Stand and Deliver
It’s come to mean other things now, but ‘Stand and deliver’ was the term bandits used when they dropped a tree across the path to stop and rob a stage coach at pistol-point.
In a modern-day re-enactment, Senate bandits like Trent Lott have thrown the log of ‘earmarks’ across the road to approval of an emergency spending bill for the Iraq war and hurricane recovery. Standing around the coach that represents this particular piece of banditry, swords and guns drawn, Lott and his lot have already shaken an additional $14.3 billion from the public pocket, but it’s not enough.
Not enough.
The bill itself is a sad necessity, the whole $92.2 billion the President asked for.
This fiscal disaster is born partially out of Iraq War costs run wild, as ‘reconstruction contractors’ are holed up in the Green Zone, afraid to reconstruct, some of them billing $100,000 a day on stand-by. Halliburton has become the ‘scandal du jour,’ not even causing news-blips any longer as its hands are found in yet anothe…