Honest question...

Begging the question of how much continual engagement in Afghan costs - which is no side question, but for the purposes of this, it is - how many American servicemen/women and civilians will lose their lives in Afghanistan if we stay for another ten years (I know, we've only - only? - been there for eight, but still) vs. the possibility of another 9/11 attack that would happen if and only if we left?

I mean, how does one even begin a rational, non-political cost/benefit analysis of Afghanistan, and without one how can we make a rational decision as to the cost (as opposed to the "keyboard commando" chickenhawks like Cheney, telling Obama to "man up" while he took deferment after deferment), both in dollars and human lives. Throw in how we've degraded our country's standards and honor by torture, and then hiding the war criminals away, and...

The 9/11 atrocity was planned mainly in Germany and Florida, and the 7/7 London subway bombings in Yorkshire. Holding a patch of ground in Afghanistan doesn't do much for us IMO, except act as a recruiting flag for AQ, in the "See? Americans are imperialists and forcefully occupy an Islamic country, proping up the corrupt, puppet regime" category.

The Congressional Budget Office Wednesday night released its cost analysis of the Republican health care plan and found that it would reduce health care premiums and cut the deficit by $68 billion over ten years.

I'll take it...

Its much less ambitious than the Dem plan, which IMO is a good thing. Its doing things in small steps, checking whether or not it worked before moving on. I'm always suspicious of huge, ambitious plans - usually their very magnitude is hiding something, given the theory that all politicians are corrupt to one degree or another.

According to CBO, the GOP bill would indeed lower costs, particularly for small businesses that have trouble finding affordable health care policies for their employees. The report found rates would drop by seven to 10 percent for this group, and by five to eight percent for the individual market, where it can also be difficult to find affordable policies.

The CBO found that under the Republican plan, insurance coverage would increase by about 3 million and that the percentage of insured non-elderly adults would remain at about 83 percent after ten years.

The CBO found that the Republican provision to reform medical malpractice liability would result in $41 billion in savings and increase revenues by $13 billion by reducing the cost of private health insurance plans.

So... why not do that, and then see what else needs doing? Tort reform? Check. Getting hard-to-insure people covered? Check. Enabling small businesses to provide coverage to their employees? Check.

As opposed to - essentially - Medicare for everyone. Even if it doesn't work, you'd never be able to take it back or scale it down - it would be political suicide.

"Here you get a special line that identifies the amount of the Federal Withholding was actually going to the defense budget all along, and it tells you what it is. You get a number that lets you identify exactly how much of your time you are working to keep the defense budget as large as it is."

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/my-friendly-nudge-of-the-day/

"I was too nice in ascribing merely a trillion dollar deficit bequeathed to Obama, as a reader reminds me:

'According to the treasury department's Bureau of Public Debt, the federal deficit went from $5,728,195,796,181.57 on January 22, 2001 to $10,626,877,048,913.08 on January 20, 2009. Bear in mind that the allegedly fiscally conservative Republican Party ran this government for six of those eight years. Roughly two trillion of that debt was added after Democrats took over Congress in 2007.'

Adding $5 trillion in debt in eight years is unprecedented in US history outside the Second World War. But that's what Bush and Rove and the GOP did. And now they lecture everyone else about fiscal responsibility.

Here's my litmus test for the Tea Party right: when they hold up effigies of Bush and Cheney as socialists, I'll take them seriously. Until then, they're more partisan than principled."

Something like that. There were many people who now carry Tea Party signs who defend the Bush administration like he was the Second Coming (Charlie is specifically exempted from this charge from me, and the rest of those whose primary protest is the erosion of 2nd Amendment rights). The federal deficit, the police-state powers (state secrecy trumping war crimes and illegal operations, like those of the 23 CIA operatives in Italy, et cetera) of the Bush administration, and torture, amongst other things.

But it wasn't until he was replaced with a Democrat that all of these things, so necessary under Bush/Cheney, became anathema for these folks.