Paul Ryan performed a phalange-ectomy today on CNN’s State of the Union today, cleaning up comments he made about military leaders lying to Congress about their true opinions on the defense budget.

In a sign of how well things are going in Afghanistan, NATO and US troops are designating guards for any time they come into contact with the Afghan security forces they’re supposed to be training.

I mentioned earlier that Paul Ryan seems to think that the military operates under a kind of Stockholm syndrome. They have fallen in love with their captors in the Obama Administration and have started to happily parrot their thoughts on trims to the military budget. But they don’t really believe in any of it, according to the House Budget Committee chair.

President Obama this week declared the war on Iraq to be an honorable success that has given us a brighter future. Are you fired up? Ready to go?

Eric Holder this month explained that it’s legal for a president to kill anyone anywhere, or to imprison them, or to spy on them. I started to get upset about this, but then I remembered that Holder is a Democrat. That made me feel much better.

Leon Panetta told Congress this month that a president can launch a war without Congress and without the United Nations and without any legal restrictions, that a NATO decision to go to war makes a war legal, that a decision by an ad hoc coalition to go to war makes a war legal, and that in fact there’s no way for a war launched by a U.S. president not to be legal.

Despite widespread reports of abuse and troubling signs of suppressing dissent, the Egyptian military will get their US funding restored, at least in part. The State Department plans to make the announcement today.

Next week, Paul Ryan will introduce the Republican budget, which we already know will set a discretionary spending level roughly $20 billion below the spending cap negotiated in the debt limit deal. We also know that it will include the premium support program for Medicare that would end the guaranteed system in favor of a voucher to seniors to choose between a menu of private plans and traditional Medicare, necessarily weakening the bargaining power of Medicare, the best part of the US health care system in terms of cost control. Now we learn that the budget will also attempt to overrun the defense trigger, replacing the cuts to the defense budget with cuts from elsewhere, mostly to federal employees.

In the wake of the miseries we have inflicted on the people of Afghanistan over the last 10 years, including the recent massacre, President Obama said Tuesday that he met with, and has extraordinary confidence in, General John Allen, the commanding general. We kill Afghanis so routinely that they no longer take to the streets when after a massacre, and we make stupid mistakes, like bombing weddings and insulting their religion and their sense of honor. But, the President trusts the generals in charge.

A Pentagon commander announced that the US has special forces teams in Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka and, more significantly, India.

BBC News reports there are teams currently “deployed to help India with their counter-terrorism” operations, according to US Pacific Command Commander Admiral Robert Willard.

Willard says the US and India are working to “contain” a Pakistan-based militant group known as Lashkar-e-Taiba, that is believed to be responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

The American people don’t subscribe to the conservative position about why our nation has a deficit. Most people blame our deficit not on excessive social spending but instead on low taxes for the rich or the huge military budget, according to this National Journal poll. Just because some people might be concerned about the deficit doesn’t mean they support the Republican party on the issue.

Please tell me that I didn’t just step out of a time machine. I guess I probably didn’t travel too far back in time, given we’re talking about Republicans in the 2012 GOP Clown Car cycle, because this is what Rick Santorum said just yesterday in an interview with CNN’s John King about the Pentagon considering relaxing rules regarding women and frontline roles in combat.