Supposedly fragging was carried out in Vietnam as a response to officers who insisted on putting their soldiers at unnecessary risk in a war that everyone understood was already lost.

I say supposedly because as far as I know, fragging was more rumour than fact.

The average family income of those on minimum wage is $45,580

That doesn't actually argue against raising the minimum wage. What it really says is that poor people simply can't afford to work at minimum wages and that only supported people such as teenagers can take on those jobs.

Poor people are forced by low minimum wages to rely on government welfare, crime, or to farm out their children to illegal labor. Someone above already called this what it is: corporate welfare. And it comes at a horrendous social and economic cost to all of the rest of us.

If poor people could afford to work at minimum wage, than the stat cited above should decline. This would be good, not bad.

What's really ironic is that the Republican party was responsible for the first and most important minimum wage law in the United States: the anti-slavery amendment to the Constitution. Slavery, as we should all recall, caused immense poverty in the American South because free labor couldn't compete with slave labor. The abolishment of slavery caused EVERYONE'S wages to eventually go up.

Same thing with the abolishment of child labor. Once child labor was abolished, factories were forced to pay adult wages and adults could then take care of their own children, thus obviating the need to put children to work in factories. This was at tremendous social and economic benefit to the country.

The minimum wage establishes the bottom floor in this country; all other wages must go up from this floor. When poor people can't even get on this floor, then we know that the minimum wage is set far too low and that the whole society is being dragged down with it.

That's really what this war is all about, isn't it?

Over 2500 dead to cover Bush's ass.

...for bloggers and Internet 'activists' of all stripes, whether lefties, righties, or whatever:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060605crat_atlarge

The fact that no one was naturally inclined to follow him made him the man left standing after all the obvious leaders had worn themselves out shouting. Jean Anouilh, in “Poor Bitos,” a now forgotten play from the nineteen-fifties, tried to draw the character: grave, charmless, touchy, proud, easily mocked, and just as easily, and murderously, offended. It is a type who could almost be mistaken for a secularized version of the religious inquisitor, burning heretics not out of hatred but out of love for the higher cause. But Torquemada and the other inquisitors were full-time fanatics who would modestly admit to the description. Robespierre and his closest collaborators were, in their own view, not fanatics but men of feeling and mind; they just happened to be right, that’s all, and what was one to do with the people who insisted that they weren’t?

...the kind of artist whose real medium is bureaucracy. Instead of wielding a brush, she wields the power of grant applications. The themes she talks about tend to make more sense on grant applications than they do in real life.

Science is supposed to be about experiment and discovery, but she seems to be only interested in using science to create polemics against the corporate culture (the same corporate culture that happens to reward her lavishly with grant money and access to museums).

The typical bureaucratic justification for art grants is that art is supposed to improve the minds of the public. Hence the great stress she puts on all the things her art is supposedly conveying to the public. However, art is in fact a lousy medium for teaching anything, because it can be interpreted in any way one likes. If the public really needs to know about fish on antidepressants, IMO there are better and truer ways to go about it than using art to turn the issue into a comedy.

...is that George Bush is an ass. And if Bill Clinton's Defense Secretary tells George Bush to do something, than George Bush probably isn't going to do it. The man doesn't even listen to his own father, because his father isn't named Rove, Cheney, or Rumsfeld.

Maybe that's why Perry said it--so that he WOULDN'T do it.

Yes, I'm kind of serious. If it turns out I'm right, I'll be shocked but not floored.

To draw the US into the quagmire of the ME, that's why.

Bin Laden figures he cut down the USSR to size in Afghanistan and he wants to do the same to the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he might end up being right.

From bin Laden's POV, all the attacks under Clinton were failures and the one on 9/11 was a resounding success. That's why he popped up so obligingly to help Bush before the election (in golden robes, no less). This is also probably why there hasn't been another terrorist attack on US soil; because it would hurt Bush and would be redundant.

The US government isn't in Iraq because it's supersmart and superevil; it's in Iraq because under Bush and Cheney it's superstupid.