Bipartisan Budget Accords Unretrieved by a Blue Dog

PiTW has the news on the House Appropriation Committee's rejection along partisan lines of Jim Coopers attempts at bipartisan accords on cutting spending.  Jeff Woods wants to know if Middle Tennessee can have its earmarks back now.  Did we ever deserve to lose them in the name of bipartisan accords?

58 Military Bases Demanded for a Country the Size of California

Osama bin Laden used Poppy Bush's establishment of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia as a pretext to the 9/11 attacks on American soil. Now Dubya intends to establish almost 60 military bases in Iraq, and he is demanding immunity from prosecution for the Pentagon's civilian military contractors. Free get-out-of-jail cards for all DoD friends to do whatever rocks their socks. These conditions would run indefinitely, which dovetails nicely with John McCain's wish to stay in Iraq 100 years.

The Iraqi government considers the terms unacceptable. So should Americans. It's going to cost us financially, and it could lead to another terrorist attack on our soil.

$1.5 Million Wasted on Profiling and Mostly Trumped Up Republican Charges of Voter Fraud

Texas Republicans won a sizable federal grant with claims that they would root out widespread practices of voter fraud. In two years they've found 8 genuine cases of fraud (costing the federal government $187,500 per root-out; not exactly cost effective). And those investigations have almost exclusively targeted Democrats, the elderly, and African Americans.

Have Car, Will Vote

With gas prices increasing demand for more mass transit, Miami (FL) is looking to raise its mass transit fares 33% in order to qualify for federal matching grants that would help expand its rail system north to include mostly working and black neighborhoods that have been waiting for rail since it was promised in the 1970s fuel crisis.

But the high demand for mass transit also includes some of the haute couture crowd to the south:

Even the beautiful people of South Beach aren't immune: models Carmen Cordoba and Andree Baeza said they ride the bus about five times a day to reach shoots. An increase of $12.50 a week, they said, would hit them hard.

Baeza said transit riders were easy targets for politicians.

"The ones who vote," he said, "are the ones with cars."

Rather Dubious Company

Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper finds himself in league with Marsha Blackburn and Bob Corker. Republicans are singing his praises. And how should Democrats respond? Will we ever see federal money come to local infrastructure again?

It's Not a Question of Losing, Because This Is What We've Already Lost

From Democracy Arsenal:

Almost 4,000 American troops have died, approximately 30,000 have been wounded, we've appropriated more than $500 billion with the costs to the actual economy estimated to be well over $1 trillion and possibly heading towards $3 trillion. For all of this we have gotten a more powerful Al Qaeda, a more powerful Iran, a more unstable Middle East, and an overstretched military.

And we have the neglect of domestic policies and the emboldening of elected representatives who choose not to fight for any more federal money to be spent at home as the mortgage crisis is bringing our national house down.

He'll Do for AT&T, But Not for the Rest of His Constituents

While our Congressman Jim Cooper is voting against legislation that is not in AT&T's interest, he is promising to forego any legislation that would bring federal dollars to any project in his district, worthy or not. How can an elected representative make blanket promises not to advocate for his all of his constituents the same way that other members of Congress do for theirs? It's a promise that makes Republican advocates of slashing domestic programs to the bone (and then pulverizing the skeleton) happy. Pandering to conservatives with unrealistic promises along with yesterday's vote against the Democratic pro-civil-liberties legislation should make progressive-leaning Nashvillians wonder how well Jim Cooper is respresenting us or the best interests of our community.

To Encourage the 2008 Presidential Candidates to Talk about Cities

Check out MayorTV. Mayors from around the country talk presidential politics and metro policy.

The Monster behind the Wall

I puzzled a while over why the fence would bypass the industrial park and go through the city park .... I think we have a government within a government ... [This is] a tremendous bureaucracy—DHS is just a monster.

- -A South Texas Mayor

The border wall--a symbolic attempt on the part of Congress (with the support of both Dem candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) in 2006 to address illegal immigration--is proving to be more about greed and class than about immigration. Melissa del Bosque reports that while the Department of Homeland Security is planning to build the wall across property owners of modest means (including through actual homes), there are no plans to build the wall across border resorts, golf courses, and the large tracts of wealthy Republican donors, like oil magnate, Ray L. Hunt.

