Senator John McCain, speaking to Tim Russert on Meet The Press about the “Istook Amendment” in the new omnibus spending bill said “What happens here is that they slap these omnibus bills together–as you mentioned, this one’s nine bills that we should have passed separately–nobody sees them or reads them. It was a 1,630- page document yesterday that was presented to us sometime in the morning, and we voted on it in the evening. The system is broken”.

The problem is “omnibus legislation”. The practice of combining disparate measures in one massive bill enables lawmakers (on both sides) to hide more undesirable measures among thousands of sections and subsections cobbled together at the last minute.

With regard to the “Istook Amendment” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said: “I have no earthly idea how it got in there. Nobody is going to defend this.” But that is the point - in the effort to gain institutional efficiency lawmakers don’t know half of what is in these bills when they vote on them!

Boston Globe: GOP Preps Stage for Bush Agenda. Recent moves by the Republican leadership to consolidate more executive-branch power in the hands of key loyalists, give the majority leader, more authority in naming members of legislative committees, and a challenge to filibuster rules are causing concern among “moderate Republicans, and some nonpartisan government watchdog groups. They say the moves are part of a pattern of rule changes that stifle dissent and threaten some of the checks and balances on government.”

NYT article states that “Senator John McCain called the White House stance on climate change ‘terribly disappointing’ and said inaction in the face of mounting scientific data was unjustified.” Senator McCain, along with Senator Lieberman first introduced the McCain-Lieberman bill 3 years ago, called the Climate Stewardship Act which aimed to bring about modest curbs on greenhouse gases. The White House continues to oppose the legislation due to “cost to the economy” and “uncertainty of the science”.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/politics/16mccain.html

While simultaneously talking about healing and bipartisan cooperation (continuation of the RMM conservative = compassionate/moderate-liberal = evil meme) the current Republican “majority” vigorously points to the mandate they now have. Josh Marshall has a nice post  in Talking Points Memo.

Thomas Barnett, author of the Pentagon’s New Map, provides a summary assessment of the global war on terror in a recent blog entry Judgment on GWOT.

Key quote: “OBL and Al Qaeda put the System Perturbation of 9/11 on us, but we decided how to run down the horizontal waves of disruption that ensued, and that’s a basic rule set of System Perturbations: super-empowered individuals can trigger vertical scenarios, but only governments have the massive resources necessary to engineer long-term horizontal scenarios in response, like creating DHS or seeking to transform the Middle East. We don’t get to choose the vertical scenarios, they choose us. But we do get to choose the horizontal ones we pursue in response to the vertical ones, and so long as those choices are wise, then we’re really in control. My verdict is then: DHS, bad choice, transforming Middle East, good choice but so far bad execution. DHS only perverts America and wastes money, whereas transforming the Middle East is a solid, realistic, strategic choice that requires our defense establish to dramatically alter itself for the challenge.”