The mentality of you liberals.
Democrats have held congress since when? Can you say 110th and 11th congress. That's four years of demonrat rule. Still hold the senate.
A democrat has been president since when?
Why not just end the war on terror. Stop funding the costs. Nobody in their right mind can blame continued and future spending on republicans.
I see you decided to put your computer down and stop posting nonsense.
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 03-14-2013 at 01:31 PM.
Drachen with nonsense too...
What has SpursTalk come to?
RG: Are we going to start counting interest in everything?
This we cannot go back and say this isn't working. Let's change it or get rid of it altogether. But there is much in the federal government that we can look at from a decade or more lens and decide if it is working and if we should maintain funding
What's even funnier is how funding for a military at war is put in the same light as paying for people who do not want to. Out of the big three in the budget, one is covered in the cons ution.
That makes me want to watch the wire
This is hypnotizing.
calm down and take out your hula hoop.
That's actually very debatable. AFAIK, there's no provision mandating funding for the military in the cons ution. Article I, Section 8 grants the power to fund the Military to Congress ("To raise and support Armies", "To provide and maintain a Navy"), but does not mandate it to.
Additionally, the predominant Hamiltonian view over the General Welfare clause would indicate that Congress has indeed the power to spend as it wants.
Seriously... narrow view reading it for military but as broad as you can he get when it comes to Medicare/caid? got it
what narrow reading? I would agree that the General Welfare clause has been debated since Hamilton vs Madison, but I can't really think of any recent ruling (past 50 years) that didn't adhere to the Hamiltonian view.
It's not "Repug stupidity", it's the decades-long VWRC/1%/corporate/Repug strategy of enriching/protecting the 1% and ing the 99%.
Guess who profits and guess who pays?
GOP and Obama Ready to Make Needy Seniors Pay for Bush Wars
Now, even President Obama has accepted the GOP "frame" of a nation mired in debt, when it was the Republican Party under Bush – many of them still in Congress – who wrapped themselves in the flag and cheered on the shock and awe of multi-trillion dollar debt and death. And any subsequent growth in the debt is in large part due to the unemployment and loss of productivity resulting from the financial crash.
Obama -- always great at campaigning and, except on rare occasions, generally poor at debunking the Republican control over debate on public policy -- either is again adopting the GOP memes or actually agrees with the scaling back of earned benefits for Americans who worked hard for them. As Talking Point Memo headlines a March 14 article: "Obama to GOP: I'm Serious About Cutting the Social Safety Net." In return, Obama reportedly wants an unspecified amount of additional revenue into the treasury.
What's most disturbing about Obama's willingness to apparently concede means testing in Medicare and Chained CPI inflation adjustments for Social Security (both of which will decrease benefits to many seniors) is that he was elected on policies of preserving both programs without cuts. One can only speculate that Obama, who is careful to stay in the campaign funding good graces of Wall Street, actually has drunk the Republican water treated not with fluoride, but with rank deception.
Basically, the deficit of the United States would likely not exist (or be relatively minimal) if it were not for the unfunded Bush wars and the tax cuts for the rich – almost universally supported by Republicans when they happened. The wars were also supported by far too many Democrats.
When one considers the trillions of dollars that the wars contributed (and still contribute even if winding down or "officially" over) to the US debt, the GOP effort -- now combined with an Obama endorsement of Medicare and Social Security earned benefit cutbacks – leads to a distressing conclusion: the Republicans and now Obama are asking senior citizens to essentially pay for the wars by receiving less money when some are on the edge of economic survival as it is.
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/c...-for-bush-wars
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013...n-dollar-wars/Linda J. Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School estimates that the wars bin Laden provoked the U.S. into launching over the past decade have cost “somewhere between $4 and $6 trillion.” She reaches that staggeringly high total by calculating not just what the U.S. spent on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also what it will spend on veterans’ health care and benefits; equipment refurbishment; future commitments made to the Iraqi and Afghan governments the U.S. sponsors; and the repayment of the debt incurred by financing the wars through foreign borrowing. Notably, by Bilmes’ framework, the real costs of the wars will only manifest long after the troops have come home.
She’s also under-counting. The shadow wars in Yemen, Pakistan, east Africa and north-central Africa will not cost nearly as much as the Army-intensive wars of Iraq or Afghanistan. But they’ll still cost something, either through leased infrastructure to base aircraft and special-operations forces; political commitments to host governments; support to allied war efforts; and some personnel costs. All these wars have the same wellspring as Iraq and Afghanistan: U.S. overreaction to terrorism.
“One of the most significant challenges to future US national security policy will not originate from any external threat,” Bilmes writes. “Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
USA - YEAH!
