Bush Appointments

According to the New York Times, another Bush appointee, George C. Deutsch, has been fired, this time at NASA. The appointee was only 24 years old and was hired last year after working on Bush's re-election campaign. His job—to limit reporter's access to top climate scientists and control their speaking engagements, especially on topics concerning global warming. Mr. Deutsch also told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang on NASA's Web sites.

Why was Mr. Deutsch fired? On his resume he wrote that he graduated from Texas A&M with a BA degree in 2003. According to Texas A&M, he never graduated. Thank God for technicalities and bloggers who found out about this.

The disturbing thing about this is that the Bush Administration has been doing this for 5 years—staffing our government with campaign contributors and campaign workers who aren't qualified for the positions in which they are hired. Once in place, many of these appointees are dismantling existing policies that are in place and preventing government transparency. It’s happened at Treasury, IRS, EPA, Health and Human Services, CDC, State, Defense, and on.

Iraq War wounded

There's hasn't been much talk about the wounded soldiers in Iraq. There has been a head count of the lives lost (over 2,000 as of now and counting), but the wounded haven't been profiled as much. The New York Times has two good articles and a multimedia piece today about the wounded.

It is really disturbing. Because of the type of body armor that the troops have and the state of medical attention today, more lives are being saved, which is a good thing. But, when you see the injuries that the soldiers come home with, it is shocking. Most of the injuries are head injuries—lost eyes, lost sight, lost hearing, brain injuries and paralysis. Not only are these soldiers and their families lives forever changed, the cost to the VA system over the next 40-60 years is going to be astronomical.

What does our current administration want to do about this? Continue to cut funding to the VA system. Is this how we support our troops? It's because of the advancement in medical science and body armor in the last 40 years that we have suffered more casualties, but we have many more severely wounded soldiers that are returning home and this isn't being covered in the media.

Oscar Nominations

I'm so bad about writing on my blog. My New Years resolution (a month late) is to make an effort to really write here every day.

So the Oscar nominations came out yesterday. There weren't any surprises, except that Star Wars got only one nomination for make-up (it wasn't even nominated for visual effects). Talk about a slap in the face. Poor George Lucas.

I think the films that are nominated are great, but I expected to see them all there. I really get a kick out of the goldderby blog on the LA Times web site. I thought I was obsessed about the Oscars. Some of these people analyze every which way on who should be nominated and win and why. It's a little scary.