This Week in Conejo Valley Politics, March 29, 2009

It was wrong of you to fire Geoff Dean, said the Civil Service Commission to Ventura County Sheriff Bob Brooks. The sheriff fired Dean for preparing to run for Brooks’s office when Brooks retires in 2010. Dean gets back pay and is the apparent frontrunner in the race.

There is a special election on May 19. It’s about the California budget. Most people don’t like the ballot measures and will vote against them according to a recent poll. This will disappoint the governor.

Californians are not happy: 77% said the state was headed in the wrong direction, 80% disapprove of the legislature’s performance, and 57% disapprove of Governor Schwarzenegger’s performance. Perhaps this is why 81% of people support Proposition 1F, limiting legislative pay during deficits. It’s the economy, stupid.

In a completely unrelated story, Governor Schwarzenegger said he would not run for political office again, since the Constitution forbids foreign-born presidents. Republicans were relieved.

Most drugs sold in Ventura County come from Mexico, say law enforcement officials. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh should buy a sombrero and move south, closer to his suppliers.

The Ventura County Supervisors graciously voted to accept $2.7 million of Barack Obama’s stimulus money this week. It will be used to buy up houses that have been foreclosed and sitting empty. They will be sold to lower-income and middle-class people. Thanks for help Ventura County, Mr. President.

Stimulus money might save police and firefighter jobs in Ventura, but only if they are still around. The Ventura City Council voted to use reserve funds to keep the officers and firefighters employed. Mayor Christy Weir, pinching pennies, voted against it.

Evangelical apocalypse enthusiasts infiltrated the military and George W. Bush’s White House, said filmmaker Michael Wilson during a screening of his movie Silhouette City in Thousand Oaks. They don’t like gays and want to “reclaim the nation for Christ.”

Bush’s Poodle: Why Gallegly Won’t Fund Children’s Health Care

Apparently funding the health care of poor children is not as important to Congressman Elton Gallegly (R-Thousand Oaks) as funding the war.

After all, poor children are certainly not going to vote Republican when they grow up. If they survive without health care, that is.

There’s no doubt about it, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which would cost taxpayers $60 billion over 5 years, would be expensive. But isn’t it the legitimate business of government to protect those who are most vulnerable?

Only if it is not too expensive, apparently.

“I understand where the president is, and I agree with him on this issue,” Gallegly told the Ventura County Star.

The president vetoed a bill to renew SCHIP on Wednesday, despite overwhelming support in the House and Senate.

The bill is popular with Republicans, Democrats, and most Americans. But not with Gallegly or Bush.

Both say the bill is too expensive. And, says the president, “government coverage would displace private health insurance for many children.”

This is certainly not true, but even if it were children with health insurance, even government-sponsored health insurance, are better off than children with none.

Senate Republicans have bent over backwards to meet the president’s demands.

“Frankly, I think the president has had pretty poor advice on this,” said Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

“I can answer every objection that they’ve made, and I’m very favorable to the president. I know he’s compassionate. I know he’s concerned about these kids, but he’s been sold a bill of goods.”

Gallegly told the Star that “this is a classic case of the ugliest part of our government process, which is taking something as critical as the healthcare of children and turning it into political spin. Today is a day that I think is an embarrassment to this institution.”

Wednesday certainly was an embarrassment. It was embarrassing for Gallegly, for Bush, for the Republican Party, and for the nation. It shows the world that we value a wasteful war in Iraq—a war that has nothing to do with terrorism—more than we do the health of our own children.

The proposed $35 billion increase in funding for the SCHIP program, an increase that will cover a five-year period, mind you, is about as much as it costs to finance the war in Iraq for a mere three months.

The president just asked Congress for an additional $200 billion in war funding. The war in Iraq has cost about $457 billion to date, and increasing at a rate of about $300 million a day, according to economist Scott Wallsten.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ineptly named war on terror will cost about $1.2 trillion between now and 2017.

Less than half of this amount, writes David Leonhardt in the New York Times, “would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.”

And yet the president and his obedient congressman can’t scrape up enough money, or moral courage, to help out 10 million poor kids.

Bush and his sycophants, like Gallegly, have been calling recently for more fiscal discipline. This is a laughable attempt to salvage some respectability at the last minute after six years of deficit spending.

The public debt is now up to more than $9 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. When Bill Clinton left office, there was a budget surplus of $127 billion.

And yet the president and his party continually tout themselves as being deficit hawks and Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals.

Nobody’s buying it, least of all now, and Republicans will pay a hefty fine at the ballot box in the 2008 elections.

The presidential veto is meant to be a check on congressional power. But in some cases, the president, be he (or soon, she) a Republican or Democrat, is just plain wrong.

This is one of those cases.

The Constitution provides Congress with the ability to override a presidential veto. The House needs 25 more votes to do this, and even Republicans are lining up to oppose the president.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the last days of a failing presidency.

