I’m beginning to understand why the DFH crowd hates the blue dogs:
U.S. Representative Jim Marshall is a Georgia Democrat and a member of his party’s Blue Dog Coalition, a group of lawmakers bound by a desire to restrain federal spending. The Blue Dogs have something else in common: a fondness for funding pet projects.
Marshall alone requested more than $12 billion worth of the so-called earmarks in the 2010 federal budget. His proposals range from $388,850 to aid 14 local farmers’ markets to $4.2 billion to purchase C-17 heavy-lift transport aircraft.
Overall, Blue Dogs submitted more than 2,500 individual earmarks totaling some $20 billion. That underscores the conflict between their eagerness to bring federal money home and the coalition’s criticism of the budget as laden with pork.
“It’s really hard to smack government’s wrists with the one hand while the other hand is looking for as much earmark cash as you can grab and bring home to your district,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based public-interest group.
This is why I have been telling Republicans to just shut up the past few months and stop being such, well, assholes. If they play their cards right, shut up, and let America forget that we hate them, they will be in a position to win an election once the Democrats implode.
TenguPhule
Please stop giving good advice to the enemy, John.
Dennis-SGMM
The fact that there’s a C-17 plant in Georgia in no way influenced Representative Marshall’s call for the purchase of more aircraft that the Air Force itself doesn’t want. The AF’s original order for 180 of the aircraft was filled long ago and the AF wants money to modernize its aerial tanker fleet – not more C-17’s. This is just one more reason why The World’s Most Expensive Military is the world’s most expensive military.
AnotherBruce
You might have more luck trying to get water to flow uphill.
priscianus jr
“I’m beginning to understand why the DFH crowd hates the blue dogs:”
Just beginning? Well, all beginnings are hard. But here’s another reason
DFH”s hate them: because they are very similar to Republicans. And are you going to tell me with a straight face that Republicans do not have a strong appetite for pork? It may be a slightly different cut of pork, but hey …
AND
“This is why I have been telling Republicans to just shut up the past few months and stop being such, well, assholes. If they play their cards right, shut up, and let America forget that we hate them, they will be in a position to win an election once the Democrats implode.”
John, I know you are truly disgusted with what the Republican Party has become, but sometimes I could swear that deep down inside, your sympathies are still with the GOP. A sort of Platonic GOP that exists only in the world of Ideas. It peeps out every once in a while.
Incertus
@Dennis-SGMM: And how many other districts have factories where parts for the C-17 are made and then shipped to Marshall’s district? Spread it around, you know.
Charity
I keep saying this: isn’t it part of a congressional representative’s job to lobby for stuff to be built in his or her district, and to get funding for projects? I mean, obviously the $237MM bridge to nowhere was an egregious example of waste, but actual projects that people need and that would create jobs?
Michael
Blue Dogs and Southern Republicans have something in common – such a love of pork that they get mad if anything might cut back on what they can haul back to their districts.
LT
Weird, John. This could only make any sense at all if Republicans didn’t do earmarks.
Tsulagi
I’ve been saying the same to the nuttier Pubs at work for the past seven years. Trust me, it doesn’t work.
Not gonna happen either.
Shawn in ShowMe
So what are they going to run on — “We love earmarks too but we’ll save you from teh gays?”
Hunter Gathers
It goes both ways, which is why this crap never gets any traction. The GOP as a whole does this shit constantly. How many GOPers decried the stim package and then 30 seconds later touted the projects that went to their home districts? Too many to count. I don’t care if a rep funnels money to his home district. It’s the reason they get sent to the Hill in the first place. These earmarks do not add to the deficit. It’s how federal dollars are allocated. Not even His Royal Highness of La La Land, Dr. Paul, decries this process.
The only quibble I have with the earmark process is the invitation for corruption. See Murtha, Jack (D-PA). That and the hipocracy on both sides of the aisle.
One man’s pork is another’s meal ticket.
