It’s funny – I actually haven’t heard a lot of these, but that’s likely because they’re circulating around the echo chamber of the right-wing blogosphere and/or Fox News. I don’t think any rational person holds any of these beliefs seriously, although I think there are definitely enough irrational people out there that they need to be clearly debunked:

1. President Obama did not speak publicly swiftly enough. In fact, Bush was silent for 9 days after the shoe bomber attack in 2001.

2. Bush would have tried Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant. Well, he tried Richard Reid the shoe bomber in civilian courts.

3. Yemen is the issue. In fact, Yemen’s government is actively bombing al-Qaeda cells, and complains that the US never shared its info on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with Sanaa.

4. A US war on al-Qaeda in Yemen is next. This way of thinking is foolish. Yemen is not a cake walk, folks.

Col. Pat Lang, former Defense Intelligence Agrency head for the Middle East, is an old Yemen hand and delivers a blunt warning against the US getting militarily involved there.

I have been to Yemen twice, before and after unification, and have traveled outside Sanaa. I’ve spoken publicly in Arabic in front of big audiences and interacted with Zaidis, Salafis, Sufis. It is an extremely complicated society with multiple ecological zones. It is an arid, tribal (segmentary-lineage) system. Most of the scholars I know who work on Yemen have been kidnapped by tribes or thrown in jail by the government at least once. People are either Arab nationalists or Muslim ones. They have very little use for outsiders. If the US tried to establish a big presence there, they would make the Iraqi resistance look half-hearted and weak-kneed.

Juan Cole, writing for ReaderSupportedNews, notes that he’s heard all of these on television from a couple of lawmakers, including people like Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Sen. Joe Lieberman. Now frankly, I don’t expect much more from someone like Hoekstra, but Lieberman just continues to show his true colors day after day, doesn’t he? At this rate, I’m almost glad Kerry didn’t win so we didn’t have to have Lieberman as a Vice President.

[ Top Republican Myths About the Crotch Bomber Affair ]
Source: Reader Supported News

Remember the “Scooter” Libby case back when Bush was still President? The one where the White House essentially used its office to defame a very vocal voice against the war in Iraq and then outed his wife (Valerie Plame) as a undercover CIA officer? Yeah – when that federal investigation was ongoing, numerous emails were subpeonaed from the White House in order to determine if anyone in the White House was using their office or status to break the law by defaming a public official and outing a CIA officer.

At the time, we were told that all of the messages that the investigation was looking for were “missing,” and otherwise unaccounted for. A couple of years go by, and what we learn is that the emails weren’t missing at all – the Bush Administration simply never went looking for them:

Between late 2005 and January 2006, the Bush administration tried to recover “lost” emails from staffers who worked in the Office of the Vice President (OVP), an effort centered on a critical week – October 1 through October 6, 2003. That same week the Justice Department announced it was investigating the unauthorized leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA status.

But one name was missing from the list of 70 individuals whose email accounts White House technicians searched in an attempt to recover and restore missing emails: I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

According to documents obtained by government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), it appears that technicians in the Office of Administration did not attempt to recover from Libby’s account emails he either sent or received during the week of October 1 to October 6, 2003. That was a week when emails from the Office of the Vice President were missing for entire days in some instances and were unusually low in others.

It was also during this time that Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel, enjoined all White House staff members to turn over emails or other documents pertaining to Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had angered the White House by criticizing Bush’s case for invading Iraq. The directive came 12 hours after senior Bush White House officials had been told of the pending Justice Department investigation.

Now I’m more than a little familiar with enterprise IT, and the fact that one person’s e-mails were conveniently “missing” is just as suspicious as it sounds. Any off the shelf archiving product that can be run on any mail server would have caught these messages and backed them up either to archive, tape, or some other disk just like everyone else’s mail. But that’s the point – there’s a far more malicious reason why Libby’s mail went “missing,” they just never looked for it:

The search of individual email accounts was conducted after an internal investigation by officials in the Office of Administration concluded that emails from the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney between September 30, 2003 and October 6, 2003 were lost and unrecoverable.

The absence of Libby’s name on the list of individuals whose emails technicians were trying to recover from the Office of the Vice President raises questions as to whether the Bush administration fully cooperated with the criminal investigation into the leak probe, lead by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who had subpoenaed White House emails in January 2004.

