Congress Fattens Up Emergency Supplemental

If there is any case for presidential line-item veto power it would be this bill--U.S. Readiness, Veterans’ Health and Iraq Accountability Act. This bill is supposed to be about funding the brave soldiers fighting the war on terror but it has become more than that with all the riders that Congress has added to it. I would list all the riders it has but it contains eighteen riders on it! Not including the minimum wage law. None of which has anything to do about the Iraq war or the war on terror. Can you say got pork? The drive-by-cloned-media will do little reporting on this bill. All the media cares about is why President Bush fired eight attorneys (President Clinton fired a lot more than that--not a word from the press)--one of which was quitting anyway to return to the private sector. But I digress. Here are some of the pork that the Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) lists (my comments are in parenthesis):

• $500 million for emergency wildfires suppression; the Forest Service currently has $831 million for this purpose.
• $400 million for rural schools. (Why just rural schools? Throwing money at schools does not solve their problems if the schools spend the money foolishly. Besides, shouldn't this be local school districts and state responsibility?)
• $283 million for the Milk Income Loss Contract program. (I did not know there was a milk crises. Don't you just love that title!)
• $100 million for citrus assistance.
• $74 million for peanut storage costs.
• $25 million for spinach growers.

Add it up. Just what I listed adds up to $2,213. The total pork sum is (drum roll please): $9.9 billion! President Bush only asked for $103 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. The reader can go to the CAGW web site to read the complete list if you want.

Here is the catch-22. Imagine you are a fiscally responsibility Congress-person (yea I know that sounds like an oxymoron) that does not like pork but wants to monetarly support the military in the battlefield. What do you do? If you are that Congress-person and vote against the bill then it will appear you don't support the troops. You know that your opponents will use that against you. The end result--you vote for the bill. As Glenn Beck says (hat tip to him for bringing this issue to my attention on his TV show) the troops are for sale. That is really sad.

If people are really concerned with deficit spending and fiscal responsibility in government then you either need line-item veto for the president or law that says you cannot add riders to bills if you are against the line-item veto. Those are the two solutions. If you do the latter solution then the bill should be easily stated in one sentence. For example this bill could state: Funding for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan only. I got this idea from my college years. When you write a procedure for a program it should have only one function. That way it is easier to debug and test. I think line-item veto is the easier solution to implement though.

Basically, pork happens for two reasons. Politicians offer money to their constituents. The constituents take the money. Supply and demand. The politicians have no self-control to stop the supply and the constituents enable the politicians by demanding more money. If constituents did not take the money then the vicious cycle would diminish eventually.

Woman Trusts Sat Nav Too Much

A woman in England put too much trust in her satellite navigation of her car. She followed the directions it gave her and drove into a river! Evidently, the satnav did not tell the woman to slam the breaks on or to go around the swollen river. She survived but her Mercedes SL500 did not.

The issue with sat navs is you have to keep them updated especially if you are going on a trip. Even in this case I don't know if it would have mattered. The sat navs cannot direct you around fallen logs in the road, tornadoes that happen to form in your path, or even in this case flooding rivers. Maps only represent the landscape. Electronic maps are no different. You still have to be alert and use those cells between the ears when driving.

By the way, the article does not say if the woman was blonde or not (yea, I know I am terrible, but I could not resist!)

Global Warming Heretics

It appears that global warming is now a religion or at least a strong ideology that cannot be questioned (that does not sound like science to me). You got that global warming fascist (Heidi Cullen) on the weather channel that wants to take away the AMS certification from any meteorologist who would dare question global warming. Isn't that nice. Then there are the global warming chicken-littles scaring everyone telling them if the world (mainly America it seems) does not stop global warming the world is coming to an end (sounds like one of those end-of-the-world cults to me) with floods, drowning polar bears, etc. Never mind those Islamic terrorists who wants to make the whole world one Islamic state--we'll just forget about them when global warming is around the corner waiting to get us. I don't know but trying to stop global warming is like trying to prevent tornadoes, blizzards or hurricanes from forming. Isn't that weather control? Good luck on that one. Leading this religion is of course the prophet Al Gore who declares that global warming is immoral on the Academy Awards. Great, we are all going to hell for something that may or may not be our fault.

With every religion you have herectics--global warming is no different. Let's start with University of Ottawa science professor Jan Veizer. He says high-energy rays from distant parts of space smashing into atmosphere could cause global warming. Isn't that interesting. Then there is Professor Ian Clark, an expert in palaeoclimatology from the University of Ottawa. He claims that claims that warmer periods of the Earth's history came around 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels. After the Second World War, there was a huge surge in carbon dioxide emissions, yet global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940. Rush Limbaugh interviewed Dr. Roy Spencer on his talk show. Dr. Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama at Huntsville and served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. He made a comment that weather actually cools the planet by "short-circuit[ing] 60% of the greenhouse effect warming that the greenhouse effect is trying to make on the surface of the Earth. If it weren't for the cooling effects of weather, the average surface temperature over the whole Earth would be about 140 degrees Fahrenheit." Ponder that for a while next time you are stuck in the rain. The names I've given here are not the only heretics. There is at least ten more I've found.