Iraq death spurs push for Humvee armor
In the days before his death, Private First Class John D. Hart called his father to tell him how unsafe he felt riding around Iraq in a Humvee that lacked bulletproof shielding or even metal doors.
It would be the last conversation Brian T. Hart would have with his 20-year-old son. On Oct. 18 near Kirkuk, Saddam Hussein loyalists ambushed his son's Army convoy, killing two. A hail of bullets felled the Bedford High School graduate while he fought from his Humvee.
"When he died, all his ammunition had been spent," the unit commander wrote in a letter to Hart's parents. "Your son gave everything he had for the safety of others. . . . As a commander, I struggle to find words that adequately capture the depth to which we honor Private First Class Hart."
For Brian Hart, a 44-year-old Bedford businessman, his only son's last words have come to haunt him, especially after learning that other families who lost loved ones in Humvee attacks had complained to the Pentagon about the lack of armor in vehicles.
In fact, an average sport utility vehicle found on US roads provides more protection than Hart's Humvee. "He would have been better off in a Toyota Highlander," the father said.
The GOP wants government off our backs, but they want to take over the job of teaching your kids about sex.
The GOP accuses the Democrats of not supporting our troops, yet shoves them into war with no protection from attacks.
The GOP claims to have a more diverse cabinet, but all the brains are exactly the same.
The GOP claims to have the morality franchise, yet corporate crime, murder, military deaths, voter fraud and abortions have increased dramatically under their rule.
The GOP claims to be the party to trust with homeland security, but they can't find anyone without a rap sheet to run that department.
The GOP claims to be fiscally conservative, but they've plowed through a huge surplus, ran it into a record deficit and they still want to borrow to pay for things like Social Security and a historically inept war.
The GOP claims to be compassionate, but their idea of a helping hand is to recruit more poor and elderly people into fighting that inept war.
Ready to take it to the streets yet? If not - when?
MORE ON EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION....As Matt says, although tax and accounting issues are worth looking at, the real cause of runaway CEO compensation is widespread corruption in the corporate governance sphere. CEO salaries are essentially set by other CEOs and a small coterie of "compensation consultants," all of whom are motivated to set each other's salaries as high as possible so that in turn their own salaries will — someday — be set even higher. How many other employees have a sweet deal like that?
So how do they get away with it? First, by convincing everyone that this is a reasonable statement: "If we want a good CEO, we have to pay above the average." Simple arithmetic tells you that as long as everyone believes this, executive salaries will spiral upward endlessly.
Second, by making it hard to figure out how much their executives are paid in the first place. Stock options, perks, lucrative pension plans, and so forth are hard to value, and thus prevent overpaid CEOs from seeming overpaid until it's too late.
And third, by putting up roadblocks that make it difficult for dissident shareholders to complain about all this. In most companies, shares are so widely dispersed that very few people have a strong enough interest in this stuff to make a fuss. And when someone does manage to make a fuss, most corporations have rules that make it all but impossible to gather enough votes to make a difference.
Of course, I guess there are other possibilities. Price levels are controlled by supply and demand, and perhaps there's a shortage of talented CEOs these days. Or perhaps demand is higher. Or maybe companies are better run than they used to be.
If any of those things were true, it would mean rising CEO compensation is just evidence of the market at work. As it turns out, though, none of them are.
CEOs aren't paid astronomical salaries because of market forces. They're paid astronomical salaries because they can get away with it. That's all.
—Kevin Drum 6:14 PM PermalinkSA to allow same-sex marriage2 December 2005
South Africa is set to become the fifth country in the world, and the first in Africa, to allow legal marriages between same-sex couples, following a Constitutional Court judgment on Thursday.
Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and Canada allow same-sex marriages, as does the US state of Massachusetts.
In his last piece for NiemanWatchdog.org, retired Gen. William Odom argued that all the terrible things the Bush administration says would happen if we pulled our troops out of Iraq are happening already. In a new postscript, Odom writes that the converse is true as well: Bush says he wants to bring democracy and stability to the greater Middle East -- but in fact the only way to achieve that goal is to get out of Iraq now.
Seriously, I don't blame Bush for this. It was to be expected. I blame Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, who were supposed to protect the taxpayers from Bush's well-known efforts to pilfer our country.
Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.
But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.
Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.
Today, SCOTUS declined to review an Appeals Court decision that ruled that Rummy and 10 other DOD officials are immune from suit for torture.
The Court’s denial of review of Rasul, et al., v. Myers, et al. (09-227) leaves intact a federal appeals court ruling that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ten military officers are legally immune to claims of torture and religious bias against inmates who were at Guantanamo but have since been released. The Obama Administration had urged the Court not to hear the case, saying that, whatever claims the four ex-detainees were now making, they had no legal basis for those challenges at the time they were at the U.S. military prison in Cuba — that is, between January 2002 and March 2004.
The D.C. Circuit Court had ruled in favor of immunity, and in doing so avoided a repeat of its earlier decision — vacated by the Supreme Court — that Guantanamo prisoners had no constitutional rights. The Justices had ordered reconsideration of that conclusion. Instead of ruling anew on the legal challenges, the Circuit Court opted for an immunity finding. The Supreme Court’s denial of review does not stand as a precedent on that point, or on the substance of the ex-prisoners’ challenges.
As Adam Serwer points out, SCOTUS’ refusal to review the immunity ruling once again deprives the American justice system of a definitive ruling that torture is wrong.
Selzer & Company for Bloomberg, 12/4-7, 1,000 adults. MoE 3.1%.
Which of the following do you see as the most important issue facing the country right now? (Read list. Rotate.) Sorted.
50 Unemployment and jobs
25 The federal deficit and government spending
9 Health care
7 The war in Afghanistan
5 Immigration
1 Other (VOL) (specify:)
3 Not sure
In a way it's kind of refreshing. Perhaps all the incoming GOP leadership will be as forthright about their goals for the 112th Congress. First, John Boehner rejects the word and reality of "compromise." And now, nine-term Alabama Rep. Spencer Bachus, who takes over as chair of the House Financial Services Committee next month, has a message for us, too:
Bachus, in an interview Wednesday night, said he brings a "main street" perspective to the committee, as opposed to Wall Street.
"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks," he said.
The fox in the henhouse announces he's a fox. More of that, please.
