It seems what I had recently dreaded to expect has been reconfirmed by experience. The Democrats are as useless as the Republicans are dangerous. Given control of Congress in 2006 to end the illegal, unconstitutional Iraq war, they waited to pass the president's recent war spending bill until they could pad it with more pork.

Democrats lead Republicans in defense earmarks. And the constitutional remedy for runaway executive power, impeachment, is, according to Nancy Pelosi, "off the table." Bush and Cheney essentially say the president has the right to break the law in times of war, even though no war has been declared and the Constitution says the president can be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors."

The Democratic candidates for president are no better. In 2002, according to the World Almanac, the U.S. was the world's number one defense spender, outspending the next top 24 big spenders combined. Today, we're spending double that to defend against a criminal gang of religious fanatics armed with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices and mortars. Both Hillary and Obama want to expand the military.

The U.S. health care system has the worst cost-to-benefit ratio of any health care system in the world. The majority of doctors, nurses and the general public favor a single-payer universal system that eliminates the insurance industry middleman. Hillary's idea of universal health care is requiring by law that people subsidize insurance industry CEOs. Obama's idea is to expand Medicaid, which fewer and fewer doctors will take.

And of course, neither candidate is calling for an immediate end to the Iraq war, which Hillary helped get us into. And both candidates want to continue giving away millions of our tax dollars to arm Israel, which has violated more U.N. resolutions than Saddam Hussein could ever dream of.

I once had the audacity to hope, but if I want change I can believe in, experience has shown me that the solution is to vote for someone else. Thank God Ralph Nader is running again.

Robert Ely

Hammond