Thursday, May 24, 2007

Cost per person for the Iraq war

OK, let me get this straight. The new war funding bill gives Bush $95 billion, with a B, yes that is 000,000,000

And it only pays for the war effort till the end of THIS September.

That's about 100 days from now. So if my math is correct, and if you don't count whatever other funding and moneys already existed before this new bill passed, then the war in Iraq is costing us $1,000,000,000 per day. About $41 million (yup, $41,000,000) every single hour of every day.

So there are only about 300 million US citizens out there, including little infants and retired elderly and all that. So each and every one of us, including those little infants, is paying $1,000 per year for this war we have going.

$3,000-$4,000 per family.

That is a lot of money.

I don't mean to say that the war is all about financials. There are lives being lost, political turmoil, violence, you name it. But the fact is that money also matters, because this is $95,000,000,000 that we could be spending on revolutionizing public transportation or massively upgrading the technology in our schools or any number of public works projects that would have long term benefits for the country.

Depressing. Billions. Many billions. A billion every day. $40 million every hour. $3000-$4000 per family, your family, every family.

Depressing.

Thursday, May 3, 2007

160,000 MySpace friends

Sounds like the Barack Obama campaign has finally won a debate with the volunteer who originally set up Barack's MySpace page. The official Obama campaign people wanted to better control the messaging and responses from Obaba's campaign MySpace page, but the guy who set it up wasn't keen to hand over the reigns.

MySpace officials had to get involved, and they decided to give the control to Barack Obama.

But will the 160,000+ friends get transfered as well? That is a lot of signups and makes the bulletin feature much more powerful. But if Obama has to start from scratch...that's a huge undertaking.

Barack Obama Security Detail


CNN is reporting the following:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, has been placed under the protection of the Secret Service, the agency said Thursday.

The government is not aware of any specific, credible threat against Obama, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the decision. But the campaign has received hate mail, calls and other "threatening materials" in the past and during his campaign, the source said.