Obey to Announce Retirement

By GottaLaff

Another one bites the dust:

Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee and the third-most-senior Member of the House, has decided he will not seek re-election in November.

His Wiki here.

Obey Announces Partial Ban on Earmarks

By GottaLaff

Is this another one of those "compromises"?

In an effort to hold off a total moratorium on earmarks, House appropriators announced Wednesday morning that they would reject all earmark requests that benefit for-profit companies.

Obey claims it will mean “1,000 fewer earmarks.” Nancy Pelosi has floated the idea of a total ban on earmarks. The GOP went for a yearlong ban.

Obey said he would hope that the policy would break the appearance of a link between campaign contributions and earmarks.

Here's the money line:

But, he said, “You will never break totally the appearance of a possibility of a nexus as long as the Congress doesn’t pass campaign finance reform legislation.”

Yeah, good luck with that.

Without effective campaign finance reform, true democracy is about as realistic as a birthday wish.

Get filled in on the details here.

Floor Fight: Waters v. Obey

By GottaLaff

Oh my. I bet Maxine won:

The Hill: "Two Democrats got into a verbal altercation -- and according to one a physical one -- on the floor of the House on Thursday night over an appropriations earmark one was seeking. After the House floor had largely cleared following a series of votes, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI) split apart from a heated conversation and began yelling at one another."

Dem. Rep. David Obey: CIA Records On Briefings Not Accurate

By GottaLaff

(click on image to enlarge)

Piling on:

Yet another Democrat in Congress is alleging that the CIA included incorrect information in its records about past congressional briefings on interrogation policies.

Rep. David Obey sent a letter to CIA Director Leon Panetta on Tuesday saying that "in light of current controversy about CIA briefing practices," he was "surprised to learn that the agency erroneously listed an appropriations staffer as being in a key briefing on September 19, 2006, when in fact he was not." [...]

The letter makes Obey the fourth Democrat to allege that the CIA's record of which members of Congress were briefed on the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation techniques contained factual errors.

Bob Graham, as posted here, is one of the four. Jay Rockefeller is the other.

All told, the testimonies of these three Democratic officials bolster the case made by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the agency's own account of those now-controversial briefings is misleading. Pelosi -- like Graham -- has insisted that members of Congress were kept in the dark in the fall of 2002 about the Bush administration's use of waterboarding on terrorist suspects.

But let's get back to who ordered the torture in the first place, okay? That would be BushCo, aka what one might call "the responsible party".

GOP Fought Pandemic Preparedness

By GottaLaff

UPDATE #2: Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events

UPDATE-- I was thinking about this very thing while typing up this post, and then promptly forgot to add it in. I'll let AMERICAblog do that for me:

GOP is filibustering the confirmation of the Secretary of HHS in the midst of swine flu preparations

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who are the most shortsighted, destructive, self-serving know-nothings of all:

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse [...]

The current swine flu outbreak is not a pandemic, and there is reason to hope that it can be contained. [...]

On Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that a national "public health emergency" had been declatred. (Notably, the second question at the White House press conference on the emergency had to do with the potential impact on the economic recovery.) [...]

Rove dismissed Obey's proposals as "disturbing" and "laden with new spending programs." He said the congressman was peddling a plan based on "deeply flawed assumptions."

Like what?

Rove specifically complained that Obey's proposal included "$462 million for the Centers for Disease Control, and $900 million for pandemic flu preparations."

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blot post to bring you breaking news. We have found the source of the swine flu outbreak:

Now back to our blog post already in progress:

The attack on pandemic preparation became so central to the GOP strategies that AP reported in February: "Republicans, meanwhile, plan to push for broader and deeper tax cuts, to trim major spending provisions that support Democrats' longer-term policy goals, and to try to knock out what they consider questionable spending items, such as $870 million to combat the flu and $400 million to slow the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases."

Famously, Maine Senator Susan Collins, the supposedly moderate Republican who demanded cuts in health care spending in exchange for her support of a watered-down version of the stimulus, fumed about the pandemic funding: "Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill No, we should not."

Yes, we should have.

Even now, Collins continues to use her official website to highlight the fact that she led the fight to strip the pandemic preparedness money out of the Senate's version of the stimulus measure.

We'll be right back after this short break, brought to you by Maine's burgeoning dry cleaning industry:

Now, back to our post:

The Republicans essentially succeeded. The Senate version of the stimulus plan included no money whatsoever for pandemic preparedness. [...]

[S]tate and local governments, and the emergency services that would necessarily be on the frontlines in any effort to contain a pandemic, got nothing.[...]

No serious player in Washington has been unaware of the fears with regard to a flu pandemic. They have been well-publicized and well-discussed. [...]

And it is important to point out that no serious player in Washington could have been unaware of the threat that a pandemic -- or even the fear of one -- would pose to economic renewal. [...]

But they bet that they would be able to score their political points without any consequences.

Senate Democratic leaders bowed to Collins in the process of crafting their chamber's version of the stimulus. [...]

Collins played politics with public health, and the economic recovery. That makes her about as bad a player as you will find in a town full of bad players.

But Senate Democrats bent to her demands. That makes them, at the very least, complicit in the weakening of what needed to be a muscular plan.[...]

There is, however, a hero on the House side. Throughout the process, David Obey battled to get Congress to recognize that a pandemic would threaten not just public health but a fragile economic recovery.

Thank you for joining us. Tune in again next week when we discover that despite Donald Rumsfeld's stake in Tamiflu, he has been foolish enough to maintain his relationship with a Mexican pig named Karlos Rovero, and, to his surprise and dismay, contracted a nasty case of the swine flu.

G'night folks!