June 7, 2014

Third Way president started the generation divide in the 90s. Greedy seniors.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/7856

Dear Grandma and Grandpa:

We write to ask for your help. We're in a financial mess, and unless everyone in our family gets together to fix the problem, we're heading for "economic and fiscal catastrophe." That's not a phrase we picked up on MTV-it's from a recent U.S. government report on the budget deficit.

This year alone America's budget deficit will be nearly $300 billion, which means we're spending $300 billion more than we take in. That's $300 billion on top of the $4.2 trillion debt we've already built up, enough to pay basketball star Michael Jordan's salary for almost a million and a half years.

The truth is, today's retirees get their benefits directly out of the paychecks of working Americans, the majority of whom are less affluent than those they support. True, you paid into the system. But so do we. And right now, we're paying FICA taxes at rates 20 times (inflation adjusted) what you paid as a young worker.

And there's no end in sight.

And here's the real kicker:

We are not ungrateful. We respect and value the sacrifices you've made for our country and have no desire to take money away from those in need. But our generation is in trouble. We were educated in a collapsing school system. Our incomes and skill levels are lower than any previous generation-by the year 2000 over one-third of younger Americans will be living in poverty. And we will be the first Americans to inherit a lower standard of living than our parents. We're not asking that your generation solve all our problems. And there certainly are many other programs that also must be cut to get the deficit under control. But Social Security must be considered, just like everything else in the budget.

Really. Jon Cowan is now prez of the Third Way, and he's still a jerk.

June 7, 2014

I am an older white woman, a retired teacher.

There are now two threads up going with the theme of how "older white men" and older people at DU in general are keeping the board from being progressive enough for the younger folks. Some even say that when we are all gone it will be more liberal.

Way to make seniors feel part of things.

Some of us "older" people have been here for many years. It's been 12 almost 13 for me. Some have been here since the inception in 2001. Many of us are criticized for being more liberal than our present Democratic party.

I want to say that I don't think there are many here who deserve the denigration going on in those two threads. There are always some, and I probably don't run into them because I am concentrating on other issues. Mostly education for me.

It's going to tear the forum apart if it keeps up.

Most of us older people here post about issues that are important to us, and the ones I read don't get into the race issue.

If I differ with President Obama, it is on policy matters like education and Social Security cuts.

I think there needs to be some moderation here.

June 7, 2014

VA Veterans say Shinseki not the problem. Angry "at the regional level of VA operations"

From a Daily Kos post about events in Florida following Shinseki's "resignation".

VA vets say Shinseki not the problem. Chaos reports pouring in.

Well I woke up to a mess. Calls pouring in from veterans on how this firing of Shinseki is not going to help. They are angry at the regional level of VA operations and privatizing is NOT the answer. Oversight from congressional leaders and those oh so concerned I support the troop republicans who were notified years ago are the problem.. One of many.

The no bid contracts and no contracts in Gainesville has proven chaotic !!! Who do we see about that ?????? Not Shinseki. These regional managers at local areas have lied, farmed out and covered up their shenanigans for bonuses. How was one man to know all of this. Hundreds of thousands of vets returning and local VA's IMO said, " Let's look like we have funding for staff and treatment and no one will know". Threats to whistle blowers were made !!!! At Regional levels. Congress....Listen up... The general gave orders and expected them to be carried out.. They weren't and the private hospitals they were sent to were worse than VA healthcare by a long shot.

We the people who truly care for our veterans need to demand accountability from those who are finger pointing to privatize. It is just another way to make the ACA look bad and being politicized while veterans are paying the price for their politics.

She talks about problems at the North Florida South Georgia facility for veterans. Apparently partially privatized. My own question....why does only one facility serve north Florida and south Georgia? That's unbelievable.

This NFSG VA Medical Center has the largest intake of veterans in the country.
They by Shinseki were put under investigation. Then suddenly all the calls for resingation begin...

I could make my own thoughts on that timing !!!!! 3 were suspended in management at that facility. This facility has huge problems and been known to privatize many things which make things much worse. Give the VA ..VA healthcare...properly funded and staffed, forget the private nonsense, I have seen how that works, and congressman and women, take responsibility for wars created and lack of oversight on your own watch !!!
The scapegoat has fallen on his sword, the problems continue and you want to make it worse.

June 5, 2014

Special Forces: "this is a dirty war. You don't know what is happening"

We wrote so often here about events in Afghanistan, we expressed our outrage. Now we don't very much. I can imagine a sensitive guy sent there into some of this atmosphere would have serious issues with it.

This article is from Fisk in 2002. The link is dead but I quoted the pertinent parts.

