The 2008 Defense Budget is an integral part of the wars we are now fighting, in addition to being essential for preparing for conflicts to come. It's the base funding for the entire Defense Department - our military. This bill in particular takes care of some issues that have been in the news recently - increased military pay, increased benefits and care for soldiers that have been wounded fighting our wars, and more armored vehicles - to name just a few. These are all things that the Democrats have been screaming about for months. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid once promised that the bill would go through clean, with no unrelated extraneous amendments added to muddy it up.

So why are the Democrats now jeopardizing the passage of the bill by adding, at the last minute, a Ted Kennedy authored homosexual hate crimes amendment, having nothing to do with the Defense Department, to the spending measure? The Army Times reminds us that the House passed the 2008 Defense Budget in May. Since then, the Senate has spent alot of time attempting to attach anti-Iraq War amendments to their version of the bill, but each one failed. So they throw one last minute unrelated liberal social agenda amendment onto the bill, in effect challenging Bush to veto the entire measure. It's almost as if the Dems did this out of spite.

The Kennedy amendment is a transparent attempt to get back into the good graces of the Left after the Democrats failed to do what they had promised (actually guaranteed) their base that they would do - get the US out of Iraq. The amendment passed, gaining 60 votes, but that's not enough to override a Presidential veto. Let's say the 2008 Defense Budget passes, and gets to conference committee with the House. There's a good chance that this amendment won't be in the final version sent to the President. But let's say it survives.

Don't look now, but if Congress doesn't reach some sort of an agreement for the next fiscal year's budget, the federal government will run out of money on Oct 1. Although political rhetoric is high, there is little chance of the Democrats going down the Newt Gingrich 1995 path and shutting down the government - primarily because they recognize that Newt's battle with President Bill Clinton was largely seen as a victory for Clinton, making Newt even more demonizable (is that a word?) until his exit from Congress in 1998. So, Democrat leaders are going to propose an interim budget to give them more time to "negotiate" with the White House on spending issues.

The draft resolution, which is still being finalized, is intended to buy as many as six additional weeks for negotiations, though Democrats are pessimistic about their chances of making much progress with Mr. Bush. With the exception of veterans' health care and border-security funds, the White House has signaled little flexibility, and neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) nor Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) appears to have much appetite for a protracted fight. "I don't want a headache. I want to try to work this out," Mr. Reid said last week after meeting with White House Budget Director Jim Nussle. At the same time as the standoff over domestic spending, Congress is being asked by Mr. Bush to provide more money to implement his Iraq policy, which the top leaders adamantly oppose.

With President Bush emboldened after his victories in Congress last week, his threats of vetoes are being taken more seriously by the Democrats. The Dems simply don't have enough votes to override any Presidential veto right now, be it on the war or general spending. That's not likely to change over the next six weeks, so look for the Democrats to capitulate on many of the White House's demands in the final budget, especially in matters regarding defense spending and funding the War in Iraq. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi believe, rightly so, that giving in on war spending at this precise moment, having lost all anti-war votes so far this fall session, would be the final straw for much of their far-left base. Hence the postponement of the final budget.

The latest numbers on Iraq will give even a hardened economic analyst like Alan Greenspan a panic attack.

The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000a minute, according to the group's analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes. The estimates made by the group, which opposes the conflict, include not only the immediate costs of war but also ongoing factors such as long-term health care for veterans, interest on debt and replacement of military hardware.

This is known as full-cost accounting which is what the IRS does when it says it costs 40 cents a mile to operate a typical car. This is what it is costing to run this war all piled on an already bloated national deficit that is becoming untenable. Like a sub-prime mortgage gone bust, we can't even afford the interest on the national debt. This war, which the leading Republican candidates fully support as a permanent war, coupled with Bush's fiscal insanity, has rendered our country the debtor nation of all time. We're in hock up to and including the White House.

This war, which is decimating the military, leaving tens of thousands of our youth crippled for life has already cost almost a trillion dollars. $720 million a day. What could we be doing?

The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity

That's just a start. It's a question of priorities and what safety really means. Ask yourself: would we be safer if we had not invaded and occupied Iraq for the past 4.5 years? If we had supported the UN instead of going it alone and invaded would we be spending our treasure and youth today? Perhaps O.J., Britney, and the other celeb trash would be alone in the headlines and we could be building a better country.

