For everyone who thinks that Republicans are fiscal conservatives

(copied message)

These guys are good. Good at squandering, anyway. Government spending in March hit an all-time one-month high for the month of March.

In its monthly accounting of the government's books, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday that federal spending totaled $250 billion last month, up 13.7 percent from March 2005.
Government receipts also were up, rising 10.6 percent from a year ago, to $164.6 billion. That left a deficit for the month of $85.5 billion, a record imbalance for March.

Here's a fun factoid. March broke the previous single-month outlay which was set in . . . February. Let's go for broke and see how much we can spend in April! Records are made to be broken, after all.

There is a tiny bit of good news here.


Even though the deficit was a record for March, it was below the all-time monthly high of $119.2 billion, which was set in February.
That's what an incompetent administration and the Rubber-Stamp Republican Congress will get you.

(back to being me)

So, who are we choosing next time to keep these people at the helm? After all the new bankruptcy laws that keep consumers from having relief from indebtedness doesn't affect the Feds.

Oh, wait - we're blowing money faster than a Baptist in a titty bar because we had to invade Iraq. After all, they had those mobile bio-weapons trailers. We FOUND those, right?

Nope. We knew that they weren't weapons BEFORE we attacked. WAY before. So, if they lied about the weapons of mass destruction, and they knowingly lied about it before we attacked, and Saddam invited the inspectors into EVERY site they asked to see before we attacked, and Saddam destroyed and dismantled everything that the international inspectors asked them to - and Geo. W. has publicly, repeatedly admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 - no connection at all...

WHY ARE WE THERE? Can one of you who pulled the lever for Geo. W explain this to me in a way that doesn't involve rhetoric or Fox news bullet points? Just the facts, ma'am. I'm willing to listen, but you ain't talking. You're just slogging away, telling me that the Liberals are dangerous and bad for the economy.

When has it ever been this bad before? In the economy, in the national debt, in public confidence, in international reputation ..

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(April 13, 2006 -- 12:09 AM EDT // link)
Here's another question on those bio-weapons mobile trailers that never were.

When did the administration let Congress in on the fact that those mobile weapons labs weren't bio-weapons labs at all and that we'd just been conned by some emigres on the make?

We're focusing now on the president's flogging of this bogus story shortly after the Defense Intelligence Agency gave a definitive verdict on the falsity of the claim. But when did they tell Congress? And how late did other administration heavies continue to make this claim?

My recollection is that with most of these stories like the trailers and the tubes and the nuclear this and that, most of this stuff wasn't definitively knocked down for many, many months after the war. Like old soldiers these fables didn't die so much as they faded away. The certainty diminished. More doubts were raised. But for what always struck me as deeply cynical reasons, the White House never publicly pulled the plug on any of these tales because as long as they kept some level of uncertainty hanging in the air they didn't have to address the fact that the central argument for the war had turned out to be false.

Hell, you've still got Hitchens publicly holding out for the Niger canard. And that's just an example of the fact that you can always find folks deep enough in the tank to churn out tall tales for the true believers to eat up.

Anyway, when did the White House tell Congress that the mobile weapons story was bunk?

A reader pointed me toward this portion of the congressional record from July 17th, 2003 in which Senators Durbin and McConnell discuss then heated WMD debate. They both discuss the mobile bio-weapons trailers with the assumption that that was what they were. And this was the day after then CIA Director George Tenet gave five hours of closed door Senate testimony on the WMD debacle. That certainly suggests that Tenet didn't knock down the mobile lab fable in that lengthy session dedicated to the topic of pre-war WMD intelligence.

What does Durbin say?

And how late were administration figures pushing the mobile bio-labs story?

Here's what Vice President Cheney said to Juan Williams on January 24th 2004 ...

In terms of the question what is there now, we know for example that prior to our going in that he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile biological weapons labs, and we're quite confident he did, in fact, have such a program. We've found a couple of semi trailers at this point which we believe were, in fact, part of that program. Now it's not clear at this stage whether or not he used any of that to produce or whether he was simply getting ready for the next war. That, in my mind, is a serious danger in the hands of a man like Saddam Hussein, and I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction.
Cheney's persistence in lying to the public about al Qaida and WMD claims is almost the stuff of legend. So even though the baldness of this lie still sort of grabs me, I can't say it's exactly shocking.

But again, Congress. For how many months did the White House continue to tell the Congress that the mobile bio-weapons story was true even while they knew it was false? For months? Or was it more like a year?