Let's see, universal health care, or a system that won't work, costs trillions, and pisses off the rest of the planet? Which provides more security to the USA?

I used to do research for the USAF and DARPA. I came across many people doing work on Star Wars related issues. Luckily the groups I worked for (we contracted to USAF and DARPA) all refused to do Star Wars related work because we recognized how unreal it was. In all my time in that community I never met one person who seriously thought it would work. The people who did the research would justify it by saying that there were some very interesting research problems (in areas such as distributed computing) that needed to be solved and that would have benefits elsewhere. I was politically far to the left but most of my colleagues were people who had spent their lives working for the military and some were very right wing. We disagreed on a lot of issues but we all agreed on Star Wars. Not one scientist or engineer that I knew believed it was an effective use of money.

One other point I forgot to make. If you look into the tests that have been conducted they have virtually ALL failed. And there has NEVER been a realistic test. The tests that are conducted are set up so that everyone knows exactly when and where the incoming missile will be fired. Of course in a realistic test you wouldn't know either of those things and in addition there would most likely be dummy firings and counter measures you would have to contend with. But even with these rigged tests they fail to shoot down the missile virtually every time. And in their typical criminally incompetent fashion how did Rumsfeld/Bush respond to this? THEY CHANGED THE LAW THAT REQUIRED SYSTEMS TO BE TESTED BEFORE THEY ARE DEPLOYED: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/feb/24/natio...

There is also the obviously totally irrelevant fact that the American Physical Society, the premier professional organization for physicists, has officially issued a statement to the effect that the whole Star Wars system cannot work as advertised without violating the laws of physics. We clearly absolutely need a grossly overpriced, geopolitically destabilizing, and totally ineffective missile defense system. /s

Sarkozy is absolutely right. It is great news that he has made such a public, and rational, statement about this ill-conceived missile shield.

I say skip the missiles and just write the a check to the companies that produce these interceptor missiles. If making money is the driving concern here, then they'll get their piece of the action, yet diplomatic relations with Russia would not be further strained.

Of course I'm joking here. But this is how little sense I think the missile shield makes; it would make almost as much sense to just give the arms manufacturers money for nothing... an safer for everyone.

This situation (great cartoon btw) reminds me of the European countries that were gearing-up to refight WWI during the twenties and thirties.

The French threw millions into the Maginot Line of static fortifications on their border.

The Nazi Germans responded by going around the fortifications through the "inpenetrable" Argonne Forest.

Both the French and British had some tanks( Char bis, A - 8) that were better than anything that the Nazis had. But they committed these tanks in a piecemeal fashion as infantry support, while the Germans committed large units to punch through enemy lines.

The Allies failed with outdated tactics - but at least the weapons systems ACTUALLY WORKED!

Our arms manufacturers propose to sell us weapons systems that don't work based upon strategies and tactics that are clearly inappropriate to the situations faced today.

General Dynamics, Carlyle et al win big!

Ewe, Ess, Aye! Ewe, Ess, Aye!

Shite...

"These vested interests intend trying to steamroller Obama from word one." That is exactly what they are trying to do but will they succeed? BTW, I am so thankful that someone other than myself is saying to slash the military and reminding him that the civilians run the show in America.

It seems that we have in our wisdom used our unprecedented post war influence and prosperity to create and expand our now global economy on the foundation of a consumerism that is fully dependent upon an ever expanding population of those drawn into the industrialized complex to squander increasing amounts of cash on a boat load of useless crap. In a nutshell, that is the operative definition of Market Economy. It obviously also includes your humble home, your basic or your outlandish car, and a refrigerator. And with those come good and bad loans and credit cards. This, anything but free, Market Economy has become America’s current heart and soul. So much so, that when there is a blip in that Market, our government sends out what they call tax rebate checks of a few hundred dollars each to those who are more likely to do just that, spend, rather than increase support to the poorest among us who might use extra food stamps and/or a few more weeks of unemployment compensation to buy the barest essentials.

When that doesn’t work beyond a tick in the tape, a full scale bailout for the now impoverished wealthy and their shares in the Market’s super financial corporations, which now sets the price of the formerly referred to as “Free” Market Economy to be a “toxic and illiquid 750 billion dollar” Market Economy which is indebted to those who covered their assets with a derivative multiplicity whose definition escapes even the nation’s financial czars who invented them and then proceeded to lend what basically amounted to good-ol’-boy cigar smoke with impunity to one another on a wink and a nod to the derivative assured tune of 531 trillion dollars, until ultimately none of the world trade financial giants would extend one day of credit even to each other for the internal distrust of insolvency. And slight choke on the smoke.

