Still Lots Of Pork In The Defense Bill

I still consider it a big victory for Obama and those who want to eventually see the military-industrial complex neutered to see additional funding for the F-22 fighter struck from the defense appropriations bill. I'm glad the Pentagon took a stand. But the final House version of the bill still includes numerous weapons systems that the White House never called for.

The House approved a $636 billion defense spending bill Thursday after voting to strip money for the controversial F-22 fighter. However, it left funding in place for several other military programs that the Obama administration said it does not want [...]

The White House also hinted that a veto might occur if the bill included funding for the VH-71 presidential helicopter and for an alternative engine program for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. But money for both programs remained, as did funding for other items the Pentagon does not want -- extra C-17 transport planes and F-18 jets, as well as the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a missile defense program.

(Good for the House, by the way, getting all of their appropriations bills done by the end of July. Majoritarian government is efficient government!)

This unwanted equipment totals almost $7 billion dollars at a time when we need to beg and scrape for $2 billion more for the wildly successful cash for clunkers program (just a side note on that, this Economist writer is relying on theory of the program offering little environmental benefit, and not the practice that fuel efficiency has shot up 69% in the cars traded in, saving consumers $187 million in gasoline and reducing carbon emissions by 655,000 metric tons).

Congress will be Congress, as they say. It's just difficult to get things out of the system once they become entrenched. And for every F-22 victory, there are billions of dollars in lesser-known projects that are just as useless and constrain our budgets. We still have a long way to go.

Arnold's Crusade Against Legislators For Committing The Crime Of Legislating

The Sacramento Bee committed an act of journalism today, taking a look at the consequences of the legislature failing to act on various bills in favor of solving the budget.

Merced County beekeeper Gene Brandi says he had enough problems before getting ensnared in the nasty war of words between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over California's failure to cure its staggering budget deficit.

His Gene Brandi Apiaries in Los Banos, which once produced 400 drums of honey a year, has turned out just 20 drums so far this year as a searing drought has deprived wildland plants of the nectar that bees turn into honey.

And Brandi says he is facing competition from food processing companies that market sugar-added honey products as the real thing. "We've got people who take advantage of the good name of honey to try to sell their product," he says.

Now some agricultural producers and Democratic lawmakers say Schwarzenegger and his aides are unfairly exploiting the good names of honey, blueberries, pomegranate juice – and cow tails – to bash legislators for fiddling while California burns.

The dust-up stirs debate over whether the budget mess should freeze out all other matters – or whether lawmakers still have a responsibility to continue the business of legislating, no matter how mundane it can appear.

Did this guy really ask to be turned into a punchline by the Governor? I would argue that the crap that large multinational food producers package and sell as food is a serious problem on a variety of levels, not the least of which is public health. And given 120 legislators with different committees and responsibilities, we are perfectly able, even with a budget crisis, to deal with additional legislation, particularly that which can make a difference to small businesses and the health and safety of the entire state. In the past several years, with budget woes in every single one of them, somehow we passed a prescription drug benefit for seniors, an increase to the minimum wage, a landmark smart growth bill, and the Global Warmings Solutions Act, just to name a few.

Ol' Stogie And Jacuzzi is guilty of the exact same crime of turning every program that sounds funny, that includes animals or food, into an object of derision, as John McCain when he discussed so-called "pork" in the stimulus package:

McCain's method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anythign that sounds silly. He's clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. Here is Dowd recording McCain's twitter postings:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. ...

$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” ...

$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

I don't know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it's a boondoggle. I don't know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there's a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.

I do know that the tattoo-removal program is an effective anti-crime initiative -- it allows rehabilitated former to reenter society shorn of visible markings that cut them off from middle-class culture. McCain and Dowd don't know this, and they don't care. What's on display is the worst elements of political demagoguery meeting the worst elements of the instant-reaction internet culture. They think the very idea of trying to learn about something before you take a position on it is a joke.

Who could have expected that going with a chief executive this simple-minded could lead us to such a place of ruin?

Stimulus II: The Restimulating

Laura Tyson, an informal advisor to the Obama White House, dared to talk about a second stimulus yesterday. I don't totally agree with her about the focus, but it's good that someone values preparation.

The United States should be planning for a possible second round of fiscal stimulus to further prop up the economy after the $787 billion rescue package launched in February, an adviser to President Barack Obama said.

