The last orange grove is long gone from the eponymous Southern California county, but the region's crippled economy is helping put some highly productive land back into agricultural production. Officials in Orange County, the Republican bastion separating Los Angeles from San Diego, just signed a lease deal reverting 114 acres of the former

By Norman Kelley With America deeply involved in two wars and with our troops spread all over the world, is it time to dust off the idea of a military draft?  Soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women are being sent back time and again to Middle East danger zones, with an increasing number of suicides attributed to the stress of these constant rotations.  All this is unfolding despite the existence of a massive list of possible replacements – the 14 million names collected and tracked by the U.S. Selective Service System (SSS). Finding replacements through the Selective Service would mean reviving the draft, an idea that now sounds more like a distant echo of the 1960s than a real tool of U.S. policy.  Yet taxpayers are paying $24 million per year to keep the Selective Service System, and its 2000 draft boards around the country, at the ready in case of a draft.  When billions and trillions of dollars are the stuff of daily headlines, $24 million may not seem like much.  But is there any reason for the continued existence of the Selective Service System?

The Taliban sheltered Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda organized the massacres on 9/11.  Taliban forces are still strong in Afghanistan, and have taken over entire towns and significant regions.  Carlotta Gall of the New York Times reports that the U.S. Marines have successfully pushed back Taliban forces six miles from an Afghan ...

Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to be unemployed and underemployed, Stephen Barr reports in the Washington Post.  Many end up in "protective services" in part because of a built-in assumption by employers that returning soldiers can't do much else beyond stand guard.  Barr notes that "many ...

Mark Thompson of Time reports on a $55 billion mistake -- the Marine Corps "new" combat plane that has been under development since the mid-1980s.  The plane has led to 30 deaths in the testing phase alone, and it is now destined for our troops to use in Iraq.  Thompson ...

Excellent reporting helps the public understand where the money goes in government. In the case of the president’s helicopters, it appears there is nowhere to go but up. Jonathan Karp and Scot Paltrow of the Wall Street Journal raise issues (see their article here) about Marine One, the presidential helicopter, that should concern taxpayers, journalists, and public servants. The Navy is ordering twenty-three of these aircraft from Lockheed. Last time I checked we had only one president (two if you count Cheney).