Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• William Astore: Generals Behaving Badly: Among other things, this answers one question I've been wondering about: how damn many generals (and admirals) are there?

  America's military is astonishingly top heavy, with 945 generals and admirals on active duty as of March 2012. That's one flag-rank officer for every 1,500 officers and enlisted personnel. With one general for every 1,000 airmen, the Air Force is the worst offender, but the Navy and Army aren't far behind. For example, the Army has 10 active-duty divisions -- and 109 major generals to command them. Between September 2001 and April 2011, the military actually added another 93 generals and admirals to its ranks (including 37 of the three- or four-star variety). The glut extends to the ranks of full colonel (or, in the Navy, captain). The Air Force has roughly 100 active-duty combat wings -- and 3,712 colonels to command them. The Navy has 285 ships -- and 3,335 captains to command them. Indeed, today’s Navy has nearly as many admirals (245 as of March 2012) as ships.

  Any high-ranking officer worth his or her salt wants to command, but this glut has contributed to their rapid rotation in and out of command -- five Afghan war commanders in five years, for instance -- disrupting any hopes for command continuity. The situation also breeds cutthroat competition for prestige slots and allows patterns of me-first careerism to flourish.

• Justin Elliott: Have US Drones Become a "Counterinsurgency Air Force" for Our Allies?: US drone strikes have killed about 2500 people since Obama became president. Some of those were "high value targets" that have been publicized, but most weren't. (The number works out to about two per day.)

  Under the Obama administration, officials have argued that the drone strikes are only hitting operational Al Qaeda leaders or people who posed significant and imminent threats to the U.S. homeland. If you actually look at the vast majority of people who have been targeted by the United States, that's not who they are.

  There are a couple pieces of data showing this. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation has done estimates on who among those killed could be considered "militant leaders" either of the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, or Al Qaeda. Under the Bush administration, about 30 percent of those killed could be considered militant leaders. Under Obama, that figure is only 13 percent.

  Most of the people who are killed don't have as their objective to strike the U.S. homeland. Most of the people who are killed by drones want to impose some degree of sharia law where they live, they want to fight a defensive jihad against security service and the central government, or they want to unseat what they perceive as an apostate regime that rules their country.

• Robert Reich: Wal-Mart and McDonald's: What's Wrong with U.S. Employment: "The walkouts were no coincidence. Low wages are strangling the economy."

  Jobs are slowly returning to America, but most of them pay lousy wages and low if non-existent benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage -- like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains. That's why the median wage keeps dropping, especially for the 80 percent of the workforce that's paid by the hour.

  It's also part of the reason why the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has been increasing even as the economy has started to recover -- from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2011. More than 46 million Americans now live below the poverty line.

  Many of them have jobs. The problem is that these jobs just don't pay enough to lift their families out of poverty. [ . . . ]

  The wealth of the Walton family -- which still owns the lion's share of Wal-Mart stock -- now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

  Last week, Wal-Mart announced that the next Wal-Mart dividend will be issued on December 27 instead of January 2, after the Bush tax cut for dividends expires -- thereby saving the Wal-Mart family as much as $180 million. (According to the online weekly "Too Much," this $180 million would be enough to give 72,000 Wal-Mart workers now making $8 an hour a 20-percent annual pay hike. That hike would still leave those workers under the poverty line for a family of three.)

  Reich reminds us that in Paul Ryan's Republican budget 62 percent of spending cuts fall on the poor. But it's hard to see just how much can be squeezed there: one key thing that spending does is to make it possible for workers to work for less, so you might as well view the "safety net" as a bizarre form of subsidy for low-wage employers. Take that away and what happens? Hard to say, but it's already ugly, and getting worse. Businesses feel pressure mostly from their financial backers to push wages down, but that in turn pushes the buying power of the economy down, which increases those financial pressures (as if sheer greed wasn't enough), into a form of death spiral. It's one of those trends that can't go on forever without something breaking bad.

Also, for further study:

• Bruce Bartlett: Revenge of the Reality-Based Community: Oh, to be young and Republican again. Well, not really. I had pretty much written him off as a possibly useful source after his series of special pleading books, but I saw him on TV recently and no one -- and on a panel where everyone was respectable or better -- managed to be so sharp and pointed. This piece explains how he got to where he is now, a combination of push (revulsion over George W. Bush) and pull (realization that Paul Krugman is always right). Still, he probably does still yearn to be young and Republican again: he just knows that neither are possible.