By Jim and Karen Irwin
From familiesunitedmission.com

We are ready for answers, because we’re ready to serve. We are Blue Star parents and as our son fights on the front line in Afghanistan, we are afraid that further delays in Washington’s decision-making will let lives and victory slip away. The recommendations of our commanders have been sitting on the President’s desk since August 30th and families like ours are growing impatient. Since General McChrystal’s report was delivered, the President has flown to Copenhagen to pitch the Olympics and accepted the Nobel Prize while we have sat and waited for a decision. As a family we have invested in Afghanistan and decisions are urgently needed.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were like most any other American family. We both worked hard to provide for our two boys and give them a chance to succeed. Like millions of other American families, September 11, 2001 added a new sense of purpose and new dimension to our lives. Not long after the attacks, unbeknownst to us, our son Mike began talking to Army Recruiters at the same time he was looking into college. He earned a scholarship to college but throughout his first two years of school the need to serve his nation kept coming back to him.

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Editor's Note: Lisa Leitz is an assistant professor of Sociology at Hendrix College and the wife of a U.S. Naval aviator currently deployed in support of the war in Afghanistan. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Lisa Leitz.

By Lisa Leitz, PhD
Military Families Speak Out Board of Directors

As President Obama weighs the strategy in Afghanistan, I along with the members of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) ask him to consider the burden he is asking military families to bear. While most Americans go about their daily lives, military families, who make up less than 1% of the total U.S. population, are being crushed by the weight of the current wars.

In the eight years of America’s war in Afghanistan, 911 military families lost their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters (and an additional 4,357 lost loved ones in Iraq). October 2009 was in fact the deadliest month of the war in all eight years. Tens of thousands of military families battle with the daily difficulties of war injuries. Friends of mine have had to quit jobs or school in order to care for loved ones, and they continue to struggle to secure the care these veterans deserve. An estimated 500,000 veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq wrestle with PTSD, and their loved ones fight daily battles with an overburdened Veterans’ Administration and to hold their families together.

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Editor’s Note: DeMaurice Smith is the executive director of the NFL Players Association. Previously, he was a trial lawyer and litigation partner at a D.C. law firm. Smith previously served as Counsel to then Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder in the U.S. Department of Justice before entering private practice. He will be speaking today to the House Judiciary Committee on the impact hard hits and concussions have on NFL players. Below are excerpts from that testimony given exclusively to CNN.

DeMaurice Smith says the number one priority of the NFL Players Association is to protect those who play the game.

By DeMaurice F. Smith

As Executive Director of the NFL Players Association, my number one priority is to protect those who play and have played this game. There is no interest greater than their health and safety. Let me repeat: protecting the players is paramount.

The House Judiciary Committee deserves immense credit and appreciation for bringing this issue of concussions and brain trauma in the sport of football to the forefront. I am confident that the Committee and today’s hearing will be a turning point on this issue and my hope is that this day will serve as a marker denoting the day that those of us that are involved in football at the highest level commit ourselves to finding the right answers.

It will not only influence this game at the professional level, but for our players in College, High School and Youth Football. I have one simple declaration on behalf of those who play and those who played this game: We are committed to getting the right answers, to work with everyone who has the goal of protecting our players and to serve as a model for football at every level.

Watch Smith discuss player safety

Given that commitment, I acknowledge that the Players Union in the past has not done its best in this area. We will do better. To men like John Mackey and Brent Boyd and to the families of Mike Webster and Andre Waters, and other players that suffered and continue to suffer daily, I commit and we commit to this as our mission. We will not fail them or their families.

Between 2000 and 2008, there were hundreds of studies highlighting this issue. I believe that the NFL MTBI Committee has reviewed many of them. Unfortunately, the NFL diminished those studies, urged the suppression of the findings and for years, moved slowly in an area where speed should have been the impetus. But as we learn more about this issue, one thing becomes clear: the days of denigrating, suppressing, and ignoring the medical findings must come to an end.

We need to share relevant information, embrace expert researchers and collectively find the right answers.

The game of football is America’s passion; it is often discussed, analyzed and debated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And the discussions focusing on the business of football are becoming increasingly popular. Fans of our great game are fully aware that the players and the owners are negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement and that much of player health and safety will be discussed in that process. Our players, our fans and the NFL should also know that we cannot wait until an agreement is signed – or worse, perhaps, a lockout – to begin taking corrective steps today.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of DeMaurice F. Smith.

Editor’s note: John P. Avlon is the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics and writes a weekly column for The Daily Beast. Previously, he served as Chief Speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun.

Ed Schultz (L) and Floyd Brown (R).

Apocalyptic urgency and unhinged accusations are the stock in trade of the wingnut fringe. By pumping up fear and anger, they try to divide and conquer for political and personal gain. This week we’re taking a look at a new form of anti-Obama psychosis and a new low in the health care debate.

One of the worst in the political business is back peddling an entrepreneurial impeachment scheme. The culprit is Floyd Brown, a man memorably called “a slimy thug for hire” by George Stephanopoulos during the Clinton years.

