Associated Press
I suppose journalistic thug-in-chief Kevin O’Brien will write some column later this week crowing about this. Well, I guess that’s to be expected.
It’s sad that when a bunch of the usual right-wing punks (the O’Reilly/Hannith/Savage fans) show up to make noise that the left folds like a cheap suit.
From the story:
Councilwoman Linda Maio said the council opposes recruitment, not the military. “It’s behavior that we oppose, not the people,” she said.
The meeting drew hundreds of people on both sides of the issue who rallied outside City Hall from dawn until well into the night.
Inside the chamber, scores of speakers addressed the council, some decrying its earlier action.
“You owe our military an apology,” said Kevin Graves, a San Francisco Bay area resident who said his son died serving in Iraq.
For what, exercising their first amendment rights? You notice, of course, that the ‘dead son’ pass doesn’t extend to Cindy Sheehan from the right wing, which accuses her of pimping her dead son for her own cause. I guess when you’re on the side of the military-industrial complex and you swallow whole all the patriotic myths, then using the ‘dead son’ rationale is OK, right?
In rallies outside, pro-troop group Move America Forward sponsored one protest, holding signs that said “Stop Bashing Our Boys.” On the other side, anti-war group Code Pink held bouquets of flowers and waved signs saying “Peace Now” and “Bring Our Troops Home.“
Stop bashing our boys. Really.
I will say it until I’m blue in the face:
Unless and until America gets over its love affair with militarism, this country will never achieve the greatness our founding fathers envisioned for it.
If you want to see the price of that love affair with militarism, check out:
Paul Craig Roberts
“We support the troops!” That’s the excuse the Democrats have given for continuing to fund Bush’s aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan. But, of course, war funding doesn’t support the troops. War funding supports an evil machine that chews up and spits out the lives and well being of the troops, along with that of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan, men, women, and children. War funding supports Bush’s aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and his continuing efforts to occupy both countries in order to turn them into puppet states.
Polls show that a majority of the troops and their families do not support Bush’s aggression. The fact that Ron Paul’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination received the lion’s share of contributions from military families also underlines the great divide between the troops and those who would “support” them by keeping them in Iraq and Afghanistan. What all those ribbon decals on the back of SUVs, which proclaim “support the troops,” really mean is support Bush’s wars of aggression against Muslims.
According to the Washington Post (Feb. 9, 2008), Bush’s $3.1 trillion federal budget provides no funding for his proposal in his State of the Union address to permit military members to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. Bush got applause for his nationally televised words, but the troops and their families got no money in his budget.
Government analysts calculate the education benefits would cost in the range of $1-2 billion annually–the cost of funding the war for two days.
The only money that Bush and Congress want to give the troops is what is required to keep them at war. Everyone has read the horror stories of the lack of care for the physically and emotionally wounded troops who have made it back from Iraq.
In contrast, to fund Bush’s war, Bush and Congress have already spent in out-of-pocket and future costs at least $1,000 billion. Every American can draw up lists of better uses of this immense fortune than blowing up a country’s infrastructure and killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens.
And Gwynne Dyer:
Last week the Pentagon asked Congress for the biggest defence budget since World War II. It asked for US$515 billion, plus an extra US$70 billion to cover the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for part of the coming year.
The United States proposes to spend more on the armed forces, quite apart from the running costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, than it did at the height of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And yet almost all the commentary and analysis in the US media has focused on the spending on the two wars.
Even that is a lot of money. The US Congress has already approved US$691 billion in spending on Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, and the total estimate for this year alone is US$190 billion. Not only that, but some of the money in the regular defence budget can also be indirectly attributed to America’s wars in the Muslim world, like the expenditure on new equipment to replace the weapons that have been destroyed or worn out in the wars.
But there is a great deal more money in the present US defence budget - probably three times as much - that has nothing to do with the “war on terror”.
Even if you accept the deeply suspect proposition that invading foreign countries is a useful way to fight terrorism, invading the target countries (which generally do not inhabit the higher reaches of the technological pecking order) does not require eleven aircraft carriers and fleets of stealth bombers.
So what is all the rest of the money for? According to Michael Klare, defence correspondent for The Nation, the answer is obvious. “The US military posits its future on the China threat. That is the ultimate justification for a defence budget of US$500 billion a year. There is no other plausible threat.
“If you look at the new budget which came out just this week, it calls for vast spending on new weapons systems that can only reasonably be justified by what they call a ‘peer competitor’, a future superpower that could threaten the United States. Only China conceivably can fill that bill. Not Iran, not Iraq, or some [other] rogue state. Only China fits that bill.”
And while we’re piling on:
TruthNews/SF Gate:
Veterans have no legal right to specific types of medical care, the Bush administration argues in a lawsuit accusing the government of illegally denying mental health treatment to some troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The arguments, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, strike at the heart of a lawsuit filed on behalf of veterans that claims the health care system for returning troops provides little recourse when the government rejects their medical claims.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is making progress in increasing its staffing and screening veterans for combat-related stress, Justice Department lawyers said. But their central argument is that Congress left decisions about who should get health care, and what type of care, to the VA and not to veterans or the courts.
A federal law providing five years of care for veterans from the date of their discharge establishes “veterans’ eligibility for health care, but it does not create an entitlement to any particular medical service,” government lawyers said.
They said the law entitles veterans only to “medical care which the secretary (of Veterans Affairs) determines is needed, and only to the extent funds … are available.”
The argument drew a sharp retort from a lawyer for advocacy groups that sued the government in July. The suit is a proposed class action on behalf of 320,000 to 800,000 veterans or their survivors.
“Veterans need to know in this country that the government thinks all their benefits are mere gratuities,” attorney Gordon Erspamer said. “They’re saying it’s completely discretionary, that even if Congress appropriates money for veterans’ health care, we can do anything we want with it.”
