The Army's Religious Test

praying soldiersThe U.S. Army is administering a mental health and fitness test to soldiers that civil rights groups say unconstitutionally requires active-duty soldiers to believe in "God" or a "higher power" in order to rank as "spiritually fit" enough to serve in the military. The Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) initiative, first used in 2009, is a "holistic fitness program" used to help reduce the number of suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) cases among military enlistees. Suicides and PTSD cases among troops have reached epidemic proportions in the last year as a result of multiple deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the poor quality of care soldiers get when they come home. The CSF test utilizes a "Soldier Fitness Tracker and Global Assessment Tool" that measures soldiers' emotional, physical, family, social and spiritual "resilience." Soldiers fill out a 100-plus question survey, and if poor results put them in the red zone in any area, they must take remedial courses in the discipline in which they received the low score. Over 800,000 soldiers have taken the test so far, and more than 100,000 of them have gotten remedial training. Non-religious soldiers say the test's spiritual component asks questions written predominantly for soldiers who believe in God, leading atheists and other non-believers to score poorly and be forced to take remedial courses which employ religious imagery to "train" troops up to a satisfactory level of spirituality.

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Wendell Potter: The Deadly Spin on Health Care Repeal

Advocates of health care reform who are fearful -- or hopeful, as the case may be -- that Republicans will be able to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") need to understand that the GOP has no real intention of repealing it.

The rhetoric of repeal is just a smoke screen to obscure the real objective of the "repeal and replace" caucus: to preserve the sections of the law that big insurance and its business allies like and strip out the regulations and consumer protections they don't like.

The rhetoric is necessary, of course, to keep fooling the people they fooled in the first place (with a corporate-funded campaign of lies and deception) into thinking that repeal would be in their best interests. For the same reason, it will be necessary for the Republican-controlled House to pass the two-page bill their PR consultants drafted to repeal the law. (Calling it the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" is a tactic that comes straight out of the playbook I describe in my book, Deadly Spin.)

Monday, January 17- Wendell Potter in Madison for Book Tour

Wendell PotterCMD's Wendell Potter will be at the Goodman Community Center in our hometown, Madison, WI, Monday to sign his new book Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. Wendell was just recognized by the Nation Magazine as "the most valuable author of the year" on the Nation's Progressive Honor Roll.

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