In an interview, Anne Weismann, chief counsel of CREW, said she believes the documents show that “for unexplained reasons Scooter Libby’s mailbox was not searched while the mailboxes of 70 OVP employees were searched.”

“It is simply incomprehensible that Scooter Libby’s mailbox was not searched, yet that is what the documents suggest,” she said.

The rest of the story goes into some more technical detail around how it could possibly be that this one user’s mailbox wasn’t archived (as in, it’s not really possible) and how suspicious this must have been to the investigators but they could possibly have been running up against delays and lack of cooperation from the White House’s staff at the time. It’s a worthwhile read, especially if you have any interest or background in IT.

[ Documents Suggest Bush White House Failed to Search for Libby's "Missing" Emails Subpoenaed in CIA Leak Probe ]
Source: TruthOut

Remember just a year or so ago, when people were dancing in the streets because George W Bush wouldn’t be their president anymore? When people were so thrilled that the Republicans were out of office that they couldn’t help but celebrate the future?

Sure, some of that euphoria has worn off, and the honeymoon is definitely over with President Obama, but if you ask anyone if they’d rather go back to the civil-liberties-stealing, war-funding, fear-mongering, terrorists-blaming days of a government run and managed by the Republicans, most Americans would visibly shudder in fear. Why? Because even though things aren’t perfect today and there are serious hardships at hand, people still feel like today is a better day than yesterday.

But what if the Republicans were still in control? Let’s take a look at what kinds of “change” we probably would have to deal with if they were still in power. Here are some of my favorites from a roundup at Alternet:

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.

5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, thus entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are used in every country that has education outcomes superior to our own.

6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise, compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted, backward nations where thousands of already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning females perish because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive rights.

7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.

8 ) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the Constitution of the United States…all under the misused rubric of “national security.”

Those are some good ones, but here are some shiners:

14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals…if only they could.

15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

[ 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance ]
Source: Alternet

The title isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not false. It’s absolutely true. 30 senators, mostly White, Republican, men, voted to protect corporations “rights” and financial interests rather than women from being gang raped. The measure passed regardless, and as much as the senators who voted this way can whine about how it was an amendment attached to a defense authorization bill (which frankly, I think it absolutely should have been because it dealt specifically with defense contractors and their legal accountability – if you’re going to authorize the money to pay for them, you should be able to make the rules that police them) but we all know that these men wouldn’t have voted for the bill even if it were stand-alone and made it through hours upon hours of committee and floor debate.

So then, here’s the scoop, lifted from MyDD.com:

It is stunning that 30 Republican members of the United States Senate would vote to protect a corporation, in this case Halliburton/KBR, over a woman who was gang raped. The details from Think Progress:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Offering Ms. Jones legal relief was Senator Al Franken of Minnesota who offered an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

Seems simple enough. And yet, to GOP Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama allowing victims of sexual assault a day in court is tantamount to a “political attack” at Halliburton. That 29 others, all men, chose to join him in opposing the Franken amendment is simply mind-boggling.

…

In the debate, Senator Sessions maintained that Franken’s amendment overreached into the private sector and suggested that it violated the due process clause of the Constitution.

To which, Senator Franken fired back quoting the Constitution. “Article 1 Section 8 of our Constitution gives Congress the right to spend money for the welfare of our citizens. Because of this, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, ‘Congress may attach conditions on the receipt of federal funds and has repeatedly employed that power to further broad policy objectives,’” Franken said. “That is why Congress could pass laws cutting off highway funds to states that didn’t raise their drinking age to 21. That’s why this whole bill [the Defense Appropriations bill] is full of limitations on contractors — what bonuses they can give and what kind of health care they can offer. The spending power is a broad power and my amendment is well within it.”

God I love it when Senator Franken quotes the Constitution. Not every Republican was so clueless. Ten voted for the Franken amendment including the GOP’s female contingent of Senators (Snowe, Collins, Hutchinson and Murkowski).

“We need to put assurances into the law that those kind of instances [the Jamie Leigh Jones case] are not capable of being repeated,” said Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted in favor of Franken’s amendment. “I want to make sure that a woman, any individual who is a victim of a terrible act, knows that they have got protections.”

Murkowski said that she considered the arguments that Sessions made about the amendment being too expansive before she decided to vote for the legislation.

