If House and Senate leaders fail to establish fiscal discipline on the (emergency) spending bill, they will probably have lost their last, best chance at restoring Congress' credibility on deficit spending issues in this election year.

How are people going to be compensated when, inevitably, mistakes are made?

I'm sure that state and local officials, given enough time, will come up with a sky-is-falling study saying that if they're not allowed to tax this, they'll lose a trillion dollars a year.

It was felt that there had to be inducements

This is the perfect opportunity for Congress to demonstrate its newfound, post-Katrina concern to keep the deficit in check.

No spending reduction is easy, otherwise they would have been done a long time ago.

Is the money really necessary to fund some of these projects, and is the money really going to communities in need? On both scores, the answer is often no. Thirty years and $100 billion is enough of a test to say this program is a disaster. Pull the plug.

Drivers already pay roughly $30 billion a year in federal gasoline taxes; that ought to be enough to at least give them a decent federal Interstate highway system with maintenance costs.

An LCD TV or a plasma TV might be a nice thing to have, but there are plenty of high-resolution televisions you can get for under $1, 000.

You can determine whether you have a case in the space of an afternoon. Your chances for success are pretty good.