Just in time for the holidays, one of Google’s newest tools pops up. Here’s the description:

The Google Veterans Network is our employee volunteer community that strives to make Google a great place to work for those who have served, their families and their friends. We also aim to be a positive contributor to the veteran community at large. Google products and services have made our lives a little easier - whether we are still in the service, transitioning out, or on a new path in our civilian lives. We wanted to give back to the community and help other veterans and their families discover how useful these tools can be. So we created Google for Veterans and Families - a collection of free and useful tools from our veterans’ community to yours.

It includes methods of getting in touch, recording your story, reaching out to fellow vets, and even document storage. 

Good on you, Google.

(Source: cognitivedissonance)

A group of married gay current and former military personnel sued the US government on Thursday, seeking equal recognition, benefits and the same support as married heterosexual couples who serve in the military.

The lawsuit filed in US district court in Boston says the government’s defence of marriage act violates their constitutional rights and asks the military to recognise their legal marriages.

“This case is about one thing, plain and simple,” said Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which filed the suit. “It’s about justice for gay and lesbian service members and their families in our armed forces rendering the same military service, making the same sacrifices, and taking the same risks to keep our nation secure at home and abroad.”

I knew it was a matter of time before US military members filed a challenge. The benefits awarded to spouses are quite far-reaching, and have legal implications. For example, if a gay U.S. Marine is killed in combat, under federal law, his husband is not his next of kin, cannot receive his body or any of the death benefits with which to bury him. He cannot have his spouse’s GI Bill benefits passed on to him. This is an excellent case to overturn DOMA. Let’s hope it succeeds. 

Warning about the link above: There’s a graphic photo of a man attacked by Lord’s Resistance Army displayed within the article.

First, what Limbaugh said:

“Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill. […] Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” … The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following: To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.”

Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

As ThinkProgress writer Matthew Yglesias says (and I agree):

“I think reasonable people can disagree as to whether or not chasing a relatively small band of depraved mass murderers around central africa is a reasonable thing for American military personnel to be doing. But let’s make no mistake—these are depraved mass murderers. And yet Rush Limbaugh is pleased to welcome them as fellow Christian allies.”

The LRA is on the terrorist exclusion list drawn up by the United States. The TEL means known associates of the group are banned from the U.S., plus U.S. citizens and aliens within the U.S. alike are banned from providing any kind of support to that group. The LRA has committed several terrorist acts, including kidnapping children to be sex slaves and child soldiers (after murdering their parents); using clubs to attack a bus full of people, causing 22 fatalities; engaging in systematic rape as a weapon of war; bombing nightclubs; and murdering World Food Group volunteers. 

At this point, I have to wonder: Is Limbaugh just testing his audience to see if they’re actually paying attention? I can picture someone taking up a collection plate at church for this “Christian” group, Googling to found out where to send the funds, and being absolutely horrified. Better yet, someone calls into Limbaugh’s show to ask where to send the cash. Either way, sending them cash could be a crime.

I think what the LRA is doing is horrible and I can’t picture the person who would endorse them. Oh, wait:

One in three U.S. veterans of the post-9/11 military believes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting, and a majority think that after 10 years of combat America should be focusing less on foreign affairs and more on its own problems, according to an opinion survey released Wednesday.

The findings highlight a dilemma for the Obama administration and Congress as they struggle to shrink the government’s huge budget deficits and reconsider defense priorities while trying to keep public support for remaining involved in Iraq and Afghanistan for the longer term.

Somehow, I don’t think the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is the morale issue… 

A federal appeals court ordered a halt today to the armed forces’ discharge of openly gay service members, citing the Obama administration’s disavowal of laws that discriminate based on sexual orientation.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had intervened in November to allow the government to continue enforcing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, despite a federal judge’s decision that the law was unconstitutional. Today, however, a three-judge panel of the court lifted the stay, saying, “The circumstances and balance of hardships have changed.”

