Republican Rep. Dale Kooyenga: “There are certain values that the state upholds. If the values aren’t consistent at the local level, there is an opportunity for the state to come in and say these are our principles and they are good.”

The conservative Wisconsin State Journal is again trying to alert fellow Republicans something is dangerously wrong at the Capitol. While Republicans vilified Madison for forcing liberalism on everyone else, ramming conservatism down our throats is A-Okay? Didn’t think so.

The line that stood out for me is this breathtaking rightwing authoritarian philosophical statement:

Rep. Dale Kooyenga, R-Brookfield: “There are certain values that the state upholds. If the values aren’t consistent at the local level, there is an opportunity for the state to come in and say these are our principles and they are good.”

Gulp! Sound frighteningly familiar? Sounds a lot like what we heard from so many despotic foreign leaders.

Reporter Matthew DeFour wrote this nice summary:

Since consolidating control of state government in 2011, Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature have enacted a series of laws that upend a bedrock of their party’s conservatism: the principle of local control. The GOP has wrested from local government’s control of cellphone tower siting, shoreland zoning restrictions, landlord-tenant regulations, public employee residency requirements, family medical leave rules for private companies and large soft drink bans, among other things. It instituted a statewide voucher program opposed by many school boards and has kept tight property tax caps on school districts and municipalities. The latest and perhaps most disconcerting example for many local officials is a bill introduced by Sen. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, that would limit a municipality’s ability to regulate certain aspects of frac sand mining operations, such as blasting, damage to highways, and air and water quality.

“Many (municipal leaders) will tell you how terrible it is and how it’s the worst they’ve ever seen,” said Dan Thompson, executive director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities.

But of course denial helps Republicans disconnect from their own hypocrisy:

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said “legislators always take into account local feedback when developing bills,” including specific bill language. “The concerns of municipalities are carefully considered…

When Republicans are whining about there being too much local control, well…..

Walker spokesman Tom Evenson said other changes, such as ending residency requirements and the soft drink provision, are meant to protect individual freedoms, Evenson said.

Nice to know our state GOP is protecting our freedom to shop:

Republicans have long promoted themselves as the party of decentralized government and local control. UW-Madison political science professor emeritus Dennis Dresang. “But boy, recently, that’s really going out the door. What we see from the tea party types and the radical right types is, ‘I’ve got an idea, I’ve got an agenda, and it really ought to apply across the board.”

How do Republicans rationalize their authoritarian behavior?

Republicans … say many of the recent moves to limit local control derive from a different party plank than local control — deregulation.

If you want to know what the guiding philosophy of our rightwing authoritarian one party government is right now, Rep. Dale Kooyenga made it perfectly clear:

“There are certain values that the state upholds. If the values aren’t consistent at the local level, there is an opportunity for the state to come in and say these are our principles and they are good.”

“Rightwing Authoritarian” is a term defined in this recent blog post. Check it out.  

Democurmudgeon

Republican Rep. Dale Kooyenga: “There are certain values that the state upholds. If the values aren’t consistent at the local level, there is an opportunity for the state to come in and say these are our principles and they are good.”

Thomas Donnelly: The Military Epidemics That Aren"t

There is a growing presumption in the West that war dehumanizes those who experience combat, or, in more extreme expressions, even those who only serve in the military. In this country, for example, journalist Robert Koehler writes of war itself as a “disease,” one that produces a nearly infinite variety of violent “symptoms.”

The wars of the post-9/11 era, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, might seem to reinforce the point—the Abu Ghraib scandal, for instance, or atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers like Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who murdered 16 Afghan civilians in March 2012. Then there are the supposedly high rates of suicide, post-traumatic stress and sexual aggression, all of which tempt one to regard the military itself as a dehumanizing institution in need of therapeutic intervention.

Soldiers, in this view, are no longer seen as models of self-control, courage and patriotism. Instead they are victims and should be treated as patients. Yet the links between combat, the military and mental health are more complex than the war-as-disease construct allows.

Begin with suicides by servicemen and women, which have increased in recent years—but by dozens of deaths, not in the epidemic fashion that news coverage sometimes seems to suggest. That said, the 349 military suicides in 2012 did exceed the 295 deaths of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The question is: why?

AFP/Getty Images

A U.S. Marine stands guard in Helmand province, Afghanistan, December 2010.

A major study published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that factors such as substance abuse, depression, financial and relationship problems accounted for the rise in soldier suicides—in other words, the same factors that influence civilians to take their own lives. “The findings from this study,” the authors concluded, “are not consistent with the assumption that specific deployment-related characteristics, such as length of deployment, number of deployments, or combat experiences, are directly associated with increased suicide risk.”

Nor does the rate of military suicides differ significantly from suicides in the general population. Using data from 2009, another study by the U.S. Army and the National Institute of Mental Health calculated the military suicide rate at 18.5 per 100,000, just below the civilian rate of 18.8 per 100,000.