NonyNony
@Charity:
Yes, and it’s also part of a congressional representative’s job to be on the lookout for actual waste and work to get it cut from the budget.
The problem is that the Blue Dogs and the Republicans don’t actually do that. What they do is stake out a rhetorical position (i.e. “We Hate Pork”) and then beat that rhetorical position to death while simultaneously working against that rhetorical position in the background.
It’s just basic level-1 hypocrisy[*] of the type you expect from even a freshman Congressional Rep, but it grates. The Blue Dogs wouldn’t be so damn irritating if they weren’t screaming about “PORKULUS” in the budget while trying to gut, say, spending on stimulus dollars to the states while at the same time loading up spending bills with their own pet piggie projects. If they would be consistent one way or the other about it they’d be annoying, but not infuriating.
[*] True masters of hypocrisy can do things like attempt to impeach a sitting president for having an affair while stepping out behind their own wife’s back. Or work extra hard to put prostitutes in jail while frequenting other prostitutes themselves. Or sanction and defend warantless government wiretapping of innocent citizens while getting outraged about their own phones being tapped with a legit warrant. But even a junior apprentice hypocrite can manage being outraged about PORKULUS while demanding an extra helping of bacon for himself.
sgwhiteinfla
Did John Cole just pull an Arlen Specter?
Dennis-SGMM
@Charity:
Sure it’s a rep’s job to lobby for his or her district. OTOH, that $4.2Bn would repair a lot of roads and bridges or spruce up a lot of schools and in so doing create a many more jobs than building aircraft that the military doesn’t want. Doing so might cause a pol to lose his place at the defense industry money spigot though so instead you get calls for crap like this.
I’m not objectively against earmarks; broadly written federal budgets cannot address what may be a crying need or a sensible project in one district. That said, any business person does a cost/benefit analysis before spending money on something. It would be nice if all earmarks were required to include a cost/benefit analysis to be posted on the Internet as well.
Bostondreams
@Dennis-SGMM:
The C-17 will always be inferior to my beloved C-5 Galaxy. Fly by wire? Bah! Who needs fly by wire? Oh, you can back up? Fancy! We can run over you!
Bostondreams, formerly of
436 AGS
C-5 Electrical-Environmental Technician
Dover AFB Del
Martian Buddy
Heh. Back in the days of the “Contract With America,” I tried to tell some Republican associates of mine that they were only fooling themselves if they thought Republicans would abstain from the pork-barreling. I never dreamed that the GOP would actually be worse. I know that “dismal failure” is the usual phrase associated with the Bush years, but “comprehensive failure” seems more apt.
Zifnab
This is like the poster statement for the dichotomy between good earmarks and bad earmarks.
On the one hand, you have a modest amount of money requested for local use in a Congressman’s own district. The request is community friendly and business friendly, and with proper oversight I imagine it could go a long way towards improving quality of life in the area.
On the other hand, you’ve got funding for requisitions – presumably for some military or civilian bureaucratic department that, frankly, shouldn’t be coming from the Georgia Congressman. If the Department of the Interior thinks it needs $4.2 billion in C-17 heavy life transport aircraft, than the budget director for the Department of the Interior should be requesting it. Not the esteemed gentleman from the state it’s built in.
In theory, I’d say the farmer’s market money should come from state or local governments. But we’ve got a 25% federal income tax on the majority of wage earners in this country and under the current system, I don’t see any problem with trickle back.
But the aircraft thing is a thin veil over an obvious political kick-back scheme.
@Shawn in ShowMe:
It’ll be 2005 all over again!
