Thinkbridge Is Back - Let's Hope Torture Is Not

It's been over 10 days, the news is excreting at a rate that is positively diarrheal, and here is this blogger, stuck in a constipated time warp. There's the wonderful news that Obama signed a ban on torture and a return to the Army Field Manual. Add to that his order to close Gitmo. Tempered by that nasty court case indicated that the reversal won't be so clear-cut.

But Slumdog Millionaire's rise to the top of the Oscars is seen in the slums of Mumbai as a victory for them. Let's hope the same happens for the rights of the criminally accused, war on terror or otherwise. There's no such thing as an untouchable, and there's no such thing as an "unconventional" human being. An accusation is just that. An accusation. It's not a conviction. There's always the possibility that the accused could be innocent. Yet GW Bush was hell-bent on torturing - I repeat, torturing - the accused, even though the U.S. has always maintained that such torture doesn't produce a real, admissible confession.

"Unconventional". That was the Republicans' excuse for torturing the accused and throwing away the presumption of innocence. These were not human beings. These were unconventional human beings. I suppose it goes with the appellation of "aliens" as applied to migrants. Words are important. So when a man is called a "terrorist", regardless of whether he actually committed or contributed to any acts of terrorism,
it whets the appetite for revenge, hence torture.

Torture is not reasonable. It's an emotional "punishment". It is not a technique. It's a way of dehumanizing another human being, when their humanity is disturbing, when it gets in the way, when it threatens the severity of one's rage, one's ego, one's quest for superiority and control over others. And Bush, more than Cheney, was ruled by emotions. He was no thinker. He ruled from the gut. Cheney did not "rule" him, as many think. He brought out that "gut" into the realm of ruthless application.

Let's hope the vestiges of that horrific legacy are truly gone forever, and Obama will really abolish them, and not let the spectre of "national security" (remember the Nazis!) allow dehumanizing humans back into th e realm of social acceptibility.

Bush-Grown Prisons Need Profit-bringing Detainees

National Public Radio gives us this report on local resistence to and protests against the intrusion of excessive detention centers - prisons - into their communities. Immigration Detention Centers.

Here's the deal. First, Bushco builds prisons-for-profit creating a "New Industry".
Then, to complete the capitalist circle, "customers" have to be "created" for the New Industry. And who are these "customers"? Well, we can't create more actual criminals than already exist. But we can create new laws and legal snafus that "snare" customers into these awaiting "detention centers". Presumably, if they continue on their current path, they will one day be called "Border Recovery & Retention Processing Facilities." The keyword "border" clueing in the cognoscenti that this is an immigration issue. Ah yes! That's the perfect "customer base" - non-citizens!

According to NPR:

The immigration crackdown of recent years has been possible, in part, because the Bush administration has greatly expanded its detention space. This is set to continue in next year's budget, with new centers planned in several states. But some are meeting local resistance.

So in these economically recessed times, the prison business is booming! Or is it a bubble?? Is there too much space? Note that immigration has slowed down, due to draconian border-control techniques and that clincher, the criminalization of migration. Yes, that human tendency that brought Asians to the Americas, and Africans to Europe, and basically assisted homo sapiens' survivability by mixing up the gene pool - migration - is now a criminal act in the United States. Unless one has "proper documentation".

Since the latter is a bureaucratic nightmare involving lots of money, migrants are easy targets. So those empty prisons CAN be filled - with massive arrests of "illegal aliens" - and what a great title that is! Problem is - it begs the issue of human rights. Something Republicans hate.

It's a typical Republican industry really. It's xenophobic: they're not Americans! It's corporate-friendly: the prison business is Big Business. It's abusive of human rights: no bleeding hearts! It's heavy-handed security: lock 'em up now! It's all about greed: let them make money out of punishment! It's anti-government: let's privatize justice! And above all, it's useless, fantasy-based: we don't really need these prisons.
And the sad part is, it's still going on. When are we going to stop being pushovers to losers?

Torture Evidence Withheld from Obama: Who's in Charge?

