Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) — a strong backer of funding for the Afghan war — is among the politicians that were illegally targeted by a U.S. Army psy-ops unit at Camp Eggers in Kabul last year, according to a new report.

Rolling Stone reports that three-star general Lt. Gen. William Caldwell directed the “information operations” unit at Camp Eggers to compile detailed dossiers on the attitudes and preferences of visiting politicians as part of an effort to spin civilians into supporting the war.

The list of targeted visitors was long, according to interviews with members of the IO team and internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone. Those singled out in the campaign included senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin; Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee; Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and a host of influential think-tank analysts.

According to [whistle blower and IO unit leader Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes], the general wanted the IO team to provide a “deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds.” The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. “How do we get these guys to give us more people?” he demanded. “What do I have to plant inside their heads?”

MLive points out that Levin has responded to the report by reiterating his support for the war and calling on the Pentagon to investigate allegations of Army propaganda violations.

“For years, I have strongly and repeatedly advocated for building up Afghan military capability because I believe only the Afghans can truly secure their nation’s future,” Levin told the Washington Post. “I have never needed any convincing on this point. Quite the opposite, my efforts have been aimed at convincing others of the need for larger, more capable Afghan security forces, and that we and NATO should send more trainers to Afghanistan, rather than more combat troops.”

Last month the Army asked Congress for an additional $2 billion to train Afghan troops.

The funding comes amid the leak of tens of thousands of classified military documents casting doubt on the Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy, showing Pakistan in support of the Taliban and describing problems with the civilian surge. President Obama told reporters yesterday, “While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.” But the leak has left many on the Hill wondering just what that $59 billion will do. Anti-war members Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Ron Paul (R-Texas) called again for returning military personnel from Pakistan.

The war funding comes none too soon for the Pentagon, which expected the money in May or June and said it might have to curtail troops’ salaries if the funds did not materialize. The funds will keep 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan until December.

A prior House version of the bill contained billions in domestic spending — including $10 billion for states to keep teachers employed, $1 billion for summer jobs programs and $700 million for U.S.-Mexico border security. The version of the bill now due to become law includes emergency funds for Haiti, but no domestic spending.

The House version of the bill included $10 billion in “edujobs” funding — money for local governments to keep as many as 200,000 teachers working as the states face yawning budget gaps in the coming year. (The White House threatened to veto the bill if it included the funding, because it paid for it in part by taking money from Race to the Top, the Education Department’s signature effort to improve schools.) It also included billions for summer jobs programs, Pell Grants and other measures. Those have now officially failed.

The House now needs to take up the whittled-down Senate version. The House bill included $80 billion in total spending, and $37 billion in war funding. The Senate version includes $33 billion for the Department of Defense and about $4 billion for the State Department’s “civilian surge.” The House has one more week before August recess. The Senate has two.

Shortly after the vote, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader, applauded the funding for the Pentagon, but criticized Republicans for blocking the social spending. “A similar bill in the House included measures to spur economic growth, including funding to support summer jobs, assistance to save 140,000 education jobs and provisions to make college more affordable, resources for border security, and funding to rectify decades-old injustices suffered by black farmers across the country and Native American trust account holders,” he said. “Unfortunately, Republicans blocked those measures as they continue to push their job-killing agenda and harm our economic recovery.”

He said the Senate would seek other ways to pass the domestic funding.

Just before the July 4 congressional recess, the House passed a massive piece of legislation: a war-funding bill with billions in funding for domestic programs included, and a budget enforcement resolution attached. The bill moved on to the Senate, where Democrats hoped to preserve social safety-net spending and money for economically stimulative programs. One of the biggest, and most contentious, provisions that made it out of the House was $10 billion in aid for states, to keep teachers on the payroll. As many as 300,000 state employees, many of them teachers, might lose their jobs in the next year due to the states’ fiscal crises.

Rep. Dave Obey (D-Mich.) included the $10 billion for teacher funding, and took some of the money to pay for it from Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s signature education initiative. For that reason, President Obama signaled he might veto the entire bill. Obey later said that the White House recommended that he pay for the education jobs funding by taking from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, benefits formerly known as food stamps.

One way or another, it does not matter now. CQ reports that the Senate is stripping the funding out, and will seek another vehicle for it. But it seems unlikely any new deficit spending will get past the Senate, meaning the House will need to find offsets or raise taxes. CQ writes:

House Democratic leaders will accept the Senate’s plan to pass a stripped-down supplemental spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while seeking another vehicle for money to prevent the layoffs of some 140,000 teachers, a well-informed House aide said Monday.

The decision reflects the reality that Democrats lack the votes in the Senate to attach billions of dollars in help for states to keep teachers on the payroll this fall. …

One bill that is being studied as a vehicle is the leftover package of tax break extensions that are not included in the Senate’s extension of unemployment benefits. The Senate is scheduled to pass the unemployment bill on Tuesday and the House is expected to take it up on Wednesday.

