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Linda J. Bilmes is a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and co-author (with Joseph Stiglitz) of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. At the Boston Globe, she writes—The $5 Trillion Wars:

This October marks 15 years since American troops entered Afghanistan. It was a precursor to the occupation of Iraq and is the longest military conflict in US history. Yet the trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended in these wars have rated barely a mention in the presidential campaign.

The most recent estimates suggest that war costs will run to nearly $5 trillion — a staggering sum that exceeds even the $3 trillion that Joseph Stiglitz and I predicted back in 2008.

Yet the cost seems invisible to politicians and the public alike. The reason is that almost all of the spending has been financed through borrowing — selling US Treasury Bonds around the world — leaving our children to pick up the tab. Consequently, the wars have had little impact on our pocketbooks. [...]

All of this accounts for the absence of any real political discussion about how we will fund huge costs of the war that are still to be paid — for example, the $1 trillion in lifetime disability compensation that we have awarded to 960,000 recent veterans. Worse, no one is asking whether the current approach in Afghanistan is working. Last month the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, reported that corruption in Afghanistan is far more widespread than before the 2001 US invasion, due to US policies that “unintentionally aided and abetted corruption.” But his investigations get barely a mention in the media.

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—Bush nixes Muslim peacekeepers for Iraq:

Lovely.

President George W. Bush rebuffed a plan last month for a Muslim peacekeeping force that would have helped the United Nations organize elections in Iraq, according to Saudi and Iraqi officials.

As a result, the UN continues to have a skeletal presence in Iraq, with only four staff members working full time on preparing for elections set for the end of January. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has refused to establish a new UN headquarters in Baghdad unless countries commit troops for a special force to protect it.

Saudi leaders, including Crown Prince Abdullah, personally lobbied Bush in July to sign off on the plan to establish a contingent of several hundred troops from Arab and Muslim nations. Abdullah discussed the plan in a 10-minute phone conversation with Bush on July 28 after meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Saudi officials familiar with the negotiations.

Diplomats said Annan accepted the plan. But the Bush administration objected because the special force would have been controlled by the UN instead of by U.S. military officers who run the Multi-National Force in Iraq. Muslim and Arab countries refused to work under U.S. command, and the initiative died in early September.

Yet another reason we need to get rid of Bush.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin tells us, again, that the race remains stable. Trump World (and Alex Jones) is crazier than you’d ever imagined. How Howard Stern owned Donald Trump. Russian hacking is real. NC Gop can’t help inflating fire story, implicates, then reverses itself.

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The firebombing of a GOP office in North Carolina is a reprehensible act, and those who carried it out deserve to be caught and brought forward to face significant charges. But for every bad guy, there are mountains of good guys. In this case, David Weinberger and a group of Democrats who put together a GoFundMe page to repair the damaged office.

Our aim is, as stated, to help fund the re-opening of the bombed-out office. We do not want any of the funds gathered to be used for other political activities. We are currently talking with officials of Orange County and hope soon to be talking with the local GOP leaders to figure out how to provide this funding in a way that meets the election laws (which are complex) and that accomplishes the campaign's stated goal of re-opening the office. If there's no legal, practical way to put all of the money to that use, we will find a strictly non-partisan way of using it, and will let the donors know so that they can participate in the decision.  

And what was the response? Over $13,000 came in from Democrats … to restore a GOP office.

NOTE: We reached our goal and then some in less than 40 minutes after we went public with this campaign. We stopped accepting donations then because our aim is to fund re-opening the bombed-out office, and we decided that we had gathered a reasonable amount for that purpose.   

In an election season filled with an unprecedented amount of hatred ginned up by a candidate dedicated to winning through division, and against a backdrop of charges that the election is rigged, it’s great to see people pitching in to show the strength of American democracy.

