The military spent over $200 million to recruit and train personnel to replace service members discharged over the last decade for being openly gay, according to a Congressional report that was just released. The report found that over 10,000 troops were discharged for violating the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that was instituted in 1993 under President Clinton. The policy allows military personnel to serve only if they do not disclose their homosexuality to anyone, including family members.

The estimate of $200 million was conservative, at best. The report only reviewed enlisted personnel who were discharged, and did not include the figures for replacing officers. Additionally, the report only contained the estimates of the Army, Navy, and the Air Force. The Marines declined to participate in the study. The report also did not consider the costs of investigating and discharging the personnel, nor did it contain the costs of processing legal challenges and reviews of the dismissals.

All evidence suggests that our lives and that of our planet are in grave peril. If we are to survive, we must immediately dismantle the forces of greed and power that are destroying our lives in the toxic pursuit of empire. It is our refusal to face the realities of global warming and our continued illegal use of Depleted Uranium that are the true terrors of our time. Our governments and the corporate empires they defend must be compelled to cease and desist from all forms of violence against our earth and its inhabitants, to work towards mitigating the damage done and to begin creating a livable future.

Once in a while, mass media outlets give a fair hearing to radical ideas that make sense. But those ideas have little chance to take hold -- mainly because followup is scant. Instead of bouncing around the national media echo chamber, the offending concept falls like a tossed rock.

That's what happened a few weeks ago when Parade magazine featured an essay directly challenging the nation's TV commercials.

"With the advent of television, the nature of concentration was altered," Norman Mailer wrote in the magazine's Jan. 23 edition. "Yet children could still develop such powers by watching TV. Video and books had a common denominator then -- narrative." But television did not long retain the continuity of "uninterrupted narratives." Before long, for viewers, "there were constant interruptions to programs -- the commercials."

Year after year, the situation has worsened. "On the major networks, the amount of time given to commercials and other promotional messages increased by 36 percent from 1991 to 2003," Mailer noted. "Each of the four major networks now offers 52 minutes of commercials in the three hours from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. every day."

Across the world, the Jewish lobby in America is accorded extraordinary power, almost to the mythic levels of guileful effectiveness once attributed to the British Secret Service. And in truth, MI6, as the Secret Service was also known, never approached the Jewish lobby in overall clout. But these days, if you read analyses by American Jews of where their power is headed, the tone is often dour and the forecast grim. They say, in the words of the American anti-Arab fanatic Daniel Pipes, "the golden age of the Jews" in America has passed its zenith.

This may seem strange when there is universal recognition that George Bush may well be the most pro-Israel president in the nation's history, when the role of the so-called "neocons," usually shorthand for the more fanatical supporters of Israel in American public life, is identified as crucial in pushing for the war on Iraq and now on Iran, when pro-Israel votes in the U.S. Congress sweep through by margins of over 90 percent.