Via our very own RegWatch, a commissioner of the Consumer Products Safety Commission is lobbying against a proposed budget increase.

Some seriously silly circus tricks are on daily display this Halloween season as three-ring leader President Bush pushes the bounds of credulity, for a man who has single-handedly added over $3,000,000,000,000.00 (three tril) to the national debt. His biggest and most mendacious trick is a sleight-of-hand to convince the children of the jury that the spending bills passed by the House, and sometimes the Senate, are budget-busting veto bait, exceeding his $730 billion in requests by around $20 billion.

This, despite the fact that not a single bill has been conferenced, no votes on final passage have been held. But that doesn't stop the Maestro from issuing veto threats without waiting for votes. You see, he really, really does think deficits matter. Now that the Democrats run Congress, that is. As spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said recently:

President Bush has signed into law tens of billions above his request when it is for his failed Iraq policy but refuses to support a penny above his request when Democrats try to invest in domestic priorities.

For a reprise of the various acts of fiscal farce, featuring disappearing deficits and budget-fudging, see Collender's latest, here.

We did $50 billion worth of spying last year, according to the Washington Post today.

The director of national intelligence will disclose today that national intelligence activities amounting to roughly 80 percent of all U.S. intelligence spending for the year cost more than $40 billion, according to sources on Capitol Hill and inside the administration.

The disclosure means that when military spending is added, aggregate U.S. intelligence spending for fiscal 2007 exceeded $50 billion, according to these sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the total remains classified.

How much of that budget was used to spy on Americans is unknown, as is the size of the budget compared to most prior years. Budget disaggregates are still classified, and only on a few occasions have intelligence officials disclosed size of agency budgets. But for comparison's sake, the spying budget is about the same size as president's FY08 budget request for the entire Department of Homeland Security, which was $46.4 billion.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription) reports that there's a new budget strategy- tie the Defense, Veterans Administration, AND Labor/HHS/educaction bills together, and send them to the president.

The package, which combines three bills into one, would total almost $675 billion in discretionary spending for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Of this, more than 70% is defense-related. The rest is expected to incorporate about $14 billion more for domestic priorities than Mr. Bush has requested.

The plan is a significant tactical change. Democrats had been expected to treat the three bills individually and send them to the White House in a sequence that allowed the party to spell out its priorities.

Supporters of the new, more-unified approach say it better serves the party's political message by melding national security and domestic issues. But they also concede it could prove a confrontational, gamble that risks alienating Republican moderates whose support is vital if Congress is to convince the White House to negotiate over domestic spending.

House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) believes ($) in the Great Pumpkin.

Imposing higher taxes at this time will doom our economy, put people out of work and cost the federal government revenue that is badly needed, if in fact we're going to balance the budget.

You see, at midnight on every Halloween the Great Pumpkin rises from the pumpkin patch and grants your wishes. Boeher hopes real bad that he'll see the Great Pumpkin this year, and that it will grant his wish that tax cuts increase government revenue.

Well, here's hoping, sir, but somehow I think you're better off trick-or-treating than sitting in a pumpkin patch all night.

Image by Flickr user shiny red type under a Creative Commons license

You don't even have to read between the lines to understand that the president is opposed to providing health insurance to children.

...I was disappointed by what Congress had been doing...This week, the majority in the House passed a new SCHIP bill that costs more over the next five years than the one I vetoed three weeks ago. It still moves millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care. It raises taxes to pay for it.

The House got a little closer to the veto-proof 2/3rds majority today, but in the end conservatives basically blocked the bill once again. The vote was 265-142 (roll call).

SCHIP supporters made a bunch of concessions around program eligibility. What gives? I guess these hyper-conservatives just don't want to spend more money on kids in particular, because we all know they'll throw away hundreds of billions for wars that are going nowhere.

There's a myth out there that President Bush is a "big spender." If anything, he's a tax cutter and a stable spender on the macrolevel. Take a look at this chart, via Econospeak.

Or maybe he's just a budget shifter. Here's a chart on defense and domestic discretionary spending by EPI:

That domestic spending includes homeland security, which has seen huge increases. The share of GDP going to non-defense domestic discretionary programs has fallen from 3.4 percent in 2001 to 3.1 percent in 2007.