In this great diary, Valtin exposes a situation where the Pentagon has blacked-out an entire two pages of material showing evidence of torture in the case of Binyam Mohamed. We're talking "medieval-type" torture. Without even knowing if the guy was really guilty. He's a citizen of Ethiopia. Why are they hiding this from their own Commander in Chief? What will his reaction be?

In a shocking revelation just posted at UK Guardian, Binyam Mohamed's attorney Clive Stafford Smith, who is also director of the legal charity Reprieve, reports that "substantial parts" of a memo, attached to a letter to Barack Obama, documenting evidence of Mohamed's torture at the hands of CIA agents and their extraordinary rendition proxies, were blanked out so the president could not read them. Who did that?

US defence officials are preventing Barack Obama from seeing evidence that a former British resident held in Guantánamo Bay has been tortured, the prisoner's lawyer said last night, as campaigners and the Foreign Office prepared for the man's release in as little as a week....

Stafford Smith tells Obama he should be aware of the "bizarre reality" of the situation. "You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command."

Valtin quotes Smith's letter to Obama:

Dear President Obama:

I am writing with great urgency concerning the rendition and torture of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner represented by our charity. His name is Binyam Mohamed, and he is a British resident.

You will doubtless have been informed about Mr. Mohamed's torture -- he was abused in truly medieval ways over a period of more than two years in Pakistan (at the behest of the US), then again in Morocco (where he had been rendered by the CIA), and then in the Dark Prison in Kabul.

There has been a firestorm in the media of our closest ally, the United Kingdom because, according to two British judges, the Bush Administration "threatened" to withdraw national security cooperation with the UK if the judges ordered the release of materials concerning the torture of Mr. Mohamed in US custody.

The British judges bowed to this 'threat'-- but suggested at the end of their judgment that your administration might reconsider the position taken by your predecessors....

Since we, at Reprieve, are US lawyers with appropriate security clearances, we have access to this classified material. We have therefore assembled a memorandum that collates the evidence of torture in question. It is attached.

... for now, to deal with the British judges' request, we are submitting this information to you with no reference to any agent's name, or even the location of the abuse. Thus, as the British judges suggested, there is nothing in the memo that divulges material that should be considered classified.

We are submitting this letter and attachment to the Privilege Review Team established by the Department of Defense to deal with these issues....

If the DOD is unwilling to forward this material to you, then we will send you only what we are allowed to send you -- which will be a copy of this letter and a redacted version of the memo illustrating the extent to which it has been censored.

And here's a copy of the letter, all blacked-out except for the header. What does this mean? Who's censoring the President? Why?

And if this doesn't get you angry, how about this description of how Mohammad was tortured from Scott Horton at Harper's:

Binyam Mohamed is a 30-year-old Ethiopian who was granted political asylum in Britain in 1994. In 2002, he was seized by Pakistani authorities and turned over to American intelligence officials in connection with the Bush Administration’s extraordinary renditions program. He was shuttled between CIA-operated facilities in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Morocco. During this period of American-sponsored detention, according to court papers, Binyam Mohamed was "routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution, and death." He is now reported to be close to death in a prison cell in Guantánamo.

Note that Mohamed was not even convicted yet! What purpose does a presumption of guilt, followed by torture, without due process, serve? It serves the salacious thirst for revenge on the part of the lowest level of unthinking dehumanized bestiality. Is that why we elected Barack Obama? Or was his campaign, and indeed his first days and weeks in office, marked by fulfilment of his campaign promise to reverse the dehumanizing process started by the Republican Bush-Cheney administration by closing Guantanamo Bay and stopping torture? That certainly was right up there with Job One.

So what does it mean that some operatives at the Pentagon are censoring Obama's mail? To protect him politically? Or to keep him in the lap of Cheney's evil web of criminal atrocities, by putting blinders on him?

Are we going to let atrocities committed in the name of the United States continue? Or go unpunished? What the hell is the difference between this atrocity and anyone else's atrocity? Hypocrisy. We claim to be better. And so we are far worse. Obama was elected to get rid of this kind of hypocrisy and cruelty in the name of fear and security. Is someone trying to prevent him to do just that? And if so, can't the Commander-in-Chief fire these low-life torture-mongering fear-groveling go-to Cheney-lovin' guys?