From my post:

Robert Fisk speaks of Afghanistan in 2002 and 2008.

The garden was overgrown, the roses scrawny after a day of Kandahar heat, the dust in our eyes, noses, mouth, fingernails. But the message was straightforward. "This is a secret war," the Special Forces man told me. "And this is a dirty war. You don't know what is happening." And of course, we are not supposed to know. In a "war against terror", journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely on the good guys to sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about human rights.

..."How many human rights did the mass killers of 11 September allow their victims? You are either with us or against us. Whose side are you on? But the man in the garden was worried. He was not an American. He was one of the "coalition allies", as the Americans like to call the patsies who have trotted after them into the Afghan midden. "The Americans don't know what to do here now," he went on. "Their morale in Afghanistan is going downhill – though there's no problem with the generals running things in Tampa. They're still gung-ho. But here the soldiers know things haven't gone right, that things aren't working. Even their interrogations went wrong". Brutally so, it seems.

In the early weeks of this year, the Americans raided two Afghan villages, killed 10 policemen belonging to the US-supported government of Hamid Karzai and started mistreating the survivors. American reporters – in a rare show of mouse-like courage amid the self-censorship of their usual reporting – quoted the prisoners as saying they had been beaten by US troops. According to Western officials in Kandahar, the US troops "gave the prisoners a thrashing".

Things have since changed. The American forces in Afghanistan, it seems, now leave the beatings to their Afghan allies, especially members of the so-called Afghan Special Forces, a Washington-supported group of thugs who are based in the former Khad secret police torture centre in Kabul. "It's the Afghan Special Forces who beat the Pashtun prisoners for information now – not the Americans," the Western military man told me. "But the CIA are there during the beatings, so the Americans are culpable, they let it happen." This is just how the Americans began in Vietnam. They went in squeaky clean with advisers, there were some incidents of "termination with extreme prejudice", after which it was the Vietnamese intelligence boys who did the torture.

From Robert Fisk, 2008. He wonders why in the world we think we can win in Afghanistan.

Original link from Independent UK:

Why does the US think it can win in Afghanistan?

We, of course, have been peddling this crackpot nonsense for years in south-west Asia. First of all, back in 2001, we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban. Then we marched off to win the war in Iraq. Now – with at least one suicide bombing a day and the nation carved up into mutually antagonistic sectarian enclaves – we have won the war in Iraq and are heading back to re-win the war in Afghanistan where the Taliban, so thoroughly trounced by our chaps seven years ago, have proved their moral and political bankruptcy by recapturing half the country.

It seems an age since Donald "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld declared,"A government has been put in place (in Afghanistan), and the Islamists are no more the law in Kabul. Of course, from time to time a hand grenade, a mortar explodes – but in New York and in San Francisco, victims also fall. As for me, I'm full of hope." Oddly, back in the Eighties, I heard exactly the same from a Soviet general at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan – yes, the very same Bagram airbase where the CIA lads tortured to death a few of the Afghans who escaped the earlier Russian massacres. Only "terrorist remnants" remained in the Afghan mountains, the jolly Russian general assured us. Afghan troops, along with the limited Soviet "intervention" forces, were restoring peace to democratic Afghanistan.

He's right. It did not work out very well for the Russians either. We never learn.

Fisk sounds almost angry in these two paragraphs. I don't blame him.

And Obama and McCain really think they're going to win in Afghanistan – before, I suppose, rushing their soldiers back to Iraq when the Baghdad government collapses. What the British couldn't do in the 19th century and what the Russians couldn't do at the end of the 20th century, we're going to achieve at the start of the 21 century, taking our terrible war into nuclear-armed Pakistan just for good measure. Fantasy again.

Joseph Conrad, who understood the powerlessness of powerful nations, would surely have made something of this. Yes, we have lost after we won in Afghanistan and now we will lose as we try to win again. Stuff happens.

That would be Conrad's Heart of Darkness I assume. Used to be required reading. Not sure now.

June 5, 2014

Remember Taxi to the Dark Side? The death of Dilowar?

All this was done in our names, except most of us only heard later on. I was reminded of this by a post I linked to from Daily Kos about Bergdahl

The video at the link below is still available, I believe it was from 2002 by Robert Greenwald.

It's just about 3 minutes, but the rest is available at cost I imagine.

Taxi to the Dark Side and the 2002 death of taxi-driver Dilawar in Bagram.

From Brave New Films:

Jonathan 'DJK' Kim reviews the documentary 'Taxi to the Dark Side'.

Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary 'Taxi to the Dark Side' tells the story of the Bush administration's torture policy through the case of Dilawar, an Afghani taxi driver with no ties to Al Qaeda who was tortured to death while in US custody at Bagram prison.

It's from a post of mine, so I give permission for extra paragraphs from another source.

"Oath Betrayed"..The 2002 death of Dilawar. From our early days of torture in Bagram.

Dilawar was a twenty-two-year-old farmer and taxi driver, whom American soldiers tortured to death over five days at Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan in December 2002. When the soldiers pulled a sandbag over his head, Dilawar complained that he could not breathe. He was then shackled and suspended from his arms for hours, denied water, and beaten so severely that his legs would have been amputated had he survived. When he was beaten with a baton, he would cry "Allah, Allah!," which guards found so amusing that they beat him some more just to hear him cry. During his final interrogation, soldiers told the delirious, injured prisoner that he would get medical attention after the session. Instead, he was returned to a cell and chained to the ceiling. Several hours later, a physician found him dead. By then, the interrogators had concluded that Dilawar was innocent and had simply been picked up after driving his new taxi by the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dilawar's death was predictable and preventable. The counterintelligence team was inexperienced; only two of its thirteen soldiers had ever conducted interrogations before arriving in Afghanistan. The officers knew that President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld had ruled that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Afghanistan. The interrogation policies were unclear. The base commander had ignored Red Cross protests about the treatment of prisoners, including the practice of suspending them. Army and intelligence officers who knew of the ongoing pattern of abuses at the Bagram facility did not intervene to stop them. In fact, another prisoner, Habibullah, had died at the same facility under similar circumstances six days before Dilawar's death.

An autopsy on December 13 found that Dilawar's death was a homicide, caused by extensive and severe "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease" (inexplicably, "coronary artery disease" is typed on the death certificate in a different font). The Pentagon reported that the prisoner died of natural causes. Later, a coroner testified that Dilawar's legs were "pulpified" and that the body looked as if it had been "run over by a truck." Soldiers delivered the body and an English-language death certificate to his wife and two daughters in January 2003. The family could not read English.

Send young men who are sensitive in nature into this culture of cruelty to fellow man...results won't be pretty.

June 5, 2014

Moving DKos post. Bergdahl witnessed killing of child in 2009. It was covered up.

Bowe Bergdahl: "We Don't Even Care... About Running Their Children Down in the Dirt Streets"

Bowe Bergdahl witnessed a careless manslaughter in 2009. The killing of a child.

And then that killing was covered up by the officers in his Army unit: no report to Army Inspector General, no unit prosecution, no detention or reduction in pay grade, no punishment whatsoever for the MRAP driver who crushed the child.

..Bowe Bergdahl was raised as a devout Christian, a Calvinist, a follower of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Mary, Lord of Lords, Messiah, Wonderful. As a Christian he refused to accept hateful delusions.

His last email to his parents made clear that his U.S. Army unit suffered a failure of leadership. This failure extended to support for an aggressive hatred of the local Afghan people.

It might as well have been Water Street in Manhattan in January, 2008. That's where a Wall Street CEO ran down Florence Cioffi, an office worker trying to hail a cab. He was recorded on video going 60 m.p.h. on that city street and kept going and was DUI and suffered not a whole lot more punishment than a strong talking-to. Nothing unusual.

The poster also links to a Rollings Stone article from 2011.

The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company's 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields.

Not an easy article to read..

The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution.

I am glad to see President Obama defending his decision on Bergdahl.

June 2, 2014

UNO Charter Schools charged by SEC with defrauding investors. Here's some background.

Stuff happens when charter schools are allowed to operate without regulation or oversight. It is not just happening in Chicago, it is happening in Florida and many other states.

SEC charges UNO with defrauding investors

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday announced it had charged charter school operator UNO with defrauding investors in a $37.5 million bond offering for school construction work by failing to disclose conflicts of interest.

The SEC alleged that UNO Charter School Network had failed to disclose a multimillion dollar contract with a windows company linked to one of its top executives, Miguel d'Escoto.

D'Escoto, resigned in February last year, days after the Sun-Times reported that UNO gave $8.5 million of business to companies owned by two of d’Escoto’s brothers with money from $98 million in state school-construction grant funding.

Ben Joravsky at the Chicago Reader (only the R is backwards) tells how UNO came to have such a huge presence in Chicago schools.

Charter school operator won't say how it spent your tax dollars

This is what's going on. Former CEO Juan Rangel built UNO's charter machine by cultivating mutually beneficial alliances with some of the state's most powerful politicians, including Mayors Daley and Emanuel.

