According to DailyKos’s dkosopedia.com, Germany’s Otto Von Bismark said “Laws are like sausages; it is better not to see them being made.” In America it’s more commonly attributed to one of the more famously, um, pragmatic 20th Century appropriations committee chairs.

I understand what they mean. Even with the most rigid party discipline and the most sizable majorities, crafting legislation is an extraordinarily complex coalition-building dance. Where, since the sausage-making metaphor is appallingly apt, the dancers are running around with gruesomely cut-up parts of animals most people wouldn’t cook for company.

And so I’ve understood the logic in the past for the House of Representatives allocating money for abstinence-only education as a way to prevent unrest from vulnerable rural Democrats, as a way to build bridges and/or keep Republicans from gumming up the works in the face of too-slim majorities, as a way to build veto-proof majorities in the face of a President who pretty clearly got Ds in college only because his professors didn’t want him to repeat their courses. And I’ve understood the not-that-well-understood rationale that once crap like that gets to the Senate, or to the House/Senate reconciliation committees, a lot of it gets ironed out anyway. And I understand this rationale, and I understand that rationale but past a certain point stuff like this…

Dems Finalize Massive Increase for Ab-Only
by James Wagoner

Today, the Democratic controlled Labor HHS Appropriations conference committee report includes the full increase requested by President Bush for abstinence-only programs. Let’s call that what it is: a stunning disgrace.

Source: RH Reality Check

... gets to be a little much. $141,000,000 isn’t just a heck of a lot of money. It’s more than the Republicans allocated even when their corrupt, scummy syndicate was at it’s most powerful!

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon correctly points out one problem with

As James Wagoner notes, abstinence-only is no boondoggle lark, but a very serious threat to public health. Discouraging kids from using condoms—ever—not only puts teenage girls at risk of getting pregnant, but it’s bound to cost lives. A big way that abstinence-only educators try to convince kids to ride bareback is to tell them that HIV seeps through condoms. Read: So when you fuck, don’t bother using them. Which means that there are going to be a lot of kids regularly taking the risk of exposure to HIV. And it’s not like the anti-protection lesson stays with you only through high school; the “don’t wrap up” message plagues many people throughout adulthood and hurts their contraception use.

She said it here.

At least when this bill was originally getting markups and this story first broke we heard that this funding was a bone thrown after appropriations for real sex education were doubled and quadrupled. Whatever happened to that story? It would make a little difference if it turned out to still be true.)

But even then the impact on public health represents only the practical, humanitarian side of the problem. Yes I’m aware that sounds ironic. Sadly it’s not because nearly every penny of that $141,000,000 amounts to foundation grants (a.k.a. non-profit corporate welfare) for thousands of individuals in dozens of organizations that by their very nature reject everything even the conservative-to-moderate Democrats like committee chairman David Obey who off-handedly passed this appropriation stand for.

In other words forking over money for the ugly Republican thugs who man (and I do mean man) these organizations the Democrats aren’t just insulting their base, aren’t just abandoning social justice, aren’t just endangering future generations, they’re arming the enemy with jobs, computers, offices, conferences, mailing lists, resumes, and, worse, a captive audience from which to recruit the next generation of David Viters’s and Richard Curtis’s who they will then support both overtly and covertly to run against decent, progressive Democrats.

In other words it’s not just America’s children that would be better of if this funding item were struck from the bill, and not only would America be better off, but the Democratic majority would be better off!

So WTF, dudes? Make sausage if you must but why fatten the bad guys with it?