Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.
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See if these two maps seem to have a running theme. First, Map 1. No titles, no labels, just ten pins: If that doesn’t seem clear enough, try this one: That is the ten richest counties in the USA according to the 2010 census. What do you think the odds are that five of them [...]
There’s campaign rhetoric, and there’s reality. The campaign rhetoric was “change you can believe in”. The reality looks something like this: Simply, 3 of the 7 states that have clear Republican majorities on the national level are in the Top 10 biggest pork losers. Nancy Pelosi controls the House, who sets the budgets ( appropriations [...]
According CAGW: $250,000 by Senate appropriator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) for the Entrepreneurial Center for Horticulture at Minot State University-Bottineau. According to its website, the center is “committed to furthering greenhouse production of organic and specialty vegetables in North Dakota.” North Dakota is not among the leading states in horticulture sales [...]
I kid you not. John Nichols at The Nation actually is blaming this “pandemic” on Republicans. He’s serious too. Here’s some meat: When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed [...]
“[Such bills] will not happen when the president has the full legislative and appropriations process in place,” Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told CNN’s “State of the Union with John King.” He argued that the White House had little choice but to support the $410 billion omnibus spending [...]
This is getting confusing to me. According to my math, the Democrats have a pretty comfortable majority in the Senate. Currently they hold a 56-41 majority with two independents caucusing with the Dems as well. That makes it 58-41. Very possibly, another seat will be given to the Dems via the Minnesota courts. In basketball, [...]
According to Congressional Quarterly, the House is on its way to passing an Alternative Minimum Tax patch to keep things the way they are right now. Apparently the Republicans, who initially raised the limits, support it, the Democrats want those exemptions gone. That’s good news to me. According to the Democrats over the last few [...]
Here’s the news: House Democrats on Tuesday failed to overturn President Bush’s veto of a bill that would have prohibited the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on terrorist suspects. Good. First of all, I don’t like the idea of locally politically motivated people determining national defense issues. War is not a [...]
I’m not really a member of the porkbusters’ club. I don’t agree with a lot of what some people define as pork. Using a very narrowly defined criteria that automatically defines something as waste doesn’t work. I’ve pointed that out here several times. However, every now and then, some things just scream pork. Take this [...]
David Bernstein over at Volokh talks of an anecdote regarding earmarks. Basically a guy working for a defense contractor is hired to do nothing but spend money regardless of whether the product works or not. I have heard several stories like this over the years. Quite frankly, have done it to some degree with other [...]