President Bush visited the twin cities area today. AOL News reported his statement:

"Our message to the Twin Cities is, we want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible, that we understand this is a main artery of life here - that people count on this bridge and this highway system to get to work," Bush said as he stood next to the buckled spans, still littered with abandoned vehicles.

He had to get out in front and say something. For one thing, the administration cannot afford to have another Katrina on their hands and be blamed for another mismanaged and bungled disaster. Even if it isn't. For another, the Republicans plan to have their 2008 convention here. It would be unthinkably awkward for the Republicans to be partying down and selecting a new president while there is local unrest and wrangling about replacing the bridge and assigning blame.

Expect Bush and the rest of the GOP to quickly sign any bill that moves through Congress on this issue.

President Bush, who didn't veto a single bill during his first term, and vetoed only two in the first two years of his second term, is planning to veto virtually all of the upcoming spending bills that Congress is about to send him.

Bob Novak reports that the president has had a spending epiphany, and met last week with House Republican leaders to make sure that he had enough votes in the House to sustain his vetoes.

(Rep. Jeb) Hensarling collected signatures last week of 147 House Republicans, one more than needed, pledging to sustain money-bill vetoes, and the number is growing. Rep. James Walsh, representing a shaky Upstate New York district, as the ranking Republican on the labor, health and human services subcommittee of the appropriations committee, has indicated that he probably will vote to override a veto of that bill. But subcommittee ranking Republicans -- the famous "cardinals" who are a law unto themselves in Congress -- met with the president on Thursday and signaled support for his budget offensive.

If Bush had done more (or any) of this during the past six years, instead of caving into the wishes of then House Speaker Dennis Hastert and those so-called appropriations cardinals, the Republicans might have retained their identification as the party of fiscal restraint and still be in the majority today.

As a conservative, it shouldn't be shocking that I often target Democrats, but an outrageous item in the NYT highlighted by my fellow Ohio blogger Porkopolis gives me a chance to be an equal opportunity blogger.

An article from June 6 highlights the strange case of a $10 million earmark for a federal highway interchange located at a prime location in Florida for raising certain property values. The earmark appeared to be placed by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska:

Mr. Young, who last year steered more than $200 million to a so-called bridge to nowhere reaching 80 people on Gravina Island, Alaska, has no constituents in Florida.

The Republican congressman whose district does include Coconut Road says he did not seek the money. County authorities have twice voted not to use it, until Mr. Young and the district congressman wrote letters warning that a refusal could jeopardize future federal money for the county.

The Coconut Road money is a boon, however, to Daniel J. Aronoff, a real estate developer who helped raise $40,000 for Mr. Young at the nearby Hyatt Coconut Point hotel days before he introduced the measure.

This is, of course, an outrage. $40,000 in campaign contributions returned $10,000,000 in federal money to raise the property values of Aronoff's holdings. That's quite a return on investment.

Remember when the Democrats took over and promised the most ethical Congress ever? It seems as though they themselves have forgotten.

The leader of this shady brigade of public do-gooders is Representative David Obey. Obey is upset that the GOP has called out the Dems for hiding earmarks--targeted spending dollars that Representatives get for projects in their districts--from public view:

The chairman, Wisconsin Democrat David Obey (news, bio, voting record), also said that his House Appropriations Committee will publicize proposed "earmarks" before House-Senate conferees resolve differences in the government's annual spending bills this fall. But Republicans said the offer falls far short of Democrats' January promise to disclose lawmakers' earmark requests before the bills reach the House floor, a process that begins this week.

The Dems are playing a game of hide the pork from the citizenry and clearly breaking their own pledge made a few months ago. Obey said today "If they think they can demagogue the earmarks process all the year long and expect Democrats to carry the burden of passing earmarks, they're wrong.... There will be no earmarks for anybody." While that sounds like a great idea, Obey knows that it will never happen so his threat is devoid of any substance.

In the interest of fairness, earmarks are clearly not a Democrat-only issue. How does an Alaskan Congressman pushing for funding in Florida sound?

But it wasn't even the congressman in the district who slipped the road into the bill. The Naples News discovered that it was Rep. Don Young, a Republican from Alaska -- yes, Alaska. In fact, the local congressman, Connie Mack, didn't know anything about it. And, yes, this is the same Don Young who steered $200 million to the "Bridge to Nowhere" to serve an Alaskan island with 80 people.