Moreover, private contractors that the Bush Administration has charged to oversee the project also have unethical, potentially self-serving connections to the companies hired to build the wall.

DHS has to be in the lowest circle of hell for their money mongering ways.

Senate Republicans Defeat Hapless Senate Dems on Stimulus Package

Despite both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton breaking off their neck-and-neck campaign to return to the U.S. Senate to vote in favor of the Democratic economic stimulus package that would have extended cash rebates to disabled veterans and stretched out unemployment benefits, the Republican hard-heartedness and will-to-back-Bush once again won the day.

Reportedly, the Dems telegraphed their confusing signals to Republicans, leading Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander to exclaim:

I’m confused about the Democratic strategy, and I imagine many Americans are .... I don’t think it’s likely to improve the Senate’s reputation.

His party sidekick Bob Corker told the NYTimes that the bipartisan measure (supported by more moderate Republicans as well as Dems) was an attempt "to win public favor in an election year," something Senator Corker could obviously never be accused of.

Our Spiritual Death: Most Bloated Pentagon Budget Ever

The Defense Department's proposed 2009 budget request of $515.4 billion is the highest (adjusted for inflation) since WWII and it does not include the billions requested in supplemental spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that a nation that continues to spend more on the military than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. In those terms the soul of our nation has flatlined.

Having Never Asked for Sacrifice, Bush Poised to Force Americans to Give Up Representation of Interest in Congress

Threatening to veto any bill that does not cut the number of earmarks in half is attempting to coerce Congress ahead of time to sell out their constituents' right to ask their elected representatives to legislate in their best interest. I'm not saying all earmarks are good ones. I'm saying that it is not the President's place to foreclose on options that the People exercise in their own best interest. There are better ways of reforming earmarks than this.

Inbound Perfect Storm Threatens Hope for Crumbling Infrastructure

Our infrastructure is not only buckling under its own age and unabated use. Rising construction costs and pressing demands for repair in disaster areas around the country are converging on slowly constricting budgets:

The costs have added to what has become an increasingly bleak economic forecast for many states and local governments. At least 25 states expect to have budget deficits in 2009, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which estimates the combined budget shortfall for 17 of the states at $31 billion or more. Many cities, too, see difficult times ahead as revenues wane and costs increase for wages, pensions and health care.

We are in need of leaders with Rooseveltian proclivities for re-building America.

Infrastructure? Who Needs Infrastructure?

If holding things together with spit and bailing wire was good enough for our ancestors (and their shorter life expectancies), it's good enough for us (a long life of quality is overrated anyway), so don't pay any attention to this otherwise alarming report from stateline.org:

• "More than one in four of America's nearly 600,000 bridges need significant repairs."
• "A third of the country's major roadways are in substandard condition."
• "The number of dams that could fail has grown 134% since 1999 to 3,346, and more than 1,300 of those are 'high-hazard,' meaning their collapse would threaten lives."
• "Aging and inadequate sewer systems spill an estimated 1.26 trillion gallons of untreated sewage every year, resulting in an estimated $50.6 billion in cleanup costs."

Cost to fix these hazards: $1.6 trillion.

The Impending Surge at Home

Life is neither fair nor just, a brutal fact that is indicated in the reality that the President responsible for the Iraq War will never have to be held accountable for the folly of that incursion and occupation. But the consequences are surging to our doorstep, according to the Associated Press in a story on the increasing numbers of Iraq War vets falling into homelessness and mental disorders.

The precipitating factors of this coming "tsunami" are unique to the Iraq theatre, "like multiple deployments and the proliferation of improvised explosive devices, that could be pulling an early trigger on stress disorders that can lead to homelessness." And the burdens of dealing with the emergent challenge will fall not where they should, on George W. Bush, but on the next President and the next and the next and perhaps the next.

And given the finicky dimensions of American post-war culture and the selective grace of conservatives (who pour money into wars they want soldiers to fight, but not into dealing with the domestic reparations we owe our veterans afterwards), one wonders about the prospects of dealing with what looks like a distinctly different kind of homelessness than we have seen in sometime.

So, while life may not be just, there is some justice in the wrath of war being visited on Americans, who gave Mr. Bush two terms as President and elected a Congress that failed to tighten the purse strings on Iraq. And in all likelihood the next President will come from that compliant Congress, so there is some justice in that.

