The Swine Line

On December 28th, Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee held a conference call with bloggers.  Our friend Robert Bluey over at the Heritage Foundation made good use of our recent release on the candidates’ ratings and asked Gov. Huckabee about what he would do about the epidemic of earmarks.  Robert shared the exchange with us, so here it is:
Robert Bluey Question:  Governor, [...]

Filed under: Appropriations, Budget, Earmarks, Pig Book, Pork, Reform | 1 Comment »

Last week, CCAGW issued a press release listing CCAGW’s Ratings of each candidate who has had a voting record in Congress.  Here is the release in full, which includes their respective CCAGW ratings:
As the Presidential primary season heats up, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) today released its earmark candidate challenge.  The passage of the fiscal [...]

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Below is the full text of the letter that CAGW, along with 19 other fiscal watchdog groups sent to President Bush asking him to use an executive order to strike all the more than 9000 earmarks from that abysmal omnibus spending bill that passed right before everyone scattered to celebrate the holidays: 
Mr. President:
This past week, Congress passed [...]

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Where Will $800 Million of Taxpayers’ Money Go?
‘Tis the season for Congress to load up on goodies. Nine thousand projects costing more than $8 billion — many of them approved without close scrutiny. Congress calls them earmarks.
Democrats put in some to help members facing tough races, such as $430,000 for local projects to help two [...]

Filed under: Appropriations, Earmarks, In The News, Media Hits, Pork | 1 Comment »

Well, what do you know… some good news out of Washington.  It seems the General Services Administration (GSA) under the leadership of Lurita Doan has been busy saving tax dollars.  That’s right SAVING tax dollars  — a cool $2 million.  Now if only other bureaucracies would follow GSA’s lead.

Filed under: Reform | 2 Comments »

 
Want to see what the Omnibus looks like?  The very bill that Sen. Dick “Evelyn Woods” Durbin (D-Ill) said every Senator had an opportunity to read?  Keep in mind, a Senator would need to read nearly 1¼ pages of the bill every minute for 46 hours with no sleep, no eating, and no bathroom breaks to [...]

Filed under: Appropriations, Pork | 1 Comment »

Read this article in today’s Washington Post if you want a grim and infuriating reminder of the insidious and corruptive influence of earmarks and why they are dangerous for our political process (how quickly we have forgotten the Duke Cunningham lessons).  They are NOT, by and large, benign projects inserted by do-good members of Congress, who know best what their districts’ needs are, [...]

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Do yourself a favor and watch this, a six-minute segment of Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) speech against this monstrous omnibus budget bill on the floor of the U.S. Senate today.  The citizens of South Carolina and taxpayers around this nation owe a debt of gratitude to him, and the others like him, in the House and Senate, who [...]

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. . . is Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) for thwarting three amendments to the farm bill that would have provided some modest reform. 
 Read more here

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Search through earmarks in the Omnibus here and comment on the juiciest ones you find on the Swine Line blog!

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See Tom Schatz on ABC World News tonight to discuss the Omnibus bill.  Check your local listings!

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Here is a sad story that demonstrates the negative effect pork-barrel spending has on communities - disrupting lives and destroying homes and farms that have belonged to generations of families in Kentucky.  It is but one example of what happens when a member of Congress decides he wants to bring home the bacon.  Practicality goes [...]

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Ah, yes.  The dirty deed is done.  While Congress has met the President’s spending limit, it isn’t a pretty sight.  The 3,400 plus page Omnibus bill has passed the House with over 9,000 earmarks.  All but 41 (out of 201) Republicans voted no.  The Republicans are trying to retrieve their fiscal conservative mantle — well, at least some of them.  Many [...]

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Watch Tom Schatz discuss the Omnibus and Farm Bill as well as announce December’s Porker of the Month on CNBC’s Pork Watch

Filed under: Appropriations, Budget, Earmarks, Farm Bill, In The News, Media Hits, Pork, Porker | No Comments »

Nearly 9,000 Earmark Requests in Omnibus
“It’s totally fiscally irresponsible to lump everything together in one spending bill and put it to a vote less than 24 hours later,” said David Williams, vice president of policy for Citizens Against Government Waste.
“It doesn’t have to be this way. They had all year to do this. It’s like [...]

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These are preliminary numbers and may be adjusted.  More appropriations to come.