“I looked at it,” said Murkowski. “And, I tell you, you look at some of the things we do and you have to say, ‘OK, you have a specific instance we’re trying to address and does this go above and beyond?’ But when you have to err on the side of protecting an individual, I erred on the side of greater generosity, I guess.”

Republican Sen. George LeMieux of Florida echoed some of Murkowski’s sentiments.

“I can’t see in any circumstance that a woman who was a victim of sexual assault shouldn’t have her right to go to court,” LeMieux said. “So, that is why I voted for it.”

Although Franken chatted up LeMieux on the Senate floor before the vote, LeMieux said that he had already made his decision. But, LeMieux added, Franken’s talk didn’t hurt.

“I had decided to vote for it before I came here, but I was happy to hear his argument for it,” LeMieux said. “He did what a senator should do, which was he was working it. He was working for his amendment.” I’ll add, Al Franken is everything a United States Senator should be.

As for Jamie Leigh Jones, she was nothing but elated and thankful. “It means the world to me,” Jones said of the amendment’s passage. “It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it.”

And for the GOP, it is a new low.

Way to lay the constitutional smackdown, Franken. I mean wow – that’s amazing.

And because I didn’t want to let the list go by and get buried in the text of the article, let’s lay it out for you right here.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the 30 men who voted against this amendment, who would rather a woman be gang raped and not be able to face her accusers or the company that allowed it to happen and protected the people involved, than at least let her have her day in court:

Here are those who vote to protect a corporation over a victim of rape:

Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)

Remember them when you head to the polls.

[ 30 GOP Senators Vote to Defend Gang Rape ]
Source: MyDD.com

Well it finally comes out, doesn’t it? The fact that we all essentially predicted for years and assumed was the case has finally come to light, and I somehow highly doubt that people within the Bush Administration will let this slide, but considering the source, I think we’re all but pretty solid on its validity:

Former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is releasing a book on September 1 titled, The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege … And How We Can Be Safe Again. U.S. News’ Paul Bedard reports that, in the book, Ridge reveals that he considered resigning because he was urged to issue a politically-motivated security alert on the eve of Bush’s re-election:

Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Like many other observers, I have to admit, I’m not terribly surprised by this announcement. But I am impressed who the admission came from – the man at the top during the time. Sad, but true, and par for the course for the Bush Administration. Remember how far we’ve come when you’re nitpicking at Obama for little things – I’m not saying don’t nitpick, I’m not saying don’t call Obama out for the things he needs to be called out on, but just take a moment, fellow progressives, to understand exactly how far we’ve come.

[ Bush White House Pushed to Raise Terror Alerts on Eve of Re-election: Tom Ridge ]

On today, the day after September 11th, it’s worth pointing out how some people in power took advantage of a tragic moment that will live forever in the minds and hearts of Americans and in American history as an opportunity to seize power and inject the American people with a healthy dose of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

The more frightened the American people were, the more they could keep us controlled, and slowly but surely we’re breaking out of that shell. Why? We’re coming to terms with the failures of the people who have propagated these lies, and we’re looking back in time and rethinking our frightened, knee-jerk reactions to the fear they’ve fostered. With that in mind, here’s a few myths about national security that have been repeated so often in the media that you’ve likely heard them all before.

Some of the highlights? The myth that Islamofaacism is our greatest national security threat, the myth that we have to give up some civil liberties in times of war to keep us safe, the myth that we’re “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” one that makes me particularly sick, and the myth that our current strategy must be working because there hasn’t been another attack.

[ Ten Conservative Myths about National Security ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

Good old John McCain. In some ways, I wish the attacks against him hadn’t started so early this campaign season, but frankly, he’s making it entirely too easy to call him out for his language and his policies.

If everyone were listening, this week should have been the week that all but ended his chances at being President, but not everyone was listening, I’m afraid, which is why these 10 gaffes bear repeating, even if the author at Alternet tends to overuse the “flip-flop” label (not entirely unjustified though, it was the right that invented the term, it’s only fair they be called out when their representatives do the same):

1. McCain unambiguously called Social Security “an absolute disgrace.”

2. McCain’s top economic policy adviser calls Americans a bunch of “whiners” for being worried about the slumping economy.

3. Iraqi leaders call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, McCain gets caught in a bizarre denial and flip flop.