The court noted that Congress has voted to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” as soon as President Obama and the Pentagon certify that the change will not interfere with military readiness or recruiting. The administration has said most troops should be trained for the new policy change by mid-summer, although it had told the court the law should probably stay in effect for the rest of the year.

The panel also cited Obama’s decision in February to withdraw support from another federal law denying benefits to married same-sex couples, and his newly announced view that laws discriminating against gays and lesbians should be declared unconstitutional unless they serve some compelling government need.

So effective today, the military must stop discharging service members under this policy - which was still happening. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is appealing, arguing the decision should be made by Congress. Not thrilled about that, but happy the courts intervened to at least stop people from being discharged under a policy that’s being phased out. 

We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct.

It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts:

• The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.

• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?

• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.

• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

The sacred cow doesn’t seem so sacred anymore, eh? Read the editorial for a very persuasive argument on why we should scale back.

The conservative news site The Daily Callerhas removed part of an article that suggested lesbians be allowed into the US military so that their male colleagues can “convert” them.

Critics say the article went as far as to suggest corrective rape for lesbians.

“Lesbians should be allowed to serve, gay men should not,” declared Joe Rehyansky in an article published Monday. Rehyansky, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam, is a part-time magistrate in Hamilton County, Tennessee, and a former assistant district attorney.

In the original article, Rehyansky concluded that his lesbians-only policy “would get the distaff part of our homosexual population off our collective ‘Broke Back,’ thus giving straight male GIs a fair shot at converting lesbians and bringing them into the mainstream.”

That alarmed some LGBT activists, who note that much of the article before that comment argued that men are rapists by nature. Rehyansky’s argument that gay men should continue to be banned from the military was based on this notion:

[S]houldn’t the overwhelmingly straight warriors who answer their county’s call be spared the indignity of showering with other men who achieve lascivious enjoyment from the sight of those lithe naked bodies, and who may be tempted to seek more than the view? They are, after all, guys.

In the early evolutionary years of the human species, Rehyansky argued, “It fell to men to swing through the trees and scour the caves in search of as many women as possible to subdue and impregnate — a tough job but someone had to do it.”

There are literally no words to express my anger here. This is just vile. I’ve heard this pseudo-intellectual evolutionary argument in many contexts, but this is the most disgusting. This man is the ultimate privilege denying dude, and unlike the meme, it’s not funny. At all.

It’s obscene that our country is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the military when so many of our neighbors are suffering from poverty, hunger and the inability to meet their basic needs. Can we really justify this in the name of “National Security”? I don’t think we’re very secure at all when one in seven Americans lives below the poverty line.

The reality is that many more Americans die of poverty than terrorism. According to the U.S. State Department, 56 American civilians died due to terrorism worldwide in 2005. That same year, 472 lives were cut short due to homelessness (pdf) in Los Angeles County alone.

Having these numbers doesn’t curb military spending, though. It’s important to note that last year the United States made up 46 percent of all worldwide military spending and dished out more than seven times as much money as the next runner up, China.

For fiscal year 2011, $1,398 billion (48 percent) of our nation’s budget is allotted for military spending(pdf). Of that, $399 billion is for paying off the interest on loans from previous military expenditures. In contrast, this year we’ll only be spending $1.79 billion on homeless assistance grants like help with back rent for at-risk families.

These discrepancies raise some questions about our nation’s priorities. Is war more important to us than feeding the hungry? Is the $600,000 we spend on a cruise missile sent to blow up someone’s home in Iraq worth more than the six or so lovely U.S. houses we could build with such money?

When we look at our priorities, we also need to look at how we can shift them. For example, the proposed Afghan war spending for 2011 is $119.4 billion dollars. That’s enough to provide one year of scholarships for 15,144,040 university students, or one year’s salary for 1,828,484 elementary school teachers, or enough to retrofit our energy grid, providing 72,101,449 American households with renewable wind power and new jobs. (Find more budget tradeoffs at the National Priorities Project.)

The gap in our nation’s budget between what we spend on military programs compared to our own social needs is more than unjustifiable and unnecessary — it’s dangerous.

Poverty is a WMD.