Number of the Day

$1.5 billion: The cuts made to disaster preparedness, including $460 million in funding for firefighter grants and $1.1 billion in state and local grants administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), made by the GOP-led House Appropriations Committee, while trimming the FEMA and Homeland Security budget.

"In today's environment," said Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY), according to CQ, "we can't be subsidizing local governments to the extent we have." Parts of his district were declared a federal disaster area earlier this month because of catastrophic flooding.

For eight years under the Bush administration, Republicans talked nonstop about national security, and used hyperbolic fearmongering about terrorism to justify extraordinary expenditures in defense, including two endless wars.

Meanwhile, countless USians have lost their jobs, their homes, their savings, their possessions, their food security, their healthcare, and the physical security of solid infrastructure and robustly-funded disaster preparedness.

We have traded everything away, every piece of real security and material safety we actually had, in exchange for protection from the existential threat of a boogeyman.