...and ANOTHER thing.

That "3 million dollar" figure; doesn't it strike you as odd that McCain is fine with sending 700 billion into Iraq, with spending another 500 to 700 billion dollars to bail out multi-billion dollar corporations, but he's all up at arms over 3 million dollars to study an endangered species?

Sure, 3 million is a lot to me. And I suspect it's probably a lot of money to you. But when you look at the economy, and the budget, and the budget deficit, it's literally a drop in the bucket.

And for McCain, it's also not a huge figure: he owns two condos in Phoenix that come to 4.7 million dollars. That's just TWO of his four to ten homes, depending on whose count you believe this week.

So, save the cost of a pair of condos, or some larger homes, but spend enough to give 4.4 million Americans free college educations at private institutions or 23 million Americans free college educations at public institutions on bailing out a bunch of very rich guys who each were paid much more than $3 million a year to run banks and manage stocks & bonds.

It just doesn't add up, does it? He'd have to cut 233,333 projects of that value to cover the 700 billion he's fine with spending. OR, he could end the war in Iraq. But he's not incensed about that.

For that matter, ONE PERCENT of 700 billion dollars is still 7 billion dollars; and the three million he's incensed about STILL isn't even a full percentage point of THAT.

My point isn't that we shouldn't be looking long and hard at the budget; we should. But we need to do so with a sense of proportion; a sense of proportion that John McCain no longer demonstrates.

Before you CUT the budget, you need to UNDERSTAND it.

One item (out of many) that jumped out at me during last night's debate (or at least the part I watched before I finally turned it off in disgust) was this comment by John McCain:

MCCAIN: "You know, we spent $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. I don't know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue, but the fact is that it was $3 million of our taxpayers' money. And it has got to be brought under control."

It immediately struck me that he was admitting his own ignorance. He had no idea why such a study received funding, no idea what the purpose of the study was, but he was willing to cut it. At no time did he bother to find out anything about the study; he simply assumed it was a waste of money and started ridiculing it. (I say this because if he HAD understood it, he wouldn't have said that "I don't know" what the purpose was. )

Isn't part of responsible stewardship of our national researches knowing why something is being funded? Sure, knowing that it is funded is important, but you should know why. It's not like it's all that hard to discover; the budget request has to include an explanation of the project being funded.

So I was very glad to see that the Sun-Sentinel actually did something useful and posted an analysis of both candidates' claims from last night's debates. And the last item in the list is the Bear DNA project.

THE FACTS: A study regularly mocked by McCain as pork barrel spending could help ease restrictions on logging, development and even the oil and gas drilling that McCain wants to expand. Montana ranchers, farmers and Republican leaders pushed for the study as a step toward taking the grizzly bear off the endangered species list. Former Montana Gov. Judy Martz, a Republican and a McCain supporter, said the bear had been used to block the use of the state's abundant natural resources, when all along the animal was plentiful. "If it is going to remove it from the list, it is money well spent," Martz said.

You see, one of the things preventing any sort of major industry in wildlife reserves are our own laws about endangered species. If the project threatens a plant or animal that is already on the verge of extinction, the industry coming in has to spend millions of dollars to either show that they won't really affect the endangered species, or spend millions of dollars to create a plan for mitigating the damage their project will do - perhaps they'll have to fund expansion of another habitat. Or maybe create a new habitat to relocate the species in the development zone. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

OR, you spend 3 million dollars to find out if the bear is actually on the brink of extinction. You do this not by counting bears, but by making sure they have enough diversity in their genetic material to re-populate with the existing population.

Look at it this way; if you have 300 hundred breeding pairs of bears, but they are all closely related, you get inbreeding; sickly bears that don't live very long. The population dies off, the ecosystem collapses, and now you have a problem you can't fix, regardless of what you want to spend. But if you have a hundred breeding pairs that are all distantly related, the can create a new, larger, and robust population of bears in just a few generations.

By eliminating the bear DNA project, McCain is actually adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of drilling, and might actually be preventing that drilling he wants from happening altogether.

And if he'd read the budget request, or researched the study, he'd know that. He has no excuse; the information was included in the budgets. It was on his desk. It was available to him.

Instead, he proudly admits that he's acting out of ignorance.

"I don't know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue, but the fact is that it was $3 million of our taxpayers' money."

Yes, it was John. And you might have at least done us the courtesy of knowing what they were doing with it.

Haven't we had enough of presidents who act out of ignorance instead reading the reports that are placed right into their own hands?

McCain claims to be a maverick; but he's better described as a loose cannon.

