Because they’re making money from it? See this article by Richard Skaff:

What do war, Congressmen, Senators, and the defense/offense industry have in common? The answer, if you haven’t already guessed is “profits.”

Conflict makes money for the military industrial complex, and the cronies they place in Congress, the Senate, and the White House.

An investigation by Ralph Forbes from American Free press reported on May 05, 2008 that more than a quarter of US senators and congressmen have invested at least $196 million of their own money in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD) that profit from the death and destruction in Iraq [1].

The report also edifies that 151 members of congress invested close to a quarter-billion dollars in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. These companies got more than 275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to Fedspending.org [2]. In 2004, the first full year after the current Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers-both hawks and doves invested between $74.9 million and 161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD [1]. No wonder the Democratic congress kept approving the enormous spending bills on the war, since a significant portion of it happens to end up in their deep pockets.

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Schneier on Security makes an important point:

News here and here:

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.[...]

Use of CCTV images for court evidence has so far been very poor, according to Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, the officer in charge of the Metropolitan police unit. “CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure,” Neville told the Security Document World Conference in London. “Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”

This is, of course is absolutely no surprise.

Very good article in Newsweek. It begins:

Michael Sheehan is on a one-man mission to put terrorist threats into perspective, which is a place they’ve rarely or ever been before. Already you can see it’s going to be a hard slog. Fighting the inflated menace of Osama bin Laden has become big business, generating hundreds of billions of dollars for government agencies and contractors in what one friend of mine in the Washington policy-making stratosphere calls “the counterterrorist-industrial complex.”

But Sheehan’s got the kind of credentials that ought to make us stop and listen. He was a U.S. Army Green Beret fighting guerrillas in Central America in the 1980s, he served on the National Security Council staff under both President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, and he held the post of ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism from 1998 to 2000.

In those days Sheehan was among that persistent, relentless and finally shrill chorus of voices trying to warn the Clinton administration that Osama bin Laden and his boys represented a horrific danger to the United States and its interests. Days after the October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 American sailors, experienced analysts like Sheehan at the State Department and Richard A. Clarke at the White House were certain Al Qaeda was behind it, but there was no support for retaliation among the Clintonistas or, even less, the Pentagon.

Clarke later wrote vividly about Sheehan’s reaction after the military brass begged off. “Who the s— do they think attacked the Cole, f—in’ Martians?” Sheehan asked Clarke. “Does Al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

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Spencer Ackerman finds a good comment on the Pentagon scandal:

Want to see a great example of the arrogance of power? Digging through the Pentagon document dump covering its manipulation of the media, Cernig unearths the following truffle:

Beginning on page 17 of this document, there’s a conversation about how to spin friendly fire incidents in the initial invasion phase of the Iraq war. Press officer LTC Kenneth McClellan notes:

“That’s what I like about the American press. The dirt clods used to come before and during the fight - - as they would tend to do internationally. Now they seem to come principally afterwards.”

The subject? How they’re going to explain why, after 3 White Sands studies on friendly fire issues, they’re still relying on “foil on plywood and glint tape on helmets” for air-to-ground IFF and why the three services purchased different IFF systems that didn’t work together.

Friendly fire incidents, the talking points pack issued to the pet analysts notes, killed 35 and wounded 72 U.S. troops. [Let's not even talk about British losses to u.S. fire, OK?] That’s an increase to 17% from WW2’s 12-14% and Vietnam’s 10-14%.

Callous bastard, this McClellan, eh? But he’s sure they’ve got a tame press - and thus the public are subjected to another kind of friendly fire, pushing the administration’s spin.

And that’s really the important point. The press tolerates this sort of stuff as a condition of access. Hey fellas: how about we remember that our responsibilities are to the public, and not to the administration?

Mike Lillis has two excellent articles on the healthcare crisis in the Washington Independent. The first begins:

In 2004, Tommy Thompson, then-Health and Human Services secretary, approached his boss with a request. Observing that the nation’s doctors and hospitals operate a tangled web of incompatible forms and technologies, Thompson asked President George W. Bush to create a universal system of electronic medical records that would follow patients around the country, eliminate redundant treatments and, according to some estimates, trim billions of dollars from the nation’s annual health care tab. Thompson wanted the president to establish the system within 18 months.

“He came out for 10 years,” Thompson said this week, “and as a result, we haven’t been able to get there.”

The anecdote, which Thompson told the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday, offers a glimpse of the obstacles facing health-reform advocates. With medical costs skyrocketing, employers increasingly dropping or trimming coverage, Medicare projected to go belly-up in a decade and the number of uninsured Americans tickling the 50 million mark, most observers contend the health-care system needs a complete overhaul. But such shakeups are rare in Washington, where special interests spend millions to keep things as they are, and the political will to confront industry is all but absent. Instead, lawmakers tend to dabble at the edges of problems until sweeping change becomes unavoidable. The health reform debate now seems to revolve around when that time will arrive.

