Every time I hear a Republican saying that Democrats and liberals undermine the troops by demanding that they not get killed for nothing, or by writing articles exposing their pain, I think of how the Republican congress voted, five days before the war began in 2003, in the middle of the night on a Friday when no one would know about it, to cut veterans' benefits by 40%. When I think of troop morale, I think of the troops' first Thanksgiving in Iraq, when the President showed up with a full feast. But once the cameras were gone, the turkey and the chicken-in-charge were packed back onto the plane and the troops hit the desert again without so much as a cranberry. I also think of Mr. Rumsfeld telling a soldier asking why they didn't have enough armor and protection — well, we don't have any, so tough. I read the WaPo article on Walter Reed. The blog written by an injured soldier inside the center is just as heartbreaking.

"The stress has come from being here. From being inside these four-gated walls. From seeing what becomes of the broken soldiers. We go from being the team leader to just a specialist. We go from being convoy commanders to being just another sergeant. We are broken down by our name, rank, and sex; sometimes even our injuries. And that is the sum of who we are. We are what has been cropped from the canvas. We are the cost of war." (via boingboing)

The first two tidbits were provided by What We've Lost by Graydon Carter back in 2004. Imagine what else we've lost in the three years since.♦

The literary giants from Latin America had a 30-year feud over a woman. I expected more from these two.♦

It's Sunshine Week. For those of you who don't know:

"Sunshine Week is a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast, and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools, and others interested in the public's right to know." (From sunshineweek.org.)

Jennifer Leblanc