"We should be planning on a contingency basis for a second round of stimulus," Laura D'Andrea Tyson, a member of the panel advising President Barack Obama on tackling the economic crisis, said on Tuesday.

Addressing a seminar in Singapore, Tyson said she felt the first round of stimulus aimed to prop up the economy had been slightly smaller than she would have liked and that a possible second round should be directed at infrastructure investment.

As Chris at Americablog notes, the first stimulus should have been designed to be sufficient enough, but it wasn't, and the President and his team should just drop the "nobody could have anticipated" crap and start anticipating the reality of a continued shortfall in output.

Where I disagree with Tyson is in the focus of Stimulus II. She says infrastructure investment, which is of course important. Maybe more of our projects could have been shovel-ready if we followed France in recognizing that any construction-creating jobs are valid, instead of disqualifying the building of museums or parks due to nonsense about "pork." But more to the point, we should in a Stimulus II provide relief for the states so they can maintain their budgets and contribute to economic recovery instead of damaging it. The perverse nature of balanced budget amendments and a recession is really stagnating the national economy. We need a permanent state fiscal stabilization fund that kicks in during recessions.

I guess Wall Street doesn't like the notion of a second stimulus, mainly because it turns their green shoots to mud. Tough. We have to look at reality, which is that the economy is not working for regular people, and without consumer spending or private investment only government can provide the kickstart necessary.

It's About Winning The Argument For Change

Michael Hirsh explains the current dynamic in Washington better than anyone else I've seen. Despite the President's belated attempt to reassert control over the agenda, it's important to figure out how this spun so out of control in such a short space of time. Hirsh nails it:

Obama's biggest problem isn't Taxgate—which resulted in the Terrible Tuesday departure of his trusted friend, Tom Daschle, and the defanging of his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. Nor is the No. 1 problem that the president can't seem to win a single Republican vote for his stimulus package. That's a symptom, not a cause. The reason Obama is getting so few votes is that he is no longer setting the terms of the debate over how to save the economy. Instead the Republican Party—the one we thought lost the election—is doing that. And the confusion and delay this is causing could realize Obama's worst fears, turning "crisis into a catastrophe," as the president said Wednesday.

Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that's supposed to be "temporary" and "targeted"—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts requiring immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

But the public isn't hearing about that all-important distinction right now. And by the time Obama signs a bill—if he can get one approved—many Americans may have concluded that the GOP is right and that the Democrats have embarked on another spending spree, as if this were just another wearying Washington debate.

I think the Administration is starting to get this, perhaps because they see the more ominous warning signs of the economy on the horizon, and they're determined to take back the agenda starting today, using all elements at their disposal, including the bully pulpit and grassroots action. Heck, they're even writing blog posts at whitehouse.gov on how the plan would create 3-4 million jobs. This is a kitchen sink strategy, albeit a week or two late.

It seems to me that they let their foot off of the accelerator. There was a lot of talk during the transition about how economists and elites of all political ideologies knew something major had to be done, and they must have thought they would just coast to a quick victory on this plan. But that's not what's happening, as public support has melted away under a heap of Republican and media misinformation. The conservative noise machine forced an argument about small particulars rather than the need to have a massive job creation program as soon as possible to stave off disaster. The bill was pre-compromised and nothing like a Roosevelt-era New Deal but it would be enough to spur job creation, save a lot more jobs that would be eliminated, and face down the abyss of massive job loss and a deflationary spiral.

The Administration misread the tenacity of a conservative movement, which has no problem denying basic reality as a governing method, and which capitalized on Obama's bipartisanship fetish instead of a fetish of doing what works. They picked apart the bill and criticized tiny pieces instead of the whole. They disconnected the bill from the argument that the economy is in a nosedive and something must be done to save it. And while ultimately they may lose and something will be enacted, they will have won because they will preserve the fundamental argument that government spending is negative and suspicious while tax cuts are always positive and righteous. Their goal is to muck up the bill enough to discredit it and make it functionally inoperable, purely for reasons of party and not country.

Of course, at some level, why would Republicans be trying to drive the country off a cliff? Well, not pretty to say, but they see it in their political interests. Yes, the DeMints and Coburns just don't believe in government at all or have genuinely held if crankish economic views. But a successful Stimulus Bill would be devastating politically for the Republican party. And they know it. If the GOP successfully bottles this up or kills it with a death of a thousand cuts, Democrats will have a good argument amongst themselves that Republicans were responsible for creating the carnage that followed. But the satisfaction will have to be amongst themselves since as a political matter it will be irrelevant. The public will be entirely within its rights to blame Democrats for any failure of government action that happened while Democrats held the White House and sizable majorities in both houses of Congress.

