http://slyoyster.com

Salon has an interesting look at the Bush administration.  And whether or not Barack Obama makes a decent president, it will take a miracle worker to dig the United States out of the hole its in.

The good news for Obama is he can’t possibly do any worse.  The bad news is that this is the mess he’s about to inherit. 

Expected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal growth path in 2009: $900 billion

Decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its decade high to its value at the close of business, Jan. 7, 2009: 5,394.83, or 38.1 percent

Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million

Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to 2008: 4 million, a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate

Real median household income according to the 2000 census, adjusted for inflation: $51,804

Real median household income as of August 2007: $50,233

Cost of finance industry bailout: $350 billion, with another $350 pending congressional approval

Cost of auto industry bailout: $17.4 billion, so far

National debt: $10.6 trillion

Amount of that debt owned by China: At least $800 billion

Number of bridges judged structurally deficient: 70,000.

Number of major roads in mediocre or poor condition: Roughly one-third.

The Bush White House’s proposed cuts in public transit funding for fiscal year 2009: $202.1 million.

Target level of federal funding for Amtrak proposed by Bush in 2005: $0.

President-elect Obama’s proposed infrastructure program: $375 billion to $475 billion.

Amount spent by FDR’s Works Progress Administration, up through 1941: $11.4 billion — adjusted for inflation, that’s about $170 billion.

Amount of money earned by a married U.S. Army sergeant with children per day in Iraq in 2007: $170

Amount of money earned by a Blackwater military contractor per day: $600

Number of U.S. military deaths as of Jan. 7, 2009: 4,222

Average cost of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle: $3.166 million

Cost of the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad: $592 million

Cost to conduct the war per month: $12 billion

Amount the Bush administration estimated the war would cost from start to finish: $60 billion

 

And it goes on. That’s just the first course, if you will. I would half-heartedly buy the argument that not all of these things are Bush’s fault. But I won’t buy the argument that collectively the majority of thse are his fault.

In some respects, you have to try really hard to be this bad at something. Like getting an “F” in high school; since if all you do is show up to class you’re all but guaranteed to get a “C-”.

See if you can guess.

A message from your president about his last night in office.

According to the Lawrence Plays Piano tumblr (via), the show might not be worth watching in person. It’s a good thing HBO will be broadcasting the event live. Recently, Ferrell tested some of the material for his one-man Broadway show at the Largo theater in Los Angeles last Sunday night. The play is set in the moments immediately following Barack Obama being sworn into office and presents a portrait of a newly unburdened and noticeably horny Dubya who, at one point, shows the audience pictures of his penis in slideshow form. But the review also contains several mentions to well-worn jokes about Dick Cheney shooting people in the face, so there’s that.

Yowzas, they really don’t like President Bush in Iraq do they?  Or at least one Iraqi journalist doesn’t.  How many White House Press Corp wished they’d done this at some point?  But President Bush has excellent reactionary skills.  It’s like he’s a wily mongoose.  The shoes don’t even come close to hitting him.  “All I can report,” Bush joked of the incident, “is a size 10.”

I was half-joking the other day that Bush should remain the figure head of the country for shiggles sake and Obama should go bunker down with the best and brightest, roll up their sleeves and get the job done.  On some level aren’t we all going to miss President Bush?  I mean for the absurd black comedy he brings to the table?  I miss him already.

Every news tidbit about the outgoing Bush administration seems to further confirm the suspicion that Dubya will no doubt go down as the worst president in US history.  At the very least he’s in the conversation and that’s bad enough.  Much of that is because he just never shifted course to right the wrong steps.  I can understand and to a certain degree forgive going to war in Iraq.  It’s not the move many of us would have chosen, but I can at least empathize with that decision.  What I can’t wrap my head around is how every questionable decision only pushed the boulder down the hill faster and faster until it crushed the town below.  He didn’t do anything to stop the boulder.

An unpublished US government report says US-led efforts to rebuild Iraq were crippled by bureaucratic turf wars, violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society, resulting in a 100-billion-dollar failure, The New York Times reported on its website.

The newspaper said it had gotten hold of a copy of the 513-page federal history of the reconstruction effort that is circulating in Washington in draft form among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials.

The document has former secretary of state Colin Powell complaining that after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’”

The overarching conclusions of the history is that the US government has in place neither the policies nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake the largest reconstruction program after the Marshall Plan, the report said.

All in all, the document concludes that the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the pervasive looting that followed, The Times pointed out.

By mid-2008, according to the history, 117 billion dollars had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including about 50 billion in US taxpayer money, the paper noted.

Not funny, is that this Republican president, will best be known for pissing the US taxpayers money down a drain to make up for poor executive leadership.  Bad policy decisions resulting in both foreign and domestic malfeasance only to burn taxpayers money in the hopes that things would magically get better.  Instead, it’s probably just going to make things worse.

We see Dubya confess that God wants him to run for president and his mother just looks at him with shock, it seems Cheney has nothing but contempt for Dubya having to correct him on the pronunciation of “Guantanamo.” “W” appears to still be on track for its October 17 release date, though director Oliver Stone has admitted to still be editing the damn thing.

It looks intentionally funny and I wonder if that’s just a marketing ploy or if this thing is really going to be a devastating satire. And with a pre-election release is this movie going to fire up both the Republican base to vote McCain to spite Hollywood liberals and/or liberals who will realize again that we just let some dumbass from a WASPy family run the country into the ground for the past eight years. I think that’s what my interest in this project will be - if there will be any tangible affect on the election.