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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