I’m willing to accept that mechanical failure was to blame. I’m no longer willing to accept the pleadings of those who want to defend this action that it’s not technically a war. This may have happened in a training exercise in the same place over the Mediterranean, but we know that it happens during a war.

Although there wasn’t any room for teachers’ jobs, there was apparently enough for some money for working people: included in the bill was $22 million in mine safety funding. This money will help alleviate a “backlog of more than 17,000 cases involving mine operator appeals of safety and health violations,” according to the House Education and Labor Committee.

While the $33 billion war supplemental may have the 289 votes needed under suspension of the rules to pass, because Republicans are likely to support it strongly, a growing number of Democrats are expressing second thoughts.

The Wikileaks release represents a potential turning point, with the White House now trying to defend a policy that doesn’t look all that defensible while walking a fine line between playing down the contents of the release and condemning the leak.

Last night, Wikileaks released their “Afghan War Diary”, over 90,000 internal military documents about the war in Afghanistan. They first gave them to three newspapers, who simultaneously wrote stories that appeared in this morning’s editions: the Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Speigel. The documents tell a story of civilian casualties, covert death squads, [...]

The lessons of the last week — notably, a reconsideration of the degree to which much of the intelligence community has been privatized and hidden in opaque contracts, as well as the WikiLeaks demonstration that the White House isn’t completely forthcoming about the problems in its war in Afghanistan — all demonstrate the need to give Congress the real oversight ability they lack now.

Pelosi and Obey make some nods to inserting the teacher funding into a separate bill, like a revived tax extenders package, but I would say the chances of that happening are between slim and none. And so literally hundreds of thousands of teachers will pay the price of additional job cuts, because we had to fight 100 or so Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That’s the functional trade-off here.

This is a couple days old, but it’s worth paying attention to. The two most powerful teachers’ unions blasted the President and his education policies at their annual conventions. In particular, they decried the veto threat the President offered on the war supplemental if the House passed legislation keeping teachers in their jobs, partially offset by cuts to the Race to the Top fund.

Let’s walk through just what happened last night in the House of Representatives on the war supplemental, and its multiple implications, given that the House bill differed from the Senate bill significantly, with all kinds of additional spending. It’s unclear whether the Senate can pass a now-$80 billion dollar supplemental.

Progressive Democrats issued a challenge this morning to their colleagues in the House on the eve of a scheduled vote on the war supplemental: the only fiscally responsible stance is to end the emergency funding.