I'll be in London most of the day, so no time to do more than a drive-by rant. Today's news (and yesterday's—we sleep through much of your day, remember) contained enough outrage to give one indigestion.
Suburban Guerrilla wakes us up with: Terror Suspects Buying Firearms, U.S. Report Finds.
Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws.
People suspected of being members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials and gun control groups have voiced increasing concern about the prospect of a terrorist walking into a gun shop, legally buying an assault rifle or other type of weapon and using it in an attack.
The G.A.O. study offers the first full-scale examination of the possible dangers posed by gaps in the law, Congressional officials said, and it concludes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation "could better manage" its gun-buying records in matching them against lists of suspected terrorists.
F.B.I. officials maintain that they are hamstrung by laws and policies restricting the use of gun-buying records because of concerns over the privacy rights of gun owners.
But, "guns don't kill people", so there's nothing to worry about. No story here, move on...
Ginger at The Hackenblog brings this to my attention: Taxpayers Pay for Wal-Mart's "Low Road".
Of the many ways that Arkansas-based Wal-Mart endangers the public interest, one of the most insidious is how, by paying its workers low wages with almost no benefits, they force tens of thousands of employees to rely on state and federal public assistance programs to make ends meet.
In other words, Wal-Mart -- one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world -- is forcing taxpayers to underwrite the costs of their business to the tune of billions of dollars.
Good Jobs First, an excellent advocacy group for "high road" development, has released a survey about how many workers and their families are forced onto Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Programs in different states to make up for Wal-Mart's dead-end jobs. [snip]
Most disturbing of all is that Wal-Mart is driving up public assistance caseloads at the very time state lawmakers are demanding sharp cuts in these programs. For example, Tennessee's excellent TennCare program is under assault due to rising costs (in part caused by Wal-Mart and kindred companies), with proposed cuts that could strip thousands of health coverage.
And as if that isn't bad enough, an earlier report by GJF shows that state and local governments have given Wal-Mart subsidiaries over $1 billion in tax breaks and other "incentives" to set up their stores -- money the company clearly doesn't need.
So the public is paying twice -- in direct corporate welfare, and indirect costs from workers driven into poverty -- to subsidize a giant company that's swimming in profits, exploits workers, busts unions, drains community resources, exacerbates urban sprawl, violates human rights abroad, and otherwise violates the public trust.
I can't blame most people for shopping at Wal-Mart; after all, a measley minimum-wage paycheck can buy more there than at Sears. But, when those same people vote for politicians who cut taxes for the wealthy AND slash health care budgets AND give tax breaks to Wal-Mart, then I want to scream.
Armando at DailyKos links to further ammunition in my argument that today's Republican-led Pentagon has little concern for the military men and women who fight their wars:
The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.
The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.
In the following weeks, as Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines, General Cody realized the Army's mistake and did an about-face. On May 15, 2003, he ordered the budget office to buy all the bulletproof vests it could, according to an Army report. He would give one to every soldier, "regardless of duty position."
But the delays were only beginning. The initial misstep, as well as other previously undisclosed problems, show that the Pentagon's difficulties in shielding troops and their vehicles with armor have been far more extensive and intractable than officials have acknowledged, according to government officials, contractors and Defense Department records.
In the case of body armor, the Pentagon gave a contract for thousands of the ceramic plate inserts that make the vests bulletproof to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He struggled for a year, then gave up entirely. At the same time, in shipping plates from other companies, the Army's equipment manager effectively reduced the armor's priority to the status of socks, a confidential report by the Army's inspector general shows. Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived late.
In all, with additional paperwork delays, the Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq once General Cody placed the order. But for thousands of soldiers, it took weeks and even months more, records show, at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was intensifying and American casualties were mounting.
By contrast, when the United States' allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days.
Rumsfeld, I'd like your resignation on my desk yesterday.
Now, can someone clean all this up while I'm gone?
