New Toon: Sugar Beet Pork To Nowhere

click to enlarge

It's pathetic and shameful that with the majority of the public saying this war shouldn't have been fought in the first place, the Democrats have to throw in a bunch of bribes in the form of millions in pork to get everyone to vote for a withdraw date from Iraq. And just for good measure, so no one could accuse them of being members of Al-Qaeda, they gave the war even more funding than Bush asked for.

The $24 million for Sugar Beet farmers is a real earmark to the bill. You can see a list of all the pork at Citizens Against Government Waste. My favorite is "$13 million for the Ewe Lamb Replacement and Retention Program" What the fuck?

The Right is naturally focusing on the pork so they don't have to mention the intractable quagmire we are in. But the Dems deserve the criticism--attaching a bunch of unrelated bullshit to bills should be banned. Is it too much to ask a law be passed on its own merits?

Non-Binding resolution? Thrown in the trash. Binding Timetable for withdraw? A certain veto. After this they'll move to the next step and defund the war, right? Heh.

Matt Taibbi's latest column:

You'll know that something real is going on in Washington when either a) the Democrats force the "antiwar conservatives" to actually cast a vote on whether or not to cut off spending for the war, or b) a dozen or so more Republicans cross the picket line to set up a possible override of a Bush veto. Until and unless one of those unlikely moments arrives, it sure looks like what we've got is one of those rare "good for both teams" baseball trades, an arranged standoff in which everybody gets to suck a little of that hot nourishing blood in the ballooning antiwar poll numbers.