And, to the embarrassment of Obama — who promised during last year’s
campaign to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel ways — the bill
contains 7,991 earmarks totaling $5.5 billion, according to
calculations by the Republican staff of the House Appropriations
Committee.
Among the many earmarks are $485,000 for a
boarding school for at-risk native students in western Alaska and $1.2
million for Helen Keller International so the nonprofit can provide
eyeglasses to students with poor vision.
I thought it was stupid when Obama and McCain yanked each other around about it, I think it’s stupid now. Congressmen and Senators are SUPPOSED to go get money for things their constituents need. Including volcano monitoring, beaver management, and Nancy Pelosi’s gay San Francisco terrorist mice. We spend tons of money on much more stupid shit than a boarding school for at-risk kids, and glasses for the blind. For example, David Vitter is still getting his health care paid for.
Nobody really cares about spending except when it fails to make their lives better. It may play well in focus groups and people may crab, but when you get right down to it, they want their roads fixed and their bridges built and their blind kids given glasses. You can’t reconcile those two conflicting positions except by concluding that “Washington spends too much money” is a bullshit thing people say because it’s what they always say. What they really mean is that nobody’s spending the way I want money spent, so let’s just all of us (including you, Mr. President) admit that’s the case and stop fapping around pretending that denying somebody money for mice is going to fix the economy.
(And for those who want to throw the Bridge to Nowhere Sarah Palin bullshit in my face, the problem with that whole thing was the way she handled it, not the bridge itself. Get a bridge if you want one, but then don’t run around telling everybody you didn’t support it and wouldn’t let anybody else have a bridge either. As theCrack Den pointed out this morning, everybody’s stuff is important to them. Is this really that hard to understand?)
A.