And the beat goes on, and the beat goes on...

Today, the 110th congress passed HR1591 that gives more money to the train, support, arm, heal, and fund our troops at home and abroad.

It also requires that all our troops be out of Iraq by the end of August, 2008.

OK. So. Let us suppose that Butch is waiting to beat you up after work because you treated his wife and kids really badly, wrecked his car, and burned down his chicken coop. What are you going to do. Walk out there and face up to this 800-pound gorilla, or maybe sneak out the back door. Then you find out that he is only going to wait outside until 8:00! Dang, just lay low and ol' Butch will go away!

So it will go with the terrorists in Iraq. They will just lay low if they know that we are going to leave in the near future.

Have you actually read the bill, though? This thing was way more than your average "let's give the troops some more money and then bring them home" bill. This was a spending bill. The several billion that the bill aims to spend contained way more than just cash for our fighting heroes.

It has been widely reported that Mrs. Pelosi (D-Cali.) bribed several of those that she couldn't bully by tacking provisions onto this bill that would insure that the representatives in question couldn't say no.

Just some of these provisions are:

Hurricane Bucks

• $25M for Livestock Indemnity


• $15M for Crop Disaster


• $100M for Citrus Crops Program


• $120M for the Shrimp Industry (through NOAA - I can not figure that one out)


• $35M for exploration by the NOAA


• $48M for NASA's trouble with the hurricanes


• $37M to lessen the risk of hurricane storm damage along the Mississippi Coast

Plus a whole lot more!

Non Military/Hurricane Emergency funding

• $30M for the Department of Education to recruit/pay/retain teachers in MS, LA and AL


• $25M for farmers who couldn't sell their spinach


• $20M to restore ground damaged by recent freeze (Global Warming?)


• $283M for Milk Income Loss Contracts (Will have to look into this one. Not a clue what it is)


• $74M to store peanuts


• $5M to cover losses by fish farmers when they couldn't import a specific kind of fish from two cities in Canada.

In all there were 230 separate dollar amounts listed in this bill. And the majority of the military spending were followed by the word "provided" and then a list of conditions were there for the President, his cabinet, or the commanders of our Armed Forces to meet; basically hoops they had to jump through to get the money.

The hurricane moneys were also subject to the "provided" clause, but mostly to insure that it didn't run afoul of other existing laws.

The pork at the end of the bill had very little provisos other than to say that the money was available until expended.

Now! The whole purpose of that was not to show how stupid Congress is, or to point out the money seemingly wasted by our government, but rather to show how cumbersome our system is. This thing is 168 pages long!

I have long been a proponent of the line item veto but would like to take it one step further: I would like each bill to contain only a single item and NOTHING could be added onto any bill that is not related directly to that bill. You might point out how the whole thing was emergency spending, but each item could have been addressed separately. Without too much additional work on anybodies part. Besides, the majority of these were added to the bill within the last day and a half! It would also simplify and de-politicize the voting process in that a Senator or Representative would not have to explain why they voted against a anti-child porn bill because it contained legislation that would have allowed genocide on wholesale level within our borders. Make 'em separate!

In conclusion I hope that this bill stalls in the Senate. It does not need to pass. Passage will only undermine our troops and their mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. We do need to get them some more money, but without all the extra baggage tacked onto it in the process. If not, President Bush gets to dust off his veto stamp.

God Bless our troops, and the USA.