Somewhere, John Murtha is smiling

Well my new Republican dictator…er…Governor is all too happy to comply in making life even more miserable for the less than well-to-do.
I still say the corporations “elected” her, not the people. but if it was the people they sure are getting a nasty surprise

you will be happy to hear that your shared sacrifice on earmarks is helping to cut the budget deficit by almost a half a percent!

That makes it sound like the easiest thing in the world to do.

Yes, here in the Tri-Cities of WA, we have a very conservative rep, Doc Hastings, becoming chair of House Committee on Natural Resources. He’s done his part to keep money flowing into this area. But the new budget cutting may hurt us, since Dept of Energy monies help support the Hanford site cleanup project and others. A couple weeks ago, a local employer announced summer layoffs of 1,350 (CH2M Hill). That’s a bunch for a community of this size (Richland about 45,000, about 170,000 in the Tri-Cities). Where are the earmarks when you need them?

(see 1,600 layoffs in the works at Hanford )

ELI!
There is only one thing more stupid than the American voter but I’m damned if I know what that is,.

MARGARET!

Somewhere, John Murtha is laughing his ass off.

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — The John Murtha airport sits on a windy mountain two hours east of Pittsburgh, a 650-acre expanse of smooth tarmac, spacious buildings, a helicopter hangar and a National Guard training center.

Inside the terminal on a recent weekday, four passengers lined up to board a flight, outnumbered by seven security staff members and supervisors, all suited up in gloves and uniforms to screen six pieces of luggage. For three hours that day, no commercial or private planes took off or landed. Three commercial flights leave the airport on weekdays, all bound for Dulles International Airport.

The key to the airport’s gleaming facilities — and, indeed, its continued existence — is $200 million in federal funds in the past decade and the powerful patron who steered most of that money here. Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) is credited with securing at least $150 million for the airport. It was among the first in the country to win funding from this year’s stimulus package: $800,000 to repave a backup runway.

That’s not an airport – it’s a shrine to Murtha.

I’ve always wondered what they hell they complaign about with earmarks

how could they get their roads or their schools or their water works, their military towns, their federal emergency aid

where do these morons think they come from, do they emanate from whole cloth?

Hey. Johnstown, PA is my, long-deceased Mom’s home town.

When I last visited there with her in 9/90, it was a shadow of it’s former self: medical clinics for brown/black lung disease instead of the ‘thriving’ steel industry of earlier decades that had employed her long-deceased brothers. 1/13 of the former steel mills still open. However, still on every 4 corners were 2 churches & 2 bars.

I miss old time crooks like Murtha.

The only thing that makes these times bearable to me is the fact that the teabaggers’ supporters are suffering right along with us.

There is only one thing more stupid than the American voter but I’m damned if I know what that is,.

peanut butter

Not to mention that ‘earmarks’ are a complete red herring, comprising something like 2% of total USG spending.

LOL. They did have more class than today’s thugs.

I live in Oklahoma where the new Governor is about to take the butcher knife to public schools. Also, our all-Republican legislature just voted to strip the State Board of Education of all authority and put all powers with the new tea party elected State Superintendent. It’s very scary here.

Pork is when it’s the other guy’s project.

you have quite a bit to worry about jwill, good luck over there

Would that be the State some folks call Florida, perchance?

how could they get their roads or their schools or their water works, their military towns, their federal emergency aid

where do these morons think they come from, do they emanate from whole cloth?

Sounds like you don’t realize that it’s not true that earmarks = federal spending.

I also recall this article: “In Banning Sharia Law, Oklahoma Voters May Have Voted Against Native American Rights, Too” (By Tanya Somanader on Nov 11th, 2010 at 12:30 pm).

I guess if you want to support earmarks:

For years, convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff was, by most Washington measures, a success. He had access to powerful people and he could get special treatment for his clients, sometimes in the form of targeted federal money, or earmarks.

After convicted former congressman Randy Duke Cunningham accepted some $2 million in bribes from defense contractors, he was able to deliver about $90 million in federal funds back to them by earmarking the money in defense spending bills.

It gives the power to a select few people that are either on the conference committee or they’re chairman of the committees. They have a tremendous amount of power, because they can insert things at the very last minute, a la the bridge in Alaska that gets on everybody’s nerves.

When House Republican leaders were trying to get the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, passed, a key priority at the White House, they were openly taking orders for earmarks from lawmakers who, in return, agreed to vote for CAFTA.

House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis of California says last year he received more than 10,000 requests for individual special projects in just one bill, the one that funds the Departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services. And those requests came from 417 members of Congress. In other words, only 15 or so members of the House didn’t request an earmark in that bill.

Why my parents had to choose this lovely place to have sex I’ll never know.

People, when the teabaggers said they were going to cut spending and earmarks, what did you think they meant?

*heh* Why do you think I voted (again) for the ‘new’ King of Pork, Dan Inouye…!

