$50,50,50…ah $55, the Wyoming bid is at $55…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 1:51 PM Permalink

I want to touch upon two unrelated articles that are related in more ways than one.

The first concerns the fact that America is broke; we got zip, zilch, zero, nada, nothing by way of having any money left. bush and his minions have overseen the greatest transfer of money from the poor to the wealthy than the most despotic despots in the history of despots and despotism.

This article shared by Raw Story:

Congress's auditor warned in a monthly update released last Friday that the latest data on America's fiscal outlook shows "a federal debt burden that ultimately spirals out of control."

The January update was based on new data supplied to the Government Accountability Office by the Congressional Budget Office, and identified spiraling national health care costs as the main culprit for the country's budgetary woes. The report also challenged a key assumption about the nation's fiscal future made by President George W. Bush in his release of the 2008 budget. [Of course it has nothing, nothing to do with the hundreds and hundreds of billions spent in Iraq that could have cured all of America's ills (pun intended). Bill]…

…The "bleak" outlook seen by the government's chief auditor results from "primarily spending on the large federal entitlement programs (i.e., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid)." Growing expenditures on health care are expected to account for the largest share of deficit-raising spending that will present a challenge "not just to the federal budget but to American business and our society as a whole."

While there are other discretionary expenditures, like those on national defense and homeland security, GAO warns that "the growth in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on debt held by the public dwarfs the growth in all other types of spending."

This article reads like something straight out of the "Armstrong William's School of Journalism" and smacks so badly of pure propaganda it just makes me want to regurgitate. I am not in any way, shape, form, or manner either known or unknown to man saying, hinting, or alleging that the author of this article, Michael Roston, is a government propagandist; he seems to be a fine writer working with the bogus info bush loves to have the CBO [which recently admitted that the gov't bookkeeping is so bad it is impossible to audit the government!. Bill] put out on Friday afternoons, and any mendacities would have arisen from those reports, not Mr. Roston.

Everyone know the Republic mantra of shrinking government to the size where you could drown it in the bathtub. Now their plan seems to be to bankrupt the country so that it can't pay for social programs, only the eternal GWOT, which, while bush has been in office for just six years, he has spent more money than all the previous presidents combined and increased our total debt from $20-trillion to $50-trillion dollars.

Since the "on the books" debt has gone from about $6-trillion to a little under $9-trillion dollars it begs the question: "Where did all the money go?"

Off the books spending, of course, black budgets, top secret, very hush-hush, and possibly even something like this: It would appear that bush, in order to now reduce Iran's influence in the M.E. has been, with the apparent cooperation of the Saudis, financing both sides of the civil war in Iraq and al-Qaede sympathizers.

See the latest article by Sy Hersh in the New Yorker where he reports:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran.…

…The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.”

So, here we are. Buried up to the tukus in Iraq, spending, ultimately, several trillion dollars we will have to borrow from the Communist Chinese to fight the GWOT, only to find that bush's unreasoned hatred of Iran has him surreptitiously financing both sides of Iraq's civil war, fronting through the Saudis, and indirectly providing funding to al-Qaeda sympathizers.

Well, I reckon that if our own president is ostensibly going to sell out the country, he might as well just start auctioning it off in pieces to the highest bidders, right? Do I hear $60, 60, 60…I've got $65 for Wyoming, going once, going twice…

Labels: Budget, GWOT