Have the brats assumed seats of power? The kids who cried and stomped their feet, screamed and yelled until they got their way, got red in the face or held their breath until mommy and daddy gave in because they wanted their children to have more than they had been given. It sure looks like it.

Have you been listening to what our military people, experts on warfare, and some economists have been saying about the cost of invading and occupying Iraq?

The figure that's tossed around as though it were meaningless seems to be $100 billion for the invasion and/or $10 billion a month for as long as we are there. Oh well, Congress will just have to come up with the cash. They'll do it. They always have. Stomp your feet and throw a tantrum.

Nobody's mentioning the fact that we just closed the books on another fiscal year and the national debt went up $421 billion, one of the largest real deficits in U.S. history. But don't worry, Enron style bookkeeping will record that as a much lesser figure.

Daddy Warbucks just signed a $355 billion defense budget for fiscal 2003 with Don Rumsfeld salivating in the background and that money is just to keep our standing armies in 41 countries, give our boys a raise, and build some more weapons of mass destruction. Locals are starting to drool over the lucrative defense contracts this might bring home. And it doesn't have anything to do with the new war in Iraq, North Korea, or wherever the next war is going to be.

Meanwhile, we've got an economy that's still on the ropes and showing symptoms of the Great Depression. The day the banks closed and people were jumping off rooftops almost three years after it all started in 1929 and economists were making the same sort of excuses and glib statements that they are today. Denial and delusion are wonderful things.

We certainly don't want more than 250,000 troops to leave these foreign countries and come home to look for jobs. Not at a time when we've still got more than 3 million laid off workers drawing unemployment or extended unemployment and only God knows how many others who've stepped down to lesser jobs as telemarketers, fast food handlers, or whatever.

And just where do you think all of this money is going to come from?