If you’re looking for an easy time flying, head to John Murtha Airport. One or two flights a day.

Then try to find a public project in West Virginia without Sheets Byrd’s name on it.

Worse, in 2009, Obama spent untold millions on road signs posted at highway projects bragging about what the simulus scam was doing for (to) the country. Total waste of money.

What a phony! They wan to cut Govt. spending, but are the biggest recipients of pork. 

Apparently Little Andy Blightphart is not too concerned with his staff knowing the actual news, Big Petty, but these two (2) individuals are deceased, and we are in different times. You know, once cocaine was legal in the US, and it was even an ingredient in Coca Cola. Once polygamy was legal in America, but no longer. Except in Utah and certain Mormon communes in the US. Once, American mothers fed their children fried chicken, corn on the cob and macaroni and cheese for dinner. Things change. Well, not Joe Barton’s all-consuming love of pork.
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Soledad: Come to Texas, by all means, but Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi. You would most assuredly not be welcome in the Cracker Belt which includes Ennis.

Just like the ones McConnell has in Kentucky? 

Come on Gloves, you know they all do that.

As always you are very selective in your outrage. Finding 3 past Democrats to single out.If you’re talking history why not Alaska’s Don Young who once bragged about stuffing a bill like a turkey. A bill he refused to initially bring to vote until it was named for his wife. Point here, there’s plenty to go around but you’re such a partisan myopic hack you can’t see past your own bizarre desire to always be the first post no matter how stupid it is. 

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/capitol-assets/public-projects-private-interests/

Here’s the list naming the Reps , the amount and how it related to them. Some incidental, some downright shameful. This is the kind of bipartisan spanking DC deserves.

Spending taxpayer money IN America?? SOCIALIST!

Joe Barton is the Republican dirtbag who apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward, and now we see he his using taxpayer money to increase the value of his own homes.

He still got an earmark thru the House during a time when Republicans are claiming they are abiding  by and enforcing an EAR MARK BAN which shows the REPUBLICAN CONSERVATIVE CULTURE OF CORRUPTION is alive and just as slimy as ever.

They control the process.

And it’s not like those signs just appear out of thin air…..people are paid to make them.

Ok…so we found another hypocritical Republican. So what else is new?

I remember that. “Oh Mr. Hayward! We are sorry you have to deal with consequences of your negligence…we don’t like personal responsibility either, just don’t tell that to the morons who vote for us.”

“The Washington Post has launched an investigation into congressional earmarks, finding that these are sometimes used to fund projects near lawmakers’ homes”

Elsewhere in “Stating-TheObvious”…

By the looks of that photo,I believe Joe represents the GNOME DIVISION of the Con Party.All that’s missing is the pointed hat.

 What I find interesting, and I find this on both ‘sides’, is that when there’s a story that paints a politician in a negative light, there is a compulsion to among those of the same party or ideology to find some sort of equivalent to that behavior on the other side.  It’s an interesting “non-defense” defense.

Agreed, we should not take partisan positions on this we should just throw them all out… I live in Florida and each year millions upon millions of dollars of public dollars are spent to restore the beach lines behind the 20+ million dollar homes that line the beaches in South Florida….  the fact of the matter is is that the Florida coast line is millions of years old and is not going anywhere, it may reshape itself but Florida is in no immediate danger of washing into the ocean.  If these millionaires wish to build on the ocean front, no problem, but they should not turn to the public to ask that we maintain and secure their properties from natural and foreseeable natural oceanic processes.  They should pay to protect their own homes, it should not be a matter of public funding but it seems that they have the clout to make it so. 

Plus, “untold millions” is a triple lie. 

It’s not “untold” because:1) it’s ‘told’ about before the fact in the budget estimate, & after the fact to the General Accounting Office;   2) it’s not “millions” in a way that has scalar meaning, in the sense that every day 320 millions brush their teeth using brushes & paste that costs money & depreciate, so one could say millions are spent every few days on Americans brushing their teeth, but in terms of saving against teeth depreciating, billions are saved every few years by them having done so – all while it comes down to pennies per day per individual, where the scale makes sense;  3) there are ancillary costs necessarily associated with a democratic society based on a consumption-based economy, one of those being having to pay for an informed society, & while the information in an ad may be minimal & not to your liking, it’s still information – if citizens aren’t informed as to how & why X road’s being built or Y investment in auto manufacturing is being made & who’s responsible for having decided to prioritize such expenditures, they’re denied the ability to make informed decisions at the ballot box.   

It’s not that ‘they always do it’ – it’s that ‘good thing they do it, or we might never know’.

Ah yes – government stimulus, and the best kind. Such things illustrate why economists are able to calculate multiplier effects on economic activity for certain kinds of public expenditures, versus none to negative for tax deductions. People are grotesquely misinformed & ignorant on the important of taxation in general & progressive taxation  in particular to the vibrancy of a society. Every successful society & civilization has understood that importance at some point, & every society that has lost it’s understanding for the concept has gone into decline.

I think the word you’re seeking here is “hypocrite”.  