Appropriations
Amount ‘05
Amount ‘06
Amount ‘07
Amount ‘08(+/- from previous year)

Agriculture
-earmark totals
 n/a
 502
 n/a
 618 (+23%)

-dollar amounts
n/a
$584 million
n/a
$397.7 million 
(-32)

LHHS
-earmark totals
 3,071
 n/a
 n/a
 2,243
(-27%)

-dollar amounts
$1.69 billion
n/a
n/a
$1.03 billion
(-39%)

Interior
-earmark totals
 n/a
 737
 n/a
 575 (-22)

-dollar amounts
n/a
$669.5 million
n/a
$454 million
 (-32%)

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Heritage has a great breakdown of the budget deal:
Spending Hikes: A Guide to the Gimmicks
Good football teams use misdirection–because it works. One trick is to fake a quarterback kneel-down in the last seconds of a half, then throw long. The same trickery happens in politics. As this year’s Congress winds down, Democrats have announced they [...]

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From today’s The Hill Newspaper:
Obey earmark proposal stirs opposition from both parties
A proposal to eliminate all congressional earmarks to meet the White House’s steep demands on domestic spending ran into deeply skeptical senators from both parties Tuesday, signaling that many lawmakers will fight to keep their pet projects as Democrats struggle to finalize their [...]

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Just about everything is stalled in Congress these days…and that usually means good news for taxpayers.
Appropriations:  Only the Defense appropriations bill has been passed and signed into law.  The 11 remaining bills are being clumped together in an “Omnibus” bill.   The Democrat leadership had hoped to spend about $21 billion more than what the president wanted in [...]

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The Politico.com features a story on Taxpayer Hero Sen. Tom Coburn:
The bucks stop here
Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, has long been known as the Senate’s gadfly, crusading against wasteful government spending. In the last year, however, this gadfly has gone through a metamorphosis and is now more of a scorpion: If you’re not careful, he’ll [...]

Filed under: Earmarks, In The News, Pork, Reform | 1 Comment »

Hoyer Is Proof of Earmarks’ Endurance
Md. Democrat’s Campaign Donors Among Grantees
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 10, 2007; Page A01
Consider the $450,000 that Hoyer inserted into a 2008 education spending bill for the California-based InTune Foundation Group, whose Web site describes it as a music-education nonprofit group.
In 2005, InTune got a previous earmark [...]

Filed under: Appropriations, Earmarks, In The News, Media Hits, Pork | 1 Comment »

December 2007
Big Time ARM Wrestling
By Leslie K. PaigeThe country continues to experience uncertainty and volatility in the financial markets as a result of the crisis in the mortgage industry.  Financial services companies have been hit hard.  For its part, Congress has been trying to help homeowners who face foreclosure or need help refinancing homes they can [...]

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On Thursday, December 6, the House of Representatives approved H.R. 6, the “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.” This bill is more than 1,000 pages long and virtually no member of the House, other than those who crafted the legislation behind the closed doors of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office, had time to [...]

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Please, don’t be such a tease!  Obey’s remarks in David Clark’s CQ Today article this morning provide a peek into the soul of a man who is truly frustrated.  The President appears to be holding the line (don’t blink!) on the budget.  The Democrats sound frazzled and a bit frantic.  They have already given back $10.6 billion of the [...]

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It now appears the House energy bill will be voted on tomorrow (Thursday).  It has just been made available and weighs in at 1,061 pages!  CAGW will be going through and looking for the most egregious sections.  Here’s the energy-bill.pdf - comment on your findings or email blog@cagw.org

Filed under: Energy | 1 Comment »

The House is attempting to vote on and pass a new energy bill today without releasing the full text of the bill.  Here’s more on CAGW’s position on the legislation.

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Blogcritics.org features an interview with CAGW President Tom Schatz covering topics such as war spending and universal healthcare.  Read the profile here.

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On this morning’s Pork Watch, Tom Schatz discussed Sen. Ted Steven’ Ferry to Nowhere as well as his other questionable dealings.
 See Tom on Pork Watch on it’s regularly schedule day and time: Tuesday mornings at 7:40am eastern on CNBC

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A lengthy, well-written but infuriating article by Gilbert M. Gaul in today’s Washington Post about massive fraud in USDA loan programs.  Here are some of the highlights:
Since the 1970s, the loan program has endured nearly $1.5 billion in losses while backing almost $14 billion in guarantees to private banks, a Washington Post investigation found.
Actual losses are almost [...]

Filed under: Farm Bill, In The News, Pork | 1 Comment »

Most of Washington is breathless as the town impatiently waits to see the energy bill, not written in a House or Senate committee with bipartisan input, but in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office.  We expect it to be bad, very bad.  Can you say higher taxes?  More subsidies for corn ethanol?  Higher food prices?  Higher electricity costs?  This is [...]

Filed under: Energy | 1 Comment »