Swamp Gas, October 23, 2007

by Frank James

A quick guided tour of some of the morning's most important or interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.

More than half a million people were ordered to evacuate their homes as wildfires swept through many parts of southern California, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses, leading President Bush to declare a state of emergency, allowing federal assistance to be added to state and local firefighting and related efforts.

President Bush asked for $46 billion in additional emergency spending to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, bringing the total spent in both theaters since 9/11 to more than $600 billion as Democratic critics lambasted the president for his willingness to spend in Iraq and at the expense of domestic priorities.

A government audit to be released Tuesday indicated that the documentation is so bad the State Department can't account for $1.2 billion in taxpayer money paid to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police. Meanwhile another report criticized the State Department's oversight of Blackwater USA, the private-security contractor.

A senior Iraqi official said his government will do its best to stop cross-border attacks by Kurdish guerillas that have led the Turkish government to threaten to invade Iraqi territory to try and prevent future attacks.

Southeastern states have mostly been too slow to respond to the growing drought conditions in that region, with state and local governments failing for years to upgrade their water-management plans or to constrain development while they now blame the Army Corps of Engineers for some of their troubles.

House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y) plans to introduce legislation to cut the corporate income tax to 30 percent to 31 percent from the current 35 percent while offsetting the revenue losses with other tax revisions.

More homeowners unable to pay their mortgages are filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 of the federal bankruptcy law that allows financially strapped borrowers to stave off foreclosure and to restructure their debts in order to pay them down over a five-year period.

The meltdown in the mortgage lending industry has led to the unsafe practice of consumer financial documents being left in dumpsters and elsewhere, raising the threat of identity theft.

John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate, argues that he's the most electable of the party's top three candidates as he delicately tries to avoid overtly playing into racist or sexist thinking by arguing that the candidate leading in national polls may be hurt electorally by being a woman and the runner up is African American.

One ostentatiously superwealthy Wall Street private-equity tycoon, Stephen Schwarzman, has come to represent for many on Capitol Hill, much that is wrong in the new Gilded Age, becoming the poster child for an effort to increase the tax rate paid by such executives.