Help help overseas bound solders find temporary homes through Operation Nobel Foster ( www.operationnoblefoster.org ) or Military Pets Foster Project ( netpets.org )

Just another way you can provide assistance to those who are serving by giving them one less thing to worry about. Whether you support the war or not, military personell should not have to give up their pets to do their duties! The bond of pets and their owners can be a very important and emotionally benificial one. We should not let our soldiers be deprived of their furry family members when they are called up and have to make hurried arrangements! Can you make room for one in your home?

nates;

Thanks for the post sounds like a good program! We can't offically have pets or animals on the compound over here.... Although unoffically a stray dog will keep a good watch at night and the cats help control our rodent problems.

Iraqi's were registering to vote today...small steps.

Hey Sarge, what happening Bro'? Good to see you postin' Sarge - be well Bro'!

Who's paying the price for our patriotism?
By Uwe E. Reinhardt
Posted: Aug. 6, 2005


President Bush assures us that the ongoing twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are worth the sacrifices they entail.

Editorialists around the nation agree and say that a steadfast American public was willing to stay the course.

Should anyone be surprised by this national resolve, given that these wars visit no sacrifice of any sort - neither blood nor angst nor taxes - on well over 95% of the American people?

At most, 500,000 American troops are at risk of being deployed to these war theaters at some time. Assume that for each of them, some 20 members of the wider family sweat with fear when they hear that a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan or that x-number of soldiers or Marines were killed or seriously wounded in Iraq.

It implies that no more than 10 million Americans have any real emotional connection to these wars.

But if all but a handful of Americans are completely insulated against the emotional - and financial - cost of war, is it not natural to suspect moral hazard will be at work in that context as well?

A policy-making elite whose families and purses are shielded from the sacrifices war entails may rush into it hastily and ill prepared, as surely was the case of the Iraq war.

Moral hazard in this context can explain why a nation that once built a Liberty Ship every two weeks and thousands of newly designed airplanes in the span of a few years now takes years merely to properly arm and armor its troops with conventional equipment.

Moral hazard can explain why, in wartime, the TV anchors on the morning and evening shows barely make time to report on the wars, lest the reports displace the silly banter with which they seek to humor their viewers. Do they ever wonder how military families with loved ones in the fray might feel after hearing ever so briefly of mayhem in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Moral hazard also can explain why the general public is so noticeably indifferent to the plight of our troops and their families. To be sure, we paste cheap magnetic ribbons on our cars to proclaim our support for the troops. But at the same time, we allow families of reservists and National Guard members to slide into deep financial distress as their loved ones stand tall for us on lethal battlefields and the family is deprived of these troops' typically higher civilian salaries.

We offer a pittance in disability pay to seriously wounded soldiers who have not served the full 20 years that entitles them to a regular pension. And our legislative representatives make a disgraceful spectacle of themselves bickering over a mere $1 billion or so in added health care spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs - in a nation with a $13 trillion economy!

Last year, folks in New Jersey collected $12,000 at a pancake feed to help stock pantries for financially hard-pressed families of the National Guard. Food pantries for American military families?

The state of Illinois now allows taxpayers to donate their tax refunds to such families. For the entire year 2004, slightly more than $400,000 was collected in this way, or 3 cents per capita. It is the equivalent of about 100,000 cups of Starbucks coffee. With a similar program Rhode Island collected about 1 cent per capita. Is this what we mean by "supporting our troops"?

When our son, then a recent Princeton graduate, decided to join the Marine Corps in 2001, I advised him thus: "Do what you must, but be advised that, flourishing rhetoric notwithstanding, this nation will never truly honor your service, and it will condemn you to the bottom of the economic scrap heap should you ever get seriously wounded."

The intervening years have not changed my views; they have reaffirmed them.

Unlike the editors of the nation's newspapers, I am not at all impressed by people who resolve to have others stay the course in Iraq and in Afghanistan. At zero sacrifice, who would not have that resolve?

http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/aug05/346379.asp