Will Gallegly go down with the ship?

That’s up to Ventura County voters. Let’s all turn out for the elections in November 2008 and show Gallegly the door.

Key Links:

Gallegly’s Voting Record, as reported by the Washington Post

“Bush Vetoes Child Healthcare Bill,” by Michael Collins, Ventura County Star, October 4, 2007

“Families Brace for SCHIP Demise,” by Carla Williams, ABC News, October 4, 2007

“Bush Vetoes Health Measure,” by Michael Abramowitz and Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post, October 4, 2007

 

“The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Public Debt, retrieved October 4, 2007

 

“Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Other Activities Related to the War on Terrorism,” Congressional Budget Office, testimony before the Committee on the Budget
U.S. House of Representatives, July 31, 2007.

 

“What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy,” by David Leonhardt, New York Times, January 17, 2007.

 

“President Clinton announces another record budget surplus,” by Kelly Wallace, CNN.com, September 27, 2000

 

“Snow, Praising Bush on Budget, Calls Clinton’s Surplus `Mirage,’” by Alison Fitzgerald, Bloomberg.com, December 21, 2005.

 

 

 

Congressman Waxman Speaks in Thousand Oaks about Oversight and the War

Congressman Henry A. Waxman visited Thousand Oaks Sunday morning to speak about the Iraq war and his efforts as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to monitor the Bush administration’s handling of activities related to the war.

 

Waxman bemoaned the administration’s prevarication about the reasons for entry into the war.

 

“We were told we had to fight in Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein to get weapons of mass destruction. We were told we had to fight there to stop terrorism. We were told we had to fight there because we were going to have a model of democracy that’s going to change the whole Middle East. Then lately we’ve been told we were going to have a surge, and the purpose of the surge is to give the Iraqi government a chance to make a stable country. We’ll settle for a stable country.”

 

Waxman said that Iraq was “decimated” and that “as soon as we leave, they’re going to blow altogether, unless there are areas where the Sunnis are gone or the Shiites are gone and so there’s no one to fight anymore.”

“I thought the best answer to why we’re fighting in Iraq was in a New York Times cartoon today where President Bush was asked, ‘Why are we fighting in Iraq?’ and he said, ‘So we can kick this over to the next administration and we can blame them for Iraq.’ But how many people are we going to kill and lose in the meantime?”

 

Waxman emphasized the role of the Congress in providing oversight of the executive branch, and chastised the formerly Republican-controlled Congress for failing to perform this task.

 

“They [Republicans in Congress] wouldn’t hold a hearing on the misuse of intelligence by this administration to trick us into going into war. They wouldn’t even look at the issues of the waste of money in the reconstruction, so called, of Iraq. They wouldn’t do anything that might embarrass President Bush, which meant they chose to be good Republicans first, and to be leaders of an independent branch of government second.”

 

“They have refused to answer questions of the press, of those of us in Congress who have asked them questions. They’ve tried to operate without transparency, without openness, and of course without accountability. Their attitude is that the government belongs to them, not to the American people. That’s what happens when you get so powerful and you think it all belongs to you.”

 

Waxman criticized “fraud, waste, and abuse” in the conduct of the war, and emphasized the role of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in investigating these issues.

 

“Our first hearing was on the shipment of $12 billion in cash to Iraq. In hundred-dollar bills, put together in brick form, put onto pallets, forklifted onto airplanes, and flown into a war zone. And then our man in charge, Ambassador Bremer, handed out $8.8 billion that he can’t account for. We asked him, where did that money go? Well, he said, well, I gave it to the Iraq ministries so they could pay their payroll. And we found out that some ministries said they had thousands of employees when they had maybe a hundred. So money was passed out without any accounting for it. Did it end up in the pockets of those that received it? Of course. Did it end up in Swiss bank accounts? I wouldn’t be surprised. Did it end up funding the insurgents? Probably. So we ended up funding both sides in Iraq.”

 

The crowd listened in respectful silence to Waxman’s speech, but grew animated during the more than half-hour question-and-answer session. It was clear that the group of mostly Democrats was largely anti-war and highly critical of the Bush administration. The dominant theme was one of concern that Democrats aggressively pursue investigations into the misdeeds of the president and his cabinet.

 

Local Democratic party luminaries attended the event, notably Jim Dantona, who is running against Tony Strickland for the seat for California Senate’s 19th district that is likely to be vacated when State Senator Tom McClintock‘s term expires, and Ferial Masry, who is running for the 37th district assembly seat currently held by Assemblywoman Audra Strickland, wife of Tony Strickland.

 

Waxman appeared at the invitation of the Democratic Club of the Conejo Valley. The eventwas held at the Conejo Recreation and Parks Community Room.

 

Be sure to check this website later in the week to read the full transcript of Waxman’s speech.