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A joint venture between Russia's Roscosmos space agency and the European Space Agency (ESA) is about to reach a dramatic milestone. ExoMars was launched last March and is already bearing down on the Red Planet. In just hours, the Schiaparelli descent module will hit the upper atmosphere and begin a harrowing descent to the arid, rocky surface far below:

Schiaparelli shared a ride with the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which will search the martian atmosphere for methane and other gasses that could signal life. These will be followed in 2020 by a much larger lander … The ExoMars program has had a long and difficult gestation. Originally a solo ESA project, NASA came on board but had to jump ship in 2012 because of budget problems. ESA then teamed up with Russia’s Roscosmos which offered to provide launchers and some contributions to the project’s hardware.

The module is intended mostly to check out the ESA’s procedure for landing on the Martian surface. That landing is complicated by an atmosphere that is thick enough to pose a threat but too thin to use a conventional descent relying on a heat shield and parachute. The relatively small twin rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, used an integrated system of heat shield, parachute, retrorockets, and airbags to slow and bounce them to safe landings over a decade ago. The larger Mars Curiosity used a nerve-racking skyhook system to successfully put its platform down near Gale Crater back in 2012.

The Schiaparelli EDM will slow down using a heat shield and one large parachute, then power up a rocket system aided by radar. If all goes well, the rockets will bring it to a hover a few feet above the ground and then switch off. A framework under the 600 kg (1,300 lb) probe is designed to collapse and absorb any final impact as it settles in the low Martian gravity at about 10:42 AM ET on Wednesday morning. Follow events at the lander’s homepage here.

Milwaukee County Sheriff and apparently four-star general of Trump’s army, David Clarke, says he really meant it with that torches and pitchforks thing.

And because it’s always comforting when someone in law enforcement encourages a insane mob to storm … everything, he clarified his position by suggesting that history was on his side.

“I’m suggesting the same thing the Founding Fathers did in the 1770s, when they drew up the Declaration of Independence,” the Milwaukee County sheriff and Donald Trump supporter said on “Fox and Friends." “Go back and read your Declaration of Independence. It's right there.”

Calling on the people to grab their pitchforks. Saying he wanted to do the same things as the Founding Fathers in the 1770s—that certainly seems clear enough.

“Were they inciting violence? No, what they wanted was self-rule, they wanted a government controlled by the people and not the bureaucrats in Washington.”

So, in David Clarke’s mind, the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, apparently scratching it out with pitchforks, so they could peacefully gain independence from … the bureaucrats in Washington. Yeah, it was totally like that.

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Outstanding. Just outstanding.

When Gurinder Singh Khalsa saw a photo of himself on a Donald Trump campaign flier labeling him a Muslim supporter of the Republican nominee, he wasn’t happy.

That’s because Singh Khalsa isn’t a Trump supporter and he isn’t a Muslim. He’s a Sikh and still undecided about whom he’s voting for, he told The Huffington Post.

Singh Khalsa is pictured in his Sikh turban, which was apparently sufficient enough to convince some eager Trump-promoting minion that he was Muslim because Trump-promoting minions sincerely do not know the difference.

How did the flyer's creators find a picture of Singh Khalsa to begin with? It may be because he is indeed politically involved; he's the head of a political action committee devoted in part to explaining to dimwitted Americans that Sikhs are not Muslims. No, not kidding.

The flyer, which also features noted Trump hater Rosie O'Donnell as one of Trump's so-called supporters, says it is paid for by "Donald J. Trump for President, Inc." The campaign, however, is denying they produced it. Perhaps it's somebody else with some cash to spend and a real hankering to prove Trump is a man of the people—whether those people want him or not?

Sheriff Joe Arpaio gets a lot of attention in Phoenix for being corrupt, infantile, fanatical, and power hungry, but he's not the only bad public servant out there. Bill Montgomery, the Maricopa County Attorney, is one of the nation's worst prosecutors. Montgomery, a Republican, is facing re-election on Nov. 8. His opponent, former prosecutor and Democrat Diego Rodriguez, has been critical of Montgomery’s record. “People just want to know the County Attorney’s Office matches their idea of justice,” he said earlier this week. According to Rodriguez, Montgomery “is a political animal. He’s not what I am comfortable having administer justice in this county.