You might have first become acquainted with his handiwork in the 1988 campaign, when he was the architect of the infamous Willie Horton commercial, which drew widespread accusations of race-baiting. He’s been disavowed by many sane Republicans, but also served as a delegate to past conventions and as an executive director of Young America’s Foundation.

Well, he’s trying to get back in the game with a noxious new Web site called Impeach Obama. Here’s a snapshot of the hysteria he’s peddling:

How long must we wait... how long should we sit back and permit Barack Hussein Obama to rip apart the fabric of this country before we take action?

Are you terrified at Barack Obama’s campaign to change our country into a third-world nation?

Are you willing to sit back and watch Obama bulldoze our great nation?

Are you willing to let him construct a totalitarian regime... fascism, socialism, Obamaism... take your pick?

It’s got all the telltale signs of Obama Derangement Syndrome – paranoia and pathological hate posing as patriotism. It riffs off race, totalitarianism and apocalyptic politics. In this case, Brown and Co. say they are trying to defend the Constitution by doing violence to it.

There were irresponsible calls for President Bush’s impeachment from the far-left during the last administration, continuing the ping-pong from Nixon to Clinton. Now it’s apparently a standard part of the hyper-partisan bag of tricks, trying to deny the legitimacy of the president from an opposing party by any means necessary. And what’s even worse is that there are folks trying to make a buck by pumping up the hate and hysteria of their fellow Americans.

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From town halls to tea parties, a lot of people across the country are really ticked off. Last week in our special series "Mad as Hell," we looked at the sources and potential solutions for all of that national anger.

Pollster and Republican Party adviser Frank Luntz says Americans are angrier than ever.

Frank Luntz is a pollster, communications expert, author of the new book "What Americans Really Want, Really" and has advised the Republican Party on hot-button issues like health care.

Luntz joined John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Monday. Below is an edited transcript of the interview.

John Roberts: So people in America, are they really angrier than they’ve ever been?

Frank Luntz: They are. 72% of Americans define themselves - we took a survey of 6,400 people, that's five times the typical CNN media poll – 72% of Americans are mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. And they're mad at politics because they think there's no accountability in Washington.

They're mad at business because they think that their employers don't respect them. And they're mad at Hollywood for the coarseness of the culture. So you've got all three things going on at the same time and they don't find a solution to it.

Roberts: Let me quote from your book here because you say what's so important is not necessarily that Americans are mad as hell. You say, “It matters more that they're not going to take it anymore. Americans have hit a tipping point with Washington and, moreover, its political parties.” So we're at this tipping point. What does that mean for the country? You gave us the background of what people are mad at but why are they mad at all of this and what is this tipping point?

Luntz: They feel like the politicians aren't listening to them. And those elected officials who canceled their town hall meetings, boy, did they make a mistake. I wrote this book and I added that extra "really" to “What Americans Really Want” because the definitions of this anger the elites don't understand. They think the town halls are an aberration.

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Editor's note: Ed Rollins, a senior political contributor for CNN, is senior presidential fellow at the Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University. He was White House political director for President Reagan and chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Ed Rollins says opposition to health care reform is about the substance, not the president's race.

NEW YORK (CNN) – President Obama is about to undertake a full-scale blitz of all the Sunday talk shows to try to convince the American people one more time of the merits of his health care plan.

This is after he has spoken on the subject publicly more than 100 times and after he just gave a nationwide speech before the Congress and the country.

I know this is his highest priority, but what else can he say to turn around the nearly half the country that doesn't want his health care plan? And if he told us honestly that the plan he and the Democrats are proposing could cost you more and cut services for those on Medicare, even more people would be opposed.

This is now an inside game. There are House versions and a Senate version of the reform bill. It's a question of how do you get them passed and get them to a conference committee to work out the differences.

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In the debate over health care reform, we keep hearing the word "rationing." For Republicans, it's been one of the top talking points. Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) said, “…rationing is underlying all of this. …If you don't get health care when you need it, you know, ultimately it's going to affect your life.”

Prof. Peter Singer says rationing is already happening in private health insurance companies.

Peter Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton University, says rationing isn't as scary as it sounds. He joined John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Wednesday.

John Roberts: When you talk about rationing health care, what specifically is it that you mean?

Peter Singer: Firstly, it’s the public part of health care that I'm talking about. I’m not talking about stopping people paying for whatever they can afford to pay for or paying for whatever extra insurance they can pay for. But if you have public funds going for something, you want and the taxpayer wants to get good value for that public funds.

So that means you’re going to have to say, look, at the margins, if there's a very expensive new treatment or new drug that perhaps doesn't do any good anyway – perhaps there's no good scientific studies that show it's going to help you significantly – we're not going to provide that. We're going to say, we want to get a certain standard of value for money, just like you would if you're shopping at the supermarket. That's rationing.

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Kerlikowske says drugs that come out of parents’ medicine cabinets are just as deadly as other drugs.

Michael Jackson’s alleged addiction to prescription drugs has been part of the ongoing investigation into his death. Dr. Conrad Murray is said to have given Jackson the powerful anesthetic Propofol to help him sleep. Police believe that drug may have contributed to his death.

