Shutting off the money-tap

The curtain is about to fall on the folly of "paying for" two wars with tax-cuts and off-budget appropriations. When the Democrats take over in three short weeks, the piecemeal way these wars have been prosecuted will come to an end. Congress is going to look at where exactly the $2 Billion dollars a week that Iraq is costing is actually going.

(Can I take a moment here and clamor - yet again - for an investigative body along the lines of the Truman Committee to investigate war profiteering?)

In a strong overture that they intend to exercise tight control over the power of the purse, the incoming Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees indicated that they would be demanding a better accounting of the war’s cost. They also stated their intent to move toward integrating the spending into the regular federal budget, which will put the war costs in the budget. Thus far, they have been hidden and the war has been fought on resolutions. The Three Card Monte method of war financing is done. Vice is shutting down the corner.

Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the incoming chairmen of the Budget Committes in their respective chambers have been blunt in stating that the administration’s approach of paying for extended military combat operations and related combat support activities through a seemingly endless series of "emergency requests" had inhibited Congressional scrutiny of the spending and had effectively hidden the true price of the war.

“They have been playing hide-the-ball,” Mr. Conrad said, “and that does not serve the Congress well nor the country well, and we are not going to continue that practice.”

Mr. Spratt, who along with Mr. Conrad is examining how the Democratic Congress should funnel the war spending requests through the House and Senate, said, “We need to have a better breakout of the costs — period.”

Meantime, the administration’s view is still what it has always been: Bush is a Unitary Executive, and Congress can not “bind how the president wants to put together the budget.” (Maybe not, but the congress still has to approve it.)

Make no mistake - we are going to see bruising battles over the budget and spending. The President and his party are going to try to paint the Democrats as Defeat-o-crats for demandign accountability, so we have to be ready and shoot down their bull-shit before the landing gear is raised.

They lost. They don't get to frame the debate. They don't get to pose false comparisons or analogies. They don't get to stand on the sidelines and say "What's your plan then? Hmmm?" and nit-pick the process while we clean up the mess they made.

No, they get to sit down and shut up for a change. They get to watch while the grown-ups get the ship of state off the shoals.

They also need a crash-course in humility, but that's a rant unto itself.

However, I think that day might be dawning, because the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that fully 59% of the American public would not vote for a hypothetical candidate simply because they had served in the Bush administration.

We have a presidnet who has for his entire term of office refused to deal with reality. Now, reality is about to deal with him.

Pop some corn and enjoy the show. It's gonna get good.

To the National Republican Party: Welcome to Kansas

Much is being made of a civil war within the Republican party. All I can say to the Johnny-come-latelies noticing the erupting schism between the religious right wing of the party and the moderate, libertarian/business wing of the party is this...Welcome to Kansas.

The Kansas Republican party has been divided since the early 90's and it is finally collapsing under it's own weight. And not a moment to soon. I've had a front-row seat for a good part of it and even struck a couple of blows against them myself.

The revolt of the moderates has been well documented in the Kansas press. The civil war, as the local press refers to it, is between the moderate Tim Shallengerger wing of the Kansas Republican Party and the Mark Gietzen batshit-insane wing.

Let me say right now that I know Mark Gietzen and he and I were bitter enemies. My children went to school with his when we were in Wichita the second time. He and I have fought bitterly at PTA meetings and I looked him in the eye and told him when he announced his candidacy for the state senate that I would see him in hell before I saw him in the senate.

He lost in the primary in a landslide.

He went on to become the State Chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, and the seeds of the parties destruction were planted.

You're welcome.

As goes the Kansas Republican party, so goes the national party. Look at all of the Kansas Democrats who won election on Tuesday after switching parties. Paul Morrison was elected the states new Attorney General as a Democrat. He was last elected two years ago as a Republican to the Jounson County Prosecuting Attorney post.

Two elections in a row, the wildly popular Kathleen Sebelius has tapped a Republican to be her Lieutenant Governor, and both have switched parties to be her second. The new Democratic LtG-elect, Mark Parkinson, is also a former state Republican party chair.

The Kansas Republican Party is about six years ahead of the national party as far as their civil war is concerned. In Kansas it has progressed to the point where a moderate, common sense Republican can not get on the ballot in the general election. It has gotten to the point where the venerable Johnson County Sun endorsed a whole slate of Democrats this year, and it is a Republican Newspaper. For editor Steve Rose, the son of the papers founder, it was a bitter moment. The entire metro area went into shock at that editorial. Those of us who actually know Steve Rose are still picking our jaws up from the floor; and that column was printed a month ago.