Blair lied as much as head's gang
Tony Blair and Iraq: The damning evidence
Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.
Intelligence officers have disclosed that just the day before Mr Blair went to visit president George Bush in April 2002, he appeared to accept this but returned a "changed man" and subsequently ordered the production of dossiers to "find the intelligence" that he wanted to use to justify going to war.
This and other secret evidence (given in camera) to the inquiry will, The Independent on Sunday understands, be used as the basis for severe criticism of the former prime minister when the Chilcot report is published.
Mr Blair is said to have "realised" and "understood" that Libya was the real threat and that he knew "it would not be sensible to lead the argument on Saddam and the WMD issue" according to evidence of a conversation on 4 April 2002, the day before he flew to the US to spend a weekend with Mr Bush.
By contrast, Iraq had no nuclear weapons and any actual WMD would be "very, very small" and would fit on to the "back of a petrol lorry", according to one senior MI6 officer. They admitted the danger from WMD was "all in the cranium of just a few scientists, who we never did meet and we have been unable to meet ever since".
Yet the weekend at Crawford in April 2002 marked Mr Blair's conversion to Mr Bush's way of thinking. The former US president was determined to deal with Saddam Hussein. On Friday 5 April, Mr Blair and Mr Bush spent the evening alone, without their advisers. By the end of the weekend Mr Blair appeared to be a changed man, where previously he had said "we don't do regime change", according to Admiral Lord Boyce, former Chief of the Defence Staff.
The findings will inform a highly critical attack on Mr Blair when the Chilcot Inquiry publishes its report later this year. "Chilcot has the full story and it's a very complex one," a former senior MI6 officer, who would not be named, told The IoS.
And top-secret British government papers suggesting that the two leaders had made a pact to act against Iraq have been given to the inquiry by barrister and Plaid Cymru MP Elfyn Llwyd. The do ent was leaked to him after the invasion.
After the invasion in March 2003, SIS4 suggested, there was "a sort of recognition that the WMD thing had served its purpose; we had got in, we had done the war".
"This report will be absolutely damning on Blair's style of government, the decision-making process and the planning and execution for its aftermath," said a source close to the inquiry, speaking before the 10th anniversary on Tuesday of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue.
One authority on Iraq, Toby Dodge of the International Ins ute for Strategic Studies, agrees. "I think they will rip into him for his style of government, and that there wasn't due process," he said. "It's clear the way the intelligence was handled, filtered out and shaped was an issue. This is a perversion of the use of intelligence."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...tService=print
UK might actually prosecute, but I doubt. accountability doesn't exist for the 1% and plutocrats.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 04-09-2013 at 11:26 AM.
Cheney's Halliburton Made $39.5 Billion on Iraq War
Private or publicly listed firms received at least $138 billion of U.S. taxpayer money for government contracts for services that included providing private security, building infrastructure and feeding the troops.
Ten contractors received 52 percent of the funds, according to an analysis by the Financial Times that was published Tuesday.
The No. 1 recipient?
Houston-based energy-focused engineering and construction firm KBR, Inc. (NYSE:KBR), which was spun off from its parent, oilfield services provider Halliburton Co. (NYSE:HAL), in 2007.
The company was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.
Who were Nos. 2 and 3?
Agility Logistics (KSE:AGLTY) of Kuwait and the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp. Together, these firms garnered $13.5 billion of U.S. contracts.
As private enterprise entered the war zone at unprecedented levels, the amount of corruption ballooned, even if most contractors performed their duties as expected.
According to the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of corruption by defense contractors may be as high as $60 billion. Disciplined soldiers that would traditionally do many of the tasks are commissioned by private and publicly listed companies.
http://www.zcommunications.org/chene...-angelo-young?
War is a business, like any other. Profits at all costs, not matter who or what gets screwed. Tax payers are war's ATM.
So lets cut medicare, medicaid, SS, etc, etc to pay for the MICS $100Bs.
Overwhelmed By Rising Health Costs, Pentagon Pushes For More Out-Of-Pocket Fees For Retired Soldiers
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013...-health-costs/
Repugs bogus war expenditures will go one for many decades, for health care and interest payments.
here's a huge cost, not always in $Bs, but in damaged brains, damaged marriages, damaged kids, etc, etc, for Repug bull wars.
S Shock Lite
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175688/tomgram%3A_jeremiah_goulka%2C_s _shock_lite/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=54e114048e-TD_Goulka4_16_2013&utm_medium=email
but dubya was quoted this week as still "feeling good" about his decisions and no regrets.
I'm sure rummy and head are equally feeling psychopahtically guiltless.
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