Obama Claims Stimulus Pork-Free, AP Disagrees
Filed under: Senate, House, Democrats, Barack Obama, Obama Administration
During Obama’s presser last night, he repeatedly asserted that the Stimulus bill before this nation is certified pork-free. There are no earmarks, the President insisted, both to the press and to the town hall meeting yesterday. After all the lamenting from Republicans and conservative pundits about pork, can the President really be correct?
Not really. I mean, look at it this way. If you are cooking a chicken, in a duck … in a turkey, and you decide to wrap it in bacon, then you’ve added pork to your meal. But if, on the other hand, you’re cooking a bacon log, you aren’t adding pork, are you? It’s made of pork. That is it’s nature. You may be adding cheese, or perhaps pineapple wedges (awesome) but you aren’t adding pork. So I guess that’s kinda what Obama is trying to say. This is a spending bill. You don’t have to earmark it when spending is the objective. You can’t, you see, earmark an earmark.
Even the AP isn’t buying Obama’s claims regarding the stimulus, not to mention his claims about his appointments.
Obama and the Democrats are playing the politics of fear, here. They want to push their spending party through and get it signed right away, under the guise of emergency assistance, before the people of America have a chance to object. This idea that the bill is bipartisan is absurd. As Mark Impomeni mentioned on Randi Rhodes’ show yesterday, the conspicuous lack of support from the man who loves Democrats too much, John McCain, is telling.
Anyone paying attention has already seen hundreds of examples of wasteful spending in the nearly trillion dollar package, and that is directed spending. Don’t forget the billions in discretionary spending. The Senate compromise version contains $1,100,000,000 in supplemental discretionary grants for airport spending, for example. Gee, I wonder who might have pushed for that?
The President wants you to think that the stimulus bill isn’t wasteful because there are no earmarks. But when the bill is designed to spend money, you don’t use or need earmarks to get your pork on. It’s the very nature of the package. He also wants you to think the choice is between doing something and just plain doing nothing. In a way, that is true too. We can either do something for the economy, or we can pass his pork bill and do nothing.
I hope the American people will review this bill in detail. Visit ReadTheStimulus.org for full text. Make sure while there you read and sign the petition urging the President to keep his campaign promise and, once it passes Congress, post the full text of the legislation in its final form online for five days for the public to review before he signs it.
Stop threatening Armageddon, Mr. President, and start coming clean.
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