Today is the last day of the legislative session before Election Day. Lawmakers will go home to campaign on September 21, which is the earliest date during an election cycle in decades. And they leave a lot of pending legislation on the table. As John Boehner announced in the above clip, the House plans to adjourn without dealing with the farm bill. A bipartisan farm bill has already passed the Senate, and the House Agriculture Committee cleared their version months ago. But Boehner has been unable to line up support on the floor for it, out of an insistence that most of his caucus support it.

Forget about the farm bill. The House GOP leadership has dropped their efforts to pass a one-year extension of farm programs under current policy, weeks after they dropped efforts to pass a Republican version of the farm bill which has passed the House Agriculture Committee. Republicans will try to pass a separate disaster relief bill dealing with livestock producers and their struggles with this summer’s historic drought:

The Senate reached a deal on amendments to the farm bill, which will allow them to begin voting today. In all, 73 mostly but not entirely germane amendments will be voted upon, stretched over two days, with the goal of wrapping up the bill by the end of the week. One of the biggest problems is $4.5 billion in cuts to food stamps.

There were multiple efforts in the various “grand bargain” bills to factor out direct subsidies to farmers. So the subsidies get replaced this year by a crop insurance piece, to compensate farmers in low-yield years. But in the apparently bipartisan zeal to cut more out of the farm bill, to save a relatively paltry $24 billion over ten years, another source of money has been attacked – food stamps.

The Government Accountability Office took a look at the federal government crop insurance program and the result isn’t pretty. We effectively waste $1 billion a year providing corporate welfare to very large agribusiness operations.

The next couple months will be consumed with discussion about the Catfood Commission II, and their efforts to reach a $1.5 trillion or higher deficit package. This will frustrate any attempt to pivot to jobs. But as long as that’s known, activists and organizations can point out best practices on that committee while trying to force the conversation in a different direction.

One way to do that is to consistently point out that job creation is the best and most robust way to ensure any deficit reduction, and that reducing the deficit with 9% unemployment is a near-impossibility. Another way is to point out how much deficit savings can be gained merely by engaging in the vitally necessary actions of protecting the earth from climate change.

The flood of waters continues, but as usual during a natural disaster, the flood of rumors is rolling right along with it. Mythical levee breaches compete with imaginary government policy decisions, all of which combine to try to drive those who are dealing with the actual flooding bonkers.

And don’t even get me started about a Fukushima-style disaster in Nebraska . . . Get a link, people — and it ought to be from someone closer to Nebraska than Hawaii.

Rumors flow faster than the water during a disaster like this. The folks who are working on protecting homes, businesses, and communities have enough to do without having to beat back rumors — but this, too, is part of dealing with a disaster.