In case you don’t have your mathboxes handy, we’re going to hold up funding the government (and extending unemployment insurance and enacting the START Treaty and ending discrimination against gays and lesbians in the miltary and…) because of grave philosophical reservations to .07% of the federal budget.

Valid point, but uhhh…

$8 Billion out of $1.2 Trillion represents 0.7%, not 0.07%.

DOH! I guess you caught it already, so nevermind.

I swear to Spaghetti Monster you had it at 0.07% when I first read it.

Well decades of Republican campaigning has the American public convinced that our national budget mostly consists of pork barrel spending and welfare payments to illegal immigrants and bla.., erm I mean…. people who don’t work hard… The angry tea party masses cannot be convinced by your elitist “numbers” that their beloved medicare, social security, and military spending is the vast majority of the budget and really shrinking the federal budget would necessitate cuts to these programs. The Republicans could never win if people realized that white old grandma milly is the true welfare queen.

Yes there are some bad earmarks in every bill, but this whole objection to every earmark has become a cult obsession.

This isn’t just petulant, it’s pretty much nonsensical.

If you were concerned with making your fellow citizens as miserable as you are, you’d understand the self-destructive logic of the spite voter.

Every cent given to a scientist is a cent spent on anti-Christian measures. This money should just be given to the church as tithe.

I should have guessed it would be John McCain again. His last presidential campaign did take a pro-pest stance, after all. Remember fruit fly research?

The people who own the corporate hog farms and who keep John McCain in three of his houses seem to not want the Government to cover the costs of figuring out how to keep their hogshit lagoons from suffocating people in South Carolina.

I sure hope they’re willing to pay for figuring out how to keep their hogshit lagoons from suffocating people in South Carolina on their own, otherwise it’ll never get done.

Didn’t those same senators just defeat a bill intended to forbid earmarks?

And how many of these earmarks go to Republican districts, Michele Bachmann?  More than the Minnesota average of $2.1 million?  Or the $398 million that Ron Paul asked for in 2010?

“Hypocrite” is too mild a word.

several of the senators who are standing up against earmarks, including Cornyn, have earmarks in the bill.

“several of the senators who are standing up against earmarks, including Cornyn, have earmarks in the bill.”

Of course.

My appropriation is critical to the Americans I represent, and certainly cannot be considered an “earmark”.  I resent the implication that the money allocated to build a statue honoring myself, Senator William J. Le Petomaine, is somehow a waste of funds, which is a total misunderstanding of its importance to the people and the economy of my hometown of Springfield.  This great work of civic virtue will be dedicated to the real Americans living in the great state of Washihoma, and will become a beacon of hope for all Americans!

On the other hand, the money boldly stolen from the general fund by my friend Senator Bilgewater, and allocated to the improvement of levees, in order to prevent further flooding and the accompanying devastation and loss of life in the great state of New Marybama, is an unconscionable act of fiscal piracy that must be condemned in the strongest terms!

Harrumph!...

Good god, I think somebody’s had a few too many servings of grammy’s special eggnog.

I’m not even going to attempt to decipher corwin’s bizarre smörgåsbord of nonsensical words and misplaced punctuation symbols. I have no fucking clue what point, if any, he is trying to make.

Jesse—you may actually want to take out the throwaway line about unemployment benefits—I think you imagined a decimal point where there shouldn’t be one, but it really has little to do with the general thrust of your argument (and either way we are talking <10% of the budget). Unless maybe you are talking about only the extension to the long-term unemployed and not the extension of unemployment benefits overall. 

And corwin, you do sound really really drunk. But on the otherhand, good for you for being able to read by age 12 *(you think). Maybe you will transfer those skills to be able to write someday.

The $1.2 trillion bill, released on Tuesday, includes more than 6,000 earmarks totaling $8 billion, an amount that many lawmakers decried as <b?an irresponsible binge following a midterm election in which many voters demanded that the government cut spending.</b>

These wouldn’t happen to be the same lawmakers that are holding everything hostage for the $700 billion in tax cuts to the ultra-rich, would they?

The thing with earmarks being passed without debate in the full Senate though? Kind of necessary simply due to the fact that the Senate does not have time to debate this shit earmark by earmark in full session, especially with this level of partisan warfare over everything to come through. They are hundreds of votes behind the House as it is—-imagine what would happen if it took three weeks of heated Senate debate over whether the grape thing was worth its cost, and repeat ad nauseum for every other earmark in the blasted thing . . . we’d get absolutely nothing done.

Which, with a Houseful of Republicans, might be a good thing . . . although I really would rather the Senate Democrats insisted on going through all of their backlogged votes before considering anything the Republicans come up with next term . . . that would be a reasonably good counter for a Republican filibuster, since they would need to give everything up-or-down votes to have any hope of getting to THEIR bills.