4. McCain’s economic plan to cut the deficit has no details and is simply not believable.

5. McCain’s deficit plan includes bringing the troops home represents a major Iraq flip-flop.

6. McCain campaign misled about economists support. (McCain claimed that “economists” supported his economic plan, and even included a letter signed by 300 of them…trouble was the economists that “signed” were signing on to something entirely different- NOT McCain’s economic plan)

7. McCain makes a joke about killing Iranians.

8. McCain denies, flatly, that he ever said that he is not an expert in economics.

9). McCain distorts his record on veterans benefits in response to a question from Vietnam Veteran, who then proceeds to call McCain out on it.

10.) McCain demonstrates he knows nothing about Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The trouble is, each one of these is incredibly salient, and hits McCain on every single point on which he believes he can stand out to Obama: the economy, the war, and national security and defense. In each instance, McCain proves that he’s not only out of touch with the American people and what they want from their government, but that he has this mad delusion that the policies of the past 8 years have been remotely successful.

[ 10 McCain Gaffes from This Week That Should Have Damaged His Chances ]
Source: Alternet

From the “How’s This for Ironic” Department, Senator John McCain decides that torture isn’t really that bad after all, apparently. And I think that the collective memories of the American people are short. I’m surprised at him! From ThinkProgress:

Today, the Senate brought the Intelligence Authorization Bill to the floor, which contained a provision from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) establishing one interrogation standard across the government. The bill requires the intelligence community to abide by the same standards as articulated in the Army Field Manual and bans waterboarding.

Just hours ago, the Senate voted in favor of the bill, 51-45.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a former prisoner of war, has spoken strongly in favor of implementing the Army Field Manual standard. When confronted today with the decision of whether to stick with his conscience or cave to the right wing, McCain chose to ditch his principles and instead vote to preserve waterboardin

I do adore their revival of a line that was used against Senator Kerry during his 2004 Presidential campaign by the swiftboaters though: He was against waterboarding before he was for it.

It’s funny because it’s true.

[ Maverick Fails The Test: McCain Votes Against Waterboarding Ban ]
Source: Think Progress

One thing that I’m consistently appalled at is how insistent the Administration is when they believe we’re under “threat” and how the Congress should give them as much money as they want for whatever tasks they choose without asking why, and how the American people should be prepared to give up whatever freedoms and rights the government sees fit to take from us to protect us from a mysterious and ever-lurking threat using means and results that we aren’t allowed to know, and specifically aren’t allowed to hold them accountable for.

So while the Administration claims that we’re under constant and never-ending threat, even though the Administration has never seen fit to properly embrace the findings of the 9/11 Commission, and never seen fit to properly provide federal funding to state and city-level first responders like police and firefighters, and even though the Administration hasn’t even seen fit to properly fund its own security and screening programs – screening cargo at American ports, screening all luggage on flights, updated scanning technology that will speed airport lines and enhance security, or even properly train federal security staff like the TSA, even though all of that is indisputably true, the Administration is cutting anti-terror funds across the board. Likely to make room for what they call the “front-line” on the war on terror – a manufactured conflict of their own making. Namely, the war in Iraq. Not even the war in Afghanistan, which so severely needs American support and redoubled efforts but is sadly ignored thanks to the quagmire just to the west, over the other big player in the area (and a whole other topic), Iran.

The Bush administration intends to slash counterterrorism funding for police, firefighters and rescue departments across the country by more than half next year, according to budget documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The Homeland Security Department has given $23 billion to states and local communities to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks, but the administration is not convinced that the money has been well spent and thinks the nation’s highest-risk cities have largely satisfied their security needs.

The department wanted to provide $3.2 billion to help states and cities protect against terrorist attacks in 2009, but the White House said it would ask Congress for less than half — $1.4 billion, according to a Nov. 26 document.

The plan calls outright elimination of programs for port security, transit security, and local emergency management operations in the next budget year. This is President Bush’s last budget, and the new administration would have to live with the funding decisions between Jan. 20 and Sept. 30, 2009.

Read it and weep America. Especially those in major American cities – which by and large, even though they’re the largest terrorist targets are usually hotbeds of the Administration’s political opposition – your funding is going to dry up instantly, and the programs that were designed to protect you will do so as well. And those expansions and additional funding that your police and fire departments desperately needed in order to complete their security planning and risk analysis after September 11th? Say goodbye to those as well.

