The following chart from Merrill Lynch speaks volumes about why the public may not agree that this economy is the best it could be. The problem is unlike past recoveries when the rising tide raised most boats, this one is lifting just a few enormous yachts.

2006 is shaping up to be another election year riddled with voting-machine computer glitches, although in this case it will likely be more widespread than ever before given the number of states that decided to purchase such machines. You think they'll finally be just as widespread passion-filled protests and calls for investigations?

Got to just love the way Scalia gets away with hoisting the middle finger just after leaving church, no less. It's been several days since this news first made the rounds on the internet, of course with it nowhere to be seen on prime-time news (you know, they're too busy showing all that bad news from Iraq). Didn't we see something like this before from his duck hunting buddy, Dick Cheney? Recall, Cheney's "f*ck you" to Sen. Pat Leahy. Ahh, that compassionate conservatism, quite lovely. And where's the religious right to condemn any of this....?

DeLay's matchstick house continues to give way....

A few columns ago, Bob Herbert cited a study:

Now comes a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, that estimates the "true costs" of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion.

....These costs, the study says, "include disability payments to veterans over the course of their lifetimes, the cost of replacing military equipment and munitions, which are being consumed at a faster-than-normal rate, the cost of medical treatment for returning Iraqi war veterans, particularly the more than 7,000 [service members] with brain, spinal, amputation and other serious injuries, and the cost of transporting returning troops back to their home bases."

...."Another cost to the government," the study says, "is the interest on the money that it has borrowed to finance the war."

....Ms. Bilmes said that the $1 trillion we're spending on Iraq amounts to about $10,000 for every household in the U.S.

And these figures aren't included in the budget -- which is already running a big deficit. So this administration and the GOP-led Congress have been spending money hand over fist, not to mention for this war, and yet they've always been touted as the smaller-government-is-good crowd. Just more peddled horse crap that John Q. Ignorant believes because Rush, Hannity, Coulter et al say it's so. Lord help us all.