Nancy Boyda was a moderate Republican who switched parties and pulled off the biggest upset in the land on Tuesday when she unseated Jim Ryun. The track star couldn't out-run the populist uprising that catapulted Boyda into the House of Representatives. Someone should have pointed out to Jim the self-defeating nature of voting against the military and veterans benefits when your district is home to both Ft. Leavenworth and Ft. Riley. More than one anonymous comment was left on this blog by soldiers at the forts who were voting for Boyda.

What happened in Kansas on Tuesday was the result of a perfect storm. It is also a harbinger of things to come for the national Republicans. Democrats, are we going to be ready to capitalize on it like the Democrats in Kansas have done?

A Blue Senate, Too?

A new McClatchey-MSNBC poll shows Democrats pulling ahead in key Senate races. In the two states that the Democrats must hold, New Jersey and Washington, the incumbent Democrats (Menendez and Cantwell, respectively) appear to be successfully fending off the challenges mounted by their Republican opposition.

Remember that election day isn't Christmas and we aren't six; we probably aren't going to get everything we want. Tennessee has Bob Corker pulling ahead of Congressman Harold Ford Junior. Ford is a scrapper, and the race is within the margin of error - but the polls say Corker will pull this one out. Ditto Virginia. Even though Norfolk is the home of the Atlantic Fleet, and James Webb was Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, it looks like things that would make normal people run from George Allen as far and as fast as they could, endears him to Virginians, since polls show Allen leading 47% to 43%. Go figure.

In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is not merely pulling ahead of the incumbent Mike DeWine, he is pulling out of sight. The latest polls show him leading DeWine by 8 percentage points, safely outside the margin of error.

In Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum has spun out of control and is going down. His melt-down during a recent debate with Bob Casey set him back so far that the national party has turned off the money tap and written off the state. Casey leads Santorum 51% to 39%.

In Rhode Island, the Democrats find themselves in a virtual win-win situation. The Democratic challenger, Sheldon Whitehouse, leads Lincoln Chaffee by a 48%-43% margin. This is moot. Chaffee might as well just switch parties - he votes with the Democrats far more often than he does the Republicans. A Chaffee victory (not likely) that resulted in a 50-50 split would be interesting, since no party would have cloture.

The two really interesting races are from two of the reddest of red states - Montana, and my own state of Missouri. In Montana, Conrad Burns is trailing State Senator John Tester, and the mood in Montana is one of "it's time for him to go." He didn't do himself any favors when he told the firefighters who battled this summers wildfires tht they did a "piss poor job" when the National Guard troops who normally take on a great deal of that responsibilty were bogged down in Iraq, an operation Burns has backed.

Missouri is really interesting this election cycle, and all over the country, eyes are cast toward the anachronism that is Missori. Some of us have been calling for a McCaskill-Talent showdown since the 2004 general election. The series of debates wrapped up last Wednesday (although the fifth and final debate didn't air until Thursday, so as to not interfere with Dancing With the Stars) and they helped Claire. She was a tough prosecutor, she knows how to work a jury, and really, what is the electorate if not the ultimate jury of ones peers?

Missourians like it when a politician answers questions. Jim Talent doesn't do that most basic thing. I will give an example...The following appeared on the letters page of the Kansas City Star weeks ago, and Jim Talent has not answered.

Jim Talent

I recently came across a post on the Fired Up! Missouri Web site that stated Sen. Jim Talent had missed 65 of 95 meetings of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
To verify this, I pored over transcripts of the minutes of these meetings, which confirmed that he has missed a shocking number.

I then started calling the senator’s office asking for clarification. My questions have gone unanswered.

I have not seen this brought up in the so-called liberal media, so I wish to pose the question directly to Sen. Talent. I hope he sees fit to answer.

Senator, why have you missed so many of these meetings? I would think they would take top priority because the United States is involved in two shooting wars and the military has lost so many troops to death and injury in these conflicts that we have effectively lost a division of seasoned and trained troops.

These absences have occurred during a time when the Army is short 3,000 officers, and the Army Reserves are short nearly 11,000 lieutenants and captains in the ranks (source: the U.S. Army Web site).

I know if I were in your position, wild horses couldn’t keep me from them.

Jim Talent has not answered this constituents question, even though it was posed in public and is in reference to a war he supports and SASC service he flaunts. A war he would vote to authorize today, even knowing what we know now.

Jim Talent votes for force and against body armor, touts his SASC service but skips the meetings, and backs tax cuts that mean every child born enters life $30K in debt. Call that a Birth Tax.

We are grave robbers because we oppose repealing the estate tax? Well try this one on for size, if you want to fight the hyperbole wars.

They are cradle robbers. In every sense of the word.