Surely by now you have heard about the fiasco that is Walter Reed Army Medical Center.  Contrary to the to all the bullshit rhetoric from republicans about supporting the troops, they have consistently done nothing of the sort.  Wounded troops undergoing outpatient treatment at Walter Reed, have been living in disgracefully squalid conditions in buildings at the facility, and the number of wounded has been drastically undercounted by the defence department.

Now in a further insult to the wounded troops,  instead of addressing the problems at WRAMC, and all the VA hospitals around the country, they have ordered the soldiers living there to be up at 6am every day and ready for inspection at 7am.  In addition they have barred everyone at the facility from talking to anyone in the press.  Don’t fix the problem, just ignore it.

Just to show how bad things are in Afghanistan:

Vice President Dick Cheney was whisked into a bomb shelter immediately after a Taliban suicide bomber struck the main American military base he was visiting in Afghanistan on Tuesday.

Up to 14 people were killed, including one U.S. and one South Korean soldier, in the Bagram Airbase attack which rebels said was aimed at Cheney.

The first part of the recording of last night’s school board meeting is up on the podcast site.  Part 2 will be up later this evening, although part 1 contains all the public comments and board discussion of the big issue.  If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, just click on the Ypsi government podcasts link at the top of this page and then follow the link to get the podcast.

The big car-makers take a lot of grief from electric vehicle fans over why they seem to be so slow to use new battery technology. I wrote a fairly long article drawing on my two decades in the industry trying to explain why they seem to want to move so slowly, and you can find it over at Autobloggreen.

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack has the dubious distinction of being the first candidate to drop out of the 2008 Democratic race.  What? you didn’t know he was running?  That’s all you need to know.  Ten and a half months until opening night in Iowa and Hillary and Barack are already sucking all the air out the room.  Let’s hope Edwards can hang in there, because the last thing this country needs is another conservative DLC democrat like Clinton.

I’ve heard about the reasons why some Democrats don’t want to pursue impeachment.  Bush has less than two years left, they don’t want to pay a political price for showing backbone, etc.  That’s not acceptable reasoning for backing down.  If Bush and Cheney are allowed to walk away in January 2009 without paying a price, it will send a tragic message to all future potential leaders.  It will say that they can essentially do whatever they want and as long as they play the “support your leaders in war-time” strategy and get away with it.  It is imperitive more so now than ever in our history, that both Bush and Cheney pay the price for repeatedly lying to the people of the United States, going recklessly into an unnecessary war, handling it with criminal negligence, and now persisting in pushing forward against Iran.

Our legislators must set a high standard for the actions of whoever is in the White House, now and going into the future.   Our constitution must be restored to it’s preeminent place in our nation.  They must move forward now and put an end to the madness that is our military misadventure in the middle East and hold those who are responsible accountable.

Listening to the Canadian Podcast Buffet, Bruce Murray finally revealed the truth:

Perfectionism is procrastination disguised as quality control

I’m on the Ypsilanti Public Schools technology committee, and right now we’re trying to figure out what the technology needs of the district are in preparation for the upcoming bond vote.  The technology in the schools hasn’t been significantly updated since the last bond 10 years ago.  Although much of what was implemented at the time was pretty state of the art, ten years on, the computers are aging and a lot of stuff needs to be updated.  The timing of a bond, assuming it passes of course, means that it’s going to be probably another two years before we get any infusion of new hardware.  Nonetheless we need to determine a direction and figure out what our needs are going to be now.

Right now we are looking at what the kids need to learn and be able to do and figure out how technology can make that happen.  We’re also looking at the district’s tech infrastructure needs to determine what will be needed to support that both to optimize productivity and minimize operating costs going forward.  As part of this effort, I set up a special blog at ypsdtech.wordpress.com as a place where anyone who’s interested can participate in the discussion.  We’ll be posting questions on there and looking for the community’s input.  If you have some ideas about how technology can be useful, please feel free to head over there and participate by commenting in response to the questions.  The comments are moderated, and if you have any suggestions about what questions we should be asking, send me an e-mail.

Lately, I haven’t written much about politics at least in part because I have not been paying as close attention to politics as I had previously.  The past six years have been particularly painful for me from a political perspective, and I just needed a mental health break from it.  After the November elections it became pretty clear, that the democrats were not going to aggressively pursue impeachment, which means that we were looking at two more years of the village idiot in charge.

Fortunately, my other writing tasks have been giving me an increasing amount of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment.  That’s something sadly lacking from the day gig as my real income has steadily declined in the past five years while at the same time, the CEO was making more and more.  So without really consciosly thinking about it, I have withdrawn somewhat from politics for a while.  I’m staying involved in school stuff with the school board podcast, and the tech committee, things that I can actually make a difference with.  Bigger stuff is so aggravating that I just need to turn away for awhile to keep from exploding or losing hope.  In the same way, I’ve been meeting people who read my ramblings on ABG and feel like I might just be having a little bit of impact in the area of alternative fuels and transportation.  So I guess want to focus on the areas where I can have some positive impact.   It’s a lot easier to feel motivated when I can see some results of my efforts.

The recording of the Feb. 12 Board of Education meeting is online now at this page. You can download a copy of the presentation from the reproductive health education advisory committee over here.   If you want to see the presentation and ask questions, it will be presented again on February 27, 2007 in the media center at East Middle School at 6pm.