Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Add This Site to Your Regular Reading

The headline today is: November Ranks 2nd In Deaths. These guys don't pull their punches, and they have substantial credibility with many on the right. But the stories they cover are not always supportive of the right's agenda, which this week seems to be to attack the reporter who filmed the soldier who shot an unarmed insurgent, or to attack on moral values using the Monday Night Football issue. Yeah, the right's issue now is to attack the media at every turn, rather than to report something like: Army Starts Punishing Reservists. You remember the story, but it is one the Bush Administration would like to keep buried. But this website features it:

The Army has begun disciplining some of the 18 soldiers from a Rock Hill-based Reserve unit who refused orders last month in Iraq to take part in a fuel convoy they considered unsafe.

Lt. Col. Steven Boylan said by phone from Baghdad on Tuesday that the actions could range from relatively minor penalties such as an "Article 15" letter of reprimand to a general court-martial with criminal charges involving prison. Although military officials will not identify the soldiers or their individual punishments, citing privacy laws, one Carolinas family has confirmed what happened to their son.

You see, the website I am recommending actually cares for soldiers. They talk up front about ill-equipped soldiers. You can bet they get the inside scoop on what soldiers think, too. Indeed, soldiers probably read this site more than any other.

Sure, the site has an opinion page that is heavily slanted right, but there's a scathing attack on Porter Goss up there alongside Ollie North's column. The article, by Richard Coffman, takes Goss apart from the point of view of a 31 year CIA veteran.

The site even has some comment on that story that is stirring up all the right-wing pundits, the one about Pentagon To Cut Boy Scouts From Bases . This is yet another of those issues that will be used by the right-wingers to bash the ACLU and the cultural values front, but my new site suggestion deals with the issue even-handedly.

So what's this new site suggestion? It's a tabloid and the last time I saw it was in the supermarket. Well, the supermarket was over at the Base Exchange. You see, the print version of www.military.com is available to every soldier of the United States Military in every base in the entire world.

Read it. It's important.

Now rinse.