Whatever Bush is, he's not the big spender on social programs people say he is. Don't believe the hype.

Minority Whip Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) is picking up his ball and going home.

CongressDaily Extra(sorry, no link):

Angry House Republicans slowed business on the floor to a crawl this morning, offering a motion to adjourn to protest the decision by Democratic leaders to vote today on a new State Children's Health Insurance Program bill. Aides to Minority Whip Blunt told GOP lawmakers to expect similar procedural tactics throughout the day.

Image by Flickr user mr. tedward used under a Creative Commons license.

CBO has an new cost estimate of all the wars we're in.

The war spending will accrue an estimated $700 billion in interest on the debt, bringing the top total estimate to $2.4 trillion.

Could CBO do a "pay-for" analysis, too? Like Jason Furman did on the tax cuts? Even the Bush administration hasn't claimed that wars pay for themselves.

As noted by Matt yesterday, the Senate approved the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill 75-19.

What next for FY 2008 appropriations? Matt takes a look in this week's The Watcher.

A few facts on the congressional budget resolution (from Allen Shick's classic The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy and Process):

• For about the first 200 years of this country, there was no congressional Budget Resolution (BR) and no discretionary cap.
• The budget resolution was originally conceived of as a way to reduce deficits. When it didn't work that well, discretionary caps were added to make it stronger.
• The discretionary spending has decreased from nearly 1/2 the budget in 1975 (the year of the first budget resolution) to less than 1/3rd now.
• In 1975, domestic discretionary outlays were 4.4 percent of GDP. The Congressional budget plan for FY08 has it at 3.6 percent. That difference (by my back of the envelope calculation) is equal to about $100 billion in today's dollars.

For more on why the discretionary budget cap (or the congressional budget resolution?) may not be the best idea, see this post.

To listen to him, Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) sounds as committed to cutting spending and the deficit as he ever has: "I think we managed the growth much more effectively in 2004 and 2005 than we had in 2001 to 2003... The fact is, liberals here in Washington want to grow the size of government at a much faster rate, at a higher rate than the Republican minority."

Then riddle me this: why has Sununu almost alone among his GOP colleagues in the Senate, voted in favor of every single one of the Democrats' spending bills this year, including the ones, such as the Labor-HHS bill, that President Bush has threatened to veto on account of "excessive levels of spending"?

Could it have anything to do with the fact that he is trailing in the polls in his re-election race in a state that suddenly went deep blue last year for the first time in a century?

For months, the Bush administration has been issue one veto threat after another, as the House and Senate approve appropriations bills that narrowly exceed the President's budget requests. Yesterday, the Senate approved, by a veto-proof 75-19 majority) the Labor-HHS bill, the largest domestic spending bill in the budget. The bill provides $152 billion in discretionary funds for medical research, early childhood education, community health centers, and nutrition services for seniors.

The bill increases spending in these areas by five percent over last year. Bush requested an increase of 2.5 percent. If you support fiscal responsibility, how could you possibly support such a massive, budget-busting increase?

In 2006, the President sought and got $120 billion in appropriations for Iraq to support military operations and indigenous security forces. This year, the corresponding figure was $170 billion (see today's CBO report, Table 2). That's an increase of 42 percent.

If you support fiscal responsibility, how could you possibly support such a massive, budget-busting increase?

The Senate passed the Labor-HHS appropriations bill last night by a veto-proof majority, and then some (75-19). Now the bill heads to a conference and then to the President, who has promised to veto it. But given the margin of victory in the Senate, does he still think a veto is the wisest way to go?

In the classic Monty Python film, "The Search for the Holy Grail," an already diminutive swordsman stuns his foe by insisting on fighting on, despite having already lost both arms and legs.

It would appear that President Bush, too, has no legs to stand on, having lost the nation's support for his war in Iraq, lost Congress last November, and floundering at sub-Nixonian approval rating levels in the latest Zogby poll.

So yesterday, when Bush, as the Post reported, "requested -- one might even say demanded -- that Congress give him yet another $46 billion for his military campaigns, for a total of $196 billion this fiscal year," the paper stood aghast, disbelieving, asking and answering "What explains Bush's cocksureness?"