Ultimately, you don't win any element of the progressive agenda in America through the back door. In secret conservatives can funnel massive amounts of money to contributors and hangers-on, use government as a profit-taking machine, pass legislation with all kinds of corporate giveaways and run roughshod over regulatory agencies. Progressives have to win the argument. It's a hell of a double-standard but it's the cross to bear for the party of the people. Nothing big has ever been done without a lot of people pushing on the outside, and without a forceful component of activism inside and outside of government making the case. I believe they call it leadership. And given the current economic straits, there's no other choice.

But there's a bigger problem here, one that the Obama Administration may not have seen coming, the underlying narrative to government for the last 30 years, one that has sustained through both Republican and Democratic victories. The great Rick Perlstein has a fascinating article about the late, lamented liberal Wisconsin Democrat William Proxmire, and his role in "shooting Santa Claus" - basically, planting the seed in our collective noggins that government spending is wasteful and unnecessary, that "in fact it will make things worse." This flies in the face of all reasonable macroeconomic thought, but talk of "porkbarrel projects" and something called the Golden Fleece Awards brought this contradiction into being, gave it power, and unleashed it on America. It's a ditch out of which we still cannot pull ourselves.

While re-reading old journalism by Tom Geoghegan, I found myself riveted by a piece of his from the New Republic in November of 1972, the same month George McGovern's landslide loss to Richard Nixon marked a major lurch in the long, slow slide of liberalism away from ideological hegemony. The piece was a profile of Wisconsin senator William Proxmire. Reading it, I began to reflect whether Bill Proxmire wasn't the most influential politician of the last 40 years—as the grandfather of the Clinton-era Democratic fetish for fiscal austerity.

Proxmire, who left public service in 1989 and died in 2005, may be best remembered—it's what I remember—for a monthly publicity stunt called the "Golden Fleece Award," bestowed upon what he would claim was the month's most wasteful and ridiculous pockets of government spending. The pundits fell in love with the notion's good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her "mountain climbing hobby." Actually, she's one of the nation's most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes "went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs." [...]

Indeed it's not hard to imagine how during the high tide of no-one-shoots-santa-claus-ism, things might have become rather decadent. The moral hazard is plain: If spending is good in itself, the door opens to boondoggles. The field was ripe, in other words, for Golden Fleeces.

Enter William Proxmire, filled with liberal good intentions, introducing a new story into the American political culture: We can do better. That the problem wasn't spending as such, but the misdirection and corruption of spending. Proxmire would quote his hero, the late liberal senator Paul Douglas, chastising their fellow liberals: "Say 'spend,' and they salivated." The source of the quote is significant: Even Paul Douglas,—who, in his days as an an academic economist, had done much the work establishing that it was sound fiscal policy to stimulate consumer spending—understood that things could go too far.

And so we've done a complete 180 in this country. Instead of recognizing that federal spending isn't always virtuous but is part of the overall economy, and vital in an economic trap when consumers and investors aren't ponying up, we've been beaten down by and consumed with far-right rhetoric about pork. So liberals say "we can do better" while conservatives say "we can't do anything." And since the middle ground is spending too little to matter, the country suffers in the process.

And, of course—this is where the "Santa Claus" idea transformed itself from a witty little metaphor to literal Republican principle—"conservatives" didn't cut spending at all. They ballooned it. Here were some contrasts between Reagan and Proxmire: His most useful Golden Fleece awards went to Pentagon expenditures. When Richard Nixon, in the spirit of Republican fiscal responsibility, proposed to lower the federal government's debt ceiling to $250 billion, Proxmire did him one better, saying it should be only $240 billion. Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush after him, provide the plain contrast: Make the idea of reigning in Pentagon spending anathema, utterly unpatriotic, and ignore responsible debt ceilings altogether. They did away with fiscal responsibility, under cover of the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, only changing government spending into a channel for private pilfering instead of a function of the public good.

