It takes 10-25 years to get the oil pout of the ground to the gas pumps. In that time period we could be spending money on alternative sources to save the environment.

AFAIK, the Republican plan is:

1) Tell voters that more drilling will lower the price of gasoline. Don't bother to mention the many years of delay before it could possibly make any difference.

2) Rush through a bill to rescind the ban on drilling offshore and in the Alaskan Wildlife Reserve so that Bush can screw us yet again by giving the oil companies sweetheart deals on leases to drill OUR oil for their own profits.

3) When the price of gasoline doesn't come down right away, blame the Democrats.

I don't think McCain is a liar. I don't sense the malice that comes from Bush and the bushies. I just think McCain doesn't know the basics of foreign policy and Iraq, and won't admit it when he makes a mistake.

The idea of a president who doesn't know his stuff, feels compelled to look like he's doing something, AND has a hot temper is pretty scary to me.

...than you should be able to define defeat as victory and we should with draw because we won.

Heh. And then maybe McCain will get himself run over at the next zebra crossing.

The answer is 42

You got that right. A more accurate statement might be "Voted against funding the asshole who sent our troops to die for a fool's errand"?

I was worried about your health.

As far as I'm concerned, wherever these systems have ended up in use, it amounts to incompetence, criminality, or both.

Keep in mind that Diebold also builds ATM's, so they know how to build systems with proper audit trail and accountability. It is hard to see how they botched their voting machines the way they did unless they intended to.

It seems that Senate Republicans are apparently trying to kill off a bill that would limit oil speculation by loading it up with amendments.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/23/congress.oil/index.html

A bill like this might provide much faster relief at the gas pump than new drilling, but Republicans don't seem to want that to happen.

But here we are, almost 7 years after 9/11, and Osama is still running around thumbing his nose at us while we jerk around in Iraq. Even worse, Osama has set up shop in a country that has nuclear weapons!

Bush's so-called strategy has been a massive failure. It's about time we tried something else, but McSame just promises more of the same.

McCain Doesn't Get the Picture

That most of America has soured on the Iraq war, even those who started out supporting it?

Perhaps McCain gets too much of his information from reich-wing outlets which continually tout the falsehood that the majority of Americans enthusiastically support everything Bush has ever done.

I appreciated your link to the Wikipedia article about Security Threater. I had long suspected that this kind of thing was going on, but my attempts to research it were frustrated because I didn't have a name for it.

McCain wants to claim that "the surge" has been a success, but he also wants us to stay in Iraq a lot longer than he's willing to admit. The problem is that calling the surge a success makes it difficult to justify a long-term presence in Iraq. I suspect this is why he gets so cranky when people ask him to make concrete statements about his plans for Iraq.

I know it is OT, but I know the price of oil is making everything more expensive. That causes inflation > inflation devalues the dollar.

Do I have that right? Economics 101 was 35 years ago.

Sorry, I didn't see your other post right away.

I don't claim to be an economist, but I'm pretty sure there is a difference between inflation and cost increases. Inflation makes stuff more expensive, but stuff can become more expensive for reasons other than inflation, such as scarcity.

AFAIK, the purest kind of inflation happens when money supply grows faster than the value of the entity issuing the money. A growing country will naturally have to create more money to keep their economy going, but this is OK as long as the total real value (ie, property, goods, etc) of the country increases at the same rate.

Creating money faster than the growth of real wealth results in an oversupply of money, and that is pure inflation. You have more money in circulation competing for a supply of goods/services/etc that didn't increase in step, so prices go up.

Did our goverment create the money to finance the war by keeping interest rates cheap? Is this sort of a Greenspan thing?

Why bother with something that complicated? All the government has to do is write checks and say they are good checks. Presto, instant new money. Who's going to challenge the government by claiming the money isn't real?

Where exactly did this ignoramus get 18 months?

Nouri al-Maliki is the Iraqi Prime Minister. Are you saying that we know what's good for the Iraqis better than they do themselves? If you do think that, perhaps you should abandon the pretense that we are "liberating" Iraq and admit that we are there strictly to serve our own interests.

If you think a little more, you might even realize that McBush wants to keep us in Iraq forever, regardless of any "conditions on the ground". That's why he gets so bent out of shape when people ask him to make specific statements about his plans for Iraq.