Author: Pensito Editors

Army Times, via Speaker Pelosi’s website, The Gavel:

Troops don’t need bigger pay raises, White House budget officials said Wednesday in a statement of administration policy laying out objections to the House version of the 2008 defense authorization bill.

The Bush administration had asked for a 3 percent military raise for Jan. 1, 2008, enough to match last year’s average pay increase in the private sector. The House Armed Services Committee recommends a 3.5 percent pay increase for 2008, and increases in 2009 through 2012 that also are 0.5 percentage point greater than private-sector pay raises.

Here’s the actual language from the administration:

Military Pay: The Administration strongly opposes sections 601 and 606. The additional 0.5 percent increase above the President’s proposed 3.0 percent across-the-board pay increase is unnecessary.

And widows’ current benefits are “sufficient”:

Special Survivor Indemnity Allowance: The Administration opposes section 644, which would pay a monthly special survivor indemnity allowance of $40 from the DoD Military Retirement Fund. The current benefit programs for survivors, DoD’s Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP) and Department of Veterans Affairs’ Dependency Indemnity Compensation (DIC), provide sufficient benefits…

Referring to his escalation of the war in Iraq in last month’s State of the Union speech, Pres. Bush said he was sending “reinforcements of more than 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Iraq.” The key phrase in the quote is “more than” — much more:

A study released today by the Congressional Budget Office shows that the real troop increase associated with President Bush’s escalation policy could be as high as 48,000, more than double the 21,500 soldiers that Bush has claimed.

As DefenseTech notes, extra forces are expected because the combat units being sent into Iraq “need to be backed up by support troops, ‘including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services.’” The CBO’s low estimate envisions at least 15,000 additional support personnel. The alternative scenario “would require about 28,000 support troops in addition to the 20,000 combat troops.”

Additionally, the cost of the escalation could be as much as five times higher than White House estimates:

According to the study, the costs for the “surge” would also be dramatically different than the President has said. The White House estimated a troop escalation would require about $5.6 billion in additional funding, the CBO now believes “that costs would range from $9 billion to $13 billion for a four-month deployment and from $20 billion to $27 billion for a 12-month deployment, depending upon the total number of troops deployed.”

Remember the bad old days when the media used to get exasperated with the Clinton administration because they had to parse their statements about Pres. Clinton’s sex life?

Except for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s “Countdown” last night, I haven’t heard a single cablenewser express concern that when Pres. Bush said “more than” 21,000, he meant “more than double” 21,000.

Bustards!

We can’t let January 2007 pass without noting that this is the second anniversary of publication for Pensito Review.

In the two years we have been publishing, the site has logged over 5 million page views, according to Webalizer software on our servers.

Thanks to all of you.

Two new polls provide more evidence that decided majorities of Americans have lost conifdence in Pres. Bush:

ABC/Washington Post: Americans broadly reject President Bush’s plan for a surge of U.S. forces into Iraq, with substantial majorities dismissing his arguments that it’ll end the war more quickly and increase the odds of victory, an ABC News/Washington Post poll finds.

Indeed, rather than Bush bolstering public confidence, the national survey, conducted after his address to the nation on his new Iraq strategy, finds that a new high — 57 percent — think the United States is losing the war. Just 29 percent think it’s winning.

CBS: Fifty percent of those who saw the speech said they disapprove of the president’s proposals, while 37 percent said they approve. Just one-third of those surveyed said they support Mr. Bush’s call to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

Following the speech, 68 percent of Americans — the same number as prior to the speech — said they were uneasy about the president’s ability to make decisions about Iraq.

The 29 percent in the WaPo poll who are under the delusion that we are winning in Iraq is very similar to another number: In 1974, roughly 25 percent of Americans still approved of Pres. Nixon when he resigned over his involvement in Watergate-related crimes. The Nixon number has historically been considered the benchmark for the hardcore Republican base.

If so, Bush is scraping bottom even before his new war escalation gets underway.

Are you fed up with life’s rich pageant of people, events and trends completely lacking in value or values? Well, we here at Pensito Review are too, which is why we created the Penny Awards, taking the “pen” from “Pensito” and the theme from the lowest valued coin of the realm, the one-cent piece, which fully 80 percent of people polled said they would not bend over to pick up off the street.

The Penny Awards, or “Pennys,” allow us to put in our two cent’s worth of commentary on the penny ante antics of people in the news, organizations that promote worthless agendas and anything else we decry as having no redeeming — or indeed any — value at all.

O.K., except for entertainment value, which we hope you will find in lavish quantities, as we hand out the 2006 Penny Awards to the deservingly worthless.

And, if you have your own ideas about who deserves a Penny, send it in, via a comment. Your opinion is not worthless to us. No, we’d give you two pennies, at least, for your thoughts.

Of course, then we’d have your address ….

[…]

Bah, hoohah: The nation’s governors seem to use the Christmas season — and their Christmas cards — as a means of expressing their inner muse as well as their political agendas. Stateline.org has collected a bunch of them here for our edification and delight.