Considering Bush's abysmal approval ratings, the widespread opposition to his war in Iraq and the Democratic control of Congress, that was a pretty brazen act. But Bush yesterday made it clear that [t]here will be no search for common ground, no outreach to critics, not even further explanation of his policies.

According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans -- an overwhelming majority, by any standard -- think Congress shouldn't give Bush all the money he's requesting for the war. And 43 percent think the request should be reduced sharply.

The president evidently is still counting on his ability to use the fear of appearing weak or unpatriotic to stampede skittish Congressional Democratic [sic] into giving him what he wants.

Who would bet that Bush will have his head handed to him, in the end?

Illustration by Joe Sutliff, After Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The Allard amendment that would automatically cut programs in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill should OMB hand down an "ineffective" PART rating was hammered back by the Senate this evening by a vote of 68-21.

Thanks to everyone who contacted Senators to urge them to vote against this dangerous policy.

Michael Tomasky asks a vital question in The Guardian:

That is, Americans have now experienced a conservative government failing them. But what lesson will they take? That conservatism itself is exhausted and without answers to the problems that confront American and the world today? Or will they conclude that the problem hasn't been conservatism per se, just Bush, and that a conservatism that is competent and comparatively honest will suit them just fine?

There's a lot of ink on this subject (Greg Anrig Jr. has written a book on it, Rick Perlstein has a blog), but there are two major fiscal policy stances that are both distinctly conservative and have directly contributed to recent governmental failures (think Katrina, Walter Reed, Iraq, etc.): budget cuts and excessive privatization.

I could be wrong, but I don't think cronyism, corruption or arrogance are in conservative's blood, nor do they have a permanent monopoly on it, however much they do at the moment. But as champions of the "free market" and "self-reliance," conservatives are ideologically disposed to favor agency cuts and privatization.

Once effective governance was an issue to co-opt from the right; now it's a defining issue for liberals, particularly in these two ways. Only liberals can clean up the mess conservatives made of government, because only liberals understand the limitations of the market and the potential of government. Hopefully the public will see this.

The National Priorities Project has a new analysis that compares the amount of taxes each state paid and what each saw in return in military spending in 2005. The study finds that 32 states pay more in taxes than they receive in military expenditures.

NPP have also included in their nifty trade-offs tool the FY 2008 war supplemental request. Here's an example using DC:

Taxpayers in District Of Columbia will pay $664.2 million for proposed Iraq War Spending for FY2008. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:

• 171,000 People with Health Care OR
• 1,175,336 Homes with Renewable Electricity OR
• 11,469 Public Safety Officers OR
• 11,306 Music and Arts Teachers OR
• 320,881 Scholarships for University Students OR
• 59 New Elementary Schools OR
• 2,307 Affordable Housing Units OR
• 210,616 Children with Health Care OR
• 90,267 Head Start Places for Children OR
• 11,306 Elementary School Teachers OR
• 9,983 Port Container Inspectors

Today, the president formally requested funds that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was sent to the Hill in September to retrieve.

This request brings total FY 2008 supplemental war funding to $196.4 billion. It is the latest in a series.

According to CQ($), House Appropriations Chair David Obey (D-WI) has no plans to move war spending legislation until the president makes changes to his war plan, but that doesn't really matter because the Pentagon's well is far from dry.

Congress is not expected to pass a new war funding measure this calender year, although it will have to provide some additional money. Earlier this month, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, D-Wis., said he will not move a war funding bill out of his committee in 2007, saying the president must change his policy in Iraq before Obey will advance the bill.

Congress could allow the Pentagon to borrow war funds from its regular fiscal 2008 spending bill, once that measure is enacted, or it could attack a few months' war funding to some other appropriations measure in the weeks between now and adjournment.

According this Statement of Administration Policy the Bush wants to veto Labor-H because its funding level is about $9 billion more than the president's FY 2008 budget request. But a reading of the SAP betrays his cafeteria-style "fiscal responsibility".

