Some soldiers, and their families are unable to make ends meet. So they end up at food pantries, and on SNAP. “I thought this was America people!” American society allegedly reveres our military “heroes.” Guess not:

Fort Hood soldiers fight to make ends meet

Frank Bruni writes a non-obtuse op-ed for once:

The God Glut

 Right To Work (for less) passes the Michigan House. These people are degenerates:

Michigan Bills Limiting Union Power Pass in Legislature

The Atlantic’s mostly brilliant staff tells you the best books they read this year:

The Best Book I Read This Year

#ICYMI. I wrote about Black Republicans, and their propensity to refer to Black Dems as being on the “plantation.”:

Black Republicans & The “Plantation”

My country continues to get the extreme short end of the “natural” disaster stick:

• Aftermath Of Sandy Leaves Haiti Facing New Disaster

Junot Diaz + Tumblr =

• This Is How You Describe Her via the better than ever PostBourgie

Finally, we have a prominent Republican willing to admit that “voter fraud” is GOP bullshit:

• Voter Fraud Is GOP “Mythology”

Apropos of what I was talking about the other day:

• Got A Phone? Got Internet? Get His Back.

The military isn’t infallible. Soldiers know this. Why won’t most politicians or media say so?:

• The Permanent Militarization of America

 “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

Eisenhower was discussing what he described as the Military-Industrial Complex. As Aaron B. O’Connell told us yesterday in an op-ed in the NY Times, Eisenhower is responsible for popularizing that phrase. Can we imagine a president or serious candidate for president making a statement like that today? Can you imagine a Republican doing it? Yet Eisenhower was both of those things. The GOP has moved so far right from what they once were it’s absolutely mind-boggling. Not only that, our country has moved decidedly to the right. Now that has been helped along by decades of GOP falsehoods, chicanery & outright lies. The media has been aiding, and abetting the GOP bullshit for much of the last 30 years as well. It’s good to remember that we were once a country where presidents could talk about people coming 1st, and where push-back against military spending wasn’t viewed as fringe politics. If we’re willing to the work, we can have a country like that again.