Who Needs Boring Spending Tables?

I know they're real busy on the Hill right now, adding verbiage to an already incomprehensible 2,000 page-plus health care bill, but I'm appalled at the sloppy work done on the fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations bill signed by President Obama on Monday.

The final version of the bill was printed in the Congressional Record, which includes the bill's text and what looks like report language that omitted numerous tables on exactly how Congress sliced and diced a $637 billion budget.

Instead of tables that specify the exact budget for, say, a left-handed cyber gimble, the report in the Congressional Record is replete with notations on page after page that say, "Insert graphic folio."

Someone forgot to insert all the graphic folios.

That means the Senate approved expenditure of billions of dollars without any real idea of exactly what was in the Defense bill. And the president compounded the problem by signing it.