stuff and nonsense

Here's a HuffPo blog entry from Danielle Crittendon that makes my teeth hurt. Every single word in it makes my teeth hurt. It's like fingernails on chalkboard. Read it at your own risk.

Support the troops:

The Bush administration disclosed yesterday that it had vastly underestimated the number of service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and warned that the health care programs will be short at least $2.6 billion next year unless Congress approves additional funds.

Veterans Affairs budget documents projected that 23,553 veterans would return this year from Iraq and Afghanistan and seek medical treatment. However, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson told a Senate committee that the number has been revised upward to 103,000 for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. He said the original estimates were based on outdated assumptions from 2002.

This went around the blogosphere a while ago, but for those of you who don't hang around the blogosphere much, here is Iraqi blogger Riverbend on the state of the war:

"The Americans won't be out in less than ten years," is how the argument often begins with the friend who has entered the Green Republic. "How can you say that?" is usually my answer -- and I begin to throw around numbers — 2007, 2008 maximum... Could they possibly want to be here longer? Can they afford to be here longer? At this, T. shakes his head -- if you could see the bases they are planning to build -- if you could see what already has been built -- you'd know that they are going to be here for quite a while.

And here's a very powerful op-ed by an ordinary Republican on why he's quitting the party, after 25 years. Read the whole op-ed, but here's a piece:

I could go on and on - about how we have compromised our international integrity by sanctioning torture, about how we are systematically dismantling the civil liberties that it took us two centuries to define and preserve, and about how we have substituted bullying, brinksmanship and "staying on message" for real political discourse - but those three issues are enough.

We're poisoning our planet through gluttony and ignorance.

We're teetering on the brink of self-inflicted insolvency.

We're selfishly and needlessly sacrificing the best of a generation.

And we're lying about it.

While it has compiled this record of failure and deception, the party which I'm leaving today has spent its time, energy and political capital trying to save Terri Schiavo, battling the threat of single-sex unions, fighting medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, manufacturing political crises over presidential nominees, and selling privatized Social Security to an America that isn't buying. We fiddle while Rome burns.

Enough is enough. I quit.

TAPPED on Republican party threats to Major League Baseball about what privileges they'd lose if they allowed George Soros to buy the D.C. baseball team. Okay, I give less than 2 shits about baseball, but, um. Threatening MLB for considering a sale to a perfectly respectable person with the money to buy, simply because he's a rich Jew who tried to get John Kerry elected?

Digby on people who still insist that Saddam Hussein and OBL were linked -- including members of Congress, apparently:

I've been told more than once, as a conversation ender, that the government has the proof but they can't share it because it would endanger civilians. And it's used as evidence of Bush's selflessness that he won't provide the proof even though he has to take shit from liberals like me.

I kid you not.

And finally, Max saw this article this morning, and it is, bar none, the most hilarious thing ever. Snorting milk up nose hilarious, and having nothing to do with torture, war, or peak oil.