The military needs Congress to authorize the funding for Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as possible. The current funding expires on Aug. 7.

The proposal made it in to the House war-funding bill, which needs a Senate vote. The White House has threatened to veto the war-funding bill if it contains Obey’s change. Here is the quote, from an interview with The Fiscal Times:

The secretary of education [Arne Duncan] is whining about the fact he only got 85 percent of the money he wanted .… [W]hen we needed money, we committed the cardinal sin of treating him like any other mere mortal. We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that’s a pretty damn good deal. So as far as I’m concerned, the secretary of education should have been happy as hell. He should have taken that deal and smiled like a Cheshire cat. He’s got more walking around money than every other cabinet secretary put together.

It blows my mind that the White House would even notice the fight [over Race to the Top]. I would have expected the president to say to the secretary, “Look, you’re getting a good deal, for God’s sake, what this really does is guarantee that the rest of the money isn’t going to be touched.” We gave [Duncan] $4.3 billion in the stimulus package, no questions asked. He could spend it any way he wants. … I trusted the secretary, so I gave him a hell of a lot more money than I should have.

My point is that I have been working for school reform long before I ever heard of the secretary of education, and long before I ever heard of Obama. And I’m happy to welcome them on the reform road, but I’ll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the secretary of education.

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.

If Obey is right about this, it is, in a word, horrifying. Food stamps are not particularly generous. They help families that are often desperate. They are just about the last thing that should get cut in the midst of a horrific employment crisis in the wake of a job-sapping recession.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the House Democratic leadership opted to pass a budget enforcement resolution rather than a full budget. (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

On Tuesday, the Treasury Department announced that the country’s deficit had hit the $1 trillion mark just nine months into the fiscal year. Fear of the deficit had already led Congress to kill or delay an administration-backed jobs bill, a federal extension of unemployment benefits, a war funding bill and federal funding for Medicaid. Now, the 13-digit monster has claimed its latest victim: a full budget for the coming fiscal year.

[Congress1] Recognizing that Democrats would be reluctant to record “yes” votes for a budget that would augment the deficit, the House leadership opted to deem as passed a “budget enforcement resolution” instead, just before the July 4 recess. While the distinction between an enforcement resolution and a full budget is largely technical, there is one crucial difference: Under the enforcement resolution, Democrats can no longer use a parliamentary tactic known as budget reconciliation next year — a process Democrats had hoped might allow them to pass key pieces of legislation, such as a jobs bill, with 51 votes in the Senate, as opposed to the usual 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.

Under the arcane rules of the Senate, budget reconciliation can only be used if it was written into the budget rules passed the previous year. With no full budget, there can be no reconciliation. As a consequence, Democrats lose a valuable tool for passing budget-related items on a majority-rules vote. Stimulus and jobs measures, if they combined short-term spending with longer-term deficit reduction, would have qualified for reconciliation.

Some policy advisers and members of Congress pushing for a such a measure — and recognizing that it could not make it past a Republican filibuster — viewed reconciliation as a last hope. “What we want to do is end up with legislation that is going to create a substantial number of jobs,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters. “We don’t have 60 votes to do that. We could do that through majority rule, 51 votes.”

But a desire among Democrats to avoid voting on a deficit-increasing budget won out over the need to preserve reconciliation in creating the budget enforcement resolution. “Members looked at the budget and said, ‘We might need more deficit spending,’” said Jim Horney, the director of federal fiscal policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “And anything you do to try to reduce those deficits would necessarily include policies that might not be popular — tax increases, cuts in major programs.” The House leadership judged the enforcement resolution as less of a political risk for moderate Democrats who will face difficult re-election campaigns in the fall.

It wasn’t either chamber’s first choice. Throughout the spring, both House and Senate leaders promised that a full budget was coming down the pipeline. “The plan is to work to bring a budget resolution to the floor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters in April. And Sen. Kent Conrad managed to pass a budget through the Senate Budget Committee, a major step in getting a budget to the floor.

But behind closed doors, the budget process caused considerable tensions — both between the House and Senate and between more and less liberal members of each chamber. In one of the few on-the-record comments made about the process, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) told Fox News: “There is some real tension within our caucus. … But it is still an item of open discussion. … I, for one, feel better about putting [a budget] out for everybody to see — but that’s a little above my pay grade.”

Off the record, Senate and House staffers have pointed fingers at one another as to who is to blame for the lack of a full budget. The Senate is the chamber that cannot get enough votes to pass anything, House staffers say, and the House should not be required to do the Senate’s work. The House did not even put together an actual budget — unlike the Senate Budget Committee — Senate staffers retort. The House side proffers that it did not pass a budget because the Senate said it could not get 51 members to stand up and vote for a deficit-increasing measure.

