My building has every convenience


Milton Rogovin, Lower West Side, Buffalo, New York, 1973

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

6. George W. Bush

"So Our Great Leader is threatening to veto health care for poor kids - again - because at $35 billion it's just too darned expensive. Those sick children will have to pull themselves up by the bootstraps like everyone else, the lazy little bastards.

"Funnily enough, George's threat came around the same time that he requested another $46 billion to kill brown people on the other side of the world. Priorities, people, priorities! Those brown people could destroy Our Way Of Life - which these days apparently involves denying health care to children of the working poor and torturing people to death. Yes folks, that's our way of life, and George W. Bush needs another $46 billion of your money to defend it.

"Meanwhile, it was reported last week that 'The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and anti terrorist efforts abroad could cost the country $2.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to a report Wednesday.'

"Yes, that's a $2 trillion dollar price tag. Or to put it another way, two thousand billion dollars. I mean, seriously, you can see why people can't get their heads around this. When you're talking about sums of money that large, you might as well say 'a gajillion dollars.'

The $2.4 trillion would pay to keep 75,000 troops deployed overseas from 2013 to 2017. About 210,000 troops are currently deployed. It does not include the Pentagon's normal spending, which in 2007 is estimated to be about $450 billion.

The estimated $2.4 trillion works out to about $21,500 per American household.

"How the hell has it ended up costing so much? And what are we getting for our money? Well, this might give you a clue:

The U.S. State Department is unable to account for most of $1.2 billion in funding that it gave to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police, a government report said Tuesday. 'The bottom line is that State can't account for where it went,' said Glenn D. Furbish, who was involved in putting together the 20-page report for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR).

"Don't worry though, it's just a BILLION dollars. A drop in the bucket! Plenty more where that came from, right?"

* In time for Halloween, Stylus picks the top ten Zombie films.

* "A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth." John Singer Sargent