"If a project doesn't support our troops, we will not fund it. If a system doesn't perform, we will terminate it. And if Congress sends me a defense bill loaded with that kind of pork, I will veto it."
This week, the Earmarker-in-Chief decided to blow that popsicle stand and broke his promise as he signed into law the 2010 Defense Appropriations Bill . The price tag: $636 billion of appropriations and $4.2 billion of pork.
Worthwhile projects in the defense appropriation?
- $5 million for a visitors center in San Francisco
- $23 million for indigent health care in Hawaii
- $18 million for the Edward Kennedy Policy Institute in Massachusetts
- $1.6 million to computerize hospital records in Oakland
- $47 million for anti-drug training centers around the country
- $20 million for the World War II Museum in Louisiana
- $3.9 million grant to develop an energy-efficient solar film for buildings
- $800,000 for minority prostate cancer research
- $3.6 million for marijuana eradication in Kentucky
- $2.4 million for handicap access and a sprinkler system at a community club in New York
While Mary "Name Your Price" Landrieu and John "Effing" Kerry boasted of their earmarks, Congress cut $300 million from a successful counterinsurgency program used by Army field commanders.
Among actual military appropriations that the services did not ask for:
- 2 destroyers the Navy doesn't want
- 10 C-17's the Air Force doesn't need
- Development of a new jet engine that no one cares about
This is what "change" is all about. Seems the usual business is what we're getting.
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