Under the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s “Affordable Health Choices Act,” local governments can apply for “community transformation” grants to build jungle gyms, sidewalks, bicycle paths, and grocery stores, to install streetlights, and to establish new farmers’ markets.

The dollar amount of these grants, and of the total “community transformation” earmark program, is left to the discretion of the Obama administration.

Cities can also apply for “community makeover” grants, which can provide them with up to $10 per resident in taxpayer dollars for “beautifying streets.”

Sen. Tom Coburn, MD (R-OK) sponsored an amendment to the HELP Committee bill that would have prevented any funds it made available from being used “to build, develop, or maintain sidewalks, parks, bike paths, or street lights.” The amendment was defeated by party-line vote.

The “Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” the House of Representatives’ health overhaul legislation, also contains an earmark for these grants. The House bill sets the amount available for their funding at $1.6 billion.

Sources: “Affordable Health Choices Act,” Title III, Subtitle C
HR 3200, § 3151

Want to see a full list of the earmarks in the Energy and Water Bill that the House is about to begin debating? Well, I hope you have some stamina because there are 1,866 of them to read.

You’ll notice that many of them are being requested by “the President.” That would be the Barack Obama 2012 re-election campaign project you are seeing there.

For some reason, my list is causing trouble with the code here, so the full list was posted by Jamie Dupree.

Wow. I wonder if Chairman Murtha - the one who delivered all the earmarks - knew that his brother was apparently somehow implicated in this fraud. I also wonder who else on the House Appropriations Committee knew. After all, the entire committee is responsible for vetting earmark requests and at least making a minimal attempt to determine that they are spent in compliance with the law:

A contracting firm that had hired the brother of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) as its lobbyist took the proceeds from a Murtha-provided, $8.2 million Air Force earmark and distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to other companies represented by the Congressman’s brother for items that were not part of the project, the Justice Department charged Thursday…

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Literally.

I’ve read the Constitution several times, but I’ve never seen the part that says that elected officials are allowed to physically assault people who’d like to ask questions. Like, say, about his questionable earmark habits:

Congressman Alan Grayson has had a close relationship with the civil rights group for which he tried to get hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. As WDBO first reported, the freshman Representative requested $350,000 for the Florida Civil Rights Association, despite its history of controversy, and being run by a man the state says is not trustworthy enough to be a bail bondsman.
(H/T: the NRCC)

Finding the constraints demanded by the dignity of the office too much to bear, Rep. Grayson? Because that’s easily fixed.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

An incredibly arrogant, venal and stupid move from an incredibly arrogant, venal, and stupid Member of Congress:

A plan by House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) to ban “monuments to me” in this year’s appropriations bills has been sharply criticized behind closed doors by a senior Democrat who wants to direct $1 million to an employment center in her district bearing her name.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) confronted Obey in the Democratic whip meeting Thursday, complaining about his refusal to fund her earmark request for the Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center in the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education appropriations bill, according to another Democratic Member and aides.

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Citizens Against Government Waste is announcing the release of the 2008 Pig Book.

The Congressional Pig Book (download in pdf format) is CAGW’s annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The 2008 Pig Book identified 11,610 projects at a cost of $17.2 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2008. A “pork” project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures. To qualify as pork, a project must meet one of seven criteria that were developed in 1991 by CAGW and the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition.

The latest installment of Citizens Against Government Waste’s (CAGW) 18-year exposé of pork-barrel spending includes $3,000,000 for The First Tee; $1,950,000 for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service; and $188,000 for the Lobster Institute in Maine.

In fiscal year 2008, Congress stuffed 11,610 projects (the second highest total ever) into the 12 appropriations bills worth $17.2 billion. The 11,610 projects represent a 337 percent increase over the 2,658 projects in fiscal year 2007. The $17.2 billion is a 30 percent increase over the fiscal year 2007 total of $13.2 billion. Only the Defense and Homeland Security bills included earmarks in fiscal year 2007, so comparisons of other bills are made between fiscal years 2008 and 2006. Total pork identified by CAGW since 1991 adds up to $271 billion.

Visit the CAGW site to read a longer summary of the wasteful, pork spending perpetrated by Congress in 2008.

