Monday Quick Hits

John Cole outdoes himself. Go read “The Slime of the Ancient Mariner” and get a quick roundup of the sleaze, the slime, and the dishonest bullshit the McCain campaign spewed out over the weekend. Best headline of the month, bar none.

If the numbers are correct, then this is a staggering problem that we have to get a handle on immediately--we cannot lose these men and women: More than 22,000 veterans have sought help from a special suicide hot line in its first year, and 1,221 suicides have been averted, the government says. According to a recent RAND Corp. study, roughly one in five soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan displays symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, putting them at a higher risk for suicide. Researchers at Portland State University found that male veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide than men who are not veterans.

I'm going to leave the door open, and see if Blue Girl can add some more...

--WS

BG says - click and keep reading...



It was what he was living for Samuel Snow lived under a cloud for 64 years. He and 27 other black Soldiers were wrongly convicted of rioting after a night of mayhem that left an Italian POW dead. Just hours after the Army formally apologized for railroading the black soldiers and upgraded their discharges to "Honorable" Samuel Snow passed away. "My dad has been standing in formation all these years, waiting to have his name cleared. With the Army's honorable discharge, he was at ease. He now has his discharge papers and he went home," Snow's son, Ray Snow of Leesburg, Fla., said in a statement.


It's going to take a WPA type commitment, and that is going to require more and better Democrats at every level We give T. Boone Pickens a fair amount of grief over some of his sleazy politics and for funding the swiftboat liars to malign a decorated Veteran, when he never served a day in uniform, but we also acknowledge when someone we disagree with gets it right. And on wind energy, Pickens gets it right. It is a vetted technology and if people want to continue to have light at the flipping of a switch, then they need to get over their NIMBY attitudes.


The credit crunch hits stable, secure businesses Two vital forms of credit used by companies — commercial and industrial loans from banks, and short-term “commercial paper” not backed by collateral — collectively dropped almost 3 percent over the last year, to $3.27 trillion from $3.36 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data. That is the largest annual decline since the credit tightening that began with the last recession, in 2001...The scarcity of credit has intensified the strains on the economy by withholding capital from many companies, just as joblessness grows and consumers pull back from spending in the face of high gas prices, plummeting home values and mounting debt...“The second half of the year is shot,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the trading firm MKM Partners in Greenwich, Conn., who was until recently optimistic that the economy would continue expanding. “Access to capital and credit is essential to growth. If that access is restrained or blocked, the economic system takes a hit.”