Posted on 12/23/2007 10:57:43 PM PST by Norman Bates
Every single dollar you paid in federal income taxes this year was spent on pork projects.
Outraged yet?
About $20 billion of the just-passed $555 billion federal budget was earmarked for pork. That might sound like a small percentage, but Heritage Foundation analyst Brian Riedl calculated that it equals the entire federal income tax payments for everyone in Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Delaware.
So congratulations, every dollar you paid in federal taxes went to help some member of Congress get elected.
What wonderful projects did you pay for?
-The Andre Agassi prep school in Las Vegas -- $200,000.
-Olive fruit fly research in France -- $213,000.
-The Stark County, Ohio YMCA -- $500,000.
-A bike trail in Minnesota -- $700,000.
The police department in Bastrop, La., got $1.6 million, supposedly for bullet-proof vests. Even if you think Washington ought to fund local police, consider this comment from a Bastrop cop:
"There's no way we'd need that kind of money just to put all our people in vests," said Det. Curtis Stephenson.
Outraged yet?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged in March to cut the number of earmarks by half. Didn't happen. This budget contains more than 11,000 earmarks, the second-highest number in history.
Outraged yet?
Congress cannot be trusted to end earmarks. If left to the legislators who use earmarks to get re-elected, there's no way this robbery will end. It will take a President to stop it. And there is only one candidate running for President who can be trusted to do that: John McCain.
Sen. McCain was first elected to Congress in 1982. In the 25 years since, he has sponsored not a single earmark. Not one.
His yearly haranguing of Congress for its pork-barrel spending has helped bring national attention to this outrageous pilfering of taxpayer money. Sen. McCain has pledged that if elected President he will veto every bill that contains an earmark. And those who know him know he means it.
Let's put the veto pen in the hands of the one man who will use it to X out all pork-barrel spending and get Washington's fiscal house in order. Let's end once and for all this outrageous use of taxpayer money for the private benefit of elected officials. Let's elect John McCain President.
“Found NOT GUILTY of any wrongdoing”
LOL, M.O., that’s incidental! Merry Christmas!
“How about McCains involvement with the Savings and Loan scandal??”
Not guilty.
Consider the polling in post 35 as another point to consider.
Didn’t he have a problem with out of control spending in his campaign? Can’t manage his own money issues, why do I think he could manage more?
Campaigns are normally divided between the financial arm and the actual campaign arm. Nevertheless, he fixed the problem. That ought to count for something. Merry Christmas!
Second, "going nuclear" works both ways. A rat President would be able to appoint courts-full of Stephen Breyers and Ruth Bader-Ginsbergs on a bare majority vote and there would be nothing the Republicans could do about it. (Of course, the rats could still "go nuclear" on their own watch, but the chances of that are at least a little diminished. Once again it would be the rats breaking new ground in their efforts to take America down the sewer.)
The "Gang of Fourteen" scheme could not have worked out better.
McCain-Feingold was probably initialted w/ good intentions but turned out to have unforseen negatives
I totally disagree with your effort to dismiss McCain's responsibility for this abominable piece of crap. It's a killer, and it makes McCain look completely untrustworthy. Any legislator who promotes legislation based on the premise that politicians are crooks who are routinely bought and sold tells me more about the sponsoring legislator than anything else. It is the stone opposite of Reagan's philosophy which was, "People donate to my campaign because they like my positions, not because they are trying to influence my positions."
Thank you. I prefer to examine records than to listen to campaign slogans and soundbites. It’s a waste of the internet’s potential to regurgitate the pablum of candidate ads and MSM punditry.
McCain is a fake conservative and I will never vote for him, WELCOME back to PENNSYLVANIA AVE Hillry and Bill!!!!
Not hardly.
The dems agreed because they know the "nuclear option" would break them and push though Bush nominees who were vanquishing for years without the normal and decades old traditions of an up or down vote.
McCain helped backstab the GOP and Bush.
Nice try BTW, but pure Bullsh*t
Try reading the posts and then get a clue.
Here they are:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1943728/posts?page=46#46
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1943728/posts?page=20#20
Point taken.
I have always believed that with his version of CFR, McCain was selfishly trying to atone for his 'Keating Five' involvement - - assuage his guilty conscience or something... Anyway, what McCain succeeded in enacting was a frontal assault on the Constitution (regardless of a reckless 5 - 4 Supreme Court ruling) and the law is little more than an "incumbent protection" law.
The proper CFR would have been a carefully crafted transparency law.
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