Politics and other nightmares

The campaign to completely strip young people of any drive, ambition and sense of competitive urgency, alas, lurches along:

Well, that's one way to whittle down the backlog:

An internal Veterans Affairs Department report states that about one-third of the veterans waiting to receive medical care from the agency have already died.

A review of veteran death records provided to the Huffington Post found that, as of April, 847,822 veterans were awaiting healthcare and that of those, 238,647 were already deceased.

Huh:

 BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- When Army Sgt. Patrick Hart decided a decade ago that he would not serve in the war in Iraq, he expected to follow the same path as thousands of American war resisters during the Vietnam era and take refuge across the border.

Oh, suck it up, ladies:

 A Marine officer who led the service's only all-female recruit battalion was fired amid complaints of a toxic leadership environment — but her supporters say she was only trying to make the unit better by holding women to tougher standards.

Bernie Sanders just shouts out what the other Democrats think but are afraid to whisper:

“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.

Hillary Clinton has come out strongly in favor of -- gasp! -- gun control:

In her standard stump speech, Hillary Rodham Clinton talks about fighting income inequality, celebrating court rulings on gay marriage and health care, and, since the Emanuel AME Church massacre, toughening the nation’s gun laws.

And so it begins:

If your policy is to "lead from behind," i.e. "follow," I guess you don't need a robust, ready military:

Interesting words encountered while wandering through the blogosphere. Actually, today we have a word pair, and while they're not uncommon in usuage, they are frequently misued: flout and flaunt. Following is a comment made to a blog post on the Oregon baker who ran afoul of the law for refusing to cater a gay wedding:

The Final Frontier is still there . . .