In 2009, Governor Pat Quinn gave UNO a $98 million grant to build more schools. And Rangel was riding high, giddily taunting anyone—aldermen, union activists, even lowly Reader writers—who dared to criticize him.

And then in February, Mihalopoulos broke the news that UNO had funneled millions of dollars in contracts to construction companies owned by the brothers of Miguel d'Escoto, then its chief operating officer.

.... In the ensuing furor, d'Escoto stepped down and Rangel apologized repeatedly before he too finally resigned earlier this month. UNO also hired ASGK Public Strategies—David Axelrod's former firm—to handle the spin. And it brought in retired federal judge Wayne Andersen to investigate how it was that the brothers of the COO got the contracts.

Short answer: UNO gave it to them!

But the story of UNO doesn't end there. They fired a teacher when he reported that a student had been assaulted in the locker room. UNO accused him of not preventing the assault in the first place.

This fired teacher was then paid $150,000 and the case was settled quietly.

UNO charter schools paid fired teacher $150K to settle case, records show

Gym teacher David Corral made news when he filed a federal lawsuit in 2010 against the taxpayer-funded charter-school network run by the clout-heavy United Neighborhood Organization, claiming he was wrongly fired for reporting the assault of a student at UNO’s Major Hector P. Garcia M.D. High School on the Southwest Side.

UNO’s then-leader Juan Rangel said Corral deserved to be fired for failing to prevent the November 2009 locker-room incident in the first place.

But a federal judge denied UNO’s bid to dismiss the lawsuit last year. And months later, Corral got $150,000 under a sealed settlement that avoided a trial, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

....Court documents in the fired teacher’s case offer a glimpse of how UNO operated under Rangel, who was Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2011 campaign co-chairman and built the community group into a political power and charter-school force.

June 2, 2014

This is from 2006 about a private who was clueless about Iraq's history.

He just wanted to get his nose dirty.

On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my head," he said.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/764

June 1, 2014

"Babylonian Booty"..more on those like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney...

who walk around totally free and unpunished for their lies. I guess I am angered over the fact Shinseki had to resign because the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq overwhelmed the VA system. Yet those who allowed the plunder of the cradle of civilization get to criticize him.

Newsweek 2003:

Babylonian Booty

Our soldiers dug for souvenirs at the tower that was symbolized the birthplace of the biblical patriarch, Abraham.

When most Americans watched the bombing on television, they were not aware that this area was one of the 7 Wonders of the World.

It had been conquered and re-conquered a dozen or more times, by (among others) the Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Arabs, Ottomans and British, and in February 1991, yet another foreign power raised its flag over the ancient city of Ur, near the mouth of the Euphrates: the Americans. Daring the allies to bomb the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham, Iraqis had parked their jets near Ur's 4,000-year-old ziggurat, but the planes were shot up all the same. American soldiers toured the ancient tower, then got out their entrenching tools and began digging for souvenirs. A forlorn Iraqi gatekeeper ran among them, wailing protests in Arabic, until U.S. officers put a stop to the looting. Last week, when NEWSWEEK visited the site, it was virtually deserted, except for a lone guide, the son of the old gatekeeper, keeping a wary eye on the American and British warplanes streaking overhead. "Ninety-nine percent of Americans don't know the country they'll be bombing is Mesopotamia," says Dr. Huda Ammash, a high-ranking Baath Party official. "Our country has served humanity for so long, now it's up to the international community to help protect Iraq."

....In 1991, with Baghdad's iron --control over the country shattered, "nine of 13 regional museums were completely looted," says Richard Zettler, associate curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Iraqi civilians began tearing into unexcavated sites with front-end loaders, carrying away anything of value. The plunder has been turning up ever since in dealers' catalogs and at auctions around the world. Last week on eBay, sellers were offering 4,000-year-old cuneiform-tablet fragments ("Be sure to bid on this fantastic piece of history!&quot and a Sumerian silver necklace from 2500 B.C. "There are Iraqi antiquities everywhere you look," says John Malcolm Russell, an authority on the region at Massachusetts College of Art. "And they didn't all come from someone's basement. There are very few legitimate objects on the antiquities market."

This week I have remembered a blogger who posted about this in 2007 with much frustration. I was able to find his post again, but the pictures are not there anymore. I kept some of them in older posts of mine.

From the blog Cogito:

Raping History

After the first Gulf War, there were widespread reports of looting of museums, so the Pentagon created special units designed to protect cultural sites that happened to be inside a combat zone. Then came the war in Iraq.