Look at all the programs for which he wants to increase funding:

• The Administration is very concerned about the $229 million reduction in the Reading First program.
• the Senate is urged to provide $25 million requested for the Adjunct Teacher Corps
• [The Administration] is disappointed that the bill provides $64 million less than the President's request [for the Striving Readers program].
• The Administration urges the Senate to fully fund the $300 million requested in the President's Budget [the Promise and Opportunity Scholarships program].
• The bill does not provide requested funding for the Secretary's Adolescent Health Promotion initiative.
• The Administration is concerned that the bill reduces [the Compassion Capital Fund] by 17 percent from FY 2007.
• The Administration strongly opposes the 26 percent funding cut proposed by the Committee [for the Abstinence Education program].
• The bill provides $25 million less than the $150 million requested for Community Based Job Training Grants and funds this program within the Dislocated Worker National Reserve.
• The bill provides only one-third of the requested funding for [the Reintegration of Ex-offenders program].
• The Administration opposes the 20 percent reduction for the Office of Labor-Management Standards [for the Union Financial Integrity program].

One can quibble over the merits of the funding requests (I certainly would), but it's clear the president is only concerned about over-spending when it isn't on his pet programs. Bush can hardly be accused of slavish devotion to "fiscal restraint".

A good article today on the declining value of funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Progam (LIHEAP). Given that gas prices are so volatile, wouldn't it make more sense just to make LIHEAP an entitlement program?

About 30 million low-income American households who will need help paying heating bills this winter from a U.S. government program will be left in the cold because of a lack of funding for the program.

The poor, already digging deep to pay for expensive gasoline, also will face much higher heating fuel costs, especially if oil prices stay near record levels.

Consumer groups and state energy officials have sounded the alarm, saying a federal program to help poor families pay heating bills will have nowhere near the money needed to cover those expected to seek assistance.

White House Spokesperson, Dana Perino: "We won this round on SCHIP."

Congratulations on winning. What exactly did you win?

Well, here's President Bush, on vetoing SCHIP:

And that's why when I tell you I'm going to sprint to the finish, and finish this job strong, that's one way to ensure that I am relevant. That's one way to ensure that I'm in the process. And I intend to use the veto.

Wait- I thought the SCHIP debate was about a difference in "philosophy" and the role of government. But of course, it's really about Bush "winning" and retaining power. Pretty sad that 4 million kids have to be denied health care for such an awfully cynical reason.

After yesterday's post on the budget process, I got to thinking: what's the point of the Congressional Budget Resolution (see this Powerpoint for budget process basics)?

Budget process experts will tell you that it brings order and coordination to the annual budget. But it also puts pressure to keep discretionary spending low.

I'm talking about the cap on discretionary spending. Once it's set, it's rarely exceeded. In fact, its purpose is to make sure that spending does not go above a certain level. That is anti-spending.

And is it even necessary? I can imagine a budget resolution without a cap that still helped coordinate the efforts of the two Houses. It could set goals for each appropriations bill and give reconciliation instructions. It could even set a topline goal. But it wouldn't have to make it enforceable.

If there isn't a cap, groups won't be fighting each other as much for funding. It'd be easier to add funding once the bills were on the floor. And it'd be even easier to readjust the appropriations bills for surprises. Supplementals wouldn't be as common, I'd imagine.

In fact, if we really wanted to facilitate discretionary spending, we could make it a funding "floor" instead of a cap, i.e. funding couldn't be any lower than X. That could improve coordination at the same time.

The fact of the matter is that the annual budget process is broken. We've now got supplemental appropriations bills that have almost reached $200 billion. Increased discretionary spending is a high priority, it seems, but the budget process might be thwarting or distorting its expression.

Writing for McClatchy, Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay report on a criminal probe into mismanagement of the construction of the $600 million Baghdad Embassy.

A congressional committee is examining whether the walls of the still-unfinished embassy complex, which are supposed to be blast-resistant, performed as they should have during the mortar attack.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker banished [the State Department contractor in charge of the project, James L.]Golden from Iraq, but he continues to oversee the construction of the embassy in Baghdad; to be the liaison with the contractor, Kuwait-based First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co.; and to supervise other projects for the State Department's Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) bureau.

The embassy — actually a 104-acre, Vatican-size compound of 21 buildings meant to house and sleep about 1,000 U.S. officials was originally meant to open in June, then in September. Now, due to problems with the sprinkler system, the latest in a series of deficiencies blamed on First Kuwaiti, it remains unclear whether it will be ready for occupancy this year.

