One Utah

The U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment at the Pentagon
The U.S. Defense Department’s FY 2008 budget was $623 billion, over a hundred billion more than the military budgets of every other country in the world put together. This does not include emergency supplemental appropriations for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Why is the budget so bloated? [...]

Via TPM Election Central… In a speech today in Missouri, Governor Sarah Palin strongly implied that Democrats think the “terrorists” are the “good guys.”
I’ve been disciplined up to now, letting others bash Sarah Palin because I prefer to hammer away at Senator McCain, who made the mistake of picking her. When you run [...]

As I continue my desultory series on the four freedoms, I find myself, in the face of the seemingly endless sludge of bad economic news pondering the idea of freedom from want.
FDR’s original line was:
The third is freedom from want–which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy [...]

In the L.A. Times, Andrew Bacevich tells it like it is:

Will the next president actually bring about Big Change? Don’t get your hopes up.
Regardless of who wins Nov. 4, we should temper our expectations of what George W. Bush’s successor will accomplish, especially on foreign policy.
In reality, presidents don’t make policy; administrations do. To judge [...]

Last night, Bill Moyers interviewed Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power. It’s worth the time to read the whole transcript. In particular I was struck by this exchange - it began with Moyers reading a quote from Bacevich’s book:
BILL MOYERS: I was in the White House, back in the early 60s, [...]

Last week, I saw this post  Leading America Into the Wildnerness, at Kos:
Whether it’s finance or science, health care or education, America isn’t leading the way — it’s not even pointing the direction.  Instead, we’re on the sidelines, trying to squeeze the grip of our still considerable military leadership ever tighter, only to have more [...]

Postcard from the Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq
The best thing about blogging is it takes no imagination, which is good because I would never be able to make this stuff up myself. Via Think Progress:
The AP reports that the Pentagon is backing a $5 billion dollar plan to “transform the U.S.-protected Green Zone” into a [...]

The corporate media circus exposed via BradBlog in all it’s commercialized glory. Don’t miss “Lapdogs Of The Corporate Press!“

The March 20 U.K. Guardian features an Iraq war commentary by former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix that for its trenchant economy could serve as an object lesson for every contributor to this blog.
As Blix says–and he would know–there was NO rational justification for this war EXCEPT the elimination of a brutal [...]

by hilage
Here’s a little recap you can send around to your Republican friends who are hearing what they want to hear from the media.

After five years, 4,000+ US dead , 40,000+ US casualties, and at least 500,000 Iraqi dead and countless wounded – not to mention several million displaced – the current situation is [...]

This post is part three in my series on good and evil.
In The Lucifer Effect Philip Zimbardo explores the way in which situational factors play a role in individual behaviors. 
Zimbardo sums up his argument:
“Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors” even in good people.
The point of course is simple - I [...]

The New York Times reports on March 19 that whereas the Bush administration sold the Iraq war to the congress as a $50 billion investment, the actual costs are more like–
1.) ultra-conservative Pentagon estimate: $600 billion and counting
(note: this Honest Abe estimate categorically excludes “extras” such as operations in the war zone, [...]