Pictorial representation of our nation's budget

My friend Dan sent me this link: http://thebudgetgraph.com/ . It's pretty neat as a nice condensed view of our nation's budget. It raises the immediate emotional observation however that 67% of the President's budget is going to military, national security spending. I thought it was useful and interesting for the casual political wannabes, but I pointed out to Dan that it was dangerous to completely rely on it in making decisions.

"Graphs and charts don't capture the rationale and policy underlying them all the time," I said. (or more accurately, wrote in an IM).
"How's that?" Dan asked. "James, the whole left side is the military."
"But someone from outerspace, if they looked at this, would say, 'a war-like culture.' And that is true. But why? The entire complicated series of events leading to the current Middle East Conflict is not captured."

I'm certainly not a fan of Middle East Conflict. (I think the acronym Global War on Terror is another successful naming convention of Pres. Bush's like "Clear Sky Initiative" or "Leave No Child Behind" which all reek of good brand-naming in an advertising sense, but fail miserably in practice because of the real underlying policies that are contrary to the surface brandname.") The lengthy and costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking up a large part of our resources now, but the policies and decisions in reaching the spending are complicated and not as clear-cut for most average citizens to say it is too much. We're in a mess and it's too hard to get out of it overnight, as seen in the Senate earlier this week with Sen. Webb's resolution.

So, the graph is good, but stories are more complicated than the thousands of words that the picture paints.

Media focus on the Petraeus/Crocker Hearings

It has been an exciting last two days here in Washington, D.C. Political junkies and other Hill people welcomed home two highly anticipated witnesses to sit in the hot seat yesterday and today. Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker returned from from Iraq to discuss the progress (and lack thereof) in Iraq pursuant to Congressional acts passed earlier this year, before authorizing more money for the occupation.

I'll let the news outlets handle most of the analysis, but I had a few comments:

First, I was disappointed by the video coverage on TV and the online news outlets by giving Sen. Obama video space in their coverage over other more salient and informed senators that talked today. The Washington Post for instance in its online article has prominent video links to Sen. Lugar (R-Ind.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). While there are insightful questions and comments from these two videos, there was a high degree of anticipation of the Senators from Virginia -- Jim Webb(D-Va.) and John Warner (R-Va.), both former Secretaries of the Dept. of Navy and with extensive experience on wartime strategy. The articles and the coverage for them were minimal, considering The Washington Post also claims that it covers local news as well; the piece would have been just as complete to throw in the discussion by these two senators.


Second, I realize that there is a lot of posturng during these hearings. Congresspeople don't actually have to ask questions in a fashion to try to elicit actual answers. Instead they are doing what lawyers do in a courtroom. Good lawyers in theory anyhow. The old adage is that a lawyer should never ask a question that he or she doesn't already know the answer to. So, politicians like their old lawyer-selves resorted to having commentary and asking damaging or helpful questions. This is not a big new insight for the political junkies that watch C-Span all day, but I thought I'd belabor it for those that get disgusted by the overtness of the posturing and not realize that it is really just the way it is done on the Hill.

Last point I want to make is that the complete transcripts are the best source to see what happened during the hearings. The talking heads and all give good summaries and may give an "In Touch" kind of quality to what happened, but the original sources are always the best. Politico.com has done a good job with keeping all the transcripts, slides and openings remarks on this page: Full text: Petraeus and Crocker testimony.