Two missing soldiers found

By Jennifer J. Foster

The families of two U.S. soliders missing in action in Iraq since last year received horrible closure last week. From the Associated Press:

The remains of two U.S. soldiers kidnapped during a military patrol last year were found after a U.S.-captured suspect led soldiers to their location, the Pentagon announced Friday.

Spc. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass., and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich., members of the 10th Mountain Division based at Fort Drum, N.Y., were captured when insurgents overran their observation post outside the city of Mahmudiyah in the early morning hours of May 12, 2007. Four other U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were killed in the attack.

A third captured soldier, Pfc. Joseph Anzack, 20, was found dead in the Euphrates River near the attack site on May 23, 2007.

Jimenez’s and Fouty’s remains were found buried together in the open desert, west of Jurf-al-Sakr, a one-time al Qaida and Sunni insurgent hotbed, after a suspect pointed out their location during a U.S. military interrogation, an Iraqi police official told McClatchy.

Our hearts go out to the families of these American warriors.

VOTE TODAY!!

By Jennifer J. Foster

If you live in Alabama, you need to get out to the polls and vote today.

Races of statewide interest include Matt Chancey against Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh for the presidency of the Public Service Commission and Lucie McLemore and Beth Kellum for a seat on the Alabama Criminal Court of Appeals.

Each of these races will decide the Republican nominees for the positions. The GOP nominees will face Democratic candidates Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley in the PSC race and Clyde Jones for the judgeship in November.

A pair of congressional runoffs are also on the ballot for some Alabamians. The most watched race this year has been the contest for CD 2, in which State Rep. Jay Love and squared off in a cage match with State Sen. Harri Anne Smith to replace retiring congressman Terry Everett. This race, which involves southeast Alabama from north and west Montgomery around to the Georgia and Florida state lines, has eclipsed the interest of even the statewide races. The winner will face Montgomery Mayor Bobby Bright in November.

In CD 5, Wayne Parker will face off with Cheryl Baswell Griffith to replace retiring congressman Bud Cramer. The winner will meet State Sen. Parker Griffith in November.

In addition, Phillip Rawls tells us (I tried to find the story for you online), there are also 16 counties with Democratic runoffs for local positions, while another dozen feature runoffs for GOP candidates for local offices.

Turnout is expected to be about 9 percent of Alabama’s 2.6 million registered voters.

That is pathetic.

So, if you live in Alabama, the polls are open. GET OUT THERE AND VOTE!

Winning in losing

By Jennifer J. Foster

Finally tonight, I did something tonight I don’t usually do: I watched a Major League Baseball event.

I could write for a long time about why this lifelong softball player finds almost nothing redeeming in professional baseball, but in a word, it’s sportsmanship, and everything good and honorable that comes with it. Sportsmanship is lacking in professional baseball (and in all the other professional sports, for that matter). I get very angry when I see tape of bench-clearing brawls, disrespectful players screaming at or spitting on umpires about balls and strikes, managers throwing bats out of the dugouts and throwing rosin-bag “grenades” and sticking their armpits in umpires’ faces in protests about this or that decision, etc. You’d think that for as much money as they make, grown men like Manny Ramirez and Phil Wellman and Kash Beauchamp and others like them could learn to act a little less like moronic idiots and a little—just a little—more like men.

For example, Manny would do well to be less Manny, more Josh.

I came back to baseball a little bit tonight as I watched Texas’s Josh Hamilton ascend into the record books from the depths of a cocaine and heroin addiction that nearly cost him his career, his family and his very life.

Read Josh’s incredible story here. You can’t make this stuff up—and you wouldn’t want to.

Even though he went to Yankee Stadium tonight and hit 28 homers in the first round of Home Run Derby and 35 in all, he ended up losing the contest to Minnesota’s Justin Morneau.

But I suspect that after being through what he’s been through in his life, Josh Hamilton would tell you that by even being there tonight, he was already a winner—even if he hadn’t hit the first home run, much less three past 500 feet.

It was fun to watch. It was impossible not to pull for him. Josh Hamilton showed us tonight what baseball—and, indeed, life—should be all about.

