Paul Krugman does the numbers on the latest version of the Bush crowd’s proposals to save Social Security by destroying it: The final insult.

In last fall’s debates, Mr. Bush asserted that “most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans.” Since most of the cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population and more than a third went to people making more than $200,000 a year, Mr. Bush’s definition of middle income apparently reaches pretty high.

But defenders of Mr. Bush’s Social Security plan now portray benefit cuts for anyone making more than $20,000 a year, cuts that will have their biggest percentage impact on the retirement income of people making about $60,000 a year, as cuts for the wealthy.

These are people who denounced you as a class warrior if you wanted to tax Paris Hilton’s inheritance. Now they say that they’re brave populists, because they want to cut the income of retired office managers.

There’s a good deal more to the piece; I only quoted the especially snarky bits. Definitely worth reading if you need some context to evaluate the “we stand for the common man; the Democrats are hypocrites” rhetoric coming out of the privatizers lately.

US military deaths in Iraq were up a bit in April, though they weren’t as high as they were back at the start of the year. My guess is that the insurgency’s current focus on killing Iraqis is keeping the US death count relatively low.

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first 26 months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.

These graphs are not intended to show the relative lethality of the two conflicts on a per-soldier basis. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

This won’t be news to those with a functioning bullshit detector (since they’ll know this already), and those who lack one aren’t likely to benefit much either (since they’ll probably persist in ignoring the evidence now, just as they’ve done all along), but here’s some pretty ironclad proof that Bush was not misled by bad intelligence on Iraq WMD, but instead cooked the intelligence books intentionally to justify an a priori decision to invade. From London’s Sunday Times: The secret Downing Street memo.

Some interesting quotes from the memo, which summarized a Prime Minister’s meeting on Iraq held July 23, 2002:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

And later:

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned Administration gadfly, has a suitably snarky take on the memo: Proof Bush fixed the facts.

From The Smoking Gun, a copy of the arresting officer’s affadavit in the case of Ajai Prasad Raj, who attended an Ann Coulter lecture at the University of Texas, Austin, and during the “audience question” phase asked her a lewd question about conservatives’ sexual practices, then ran back to his seat making a rude gesture, thereby inciting the pro- and anti-Coulter forces in attendance to get uppity, and in turn inciting said arresting officer to live up to his title: Another Counter-Coulter Bust – May 4, 2005.

I boggled the other day when I read in the LA Times about 15-year-old Troy Driscoll and 17-year-old Josh Long’s six days adrift in a 15-foot sailboat off the coast of South Carolina. At first I thought these two kids were just incredibly stupid (though also incredibly lucky). After reading more about their story, though, I’ve begun to suspect that they’ve just been really horribly educated at the private Christian school they attend. I confess I’ve let my snooty blue-state side run away with me, imagining the Medievel educational system that prepared them for their ordeal by giving them a thorough grounding in hymns, prayer, creationism, and doing what you’re told, but overlooked teaching them anything about biology or geography, and failed to foster the slightest degree of common sense, critical judgement, or initiative.

Of course I don’t really know Troy and Josh, don’t know the forces that have shaped their lives. And at least in the Darwinian sense, their abundant good luck appears to have entirely made up for their educational shortcomings. Their DNA is still very much in contention for being passed on to future generations, as frightening as that is. But in the same way that right-wing webloggers feel free to construct grand morality plays about news items that illustrate, to their minds, the failures of secularism and tolerance, I see this as a frightening parable about the dangers of religious conservatives’ attempts to overhaul the education system.

Here are a bevy of links, in hopes one or more of them will continue to work as the news sites rotate their content into the great bit bucket:

• Adrift at sea for 6 days, boys kept hope afloat (LA Times)
• Prayer helped keep drifting teens alive (Fox News)
• Rescued teens say final day at sea felt different (The Sun News/Myrtle Beach Online)
• Troy Driscoll returns home (ABC News 4 Charleston)
• Finger-pointing starts in S.C. sea rescue (Washington Post)

Some favorite snippets:

LA Times:

Troy couldn’t stop asking questions. Dude, he asked Josh, what will you do with me if I die? If I die, will you eat me? Do you think that’s Africa in the distance? If we land in Africa, should we become missionaries?

Note that when the boys were picked up, they were drifting about seven miles off Cape Fear. They had covered about 100 miles during the six and a half days they drifted, trending mostly north by northeast, parallelling the coast. Which they never bothered trying to reach, apparently, being content merely to drift, sing hymns, and pray for divine intervention.

Supposedly they started out with a single paddle. Assuming they didn’t throw it overboard as “useless” (which they did with their fishing gear on day two, at least according to one account, though most of the articles generously refer to the fishing gear only as having been “lost”), they should have been able to make a knot or two of headway, taking turns paddling. Assuming they were bright enough to figure out the general direction of land (doubtful, I realize, given their apparent degree of navigational clue), they would have been able to reach shore on day one, or day two at the latest.

Of course, then there’d have been no “miracle.”

ABC News 4 Charleston:

Troy Driscol was the last to leave the hospital. He was picked up Tuesday afternoon in a limo and then stopped at Cathedral of Praise Private School. Troy saw his classmates for the first time in almost two weeks. Later, his fellow castaway Josh Long joined him at his mother’s home. The two told their story again to friends and family crammed inside.

“I’ve had boating classes, I’ve been around it my whole life. It was just an accident. It happened. It wasn’t like we were trying to go out in the ocean. We were just trying to get in between the sandbar and beach”, says Josh Long.

Um, no. I’ve had boating classes, Josh. I’ve been around the ocean my whole life. You, on the other hand, are a poster child for nautical ignorance.

ABC News 4 Charleston (continued):

As a joke, a friend gave the two the book “Sailing for Dummies”.

Photographers from the Post and Courier took the families’ picture for People Magazine. The boys have been contacted by the Oprah Winfrey Show, Montell Williams, Time Magazine, and many others. The boys say they’re interested in writing a book.

Oh, no doubt. I’m sure congregations from one end of Red America to the other will snap that book up, eager to learn how faith can bring about miracles in these doubting times.

Sigh.

Washington Post:

“What they did was incredibly stupid,” said L.J. Wallace, who hosts a radio marine show in Charleston, S.C.

Amen to that.

Janus/Onan pointed this out to me. It’s a blog entry on the death of a serial killer, and the mixed feelings it inspired in the person blogging about it, one Chris Clarke of Creek Running North: Life and death. Be sure to skim the comments that follow for some really interesting interaction between the author and various fundamentalist Christians seeking to challenge his questioning of the killer’s deathbed conversion.