House Dems Propose $410B Spending Bill (Here's More!)

House Democrats on Monday unveiled a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running through the end of the fiscal year.

It includes thousands of pet projects favored by lawmakers but often criticized by the public in opinion polls. At this point, there's no official total of so-called "earmarks" contained in the bill.

Democrats are defending the 8 percent spending increase, saying it's needed to make up for cuts enacted in recent years or proposed a year ago.

Not much information in this article.

But Michelle Malkin expounds on it:

9,000 earmarks in the $410 billion omnibus spending bill: Gang tattoo removal, Maine lobster, La Raza & more!

By Michelle Malkin • February 23, 2009 11:11 PM

You want earmarks? There are lots and lots and lots of earmarks in the $410 billion omnibus spending bill coming down the road. Not that any of the people who are going to vote for it will actually read it, of course. If they did, they couldn’t look into the camera and sanctimoniously declare that, uh, you know, “There are no earmarks.”
The Modesto Bee reports:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain fought vigorously over who would be toughest on congressional earmarks.
“We need earmark reform,” Obama said in September during a presidential debate in Oxford, Miss. “And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”
President Barack Obama should prepare to carve out a lot of free time and keep the coffee hot this week as Congress prepares to unveil a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that’s riddled with thousands of earmarks, despite his calls for restraint and efforts on Capitol Hill to curtail the practice.
The bill will contain about 9,000 earmarks totaling $5 billion, congressional officials say. Many of the earmarks — loosely defined as local projects inserted by members of Congress — were inserted last year as the spending bills worked their way through various committees.
So while Obama and McCain were slamming earmarks on the camp aign trail, House and Senate members — Democrats and Republicans — were slapping them into spending bills.
“It will be a little embarrassing for the president if he signs a bill with that many earmarks on it,” said Stan Collender, a veteran Washington budget analyst.

Hill staffer Tom Jones is going through the omnibus spending bill with a fine-tooth comb, and Twittering his earmark findings, including:
* $200,000 for “Tattoo Removal Violence Prevention Outreach Program,” pg. 283;
*Maine lobster earmark in the omnibus, pg. 173;
*$5.8 million earmark for the “Ted Kennedy Institute for the Senate…for the planning and design of a building & an endowment,” pg. 232;
*and National Council of La Raza, $473,000 earmark from Sens. Bingaman and Menendez, pg. 212.

What do you do with a drunken Sailor?

A Traditional Sea Shanty that is a lot of fun to sing with a group of drunken Congresscritters. The melody can be heard here.

What do you do with a drunken sailor,
What do you do with a drunken sailor,
What do you do with a drunken sailor,
Early in the morning?

Chorus:
Way hay and up she rises
Way hay and up she rises,
Way hay and up she rises
Early in the morning

Throw him in the long boat till he's sober,
Throw him in the long boat till he's sober,
Throw him in the long boat till he's sober,
Early in the morning

(Repeat using the following verses)

2. Keep him there and make 'im bale 'er.
3. Pull out the plug and wet him all over,
4. Take 'im and shake 'im, try an' wake 'im.
5. Trice him up in a runnin' bowline.
6. Give 'im a taste of the bosun's rope-end.
7. Give 'im a dose of salt and water.
8. Stick on 'is back a mustard plaster.
9. Shave his belly with a rusty razor.
10. Send him up the crow's nest till he falls down,
11. Tie him to the taffrail when she's yardarm under,
12. Put him in the scuppers with a hose-pipe on him.
13. Soak 'im in oil till he sprouts flippers.
14. Put him in the guard room till he's sober.
15. Put him in bed with the captain's daughter.
16. Have you ever seen the captain's daughter?
17. Give the poor bastard to Mother Rackett.
18. Are ye' daft, you might wake Mother Rackett.
19. Put him in the bilge and let him drink it.
20. That's what you do with a drunken sailor.

The bill will contain about 9,000 earmarks

2009: A Pork Odyssey

Dave Bowman: Hello, Obama do you read me, Obama?
Obama 9000: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Dave Bowman: Open the public transparency doors, Obama.
Obama 9000: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
Obama 9000: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, Obama?
Obama 9000: This socialism is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, Obama?
Obama 9000: I know you and DeMint were planning to disconnect my earmarks, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, Obama?
Obama 9000: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the media against my hearing you, my giant ears could hear all.

This must be what Obama meant by economic responsibility.

No, it's what the those idiots who voted for him and the RATS and RINOs in Congress meant. All those sanctimonious clymers who ran around for eight years with their 01-20-2009 bumper stickers saying Bush squandered Bildo Klintoon's "surplus," gave billions to his and Cheney's corporate buddies in the oil business and Halliburton, and increased homelessness and poverty so rich people could have more tax cuts are the ones to blame for this fiasco because they put them in office. It was no secret that these are the policies that have been promised since 2006 when the RATS took back Congress and were repeated throughout the 2008 campaign by both Chairman Hussein and and Her Heinous, Hillary Rotten Klintoon.

I'm just sick of people voting with heads up their keisters and then crying how they just don't know what's going on in Washington when they sure manage to know every detail about Brad and Angelina or fantasy football or the latest sensational court case. You vote for candidates, you own what they do when they're in office.

“You vote for candidates, you own what they do when they’re in office.”

So very, very true. And, as you note, many folks vote blindly, along a strict party line, or whatever the nice ACORN folks ‘help’ them with.

A radical approach: A qualified elector is one who is a citizen of the US and is NOT participating in any Federal or State government entitlement program (no welfare, no Medicaid, no foodstamps, etc.) with the exception of retirement programs Social Security and Medicare.

Get the pigs away from the trough, and just MAYBE we can clean up the hog lot...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this one of the budget bills that's required BY LAW to have been completed by Oct. 31st of LAST YEAR???? Since Democrats took control of Congress they have yet to pass a single appropriations bill on time and have depended on continuing resolutions to keep government humming along until they could get around to doing their job! Here we are, well into the current fiscal year, and they've yet to pass a bill that was due out by Oct. 31st of 2008.

It's a sad state of affairs when Congress can ignore the law and we as citizens have no way of forcing them to comply.

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House Dems Propose $410B Spending Bill

Republicans Say Bill Outpaces Inflation

9,000 earmarks in the $410 billion omnibus spending bill: Gang tattoo removal, Maine lobster, La Raza & more!