Watch it, but don’t believe it.

Under the “cuts”, the Defense budget will be $36 billion bigger in 2017 than it is today.

The plan is for a bigger military budget, not a smaller one.  Even Panetta’s jowls can’t hide that fact.

I feel that it’s necessary for me to state explicitly that it’s a very rude thing for anyone to piss on any other person’s dead body. Most people would be shocked to see that being done to the dead body of a dog, or a horse. For this reason, it’s good that people are condemning the creation by U.S. Marines of a video showing four soldiers from the Marine Corps emptying their bladders on the dead bodies of three dead Afghan men.

Now that I’ve joined in that condemnation, though, I have to wonder at the bizarre perspective that regards it as perfectly acceptable to kill another human being, but is nonetheless outraged upon finding out that a person was urinated on after having been killed. Guns kill. Pee doesn’t.

If someone offered me the choice between being shot to death with gunfire or being pissed on, I might grimace at the thought of it, but I would not hesitate in making my choice. I would choose to let other people pee on me, even if they recorded the humiliation on a video camera.

Many Americans are now resorting to a knee jerk response that’s developed to all news of outrages committed by American soldiers. They utter their pro-war mantra, “Support Our Troops!”, and then say that the corpses that were urinated on were Taliban, and so they deserved it.

The truth is, it isn’t known whether the dead people shown in the video were affiliated with the Taliban in any way. A caption added to the video says that they were Taliban, but then, consider the source of that claim. Can people who smile while pissing on dead human corpses, and then show videos of that activity to their friends, be considered credible?

What if the corpses did belong to members of the Taliban? We still wouldn’t know what these Taliban members did, if they were violent, and whether they joined the Taliban in order to help Osama Bin Laden or were merely more recent recruits trying to fight against a foreign invasion and corrupt central government. Those who apologize for the post mortem pissing ritual are making very quick judgments against people they don’t know at all.

The most laughable statement in reaction to the video came from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which said, “This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces.”

It’s sad, but the urination by U.S. Marines on dead human corpses is entirely in keeping with the moral standards of the U.S. military and other military organizations. It isn’t inexplicable. On the contrary, it’s easy to explain. When you take impressionable teenagers who have no experience of the world outside of the care of their parents, and teach them that it’s an honorable thing to punch, kick, stab, shoot, bomb, and in other ways brutalize other people merely because they’ve been ordered to do so, it is quite predictable that those young people will lose their moral foundations and perform all manner of disrespectful acts.

War is not moral. War is not respectful. That’s the simple message that’s been lost in the coverage of the U.S. Marine golden shower video.

YouTube requires people seeking to view the videos of the U.S. Marines pissing on dead human bodies to confirm that they are 18 years or older. What a shame YouTube does not place a similar requirement on U.S. military recruitment videos.

That’s what Rick Perry said in the New Hampshire Republican presidential debate last night.

Perry’s rationale for starting a new Iraq war, and sacrificing even more American lives and money: If we don’t send American soldiers back into Iraq to restart our war there, Iran will invade Iraq, and then, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq will have been for nothing.

Will someone please send a memo over to Rick Perry explaining that George W. Bush’s purpose in invading Iraq was not to prevent an Iranian invasion? The reason the United States invaded Iraq was to capture weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.

How would the American government react to such a scenario? They’d consider Iran as attempting to incite a war.

The scenario I described is fictional. The reverse of this scenario, however, is taking place right now.

American politicians are agitating for war against Iran. We can’t afford the war, but then, we couldn’t afford the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan either.

As usual, the proposed war is centered around oil. The latest threats of violence by the United States and Iran are focused on control over petroleum shipments.

Who is going to take a stand against this continual push for war? Not Barack Obama. President has been weak on peace, arguing that he has the right to send the American military into battle anywhere in the world without the approval of Congress. That’s directly unconstitutional, but Obama doesn’t seem to care.

For a presidential candidate who is willing to end the saber rattling, and to do the word to establish peace, look to Jill Stein. The Stein for President campaign has pledged an end to the policy of “perpetual war” that’s been embraced by the Republican and Democratic parties.

Anti-war Americans are looking for a real change in 2012 – something neither the Republicans nor Barack Obama can deliver. Dr. Jill Stein is the most plausible peace candidate we’ve got. If you believe that America needs to escape the cycle of endless war, consider giving Stein 2012 your support.

Examples of the waste and ineptitude in military spending that Congressman DeFazio identified:

- An inspector general in 2000 found 2.6 trillion dollars of untraceable, unaudited military spending
- In 2003, the U.S. Army completely lost 32 tanks, 36 missile launchers, and 56 airplanes
- While soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq were short of suits to protect them from chemical and biological weapons, the Pentagon was selling those suits on the Internet at a 98 percent markdown.
- In just one year, the military bought 100 million dollars of airline tickets that it never used
- Last year, half of all military contracts were left uncompleted

Back in 1994, Congress passed legislation requiring the U.S. military to undergo a financial audit. Nonetheless, that audit has never taken place.

In this year’s defense authorization bill, the requirement of a Pentagon audit was added back in… but the congressional conference negotiating the House and Senate versions of the bill removed the audit again.