Alack and alas, William Proxmire: like it or not, your "critique of pork barrel Keynesians" greased the skids for this big con. You and your enlightened Dem budget-hawk comrades made the usual mistake: presume good faith on the part of the modern Republican Party. "One of Proxmire's favorite statistics," Geoghegan reported in 1972, "compares the rate of return on government investment with the rate of return on private investment. (The public sector falls short by five percentage points.) Rather than spend tax money to reach a social goal, he urges the use of tax policy to the same end." Sound familiar? Says today's well-dressed wingnut: tax cuts are the only responsible stimulus. Thought Proxmire: "Neither the Executive nor Congress is organized to make spending 'cost effective.' That rankles him." He convinced a nation. Now, concludes the well-dressed wingnut, government spending is inherently irresponsible. And the well-dressed Democrat half believes he must be right.

This is a story that has put liberals—"responsible" ones, "populist" ones, all of them—into a terrible bind. At this late date, decades since anyone in Washington would admit to believing that any government spending is useful spending, when flesh-and-blood Democrats in the White House like Bill Clinton proved themselves such responsible stewards of the public purse that the federal payroll went down under their watch, Barack Obama wants to do some spending. He wants to do it in a way Proxmire the liberal budget hawk would surely have signed off on: targeted, responsible, scientifically—sophisticated spending, on public-service jobs, spending that starts fast and automatically tapers off as the economy recovers.

And what is his reward? Republicans are able to parade themselves before our supposedly most responsible media commentators and proclaim, "Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job."

You have to do more than win an election. You have to win the argument. You have to tell people why your ideas are more worthy of their vote than the opponent's ideas. It cannot be style, or charisma, or superior resources. Not if you want big change. As Tom Geoghegan said at a chat with LA-area bloggers yesterday, people don't like taxes because they don't feel like they get anything for them in return. Instead of blaming those in government siphoning away that money to the rich, they blame the taxes. It's natural. And it becomes a terrible conditioned response, one that disrupts and distorts progressive change for our whole society.

We have to, in the short term, turn around the flood of calls and fight for this recovery plan. As the months go on, we have to continue to make the arguments, as we have on the blogosphere for years, to our lawmakers, and press them to make those arguments wherever they go. President Obama started this today with a simple statement.

In the past few days, I've heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care, that we can somehow deal with this in a piecemeal fashion and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.

Especially in the midst of this meltdown, we cannot sit back for a moment while the forces conspiring to maintain the failed status quo push ever forward. Forget about campaigning, this is governing. And while different rules apply, one thing is constant - we will never win the battle of ideas by sitting on the sidelines.

Call your Reps.

Making The Case

The President, sensing that the recovery package is getting away from him, is finally using the bully pulpit, doing a rare midweek full Ginsburg and sitting down with every top news anchor separately in the Oval Office. These interviews will dribble out over the course of the day and set the agenda for both today and tomorrow.

But I think that time has perhaps passed. The Republican strategy of demanding "bipartisanship" as a cover for limiting spending in the bill continues to work. Yesterday the anti-smoking and STD prevention provisions were tossed out, and given that everyone will abruptly get religion on fiscal responsibility the moment that this package is out the door, believe that they're not coming back. Good thing lawmakers understand the importance of preventive medicine as a cost saver! (Health care is, frankly, doomed, if this is the attitude.)

The amendment process in the Senate is a mess, in a word, with each Senator having their own conception of the bill, adding and subtracting so that there are basically 55 different bills out there. Jon Ensign and Barbara Boxer (!) want to repatriate offshore funds at a dramatically reduced tax rate for corporations, even though this was tried before and a resulting investigation is looking into abuses to the program.

Republicans say they just want the bill to "create jobs" and not be a wish list for long-desired spending. And yet they're trying desperately to add nuclear and clean coal funding into the bill. ANY bill like this is going to be a Christmas tree, and so the strategy of screaming pork is just rank hypocrisy... but it's working.

I have to say that this process has been pretty enervating. The public still wants a bill to be passed, but their conception of what it is and what it should do is shoddy. I agree with Tom Edsall:

Now, as the centerpiece of the Obama administration's agenda -- the $819 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is before the Senate -- there is a growing chorus of economists, policy specialists, and commentators -- men and women across the ideological spectrum -- who suggest that the legislation falls far short of Obama's own standards, that it is rooted in the past, that it lacks ingenuity, that it is not sufficiently geared toward innovation, that it contains a raft of special interest tax breaks and subsidies, that huge chunks of cash will be funneled through old bureaucratic pipelines, and that the measure will plunge the country deeper into debt with little to show for it.