The science of military post-traumatic stress is also less settled than conventional wisdom has it. There is no doubt about the mental suffering that too many combat veterans endure. But there is confusion about the extent of the anguish or how to treat it. Yet, with hundreds of millions if not billions of health-care dollars per year at stake, the rush toward more treatments, therapies and medications for veterans is accelerating. Something like a “PTSD industry”—and an accompanying and powerful political lobby—has sprung up over the last decade. Our feelings of appreciation for military service, perhaps mixed with more than a little guilt, may be overruling better judgment.

Combat stress is a complex phenomenon. But research has confirmed what military commanders have long known: It is possible to identify those who are most prone to stress problems, and that has more to do with nonmilitary issues—again, substance abuse, money and family problems are the culprits—than with the experience of combat or deployment to a war zone.

Compared with other countries, the United States diagnoses PTSD cases at improbably high rates. Recent PTSD rates in the U.S. have reached as high as 30%, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By contrast, only 2% of Danish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan (and, per capita, the Danes have done as much fighting as anyone) are diagnosed with significant PTSD symptoms, according to a study published in December in Psychological Science. One consequence of high rates of PTSD diagnosis is that the treatment is too often conducted outside a military environment. Soldiers are deprived of what traditionally has been the best medicine: talking to other soldiers.

The recent debate about sexual assault in the military also reflects the notion that there is something fundamentally diseased about the institution itself. The New York Times has editorialized on “the military’s entrenched culture of sexual violence.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) demands that the country replace the military chain of command with civilian legal processes in cases of sexual harassment and assault because the military is inadequate to deal with crimes of “dominance and violence and power.” Ms. Gillibrand has been joined in her legislative effort by two leading libertarian Senate Republicans, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

Yet the numbers bandied about to show an epidemic of sexual violence in the U.S. military are questionable. In May, Capt. Lindsay Rodman, a judge advocate stationed at U.S. Marine Headquarters in Arlington, Va., reported on this page, for example, that the number of military sexual assaults frequently cited in Congress and elsewhere are based on a badly distorted interpretation of a Defense Department survey. In recent months the American public has often heard that 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted last year. But that statistic comes from an unscientific poll and refers to “unwanted sexual contact,” including touching the buttocks or even attempted touching.

Moreover, as Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, wrote recently in the Weekly Standard, “there is no evidence that the military has a higher rate of sexual assault than, say, colleges and universities. Indeed, what paltry evidence there is suggests the opposite.”

There is no doubt that “war is hell”—Gen. William Sherman lived through that hell in the Civil War. The 19th-century military theorist Karl von Clausewitz—who argued in a more antiseptic fashion that war was a “continuation of political intercourse by other means”—also understood that the veil between this political understanding of human conflict and the underlying, primal instinct for violence was thin indeed.

But war demands unflinching discipline, courage and loyalty in the presence of our deepest animal passions, and in that sense it is anything but dehumanizing. By regarding soldiers, sometimes condescendingly, as victims and patients, we are in danger of foisting our own, very civilian and very modern, therapeutic pathologies on people who don’t need them and whose ability to do their jobs—that is, keep us safe—is likely to be diminished.

Mr. Donnelly is a resident fellow and co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

WSJ.com: Opinion

Thomas Donnelly: The Military Epidemics That Aren"t

Afghanistan: Taliban Numbers Aren’t Declining

• 
• Dalton Vogler
  Blogger, Townhall.com

Feb 26, 2013 03:25 PM EST

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Despite earlier reports this year that insurgent attacks in Afghanistan were on the decline, new information suggests that the ISAF, a U.S.-led coalition, has misrepresented data regarding the current Taliban conflict. Figures suggested that attacks from 2011 to 2012 had seen reductions of 7%, but the numbers were later corrected to 0%:

“The 7 percent figure had been included in a report posted on the coalition’s website in late January as part of its monthly update on trends in security and violence. It was removed from the website recently without explanation.

“[C]oalition officials said they were correcting the data and would re-publish the report in coming days.”

ISAF spokesperson Jamie Graybeal couldn’t identify when the errors in data began or who discovered them, when asked about the coalition’s mistakes:

“During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan.”

This report threatens to undermine months of exit strategy promotion by the current administration, who argue that a drop in insurgent attacks warrants the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. During the State of the Union address, President Obama announced plans to withdraw half of the current U.S. forces, signaling the return of 30,000 soldiers. And by 2014 the U.S. is hoping to transition security responsibilities to Afghan forces, leaving the country without a U.S. military presence.

Contrary to that announcement, NATO plans emerged last week suggesting some-15,000 soldiers will remain. The briefing preceded the release of the ‘correct’ Taliban attack numbers by a few days.

“Only 5,000 of the 10,000 American troops foreseen by the plan are to be made available for the training mission. The other half will be earmarked for targeted operations against terror cells and al-Qaida camps as well as for the protection of US facilities in the country such as the embassy in Kabul. In total, the post-2014 training mission is to encompass 15,000 troops.”

Military leaders will be reluctant to commit to major withdrawals if there aren’t guarantees that the region is becoming safer, and that the Afghanistan government can handle a large departure of American forces. Until the conflicting reports are sorted out, Obama’s plan for an America-free Afghanistan faces indefinite postponement.

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Afghanistan: Taliban Numbers Aren’t Declining