While most of us here (including myself) seem to be preoccupied by the
Obama/Clinton rivalry, we should not get distracted from and forget who the
real adversary is, namely the person who has more seriously hurt our
country than any U.S. citizen in history, George W. Bush. I just came
across the following link on the recent book on the cost of the war,
and it will probably be of interest to those of you who might want for a time to
get distracted from the Democratic family infighting that we seem to
be having and get even more depressed by the realities of bush.

http://threetrilliondollarwar.org/

A few days ago the third quarter profits of many companies were announced.  Given the amounts of money being spent every month by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan there should be no surprise that the merchants of war did very well indeed this quarter compared to the same period a year ago.  The orginal article which led to my pondering may be found here.  Snippets of that story along with additional information follows over the fold.

Another little aspect of the ugliness of war. We, Americans, Brits, Europeans in general, may have progressed from this malevolent practice–executing soldiers for supposed cowardice--since World War I but . . .

According to a revised estimate of the cost of this war by economists Joseph Stiglitz  (Nobel laureate) and Linda Bilmes (Harvard), their older projection of 2 trillion dollars was too low, and the new projection has increased by more than a quarter trillion dollars to 2.267 trillion dollars.  You can read the short version here:

http://niemanwatchdog.org/...