Rob Shvern on Politics

John McCain has clarified his platform. He says jobs are never coming back, illegals are never going home, and we are doing to start a lot more wars.

You might remember a few weeks ago when McCain said he would like to stay in Iraq for 100 more years. He is now open to staying in Iraq for 10,000 years.

Hillary Clinton has promised to keep troops in Iraq until at least 2013 with at an estimated deployment of at least 75,000.These forces will be used to “fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.” Clinton’s policy is estimated to cost almost 5 trillion dollars.

You might remember that in the months before the March 2003 Iraq invasion, the Bush administration estimated the Iraq war would cost no more than $50 billion, but a recent Congressional Budget Office estimate warned that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country.

Slowly developing cognitive deficits, as demonstrated so clearly by the President, can represent only one diagnosis, and that is “presenile demential”! Presentile dementia is best described to nonmedical persons as a fairly typical Alzheimer’s situation that develops significantly earlier in life, well before what is usally considered old age. It runs about the same course as typical senile dementias, such as classical Alzheimer’s–to incapacitation and, eventually, death, as with President Ronald Reagan, but at a relatively earlier age, President Bush’s “mangled” words are a demonstration of what physicians call “confabulation,” and are almost specific to the diagnosis of a true dementia. Bush should immediately be given the advantage of a considered professional diagnosis, and started on drugs that offer the possibility of retarding the slow by inexorable course of the disease.

Dr. Joseph M. Price
The Atlantic (October 2004)

Sen. Joe Biden nails Rudy Giuliani during Tuesday’s MSNBC debate: “And the irony is, Rudy Giuliani, probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency, is here talking about any of the people here. Rudy Giuliani… I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He’s genuinely not qualified to be president.”

  As chairperson and ranking member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 through the end of 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful subcommittee.

In 2005, Roll Call calculated Feinstein’s wealth, including Blum’s assets, at $40 million, up 25 percent from the year before. That made her the ninth wealthiest member of Congress. Feinstein’s latest Public Financial Disclosure Report shows that in 2005 her family earned income of between $500,000 and $5 million from capital gains on URS and Perini stock combined. From CB Richard Ellis, Blum earned between $1.3 million to $4 million.

http://www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html

This is the $16,500,000 mansion the war bought:

And that’s exactly why the Bush administration is so darn bullet-proof. The Democratic leadership in Washington is just as crooked and just as callous.

http://www.counterpunch.org/frank02282006.html

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D. Ohio) suggested today that President Bush’s comment about a nuclear Iran precipitating “World War III” is a sign of mental instability.

“I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health,” Kucinich, a back-of-the-pack candidate for president, said in an interview with The Inquirer’s editorial board. “There’s something wrong. He does not seem to understand his words have real impact.”

“You cannot be a president of the United States who’s wanton in his expression of violence,” Kucinich said. “There’s a lot of people who need care. He might be one of them. If there isn’t something wrong with him, then there’s something wrong with us. This, to me, is a very serious question.”

Garry Kasparov rejects media cliches and states clearly how things appear.

In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles.

In “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” published by Penguin Press, Mr. Greenspan criticizes both congressional Republicans and President George W. Bush for abandoning fiscal discipline.

Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a “lifelong libertarian Republican,” writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb “out-of-control” spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush’s failure to do so “was a major mistake.” Republicans in Congress, he writes, “swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118978549183327730.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news