But the advent of fury at home includes post-traumatic bills coming due and homeless veterans whom we will have to face and to whom we must respond on our streets. And while the karma is realized more and more with passage of time and while life will continue to be unjust, the lot that falls to us will be to demand and to make justice where none can be found. We cannot in good conscience fall back on the social Darwinism that life is unfair, when it is our hands and our hearts that make it fair, and that make it so even after our soldiers come home.

Opulence amidst Crumbling Infrastructure

Tomorrow's NY Times underscores the problem of privately-funded opulence in the heart of crumbling urban infrastructure:

The shift from public money to private wealth in shaping the nation’s cities is evident in national data. Government outlays on physical infrastructure have declined to 2.7 percent of the gross domestic product, from 3.6 percent in the 1960s. Philanthropic giving, in contrast, has jumped to nearly 2.5 percent of G.D.P., from 1.5 percent in 1995 and 2 percent in the ’60s.

Read the entire piece to see how the Times follows an expanding and exclusive urban university in the midst of a declining city--a city within a city--as a case study for alarming, volcanic disparities between public and private. Here's a head-shaking taste:

Yale now spends more than $400 million annually on its renaissance, nearly six times its outlays for construction and renovation in the mid-1990s. New Haven, by contrast, budgeted $137 million in the current fiscal year for all its capital projects, including those subsidized by state and federal governments. That is less than twice the amount budgeted in the mid-’90s.

Private Contractors: The Tail that Wags the Dog

The Bush White House refuses to take any control for or responsibility of the security contractors on the ground in Iraq. The Washington Post reports today that both the Pentagon and the State Department have basically ignored warnings from defense and legal experts for the last two years who expressed concern for the lack of control over privatization. As you can see from the President's response to a question asked about the subject in the video above, he lacks answers and leadership. Rather than looking like the Commander-in-Chief, he looks beholden to big money interests and war profiteers who want our tax dollars for themselves.

Tennessee's Republican Senators Vote for $70 Billion for Iraq & Afghanistan; No Dem Candidates Vote

While Senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander voted to continue to fund George W. Bush's War in Iraq without stipulating any deadlines, none of the Democratic Senators running for president (Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Obama) voted at all.

Like Cold Water Cast on a Dawning Drowse

All of those promises we are hearing from the campaign trail about the benefits of making the Bush tax cuts permanent are not only hallow, but dangerous for the next generation:

Simply to extend the Bush tax cuts indefinitely into the future and, as both Republicans and Democrats have vowed, prevent the alternative minimum tax from imposing an increasingly heavy burden on tens of millions of middle-class and upper middle-class taxpayers would cost the government, over the next decade, roughly $2.5 trillion in revenues now expected under current law. And that’s just the beginning.

Even without taking on any additional tasks, merely meeting the government’s existing obligations — mostly to pay for the military and to keep up with the health care and retirement needs of the elderly — would send the budget deficit soaring, pushing overall federal debt held by the public from under 50 percent of the size of the nation’s economy today to over 300 percent by 2050.

That alternative minimum tax was the one originally meant to tax the market investments of the wealthy rather than the middle and working classes. The Reagan Administration kept it and stipulated that it extend to family investments like homes.

So, ironically, making the tax cuts permanent will merely make the tax burden on middle and working class families heavier. That's going to foment even more resentment toward funding services that people demand the government provide. It's exactly the first principal of the Bush Model of Home Rule: make government so onerous that it matches every bad thing that conservatives say about it. It happened with the FEMA breakdown after Katrina, it happened with the failures of government to regulate unsafe toys out of the marketplace, and its going to happen with any future president who follows George W. Bush's tax cuts.

Cooper Votes Against Linking War Funding to Withdrawal Timetable

Tennessee Blue Dog Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper joined 14 other House Democrats in voting against legislation linking $50 billion in funding for Iraq and Afghanistan wars to requirements that President Bush start bringing troops home within 30 days and complete troop withdrawal a little over a year from now.

What is wrong with declaring victory in Iraq and setting a timetable to bring the troops home so that the Iraqis will assume responsibility for their own mess? Our soldiers need to stop being played by this administration as stooges for private contractors and security companies like Blackwater.

HT: TPM

UPDATE: Look! Roadside bomb incidents are down. So, why can't we tug on those congressional purse strings to motivate the President to declare victory and to start bringing troops out of Iraq?