The Military

Zen is the art of doing things in the unconscious, Winston L. King writes in his book, Zen and the Way of the Sword: Arming the Samurai Psyche. Doing without thinking. Internalizing knowing as close as can be got to the core of one’s being. This is Sgt. James, taking off the safety suit with eyes and mind and all of his being for the ordnance only and with total disregard to his own safety. He is Master Chief. He is Zen Man.

You get real results when you talk to the people on the front lines, the rank and file.

Mr. Hudson's idea sounds remarkably simple — create and use standardized medical questionnaires for private physicians to fill out when they treat veterans to speed up the process for evaluating VA disability claims. Currently, veterans must undergo a further exam at a VA medical facility to get information on their conditions and degrees of disability.

Benefits for veterans from that simple idea could be significant.

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Archived under: The Military

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OK, the deal is that former and current service members can get back pay, if they were involuntarily extended on active duty because of surprise stop-loss clauses from Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 30, 2008.

(The Obama administration made this happen; the prior administration didn't want to pay the troops.)

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Archived under: The Military

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History was made when the nation’s top uniformed officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military. We must get rid of today’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, said Mullen, because it’s simply “the right thing to do.”

Well, it’s about time. It was a mistake on Bill Clinton’s part to adopt that policy in the first place, way back in 1993. My only questions are: What took them so long to get this far? And now that the Pentagon recognizes that getting rid of the old Clinton policy is the right thing to do, why’s it going to take so long to change it?

Maybe popular thinking is wrong. It's entirely possible that when President Barack Obama advocated doing away with "Don't ask, don't tell” the other night, the Joint Chiefs of Staff generals were not being stoic, they were stunned — too panicked to move. It wasn't military bearing, it was fear.

Why? It's not as if the president was proposing that the services' chaplain be required to perform gay marriages, simply that we get real about the present policy about the non-straight orientation in our armed forces, which is basically "If you got it, don’t flaunt it.”

We have just finished eight years of amateur hours, so my brother Ron Christie knows whereof he speaks, in a sense.

For example: we should have killed bin Laden at Tora Bora, but didn't, because neocon amateurs had another, mistaken, war to fight. We had won the Afghan war, but neocon amateurs gave that away, too, for which we pay the price very dearly today. Read more...

Hey, it's good that the current administration supports the troops.

You might recall that the prior presidency, um, forgot to pay a lot of them for some of their service.

The good news is that stop-loss pay starts flowing on Dec. 16.

A.B. Stoddard talks with two political strategists about the Democrats' plan to pay for a jobs bill with funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). John Feehery and Chris Kofinis join A.B. in discussing the president's plan for Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan policy is making strange bedfellows indeed — Karl Rove is cheering him on in today's Wall Street Journal,

and though his praise is qualified — he didn't like the date for withdrawal, of course — Rove said "only a failure of presidential nerve ... an unwillingness to make further midcourse corrections as the need arises will keep Mr. Obama from achieving the goals he has spelled out," and that though it won't be easy, "victory can still be won ... it is now within his grasp." Read more...

One of the cool things about working in Washington is that you get the chance to put some of your college education to work.

I remember both an economics professor and a history professor teaching me about the economic debate that each country must face: Should our government spending focus on guns, or should it focus on butter?