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State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki will become President Barack Obama’s new communications director, filling a key slot as Obama embarks on the final two years of his presidency, White House officials said Thursday.

She replaces veteran Democratic media strategist Jennifer Palmieri, who is leaving the White House to join Hillary Rodham Clinton’s likely presidential campaign. Psaki will step into her new role April 1.

via Obama picks State’s Psaki to head White House communications.

April Fool’s Day. How fitting.

As DrewM notes, Obama is just trolling us now.

A new study by Army War College professors found that not only is lying common in the military, the armed forces themselves may be inadvertently encouraging it.

The study, released Tuesday, was conducted by retired Army officers and current War College professors Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras. They found that untruthfulness is “surprisingly common in the U.S. military even though members of the profession are loath to admit it.”

via Lying in the military is common, Army War College study says – The Washington Post.

Contra the lede from the Post, the study isn’t so much an indictment of integrity in the service (though it is that to some degree) but rather a condemnation of the demands placed upon members to complete far more tasks than they have time for.

Every large organization needs some considerable degree of reporting from its lower echelons to inform its decision making.

But today, especially in the renewed “zero defect” environment of the services, there is such a demand from administrivia from subordinates that, again, we see the process becoming the product.

From the comments, an accurate assessment:

It’s a shame the article didn’t bother to mention what the study recognized as a primary cause of less-than-absolute-truthfulness (quote taken directly from the report’s summary):

>Sadly, much of the deception that occurs in the profession of arms is encouraged and sanctioned by the military institution as subordinates are forced to prioritize which requirements will actually be done to standard and which will only be reported as done to standard. 

Any of us – military or not – forced to verify a zillion actions — including many which, in all honesty, just don’t matter — would do the same: prioritize our time and efforts on verifying the actions that matter and making sure that the rest are “close enough.”

Fairly read, I don’t think the report (unlike this article) identifies “untruthfulness” as the primary culprit, so much as an environment that requires the impossible of our men and women in uniform.

New federal rules that make it harder to get narcotic painkillers are taking an unexpected toll on thousands of veterans who depend on these prescription drugs to treat a wide variety of ailments, such as missing limbs and post-traumatic stress.

The restrictions, adopted last summer by the Drug Enforcement Administration to curb a national epidemic of opioid abuse, are for the first time, in effect, forcing veterans to return to the doctor every month to renew their medication, although many were already struggling to get appointments at overburdened VA health facilities. And even if patients can get appointments, the new rules pose an additional hardship for many who live a good distance from the health centers.

Although the tighter regulation applies to everyone on opioid painkillers, it’s hitting veterans especially hard because so many are being treated for horrific injuries sustained during the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and have become dependent on the Department of Veterans Affairs’ beleaguered health-care system for medical care.

via New rules on narcotic painkillers cause grief for veterans and VA – The Washington Post.

Starting around 2005-2006, the services and the VA, faced with an influx of badly injured veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, began to aggressively treat chronic pain with opioids.

Coupled with an tendency to automatically treat any complaint even approaching PTSD with an aggressive drug treatment program, that’s led to a lamentable tendency for veterans to be on some long term medication regime.  Further down in the article is this bit:

Half of all returning troops suffer chronic pain, according to a study in the June issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

There’s chronic pain, and then there’s chronic pain. We find the proposition that half are suffering from chronic pain to be…. unlikely. Of course, the way the VA and veterans benefits are structured, there’s an incentive for servicemembers to make a claim early and often, lest they be denied at a later date.

But there is a population of veterans who do suffer from real, debilitating long term pain that alternative therapies are unlikely to ameliorate. And of course, that’s the population that has been caught up in the new DEA regulatory scheme. As if dealing with the VA wasn’t trying enough beforehand.

The Justice Department is preparing to bring a lawsuit against the Ferguson, Missouri, police department over a pattern of racially discriminatory tactics used by officers, if the police department does not agree to make changes on its own, sources tell CNN.

Attorney General Eric Holder said this week he expects to announce the results of the department’s investigation of the shooting death of Michael Brown and a broader probe of the Ferguson Police Department before he leaves office in the coming weeks.

via Justice Dept. could sue Ferguson for racial discrimination – CNN.com.

I’m going to give Holder a pass on this. It fits a pattern of his of apparent racial bias in favor of African Americans. But in this case, there’s a fair bit of smoke, and probably a bit of fire in there as well.