Florida Budget Priorities

Since the idiots in Tallahassee our elected officials seem to be having a problem understanding what their priorities should be, I thought I'd put together a list for them to refer to. So here they are, in order of importance.

EDUCATION
This must be Number One, before anything else on a rational budget. You can't thrive in the world without an education. You need a good education to get a good job, or to understand the world around you. To solve our problems we must understand them; and the problems we'll face tomorrow will only be more complex. Our schools must not be treated as a baby-sitting or warehouse service; our children must grow up to be the leaders of tomorrow. We must prepare our children to face the problems facing them, and that means fully funding our schools. Remember, in a few decades your children will be taking care of YOU.

PUBLIC SAFETY
We must be safe. If you do not understand this, you should not be in public service. We need to know that our laws will be enforced, and that help will come in an emergency. Our police and fire departments lay their lives on the line for us, the least we can do is make sure they have the equipment they need to do that job. A police officer shouldn't be alone on patrol. Firefighters need to have gear they can rely on, and paramedics need to have the supplies they need to save lives. We also need to ensure that they can pay their bills, and that their families are provided for if the worst should happen. Cutting their budget is like cutting off your arm or leg, or that of someone you love.

WATER
Without clean water, you have nothing. We must stop dumping sewage in our oceans; this contaminates our oceans and destroys our fisheries. We must stop further destruction of the Everglades; most animals know better than to destroy their own homes, and it's time we learned at least that much.

We must carefully regulate the use of our fresh water supply; we can't continue to squander drinking water on our lawns, golf courses or the estates of a privileged few. We're literally flushing our most precious resource down the drain. NOW is the time to ensure that we'll continue to have fresh water in the future. With prudent management, we should never have to worry about the taps running dry.

TRANSIT
Apparently some of you missed the 1970s and the two crises that should have alerted you to the fact that the supply of oil is finite. We should have been building our cars and trucks with an emphasis on efficiency; instead, you've allowed Detroit to foist bulky and inefficient SUVs on us. The result is that instead of building up a reserve of decades that would have stabilized both supply and price, you've left us at the mercy of foreign powers. Gasoline is rapidly climbing towards $4 a gallon on average. It's becoming too expensive to drive our big, gas-guzzling cars, and even the more efficient cars are becoming increasingly costly to operate.

Yes, it's great that we're starting to see hybrids that get greater mileage, but not everyone can afford them; and even if we could, we still don't know how long the batteries will last and how much they'll cost to replace.

No, we must stop focusing on accommodating automobiles; we must not expand their infrastructure, we must not widen our highways, or add new routes. It's time to get cars OFF the road. And we do that by giving would-be motorists better options; and that means buses and trains.

It's time to design transit systems that WORK. We can't look at the broken half-formed poor excuse of a system now in place and claim that it teaches us anything. Learn the lessons Tri-Rail teaches us: once the double-tracking allowed trains to run every half-hour during rush hour, ridership shot up. People will use public transit if it is reasonably convenient for them to do so. This has been proven around the world time and time again. We are no exception to that. It's no longer viable to use the excuse that other places had it longer, or that it was cheaper then: it really wasn't. It used up just as much resources then as it would now.

We need to act now to solve tomorrow's fuel crisis. Our economy will collapse if people can't afford to get around town. Businesses are already seeing a drop in patronage as people stay home more. People on the lower half of the economic scale may soon have to choose between putting gas in their tank or putting food on the table. Some are already there.

CONCLUSION
The simple-minded Republican solution of cutting taxes will not get us out of this mess. Neither will hand-outs. We need to set clear and logical budget priorities, and exercise prudent administration of our tax monies.

We shouldn't underwrite businesses that make enough to pay their own way; our sports franchises make a lot of money for themselves, they don't need a dime of tax money. Expenditures at the state level must reflect value for the entire state; at the same time, the state needs to make sure that a fair proportion of funds return to their county of origin.

The legislature needs to stop wasting our tax dollars debating bad law, such as the bill forcing women to pay for ultra-sounds before having an abortion; our legislators are not doctors, and have no business dictating unnecessary medical procedures. It's wasteful and a clear abuse of power. How much has this stupid debate cost the taxpayer so far? Such behavior will not get us out of our budget mess, and should be stopped immediately.

There's a lot I left out of my budget discussion; that's because we need to concentrate on the four areas I laid out above. Everything else must be dealt with AFTER these four key areas.

The next time we're adding frivolous amendments, we should consider adding practical ones: preventing budget cuts in the areas outlined above except under very proscribed and specific circumstances.