The Pentagon will be sending 12,000 to 15,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, possibly as soon as the end of this year, with planning underway for a further force buildup in 2009...

Today, a continuation of a short series looking into the factors affecting the current political climate.  It's no secret that the country isn't too happy about the economy, the war in Iraq, and the direction the country is headed in.  But for me at least, I like to see the data.  First, the right track/wrong track question:

Click to enlarge.

The trend is clear, the numbers are huge: almost three quarters say we're off on the wrong track.  Much more below.

I don't think John McCain really understands that the United States was founded primarily on the ideals and principles of the Enlightenment, rather than simply "Judeo-Christian values.”  Sure, such religious values played an indirect role in the founding of the country, but the fact remains that our founders were convinced that an official state religion should be avoided at all costs.  Indeed, several of our founding fathers - including Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin - were actually deists rather than traditional Christians.  More importantly, the First Amendment guarantees “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”  

I discovered this morning that one of my closest friends and confidants is being deployed to Iraq. The spectrum of emotions I have gone through today is unlike anything I have ever experienced before. I fear for my friend, I worry for his safety, I shudder at the possibility of a young life without such a friend, and I feel guilt at the selfish emotions coursing through my thoughts, when I am not the one destined for the battlefield, and I am not the one putting myself in harm's way.

I cannot begin to imagine the feelings of mothers or fathers, brothers or sisters, wives, husbands or children, who are seeing men and women whom they have watched grow as adults, as siblings, as partners, or as parents being shipped off for their first or second or third deployments. Nor can I begin to understand, the grief of those who have lost their loved ones in this war.

(Cross-posted from "Bayh-Bayh-Bayhden.org")

    Some say Obama chose a VP already.
    Well, maybe it's time to un-choose.

    While this diary resembles my previous di on similar topics, there's a lot more to say:


JOE BIDEN

1. Biden is a plagiarist. Even if it was 2 decades ago.

    Actually, more than a plagiarist; just peep the Wik,

(look out below)

John McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time last year.

That's no small feet.

But when McCain says that he refuses to let soldiers return from Iraq until he "wins with honor and victory," it's not Bush I'm thinking of, but McCain's old hero, Richard Nixon.

For the last seven years, Republicans have poked the real pain we felt on 9/11 to convince us that small nations who weren't involved in those attacks would be an "existential" threat to the United States if they got hold of even a handful of nukes--even though we have 10,000 warheads enough to destroy every country on earth several times over.

However, the Bushies and McCain's false promises of support to Georgia to get them to attack Ossetia to provoke a Russian response may undermine their "War on Terror" propaganda in a couple of ways:

I'll be short and to the point.  We progressives have missed the most effective way to utterly destroy McCain's main campaign message -- that Obama is an unpatriotic "other" person who is "foreign" to the true values of America, as shown by his "defeatism" and opposition to McCain's supposedly principled support of our troops in Iraq. As with most Republican points, this is a false choice that can be turned against them to devastating effect by a simple truth -- the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iraq war, a point the media is trying to make us forget.  http://www.csmonitor.com/...  Therefore . . .

Passed by Congress in 2000, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act was designed to allow the prosecution of civilians contractors employed by the Department of Defense for crimes committed while overseas on official business. The original intention was to close a loophole allowing civilians to escape prosecution for serious crimes because they were not subject to military law and U.S. prosecutors lacked jurisdiction. The law is set to be used for the first time todoay.

(h/t to Bob Sackamento for notifying us of this subject)

Barack Obama is speaking in front of the VFW right now in Orlando, and is hitting McCain very hard on his Achilles heel - the fundamental decision to go to war, and for the first time, brings up the fact that McCain pushed for war with Iraq right after 9/11:

Six years ago, I stood up at a time when it was politically difficult to oppose going to war in Iraq, and argued that our first priority had to be finishing the fight against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Senator McCain was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, and he became a leading supporter of an invasion and occupation of a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and that – as despicable as Saddam Hussein was – posed no imminent threat to the American people.

And he then pivots to the original decision to launch the war in Iraq:

  (you place the CD into the player)

  (sounds of ocean waves rumbling)

  (soft, piano music begins playing)

OBAMA: Welcome to the Self-Help Hypnosis Series.  I'm Barack Obama, and I want to help you overcome your problem of voting for idiots.

On Friday August 15 the Bush administration sent Condoleezza Rice to meet with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili as a "show of U.S. support."  Yikes.  They sent Condi?  Talk about giving somebody the goodbye look.  If this were a Marty Scorsese movie, Saakashvili would have been sleeping with the fishes come Saturday morning.  You'd think Keystone Kondi would have lent sufficient slapstick to the Georgian situation, but no.  Adding to the antics, John McCain announced on Friday August 15 that he would send along as his personal representatives Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, the Bea Arthur and Betty White of neoconservatism.  Then, to cap things off, McCain himself dropped the atomic punchline: "In the twenty-first century, nations don't invade other nations."

You could hear irony clawing at its coffin lid.  

Sorry for the short diary here, but I felt compelled to share this as far and wide as possible. Satyam at ThinkProgress.org today related that the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy has polled progressive and conservative foreign policy experts, and that they overwhelmingly agree with Obama's Iraq strategy and overwhelmingly reject McCain's:

   – 80 percent say that the U.S. has focused too much on the war in Iraq and not enough on Afghanistan.

   – 69 percent recommend that the majority of U.S. forces in Iraq be redeployed in the next 18 months, up one percent from last year.

   – Zero percent say Iraq is most likely to become the next al Qaeda stronghold; 51 percent say Pakistan will be.

   – 81 percent say U.S. policy towards Iran has negatively impacted national security.

Check out the full posting here.

My lovely girlfriend and I were fortunate enough to attend the 50th Annual Chicago Air and Water Show yesterday, and I would like to dedicate this diary to admiration, respect, and gratitude for all of the brave men and women of our Armed Services.

The air show put on by the U.S. Navy in Chicago yesterday was truly a sight to behold..more on the flip.

I'm still at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana.  We're finishing up and getting ready to head back to Fort Bragg in the next few days.

I have posed this question on nearly every blog know to the world wide web.  I have come to feel as if I am asking for seeds to grow a hundred dollar bill tree in my back yard. Is it really that hard?  Follow me--->

I awoke this past Saturday morning at the Asheville Friends Meeting House, and then went upstairs to wake up the dozen or so college students who had spent the night there.  They were in town for a regional meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society, and were busy planning their trip up to St. Paul to protest the Republican Convention.  I then went to pick up Adrianne and her daughter Willa – we had a big day planned for Rusul and her dad.

More below.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs Stephen Biddle, Michael O'Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack have written an article entitled, "How to Leave a Stable Iraq: Building on Progress".  They argue that

"there is a real chance that U.S. persistence in the short term can secure a stable Iraq and enable major withdrawals in 2010 and 2011 without undermining that stability."

Yet, their conclusion seems oddly contradictory to the evidence they put forward.  Their analysis and evidence is weak, and the specific citing of 2010 and 2011 is nothing more than wishful thinking.  

Moreover, they avoid even considering the costs of our current policy at home or in the region.  

Finally, there is zero concern about whether empowering a Shiite government in Baghdad and radical Shiite clerics in the south is even in the best interests of the United States, the region, or our allies.