Cleaning Up The Oil, Cleaning Out The Treasury

Finally, a US lawmaker has used the T word when discussing the oil spill:  trillion.

As in "the amount of dollars needed to take care of all the damage from this mess."

The cost of helping the US Gulf Coast rebound from the ruinous Gulf of Mexico oil spill could run into the trillions of dollars, a US lawmaker said Thursday after a briefing from top government officials.

"It will take billions of dollars -- even trillions," Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee told reporters, citing "a presentation by the president's team on the BP oil spill" early in the day.

"We will have an ongoing and unending commitment to fixing this disaster," the Texas lawmaker said at a press conference with other representatives calling for blocking an Afghan war spending bill.

Now there's a concept.  We can't afford to worry about Afghanistan right now because we have much bigger problems here.  We can't afford to extend unemployment benefits to our own citizens because that would be fiscally irresponsible, but there's plenty of support to ignore paygo on both sides of the aisle to bomb Kandahar again, or to pay off Afghan warlords, or to develop mineral mines, or to torch poppy crops.

Congress is full of idiots.  We're paying for it, too...and we can no longer afford it.  We need out of there, now.