Category: Politics

new estimates are out

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002739307_warcosts14.html (related article)

The original Bush administration estimate for the costs of the Iraq war were between $10 Billion and $100 Billion (this came from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz). Bush Administration Economic Advisor Lawrence Lindsay suggested that it was more like $100 Billion to $200 Billion and he was immediately fired. As of this moment, congress has appropriated $357 Billion dollars and we are nowhere near done over there.

These two papers
The Economic Costs of the Iraq War, by L. Bilmes and J.E. Stiglitz
The Economic Costs of the War in Iraq, by S. Wallsten and K. Kosec

represent new estimates from liberals and conservatives (the first paper is from a Columbia University prof and the second from an analyst at the Brookings institute (a conservative think-tank) estimate the Real Cost of the War between $657 Billion and $2 Trillion dollars. Their estimates take into account the expected future costs of supporting the effort in Iraq plus all the lost wages and productivity by those killed plus the additional costs in fuel to Americans and all the other little details that insurance people like to compute, but the Bush administration claimed was too hard to calculate before the war.

The administration claims that you can’t pay too high a price to protect our freedom, but that is just the same kind of mindless bullshit that they sprout anytime dares question their judgment or decisions. If you look at the real numbers, we are less safe now then we ever have been. The number of terrorist attacks world-wide are up 3 times over last year which was up twice the year before. Both are all-time highs. The US invasion of Iraq is minting new US-hating terrorists everyday that we remain there. We are providing a rallying cry for radical leaders in the middle-east. With GWB’s saber-rattling towards Iran in the last few days it makes the problem even worse.

Meanwhile we are spending our Nation’s capital in both economic and moral senses on a needless folly that all the experienced voices in government disagreed with, but were shouted down or replaced with yes-men. Anytime someone at the Pentagon or within the administration questioned the military judgment of a group of chicken-hawks playing toy soldier with other people’s children, they were removed or asked to step down. That left no real voices of wisdom or real discussion within the White House. Now, we will be paying for that stupidity the rest of our and our children’s days.

GWB has left America bankrupt and with no moral authority or respect in the world. It is time that congress perform its oversight duties and impeach this cretin before he does any more damage to our once great nation.

What I hope for the new year…

I think that 2005 was the year that the Republican’s chickens came home to roost. I hope that 2006 will mark the end of the American people’s patience with graft, corruption, hubris and lies. I hope to see a new democratically-elected congress in November. I hope to see Tom DeLay and Bill Frist in jail. I hope to see George Bush on permanent vacation minus the American people footing his paycheck (I want him impeached!)

However, more than likely, GWB will allow a terrorist attack or will make some claims to something or other to scare the crap out of the American people and we’ll just get more of the same: taxing the poor, giving handouts to the rich, and hastening the end of the once-great American dream.

The president has declared that the “War On Terror” is a real war, and that in order to fight this war, he needs extraordinary powers to protect us. This rationale has been used before to validate the erosion of Civil Liberties. It has been used in places like Soviet Russia during the cold war, Italy during World War 2, Germany under the rule of the Nazis. Just as in other wars used to justify the ending of people’s rights, this war will never end. You cannot win a war on terror just like you can’t win a war on gravity. Terrorism has existed for more than 2000 years. George Bush can’t defeat it, but by using it as an excuse, he can do whatever he wants for as long as he wants including monitoring his own citizens phone calls and internet usage and targeting American citizens who are members of the Muslim religion. His claim that he is only monitoring international traffic has already been proved false. The NSA is monitoring millions of Americans with no existing or possible ties to the terrorists. They have resumed their data-mining operations that were originally shut down when they were brought to light. Bush has restarted this with no congressional approval or oversight. Indeed, this “War on Terror” is not a war. Only congress has the right to declare war, but the administration is ignoring that check on its power as well.

US Mosques checked for radiation (BBC)
Muslims angered by FBI radiation checks at mosques (Seattle Times)
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report (New York Times)
Seattle Times editorial

Happy Chanukah (don’t know if I’ll be on-line tomorrow)! And to all my Christian friends, Merry Christmas! And if anyone reading this celebrates Kwanzah, Happy Kwanzah!

And to Bill O’Reilly and Pat Robertson, Happy Holidays and bite me Jackasses!

My buddy Mike sent me a link to this article on salon which is just funny and sadly true about how Bush will survive the spying scandal just like he’s survived all the others… Also, he wanted me to have full posts in my RSS feed, so here is one.

This is so disgusting that I almost don’t know what to say

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002692294_webcongress19.html

There is so much insanity here, I don’t know where to begin. On it’s way out for the Christmas break, the house stayed up all night attaching evil amendments to important bills and cutting critical health and social programs.

I don’t even know if I can actually comment on each thing it is just leaves me speechless. I’ll just list the crap.

Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was passed after it was added to a critical defense budget bill

The GOP is crowing about cutting the deficit by $40 billion which is a drop in the bucket not only of our national debt, but even in the bucket of the yearly deficit under President Bush. In that $40 billion they are so proud about cutting:

• Medicare cut by $6.4 billion
• Medicaid cut by $4.8 billion
• Student loans raised to a fixed 6.8% instead of variable lower rates saving $13 Billion

So, in this big budget savings bill, they manage not only to screw over our past (cutting aid to senior citizens), but also our future (making student loans more expensive). I just can’t find the words to express how much these people hate the people they serve.

Again, the parallels between the current administration and communist-era Russia are almost frightening

So the administration has been using the guise of the war on terror to spy on its own citizens. Is anyone surprised by this? This is exactly what everyone who was actually paying attention to the Patriot Act language said was going to happen. Americans said they’d be willing to give up some civil liberties in order to be safe. Well, now you’ve given up your liberties and you aren’t any safer. Feeling cheated yet? You should be. What is actually interesting when you get into the details, is that this spying might have even been illegal within the rubric of the wiretapping laws.

It’s time once again for me to ask for a real congressional investigation, and for the Republicans to once again decide that, as President, cheating on your wife is worth of a special prosecutor and hundreds of hours of discussion, but lying to the American people, imprisoning American citizens for months without charges, torturing foreigners, spying on the American people and basically acting more like a dictator than a representative of a Democracy is A-OK.

The crazy-ass thing is that after getting caught at it, he says he’s going to keep doing it and that disclosing it was helping the enemy. These people make me insane. Bush wants to be the national father figure, but he’s the idiot dad with a drinking problem that says way too often “do what I say, not what I do.” The enemy, the enemy, doubting the administration is supporting the enemy, questioning the administration is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Cheney says “debate is good, discussion is good” while simultaneously slamming every lawmaker who steps forward to do just that.

“It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is discussing the enemy.” – President Bush

Get this George, you work for the American people. You work for us and we’ll discuss whatever we want, whenever we want, in whatever medium or venue that we wish until you just declare yourself dictator and we get busy mobilizing against you.

mission accomplished, my ass

The administration receiving many “F”s and “D”s from the 9-11 commission this week reminded me of a couple of other things that seem to have slipped out of the American memory banks. Hey, remember Osama Bin Laden? Remember how he was public enemy #1 after 9/11? Remember how we were going to “smoke him out of his hole”? Yeah, that never happened.

Remember how after Hurricane Katrina George Bush promised that we were going to rebuild New Orleans and the government was going to launch new initiatives to help the poor? Well, with the new rounds of tax and budget cuts, the war on Poverty has turned back into the war on the poor that had been going on since 2000.

A few predictions:
1) Congress will start withdrawing troops out of Iraq next year so that Republicans can hold on to their majority in the elections.
2) In 2008, we still will not have captured Osama Bin Laden. If we have pulled out of Iraq, it will be in full-on-civil war, or if we haven’t, we will still have our soldiers attacked daily.
3) Also in 2008, in New Orleans: The French Quarter, Garden District and downtown will be 100% back to where they were. In the poor outlying districts, away from the tourists, nothing will have changed since Katrina and the levees will still be inadequate.

If you connect the dots between the various Bush Administrations failures, you can see the pattern emerge…

Hurricane Katrina showed how devastatingly out of touch and how slow to action George Bush is, right? Maybe you’ll get this realization if you’ve never seen the timeline for President Bush on 9/11. Just as Bush waited days before doing a flyby over what was left of New Orleans, he entered the classroom after the first tower had been hit. Hundreds of people had just died in a major catastrophe in a major American city (it may not have been clear that we were under attack at that point) and the President ignores this to sit down and read to children. It wasn’t until several minutes after the second tower was hit that he stood up to leave the room and only when his staff basically hauled him out. If there was ever any doubt to the lack of engagement of this president, 9/11 should have made it clear. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina just showed that the man still hadn’t learned the lesson that he should actually care about the American people instead of just using their deaths to further his own agenda.

Similarly, if you remember the flap around Armstrong Williams and the Bush administration planting false news reports and paying for favorable editorials in American media, the fact that we were doing the same in Iraq shouldn’t surprise anyone.

What surprises me these days isn’t the fact that our President continues to violate American law and the trust of the American people but that anyone is surprised about it anymore.

should make every American who voted for W feel like an idiot.

Alan Greenspan says that the economy is doing pretty good at the moment, especially considering the blows from this Hurricane season. However, he looks at the deficit, America’s aging citizens and our debt which is being shouldered by foreign countries and he says “we need to do something about this.” George Bush says that the economy is doing wonderfully and that is thanks to his plan of deficit spending and tax cuts which are producing the crazy debt. He makes no mention of the future because he doesn’t think about the future, he doesn’t give a damn about it. That is the next guys job. He is a dorkus who is condemning the American people and the American way of life to decades of ruin to pay for his excesses. If I were reasonably young (which I am), I’d be making plans to get off this sinking ship and find a place where I won’t be paying off Reagan and G.W.B.’s get rich quick schemes until I die.