President Obama, it's time to take America back. Insubordination to the president elected by the people, for the people, is insubordination to democracy itself. No, torture is never justified by any ends. It defines the very principles by which one lives and organizes society. Its presence means no democracy, no respect for human rights exists. Its absence is the beginning of hope and change. Remember? The majority voted for hope and change, not coverups for torture and other abuses - but transparency.

Transparency begins with the President and what information he receives. This is no small matter. Our very future and moral standing depend on this point.

Female Suicide Bombers Raped Into Submission

A middle-aged female suicide bomber recruiter in Iraq, according to this report,

In a prison interview with the Associated Press -- with interrogators nearby -- she said that she helped to organize the rapes of young women and then stepped in to persuade the victims to become suicide bombers as their only escape from the shame.

This interview occurred after her arrest, of course.

A middle-aged woman suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has been arrested in Iraq, a senior officer said today.

Samira Ahmed Jassim, 51, confessed to sending 28 of the women to carry out attacks, Major-General Qassim al-Moussawi, a Baghdad security spokesman, said. She was captured at an undisclosed location a fortnight ago.

She was a member of Ansar al-Sunna, a Sunni Arab militant group. Apparently, most of these recruits were coerced somehow.

She had to talk to one elderly woman several times before persuading her to blow herself up at a bus station, she added.

She spent a fortnight recruiting another woman, a teacher, and had problems with the woman's husband and his family, according to the confession. This woman also went on to blow herself up.

They called her "mother of the faithful", but that faith could not be Islam. Coercion is as far as you could get from Islam. And as for the end justifying the means, in Islam, the means gets you your end - in this case, she should be very afraid of the consequences. The ideology of this is abominable. And rape? What the hell is she fighting for?

Torture Is Cool: Legacy of Bush/Cheney Propaganda

"Torture Chic", subtitled " Why Is the Media Glorifying Inhumane, Sadistic Behavior?", a thought-provoking article by Maura Moynihan, really struck a chord with me. This is not exactly new, but it reminds one of the last days of Rome when throwing people to the lions (and other wild animals) was a spectator sport - entertainment for the Romans, and not just a elite class. Not so long ago, an LA Times editorial remarked (and the blogosphere expanded) that Americans were "blase about torture."

From such banal offerings as "Wrestling Entertainment" and its obsession with "bad guys" to the pro-military, get-the-Islamic-jerks propaganda spewed from all manner of sources, there has been a growing popular macho movement towards acceptability of torture, cruelty and sadistic behavior.

In their zeal to legalize torture and trounce the Bill of Rights, the Bush team crafted a media campaign to sell the "War on Terror" as a righteous quest retribution for 9/11, inciting fear of future carnage to justify violating the Geneva protocols and the U.S. Army Field Manual. While the Bush torture policy made stunning progress through the courts and the legislature, with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, there followed an increase in the normalization of torture images in popular culture, a growing acceptance of violence as effective, routine.

When photographs of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib appeared in 2004, Bush's approval ratings sank, yet torture themes multiplied in film and TV. From 2002 through 2005, the Parents Television Council counted 624 torture scenes in prime time, a six-fold increase. UCLA's Television Violence Monitoring Project reports "torture on TV shows is significantly higher than it was five years ago and the characters who torture have changed. It used to be that only villains on television tortured. Today, "good guy" and heroic American characters torture -- and this torture is depicted as necessary, effective and even patriotic".

So are these the "new American values"? And if so, what distinguishes us from, say, Al-Qaeda? How long before Americans could use techniques such as rape to coerce other Americans to do things they otherwise would not - in the Machiavellian "end-justifies-means" philosophy espoused by prominent neocons? Where is their moral high ground over al-Qaeda?

