Today, lawmakers took to the Senate floor and blasted President Bush’s wasteful spending. To fully illustrate the impact, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), brought up a chart showing the budget plans of President Clinton versus the budget formulated by Bush. He concluded that by squandering Clinton’s government surplus, Bush has cost the country $7.7 trillion:

This next chart illustrates the value of the differences between the budget landscape planned by President Clinton and the one created by President Bush. As you can see, the difference between the two is a staggering $7.7 trillion. This number represents the fiscal harm that President Bush has inflected on our nation. This number is the Bush debt. [...]

Like most concepts of enormous size, this amount takes some thought to comprehend. $7.7 trillion is $25,000 owed by every adult or child in the United States.

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The federal budget deficit is currently at “$87.7 billion so far this budget year, double the $42.2 billion imbalance recorded during the same period in 2007.”

Additionally, five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, national unemployment is going up. Between December 2006 and December 2007, the national unemployment rate increased by 13.6 percent in seasonally adjusted terms, from 4.4 to 5.0 percent. Additionally, 68 percent of the American public believes that redeployment from Iraq would help fix the country’s economic woes.

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On Deadline reports that President Bush has appointed long-time friend and advisor Karen Hughes to the board of visitors at the West Point military academy. Last October, Hughes resigned from her most recent White House post as Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, where her role was to “marginalize violent extremists.”

One of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) favorite examples of government abuse is a multimillion-dollar study of the Montana grizzly bear population by the U.S. Geological Survey. In a recent campaign ad, he attacks “wasteful spending by Congress,” giving the example of “$3 million to study the DNA of bears.” On the stump, McCain goes further, joking, “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money.”

McCain continued his mockery in a campaign appearance today. Watch it:

McCain has long portrayed himself as a crusader against government “pork” such as Alaska’s notorious “Bridge to Nowhere.” McCain has mocked the bear study since 2003, when Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) allocated a $1 million earmark to the project.

His new attack on the bear project comes despite a Washington Post story yesterday digging into the actual project McCain is attacking — the USGS Northern Divide Bear Project.

As the Post explains, the project by field biologist “is focused not on the DNA of grizzly bears, but on counting them.” Before this study, the size of the population was unknown:

Grizzly bears in northwest Montana are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. But Kendall’s project — the results of which will be published soon in a scientific journal — revealed that there are more grizzlies than anyone had realized. That suggests that three decades of conservation efforts, costing tens of millions of dollars, have paid off.

A National Wildlife Federation spokesperson told the Washington Post, “Someone like McCain should be delighted, in fact. The Endangered Species Act works.”

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During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing today on waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq, GAO Comptroller David Walker said that “the Iraqis have a budget surplus” which “is not being spent.” He added that oil “revenues are going up” and therefore “one of the questions” regarding Iraq reconstruction is “who should be paying?”

Citing Iraq’s rising oil revenues and the fact that the U.S. has already spent $45 billion rebuilding the country, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said that instead of President Bush “asking for billions” more to rebuild Iraq, the Iraqis “ought to be able to use some of their oil to pay for their own costs and not keep sending the bill to the United States.”

Meanwhile, U.S. tax money is ending up in the hands of sectarian militias in Iraq. Later in the same hearing, Walker confirmed that a “significant” amount of what the U.S. spends on Iraqi contracts is being diverted to Sunni and Shiite militias. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, agreed, adding that “it is a significant problem.”

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Bottom line: We’re fighting them spending money over there so we don’t have to fight them spend money here at home.

Asked about Adm. William Fallon’s resignation today as Centcom commander, Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon initially replied, “I can’t clearly see what the reason would be for why he resigned.” O’Hanlon then, however, put forth the possibility that the “success” his good buddy Gen. David Petraeus has had in Iraq may have “overshadow[ed]” Fallon’s “ability to be effective in the job.”

CongressDaily reports that “senior administration officials” refused “invitations to testify today during a House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing examining President Bush’s signing statement on the FY08 defense authorization bill.” Bush’s signing statement waived provisions that would ban permanent bases in Iraq and create a wartime contracting oversight commission.

On Bill Bennett’s radio show this morning, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said he repudiates “any comments” by hard-line conservative Pastor John Hagee “that are anti-semetic or anti-Catholic, racist, any other.” “I repudiate the words that create that impression,” said McCain.

But unlike his previous, half-hearted attempts to distance himself from Hagee, McCain also spoke up in the controversial pastor’s defense, saying that Hagee “said that his words were taken out of context”:

I will say that he said that his words were taken out of context, he defends his position. I hope that maybe you’d give him a chance to respond. He says he has never been anti-Catholic, but I repudiate the words that create that impression.

McCain then said he could look past Hagee’s bigoted comments because “when we were doing the No Surrender tour, he came and spoke on behalf of not surrendering in Iraq.”

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Even if Hagee does support McCain’s vision of 100 years in Iraq, that does nothing to change the context of his past toxic comments. What context would absolve his belief that “Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans” for hosting a gay pride parade?:

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing

When McCain ran for president in 2000, he chastized then-Governor Bush for “seeking the support of Southern fundamentalists who have expressed anti-Catholic views,” saying that he “would condemn openly” such “agents of intolerance.” Now he says such intolerance is just “taken out of context.”

UPDATE: TPM has more of the “context” of Hagee’s intolerant comments here.

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Last year, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign advisers “lobbied for a European plane maker that beat Boeing to a $35 billion” contract, which Boeing advocates say McCain helped make possible. Huffington Post is now reporting that the day after McCain “formally called for multiple bidders in the tanker deal,” contributions from the Northrop Grumman/EADS consortium “began to flow” his way.