As is now well known and documented, the Baghdad Museum, perhaps the single most important repository of material culture from the Cradle of Western Civilization, was sacked and looted. The cultural protection units who might have stopped this were not even deployed. No more than fifty men would have been enough to secure this treasure house, but it was left to the ravages of the mob. Then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld shrugged it off with his usual indifference to tragedy, and the world took a few steps closer to viewing the invasion of Iraq as the work of the forces of a militarist, imperial government ruled by a mad cowboy.

I have never heard a more apt description Rumsfeld than "mad cowboy". It would fit his boss well also.

Unfortunately, the recovery of much of the Baghdad Museum collection is just a small ray of light amidst a much larger, growing darkness for those who value our common history. For centuries, the great civilizations of Babylon and Assyria lay buried and forgotten, save for some references in biblical and classical literature. The earlier Sumerian civilization was lost completely to history, and only rediscovered within the last 150 years.

But in spite of tremendous progress during that time, thousands of archaeological sites remained unexcavated. Say what you will about the late President Hussein, he did value his country's heritage even if it was for his own self-serving ends. The point is that these sites were protected and viewed as a source of national pride. Now, a report by Robert Fisk in the British newspaper The Independent reveal that the chaos spawned by the war in Iraq has created conditions where entire cities are being raped by looters and wildcat diggers clear down to bedrock. Illegal antiquities are flooding the black markets. An artifact removed from its context without proper documentation becomes useless for archaeological purposes. The vast, unknown history of the origins of our civilization is being systematically destroyed before it can be read. It is being plundered both by opportunists, and by people who have no other means of support. Some of this may be recovered, but there will always be issues and problems we will never be able to solve because critical contextual information was lost.

He ends with saying that "War is a destroyer of cultures, but in this case the culture is that of the western world, along with a fair share of the east. I do not doubt that fairly or unfairly, future scholars and historians will mention the American invasion of Iraq in the same breath along with the Germans at Louvain, or the Romans or Muslims at Alexandria."

June 1, 2014

Too easy to forget Rumsfeld's words on the looting of Iraq. "Stuff happens".

He said so many outrageous things during the Iraq invasion. I don't think we should ever forget or let him forget his arrogance.

When we invaded Iraq in 2003 based on lies, there was terrible looting of that country's antiquities. There were so many irreplaceable historical treasures in museums there, and once we attacked with our shock and awe the looting began.

His words during that time were breathtaking. They were evil.

What Rumsfeld said about the looting of Iraq

From CNN 2003:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Declaring that freedom is "untidy," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday the looting in Iraq was a result of "pent-up feelings" of oppression and that it would subside as Iraqis adjusted to life without Saddam Hussein.

He also asserted the looting was not as bad as some television and newspaper reports have indicated and said there was no major crisis in Baghdad, the capital city, which lacks a central governing authority. The looting, he suggested, was "part of the price" for what the United States and Britain have called the liberation of Iraq.

"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Rumsfeld said. "They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here."

Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed. "This is a transition period between war and what we hope will be a much more peaceful time," Myers said.

Please note that General Myers agreed.

There is an article by Tom DeFrank at the National Journal today about how Rumsfeld undermined General Shinseki after his appointment by Bill Clinton to Army chief of staff.

How Donald Rumsfeld Complicated Eric Shinseki's Last Administration Exit

But let's not forget that Ric Shinseki is not just a highly decorated commander and wounded warrior, losing part of his foot in Vietnam and clawing his way back onto active duty against the wishes of Army brass. He's a truth-teller of the first rank—and that display of character so enraged the George W. Bush defense team that he encountered some of the shabbiest treatment an officer and a gentleman has ever encountered during my 46 years serving in and hanging around the Pentagon.

It didn't help his case with the Bushies that Bill Clinton had appointed him Army chief of staff. Moreover, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who didn't enjoy being challenged, quickly took a dislike to Shinseki after several policy and strategy disagreements.

Rummy was so intent on punishing Shinseki, in fact, that he directed one of his flack-shop acolytes to leak word of his replacement to the New York Times—15 months before Shinseki's four-year term was up.

This had the instant effect of rendering Shinseki a lame duck within the E-ring, the Pentagon's power corridor. It was cheesy, petty, shameful and totally unwarranted behavior. The Rumsfeld crowd loved themselves for it.

I like the way DeFrank referred to Shinseki's departure from the Veterans' Administration.

In the political game there's often a difference between needing to go and deserving to go. Not for the first time in a storied career, Ric Shinseki deserved better.

I realize that President Obama truly had no choice but to accept his resignation since so many Democrats were publicly calling for him to go.

But something in me wishes that our Democrats as a party had stood up together and made it clear how the Republicans had been saying no to needed resources and funding.