Human Rights First has just released a short film entitled "Primetime Torture" that examines how torture and interrogation scenes are portrayed in television programming. A retired military leader interviewed for the film says, "The portrayal of torture in popular culture is having a significant impact on how interrogations are conducted in the field. U.S. soldiers are imitating the techniques they have seen on television -- because they think such tactics work."

Lately it seems that three out of five offerings at the local Cineplex are tales of clever and nimble torturers and serial killers. This mass marketing of the murderer, sadist and child molester endows the deviant with a fictitious intelligence, the pretense of a rich and complex "inner life", a particularly annoying Hollywood buzzword. Such characters aren't presented as perverts, rather, they're complex geniuses, creative and tormented, ever misunderstood. It must come from the suits, who study box office returns for the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" franchise. Whereas actresses frequently complain that the only roles available are for killers or tarts, actors bemoan the dearth of "serious" movies amid piles of scripts about guys shooting off guns. They'll play the killer if they have to, it's work.

There is lots of evidence that so-called pop culture has a very heady influence on people's mindsets in general, especially people without a strong "counter-influence" such as family or cultural values that override these influences. And in the military, the military culture itself overrides, or can easily override, one's previous cultural values.

I know of several people in the military who have emerged deeply changed and affected by their experience, and not in good ways. They returned alienated from friends and family, introverted, depressed, moody, unstable, uncommunicative, obsessed with security or weapons, or even prone to addictions. Opening the door to torture added to the stress of fighting a confusing and unclear war in culturally alien territory where any value system seems not to apply... all this can lead to abuse. It's the absolute wrong way to go.

In the Bush years torture images migrated from Hollywood to fashion and advertising. ...In 2007 a fashion blog proclaimed; "Torture is the New Black", when John Galliano's 2007 runway show male models wore hoods, nooses, handcuffs, and had their bodies painted with gashes, cuts and cigarette burns. Then Italian Vogue ran 30 pages of color photographs by Steven Meisel, depicting models elegantly clad in Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and more, being interrogated and beaten by policemen with clubs, knives, guns and attack dogs. Many fashion writers embraced "Torture Chic". Joanna Bourke, a professor at Birkbeck College, observed that the images served "the interests of the politics of torture and abuse. There is a vicarious satisfaction in viewing these depictions of cruelty in the interests of national security.'

Interests of national security?? Vicarious satisfaction? What security is that, exactly? And what about when the tables are turned? Did anyone ever tell these people that the tables always are turned, sooner or later?

According to Human Rights First:

U.S. interrogators say that not only is torture illegal and immoral, it is also ineffective as an interrogation tactic – because it is unreliable. Moreover, evidence gained through torture is inadmissible in court – and therefore unusable for prosecuting alleged terrorists or criminals.

Torture, as it is performed by American characters on television, regularly produces reliable information – and quite quickly. When writing about interrogation, writers might consider creating scenes that more accurately mirror reality: showing that torture often incapacitates suspects (or kills them); that innocent people are often mistakenly tortured; or that victims of torture provide false information. On television today, torture has few consequences for the torturer and the tortured ... it would be difficult, if not impossible, for those who torture or are tortured to resume normal life quickly as they do on television.

So torture is not helpful to security, not helpful to law enforcement, achieves nothing militarily, does not do anything except destroy the image of America in the greater public around the world. It makes America look like the villain, the cruel taskmaster, the bad guy. And in effect, by engaging in torture, that may actually be the case. America is acting as a rogue nation in defying the Geneva Conventions it originally espoused.

Obama is absolutely right in opposing torture and undoing the unimaginable damage done by Bush and the Republican neocon right by allowing and encouraging it. Let's hope that popular culture will catch up with Obama in standing tall for reason, compassion, human rights, science, the Constitution, taking action to deal with challenges, and being upfront and direct to the American public, as well as working with diplomacy before guns.

GOP: The Party of Fear, Loathing, and Mongering

For a few magnificent moments, America seemed awash in good vibes, sunlit vistas, brotherly-sisterly love, dreams being fulfilledk ancient rivalries turning to handshakes, other cheeks being turned, kisses and hugs being given, earth looking forward to peace and change, and peace on a well-balanced albeit agonizingly slow fall towards earth. It was the Obama Moment. The greatest ushering-in of any Presidential Era in living, maybe even historical, memory. But now...