If you think this sounds suspicious, you know Congress all too well. It seems that the developer wanting this interchange -- for 1,000 acres he owns on Coconut Road -- helped raise $40,000 for Mr. Young's re-election just before he introduced the measure.

Now that is pure and simple corruption on the part of Young. You can see if it were a land owner in Alaska, but Florida? Don Young is so shady he thinks that he can attach an earmark to a bill without even consulting with the district's congressional representative and in a state that didn't elect him. Now that my friends is chutzpah on a grand scale.

You can read more about outrageous earmarks here here and here.

Under the cover of the Iraq war funding bill and the immigration amnesty announcement, Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats quietly passed their 2008 budget outline on Thursday, which contains the biggest effective tax hike in current dollars in American history, as well as ignoring wasteful spending and the oncoming insolvency of major social programs:

• Raises taxes by $721 billion over five years, and a projected $2.7 trillion over 10 years, or more than $2,000 per household;
• Includes 23 reserve funds that could be used to raise taxes by hundreds of billions more; Increases discretionary spending by nearly 9 percent in FY 2008 and does not terminate a single wasteful program;
• Completely ignores the impending explosion of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid costs;
• and creates rules that bias the budget toward tax increases.

How do I come up with this being the largest tax hike in history, some (including my editors) might ask? Easy. In 2006, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis updated a scholarly article, Revenue Effects of Major Tax Bills (pdf file) that records the revenue effects of all major tax bills enacted since the modern tax system was put in place to pay for World War II. Take the above numbers (and the actual effect of the Democrats' suggested budget might even be as high as an increase of $900 billion over five years and a projected $3.3 trillion over ten years, a $2,641 per household tax increase) and compare them to all the other bills in the study using today's dollars. Even $721 billion over 5 years and $2.7 trillion over 10 years dwarfs anything we have ever seen before.

George W. Bush is vilified by liberals for being a strong conservative, but is he? Yes, he reduced taxes as promised but he has not reduced spending and that is the thing that conservatives were counting on. Lower taxes plus lower spending means higher revenues and surpluses. Bush just left out that reduced spending thing:

So far this year, tax revenues total $1.505 trillion, an increase of 11.2 percent over the same period last year. That figure includes $383.6 billion collected in April, the largest monthly tax collection on record.

Excellent, another example of lower taxes yielding higher revenue, the basis of fiscal conservatism. People will spend more money if they have it and lowering taxes allows that to happen. But wait:

For the first seven months of this budget year, which began Oct. 1, revenue collections and government spending are at all-time highs.

However, the spending total of $1.585 billion was up at a slower pace of 3.2 percent from the previous year.

If President Bush had not signed the prescription drug bill and cut spending in areas such as the National Endowment for the Arts and Public Broadcasting as well as putting his own party and the Democrats on notice that he would expose every earmark and not sign any bills containing them, we would be in a record surplus situation.

A liberal editorialist deplores what happened to the promised minimum wage hike

The public at large likely doesn't realize the wage measure languishes. It was a top Democratic promise in the 2006 congressional campaigns. The House passed it just after Democrats took control of the chamber in January; the Senate followed in February. After weeks of negotiations over business tax cuts that Senate Republicans had insisted upon as a condition of any minimum wage hike, both houses agreed to $4.8 billion in tax breaks - then attached the whole package to the must-pass war funding bill.

As Scott reported, Bush vetoed it along with the rest of the bill.

Oh, you thought the Democrats were serious about that? Maybe they were, or maybe they'll just keep the possibility of a minimum wage hike around as good sugar for any must-pass but low-support legislation like Iraq funding.

As Scott reported, the funding bill also provided for the fight in Afghanistan, which almost everyone supports, and funding to shore up military spending at bases and hospitals for returning vets, which everyone supports. So a funding bill of some support is absolutely must-pass. Furthermore, the Democrats want to get it done by Memorial Day recess, which gives them a very short window.

It would look extremely bad for the Democrats not to be able to get their act together by Memorial Day considering the usual parades and wreath laying that occurs by then. The pressure is definitely on. The Democrat leadership will meet with President Bush today to work this out.

It's not only the Iraq War that hangs in the balance, it's Afghanistan, the minimum wage, medical care for vets and about $20 billion in pork.

