The study creates far more questions than it resolves:

For the sake of full disclosure, I should mention that I am a relative of Charles Ballew, the kid who designed and performed the research as his senior thesis (but doesn't get mentioned in any of the news articles. grrr....), but that has little to do with why I find the evidence presented so disturbing.

At this very moment the ramifications of these observations are surely being contemplated by campaign operatives across America and the world.

What do you think *they* are gleaning from it?

The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army's senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.[...]

If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.

Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.

And I found because of a NYTimes article citing fractures between the junior and senior officer corps:

On the lower end of the scale, things have changed — but for the worse. West Point cadets are obligated to stay in the Army for five years after graduating. In a typical year, about a quarter to a third of them decide not to sign on for another term. In 2003, when the class of 1998 faced that decision, only 18 percent quit the force: memories of 9/11 were still vivid; the war in Afghanistan seemed a success; and war in Iraq was under way. Duty called, and it seemed a good time to be an Army officer. But last year, when the 905 officers from the class of 2001 had to make their choice to stay or leave, 44 percent quit the Army. It was the service’s highest loss rate in three decades.

Col. Don Snider, a longtime professor at West Point, sees a “trust gap” between junior and senior officers. There has always been a gap, to some degree. What’s different now is that many of the juniors have more combat experience than the seniors. They have come to trust their own instincts more than they trust orders. They look at the hand they’ve been dealt by their superiors’ decisions, and they feel let down.

What immediately comes to mind are the WWII era officers whose understanding of the actualities of war itself helped keep the cold war cold. The modern generals described in Lt. Col. Yingling's article probably would not have been so prudent.

I am left wondering if GOP-mouth-piece Matt Drudge's posting of this story regarding a supposedly racist remark by a showy third party Texas Gubernatorial Candidate might be a weird attempt to provide a little cover for George Felix "Macaca" Allen.

Why else would this odd twist make the national radar?

Kinky Friedman has been singing, saying and writing rather politically incorrect stuff for years and years. Much of it is hysterically tongue-in-cheek or snarky commentary. (Anybody who is familiar with his work got the joke in question.) His candidacy is just another episode in the Kinky Show. (Then again, nobody predicted Jesse Ventura in MN, YIKES!)

If this is, in fact, some kind of hamhanded "they're racists too" attempt to blur the Macaca Affair, is Drudge so stupid as to think that the band leader of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys is the appropriate way to juxtapose the two?

Oy....

An ex-CIA agent is suing his former employer for wrongful dismissal, claiming he was sacked because he did not come up with the desired slant in his pre-war Iraq WMD.

A federal judge has ruled that a CIA agent identified only as "Doe," allegedly fired after he gathered prewar intelligence showing that Iraq was not developing weapons of mass destruction, can proceed with his lawsuit against the CIA. The judge has ordered both parties to submit discovery requests–evidence they want for their case–to be completed by March 15, according to the CIA agent's lawyer and a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is defending the CIA in court.

I guess if you don't have Tim Russert testifying under oath it's not worth covering.

Sad and scary. We are treated like children by our rulers and our media.

Damn. That pseudonymous blogger who shares a real name with me is pretty sharp sometimes.

But this is not 2002 or 2004. This should absolutely expose the weaknesses of the GOP rather than help them. It is not hard to figure out how to do this.

I left these points on that comment thread:

Talking points for Dem operatives in the morning:

1) It was Bush who "let the genie out of the bottle" with his assinine policies starting with his repudiation of Colin Powell's desire to continue Clinton-era UN containment policies with NK in 2001.

2) Bush has weakened our military to the point where our only response will be a paper-tiger or war.

3) WE CANNOT TRUST THE INCOMPETENT BUSHIES AND GOP RUBBERSTAMP CONGRESS TO FIX THIS MESS! THEY WILL MAKE IT WORSE.

4) Vote for Dems or die! (If the GOP could make it work in '02 and '04, why not the Dems. Karma is a bitch!)

Karl's karma is about to bite him in the arse.