"I just don't understand," said one key Obama transition aides who worked on the economic program, "how a group of A-level people could produce such a B-minus, C-plus product," referring to top economic advisers Larry Summers, Jason Furman, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia professor of economics and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize, is a firm believer in the necessity of a major stimulus package and described to the Huffington Post the measure before Congress as "much better than doing nothing. The alternative is massive job loss. [Even with the new spending in the bill], there will be large job loses, but there will be fewer." Stiglitz has reservations, however: "The criticism I've raised is that it is not optimally designed from an economic point of view. There should be maximum bang for the buck."

Of course, it's not totally their fault, this is an equal-opportunity problem. And messaging is a big part of it - the GOP has outworked us. Obama has a chance today to put things back on track, but the train may have left the station.

McCain: Veto The Bill I Voted For, Mr. President

This is some kind of flip-flop record:

SCARBOROUGH: Why did these (pork-barrel) items have to be in this critical bill?

MCCAIN: Well that’s just the way the system is working in Washington and the reason why it’s got to be fixed, and it’s got to be changed. And no matter what the stakes are, you’ve got to stop this by starting to veto bills that come across the president’s desk. … It’s insanity and it’s obscenity, because it’s a waste of taxpayers’ dollars and it goes on, and until we stop it, until we get frankly a president who will say, I’m gonna veto these bills, I’m gonna make the people famous that put them on there, uh, famous.

I want to clear up a misconception that these "sweeteners" were somehow picked specifically to appeal to individual legislators in the House. That's not true. This was a tax package that the Senate passed weeks ago. They picked it up and added it, maybe to appeal to a couple tax-cutting Republicans, but really to jam the House and force them to vote for it, after they demurred earlier. For crying out loud, the bill increases taxes on Big Oil. Do you really think they would have constructed it that way to appeal to Republicans? It's the only part of this or ANY bill passed this year, really, that would help reindustrialize America (due to the renewable energy production tax credits), and as a standalone I would have voted for it happily.

But let's get back to the main point. McCain flew to Washington yesterday and voted for the bailout bill. He hasn't been on the Senate floor to vote in six months. So this was obviously very important. And now, he turns right around and says that the President has to show some courage and veto the bill which he just voted to pass.

The disconnect is staggering. It's the same feeling you get when you see McCain's reinvention as a master regulator despite his consistent opposition for 26 years. More than anything, this is why he's losing. People don't trust him.

Farm Bill Follies

Apparently the House f'ed up and left a big piece out of the farm bill when the President signed it. While at some level it's annoying that we're still applying an 18th-century standard of signing a piece of paper and all of the attendant papers having to be in a bundle, it's circumstances like this that led to Don Young slipping the Coconut Road earmark into the highway bill without it ever being voted upon. I'm sure they'll sort this out, but Republicans are using it as a way to cause mischief.

Meanwhile, I see a lot of liberal bloggers like Ezra Klein praising John McCain for his resistance to the pork-laden farm bill. And I agree to an extent, but the 2002 farm bill was much worse, and the consequence of not passing this one means that the funding levels of the old one remain in place. So McCain is essentially advocating for worse subsidies and a worse bill. In addition I don't believe that McCain's vision of agricultural policy is some sort of organic food-heavy, no-GM, end to all agribusiness kind of nirvana. He actually doesn't much care about agricultural policy, but he likes to bluster about any "wasteful spending" that isn't military spending so he can rail against the farm bill without articulating any broader strategy.

The farm bill sucks, and it is an example of power politics trumping sensible policy, but let's not kid ourselves that John McCain has some larger principle about agriculture - or anything at all about it - in his back pocket.

The Last Bastion of Sausage Making

The farm bill is still a joke. Commodity prices have skyrocketed so farmers, particularly agribusiness, is profiting in a big way, but the subsidies have remained in the bill. It's a five-year bill so it ought to have some flexibility, but married couples making $1.5 million dollars don't need an extra incentive to grow. The bill isn't as horrible as in previous years, but it still ought to have some balance to it. Of course, this is one of the ultimate pork-barrel bills, where lawmakers of both parties reward the farmers in their states and the commodities they make. It's very hard to get any kind of reform in there.

Oinkers - Continued

So remember yesterday, when I basically said that Consumers Against Government Waste was essentially a GOP front group designed to sap trust in government by promoting Congressional waste and "runaway spending" without relating it to where the real runaway spending actually comes from?

