After more than one trillion dollars spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, the so-called fiscal conservatives in Congress are lamenting the cost of Barack Obama's stimulus plan. According to today's New York Times:

Congress has delivered only about a quarter of the $266 billion in "temporary recovery measures" the president sought in his February budget request and ignored much of the rest. There is unlikely to be another "recovery" check for Social Security recipients. Come December, Obama's "Making Work Pay" tax credit — the signature initiative he regularly touts as a tax cut for 95 percent of Americans — will probably be gone.

Even the state aid that Obama last week called critical to preventing the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and other government workers is foundering. After days of talks, frustrated Democratic leaders in the Senate failed again Thursday to muster the 60 votes needed to approve the cash and left town for the weekend with no clear path forward.

All of this reminds me of John McCain's ridiculous complaints about the government spending $3 million on DNA testing for bears in Montana, even while McCain was one of the main cheerleaders behind flushing countless billions of dollars in taxpayer money down the toilet in Iraq (for up to 100 years if necessary, no less).

I guess the only kind of spending that people in the United States have a problem with is that which involves helping people other than the millionaire and billionaire contributors to the Republicans and (to a lesser extent) Democrats. Money that goes to wars without end doesn't count, apparently, when faced with the exigencies of what's sold to us as national security.

Obama is partly to blame for this. His decisions to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan are not only wasting the lives of our soldiers and billions of dollars of money that could be spent on improving our country's pathetic public infrastructure, but are also drawing the United States into imperial conflicts that we have no business getting involved in. 

There's just too much money to be made from war, and too much influence held by those who are making it.


Places like the Motor City need a little more love these days