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Okinawa Jack seems very, very defensive in this article (H/T: Instapundit):

Murtha defends statement

The region’s outspoken congressman is in the national lens again – this time CBS News television cameras – in a report Wednesday that calls him “the king of earmarks who wastes a lot of taxpayer money” and implies that the FBI is investigating.

U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, responded by waving the Constitution at the camera, saying: “What it says is the Congress of the United States appropriates the money. Got that?”

The CBS article in question is here, along with video footage that Murtha is going to regret. You can say and do things to, say, a private citizen with a video camera that you can’t do to a national news organization, and he made no friends in CBS with that antic. As can be seen with the next couple of paragraphs:

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I’m not a federal prosecutor. That means that I don’t have to bend over backward to avoid making what is really a fairly obvious statement. Via Instapundit:

PMA Lobbyist, Relatives Gave Lawmakers $1.5 Million Since 2000

A defense lobbyist and his family made $1.5 million in political contributions from 2000 through 2008 as the lobbyist’s now-embattled firm helped clients win billions of dollars in federal contracts. A sizable chunk of those campaign dollars went to the House members who control Pentagon spending.

Paul Magliocchetti, founder of the PMA Group, and nine of his relatives — two children, his daughter-in-law, his current wife, his ex-wife and his ex-wife’s parents, sister and brother-in-law — poured contributions into the coffers of candidates, political action committees and national and state party committees, according to a CQ review of public documents.

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Yikes - that’s a lot of paper. Then again, as the Obama administration’s advent has apparently succeeded in bringing fur back into fashion with “high-minded” Democrats, I’m not terribly surprised that paper waste of that magnitude (let alone spending waste of the magnitude that paper represents) is pretty much a ho-hum deal these days.

Update: An emailer points out that the 54 Rs and Ds who abstained from voting on the motion must have made President Obama, with his history of over 100 “present” votes in the Illinois state legislature, very proud.

Minority Leader John Boehner’s Motion to Recommit, which would have frozen federal spending at current levels and stripped the 9,000 un-reviewed earmarks from the $410,000,000,000.00 omnibus spending bill currently working its way through Congress, was voted down 160-218 this afternoon.

Every Republican who voted did so in support of the measure, as did 8 Democrats (Reps. Altmire, Childers, Donnelly, Ellsworth, Giffords, Minnick, Mitchell and Nye; h/t Connie Hair at HE for the names).

26 Republicans and 28 Democrats abstained from voting on the motion altogether.

The 26 Republicans who abstained from voting on this motion are listed below the fold. Is your Congressman one of them?

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Well, Rep. Flake tried to get the Democrats to vote in favor of ethical behavior again, and again they voted him down. Via Instapundit:

House turns back call for PMA probe

The House on Thursday night turned back another call to investigate the PMA Group, a once-powerful lobbying firm whose offices were recently raided by the FBI and which has close ties to Pennsylvania Rep. John P. Murtha (D).

Twenty-one Democrats, including nine freshmen, voted to proceed with debate on the measure offered by Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake (R) calling for an investigation of the lobbying firm. Most of the Democrats represent fiscally conservative districts.

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We’ve received word that House Republicans plan to force a vote this morning on a spending freeze that would lock in federal spending at current levels and strip the $410,000,000,000.00 “omnibus” spending bill of all 9,000 “un-scrutinized earmarks.”

Though certain to fail, this is another laudable move from a GOP minority that unanimously opposed the nearly $1,000,000,000,000.00 in pork-barrel waste that made up President Obama’s “stimulus” package.

GOP leaders have also called on Obama to veto the omnibus when it passes the Democrat-led legislature, but the likelihood of the man who already signed that $1,000,000,000,000.00 spending bill (while declaring the pork-laden monstrosity “free of earmarks”) is, in my estimation, a bit less than the likelihood of his actually taking up Rush Limbaugh on the latter’s offer of a public debate.

Update: The AP says the following:

The top Republican in the House is seizing on the latest spike in unemployment to call for a freeze on government spending and to urge President Barack Obama to veto a $410 billion spending bill.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the jump in unemployment to 8.1 percent and the loss of 651,000 jobs in February is a sign of a worsening recession that demands better solutions from both parties.