On 9/11/01 I dropped off my wife at the PATH train station at Exchange Place in Jersey City, NJ, right across the bay from lower Manhattan. I kissed her goodbye and she went into the station, I started to drive home (we lived in Bayonne, NJ right next to Jersey City) listening to Howard Stern on the way. I learned of the first airplane hitting from him. By the time I got home and turned on the TV the second plane had hit.

My wife’s train ended in Manhatten at the WTC station. In all of the aftermath news shots of the big hole, the platform she arrived at could be seen half intact.

Let me say now that my wife passed through the Trade Center about 5 to 10 minutes before the first plane hit and she made it to her office in mid-town without any trouble.

Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. To make things really fun, all of the telephone cables connecting NY and NJ relayed through the Trade Center Communication Center, so I couldn’t call her. She had no cell phone. And she was four months pregnant with our daughter.

Digby likes to say (and I agree) that nobody senses the political zeitgeist like Atrios. In the same vein, I would suggest that few, if any, can see tomorrow's news today like Mr. Sargent.

It's Labor Day. My coworkers and I have the day off. Granted, it's not because it is a holiday, but rather because the restaurant is always closed on Monday. Worker's Holiday? Don't make me laugh.

The vast majority of working class schlubs in America who do not work for government, large manufacturers or white collar firms will not be celebrating "our" day. We will instead be punching the clock or going about our normal activities.

I would hope the perversity of a low wage worker stocking the shelves at the mall on Labor Day so an investment banker with a weekend house in the Berkshires can find a cheap MP3 player on his long holiday weekend is not lost on the majority of us. Unfortunately I would bet that most folks would not even contemplated the irony.

Perhaps the first time I realized that the modern version of Labor Day was not actually for wage workers was when I was flipping burgers during a high school summer break. I had the audacity to ask if we would, at least, be getting time-and-a-half for working on the first Monday of September. My supervisor's incredulous laugh, at what I thought was a reasonable request, ensured that I did not come back the following June.

Almost 20 years later that incident had faded from my mind. Then I found myself working in the management staff of a very exclusive country club in the Pacific Northwest. It is a place where names like Weyerhaeuser still appear on the membership rolls. The pay and benefits were decent and there was even a standard array of six paid holidays. We still had to work on those holidays, mind you, but an extra day's wages found their way into our checks. Fair enough.

Then one fall, I noticed that the holiday pay I had been expecting had not appeared. That was odd. I pulled out the employee handbook and discovered that the club members who oversaw our benefits had switched Columbus Day with Labor Day as a paid holiday. When I inquired with the sitting Club president, the CEO of a mid-size firm, why the change had occurred, he told me in an adolescently gleeful tone that the board had decided to make an intentional politically incorrect statement about how labor was less important than Christopher Columbus. The members of the board, multi-millionaires all, had thought their actions were oh-so-clever and cute. They also assumed that few of the workers would notice or care. Sadly, they were right.

These anecdotes came to mind last week when I read the news stories about how the past five years of economic expansion have completely bypassed the working class. In our country's modern history there has never been a growing economy for this long that has left the lower rungs of wage earners at, or below, where they were when the last recession hit.

This growing inequality was driven home in last week's Transcript in an article on the cooling of the local housing market. According to realtors the market has softened, that is, except for those in high-end improvement business. As one local business woman put it; "People who have the big bucks are not hurt by what's going on right now. People that have that kind of money are always going to be around."

I see the airlines trying to bust their unions in bankruptcy court. I hear of a major test case in Kentucky where nurses are being reclassified as supervisors to eliminate their organizing rights. And the traditional union job related to manufacturing? Forget about it.

Ford and GM are faltering. Who gets the blame? The workers, of course. Evidently it is not a generations worth of bad business decisions by those with Harvard MBAs. According to people who should know better, it's all the UAW's fault.

And then there are the rest of us; those who cook your food, bus your kids, empty your wastebaskets, bag your groceries, etc… Some of us might have the day off, but when you find those of us who are working today, do your best show a little extra appreciation. Slip your waitress an extra couple bucks or fill out a compliment card at Wal-Mart. But more importantly, ask yourself; "When do these folks get their day?"