Turns out that CAGW is actually a REAL GOP front group that makes a lot of its money through lobbying.

Two years ago, the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste launched a lobbying campaign about avocados.

The group, which enjoys a strong reputation in the nation's capital for keeping an independent eye on government spending, plunged into an obscure agricultural dispute. It issued press releases and prodded its members to support avocados from Mexico.

Tom Bellamore, whose California Avocado Commission was fighting the Mexican imports, was puzzled. "I don't think avocados have much to do with government waste," he said.

Indeed, Citizens Against Government Waste did not reveal what motivated the aggressive campaign: It had received about $100,000 from Mexican avocado growers.

That's just one of many instances in which CAGW has traded on its watchdog reputation by taking money from companies and trade associations and then conducted lobbying and public relations campaigns on their behalf - without revealing that money changed hands.

You can read on in this great investigative piece from the St. Petersburg Times, and the companion piece exploring CAGW's experience lobbying for Big Tobacco to the tune of $245,000. They also publish a lot of information in their Pig Book decrying federal grants for things like YMCAs without noting that they lobby for The International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, whose members compete with YMCAs.

What's notable is that the exposé is in the St. Petersburg Times, a unique project owned by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school. In other words, not a corporate entity.

Who's Pigs Are Bigger?

Oh great, the geniuses at Citizens Against Government Waste have rolled out their latest Congressional Pig Book, and they had a big press conference in DC, complete with actual pigs (har!), humiliating and shaming all those Congresscritters who feed themselves at the trough (get it?) with these wasteful pork-barrel projects that blow a hole in the federal budget. $17 billion dollars worth of pork in the 12 appropriations bills. $17 billion!

Ahem.

Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon's biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages.

Auditors said the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began issuing its annual assessments of selected weapons systems six years ago. "It's not getting any better by any means," said Michael Sullivan, director of the GAO's acquisition and sourcing team. "It's taking longer and costing more."

The CGAW designation of what is "porkbarrel" spending is not qualitative, based entirely on the technical way in which spending requests are inserted into appropriations bills. They could be money for museums or research and development all the way up to infrastructure improvements (next time someone goes on and on about "pork" say something like "Yeah, I know, I hate fixing bridges so they don't collapse with people on them!"). The GAO designation of these overruns in the weapons projects reflect the discrepancy between the original budget and the final cost. Which is kind of the definition of, you know, waste.

$295 billion in waste versus $17 billion, some of which is waste. Sounds like Citizens Against Government Waste has the right target, don't you think?

The $63,000,000 Boondoggle

Duncan Hunter, the man who wants to be put in charge of the Federal Treasury, has seen the all-too-slow-death of the $63 million plane that doesn't fly, one which he enthusiastically supported for two decades.

Millions of dollars later, Congress has effectively killed a military plane program the Pentagon repeatedly rejected, and which never had a successful flight.

The $63 million Congress poured into the DP2 program over 20 years was not requested by the Department of Defense. Instead, it was mandated through obscure provisions in bills known as "earmarks." Most of those earmarks for the DP2 were inserted by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., in whose district the plane was designed and built, in prototype.

The 2008 defense spending bill does not include an earmark for the DP2. Hunter had wanted to direct $6 million toward the plane's development.

Designed as a plane that can take off straight up and then fly at 700 miles per hour, the DP2 has never attained a height of more than a few feet in prototype tests before crashing to the ground.

I guess the good news here is that, if on the off-chance that everyone's voting rights were taken away but Ann Coulter's, and he were elected, the whole country would be his district, meaning lots of pork for everyone! And since executive branch officials can apparently get corporate-funded trips without any problems, Hunter will be right at home... in Bizarro America, during the Hunter presidency.

The Young And The Shameless

A couple years ago, Don Young (R - Corruption) snuck an earmark into a highway bill calling for funding a highway interchange in Florida that would benefit a real estate mogul and friend of his. Don Young's from Alaska, did I mention that? But that's not the most shocking part of this escapade:

The 'Coconut Road' earmark wasn't in the bill passed by the House and Senate. I don't mean it wasn't in the original bills before they went to conference (where the separate bills from the House and the Senate are reconciled into a single bill). It wasn't in the final, reconciled piece of legislation passed by both houses of Congress after conference.

But it is there now.

So here's what happened. Apparently Young added the text after Congress had already passed it but before the president signed it. As Laura McGann explains in this post, this must have occurred during the process called "bill enrollment" when revisions of grammar and technical but not substantive changes are permitted to be made.