It's not that private firms can never do right, but that, contrary to conservative ideology, they are quite capable of colossal failure. The tragedy of the president's failure to recognize this simple, yet blindly obvious fact will result in millions of kids going without health insurance.

The Washington Post reports that a retooled SCHIP bill will be back on the floor in two weeks.

David Broder has a good column today about the bipartisan housing trust fund, which passed the House with little notice by the press. Worth a read.

Let it be known that the BudgetBlog holds no grudges or biases. You write a good column, you will be praised. You write a bad one, well...

This morning's New York Times has a story about New York City food banks whose supplies are falling futher and further behind demand. The Oregon Food Bank has been having the same problem. The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), according to both food banks, is partially to blame for the rundown in available food.

TEFAP supplies food banks all across the country with commodities that they turn into consumable products. It's a part of the "Farm Bill," a collection of nutrition, farm assistance, and conservation programs. The Farm Bill, as you may know, is up for reauthorization this year. The House has passed its version, but the Senate has not. The President opposes the bill but has not directly threatened to veto it.

A quick look at FedSpending.org shows that TEFAP expeditures have decreased by about 1/3rd over the last 3 years.

But fortunately, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the House-passed Farm Bill nearly doubles the ceiling that TEFAP funding has to stay under. The Senate ought to hurry up and pass the same funding increase before things get even worse.

Last night, the Senate approved (75-19) the veto-threatened Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations bill.

Next up: Labor-H

The Senate is now considering the FY08 Labor/HHS appropriations bill, which includes most of the funding for federal social policy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a good summary of what's in the bill and puts it in context. It's got about $8.3 billion over the President's request, and President Bush has threatened to veto it.

The Senate is expected to pass the bill by the end of this week, but it won't end there. The House has already passed its version, but fell just short of a veto-proof majority. The House version is about $1 billion larger than the Senate version now being considered. The Senate and the House will have to reconcile the two bills, and then it goes to the President.

Ultimately, this bill will be a crucial test of the President's threats to veto appropriations bills, and Congress's ability to override them. Only strong support for the bill will ensure passage. Now, and when the override vote comes, your representative will need to hear from as many constituents as possible.

From the good folks over at Angry Bear and Econospeak, a little common sense about the deficit: it's not really going down.

The general fund deficit, that is. You see, Social Security revenues are in surplus, and a whole lot of money is being taken out of the flush Social Security trust fund to pay for current government services. This surplus has tremendously contributed to the declining unified deficit, the figure that gets most media attention. See this graph for a good representation.

But Social Security revenues are for, well, Social Security, and under current law they must be paid back to beneficiaries when Social Security is no longer in surplus. So in a way, the government has been borrowing all these new revenues from future Social Security beneficiaries- hence adding to the general fund deficit.

Another way to think about it is that we're adding to future responsibilities to pay for expenditures now. When the bill comes due, the government will probably have to borrow money, raise taxes, or squeeze money out of programs (including perhaps Social Security).

So what are we now buying with the Social Security trust fund? Well, about $200 billion for tax cuts for the rich, and about $170 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without these expenses, the unified deficit would be in surplus, and the general fund deficit would be near 2001 levels.

Under the Bush fiscal policy, the rich have unquestionably gotten richer, and that has had opportunity costs for everyone else. But now we're seeing the first step towards a massive redistribution of wealth the old fashioned way- taking from the workers subject to the payroll tax and giving to rich people and the beneficiaries of the wars.

Via the Center for American Progress, a new poll shows the public supports many of the funding increases that President Bush and his conservative congressional allies oppose.

Congress is in the middle of a battle over the budget. On one side are those who want the budget to include higher appropriations for programs in health care, education, infrastructure, homeland security, and law enforcement. On the other side are President Bush and his conservative allies who want to cut these domestic appropriations on the grounds that the levels proposed by the majority in Congress represent, as usual, wasteful and unneeded spending.

But which side is the public on? Thanks to a September poll by Hart Research for AFSCME/US Action, we can answer that question quite definitively.

