Odds & ends, Tuesday, 15 February - read 'em and weep...

yeah, i know, i talk a good story but i sometimes don't follow through... back in early january, i said i was going to "post links to things i've come across in my day's reading that i think might be worthwhile to share with others but don't quite grab me enough to bother putting up a dedicated post"... yeah, well... < cough, cough > i think i managed to put up two or three posts along those lines and then i sorta drifted away...

well, today, as i'm getting ready to depart for africa on friday, and given the increasing number of stories that are pointing to the imminent dissolution of the country i've known and lived in all my life, i am wondering just what i will find when i come back at the end of may... it's looking really grim, i gotta tell ya...

GOP Sending Women Back to the Back Alley

South Dakota Wants to Legalize Murdering Abortion Providers

Missouri GOP Wants to Repeal Child Labor Laws

Tuscon Minuteman Found Guilty of Murdering 9-Year-Old Mexican-American Girl

Wisconsin Governor Launches Attack on Public Sector Employees and Unions; Threatens to Deploy National Guard to Quell Labor Protests

President Obama to award George H.W. Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Obama's Budget Betrayal

what THE FUCK, he asked, is going on here...? oh, never mind... we're all being hung out to dry... silly me...!

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Instance No. 1,657,493 of Bush not walking his talk

maybe it's actually no. 1,657,494... dunno... i think i may have missed one back in may 2001...

President Bush drew great applause during his State of the Union address last month when he called on Congress to allow U.S. troops to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. "Our military families serve our nation, they inspire our nation, and tonight our nation honors them," he said.

A week later, however, when Bush submitted his $3.1 trillion federal budget to Congress, he included no funding for such an initiative, which government analysts calculate could cost $1 billion to $2 billion annually.

veterans...? bah... just piece parts for the war machine... to hell with 'em...

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The budget graph

an information-loaded, interactive visual entitled, death and taxes, that displays in great detail just where the federal government is spending our money...

(thanks to miss laura at daily kos...)

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Make sure the ones you're depriving have no means to fight back

from today's la times...

Gov. seeks to cut mental services for homeless
Schwarzenegger says ending the acclaimed program would save $55 million annually toward $3-billion budget gap.

A nationally lauded program that has helped thousands of mentally ill homeless men and women break the cycle of psychiatric hospitalization, jail time and street life is now on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's list of budget cuts.

The governor has proposed eliminating Integrated Services for Homeless Adults With Serious Mental Illness, which receives $55 million annually, as part of his attempt to close a budget gap estimated at more than $3 billion.

why, it all makes perfectly good sense... the homeless mentally ill have no lobbyists... as a source of campaign contributions, they're practically worthless... they don't have access to the media... they don't own property or stock... they're not affiliated with an ethnic group, religious organization or political party... they don't speak out on issues... they probably don't even vote... hell, when they talk at all, they don't even make sense half the time... what a perfect opportunity for a budget cut...

p.s. $55M is 1.9% of $3B...

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Why is the WaPo defending George's budget?

hell if i know... as i noted in yesterday's post, why ANYONE would defend this budgetary abomination is beyond me...

The $481 billion proposal for fiscal 2008 reflects an 11 percent increase over this year; including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the $623 billion total is 60 percent larger than the defense budget that Mr. Bush inherited in 2001. Some analysts argue that the spending is historically outsized, pointing out that the total spent or requested for the two ongoing wars is greater than the cost incurred in Vietnam.

In fact there is some excess in the Pentagon's spending plan -- but many of the comparisons being drawn are deceiving. As a share of the U.S. economy, defense spending was at a near-historic low before Sept. 11, 2001, and even if Mr. Bush's new budget is fully funded, it will still be well below the average over the past century. Defense spending is now just under 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 9.5 percent during Vietnam; the Reagan-era buildup took a 50 percent larger piece of national output.

how disingenuous can you get...? of course, the wapo has a grand tradition of being disingenuous, but sometimes they are simply over the top, as in the neglecting of THIS inconvenient truth...

The United States' military budget is greater than that of the next 14 biggest military spenders combined. Even if not one additional dollar is allocated to the advanced weapons systems now in the works, there is not a nation on Earth that would dare challenge U.S. dominance in the air or on the seas for decades to come. The enormous imbalance in U.S. military spending is not about defense but rather profit.

isn't it time we stopped spending our money on DESTRUCTIVE capability and started spending it on CONSTRUCTIVE capability...? isn't it WAY PAST TIME...?

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Using the budget to create endless war and to continue destroying the social contract

buchco rolls merrily along with their plan to perpetuate our endless war, keep the rivers of cash flowing into already super-rich pockets, eliminate any traces of a social contract, and turn the united states into an authoritarian dictatorship...

the nyt...

The budget is based on a series of improbable, if not dishonest, assumptions. To make it appear as if the tax cuts are affordable in the near term, it assumes that the Pentagon will not spend a single penny on Iraq or Afghanistan after 2009. It also assumes there will be no costs for fixing the alternative minimum tax after this year, even though Mr. Bush and virtually every politician in America is committed to such relief.

The new budget would also slash key entitlement programs and punish many of the country’s most vulnerable citizens. Sharp reductions are envisioned for Medicare, with cuts of $66 billion over five years, and Medicaid, down approximately $11 billion. Some of the Medicare proposals could serve as useful starting points for a debate on controlling costs through such steps as raising premiums for high-income beneficiaries. But the Medicaid cuts would be largely counterproductive. At a time when the number of uninsured children is rising, the cuts would force many states to reduce their Medicaid rolls.

Mr. Bush’s budget would also take an ax to most other domestic spending. One program that would be gone entirely in 2008 provides monthly bags of groceries, each worth less than $20, to 440,000 needy elderly people. The $99 million block grant to states to help pay for preventive health care would also be eliminated. Other cuts — in Head Start, veterans’ health care, environmental protection, scientific research, low-income housing and heating assistance, to name a few — would start in 2008 and grow, totaling $114 billion over five years. Such cuts would be shortsighted and cruel. They would also be politically impossible to enact — further exposing Mr. Bush’s budget as the sham it is.

yes, it's a sham... yes, it's unconscionable... but, what will we do about it...?

ari berman at the nation via alternet...

Four defense analysts at the Security Policy Working Group recently awarded the government low or failing grades on virtually every aspect of the budget -- use of nation's resources (D), affordability (D), realism (D) and transparency (F). On only one criteria, advertising, did they award at A+, "for the Pentagon managing to convince Congress that the world's largest defense budget is too small."

The question now is whether this Congress will take the bait?

will they take the bait...? oh, c'mon... get real... of COURSE they will take the bait... they can't even manage to get a debate going on iraq, the most disastrous misadventure in u.s. history... do you honestly think they aren't going to pass a budget...?

robert scheer writing at alternet...

So the test for the recently victorious congressional Democrats will be to resist the temptation to go along with a patriotic-sounding military budget that may produce jobs in their districts and campaign contributions in '08 but that has nothing to do with fighting terrorism.

If they go the craven route, they will once again join this president in wasting our nation's resources by pretending to fight a world war against a militarily sophisticated enemy that exists only as a contrivance of his speechwriters' rhetoric.

"if they go the craven route...?" "IF...???" (see above comment...)

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