Hamilton may have lost Home Run Derby. But he’s winning the battles that count: The daily fight against his drug and alcohol addiction. The fight to reclaim his career. The struggle of living with the knowledge that three years of his life have been poured out and smoked away.

It is the battle for his life, every day of his life.

I am among his newest fans.

Obama: Surge in Afghanistan

By Jennifer J. Foster

Barack Obama talks a lot about how he opposed the War in Iraq from the beginning.

He also opposed the so-called “surge,“ which beefed up the presence of U.S. military forces in Iraq to quell growing violence there last year.

Obama has made further comments about his Iraq policy over the past week, and he’s been accused of backing off of his commitment to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq if he is elected president.

John McCain points out that he was for the surge when Obama was not. Judgment, McCain says: I’ve got it; he doesn’t.

Obama says the surge was a tactical success that wouldn’t have been necessary had the U.S. never invaded Iraq to begin with.

ANYWAY ... as it turns out, Obama might not have been for the surge in Iraq. But it sure sounds like he supports one in Afghanistan, where violence in increasing against U.S. and coalition forces there.

From the Associated Press:

Democrat Barack Obama repeated his assertion Monday that as president, he would send at least two more combat brigades to Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers face rising violence ...

Obama’s proposed force increase is part of a plan to pull combat troops out of Iraq and focus on the growing threat from a resurgent al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

“As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan,“ Obama said in an op-ed published Monday in The New York Times ...

“We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there,“ Obama said. “I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.“

Surge: OK in Afghanistan. Not so much in Iraq, according to Obama.

See also:

Official: Insurgents kill 9 U.S. troops in Afghanistan

Losing ground in Afghanistan

Quick hits

By Jennifer J. Foster

Here are a few quick hits I wanted to draw to your attention:

The US environmental protection agency (EPA) has lowered the value of a human life by nearly $1 million under George Bush’s administration, according to the U.K. Guardian::

The EPA’s estimate of the “value of a statistical life” was $6.9m as of this May - down from $7.8m five years ago - according to an Associated Press study released today.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule.

The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation - such as the tighter restrictions on pollution that the EPA refused to impose today, effectively postponing any action on climate change until after Bush leaves office.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

Um, I bet it will be worth it for THE FAMILIES OF THOSE 2,500 PEOPLE!

Wow. Is this how government agencies really make policy decisions—with mathematical calculations?

I knew I should have listened better in algebra.

Perhaps in a related item …? From the Washington Post:

Under pressure from farmers, livestock producers and soaring food prices, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is weighing a policy change that could lead to the plowing of millions of acres of land that had been set aside for conservation.

At issue is the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), under which the government has paid farmers to stop growing row crops, such as corn and soybeans, on 34 million acres across the country. Designed in the mid-1980s to hold down production and bolster commodity prices, the $1.8 billion-a-year program has turned into a major boon for conservation, with much of the acreage planted with perennial grasses or trees, or restored to wetlands.

But the ethanol boom, widespread flooding and high prices for feed crops have changed the equation. Livestock producers have been howling about the high price of animal feed. Pork producers say they are losing $30 per pig.

Hey, math guys: What’s the calculation for the life of a farm animal?

Barack Obama wins the UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE MILLENNIUM award.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Obama “told a potential donor to his campaign that Hillary Rodham Clinton is on his list of possible vice presidential running mates, but that her husband’s status as a former president makes matters ‘complicated.‘“

The potential donor, Jill Iscol, had been “an ardent supporter” of Hillary Clinton, and Obama “reached out to her because he heard she was unhappy about the way the New York senator had been treated by the Democratic Party and the media,“ the Times said.

Iscol turned their phone conversation Thursday to the vice presidency—something the Obama campaign has refused to discuss publicly. She said she told him that Clinton would be his best running mate.

Obama replied that she is on his list, Iscol recounted, and that it would be a mistake not to have her on such a list. But he also explained that he was thinking through a potential “complication”—Bill Clinton.

“He said once you’re a president, even if you’re a former president, you’re always a president,“ Iscol said.

Well said ... especially for a man who hasn’t been president.

Read the rest here.