I still think Chris Dodd should receive accolades for being the only Democrat with the balls to stand up on the Senate floor and force the FISA bill to a halt. I suspect he will filibuster eventually, because we have too many namby pambies in the party who won't stand up to the thugs who have hijacked our democracy.

What Bruce said.

And here's what I wrote to the NYT last night:
Elizabeth Edwards's comments about training Iraqi troops outside Iraq are most interesting. I understand that the U.S. Army has a California training facility set up to mimic the Middle East in climate, terrain, and the like. Our soldiers were supposed to undergo training there before going to Iraq, but instead our troops deploy from basic training. I've long wondered why we don't train Iraqi troops there, and cut most of the very long tail on the tooth of this training.
I do hope that's what Ms. Edwards has in mind.

Well, I don't know about training "their" troops. I suspect they'll be "our puppets", thugs most likely, who, if they are brought to the US, will likely be trained by other thugs (perhaps I'm being more harsh on our army than I should be, but the evidence during George Bush's reign of terror proves otherwise). Perhaps we should turn the training over to a more civilized nation.

And let's hope whoever does the training does it better than the US did in training the Taliban to fight the Russians. Look how that's turned out.

I dunno, I think the immediate post-Vietnam period included a lot of soul-searching, and we might see something similar, when and if we get out of Iraq. There were not only the popular books like Bright Shining Lie but also the internal evaluations like H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty. The latter apparently excoriates top brass for providing sunny data when things weren't sunny, thus killing many more people for nothing (I haven't read the book, I just got it out of the library a few days ago). Basically, the decision arises between duty to obey and duty to follow law, and the latter must prevail, thus requiring resignation.

From what I've read there's some rumbling about who will write the McMaster for Iraq.

And who's kept us from invading Iran? Certainly no one in the White House. Since it was made explicit in the Guardian several months ago that more than one member of the Joint Chiefs was prepared to resign rather than execute an order to attack Iran, that option basically left the table of reality.

I think the military is not the problem. You put young militarily-trained people in a war zone, bad things are gonna happen. I certainly don't excuse the individual acts or the entire enterprise, I simply observe that when you let go of the apple, it tends to fall.

The US military has many negative effects on society, particularly the economy but also the psychology. But it's not mainly the military's fault when the civilian "leadership" sends it on a ill-conceived mission with minimal chances for success. If the military realizes that chances of success are small, it should make that extremely clear (as Faramir says, If I should return, think better of me). If the mission is impossible or worse, refusal to go is the best way to serve the country.

Finally, there's no doubt that Chris Dodd has done truly heroic deeds attempting to stop the telecom immunity provision. I support him strongly for that, and I hope he remains in the Senate for many years, like Robert Byrd. Both are real gentlemen who can fight when the time comes.

The problem with having Dodd as President, for me, is his intimate connection with the insurance companies. It's a natural connection for a long-time Senator from Connecticut, and I'm not suggesting anything at all underhanded. But his biggest constituents are people I want left out of the discussion. To me, taking on the problems of war, health care, and the environment means confronting corporations. We're not gonna beat war immediately, but health care won't be fixed by compromising with the drug and insurance companies, and the environment won't be cleaned up by compromising with the oil and auto industries.

Moreover, what sort of training do these Iraqi troops need that they haven't already received, and from our point of view, why do they need it? I don't know much about military training, but it seems like some of the original trainees ought to be getting master's degrees about now.

I suspect that it's all an excuse to stay in country (so the neocon-affiliated corporations can continue bankrupting us), and bringing the training here would burst that particular excuse bubble.