16 March 2006

At Counterpunch, Winslow Wheeler notes that lots of things are being snuck in to the latest, $92.2 billion supplemental funding request for the wars.

Wheeler has done his homework, and in recent months he has written up an informative series of articles on Pentagon pork (and a little Googling will get you even more):

• Inside the Pork Shop: The Defense Budget and Congressional Earmarks (30 January 2006)
• Pentagon Pork: What is It? Who Cooks It Up? (31 January 2006)
• Pentagon Pork: How to Eliminate It (2 February 2006)

Ah, pork. Congress has to spend that money you worked so hard for somehow. Might as well be so a big concrete bull can get its ass spackled.

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Just in case you thought the U.S. had decided to sit back and let Iraqis do all of the Iraqi-killing:

American forces have dramatically increased airstrikes in Iraq during the past five months, a change of tactics that may foreshadow how the United States plans to battle a still-strong insurgency while reducing the number of U.S. ground troops serving here.

A review of military data shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year. Knight Ridder’s statistical findings were reviewed and confirmed by American Air Force officials in the region.

The numbers also show that U.S. forces dropped bombs on more cities during the last five months than they did during the same period a year ago. Airstrikes hit at least 11 cities between Oct. 1, 2004, and Feb. 28, 2005, but were mostly concentrated in and around the western city of Fallujah. A year later, U.S. warplanes struck at least 22 cities during the same months.

Not great news, but it is nice to see some actual journalism on the wires…

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It’s a strange surprise when a piece of network television entertainment decides to weave tax resistance into the plot, as the law opera Boston Legal just did.

In the “Stick It” episode, the secretary of one of the main characters gets hauled into court for tax resistance, and her boss defends her — giving a courtroom soliloquy about the lies that the country went to war on, the torture and abuse of detainees, and the decline of civil rights in America that I’m sure left many viewers cheering and wondering why they see only fictional characters saying such things on television.

I didn’t see the show, so can’t comment on any of the nuances, but if you’d care to, you can see the closing arguments here. A commercial for war tax resistance that went out to some ten million viewers… not bad.

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A couple of months back I noted the recent arrest of Ernest McQueen for deserting the military in 1969 during the Vietnam War. I speculated that the government was digging up an old case like this as a way of sending a message to the current mess of troops, who seem to be nervously eyeing the exit themselves.

The Democracy Now show has tracked down some other recent cases and comes to similar conclusions.