Boehner criticized the spending bill as chocked full of wasteful, pork-barrel projects. The Senate postponed a vote on the bill until Monday amid the criticism.

Boehner said he hoped Obama would veto the bill. He urged the president to work with House Republicans to impose a spending freeze until the end of this fiscal year.

Update 2: Boehner’s office had the following to say about the Motion to Recommit:

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Repeat: “may.” Congress has an impressive talent at somehow managing to find new and exciting ways to spend your money.

Senate bogs down over $410 billion spending bill

WASHINGTON – The Senate, tied up in a fight over a huge omnibus appropriations bill, will have to pass a stopgap spending measure Friday in order to avoid a partial government shutdown.

[snip]

The huge, 1,132-page spending bill awards big increases to domestic programs and is stuffed with pet projects sought by lawmakers in both parties. The measure has an extraordinary reach, wrapping together nine spending bills to fund the annual operating budgets of every Cabinet department except for Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.

The measure was written mostly over the course of last year, before projected deficits quadrupled and Obama’s economic recovery bill left many of the same spending accounts swimming in cash.

And, to the embarrassment of Obama — who promised during last year’s campaign to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel ways — the bill contains 7,991 pet projects totaling $5.5 billion, according to calculations by the GOP staff of the House Appropriations Committee.

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Now this is a surprise:

President Obama, who took a no-earmark pledge on the campaign trail, is listed as one of dozens of cosponsors of a $7.7 million set-aside in the fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill (HR 1105) passed by the House on Wednesday…

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(Followup to this post)

The bad news, of course, is that majority party Democrats are adamant against having any investigation into whether there are links between campaign contributions and earmarks in bills - which is very interesting, given that they control Congress, and thus can presumably make sure that the proceedings are fair…

The House voted Wednesday to kill a resolution calling for an ethics investigation into potential quid pro quo between lobbyist campaign donations and lawmakers.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., sponsored the proposal that would have forced the House Ethics Committee to launch a probe into ties between the source and timing of campaign contributions by lobbyists and subsequent legislator requests for special projects or earmarks.

While open-ended, Flake’s resolution was a direct response to the ongoing federal investigation into the PMA Group, a lobbying company accused of making fraudulent donations to lawmakers using names of people who did not exist.

The firm, which has contributed millions to politicians in the last decade, has close ties to senior Democratic appropriators including Reps. John Murtha D-Pa., and Pete Visclosky,D-Ind. The FBI raided PMA’s headquarters in November and is investigating the group’s founder and president, Paul Magliochetti, a former Murtha aide.

Ah. That might be the problem, right there.

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As you know, it’s in response to the PMA meltdown/outrage (see here for some background posts):

Rep. Flake targets earmarks amidst PMA controversy
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), the House’s most vocal critic of pork barrel spending, is trying to shake the ethics committee into action on the link between earmarks and campaign contributors.

Flake has seized on the public corruption investigation of PMA Group, a once-powerful lobbying force that has disintegrated in the wake of an FBI probe into fraudulent campaign donations to numerous members of Congress.

In the past 24 hours, Flake has highlighted earmarks in the omnibus appropriations bill for PMA clients, written a scathing op-ed to The New York Times about Congress’s pay-to-play practices and offered a privileged resolution on the House floor that would force the House ethics panel to scrutinize the connection between earmarks and campaign cash and report back to the full body in two months.

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Here is a little list:

1. The ability to restore fiscal discipline, given that we passed a stimulus bill in the House that spends more than did the massive New Deal boondoggles of years past.
2. The ability to have a separate and vigorous argument over education policy, given that federal education outlays have been doubled in the stimulus bill.
3. The ability to have a separate and vigorous argument over health care policy, given that the states are receiving $87 billion in Medicare funds, and that Medicaid and SCHIP coverage is being determined through the stimulus bill.
4. The ability to have a separate and vigorous argument over redistribution of wealth, given that the stimulus bill engages in redistribution.
5. The ability to crack down on the culture of earmarks.

Sources are here, here, and here. These are the “good government” policies that were sold to us during the election?