And Another One Gone...

By Cernig

Yet another Bush apparatchik shinnies down the anchor to dry land -

Drug Enforcement Administration chief Karen Tandy said Monday she is resigning, officials said, ending her four-year tenure as the first woman to hold that post.

Tandy told employees Monday morning that she was resigning to take a job with Motorola, according to two DEA officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement was not yet public. It was not immediately clear what she would be doing for Motorola.

Probably trying to get Motorola a bigger slice of pie. The Iraq quagmire has turned into the world's biggest cash-and-oil scandal, after all. Now I see Bush wants another $46 billion. Which -

brings to $196.4 billion the total requested by the administration for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for the budget year that started Oct. 1. It includes $189.3 billion for the Defense Department, $6.9 billion for the State Department and $200 million for other agencies.

That figure alone is higher than the $141.7 billion the Bushies originally said it would all cost - and the total bill so far is quite a bit more than that:

The Iraq war, now in its fifth year, already has cost more than $455 billion, with stepped-up military operations running about $12 billion a month. The war has claimed the lives of more than 3,830 members of the U.S. military and more than 73,000 Iraqi civilians.

Any candidate who says they want years more of the same cannot be taken seriously if they also claim to be either fiscally responsible or to support the troops.