The poll asked about spending proposals in 13 different areas and the public sided with proposals for higher spending levels in each case. The results for nine of these areas are shown below. Support levels in these areas range from 63 percent for an additional $35 billion for the state Children's Health Insurance Program, an additional $1.5 billion for schools/Head Start, and an additional $1.6 billion for law enforcement/crime to 71 percent for an additional $630 million on highways and bridges and 74 percent for an additional $3.7 billion on veterans' health care.

Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH) is circulating a letter among her 45 Republican colleagues who voted for SCHIP expansion criticizing Democrats for failing to give into the president's demand that more children go without health insurance.

Matthew Yglesias is right on here:

Thus Pryce et. al. get to signal to their child-hating paymasters that, despite their [yea] vote, they have big businesses [sic] back and are doing the very most they can within the confines of objective political constraints to make sure that working and middle class families get no help with their health care.

It is done: the deficit for FY2007 was $161 billion. Strangely, the President has yet to proclaim "mission accomplished" for "reducing" it from the inflated estimate he gave in his budget- $244 billion. Perhaps he isn't bragging because he didn't reduce it (or perhaps not).

If it wasn't for his many fiscally irresponsible policies, there'd be no deficit at all. Take for example, oh i don't know, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. $170 billion was appropriated for them last year. If it had been offset, there would be no deficit. And that's just one of the many fiscally reckless decisions made over the last 6 years.

Imagine a world where there is no deficit. Picture the budget balance, the debt reduction, the low low interest rates...well, having any trouble picturing it? That's because a great deal of that money wouldn't have been put towards deficit reduction. It likely would have been spent on social and economic programs. There's no guarantee, of course, but there's a pretty good chance, Congress being in different hands and all.

Folks, this war isn't just going to paid "by our children" and all that racket: we're paying for it now, in all the spending that just isn't happening. Money that could have been spent on opportunities, security and living standards for lower and middle income folks is being sunk on our foreign adventures and all its beneficiaries. War has opportunity costs.

One wonders if the Bush administration's fiscal incompetence wasn't so incompetent after all. After all, competence is only a measure of achieving goals, whatever they may be. If we assume its goal was to redistribute government finances, it performed rather competently.

When Ted Northouse and Michael Schellenberger wrote "Death of Environmentalism," it got people throughout the progressive policy community thinking about what might be wrong with their strategy for pushing policy. They've turned that article into a book that just came out. In it they put forward what they believe to be a politically viable way to solve global warming. TPM Cafe is currently debating it.

They essentially want $30 billion a year to invest in clean energy research and development. Interesting. Well, in the fiscal policy world, that's a tall order. Congress is having a tough time pushing through $7 billion a year for kid's health insurance. And $30 billion will require some serious offsets. It's not a free lunch. Who's going to pay for it?

Sure, in 2009 there may be a Congress and President that's ready to spend some serious cash on domestic policy. But the costs of better regulation would not make the public's eyes bulge and open up Democrats to old charges of being "tax and spenders." If regulation could achieve the same goals, why not include at least some of them in the package, and try to sell them with similar arguments when applicable?

Northouse and Schellenberger may have addressed these concerns in their book. If their primary interest is to pick the solutions to global warming that might be political winners, they would be remiss not to.

President Bush's veto this week of the bill to provide private health care for five million additional children under SCHIP left even stalwart congressional conservatives such as Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch (UT) and Charles Grassley (IA) "sputtering in incomprehension."

So riding to the rescue, providing the president with some points supporting the rational behind his veto comes an LA Times op-ed, The Cult of "For the Children", which seems to channel that great American...

[CLARIFICATION: That's W.C. Fields, whose most famous quote is, "Any man who hates dogs and children can't be all bad." The trouble is, it wasn't said by him. It was said about him. Does that make much of a difference, though?]

Democratic leaders are rejecting an SCHIP compromise with President Bush for now.

On Wednesday evening, the Senate passed, by voice vote, the FY 2008 Defense spending bill. Although both House and Senate versions have identical bottom lines, there are differences between the measures regarding funding levels for specific programs.

CQ($) informs us that, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), "Conferences have started." Additionally, Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have worked out a "302(b) allocation situation." It looks like we could see a bill or two move to the president's desk soon.