Now that the Great Stumble Sideways stimulus plan has passed the House and is on its way to the Senate where it is approaching the $900 billion, its time to start taking a good hard look at all the goodies that await sitting there underneath that Christmas Tree.
By the way, the House version of the bill itself in all its 258 page .pdf mind-numbing glory can be found here.
First stop: National Parks.
The man, David Obey (D), Wisconsin who essentially cobbled this thing together is under the gun because the National Park Service is getting $2 billion of the stimulus plan. Obey happens to have a son Craig who is a senior VP and top lobbyist for the National Parks Conservation Association which made public appeals for funds to repair and maintain national parks in the weeks before the House passed the bill Wednesday.
Obey’s people came to his defense by saying there is a tremendous backlog of work at the parks and that people could be put to work by, yada, yada, yada….
But here is the line of defense we thought was the most interesting.
Dicks' chief of staff, George Behan, said neither Obey nor anyone else needed to lobby the lawmaker on the issue.More than anything else, this speaks to the ungodly amount of money contained in this bill and Behan certainly has a point, inferring 0.24% of the total bill as mere crumbs that fell off the dinner table and into Park Service’s lap. No lobbying necessary.
Alright, let’s leave the great outdoors and get inside… way inside. Now, you didn’t think that the Organizer-in-Chief was going to forget his roots, did you? A cool $1 billion will be going to the lovely and talented “Community Development Fund” (p. 228) which will be distributed via the always transparent and accountable “community development block grant program”. Also, the “CFD” will receive an additional $4.2 bil for “neighborhood stabilization”.
You can dress up that pig any which way you will and call it what you please, we will refer to it as seed money for the Obama in ’12 campaign.
More to follow.
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14 comments:
If ever there was a long-neglected pony that needed a big drink of water from the trough, it is the national parks.
My reaction...
$2B. Is that all?
- Mongo Lacing Up the Boots (Oh, and When is Ken Burns' Documentary Coming Out, Anyway??)
Mongo, whether or not the NPS actually needs 2 Bil may or may not be true.
Your "Is that all?" comment, though, is emblematic of the gargantuan-ness of the stimulus bill as every single area of the government that money is being funneled through has a constituency saying, "Is that all?"
Where's my stimulus....sorry honey, what was I thinkin'.
Sure, why not 3B, 4B, let's cut whatever budget for the arts and send it to the parks. Dood, I'm all for it! How about abortion funding, lets cut that and send it to the parks, how about multi million dollar bonuses for execs, let's take it away and give it to the parks. How cool, let's do it!
Dawg
K....maybe I'm just an idiot former enlisted, but...if one is short on money, doesn't one *stop* giving money away, first?
Foxie, you're no dummy. The problematic element of this problem is that we are somehow going to spend our way out of the problem... but which the action verb of that last sentence being what got us into this mess in the first place.
Hey, all I know is that we seem to have had enough money to pay Halliburton $100 for each bag of a U.S. soldier's laundry. $100K for tricked out SUV's for a secretary. Millions of dollars for empty truck convoys -- just so that big business can say they were on the road to Fallujah. Huge contract amounts for tow jobs while our soldiers sat broken down for hours and within easy sniping distance. And on, and on, and on.
If the gravy train is good enough for the GOP's best friend...
Where was all this howling about "Money for Nuthin'" for those Dubya gems?
The Grand Ol' Party got us into this mess. Now they can stand aside. Why? "I won".
- Mongo
Disregarding that conservatives don't support waste, disregarding that the "stimulus" costs many times more than Iraq and Afghanistan, disregarding if the allegations are true or not....
How exactly does that excuse more waste?
The logic of that comment, Mongo, seems to be: "Hey, you guys wasted a boatload of money on Iraq and Afghanistan, now it's our turn to waste even more".
How does that remotely make any sense?