I do not mean to excuse the rioting and looting committed in Ferguson in reaction to the grand jury’s passing on indicting Officer Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown. Every bit of evidence I’ve seen supports the thesis that Wilson acted within the law, and for that matter, my own expectations of due regard for a citizen’s rights.

Holder’s DoJ will almost certainly move forward with its suggestions for reforms for Ferguson PD on the basis of disparate impact. That blacks are cited or arrested at rates out of proportion to their numbers in the community. They likely are. Unfortunately, that’s because blacks are also committing crimes at disparate rates, as born out by criminology data over the years.

There’s an element of truth to this line of argument. Violent crime rates are far higher among blacks than among whites and other groups. One reason cops have a disproportionate number of interactions with African-American males is that these men commit a disproportionate number of offenses.*

But that doesn’t mean the police department in Ferguson isn’t guilty of a pattern of behavior that is at odds with the rights of citizens, be they black or white.

The St. Louis suburb, where unarmed black teen Michael Brown was shot dead August 9 by white police officer Darren Wilson, has just over 21,000 residents and had more than 40,000 arrest warrants as of June 2013, according to ArchCity Defenders, a local advocacy group.

The town’s aggressive policing strategies and difficult to navigate court system generated $2,635,400 in fine revenue for the small town in 2013. Court fines are Ferguson’s second-largest source of revenue, according to the Daily Beast.

Quite obviously, public services in Ferguson (and apparently several other collar cities in the St. Louis region) have inverted the normal status between government and citizenry.

As a bunch of dead white guys once noted, That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Instead, we see the use of police powers not as a means for securing rights, but rather generating revenue. The city government exists to serve, well, the city government, not the city citizens.

(They) has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: (when fines and court costs are your second largest revenue source, they’re a tax).

For once, if only for the wrong reason, the Holder lead DoJ may be doing the right thing.

*Of course, as the article notes, only a small percentage of blacks commit violent crime, and the rate of crime, both black and overall, is far lower than it was as little as 20 year ago.

The U.S. Army has said it wants to expand its reach into the Pacific and soldiers hope that includes a new boot designed for tropical environments versus the arid and mountainous climates soldiers faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Service leaders are testing equipment designed for these jungle conditions to possibly update the gear issued to soldiers. Chief among these programs is the Army boot.

Soldiers like Sergeant 1st Class Desmond Politini, who completed jungle training in Malaysia this past year, said Friday at a Pentagon meeting with reporters that the service-issued boots failed to perform well in the jungle climate.

via Army Completing Testing for Jungle Boots Designed for Pacific | Military.com.

Of for crying out loud. Just buy the old 70s/80s version and save some damn money. They were great boots.

Despite what the Pentagon and senior Air Force leaders might say, the A-10 Warthog is far from “single-purpose airplane.” But dropping nuclear bombs might be one of the things the low- and sl0w-flying attackers actually can’t do.

But the Air Force once briefly considered the idea.

In December 1975, Secretary of Defense Bill Clements wanted to know how much it would cost to modify F-15 and F-16 fighter jets so they could carry atomic weapons. Two months later, the Air Force sent back data on what it would take to upgrade those two types of aircraft—or the A-10—with nukes.

“For your information, we have also provided similar cost data on the A-10 aircraft,” states an unclassified memo War Is Boring obtained from the Air Force Historical Research Agency. “The estimated cost to make 275 A-10s nuclear-capable is $15.9 million.”

via The A-10 Could Have Become a Nuclear Strike Plane — War Is Boring — Medium.

The author consults with an unnamed Air Force officer and they come to the conclusion that the A-10 simply wouldn’t be able to escape the blast of the weapon.

Which is disappointing. Apparently, neither the author or the unnamed Air Force officer know jack about nukes, or how a quick look at google can provide relevant information.

All three weapons discussed, the B43, B57, and B61 (there’s no dashes in a nuke bomb designation, btw) either have “dial a yield” or come in variants with differing yields. Quite a few of them have variants that yield as little or even less than the bomb used at Hiroshima.

Given that the A-1 Skyraider was fully capable of delivering a low yield weapon and escaping, the A-10 would certainly be capable as well.

Further, they apparently have no idea what a “lay down” delivery mode is.

The main reason to not equip the A-10 would likely be that the aircrews simply did not have time to prepare and qualify for the mission. Time spent certifying a unit for the nuclear role (which was a very time consuming process, and had to be repeated over and over) was time not spent on training for the unit’s primary mission.