They're back. The Republicans, that is. And with them, fear, fear-mongering, loathing, loathing-mongering, orneriness, orneriness-mongering, backtracking and backtrack-mongering. They stand as one, united, to be something, anything, as long as it represents the Opposers, The Id, Defiance, Rebellion, The Contrarian, and in this case, just saying "NO!" to bailing out an economy they and their cohorts, Bushies all, trashed. They trashed the economy with their voodoo Reaganomics on megalying speed, and now that it's tanking, they say, to the last man and woman, "No Safety Net!"

Why? Because the Republicans have adopted the oxymoronic slogan "Country First, Government Last." Reagan succeeded to instill the Republican Collective Consciousness with this idea that Government=Evil, aka Big Government=Big Evil. Which makes one wonder why Republicans would ever elect one of their own to such a cabal as "Government" in order to actually run it? If it is evil, what does that say about Reagan? He was a part of what? A fishing expedition?

Ah, no, good Republicans enter government in order to supposedly "minimize" it or get rid of it. At least that's the line. The reality is the diametrical opposite. Under Republican leadership, the government has grown so big neither we, nor the combined wealth of the planet, can afford it. Of course, we're not talking about social programs. We're talking about that giant sitting Holy Bear called the Pentagon. And don't forget Homeland Security. IN other words, government has been slowly replaced by military and police functions, which are invading every aspect of life - under Republican leadership, of course. So bailing out an economy that tanked over lies and wars and more lies and more wars and more Ponzi schemes and more lies to coverup the Ponzi schemes that benefit the rich and trash the non-rich --- correcting their mistakes and rehabilitating America from the robbery, waste and con job pulled by Republican leadership and Republican government, that's not on their job description.

In short, Republicans don't do repairs. They only do destruction. So there they are, saying "no" to Obama's gigantic stimulus plan at a time when everyone who knows anything says we must take action fast, and quibbling about minutiae while ignoring their own man-eating Pentagon Bear that we can no longer afford to feed but he's devouring everything in sight anyway. There they are, representing their constituents by guaranteeing they won't find jobs any time soon in the civilian sector. There they are, counting on the Pentagon to do some hiring. Problem is, the Pentagon requires one thing they don't like to talk about - GARGANTUAN, HUGE GOVERNMENT SPENDING. And another thing: WAR. Without war, what's the point? So they want wars to get government spending to keep jobs to do what? What economy?

It seems the whole purpose of the Republican Party is to make government collapse so the people can have what they really want, a choice between anarchy (Individual Choice!) and a police state (Keep America Safe!). They do this by undercutting and deriding the whole purpose of government and the Constitution they are supposedly sworn on Bibles to uphold.

Their modus operandi is twofold:

1. Convince the public that they must be always afraid and "vigilant".

2. Show real or imagined enemies that we've got balls by acting as kickass mean and nasty as possible. At least by refusing things. Especially things that sound good. Things that sound compassionate (bleeding heart! ick!) should be refused. Things that sound peaceful (surrender!) should be refused. Things that sound helpful (liberal wimps!) should be refused. Things that relate to education or health care (socialism!) should be refused.

The GOP is the party of refusal. Why should anyone expect anything else? Let's just hope there's a post-mortem on this. Maybe some real Conservatives will come out of the GOP's well-deserved demise and do something to actually conserve things - like fiscal conservatives trying to rein in the excesses of the rich, like environmental conservatives trying to rein in excesses of the polluters, or even pro-life conservatives trying to rein in excesses of the killing machines let loose by neocons. Now that's a conservatism we can work with. Together, for a long time, and a genuine future. But where is it? Where are the conservatives? Locked up in the lies and betrayals of the GOP.

Time to say to the GOP, RIP.

How Immigration Stimulates Economy: Case In Point

This article gives a case where immigrants literally saved a town in Maine - by stimulating their economy. How?