Previously on 'The Stump':
· Bush Vetoes Democrat War Funding Bill
· Happy 4th Anniversary, Mission Accomplished!
· Funding Without Timetables

Matt Stoller notices U.S. Rep. Randy Kuhl (R-NY) bragging about securing $2.5 million in federal loans for a private business in his district (Kuhl is simultaneously attacking the Iraq funding bill for having too much pork; more proof that irony is dead).

The $2.5 million is set to head to a bowling alley. Rep. Kuhl is proud of this, since the money "will help Roseland Bowl by allowing the owners to restructure their debt to help improve the business and, importantly, save the 36 jobs there." Unsurprisingly, the owner of Roseland Bowl contributed $1,000 to Rep. Kuhl -- an interesting move for an endangered businessman (unless he knows his congressman responds to cash money).

But let's look at the bottom line on his excuse. Saving 36 jobs at a cost of $2.5 million? That works out to a per-job cost of $69,444.44. Somehow, my gut says that none of the employees of this bowling alley are making anywhere near that.

Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund has an alarming story about one of the biggest election year subjects (Earmark Cover-Up) over at OpinionJournal.com. As readers of this blog know, earmark abuse is a sore subject among all our posters (remember the "Bridge to Nowhere"), both on the right and the left. If a project is good enough to fund, fund it through the normal appropriations process (proposal, debate, and approval) within the budget bill - don't hide it in other bills. Democrats won alot of votes last year because of the earmark and pork abuses under Republican leadership, and rightly so.

But now something remarkable has happened. Democrat leaders, who once wanted to shed as much light as possible on earmark and pork spending (thus getting high marks from outfits like Porkbusters and the Sunlight Foundation) now have changed the rules mid-game.

On Friday, the House was barely able to pass the emergency supplemental war bill, HR 1591. It was supposed to be only for the military and related war expenses, but Field Marshal Pelosi couldn't get the votes she needed to pass it and began bribing Democrat legislators with pork. The official title of the bill became "U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act, 2007". But when a bill has seven Titles (sections) to it, and only the first pertains to the military, that official title seems a bit silly. So the Democrats and the Clerk of the House, on the roll call page, unofficially changed the title to "Making emergency supplemental appropriations for fiscal year ending September 30, 2007, and for other purposes" to avoid looking like fools to the public, but the official title remains.

I was wondering what today's Democrat needs to fight a war. Here's a sampling:

TITLE II--ADDITIONAL HURRICANE DISASTER RELIEF AND RECOVERY; TITLE III--AGRICULTURAL ASSISTANCE, SEC. 3101. CROP DISASTER ASSISTANCE, SEC. 3102. LIVESTOCK ASSISTANCE, SEC. 3103. SPINACH, SEC. 3104. EMERGENCY CONSERVATION PROGRAM, SEC. 3105. PAYMENT LIMITATIONS, SEC. 3106. ADMINISTRATION, SEC. 3107. MILK INCOME LOSS CONTRACT PROGRAM, SEC. 3108. PEANUT STORAGE COSTS, SEC. 3109. LOSSES DUE TO APHIS EMERGENCY ORDER, SEC. 3110. EMERGENCY DESIGNATION; TITLE IV--OTHER MATTERS (including Farm Services, NOAA, Forest Service, etc.);TITLE V--CONTRACTING REFORM; TITLE VI--ELIMINATION OF SCHIP SHORTFALL DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES; and TITLE VII--MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE AND SMALL BUSINESS TAX RELIEF

Can't wait to see the Left's heads collectively explode over this one. Last fall the Democrats had no policy plans or ideas to run on, so it concentrated on attacking the very large target that the Republicans had created of themselves on corruption and special interest spending coupled with promising to repeal many of the Republican "abuses" by either direct legislation or by the budgetary process. Thus, they were able to promise their constituents that they'd be able to stop the Iraq war by staving it of funds, roll back the Bush tax cuts, etc...

According to this morning's USA Today, the Democrats, in their first budget, are going to do neither. In the first budget written by Senate Democrats in 13 years, there is no repeal of the Bush tax cuts, as was promised, nor is there any decline in the Administration's Defense Department budget requests. There are some new programs, such as increased spending for children, students, and veterans - but no way to pay for them.

Senate Democrats will unveil a 2008 budget today that would boost spending for uninsured children, students and veterans without cutting funds for defense or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The budget also would not roll back any of President Bush's tax cuts after 2010, when they are set to expire. It says the tax cuts can be extended if they are paid for.