Dennis-SGMM
@Bostondreams:
Memories… My Navy squadron down in Texas had the Guest Flightline and taking care of it was one of my duties. One day just after sunset a C-5 made a pass over the field and then landed. The damned thing looked like Rodan and it dwarfed the two seaters that we flew. The next thing I knew, the Follow Me truck called me up on the radio and told me to direct the visitor aircraft into a parking spot. Thanks to the professionalism of the crew I got the mother parked without incident. The loadmaster was good enough to give me a tour of the aircraft afterward. That was thirty years ago and I still remember how damn’ big that airplane was, inside and out.
cmorenc
I can understand this – I could belong to the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and especially, Teddy Roosevelt (minus some of the jingoistic imperialistic impulses). I grew up through high school and the first couple of years of college with a “young Republican” sort of political view, and cast my first chance to vote for Richard Nixon in 1972, my last for a Republican at the presidential level so far.
It was not so long after that I began to come to my senses and realize increasingly over the next eight years that the modern Republican party was not what I had originally, idealistically envisioned it to be – a party of sensible libertarianism and responsible stewardship of the environment or other public interests (recall that it was under Nixon, with his active blessing influenced by Erlichman that we got many of our basic federal environmental laws and the EPA etc.). The racial ugliness of the “southern strategy” really only became manifestly obvious to me in 1980 as Jesse Helms became increasingly mainstream rather than fringe in the GOP, Ronald Reagan deliberately chose Philadelphia, Miss to kick off his campaign, and I grew out of my southern white-boy small-southern town mindset that had so naturally embraced these sorts of things a dozen years earlier.
I too wish the GOP party of my libertarian ideals actually existed, but alas like some mythical land of Shangri-La, it doesn’t, and never really did except for brief partial intervals (Lincoln, Roosevelt, perhaps Eisenhower)…but in even these cases, was marred by deeply repugnant elements. It’s not coming back, because it never was, really, not even remotely close.
John, I’m glad that you woke up (albeit later than I did) to what a colossal bunch of dangerous hypocritical, cynically callous, selfish assholes the GOP really is, even with a glitter of a handful of more sensible folks still aboard who haven’t abandoned the party out of sheer habit and loyalty. The dems are an imperfect vessel for our aspirations, but they’re the best we’re going to get in this lifetime, barring tectonic shifts in this country’s political makeup for the better.
Joshua Norton
And no one wants either of those things to happen since, everything will once more resemble the reign of Bush II.
Remember, first historic repetition is tragedy, second is farce.
WayneLively
The GOP has and always will remain above all the party of the rich. Their rhetoric is a smoke screen for their real purpose which is to steal as much of the loot they can get their hands on and send it to the wealth class. They have money and we have more votes. Money and votes are power which should ideally cancel one another, but when the voters are ignorant, the balance of power shifts to those with money. Hence, thirty years of Republican rule and stealing everything that wasn’t mortared in.
A Blue Dog is a Republican who can read a poll.
http://www.politicalpragmatist.com
Joshua Norton
The “party of Lincoln” lasted as long as Lincoln did. After slavery, they found out there wasn’t much reason for the party to exist. Then the robber barons took over and convinced everyone there wasn’t any money in helping people, and the party of business was born.
Now-a-days, when they claim they’re “the party of Lincoln”, all it means is that they’re dead with a hole in their head.
John S.
Maybe that’s what Trent Reznor was referring to.
AhabTRuler
@Joshua Norton: Remember, Abraham Lincoln didn’t die in vain…
fledermaus
Never gonna happen. The 28% crowd and their congress critters are incapable of letting any percieved challenge or slight to their manhood go unanswered. Worse for them they see slights everywhere and labor under the delusion that all Real Americans are on their side. And for some reason the more they piss people off the more they think they are winning
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
JSF was warning us about this very facet of JC’s character a couple of weeks ago. I guess we’ll just have to keep a close eye on that one.
thomas
the robber barons had a hold on the party of Lincoln while Lincoln was alive. The transcontinental railroads were authorized and the land give-away started during the LIncoln administration.
Joshua Norton
That’s true. And using much of the “too big to fail/they need a bailout” reasoning we see today.
But the good stuff like Crédit Mobilier took hold during the corruption of the Grant Administration. Much like AIG under Bush.
