stop loss

I mentioned this in a comment yesterday, but thought it was worth an individual post. Over the course of the last four years, the notion of "The Troops" and what it means to support them has undergone a radical transformation. In 2004, supporting the troops meant putting a yellow magnetic ribbon on the bumper of your car. During the '04 election, the troops were a bludgeon used to beat back Democrats and brand any opposition to the war as unpatriotic - indeed at times it was suggested that dissent was synonymous with giving comfort and aid to the enemy (a treasonous offense).

Since then, we've had four years of conservatives exploiting the troops as weapons and sheilds to fight their political battles, all the while short-changing them on the resources they need to safely execute their orders and build a middle class life once they leave the service.

First came the revelation that Private Jessica Lynch was used as a propaganda tool by the administration to create a war hero and drum up support for the conflict. Then came Cpl. Pat Tillman's death under friendly fire and the subsequent cover-up. Just this year, CREW uncovered shocking evidence that the Veterans Administration was purposefully blocking its administrators from diagnosing and treating PTSD in Iraq and Afghanistan vets. And all the while we've had reports that the administration failed to provide our troops the resources they needed in the field. Most recently, it was revealed the VA is blocking voter registration in their facilities and disenfranchising some of our most vulnerable troops.

It hasn't been all bad, though. We've made progress in the last 4 years as well - usually thanks to the Democrats. Early in the primaries, both Clinton and Obama sat down for serious - televised - discussions with young vets about the progress of the war, PTSD, health and education benefits, and more. To my knowledge, this was the first time since the war began that we had an honest national dialogue about what it truly means to support the troops. After a long fight, Democrats passed the 21st Century GI Bill, despite objections by both President Bush and Senator McCain.

Today, those successes continue as the Veterans Affairs Committee and the VA - after much hemming and hawing - plan to launch a massive campaign to raise awareness about and prevent suicide among our veterans.

Culturally, we are in a new space as well. Movies like Stop Loss, and In the Valley of Elah have created a much more complicated - and truer - vision of the troops and their experiences than the sanitized, heroic archetype paraded across the airwaves by political pundits. This trend, too, continues, most recently with the release of Generation Kill, by the creators of The Wire.

Changes to the cultural and political landscape now offer us a huge opportunity to permanently remove the troops as a weapon in the conservative arsenal and create more policies that provides real, tangible support for those who fight on our behalf. For me, this is a big part of a revamped foreign-policy. Young people - as troops, as activists, as now-respected members of the electorate - can help drive that change. This is a huge opportunity for us as a party and as a generation to do right by our peers and put our country back on track.

• PBS did a huge segment on the youth vote with Heather Smith of Rock the Vote, Sujatha Jahagirdar of PIRG, and three students each supporting one of the remaining candidates. For my money, Sujatha had the best line in the piece:
  
  But the real story here is that young people have been turning out for many election cycles. In fact, in 2004, youth turnout increased by more than 11 percent, which was almost triple the increase we saw in the general population.

  So what we hope we see this election cycle is the permanent death of the notion that young people don't vote and young people don't matter. - PBS

• The National Campus Voter Registration Project has launched Your Vote, Your Voice, a project to help students register their peers on campus. - Chronicle of Higher Education
• Scotty McClellan's new book is the talk of the town and everyone has blogged it today. For my money, Glenn Greenwald has the best take in this post which skewers the media reaction. - Salon
• All three remaining candidates have joined forces to release a (toothless) statement about Darfur. - TPM Election Central
• Clinton backers plan to protest at the game-deciding Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting this Saturday. - Washington Post
• With less than one week to go, Obama appears to be "banking" super delegates for a big announcement. - Political Wire
• Whatever happened to the Jena 6? - AlterNet
• The VA continues to downplay the seriousness of PTSD. - Vet Voice
• Declare Yourself has released a book in which celebrities discuss why they will vote. Not too sure how I feel about this. Seems a little silly and superficial, but if it sells copies and convinces people to go to the polls then yay on them. - Declare Yourself
• The latest craze at Oberlin College? Competitive sustainable living. - New York Times
• GRITtv interviews a soldier who was stop-lossed. - FireDogLake

• First, I've been remiss in reporting that Mike Lux at Open Left is calling on all netroots progressives to work their asses off to register high-school seniors before they graduate. He's even got some ideas on how it might work. - Open Left
• Hillary Rosen, former head of the RIAA (and proponent of taking students, seniors, and assorted toddlers to court over filesharing) is now running the political operation at Huffington Post. WTF? - Boing Boing
• The Democrats are proposing that we pay soldiers who are stop-lossed into service (aka back door draft). Sounds good to me. - Daily Kos
• Ben Adler gives us a brief history of Drinking Liberally on the week in which the organization celebrates its 5 year anniversary. Congrats to Justin and Matt for all their accomplishments. - The Politico
• Georgia10 takes a stab at outlining what Ted Kennedy means to the Millennial Generation. - Daily Kos
• What can we expect from Generation "Z" ? - Profy.com
• Google: Viacom's YouTube lawsuit threatens the net. - Mashable!
• And finally, Joe gives us a run-down on the state of the race and why it's OK that the Clinton campaign keeps chugging along. And congrats to Joe on scoring the AlterNet gig. I believe this means that all 3 people who served as Web/Communications Director at MFA are now in the employ of AlterNet.