Montgomery is bad on a whole host of issues—the death penalty, abortion, immigration, marijuana, sex crimes, racial justice, animal protection, transparency, and innocence claims, to name a few—and we will cover them all over the next few weeks. But for now, lets just start with the fact that Maricopa administers the death penalty more often than 99.5 percent of other counties or county-equivalents. Yes, 99.5 percent. 

All of that is because of Bill Montgomery’s office. In fact, between 2010, the year he was elected, and 2015, Bill Montgomery's office was responsible for 28 death sentences. From “Too Broken to Fix,” a report from Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project:

Between 2010 and 2015, Maricopa County had 28 death sentences. Maricopa’s rate of death sentencing per 100 homicides is approximately 2.3 times higher than the rate for the rest of Arizona. Though Maricopa has one percent of the nation’s population, it accounts for 3.6 percent of the death sentences returned nationally between 2010 and 2015.

That puts Montgomery's office in the top one-half of one percent when it comes to death penalty sentences. This, despite the fact that death penalty cases are insanely expensive for the taxpayer, and despite the fact that evidence shows that the death penalty isn't a real deterrent.

And, if the sheer number of cases alone isn't adequately concerning, the defendants share some troubling similarities. 

Welcome back to the dystopian hellscape that is the Donald J. Trump 2016 presidential campaign, the campaign we Americans deserve after we started putting every halfwit and blowhard on our television channels and pretended they had good points to make.

The last of the three presidential debates will be held tomorrow evening; in the meantime, let's just get this over with, shall we?

• The day after Melania Trump dismissed claims by women that Donald Trump sexually assaulted them in a CNN interview, People magazine, who published a report of one of their own reporters being assaulted by Trump at his Florida club, has produced six witnesses who confirm the victim told them of that assault soon after it happened.

• Trump today again insisted that the women's stories were "totally fabricated." "They were made up for, I don’t know, fame, or Clinton got them to do it, or for whatever reason."

• President Barack Obama dismissed Trump claims of a "rigged" election in no uncertain terms. “He starts whining before it's even over? When things are going badly and you start blaming somebody else, then you don't have what it takes to be in this job.”

• Going full Breitbart: President Obama's half-brother and the mother of a man killed in Benghazi will be Trump's guests for the third and final debate.

• 55 retired military officers have signed a letter calling Trump "utterly unworthy of being commander in chief" and calling his behavior "antithetical to American values."

• Trump backer and Fox News host Sean Hannity took to his radio show to sputter support for Trump's claims that the world is allied against him, insisting that the "globalist establishment" is manipulating things "on a scale that is frankly, in my opinion, is reminiscent of former Soviet Union propaganda and mind control."

A recent poll from Global Strategy Group for the DCCC argued that, regardless of whether Republican House candidates recently unendorsed Donald Trump or if they continue to stand by him, they were in real danger of losing critical votes. The DCCC is now up with ads in three House contests arguing that the Republican incumbents supported Trump for months when they should have denounced him long ago. Their ads are running against Erik Paulsen in Minnesota’s 3rd District, Cresent Hardy in Nevada’s 4th, and Will Hurd in Texas’ 23rd.

Paulsen, who represents an affluent seat in the Twin Cities suburbs, has been a particularly frustrating target for Team Blue. While Barack Obama carried the seat just 50-49 in 2012, a recent independent poll from SurveyUSA showed Hillary Clinton dominating 48-35 there. However, the same poll gave Paulsen a huge 49-38 lead over Democrat Terri Bonoff; the DCCC’s allies at House Majority PAC also recently cut their entire planned ad buy, another sign that Paulsen is doing well. 

