{"id":3323,"date":"2010-11-10T03:19:18","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T11:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=3323"},"modified":"2010-11-10T03:19:18","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T11:19:18","slug":"what-will-we-do-about-earmarks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/10\/what-will-we-do-about-earmarks\/","title":{"rendered":"What Will We Do About Earmarks?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This might be a good day for the devil to check the infernal regions for icicles, because there is actually something about which I agree with Teabaggers.  They don\u2019t like earmarks, while corporate Republicans love them.  Democrats are in the middle, having cut the amount spent on earmarks in half, starting in 2007.  Now you may ask, what\u2019s important about earmarks, given that they are only about 1% of the budget, when there are more important things at stake.  As I see it, anything that ties up Republicans fighting among themselves takes time they could be spending ending trying to end Social Security, end Medicare, end healthcare reform, however paltry and delayed, ship jobs over seas, kill the CFPB, kill the Volker Rule, cut unemployment benefits, cut veterans\u2019 benefits, hold umpteen gazillion hearings, disenfranchise minority voters, promote killing gay Ugandans, establish pseudo-Christian Sharia, start more wars, and transfer wealth from the poor and middle classes to the rich.<\/font><\/p>\n

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\"10earmarks\"Legislators backed by the Tea Party want to ban pork-barrel spending in the Senate against the wishes of their old guard Republican colleagues<\/strong>, reports the Wall Street Journal. [Murdoch delinked] South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint yesterday began mobilizing Senate Republicans against the earmark system, which channels federal funds to legislators’ pet projects. House Republicans back the idea, as does President Barack Obama. But the move hasn’t pleased some Republicans who have spent years securing pork to sate their constituents: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has argued both that earmarks represent a trivial proportion of federal spending and that they provide an essential bulwark against executive power. "Every president would like for us to appropriate all the money and send it to them and let them spend it in any way they want to," Mr. McConnell said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. "The earmark issue is about discretion\u2014about an argument between the executive branch and the legislative branch over how funds should be spent."\u2026 [emphasis original<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Slate Magazine<\/a>><\/p>\n

This should be particularly interesting, because Senate Minority Leader \u201cBought Bitch Mitch\u201d McConnell is the current earmark champion.<\/font><\/p>\n

Sadly, it will probably be a short fight.  Even Rand Paul is showing signs of weakness, saying that he intends to fight for Kentucky’s share of the pork.  He\u2019s just a Republican, after all, and his greed is showing.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This might be a good day for the devil to check the infernal regions for icicles, because there is actually something about which I agree with Teabaggers.  They don\u2019t like earmarks, while corporate Republicans love them.  Democrats are in the middle, having cut the amount spent on earmarks in half, starting in 2007.  Now you […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}