"And the speaker is...

...one J. Dennis Hastert, possibly the most inept speaker ever. Who's next?"

And also the longest reigning Republican speaker ever. Does that say something?

But Hastert would become president only if the VP replaced the president and something happened to him before his appointment of a new VP could be confirmed. That would also happen if both Bush and Cheney were to be impeached simultaneously.

Talk about Hobson's choices.

"But the CRS says that even assuming substantial troop drawdowns in the near future, the cost of the two wars could exceed $800 billion by 2016."

If it's expected to cost $500 billion by this time next year, after over four years of fighting, why only an additional $800 billion in another nine years, even with "substantial" troop drawdowns.

But all the figures quoted in this piece are far short of the ultimate costs, even if all the troops were to be brought home tomorrow. The costs of caring for all the injured veterans, many with lifetime disablements, will be in the trillions of dollars. Then there are the interest costs on all the money borrowed to wage it, eventually more than the principal amount. And who knows how many billions the Bushies are hiding from public view.

I think progressives are once again setting themselves up for a fall with their premature celebrating of this apparently favorable Supreme Court decision.

The 5-3 Supreme Court Decision would have been 5-4 if not for Roberts' decising to recuse himself because it was his appelate decision under appeal. He would not have needed to vote though even if it was 4-4, because a tie vote would have approved the lower court decision. So he could afford to appear ethical.

But the SC justices are not legally required to recluse themselves from any case. Would Roberts have been so ethical if the lower court decision had been the other way and a tie vote would have approved it?

More to the point, the Court is now divided 5-4 between the mostly very old moderate wing and the relatively young regressive wing. It is more than likely that Bush will have at least one more shot at appointing another justice before he finally leaves the scene in about thirty months. (If he does leave, that is. But that's another story.) Unless the Democrats can avoid snatching defeat from the jaws of victory this November, or can succeed in filibustering an appointment or two if they don't win, that appointment will certainly reverse that ratio. The Bushies will then have achieved their wildest dream: the end to their last check on unlimited power.

Tim Grieves says the war in Iraq has cost $300 billion so far. That's the lowball figure acknowledged by the Bushies; there are hundreds of additional billions hidden under other expenditures.

Then there are the future costs. Replacement of the military equipment will be in the hundreds of billions. Reconstruction in Iraq, and replacing the many billions already wasted and stolen by incompetent contractors, will be another tidy sum.

And the long term military care for many of the 18,000 plus severely wounded military personnel is expected to total in the trillions of dollars.

Before you know it we'll be talking about real money.

George W. Bush really is a bold, decisive leader. So is the first lemming over the cliff.

And his assinine garbage quoted in this piece proves it.

His penchant for inserting buzzwords and truncated phrases from his talking points, without a clue as to what they mean or any attempt at expressing a clear thought -- and getting away with it -- reminds me of a spoof book from thirty years back called "Naked Came the Stranger," under the pen name of Penelophe Ashe. http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/stranger. html It was written by 24 columnists and reporters from Newsday, each assigned one chapter and none seeing what the other had written.

If anyone wonders why the Maine Stream Media and so much of the general public still takes Bush's nonsense seriously, consider that Naked received serious reviews in the press and sold like hot cakes, after it was heavily promoted, with an attractive woman in low cut dresses played the part of the fictitious author in book tours, crooning buzz word phrases about the joys of sexual liberation and such. Sound familiar?

And when the hoax was revealed, sales became even hotter.

But we're smarter than that now, right?

That's a good point, that the reason so many entrenched incumbents are for Pious Joe is that they see his defeat the possible start of something really disastrous: the end of incumbency entitlement to at least their party's nomination.

That would be a truly radical idea, with effects more more profound than perhaps Greenwald realizes.

If the certainty of renomination by incumbents is threatened, then so too is the influence of lobbyists; lobbyists can and often do hedge their bets in tight races by supporting both candidates, but that is a lot harder to do with several viable primary candidates running against an incumbent.

That could be almost as effective as candidates finding ways to exploit the campaign funds of their opponents, causing those contributions to backfire.

Campaign financing "reform" laws are useless; they are written by the same pols who would be affected by them, and wide loopholes are inevitable.