Catch-Up Post!

If you are a fan of the Daily Show, then you will love this podcast I recently discovered. It's called, The Bugle - Audio Newspaper for a Visual World. Here's the description from their iTunes page:

Based respectively in a penthouse turret in metropolitan New York and a small lair in South London, John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman, with their combined height of 3.59 meters, will together canoe through the murky swamp of big stories, small stories and assorted hogwash that inundates our daily world. Comprising news, sport, comment, analysis, other stuff, and our unique audio crossword, The Bugle is the newspaper of the future, before the future actually happens.

Here's the link to the most recent episode (episodes come out once a week).

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I hope Hillary looses both Indiana and North Carolina tonight, AND that Jason Castro gets booted off American Idol. Politics and pop culture all on a Tuesday night! I happen to be partial to MSNBC (Tim Russert is the best analyst on TV). Will you watch the primary results tonight or are you lame or I mean busy.

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Saw this incredible headline (sorry no t-shirt available):
Post-War Suicides May Exceed Combat Deaths, U.S. Says

The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government's top psychiatric researcher said.

Community mental health centers, hobbled by financial limits, haven't provided enough scientifically sound care, especially in rural areas, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He briefed reporters today at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Washington.

My jaw dropped when I read that. According to the WHO the suicides per 100,000 males are 17.1 (source). According the article 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. If suicide rates were consistent with national rates for those 1.6 million soldiers then approximately 273 males would be likely to commit suicide.

There have been 4,560 soldiers killed in combat since 2001. If soldiers and veteran suicides do in fact outpace the death total from these two wars that would represent a 1,670% increase over the standard national suicide rate. Here's the damning part. A big part of the reason why there are so many suicides is because money isn't being spent to make sure the 53% of returning combat veterans who have PTSD get the help they need.

This from a country that spends over 700 billion every year on it's defense department (China is upping their spending to 53 billion). This injustice is sickening. We ask our young people to go to war for us, and then leave them hanging out to dry once they have done our dirty work for us. This will have ramifications for years and shows how insincere our Commander in Chief and congress is about supporting our troops.