"Bush spoke glowingly of the 84-million-acre park system. As a presidential candidate in 2000 and 2004, he pledged to eliminate the service's nearly $5-billion maintenance backlog by 2005; the most recent estimate to repair and upgrade the nation's parks is $8.7 billion."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-parks25-2009jan25,0,6965342.story
- Mongo
"The National Parks Conservation Assn., a nonpartisan parks advocacy group, testified before Congress that the nation's 391 parks have billions of dollars in "shovel-ready projects," some of them remnants of the system's more than $8.7-billion maintenance backlog.
Citing the CCC as a model, the parks group is advocating for the development of a National Park Service Corps and estimates that investing stimulus funds in parks would create approximately 50,000 jobs. The group has studied the economic impact of parks, particularly in rural areas, finding that every dollar spent at a park generates $4 in benefit.
Construction projects could be contracted out and stimulate the local economy, said Jon Jarvis, park service director for the Pacific-West region.
"We have literally thousands of those types of projects," he said. "The infrastructure of the national park system has come in fits and starts. It was massive during CCC; now a lot of those systems are inadequate and failing."
Jarvis, whose father was in the CCC, said he would like any new park service projects to "set the standard to be as green as possible, to use that bully pulpit to educate the public about what they can do."
"There's a legitimate opportunity to make us part of the stimulus package," said Stephen Martin, superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, where some 1,000 CCC enrollees labored. "We have a broad need for people to work in parks. We can offer employment programs for college students -- help educate them. We require work from engineers and accountants.""
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-yosemite-ccc-stimulus1-2009feb01,0,3759868.story?page=1
- Mongo With Another Biased Cut n Paste From The Liberal Elite Media
0.o
Liberal, hell... "Buy more Beef United, a non partisan group, testified today that Congress should have hamburgers instead of Pizza for the superbowl party...."
How will the Republic ever survive without a properly funded NPS?
Mongo, thank you for re-enforcing my point.
As you are now aware, every single constituency/advocacy group will trot out numbers to display just how much their pet govt. project or favorite federal dept. is dangerously underfunded by billions of dollars.
With respect to the NPS, I've extensive boots-on-the-ground experience with NPS sites, particularly in the south-west and I'm not seeing the dangerously underfunded condition described.
An $8.7 Bil backlog? For that, I better be getting a 500 hundred room casino/resort on the North Rim and a 4-lane hi-way right through Yosemite Valley... and wouldn't that be grand?
I've been to a park or two myself -- and read just a tiny bit. Parks by their very nature are fluid places. Trails, buildings, roads and bridges get washed out or heavily damaged, e.g.
This is just off the top of my head, and -- of course -- no means comprehensive...
- Graffiti removal
- Trash removal
- Habitat restoration (similar to project along Yosemite Valley stetch of Merced)
- Counter-narcotics (in Sequioa for rivers being used to grow pot, e.g.)
- Raises for rangers
- Increase ranger staff and recruitment
- Modern sewer pipes (lest we have a Rolando Beach-type incident in the middle of Old Faithful village, e.g.)
- Artifact inventory and protection
- Interpretation exhibits
- Studies (botanical, human use, etc -- e.g. a study into the effect of multiple GOP-sanctioned plutonium leases at the edge of the Grand Canyon might be in order)
Again, that's just off the top of my head. Way smarter minds than mine who know these issues inside and out can probably go down the entire list of $8.5B and make a water-tight case for each project. I'm not your guy for that.
But I get the general picture, and that is that our most prized and respected natural assets have suffered greatly from neglect -- and that there is a 3-letter acronym beginning with "G" that has played a huge part in their status. These are places that are supposed to last generation to generation, down through the centuries. GOP has only had the foresight to make a quick buck off of them right now, and not preserve them into the next decade -- let alone into the next millenium.
- Mongo
Backlog= wishlist?
Usually, backlog= needs to be done ASAP, for basic upkeep.
Maybe it's to plow up the roads they missed on the Nat'l Forest up in Washington....
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