Representative DeFazio didn’t let this special maneuver back into fiscal unaccountability for the military go unnoticed. “It does not serve the national defense needs of the United States of America,” he said to his colleagues yesterday, “and it sure as heck doesn’t serve the interests of the American taxpayers. The Pentagon must be audited like every other agency of Federal Government”.

Finally, nine years after that resolution was approved by the Senate, the mistake could have been corrected. The American military is finally being withdrawn from Iraq. To seal this withdrawal, Senator Rand Paul offered an amendment to the 2012 Defense authorization bill. The Paul amendment would have revoked the authority to go to war in Iraq.

Without such a revocation, the President of the United States could repeat the blunder of George W. Bush, and invade Iraq once again. This mistake could be made not just by Barack Obama, but by any future President.

Rand Paul, explaining the need for his resolution, warned his colleagues, “We’ve been at war for nearly 10 years in Iraq. we’re coming home, and we should rejoice at the war’s end. But we need to reclaim that authority. If we leave an open-ended authority out there, that says to the President or any President – if not this particular President, it could be any President – if we leave that authority out there, we basically abdicate our duty. We abdicate the role of Congress.”

The war in Iraq should never have taken place, but yesterday, the Senate could not muster the courage to admit that was the case. The Paul amendment was defeated, by a vote of 30 in favor, 67 against, and 3 refusing to vote. The vote did not take place along party lines.

24 Senate Democrats refused to vote for an end to the power to go to war in Iraq. The names of these senators are:

Daniel Akaka
Michael Bennett
Richard Blumenthal
Thomas Carper
Robert Casey
Chris Coons
Kent Conrad
Kay Hagan
Daniel Inouye
Tim Johnson
John Kerry
Herb Kohl
Mary Landrieu
Carl Levin
Barbara Mikulski
Bill Nelson
Mark Pryor
Jack Reed
Harry Reid
Charles Schumer
Debbie Stabenow
Mark Warner
Jim Webb
Sheldon Whitehouse

It’s in this context that Barack Obama is announcing an expansion of the U.S. military in the Pacific region. As we’re struggling to make ends meet here at home, Obama wants to spend more on military strategy in an arena where the United States hasn’t suffered aggression since Pearl Harbor.

Must we? Is Australia in crisis? Is South Korea on the verge? Couldn’t we have a little expansion of domestic power within the American region?

In 2008, Barack Obama was promoted as an anti-war candidate. In 2012, he’ll be running as a chum of the military-industrial complex.

Cain announced during this weekend’s presidential debate that he would be willing to become Secretary of Defense under Mitt Romney, “to help the generals and commanders on the ground to get what they need, to do what they do best, and that is kick the you-know-what out of everyone in the world.”

Cain was surely trying to sound tough, to establish his credentials as Commander In Chief or as Secretary of Defense. What we’ve learned over the last decade of war, however, is that the ability to spit out tough-sounding lines, like a Hollywood action hero, isn’t a sufficient qualification, either for the job of Secretary of Defense or for the job of President.

We heard lots of tough talk in the days before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but all that tough talk didn’t enable the American military to prevail in either country. The wars in those countries were not intelligently planned, and they weren’t wisely deliberated. As a consequence, our nation has lost prestige, thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars.

Herman Cain doesn’t understand the difference between defense and offense. The mission of the American military is not to go out and fight against all the other nations on Earth, “to kick the you-know-what out of everyone in the world.”

Our nation cannot survive another trigger-happy President. We need national leaders who understand that true strength is demonstrated through restraint rather than through threats of random acts of violence. If Herman Cain wants to play shoot-em-up, there are video games that will allow him to do so. He should not be allowed to dispense with American soldiers, however, as if they were nothing more than pixelated extensions of his bloody fantasies.

What if the government that the United States has installed in Afghanistan turns out to be unjust and cruel, just like the Taliban? What if, in its conduct of the war in Afghanistan, the United States begins to adopt some of the brutal tactics of the Taliban? When that happens, the rationale for the long Afghanistan war crumbles to dust.

Today, NPR is reporting a story that provides one more blow to the credibility of the war in Afghanistan. Many Afghan villagers have independently given the same story: Soldiers from the American-installed Afghan government, accompanied by American soldiers, pulled civilians out of their houses at night and forced them to march in front of the soldiers, along a road that was known to conceal unexploded land mines.

The U.S. military says that there’s no physical evidence to corroborate the story, but what were the villagers supposed to do? Grab digital cameras from their remote, rural homes as they were being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night? The U.S. military, for its part, has failed to explain how so many independent sources could be telling similar stories about an incident that never took place.

If this incident did indeed take place, it’s a war crime. It wouldn’t be the only of its kind on the part of the Americans in Afghanistan, however. The more we see of what actually happens in war, the more clear it becomes that “war crime” is a redundant term.

Norton and Ariely’s tidy tale of wealthy inequality was unfortunately massaged to hide the result that people actually want a society even more equitable than Sweden’s.

One and only one member of the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy Advisory Board on fracking does not have a financial tie to the fracking industry.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall write to Attorney General Eric Holder: would you please make the Obama Administration’s secret warrantless surveillance practices public, pretty please, with sugar on top?

The Department of Defense let military and covert intelligence megacontractor SAIC write the government’s terms for a contract. Guess who won the contract?