I posted yesterday about House Resolution 153 which would designate a day as a national day of prayer, fasting and humility.  Well, the damnable thing passed today.  If you'd like to find out whether your representative voted in favour of it or not, here's the vote roll at thomas.loc.gov so you can find out.

Over at Atrios' Eschalon, several people have suggested various ways to protest this action, including declaring your own day of gluttony, bragging and hedonism.  One suggestion is to - on whichever day is eventually chosen to be The Day - spend the day visiting every all-you-can-eat buffet you can find, bragging about yourself and having some good, not-so-clean fun.  While I can't actually go out to do something like this, I love the concept, and want to encourage anyone who thinks this kind of a resolution is inspiringly insipid - not to mention a violation of the separation of Church and State - to join in.

Breaking News: MSNBC has just reported that Richard Perle has resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.  This will come as good news to many people.  Atrios at Eschaton has reported frequently on Perle, many of the outrageous things he's said, the conflicts - and potential conflicts - of interest between his position as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and his buisness associations.  

UPDATE: Perle's resignation has been accepted, but he is being asked to stay on as a member of the board.

It's been no secret that President Bush doesn't want there to be much of an investigation into what went wrong and allowed the September 11th attacks to happen.  While there is endless speculation of why this may be - theories have ranged from feeling it would be a waste of time, since something like this couldn't really have been prevented, to conspiracy theories claiming that Bush doesn't want an investigation because we then might find out he was somehow involved in the attacks to help arrange his own political gain.  We may never know where between those extremes the truth falls, but there's no denying that Bush simply doesn't want anyone to go poking around into the whole mess.

Previous tactics have included delaying announcing the formation of an independent "blue-ribbon" commission, warning Congress not to look into the matter too deeply and suggesting that we simply move forward, to the naming of Henry Kissinger as the head of the commission - a move Bush and his administration had to have known would be beyond controversial and tie things up with debates and protests until a new head was named.  Since that time, little has been heard about the commission at all. 

When Bush finally agreed to set up an independent commission, they were given until May of 2004 to do all of their investigative work and a $3 million dollar budget. Recently they requested an additional $11 million in order to do their work properly.  The White House has "brushed off" the request, and did not include it in their most recent supplemental spending bill - the that included the $75 billion for the cost of the war.

If the commission does not get the $11 million that they have requested, they will not be able to continue functioning past August of this year, meaning that they won't be able to complete their job or do the kind of investigation this country needs.

As a point of comparison, a commission has been formed to investigate the recent explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, and they have been given $50 million in order to do their work - yet the 9/11 commission cannot get $11 million to do theirs.

Commission member Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, said the probe is off to a disturbingly slow start and that failure to quickly provide the funding increase wouldn't help. "The White House should be strongly supporting that effort, given President Bush's compelling statement when he signed this bill into law," said Roemer, who last year served on the House-Senate joint inquiry on 9/11 that led to the creation of the commission. Roemer has gone so far as to draw comparisons with the $50 million provided to investigate the recent Columbia tragedy in which seven people died. "If we're looking at well over $11 million for that, we certainly should be looking for at least the same vicinity of money for how 3,000 people died and how to strengthen our homeland security," he said.

Of course, with all the focus that the war has been getting, the 9/11 commission and their woes has taken a way-back seat in the news.  Bush may be hoping that he can quietly kill the commission by refusing to fund it, so that the investigation will never take place.  He cannot be allowed to get away with this. 

America needs to know what happened - what we did wrong, and what we did right.  We need to know that our country is doing everything it can to prevent another attack from happening.  In the name of preventing another attack, the government has been curtailing our rights, expanding their own powers, creating new departments, colour coding how worried we should be, planning to invade our privacy in new and different ways - including the use of data mining and background checks before allowing people to fly, demonizing dissenters and started a war with a country that they can't prove had anything to do with 9/11.  What they won't do is allow a truly independent commission to have the time, money, manpower and access necessary to fully investigate what actually happened so that we can learn from the mistakes we made and make better use of the things we did right. 

If we can't do that, then all of our other efforts will be in vain.

Time Magazine link via Hesiod at Counterspin Central

Watching MSNBC last night, I heard their reporter who is embedded with the 3rd division mention that some of the soldiers had been asking him what to expect when they return to America.  It seems that some were concerned they would be spit on and derided, much like the returning Vietnam vets had been.  Thankfully, the reporter was able to assure them that even those who may oppose the war want the best for our soldiers and hope that they will be able to come home very soon.

Given that so much of the rhetoric passed around by the pro-war advocates claims that the anti-war side opposes not only the war but our soldiers as well, I was very glad that the reporter not only gave the soldiers what reassurance he could, but that he also felt it was worth mentioning on the air.