That said, there are a number of features about earmarks that complicate the picture. Part of the role of the individual Congressional House rep (as opposed to the individual Senator, although Senators do have a role in this) is to bring to Washington & to the attention of the House as a whole things that she or he feels can ameliorate both the conditions in that district & contribute or play its part in contributing to the national condition, & the most successful model for doing that in a particularly huge & quite geographically diverse nation like this one is earmarks. It’s not sufficient to simply go to the capital and ask or beg, there has to be some sort of leverage or enforcement mechanism to render that role effective. You simply can’t expect the administration to be able to prioritize among the interests of 435 congressional districts among 50 states & more territories & protectorates – the idea behind our reps being sent to Washington is to argue for our own interests in our own districts. If I were in charge, I wouldn’t throw out earmarks per se, I would instead reform that use of them & make the use of them more transparent, in order to improve the synergy between the roles of the administration & the roles of the House & the individual House reps. 

This particular earmark is portrayed here as ‘selfish’ in the sense of catering to the individual rep’s PERSONAL interests, as opposed to his district’s interests, and that may be so. But that’s something for the voters he’s answerable to every second November to grapple with.

“we should not take partisan positions on this we should just throw them all out” 
There’s a lot wrong with this assertion. Firstly, that IS in fact a partisan position, because it’s spun by the party that is more beholden to lobbyists & big money issues. As we’ve seen with the grave difficulties that the House Republican Tea Party Caucus has caused since January 2011, the less experienced a rep is, the less knowledgeable that rep is & the less effective & more destructive that rep is, & the more they are vulnerable to industry & big money interest lobbyists.  Secondly, just about everyone hates Congress, but that feeling manifests itself in a desire that every OTHER district throw its rep out, and generally does not manifest itself in a desire to throw out one’s OWN rep. That means that the general disposition against Congress is not against the individual reps, it’s against the overall work product, which comes down not the job being done by individual reps but rather to the context in which they come together to do the people’s work. 

A lot of this inefficiency comes down to the ignorance & apathy of the electorate in most districts, as reflected in turn-out & susceptibility to misleading information. The Founders, or at least the ones that were interested in the republic working for the people as a whole, and lasting, were acutely aware of the role of education & constructive skepticism in the model they were able to negotiate, & I would argue, strongly, that the disconnect between Congress & the people today is a function of poor educational standards. One of the first things to be aware of is that that problem is a long term one & can’t be ameloriated over night or within a single congressional or presidential or senatorial term – but if we fail to compel our representatives to address it NOW, it means we don’t get out of the problem & it tends to become perpetual. There’s no shortcut to this – more people have to use their voting power more constructively. That’s made particularly difficult in this post-Citizens United environment, but at the same time is ameliorated by such tools as the Internet & the Occupy movement.

I’m against government spending, unless it’s for my voters. Tax money is supposed to be spent on things that increase the living standard of all Americans, not just the 1%. When did we start down this path? Oh, that’s right, when Obama was elected. Now government’s bad and being rich is good.

Well you and I can disagree, but I do appreciate the tone of your response… and you do make some points that I do agree with.  The Tea Party movement may or may not understand the complexity of our problems, they are very much underestimated as a big part of what these people do is read about and bring themselves current on issues facing our government.  I do not agree that we can solve the deficit problems without addressing the revenue side of the equation, however you and I would part on my views of government spending and much of the regulations coming out of DC.  

The Tea Party sent these newly elected officials into DC with the firm mandate of no new taxes and cut spending, which did not afford many of these folks much room to moderate their stance as they would be facing that same electorate in just 2 short years.  But I would argue that the old horses in DC did not only help to get the country to the place at which we have arrived, but they have little interest in changing course to take us to some other place, they have made their deals and have their cutouts in hand…  they are not going to be the solution to the problem, as it was they who created the problem and it remains in their interest to perpetuate it.  

He likes getting his picture taken at the ribbon cutting ceremonies.  

Multiplier effect?  That is just a Keynesian dream, what is the difference of money being spent in the private economy vs the government removing that money from the economy to spend where it sees fit…  there is none… but I know this is not actually the case here as the government has a problem in that it spends more than it receives..  so this would be freshly printed money that makes yours worth less but still maybe there might be a change with this newly printed money of creating a ripple effect in the economy…  noooo not a chance because there is no real multiplier effect as Harvard economist Robert Barro….

“The existing empirical evidence on the response of real gross domestic product to added government spending and tax changes is thin. In ongoing research, we use long-term U.S. macroeconomic data to contribute to the evidence. The results mostly favor tax rate reductions over increases in government spending as a means to increase GDP.”

He goes on to say…

“The bottom line is this: The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely raise GDP by less than the increase in government spending. Defense-spending multipliers exceeding one likely apply only at very high unemployment rates, and nondefense multipliers are probably smaller. However, there is empirical support for the proposition that tax rate reductions will increase real GDP. ”

There is no magic governmental spending fix, it just means larger deficits and more misery later…  it just makes things worse in the long run.  

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