Greg Roach is a Berkshires based essayist and working chef. He can be reached at greg@gregoryroach.com.

I live in a small city in rural New England. I run the kitchen of a well regarded small restaurant one town over and live here with my wife and child.

Like most places, we have a few “local” blogs where regional issues are kicked about by a host of regular commenters. The cast includes some local professionals, a couple of blue collar types like myself, profs and students from the two local colleges and even a few elected officials.

One of the most prolific commenters is a long time city councilor who is also a history professor at the local state college where he is the advisor for the Conservative Student Union. (He openly agrees with David Horowitz’s claims.) Every week he goes in front of the cameras for a local access cable TV show and spews typical right leaning pontifications for an hour. (But he claims he is not conservative. No, really.) And he has a well earned reputation for being a rude, vile and obnoxious jerk.

To my dismay, I have become one of his favorite targets on the web.

In the comment sections of these local blogs he has attacked me and others using some of the most profane, despicable and insane insults imaginable. They range from the incredibly homophobic to overt sexism. One of the most bothersome things is that he regularly suggests that I give my restaurant customers food poisoning. (He does this for no good reason. He is just trying to bait me.) He also has made some wildly racist comments which few people had the courage to call him out on.

Recently I wrote the mayor, the one and only person this councilor is afraid of, and asked him to discreetly intervene with this guy who is his friend and neighbor. I included a “greatest hits” of some of the more contemptible comments. It seemed to have worked for a week or two, but recently, the personal attacks have been coming back, although not quite as vile.

While I could simply ignore the jerk, my nature has always been to punch back when a bully gets uppity. Hence, my only other option is to escalate this into a formal complaint which will invariably attract some media attention and give the city a self perceived black-eye and that is not my intention.

Unfortunately, as with most small towns, this will not be seen as neighborly. Even though the councilor’s remarks are absolutely indefensible, I will experience some backlash and many locals will rally around him because of what will be seen as an attack on the old guard of the city itself. I will be called an “instigator”. Small town dynamics and politics are a world apart from those of metropolitan areas.

Ultimately, though, I suspect that abject public humiliation via a formal complaint may be the only way to temper this guy’s rabid nature.

What do you think?

U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Daniel H. Petithory is a local hero, plain and simple. He died in a friendly fire incident when an American smart-bomb went off course while he was directing air strikes from the ground in the mountains of Afghanistan against the Taliban in December 2001.

It is hard to convey how this is perceived in small town, rural New England, where few are separated by more than two or three degrees from anyone else. The graffiti was discovered by Petithory's brother who rides the bicycle trail every day.

Here in the Berkshires we all know somebody who is deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Heck, my 6 year-old son's best buddy is over and playing for the day. His dad is somewhere in Baghdad with the Massachusetts Guard as we speak. (We try and give his mom a break whenever we can.)

I am friends with people who are currently serving who believe that Bush, Rumsfeld and the gang are destroying the military. Then there are those who think my oppositional columns in the local paper are tantamount to treason. However, we all live, play, shop and commune together in this little corner of the world. Magnetic yellow ribbons as well as peace symbols are visible in almost every parking lot, from Wal-mart to the natural food co-op.

Perhaps this corner of New England is a microcosm of America that people should take notice of. Most of those living insulated in both the reddest of the red and bluest of the blue parts of our country probably do not experience what we see here everyday.

I suspect that the memorial vandal is a local over-idealistic kid who has never experienced loss personally. At least I hope it is. If it is an adult, my feelings of disgust will quickly turn to anger. This isn't about politics. It is about community.

Maybe it's because he's posted photos of the old Kresge Building where my grandfather worked.

Maybe it because he wrote about the odd little riverfront trailer park where I helped my friend Mike MacMichael deliver newspapers.

Maybe it's because he posts pictures from the Grande Ballroom where I saw punk rock acts in the '80s and my dad saw jazz greats in the '40s and '50s.

Or maybe it's just because he sees the same madness that characterizes the once proud city - the madness that now makes the place painfully intriguing, but almost assuredly will prevent me from ever calling Detroit home again.