Cromagnon
The C17 is the one aircraft the Air Force should be buying a lot more of. America’s greatest strategic weakness is the inability to move significant ground forces quickly to any trouble spot. Right now the best the AF can do is transport a couple light Airborne Brigades with very limited heavy weapons. They have no ability to transport heavier mech and armored forces in strength… The AF doesn’t want more C17s because moving the Army around isn’t as cool as fighter jocks flying F22s
AhabTRuler
Well, that’s what Marines are for.
Cromagnon
Marines can’t move quickly. Airplanes fly at 500 knots. Ships about 25 knots. And a couple of Marine battalions don’t represent a significant force. A couple of Army mechanized divisions is a significant force
Martian Buddy
Alternatively, we could just get out of the “invade other countries on false pretenses” business. It’d be much cheaper.
To put it another way, what strategic threat requires these massive airlift capabilities? Who do you expect us to have to deploy several mechanized divisions against?
TenguPhule
This is a feature, not a bug.
It was supposed to keep us from doing something stupid like rushing into wars of choice by giving time for saner heads to prevail….oh damn.
TenguPhule
Canada.
The socialist hordes with their cheap drugs and universal healthcare must be stopped at any cost to the taxpayers!
Death to Zombie Santa!
fester
Cro-magnon — moving a single heavy army battalion with (figure ~60 armored fighting vehicles of at least 30 tons (either M1s or M2/3s) artillery, engineering support and supplies by air is expensive enough. You really want to scale that up by a factor of 30 or 40 for a pair of heavy divisions.
The entire point of the US force structure including the pre-po ships and POMCUS is to have a crisis break out, a President decide to do “something” as assets begin to mobilize or move in the general direction of a crisis (including moving the floating brigade sets of heavy equipment in the general direction of the crisis) as the light infantry forces backed by a few heavy companies and a shit-ton of airpower seizes an entry point (either a port or an airfield, preferably both, but getting less important as sea-basing takes up the slack) and then hold a defensive position where superior US aimed firepower can hold against most 2nd and 3rd world army’s counterattacks until the MEB and pre-po brigade sets arrive within two weeks, at which point the heavy division sets are only a week to three weeks out as well from Georgia or Texas.
That has been US doctrine (excluding Reforger) since the late 70s at the very least — you want more heavy unit strategic capacity than the US has ever had when it can not count on POMCUS division sets that are 99% available when the 3rd Armored and 1st Cav get off their 747s in Ramstein…
How will you pay for it, and what will you cut?
Thankovsky
@Cromagnon:
Your comment on the fighter jocks is unfortunately the God’s honest truth. They’ve had a complete stranglehold on Air Force policy, especially procurement. They’ve taken the focus off of pretty much everything else the USAF is supposed to do, to the tremendous detriment of things like nuclear surety. Which is why the last two years were pretty much uninterrupted slews of embarrassments with regard to the security and maintenance of our nuclear forces.
Fulcanelli
I cain’t quit yooooo, Mr. GOP. Say it ain’t so John, say it ain’t so. Quit looking at those pics of Palin all over the place. Or something.
It’ll pass, John. We DFH’s were right, remember? You do remember right?
p.a.
STFU is good advice, except for the fact that the Republican ‘leadership’, and especially the die hard supporters, have the emotional maturity and intellectual acuity of 8 year old schoolyard bullies. NaGaHaPen.
Redshift
Blue Dogs are “fiscally conservative”, just like many Republicans. While it once meant something different, in the past twenty-five years or so, it has been redefined to mean they’re in favor of cutting taxes and complaining about deficits because someone else isn’t cutting spending.
JGabriel
John Cole:
You’re right. Stop telling them that. I f they figure it out, and act upon it, then they’ll be back in charge that much sooner – possibly without even going through the soul-searching that might lead the GOP to some semblance of sanity.
.
JGabriel
Dupe. Deleted by author.
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Martian Buddy
Now that you mention it, poutine is a weapon of mass arterial destruction… BOMB THEM!