I rather do enjoy having the current Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee as one of my critters…! ;-)

I am director of a community-based re-entry project at a NYC non profit. Over the years, my program has helped thousands coming home from prisons. My recidivism rate over the last 10 years hovers at 10% compared to more than 66% nationally.

It costs about $50-70k annually to house an inmate (at the juvenile level, the cost is about $250K annually). We help people pick up the pieces of their lives at a fraction of that price.

Due to extreme and punitive cutbacks, my program will most likely have to close at the end of the current fiscal year.

You do the math.

Peanut butter is far more palatable.

I know CH2M Hill and their line of work. I went to the article to which you linked and saw this:

CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., which was assigned $1.3 billion of the work paid for with stimulus money, is hardest hit. It is assigned to central Hanford and ground water cleanup projects.

I’m not up on precisely what CH2M Hill’s contract covered or the status of the project but Oregon sure isn’t going to like the sound of this. This story in particular is a total flashback to the sudden layoffs across environmental monitoring and engineering firms after Reagan won his second term in office.

Isn’t Hanford still a Superfund EPA Cleanup Site…?

yum

there is something about the famed peanut butter and jelly on tastey white bread combination that just does not make sense, it should not taste that good

like the beatles, far greater then the sum of it’s parts

my fav would be super chunk skippy with apricot preserves

washed down with whole milk

yum

yum

yum

Your comment reminded me to go review this: 2011 State of Indian Nations Address (Jan. 27, 2011)

People, when the teabaggers said they were going to cut spending and earmarks, what did you think they meant?

When the teabaggers said they were going to cut spending and earmarks, the teabaggers themselves didn’t know what they meant.

Had these people been around to protest Bush just as loudly when he and the Republican Congress till 2006 created much of the mess, I’d be far more impressed by them.

Education is the biggest pork of them all. Just allows the schools to spend more money on football. Besides, who needs an education when there aren’t any jobs.

You got that right (see Hanford Superfund Site History).

There are native nations in both Washington and Oregon who will be very interested in what is going on with this. Water quality is a big deal. In PDX, we’ve been successful up until now in protecting the Bull Run water shed which I understand is as good (pristine water quality as US sources go) as that of Hetch Hecky in California.

It’s sad, I’ve seen similar reports from other DoD,DoE, etc… From Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Los Alamos in New Mexico, to my own Isle, in which they deny the use of DU, despite independent tests conducted outside of, and, downwind of Pohakuloa Training Area…!

and fracking is not harmful in any way.

I hope you’re trying to be funny. Last year over a 100 teachers got laid off in my district alone and more are sure to come. These are people with families, not pork.

So that huge chemical blaze in Tejas seems to be a major manufacturer of that fracking fluid…! Is it God stepping in and saying enough already…? ;-)

I bet there are more laid off teachers than members of the Teaparty. They should start a club of their own.

Laura Flanders on the Ed Show…! 8-)

How many coaches got laid off?

Aren’t coaches teachers?

Sorry, I was expecting schools to concentrate more on … education? I’ve never been impressed by jocks. Football stadiums seem as useful to me as churches.

Speaking of DU, I found this on food irradiation practices in Hawai’i.

So is alan1tx just a contrarian troll who needles people? Its like all he posts.

Most of the coaches in the urban schools where some of my friends teach pull double duty. They’re as expendable as anyone else. The superstar coaches are in suburban and private schools.

Yes you got it.

That’s mostly been my experience with friends who coach … The ones I know are teachers first & coaches 2d.

Eli’s article attempts to show that an unsophisticated elimiation of a category of spending can be harmful to some, perhaps, worthwhile local needs. What he mistakes are ends and means. Bad means can be used towards good ends, but eventually the results are bad. Earmarks produce spending that is not subjected to budgetary scrutiny as are other appropriations. They are simply put into the budget as a courtesy to powerful legislators, often as a quid pro quo for his vote on another issue, which he would not otherwise oblige.

Worthwhile appropriations should be approved where the local benefit is also a benefit to the entire nation, areas such as education, health, infrastructure improvements.

Far better if the states raised there own taxes for what they need, but the taxes within most states are highly regressive, and the tax base is narrowed by the demands of the federal government for revenues to pursue its wars and subsidizations of favored industries, military, agribusiness, etc.

Unregulated earmarks, better to be rid of them!

The hysteria over earmarks is really nothing more than a means of distracting the electorate from the fact that neither party has EVER been serious about cutting spending. As the article above intimates, what constituents of one Congressional district might deem to be “pork” is viewed by another as a vital local project.

Earmark projects in any case only constitute a tiny fraction of overall spending. In fact, they often serve an important purpose beyond their significance to the sponsoring legislator’s constituency; they are part and parcel of the legislative currency that enables deals and compromises to be made among legislators in cases where their support is needed. So whenever I see a politician seizing on “earmarks,” my first thought tends to be, “What harder issue is he/she avoiding that causes him/her to seize on this non-issue?”

“The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.”
— Harlan Ellison

Yeast cells. The original “consumer”. :)