And of course we’re going to hold it hostage for hundreds of billions worth additional deficits (caused by the continuation of top 1% tax breaks) while freaking out about a measly $13.5 billion, which is spent about every two minutes in Iraq and Afghanistan (ok, I’m exaggerating on that last bit).

Or what Kyra said…

Here’s more on stupid fuckers who are voting no on the budget to oppose earmarks after adding earmarks for their own districts.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2010/12/15/132083977/reporters-jump-senators-for-perceived-earmark-hypocrisy?ft=1&f=1014&sc=tw
They vote “no” knowing full well that the grownups in the senate will have to pass a budget anyway. Senate rules need to be changed so that if a senator votes “no” on a bill all of their ammendments will be voided.

The thing with earmarks being passed without debate in the full Senate though? Kind of necessary simply due to the fact that the Senate does not have time to debate this shit earmark by earmark in full session, especially with this level of partisan warfare over everything to come through. They are hundreds of votes behind the House as it is—-imagine what would happen if it took three weeks of heated Senate debate over whether the grape thing was worth its cost, and repeat ad nauseum for every other earmark in the blasted thing . . . we’d get absolutely nothing done.

“By Executive Order, should government spending be required to be curtailed because of this slowdown by Republicans, I will be defunding all government operations in teh following states in sequence, and I thank Wikipedia for the list

# Utah (R + 30.768)
# Idaho (R + 27.018)
# Wyoming (R + 26.132)
# Nebraska (R + 22.606)
# Alaska (R + 20.946)
# Oklahoma (R + 20.152)
# Kansas (R + 16.892)
# North Dakota (R + 16.484)
# Alabama (R + 15.162)
# Texas (R + 12.872)”

(Just kidding!! Obama will start out with an offer to defund all the Blue States, and then settle for a compromise position of herding every Democrat voter into camps to be starved to death cheaply.  Bipartisanship.)

A lot of those “earmarks” look like USDA-ARS grants. Almost the sole purpose of the USDA is to serve the US farmer. However, many people in agriculture (in my limited experience) are conservative. Thus, they vote for cuts to research into the very things that they need. If $400.000 was allocated to protect potato crops in Wisconsin, it’s because local extension and/or USDA agents identified a problem and submitted a grant proposal, which was then reviewed and approved by a granting body. It’s not like this some random shit somebody made up to get free money. Maybe Republicans want the potato crop in Wisconsin to fail, thus hurting farmers and by extension the potato processing plant outside Stevens Point, and so on.

And traditionally Dems aren’t good with complex problems (like arithmetic0 Could you check on that and get back to me. From my point of view, if i mis measure something,like say a,wbc count by tenfold, I may miss a leukemia

And if you could communicate in grammatically correct English, that might reduce errors as well.

First,your insistence that folks keeping their money is stealing.I am always puzzled.A little explanation might help

Just like having to have auto insurance is stealing, because people have to pay for it instead of keeping the money to do with as they please.

Jesse,what does it take for you to get it.Look around you,at the results of your political philosophy.Things have crashed.

Because GWB and the Republican Congress followed Jesse’s political philosophy from 2000-2007, GWB until 2009, etc.

Jess,
You sure about the 5.6 B for unemployment benefits/ it seems a bit low.And traditionally Dems aren’t good with complex problems (like arithmetic0 Could you check on that and get back to me. From my point of view, if i mis measure something,like say a,wbc count by tenfold, I may miss a leukemia
Comment #14: corwin

Remind me to avoid Corwin’s hospital / blood center at all costs.  If they hire people who write their resume like his posts I fear they;ll be vector prime for the next pandemic.

Blondie, there’s lies, damned lies and statistics.  You need the look at the exact wording of the poll to determine the tax cut turn around.
Did they separate the $250,000+ tax cut from the >$250,000?
Was a push?  Did they include the detail about unemployment that’s been hogtied to the tax cut?

Statistically, the devil is in the details and FAUX “News” and their Republican lackies are paid to obscure the details.

Actually there has been lots of back and forth in the polls wrt the top tax cuts. This summer allowing all tax cuts to expire was the more popular position. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/previewing-the-g-o-p-s-2012-argument-on-tax-cuts/
Unfortunately the vast majority of Americans do not have very strong policy positions, and mass opinion is often sharply different from the opinions of those in the know.

@BlackBloc

“Every cent given to a scientist is a cent spent on anti-Christian measures.”

Yeah, because cancer researchers iare so concerned with furthering some perceived anti-Christian agenda.  I guess somebody doesn’t want a smallpox vaccine, or a polio vaccine, or antibiotics, or a car, or electricity, or a computer to make inane accusations of persecution with.