The president did sign the bill. But the portion apparently added by Young, if I understand anything about our system of government, was never passed by Congress. So it means nothing.

Not only that, the county in Florida which was the beneficiary of the earmark voted to send it back and disassociate themselves from Young's dirty dealing. And his constituents back home are turning on him, protesting him at public events while wearing pig masks. But Young's got a whole new problem.

A Justice Department corruption task force is investigating whether Alaska Congressman Don Young took campaign cash in return for securing $10 million for construction of a proposed Florida highway ramp that would give a windfall to a local real estate developer, a source familiar with the inquiry said Friday.

The controversial funding, which was to pay for a study of the potential highway interchange abutting environmentally sensitive land, was slipped into a massive 2005 Transportation Department bill, congressional aides say.

Investigators’ interest in the Florida earmark stems in part from its timing. In the two weeks before and after the earmark was inserted in the spending bill, Young’s campaign and political action committee collected contributions from the Florida developer, Daniel Aronoff, and Aronoff's lobbyist as well as a number of other Florida business executives. The Florida donations, mainly from real estate interests, totaled more than $40,000.

Young sees himself as someone whose entire goal in Congress is to bring back money to his state and for his contributors. He views government as an ATM machine. And now he's been caught making one too many withdrawals.

Stevens Mad! Stevens Smash!

This August recess couldn't end soon enough for Senator Stevens. This is from an interview with his local paper, the Anchorage Daily Star, the paper which has generally had the best coverage of Stevens' run-in with the FBI over hiring an oil company to remodel his house for pennies while they got favorable contracts from him at the same time:

Stevens: More people are repeating what you're writing in your paper than anything else in the country. This paper has caused me more difficulty, and I've told you that before, than anything else. You've created me as the senator-for-life. You've been hanging me weekly.

You read any paper, the information -- most of it is not true -- started right here. And your guys just yesterday, they taunt me. They taunt me with statements that really no respectable reporter would ask a senator. It was already said I'm not going to answer your questions. They say, don't you have any concerns for your own integrity? Don't you have any conscience? That's what your reporters do to me. ...

I've spent hours here with you here in the past, and I've never seen any result of it at all. ... This paper has done nothing but try to assassinate me.

This sounds like the old paranoid guy who eventually starts thinking that everyone is trying to kill him. Of course, he's not that stupid, because he and his fellow Alaska Congresscritters have been raiding the federal treasury for decades. Stevens is just pissed off that somebody figured the scheme out.

Wherein I Round Up Some Horrors From Iraq

Now that it's as clear as mud why we went to Iraq, maybe we should take a look at what's been happening there over the past few days.

• Turns out the Iraqi government is modeled on American democracy after all. Just as the Coalition Provisional Authority lost $8 billion dollars when they were in power, so too has the Iraqi government misplaced the same amount.

Iraq's top corruption fighter said Wednesday that $8 billion in government money was wasted or stolen over the past three years and claimed he was threatened with death after opening an investigation into scores of Oil Ministry employees.

Radi al-Radhi, who runs the Public Integrity Commission, leads one of the more dangerous missions in the country. He said in an interview with The Associated Press that 20 members of the organization have been murdered since it began its work.

In perhaps the most publicized recent case, an estimated $2 billion disappeared from funds to rebuild the electricity infrastructure.

Former Electricity Minister Ayham al-Samaraie, who holds both U.S. and Iraqi citizenship, was convicted in that case and sentenced to two years in prison. He escaped from an Iraqi-run jail in the Green Zone on Dec. 17 and turned up in Chicago on Jan. 15. Al-Samaraie has said the Americans helped him escape.

Al-Radhi said the commission has investigated about 2,600 corruption cases since it was established in March 2004, a few months before the United States returned sovereignty to Iraq. He estimated $8 billion has vanished or been misappropriated.

This kind of corruption is endemic to a war zone. When warlords can kill anyone who questions them, of course they're going to steal and dare anyone to say different. Al-Radhi is a special kind of hero, while the Iraqi government is the kind of kleptocracy you'd expect to be nominally in charge of such chaos.