Director of the office of national drug control policy at the White House, R. Gil Kerlikowske spoke with CNN’s John Roberts Wednesday

John Roberts: I wanted to ask this, not as a law enforcement question but from a substance abuse perspective which falls into your arena. To use the drug Propofol, which is used either as a sedative for surgery or a general anesthetic, to use it as a sleeping medication would that constitute the abuse of that drug?

Director R. Gil Kerlikowske: You know I’m not an M.D. I can tell you the prescription drug issue is really significant throughout the United States. And of course, we've seen that in paper after paper after paper. I don't have the facts about the Michael Jackson case, the very sad and tragic loss that occurred there, but I can tell you that prescription drug problems are a problem in this country.

Roberts: The police and drug enforcement administration are looking to whether or not he used aliases to try to get drugs, whether he was doctor shopping. We hear about people doctor shopping and prescription drug abuse. How did it get so bad in this country?

Kerlikowske: I think it got so bad because we didn't raise the alarm. It's been bad for a while. If you look, the most recent data, which unfortunately is 2006, tells us that more people have died from overdoses than have died from gunshot wounds in this country. And frankly, this is something that in many ways can be prevented.

Roberts: So, when you talk about prevention, you talk about trying to curb demand and education from that standpoint. And then there's also enforcement. How do you effectively enforce something like this? You take a look at the fact that more than 56 million prescriptions were written for sleeping medication in 2008 alone, that's up 54% since 2004.

Kerlikowske: Well, there are two things. One is that 38 states have prescription drug monitoring programs. These are electronic databases and they help health officials and in some cases depending on how the law is written, law enforcement. And they can look at over-prescribing by a physician but they can also look at patients who are, as you mentioned, doctor shopping. The other thing, of course, is that a lot of this comes out of parents' medicine cabinets.

Parents can do an awful lot. We have a website, www.Theanti-drug.Com. Parents can get a huge amount of information. We've seen significant problems with kids that have experimented thinking that, ‘hey, these are prescription drugs, these are safe,’ and, in fact, they are just as deadly and just as addictive as anything that comes from anyplace else.

Roberts: You came to this job from your former job. You were the police chief of Seattle. Was it possible in Seattle to effectively police this?

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Smith says Vick's impact as a humane spokesperson could be far-reaching

Michael Vick is back in the game. Now he needs to find an NFL team that will let him play. The former star quarterback, who just finished serving 18 months in prison for running a dog fighting ring, received a conditional reinstatement Monday from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. A ruling on Vick’s full reinstatement is not expected until October but he could be cleared before then.

Ryan Smith is sports attorney and BET talk show host and spoke to CNN’s Kiran Chetry Tuesday.

Kiran Chetry: Were you surprised that Roger Goodell said Vick could come back in?
Ryan Smith: Not at all. He had to give him some sort of second chance. Playing in the NFL is privilege, not a right but there has to be some sort of forgiveness. He served 18 months. Goodell is thinking let's let him back in, at a time frame that’s not immediate after he served his sentence but after a little bit of time.

Chetry: When we talk about conditional what does he have to do, what obligation does he have to meet to be fully reinstated?

Smith: Well Michael Vick submitted a plan to the commissioner about what he’s willing to do to show that not only that he has remorse but also that he's going be an active good citizen and spokesman on the behalf of dogs. He's going to work with the humane society possibly to be a spokesman for them because his voice as a convicted felon of these kinds of crimes has a greater impact than someone just coming out and saying ‘don't abuse jobs.’ Look at what he lost, he could say, this is why you should not hurt dogs.

Chetry: Just to remind people who may have forgotten the federal conspiracy charge against Vick for his role in the dog fighting venture which was on his property. It included executing eight dogs who underperformed. One of them, he got the okay to wet the dog down and electrocute them. In one case they hung the dogs, in one case he drowned them, and in another case they slammed the dog's body against the wall. If you and I faced prison time for that, would we get our old jobs back?

Smith: We would never get our jobs back. That makes it surprising in the overall scheme of things. That's why the commissioner is taking this approach. Look at it this way, the NFL doesn't just want people to come and play in their league and be good players, they want good citizens. So what he's trying to say, look, I don't want to take everything away from him. He served 18 months in jail. He did his time but I’m not going to let him right back in unless he shows me complete remorse. Not only is he going to be somebody who’s going to say ‘I’m sorry’, but he's going to be somebody to fight for the rights of dogs and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Chetry: The other interesting thing is you said that Roger Goodell said in his statement that the playing for the NFL is a privilege, its not a right. But he also said that a player is held to a standard of conduct higher than that generally expected in society and is held accountable when the standard isn't met. In this case, it seems, yes, he served his time but that wasn't being held to a higher standard. The dog-fighting ring is not anything that's acceptable to society but he's getting his job back.

Smith: Yes because most people would not get their jobs back but I think what he’s trying to show is if he cuts the player off now then NFL players might look and say, you know what, this is unfair. I served my time. You're trying to hold me to a standard that's higher but I'm in the public eye all the time. Maybe if I can show remorse, maybe if I can go out there and do things that the normal citizen can't do because of my stature maybe I should be let back in.

Chetry: He cleared that first hurdle. The next hurdle is finding a team that will take him on. What's the likelihood of this?

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