If the DCCC wants to win this seat, they’ll need far more anti-Trump voters to take their anger out on Paulsen, and the new ad encourages them to do just that. The narrator argues that Paulsen “has had plenty of time to speak up for Minnesota, and speak out about Donald Trump.” It then shows a clip of Paulsen declaring, “I plan on voting for the nominee.” The commercial goes to feature some of Trump’s worst clips: Trump is shown saying, “You take a look at her. She’s a slob,” “She ate like a pig,” and agreeing that “[t]here has to be some sort of punishment” for a woman who has an abortion. The narrator then reminds the audience that Paulsen has had 18 months to speak out, before the congressman is shown saying, “That shouldn’t be up to any of us to denounce presidential candidates.”

The DCCC tries something similar in the other two races. 

Too many Republicans stood with Trump until the polls told them not to, and now we have the chance to make them pay. Please chip in $1 to each member of our House slate today.

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Retired officers who would like to see the military’s sexual assault problem get better, not worse, are voicing their concern at the example Donald Trump would set if elected president:

“This behavior renders him utterly unworthy of being commander in chief and president,” said the open letter signed by 55 general and flag officers and provided to The Wall Street Journal. “If given such power, Donald Trump would create a command climate intolerant of women and incompatible with a trained, ready and honorable military.”

The signatories include three retired four-star generals, nine three-star officers, and one- and two-star officers, along with some more junior officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Army National Guard. “The American people deserve better than a misogynist in chief. Donald Trump’s behavior is antithetical to American values,” they wrote.

Strong words there. But it’s an important point: How could you seriously expect the military to improve its record, if the commander in chief had a long record of doing just what the military was trying to eliminate?

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The GOP is falling apart before our very eyes—that much is clear. The gaping chasm between the elite/establishment wing of the party and the white working-class voters in the South who have consistently voted Republican (often against their own economic interests) has swallowed whatever middle ground may have once existed between the two factions. Libertarians, in the meantime, don’t know which way to turn. This has Republicans of all stripes conjecturing about what the future holds for conservatives—and here’s one thing they seem to agree on: The GOP as we know it won't exist following this election. Niall Stanage writes:

John "Mac" Stipanovich, who has worked in Republican circles in Florida for 35 years, including as a senior adviser to Jeb Bush and chief of staff to former Gov. Bob Martinez, said that he thought “people of good intentions and goodwill may regain dominance in the Republican Party” but that the process would take a long time.

“That may be a much-shrunken Republican Party,” Stipanovich said. “We may be about to enter a wilderness here in which we will wander for a decade or more, and hopefully emerge. But if that’s the case, then we need to wander. I personally don’t want to be in a party that is characterized by Trumpism.” 

Stipanovich's theory suggests a journey that plays out over several election cycles as a fight to the death ensues. Then there's the two-party theory.

Election Day is fast approaching, and we need all hands on deck! With the PCCC and Daily Kos, no matter where you live, you can call key voters in districts where progressive Democrats are in tight races. Click here to get started!

Priorities USA is out with a new anti-Trump ad. This one features the mother of Matthew Shepard, murdered in Wyoming in 1998 for being gay. Judy Shepard:

So when I see the hate that Donald Trump has brought to his campaign for president, it terrifies me. [...]

Words have an influence, violence causes pain, hate can rip us apart. I know what can happen as the result of hate, and Donald Trump should never be our president.

You can watch it here.

One of the basic tenets of the of the Sixth Amendment is the right to a speedy trial. But what if there aren't enough judges to make that possible?

...more than 90 vacancies in the federal judiciary are taking a toll on judges, the courts and Americans seeking recourse. (President Barack) Obama has nominated replacements for more than half of those spots, including 44 nominees for the district court and seven for the appeals court. Yet the Senate has confirmed only nine district and appeals court judges this year — and only four since (Supreme Court Justice Antonin) Scalia died.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) has slowed the approval process for federal judges and in the case of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland refused to hold a confirmation hearing since he was nominated. Overall the delays make it more difficult for those who remain on the bench to do their jobs.

“These vacancies make it harder for the federal courts to do their job,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “Right now there are 30 outstanding judicial nominees who have been reported out of committee and who are waiting for a vote on the Senate floor, but the Republican majority will not give them votes even though some of these nominees have been waiting for nearly a year and even though they would be easily confirmed. ”

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