Barely a decade ago, Lewiston, Maine, was dying. The once bustling mill town's population had been shrinking since the 1970s; most jobs had vanished long before, and residents (those who hadn't already fled) called the decaying center of town "the combat zone." That was before a family of Somali refugees discovered Lewiston in 2001 and began spreading the word to immigrant friends and relatives that housing was cheap and it looked like a good place to build new lives and raise children in peace. Since then, the place has been transformed. Per capita income has soared, and crime rates have dropped. In 2004, Inc. magazine named Lewiston one of the best places to do business in America, and in 2007, it was named an "All-America City" by the National Civic League, the first time any town in Maine had received that honor in roughly 40 years. "No one could have dreamed this," says Chip Morrison, the local Chamber of Commerce president. "Not even me, and I'm an optimist."

It's not just that Maine has a low birth rate. Why does it have a low birth rate? Lack of diversity. So it's not just people, but people of diverse backgrounds, that stimulates the economy. Think Obama. Think immigration, too.

Commerce isn't all the Somalis are reshaping. Maine has America's highest median age and the lowest percentage of residents under 18. Throughout the 1990s, the state's population of 20- to 30-year-olds fell an average of 3,000 a year. Demographers predict that by 2030, the state will have only two workers for each retiree. "In many small Maine towns they're looking at having to close schools for lack of schoolchildren," says State Economist Catherine Reilly. "It will snowball. Right now we're seeing the difficulty of keeping some schools open; in 10 or 15 years that's going to be the difficulty of businesses finding workers." The same ominous trend is seen in other states with similarly homogenous demographics and low numbers of foreign-born residents—states like Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. Reilly adds: "If you told a demographer just our racial composition, they would be able to guess that we're an old state with a low birthrate."

Want to do something really patriotic, good for America? Encourage immigration.

Take that, Lou Dobbs!

Taxpayers Alert: Meet the Madoff Pentagon, A Money-Burning Machine

Think of the Pentagon, and you think of security, right? Think again. The Pentagon may just be the U.S. taxpayers' Bernie Madoff. It's the biggest drag on the economy, and the reason is not because we need what it burns money on. The reason is not that the "world is a dangerous place" and we need "protection", and protection costs what it costs. We need what the Pentagon is paying our lifeblood and treasure on less than we need a huge Ponzi scheme to keep our economy from totally tanking. Chalmers Johnson at Tomdispatch really turned the world inside-out on this one.

Worried about pork-barrel spending? Maybe you should worry about the defense budget.

Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

A trillion a year? On what? Oh, those wonderful, wonderful wars and their flying machines.

It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.

Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan -- insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.

That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."

So we've got an economy about to go over a cliff, and yet we spend billions on weapons systems that we will never use, to satisfy the fantasies of admirals and generals and other military-related beneficiaries? Well...yes.

So when we talk about "stimulating" the economy, maybe we should talk about cutting spending and cutting pork. Not birth control-type nickel-&-dime pork. Big, lousy, wasteful, useless, dead-weight, sink-the-national-treasury Pentagon pork.

It has nothing to do with security, but everything to do with procurement and the good ol' boy system. Oh, and PR. Lots of lies and PR. Is that really "conservative"? Sounds very very liberal to me - as in "use liberally".

What do people struggling to make ends meet need with a 6.2-billion dollar aircraft carrier designed to fight the Cold War? It was probably commissioned, like the one named in 2009 for Bush I, to pat some old political hack/warrior on the back with his outdated dream. And we put people in prison for not paying a few thousand in self-employment taxes (which are required for anyone with over $400 in income - like he can afford to pay taxes on $400! - talk about preference for the big corporation!).

It's time to think twice about those "guaranteed" Pentagon budgets, to think twice when you think that paying for anything labeled "military" means you'll be more secure. The opposite is true. By paying for way overpriced, outdated equipment, we are sinking the whole country ... and none of those fancy flying machines, etc., will be able to lift one square mile of us out of that sinkhole.

Taxpayers, unite! Screw the Pentagon, and tell your Congresspeople they'll have to think before they spend.