Thursday, February 17, 2011

Spending cuts?

Spending cuts or "hide the baloney pony?"
  While he was alive, Rep. John P. Murtha was a prince of pork, directing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars back to his southwestern Pennsylvania district. But Wednesday, the House took the first step to turn off the spigot, voting overwhelmingly to defund the National Drug Intelligence Center that Murtha had the government build in his hometown.

And that was just the beginning.
Dead, but not soon enough
  In the first freewheeling spending debate the House has held in years, Democrats and Republicans teamed up to take on entrenched defense interests and to rewrite a GOP 2011 spending bill to cut about $800 million from NASA and from homeland security research and development, and send the savings to fund local police and firefighters.

STOP the music.  I watched C-Span yesterday as a series of goofy sounding amendments to the spending bill went to a vote.  In every instance I expected them to fail.  In every instance they passed. Here's the vote that caused me to turn it off in disgust.

Rep. Weiner ((D-NY) Amendment to Cut NASA Budget by $298 Million Passes

 A New York Democrat voting to cut spending?  In fact, the budget was not cut one cent in this amendment.   The C-Span title was "Amendment to transfer $298M from NASA to the Attorney General's Community policing blah-blah-blah.    Sounds like the same Three-card Monte hustle to me.  Anyone?

As far as Murtha goes, I would expect that the Navy ship being built, and named for him, be renamed.  Anyone?


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The day they take the money from a federal program and return it in the form of checks to the TAXPAYERS, I'll believe these jackwagons are actually cutting federal spending. Note to our esteemed congresscritters: moving money from one line of the federal budget to another line IS NOT A CUT.

Jim - PRS said...

How about "U.S.S. Unidicted Co-Conspirator?"

CDR J said...

Re: Naming a ship after Murtha
That action was so egregious that I wrote all three of my Congress critters. Unfortunately, all three wrote back saying that the naming was under the control of the Secretary of the Navy, and that there was nothing that they would do.

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