For those impervious to the suffering of others, a dollar figure sometimes helps bring it home. Two honest economists have recently put one on the Iraq war, and in so doing shown a spotlight on the black hole in the center of our future.

If $1 trillion makes you gag, try $2 trillion.

The latter number is the "moderate," as opposed to the conservative, price tag that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes have put on the war, which they calculated by factoring in some - but by no means all - of its real costs, such as lifelong care for brain-injured U.S. troops.

The most outrageous deception in the selling of this war three years ago is not the claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or had links to al-Qaida, but the blithe assertion that the war could be fought for chump change; it was supposed to be pay-as-you-go, financed by liberated oil revenue. White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey was sacked for saying the adventure could cost the country as much as $200 billion; of course, the total, even by conventional calculation, has gone well beyond that.

With the passage of Ohio HB 3 it is incumbent upon the Secretary of State to guarantee equal protection to all Ohio voters and all qualified Ohioans seeking to participate in our electoral process.

When elected I will act in accordance with the intent of the new voter identification requirements and  immediately establish and issue the Ohio Voter Identification Card to all eligible Ohio residents.  I will also use the budget and manpower of the office to conduct aggressive, continuing statewide voter registration efforts to insure that those most likely to be disenfranchised by these new provisions are in fact included in Ohio’s election process.

Special emphasis will be directed towards registering and issuing cards to the elderly, the infirm, residents of poor urban neighborhoods, citizens in impoverished and isolated rural areas, students, the homeless, and temporary residents of support shelters including special needs situations.

In the interests of guaranteeing the voting rights of those participants I will initiate procurement of video and audio equipment to document their registration and validate their efforts.

Diabolic… Cindy Sheehan armed with a concealed T-shirt boldly snuck into Bush’s State of Disunion Speech.

How did she get in? In a plot to terrorize Bush, Representative Lynn Woolsey, Dem from California, nothing more need be said, but I will say more, invited, even gave Cindy Sheehan a ticket to the speech – Gallery 5, seat 7, row A, while the treacherous Sheehan attended an ‘alternative state of disunion’ by the suspected terrorist organization Code Pink.

Why haven’t these people been arrested and stored in secret jails yet? Code Pink is a group controlled by radical feminist Peace Niks. They’ve been protesting Bush’s invasion of Iraq – along with millions of little people all over the country since even before Bush started his war.

Once upon a time Code Pink almost made their protest mainstream when a Code Pink member returning after Bush’s Invasion of Iraq reported on the bloodshed on the Republican News Hour with Jimmy Lehrer. Luckily the News Hour realized their error and cut her off in mid sentence forcing Code Pink underground to work with the likes of the radical Cindy Sheehan.

The Institute for Public Accuracy has a PDF critique of the State of the Union for public distribution at: http://accuracy.org/s2006.pdf.  Please spread the word about this to activists.