In an article about the ostensible Democratic prebuttal to the Petraeus testimony, Senator and Presidential candidate Joe Biden is quoted as saying:

Unless we get 67 votes to override [Bush’s] veto, there’s nothing we can do to stop this war

This of course, is a lie. It does not take 67 Senators to stop funding.

Crossposted from Daily Kos

I am not an economist, but reading Jay Elias’s latest diary made me think of another problem with the way George Bush and his sycophants look at Iraq: they keep falling for the sunk-cost fallacy. Wikipedia defines the fallacy as follows:

Economics proposes that a rational actor does not let sunk costs influence one’s decisions, because doing so would not be assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits.

This strikes me as being pretty much exactly the mistake George Bush keeps making. What are the merits for staying in Iraq now? None that don’t have some basis in the cost we’ve already sunk.

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Crossposted from Daily Kos. let me go for some substance this time

Well, this didn’t take long. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the story to make you angry:

The willingness to consider alternatives represents a shift by Democrats and is a recognition of changing political and practical realities they face in grappling with Iraq and its future.

Democrats had been counting on more Republicans to make a clean break from the president after the summer recess, but the White House has managed, at least temporarily, to hold on to much of its support.

Got that, the Republicans aren’t caving in magical September, and the Democrats are SHOCKED. So what are we getting in place of a date certain?

Republicans and Democrats are also discussing ways to tweak a bipartisan plan by Senators Ken Salazar, Democrat of Colorado, and Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee [. . .]

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