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Cane toads are not a benign invader in Australia—well, “invader” is a stretch: they were actually brought there deliberately in a misguided (and futile) effort to control the cane beetle. Now the cane toad (subject of an entertaining movie) may be controllable:

New research on cane toads in Northern Australia has discovered a way to control the cane toad invasion using parasites and toad communication signals.

Professor Rick Shine from the University of Sydney has been studying the biology of cane toads, and will reveal his new research May 7 at the Academy of Science’s peak annual event Science at the Shine Dome.

He says that controlling toads has been difficult as things that kill them will often kill frogs. Professor Shine and his team studied cane toads in Queensland that lagged behind the invasion front and found they were infected with a lungworm parasite which slows down adults and, in laboratory tests, kills around 30% of baby toads.

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Interesting development:

An unusual cast of conservatives has added momentum to a bill that would protect the confidentiality of reporters’ sources, even as the Bush administration has lobbied vigorously against the idea.

The latest flashpoint in the debate came Friday in an appellate courtroom in Washington, as a former reporter for USA Today faced fines of $5,000 a day for refusing to disclose the sources of her articles on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2001 anthrax investigation.

A conservative judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Brett M. Kavanaugh, a former Bush White House official, offered perhaps the broadest defense of reporters’ rights during oral arguments in the case.

Judge Kavanaugh noted that “49 states have recognized some sort of common-law privilege” protecting the confidentiality of reporters’ relationships with their sources, and he questioned why lawyers for Toni Locy, the former USA Today reporter now facing a contempt citation, had not asserted that privilege more aggressively.

The appeals court hearing came three weeks after Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, joined both candidates for the Democratic nomination in backing a federal “shield law” offering some protection for the confidentiality of reporters’ sources. Mr. McCain cautioned that his support for the law was “narrow” because of his concerns about damaging national security leaks in the news media. But he said he would support legislation now pending in the Senate, despite the opposition of the White House.

A federal shield law passed the House last year by a veto-proof margin of 398 to 21, with a conservative Republican — Representative Mike Pence of Indiana — leading the effort.

“What’s a conservative like me doing passing a bill that helps reporters?” Mr. Pence asked in the House debate last year. The answer, he said, came from his belief that “the only check on government power in real time is a free and independent press.”

Shielding reporters’ confidential sources, Mr. Pence said, “is not about protecting reporters; it’s about protecting the public’s right to know.”

Bush’s White House is fighting the bill tooth and nail. No surprise. Continue reading at the link to learn more about the fight.

Jeremeny Ben-Ami has a good column in the Washington Post. It begins:

Six decades ago, my father fought alongside Menachem Begin for Israel’s independence. If you’d have told him back then that politicians in the world’s last superpower would be jockeying today to see who can be more “pro-Israel,” he would have laughed at you. Grateful as I am for decades of U.S. friendship with Israel, I have to wonder, as the state my father helped found turns 60, just who is defining what it means to be pro-Israel in the United States these days.

Some purported keepers of that flame claim that supporting Israel means reflexively supporting every Israeli action and implacably opposing every Israeli foe — adopting the talking points of neoconservatives and the most right-wing elements of the American Jewish and Christian Zionist communities. Criticize or question Israeli behavior and you’re labeled “anti-Israel,” or worse. But unquestioning encouragement for short-sighted Israeli policies such as expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank isn’t real friendship. (Would a true friend not only let you drive home drunk but offer you their Porsche and a shot of tequila for the road?) Israel needs real friends, not enablers. And forging a healthy friendship with Israel requires bursting some myths about what it means to be pro-Israel.

Continue reading to learn the 5 myths and how they don’t hold.

Very nice looking salads, and Trader Joe’s has Persian cucumbers right now. I’m going to stop and pick up a few.

UPDATE: Oops. Fixed the link.

Something for your weekend pondering.

Some are quite good.

A good walk, and now the weekend off. The walks together with the kid’s plate are starting to have some effects. 3 lbs down.

Honeybee Essentials Flora Euphoria was the soap, Rooney 3 Small Super the brush. The lather was fragrant and nicely dense and wet—rolled up on the razor like new snow. I used a Gillette NEW in exceptionally good condition and tried a brand-new Lord Platinum blade. Man, that blade was nice. Perhaps it was the prep, but the blade this morning cut as smoothly as any blade I’ve tried. Three passes, and then an All Natural Shaving Oil pass. Perfection. Finally, a splash of yesteryear with Pinaud’s Clubman aftershave.