• We've lost 8 soldiers in the past 3 days in Iraq, and four British soldiers died as well in an ambush. Meanwhile, a report from an incident in February suggests that two Americans died from friendly fire, both of whom were rushed into the field without adequate training. Here's Nitpicker:

For those of you with no military experience, imagine your kid gets her driver's license having spent only the bare minimum of time behind the wheel of a car. Wouldn't you feel better if, before she got out on the interstate, you could give her four weeks of realistic test driving with a car made of rubber, highly-skilled instructors and ready access to the latest info on how to survive in different types of traffic?

Now add guns. And IEDs.

• In the war at home, Rudy Giuliani is now urging compromise like the statesman he is, a statement he must have made before saying that the President has an inherent authority to fund the troops even if Congress doesn't give up the money. I'm a bit confused on his rhetoric. And a big story on Wednesday revealed that unrelated pork has been a part of Iraq spending bills since the war began, which doesn't necessarily make it right, but does add context. Particularly of interest are the number of earmarks inserted into these bills by the President himself.

"Frankly, I don't see a lot of vote-buying here. And if that was what they were after in some cases, it didn't seem to work," said Scott Lilly, who was a longtime senior House Appropriations Committee aide and is now at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.

The president's own request last year for emergency war spending included $20 billion for Gulf Coast hurricane recovery, $2.3 billion for bird flu preparations, and $2 billion to fortify the border with Mexico and pay for his effort to send National Guardsmen to the southern frontier.

Sadly, that's pretty much how the sausage is made in Washington, and while I objected to some of the spending because it gave the Republicans a talking point, I understand that you sometimes try to get worthwhile projects into bills that you know will eventually pass. The dishonesty of the White House, meanwhile, who put up a list of earmarks from the 109th Congress WITHOUT INCLUDING THEIR OWN, is predictable but saddening.

Now you can get on with your day.

This Is Wrong

Politicians are politicians, after all, and it's been drummed into their heads that pork for their districts will help them get re-elected (I'm not even sure that's true anymore, as plenty of pork-barrelers went down last cycle). But the Democratic Congress is severely risking their credibility with me on this one.

House Democratic leaders are offering billions in federal funds for lawmakers' pet projects large and small to secure enough votes this week to pass an Iraq funding bill that would end the war next year.

So far, the projects -- which range from the reconstruction of New Orleans levees to the building of peanut storehouses in Georgia -- have had little impact on the tally. For a funding bill that establishes tough new readiness standards for deploying combat forces and sets an Aug. 31, 2008, deadline to bring the troops home, votes do not come cheap [...]

Democratic leaders say the domestic spending in the bill reflects the pent-up demand from lawmakers who last year could not win funding for programs that had bipartisan support such as disaster assistance.

But in a formal veto statement last night, the White House denounced what it called "excessive and extraneous non-emergency spending." With unusually caustic and combative language, the statement dismissed provisions of the bill as "unconscionable," and said it "would place freedom and democracy in Iraq at grave risk" and "embolden our enemies."

You've now given the White House a talking point that resonates. This headline might as well have come from a Tom DeLay-led House of Representatives.

Not all pork-barrel spending is evil, but I strongly object to vote-buying by placing unrelated issues into must-pass bills to curry political favor. That's flat-out wrong. I wish somebody would propose a "No Unrelated Riders Act," but it'll never happen, because as you can see, both Democrats and Republicans need the tool to get their agenda through. If a bill can't pass on its own merits, it isn't worth passing. This is a time to legislate and not think up political ads, particularly with respect to the disaster of the Iraq War. I'm sure we'll see ads saying that Rep. Charles Boustany "voted to take funds from Katrina victims" and it will be wrong to characterize him out of context.

"It gives me no satisfaction to vote against measures that I have been working for since even before [Hurricane] Katrina, but I cannot in good conscience vote for a bill that does this to our troops," Boustany said yesterday, decrying what he called the "cheap politics" of using disaster aid to win votes on a measure this controversial.

Some Democrats are taking principled stands about this and I applaud them.

Even some Democrats say the issue of Iraq has become far too heated to be conducive to vote-buying.

"The profile and urgency of this Iraq vote really doesn't lend itself to these kinds of side deals," said Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), who has pushed drought relief for more than a year.

This Iraq bill is not a good bill as it is, not strong enough to enforce an end to our involvement in Iraq and begin a fully funded withdrawal. With all these pork products added on top, it's almost unconscionable. Plus, it's bad politics. A clean bill that gives members a Congress to be on the side of the Bush Administration or the American people would be far more effective. These silly games shouldn't be played.