By Aaron Glantz
Foreign Policy in Focus

Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.

These are statistics that most Americans dont know, because the Bush administration has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has tried to present it as a war without casualties.

In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones.

The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake, went to trial last month at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing briefs until May 19 and waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already having an impact.

“Shh!”

That’s because over the course of the two week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis effecting wounded soldiers.

“Shh!” begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VAs Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.

“Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” the e-mail concludes.

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By Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn
The Politico

John McCain is planning to run as a different kind of Republican. But being any kind of Republican seems like some sort of death sentence these days.

In case you’ve been too consumed by the Democratic race to notice, Republicans are getting crushed in historic ways both at the polls and in the polls.

At the polls, it has been a massacre. In recent weeks, Republicans have lost a Louisiana House seat they had held for more than two decades and an Illinois House seat they had held for more than three. Internal polls show that next week they could lose a Mississippi House seat that they have held for 13 years.

In the polls, they are setting records (and not the good kind). The most recent Gallup Poll has 67 percent of voters disapproving of President Bush; those numbers are worse than Richard Nixon’s on the eve of his resignation. A CBS News poll taken at the end of April found only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP – the lowest since CBS started asking the question more than two decades ago. By comparison, 52 percent of the public has a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

Things are so bad that many people don’t even want to call themselves Republicans. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has found the lowest percentage of self-described Republicans in 16 years of polling.

“The anti-Republican mood is fairly big, and it has been overwhelming,” said Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis.

With an environment so toxic, does McCain have even a chance of winning in November?

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Congressional Quarterly

Last week’s Indiana primary put an exclamation point on one of the big civic-political trends of the year: Democratic turnout is surging.

Of all adult Hoosiers who could vote, 27.6 percent went to the polls to choose between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the fourth-strongest turnout this year — and more than 20 percentage points higher than in either of the state’s previous two presidential primaries. And something similar has happened across the country:

State by State: Click Here to View Chart

In Washington, D.C., and the 26 states that have had contested Democratic primaries all three times, turnout of the voting-age, citizen population in those contests has averaged 19 percent in 2008 — 9 points higher than in 2004 (when John Kerry wrapped up the nomination by early March) and 10 points higher than in 2000 (when Al Gore did likewise, and the GOP nominating contest was harder-fought.) More than one-quarter of adults showed up to vote Democratic in D.C., Vermont, New Hampshire, Indiana, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Ohio.

And 17 places recorded percentage-point turnout gains in double digits since 2000. The Republicans have not seen the same phenomenon; the turnout of adults for GOP primaries topped 20 percent only in New Hampshire this year, and in 15 states turnout was a smaller percentage this year than in 2000.