It draws an irony behind waging a yet fruitless war over the fall of the grandiose symbols of the Free Market Economy, the World Trade Center Twin Towers, brought down by foreign hatred of exactly that which even we ourselves might now see as a possibly treasonous Corporate American greed that would fully pulverize and devastate itself and the financial foundations of the entire world, as we now hastily throw buckets of money to the rich and pledge allegiance to “one nation, under financed in deregulation, with no justice dispensed, and all civil and financial liberty abdicated to the executive branch.”

The wealthy hold contempt for social governing when they are rich, but demand huge chunks of tax money to shore up profits when they are not, because they know from the outset that there is never a “trickle down.” Real money is always “sucked up.” And these tax monies as well are increasingly bled from the unfortunate working poor who have no voice in their need and in good times hold quietly to false hopes bandied about by the rich that the trickle will begin to pour. In good times they are the middle class and they have a price. And the rich say, this isolated incident and disaster is an enigma, this is a once in a life time drop in the market, and then snicker conspiracyism at a thoughtful comment on how the money moved the rumrunner into a more legitimate business. But it was the rumrunner who said it himself. And it may be that the crime is less organized than it might have been, but there will always be the municipal contract, and the Fed. And it will always be a contract on the poor, because the Free Market will never ask where the money comes from, so long as you have it. But the money will always change hands, be it by a bag runner in downtown Chicago or through an office high on K Street. It will now forever be an unchartered organization of disorganized crime. No organization is needed when the code of silent values are clear and the resemblance of ethics embraced. Those understanding these, will regulate themselves and as many as they may, until the end time. And when the end time looms, the top will pay dearly for the crowd to yell “kill” and some poor, needy, do-gooder will usually do it but good. So the world order lingers in the smog.

We have it in writing, the perfect world order, when the government, the commerce, and the organized godheads all agree. The perfect world order spreading freedom and prosperity throughout the world by the most deadly armed, heavily ammunitioned, and most highly tech-equipped military a sole world super power can provide to every corner of the globe, wherever corporate control of the provincial government and the gross national product of business is obstructed.

Hampered by those intent on a social integrity, those who revere ethnic communities and customs, those who fight to protect the land, water, and human rights of the uprooted indigenous peoples, and thwarted by those who impede the squandering of natural resources, biodiversities, and environmental symbiosis, the industrial expansion is disrupted also by its own, governments that fully fathom sovereignty, those already entrenched in established political and financial power know implicitly to resist another’s greed for their own. Although in the end, prosperity ruthlessly pursues from exactly these so established, those having an obtainable price, supplies them with munitions to establish the rule of Market law, and that coalition then colludes to advance the rule of their money at gunpoint. The Cold War was the Third World War. And the people of each nation lost and are losing still. The Market Economy, now surnamed “Money Talks”, won and conquered, and spreads peace and prosperity with each “smart bomb.” It is not the first end times.

We have it in writing, the perfect world order, when the government, the commerce, and the organized godheads all agreed. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and Rome all grasped rigorously to the governing rule of law to kill the Christ, kill all that was good in the world so that the world order remained, so that peace was maintained, and power remained in the realm of the selfish and self-righteous. It is the world order. It is the Tower of Babel. And it is what the Book is all about: The ebb and flow of world order verses human decency. And the Market Economy is the world order, where money talks and rampant and vulgar consumerism is the Babylonian whore luring the rich and powerful to plunder at will. There is no new thing under the sun.

The sun rises. The truth falls
Under the scrutiny.
The sun sets. World Trade
Reigns and the storm
Gathers the nations.
There is no new thing
Under the sun.
Not even who. Who
Holds the reigns. And
Who does not. Not even
How. How the storm
Calms the waters raging
When the world is
In World Order. What
Rules where is written
In the end times
Long ago. Then and
There is no new thing
Under the sun.

When there is nothing, only manna, those that gather more have no more than they need and those that cannot have no lack. The rich decry it in their wealth and demand it in their poverty. So if it is good for Wall Street now, why is it never good enough for Main Street and why does no one now scream “We Will Never Forget”?