The Administration will probably try to say that they want to spread out the funding to other potential targets, but I don’t buy that for a second. They said they would look into funding security around critical infrastructure elements like bridges, power plants, refineries, and water-treatment facilities, but they’ve done no such thing and it’s looking like that task – like all of the others – will fall to the states, which will undoubtedly have to raise taxes to support security planning that the federal government should really do (think of it – a patchwork security plan depending on what city or state you live in). If it’s not the responsibility of the federal government to protect us, whose is it?

Instead, the administration will likely funnel more money into the Pentagon towards cold-war era military projects like the Osprey and the scientifically-proven-not-to-work missile defense program that they’re trying to provoke a conflict with Russia over.

The proposal to drastically cut Homeland Security grants is at odds with some of the administration’s own policies. For example, the White House recently promised continued funding for state and regional intelligence “fusion centers” — information-sharing centers the administration deems critical to preventing another terrorist attack. Cutting the grants would limit money available for the centers.

The White House’s plan to eliminate the port, transit and other grants, which are popular with state and local officials, would not go into effect until Sept. 30, 2008. Congress is unlikely to support the cuts and will ultimately decide the fate of the programs and the funding levels when it hashes out the department’s 2009 budget next year.

The White House routinely seeks to cut the budget requests of federal departments, but the cuts proposed for 2009 Homeland Security grants are far deeper than the norm. Congress has yet to approve the department’s 2008 plan.

“This budget proposal is dead on arrival,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “This administration runs around the country scaring people and then when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is, they say ’sorry, the bank is closed.”’

Well said, Senator Boxer (she always knows what to say). It’s remarkable how the administration is willing to use fear to keep the American people in check, even drive us to war in a foreign country over nothing but smoke, mirrors, dust, and their word, but when it comes time to ante up, they’re not willing. Instead, they propose cuts that they know Congress won’t accept, or more importantly, accept blame for if they actually cut the funding.

To zero out essential Homeland Security programs which have more to do with protecting Americans and fighting the war on terror than much of the money spent in Iraq shows how warped and out of touch this administration’s priorities are,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat.

My thoughts exactly.

[ White House Seeks to Slash Anti-Terror Funds ]
Source: MSNBC

Whether we’re discussing fiscal responsibility or social accountability, conservatives have proven time and time again that they simply can’t count. It’s not about tallying numbers and coming up with incorrect figures, it’s about fudging statistics when the numbers disagree with their perspectives, it’s about taking opt-in surveys and parading them as independent studies until someone comes along and debunks it, it’s about claiming there’s plenty of money in the tax coffers when it comes to bombing children and putting off diplomacy and accountability but claiming the coffers are empty and we suddenly need to control spending when it comes to giving children health care and protecting children from lead-covered toys being shipped in from sweatshops abroad. When it comes to the right side of the aisle, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and they like it that way – gives them a kind of implausible deniability.

There are dozens of examples of this in the war in Iraq, from the way veterans are treated when they return home and the near squalid conditions that many of them were subjected to (the lucky ones who were even granted care – others have been booted from the service entirely for no other reason than suffering PTSD under the guise of having ‘personality disorders), but looking past the fact that our brave men and women aren’t getting the support and care they need and deserve from the military when they get back, we can see something more troubling: veteran suicides. The trend has manifested itself as an ugly number in recent months, and conservatives, typical to form, don’t think there’s a problem:

CBS news wanted to learn more about the problem of suicide among returning Iraq veterans. Here, first, is what they learned:

[I]t turns out little information exists about how widespread suicides are among these who have served in the military. There have been some studies, but no one has ever counted the numbers nationwide.

“Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,” Bowman said.

Why do the families think that is?

“Because they don’t want the true numbers of casualties to really be known,” Lucey said.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

“If you’re just looking at the overall number of veterans themselves who’ve committed suicide, we have not been able to get the numbers,” Murray said.

So CBS went looking itself. In return, they—and the American people—received a slap in the face. They filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense for suicide numbers for the last dozen years:

Four months later, they sent CBS News a document, showing that between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers.

CBS News went to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Dr. Ira Katz is head of mental health….

Why hasn’t the VA done a national study seeking national data on how many veterans have committed suicide in this country?

“That research is ongoing,” he said.

The “research is ongoing,” and the check is in the mail.

That sounds about right to me.

[ Conservatives Can't Count ]
Source: TomPaine.com