Ultimately, reconciliation and the broader budget both died due to a lack of conviction on the part of Democrats about the need to spend more. Democrats knew in advance that they absolutely wanted the reconciliation option available for health care, and so they kept it on the table in last year’s budget. But they never committed to more stimulus, jobs funding or other types of bills for fiscal year 2011.

“Even if they had gotten a full budget, there was no agreement that they would want to have reconciliation instructions for any big, significant legislation,” Horney said, noting that Democrats had promised not to move cap-and-trade or a carbon tax via reconciliation. “There was just no consensus among Democrats about what to do here.”

The budget enforcement resolution passed the House quietly, attached to a war spending bill. Nevertheless, the maneuver ginned up considerable criticism. “There is not a big functional difference between [a budget and a budget enforcement resolution], but there is a big symbolic difference,” said Maya MacGuineas, the head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Having Congress neglect to create a budget for political reasons is disturbing, to say the least, this year. In terms of the symbolism, for the credit markets, it is a strike against us, if Congress will not talk about where responsible cuts are going to come from. And in terms of partisan politics, it is fuel for the fire, too.”

And Republicans have been happy to fan the flames. “Facing a record deficit and a tidal wave of debt, House Democrats decided it was politically inconvenient to put forward a budget and account for their fiscal recklessness,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, said on the House floor. “With no priorities and no restraints, the spending, taxing and borrowing will continue unchecked for the coming fiscal year. The so-called ‘budget enforcement resolution’ enforces no budget, but instead provides a green light for the appropriators to continue spending, exacerbating our looming fiscal crisis.”

So despite their efforts to avoid deficit-related criticisms, Democrats are being hammered for deficits and for obfuscation. And in the process, they’ve made it almost impossible to imagine a meaningful jobs bill passing next year.

Controversially, the House bill funds the $10 billion for education jobs in part by taking away $800 million from the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program and other Obama administration education reform efforts. Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) inserted that change. Democratic senators might change the provision when the bill comes back to the upper chamber. “The proposed education cuts are unacceptable,” 13 Senators, led by Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.), wrote to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Choosing between preserving teacher jobs and supporting vital education reforms is a false choice and would set a dangerous precedent.” President Obama is threatening to veto the bill when it makes it to his desk if it includes the education cuts.

The House also deemed as passed a budget enforcement resolution, setting a discretionary spending cap of $1.1 trillion for next year — $7 billion less than the White House wanted. It also stipulates deficit reduction along the lines the White House had already laid out. Here’s the controversial bit: Rather than saying what the House wants cut, the bill pushes the decision to the deficit commission and the Senate. “While this resolution does not project the budget out over five years, it does look to the future by assuring that the House will have an opportunity to vote this year on longer-term budget proposals made by the president’s Fiscal Commission and approved by the Senate,” Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.) told The Hill.

The only people we’re asking to sacrifice in this war effort have been the men and women who serve our armed services and do so valiantly. They deserve the same kind of commitment here at home from citizens.

The Democrats’ plan, sponsored by House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.), would apply a 1 percent tax to most Americans. At the discretion of the White House, those earning more than $150,000 per year could be taxed at a higher rate. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be exempt, as would those who have lost family members in either conflict.

Larson says the bill would reverse the current congressional trend of heaping the financial burdens of Congress’s unfunded initiatives on future generations.

“We didn’t pay for the Bush tax cuts,” Larson said. “We didn’t pay for this war. We didn’t pay for the bailout of Wall Street and look at the problems that we found ourselves in.”

He forgot to mention that, just a few weeks ago, the Democrats passed a $210 billion proposal to hike Medicare payments to doctors — a bill that is unfunded.

There’s all sorts of money that has been ill-spent to date. I would propose to the president that he begins to decrease spending in non-defense areas, non-defense discretionary areas in Washington where you can save significant amounts of money. A penny on the dollar will get us hundreds of billions of dollars in order to accomplish the priorities that we ought to have for the American people. And one of the priorities absolutely has to be and must be the protection of our land and degrading the resources that Al Qaida has.

And it’s not only Republicans dismissing the war-tax proposal. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” yesterday that it’s not realistic that Congress could push through such a tax in the middle of an economic downturn.

In the middle of a recession we’re probably not going to be able to increase taxes to pay for it. There should have been, as far as I’m concerned, tax increases for upper bracket folks who did so well during the Bush years — that’s where the tax increases should have taken place. But that should have happened some time ago.

Hat tip to The Hill.

The vote was an overwhelming 91 to 5. The House passed the bill earlier in the week, and now it goes to the White House, where President Obama has said he will sign it.