Snowfall

New York Times:

Tony Snow Resigns

As Tony Snow, the White House press secretary had indicated earlier, he has decided to resign his post with the Bush administration, effective Sept. 14.

Mr. Snow, who has been battling a recurrence of colon cancer and just finished a lengthy set of chemotherapy treatments, had said that he intended to leave before the end of President Bush’s second term. In recent interviews, he said he would depart for financial, not health reasons.

The former journalist with Fox News who had a nationally syndicated talk show received a salary of nearly $170,000 as White House press secretary, far less than his cable show earnings.

He recently told Hugh Hewitt: “I’m not going to be able to go the distance, but that’s primarily for financial reasons,” Mr. Snow said. “I’ve told people when my money runs out, then I’ve got to go.”

Mr. Snow, 52, is one of several Bush administration officials who have decided to leave the White House. His resignation follows those of Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom decided to leave earlier this month.

It looks like Tony Snow isn’t doing too good. A growth near his abdominal area was discovered to be cancerous, and spread to his liver.

Too bad, huh?

What?

Do I sound cruel? Insensitive? Yeah, I know I do, but I can’t help it. No, I'm not proud of it, but I can't feel much sympathy for Mr. Snow.

Besides, bad as it is for Tony Snow right now, he still has it better than most of us. He’s wealthy (which we’re not), so he can afford to take the time off from his job as long as he needs to (which we can’t), and get the best doctors and medical treatment available to him (which we can't afford). Being Bush’s hand puppet was a well-paying gig, and Tony was great at it. Cancer doesn’t discriminate, but you don’t want to be in the ER with a tin cup either.

Maybe to his rich white Republican friends sending him “Get Well” cards Tony Snow was a good guy, but he hated the rest of America, and he let us know it. As a newspaper columnist, a talking head on Fox, or press secretary for the President, he was always the same: a smug, narrow-minded bigot. But because Tony Snow was articulate, and handsome and had a nice smile, it was O.K. Hey, if you’re not parading a Confederate flag or wearing a swastika, you can’t be racist, right? Just ask Ann, or Rush, or Sean.

He didn’t build the GOP’s Pretty Hate Machine, but he certainly kept it running and well-oiled. And Tony Snow never met a queer, tofu-eating, dope-smoking, Bible-burning, terrorist sand nigger he couldn’t beat up on.

And he liked it.

I'm not enough of a bastard to wish him dead, but only because of his wife and children. Nobody deserves to be a widow. Nobody deserves to be a orphan.

But say a prayer for him?

I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time. I’m busy.

I’m saying prayers for the soldiers fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Walter Reed. I’m saying prayers for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis trying not to get shot, raped, tortured or blown up. I’m saying prayers for the people of New Orleans who helplessly watched their friends, family, jobs, homes, neighborhoods, culture, and future drown. I’m saying prayers for all the besieged working-class heroes in America who are one paycheck away from bankruptcy, unemployment, and homelessness.

So, you expect me to waste a prayer on Tony Snow, one of the grinning cheerleaders who helped get us into Dubya’s incompetent, blood-soaked obscenity of an administration in the first place?

May God forgive me, I can’t.

I can't.

This Administration should never again be able to get away with accusing ANYONE of "not supporting the troops"

The situation at Walter Reed is even worse than what we've known up to this point:

Washington, DC (WUSA) -- A major 9NEWS NOW EXCLUSIVE -- allegations from a former inspector at Walter Reed of widespread and dangerous problems in nearly all the buildings at the Army's premier hospital.

Burst steam pipes near electrical cables, rats, mold, and holes in floors and walls -- all of that extends far beyond the well-publicized problems at the notorious Building 18.

And 9NEWS NOW has learned managers may have been slow to respond.

A worried quality control inspector, Mark Cordell, finally quit last week in frustration, and brought his fears to 9NEWS NOW.

"I won't sit back and watch someone get killed," he says while running through 81 pictures of the problems on a laptop computer.

Cordell says the worst of it may be Building 40. The old research institute has been condemned, but last week, the private contractor now responsible for maintaining Walter Reed sent workers in to fix a leak.

Cordell points to a picture showing the terrible decay inside the building and says, "The water is actually on the ground floor here. There is water halfway across the ground floor. And there's electricity too. There's high voltage that goes to this building. Two thirteen thousand volt transformers. Through the basement filled with water."

