the opening salvo from John Perry, a regular columnist with the right-wing website Newsmax, in an article entitled "Obama risks a Domestic Military 'Intervention'". I would like nothing more than to provide you with a link to the whole article, but it has apparently disappeared down the memory hole. Perhaps the editors at Newsmax realized it would be inconvenient to have an article speculating on the potential for a military coup at the same time they are trumpeting the peacefulness of the tea-party protestors and wondering why anyone would accuse them of encouraging dangerous, violent extremism. The quote I harvested above came from Mediamatters.org, which detailed this story yesterday. Unfortunately, the did not reproduce the full column. I managed to grab a screenshot of the Newsmax website search function, which proves that the article really did exist, although the hyperlink for the article now returns visitors to the main Newsmax page.
Amidst new reports that Iran has not been forthcoming about its nuclear program, Glenn Greenwald urges that we do what the Chinese are doing, as reported by the NYT:
The Chinese, one administration official said, were more skeptical [of recent reports], and said they wanted to look at the intelligence, and to see what international inspectors said when they investigated.
What Greenwald is suggesting is common sense. He might need to repeat his advice endlessly, though, because we live in a country where the gold standard for the news media is hyped up conflict and because we are a country that doesn't seem to "get" common sense anymore.