How much to fly from Baltimore to the USS Abraham Lincoln?

Today, I received an email that floored me. American Airlines is running a program in which you can donate frequent flyer miles to "Operation Hero", which provides free tickets to soldiers who are on emergency and R&R leave from Iraq.

It turns out that under something called the "Iraqi Freedom Rest and Relaxation Program", if you're on leave to visit family, or attend a funeral or whatnot, the military will fly you to one of three airports in the US -- Atlanta, Baltimore (BWI) or Dallas/Ft. Worth. If your final destination isn't one of those three cities, that's tough -- you have to pay your own way from there to wherever you are going.

As Tasha, who sent me the email, put it: You have got to be f-ing kidding me. I just learned that we send our troops to risk death in a foreign land, and then when we finally let them come home for a little while, we dump them at a gateway airport and make them cough up money to pay for their own tickets home. Some thank-you! It makes me feel even worse about the tax cut than I did before - the small bit of extra money I get back could have been used to buy a plane ticket for one of these heros.

And, just to prove how the tax cut is mythical, I am now being asked to voluntarily provide the plane ticket for the soldiers by donating my frequent flyer miles. Which, of course, I will do to some extent. So the tax cut benefits me exactly how???

So far, the Republicans have managed to cut military pay and Veterans Administration funding; have repeatedly extended the deployments of Reservists after telling them they were going home; rewritten the rules of Reserve tours of duty so that unlike regular troops, you can't be discharged from the Reserves until after your entire unit has been deactivated (even if your term has expired); and now make soldiers pay to get from a hub airport to where their families, whom they haven't seen in a long time, are. Yet the Republicans are the party of patriotism, military strength and family values? I don't see it.

Anyway, if you have American Advantage miles and would like to donate, here's a link.