Cordell took more pictures in Building 1, the old hospital, that's now the main administration building. Water damage in the walls; holes in the ceilings next to electric cables and computer servers; hazardous waste stored between occupied floors; and leaking pipes that are rotting floor joists.

"The steam pipes below these buildings have burst, and it's making the rafters on the basement floor wet. People work on those floors," says Cordell.

When the Washington Post exposed the black mold in Building 18, where wounded soldiers recover, the contractor sent Cordell in to coordinate repairs. He says he did 250 to 300 work orders in two weeks.

The Army moved many of the injured soldiers to Building 14 -- and Cordell says as soon as they arrived the troops found more problems.

"So the building the soldiers moved to is just as messed up as Building 18?" asked 9NEWS NOW Reporter Bruce Leshan.

"Yes. Every one of the buildings at Walter Reed is the same way, or worse."

If you needed further proof that to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the entire neocon cabal that got us into this mess in Iraq, these young men and women are nothing but cannon fodder -- meat puppets to be deposited into a war zone and then forgotten -- here it is. They give lip service to supporting the troops, but then outsource the maintenance of the facility to -- wait for it -- a subsidiary of Halliburton. It's all about the money to this bunch -- money stuffed into Cheney's pockets, money stuffed into the pocket of the other Bush cronies who have been feeding at the federal trough ever since this bunch of criminals took office in 2001.

In Bush's weekly radio address yesterday, he said, "Congress needs to approve emergency funding for our troops, without strings and without delays...Many in Congress say they support the troops, and I believe them. Now they have a chance to show that support in deed, as well as in word."

And so does the Bush Administration, by cleaning up Walter Reed or getting the American kids wounded in his war of choice, his unnecessary war based on lies, this war he was determined to have no matter how many careers he had to destroy to get it, the hell out of there.

Just so much cannon fodder

In case you thought that Walter Reed was just an isolated case of a military medical care facility that's going to be shut down anyway being neglected, guess again:

Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.

"It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again."

Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories -- their own versions, not verified -- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.

[snip]

Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. "The staff sergeant says, 'Here are your linens' to my son, who can't even stand up," said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. "This kid has an open wound, and I'm going to put him in a room with fruit flies?" She took her son to a hotel instead.

"My concern is for the others, who don't have a parent or someone to fight for them," Karen said. "These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?"

Capt. Leslie Haines was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky for treatment in 2004 after being flown out of Iraq. "The living conditions were the worst I'd ever seen for soldiers," he said. "Paint peeling, mold, windows that didn't work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses. You had wounded and injured leading the troops."

Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.

For the last four years, The Bush Administration, Congressional Republicans, and their mindless, grinning supporters have succeeded in painting those of us who disagreed with their policies as "unpatriotic", "treasonous", and "not supporting the troops." Even now, such accusations from Republicans have cowed Democrats as a few of them attempted to actually do something about this president's misadventure in Iraq, saying that disallowing funding for the "surge" demonstrated lack of "support for the troops."

Even now, more troops are being fed into this misadventure of a war, and once again there is no Plan B:

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

In the weeks since Bush announced the new plan for Iraq -- including an increase of 21,500 U.S. combat troops, additional reconstruction assistance and stepped-up pressure on the Iraqi government -- senior officials have rebuffed questions about other options in the event of failure. Eager to appear resolute and reluctant to provide fodder for skeptics, they have responded with a mix of optimism and evasion.

It is time for Washington Democrats to get off their knees, stop internalizing these false accusations, and finally act as watchdogs for the military, because God knows that Republicans don't give a shit about these kids. Republicans have made perfectly clear that they regard the young men and women who serve in the military as expendable -- just so much cannon fodder to be used for political advantage, put in harm's way without adequate equipment and then sent home under cover of night -- invisibly -- in body bags. Those who survive are an embarrassment to the Administration, so they must be hidden away in filthy and inadequate VA facilities, away from prying eyes that might question the cause for which they lost their limbs and faculties and being treated with inadequate care, lest it become necessary for corporate CEOs to perhaps have to pay a few more taxes for their care.

In the 2008 campaigns, from the Congressional level on up, Republicans are once again going to try to paint Democrats as weak on security, as not supportive of the troops. Democrats should hang photographs of the conditions at Walter Reed and other VA facilities around these necks, weighted down with anvils. Because this is what Republican policies that take the wealth of this country and stuff it into the pockets of wealthy campaign cronies and corporate executives do. This is American Republicanism in full flower. Let voters finally see what it looks like.