We write to you on Veterans Day 2010, and just weeks before the expected appearance of a report from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, to urge you to consider a change of course from the skyrocketing military spending that is driving our federal budget and our economy into the ground, while producing ever more veterans from America's wars who need postwar care.

Many Americans do understand there's a priorities problem here: are you listening? When the Program on International Policy Attitudes surveyed Americans in 2005, 65 percent wanted the military budget cut. Majorities wanted war spending slashed but spending on veterans increased. Americans also called for increases for education, job training, and employment.

World Public Opinion

Where are these funds for jobs and education? It's obvious to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz:: shift them out of the military budget.

Bloomberg

A couple weeks after being rejected by the General Assembly for a position on the Security Council, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper has expressed his sour grapes at the rejection stating that Canada will not "pretend" to be an "honest broker." The other option then is dishonesty.

There is plenty of that in Canada's position. In his speech supporting Israel at a “gathering of international parliamentarians and experts,” he performed the old standard of conflating the Holocaust with the creation of Israel, yet he should know that the Zionist cause began well before there were any indications of that genocide. Christian Zionism could be argued to have begun even before the European variety showed its colours at the turn of Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Both Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists understood that to occupy Palestine meant the displacement by some means - some form of ethnic cleansing or genocide, of the indigenous people - the Palestinians - who resided there and had since the beginning of the Christian era.

I know it seems like more of a noble sacrifice to cut spending on things people less fortunate than ourselves need, but can somebody explain to me why it wouldn't be at least that noble to eliminate the budget of the CIA, which serves no one?

The Washington Post and the Obama administration have been busy telling us that it's legal to kidnap people and send them to countries that torture. They may call it "renditioning" to nations that use "enhanced interrogation techniques," but a new book details what this means in English.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Increasingly deadly bomb attacks across Bangkok have plunged this Buddhist-majority country into confusion, despair and fear because its military and police, who received years of counter-terrorism training by the U.S., are unable to keep the capital safe.

The Thai government exposed its weakness when the prime minister and other officials -- issuing what sounded like a macabre weather report -- bleakly warned more bomb attacks would occur in October but may taper off in November.

Security officials suspect frustrated pro-democracy Red Shirt revolutionaries may now be unleashing bloody revenge assaults in Bangkok, after the military crushed the Reds' nine-week insurrection last Spring, leaving 91 people dead -- mostly civilians -- and more than 1,500 injured.

"If the conflict is not resolved, it is likely that more bombs will be used in attacks, especially IEDs (improvised explosive devices) because they are easily assembled," warned Explosive Ordnance Disposal Police Lt. Col. Khamthorn Auicharoen.