Omnibus spending bill

[Soldier4Christ]

Omnibus spending bill

An omnibus spending bill, also called the consolidated appropriations bill, is a bill that sets the budget of many departments of the United States government at once. It is one possible outcome of the budget process in the U.S.

Every year, Congress must pass bills that appropriate money for all discretionary government spending. Generally, one bill is passed for each sub-committee of the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations. Ordinarily, each bill is passed separately — one bill for Defense, one for Homeland Security, and so on.

When Congress does not or cannot produce separate bills in a timely fashion (by the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1), it will roll many of the separate appropriations bills into one omnibus spending bill. Some of the reasons that Congress might not complete all the separate bills include partisan disagreement, disagreement amongst members of the same political party, and too much work on other bills.

Often, omnibus spending bills are criticized for being full of pork (unnecessary/wasteful spending that pleases constituents). The bills regularly stretch to more than 1,000 pages long and often have not even been read in full by the people voting for them. Nevertheless, they have grown more common in recent years. This year the omnibus bill exceeded 3,500 pages.

This bill was passed by the Senate last Wednesday. This bill is quite large and as a result is very difficult to sort through and find any one source that has made it easy to list exactly what was passed and what wasn't. The bill contains 11,772 earmarks (pork) at a cost of $15,780,533,623.

Some of the things passed was additional appropriations funding for the Iraq war. Funding for a 3.5% increase for military employees. While funding for the border fence was gutted completely.

Below are some of the most egregious earmarks in the bill:

1. $25,000: Curriculum development for the study of mariachi music, Clark County School Distinct, NV, Labor-HHS.
2. $25,000: Banana Factory for an arts and technology after school program, Bethlehem, PA, Labor-HHS.
3. $45,000: A+ for Abstinence for abstinence education and related services, Waynesboro, PA, Labor-HHS.
4. $300,000: CyberSeniors, Inc. - Experience Senior Power Program, Detroit, MI, Labor-HHS.
5. $225,000: National Wild Turkey Federation, SC, Agriculture.
6. $250,000: Country Music Hall of Fame, Nashville, TN, VA/HUD.
7. $1,000,000: Missouri Pork Producers Federation: converting animal waste into energy, MO, VA/ HUD.
8. $75,000: Renovations of the Merry Go Round Playhouse, Auburn, NY, VA/HUD.
9. $100,000: Punxsutawney Weather Museum, Punxsutawney, PA, VA/HUD.
10. $306,000: Restroom repair at Porter Beach at Indian Dunes NL, IN, Interior.
11. $4,989,000: Stabilize bathhouses for adaptive reuse, Hot Springs, AR, Interior.
12. $800,000: Soybean Rust Research, Ames, IA, Interior.
13. $1,400,000: Laser lines of tug roads and lake Hood Seaplane base, Ted Stevens International Airport, AK, Transportation.
14. $1,593: Potato Storage, Madison, WI, Agriculture.
15. $250,000: Asparagus Technology and Production, WA, Agriculture.
16. $50,000: Feral Hogs, MO, Agriculture.
17. $150,000: Coca-Cola Space Science Center, Columbs, GA, VA/HUD
18. $150,000: Beaver management and damage. WI, Agriculture
19. $250,000: Sidewalks, street furniture, and facade improvements. Boca Raton, FL, VA/HUD
20. $200,000: American Cotton Museum. Greenville, TX, VA/HUD.
21. $218,250 to the Port of Brookings Harbor, Oregon for the construction of a seafood processing plant.
22. $344,000 to the City of New York Department of Parks and Recreation for the renovations to the Bath House at Crotona Park.
23. $72,750 to the City of Portland, Oregon for the Central City Eastside Street Car project.
24. $1,000,000 for the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi $250,000 for the City of Caribou, Maine to improve and repair a gymnasium and related facilities in the Armory building.
25. $275,000 for the Village of Tijeras, New Mexico for the purchase of a fire truck 26. $200,000 for the town of Pahrump, Nevada for costs associated with the construction of the Pahrump/Nye County fairground.
27. $550,000 for Cleveland Playhouse Square.
28. $250,000 for the City of Birmingham, Alabama for the renovations to the Birmingham Zoo.
29. $100,000 for building a playground in Louisville, Kentucky $100,000 to the City of Ottawa, Kansas for the improvements to the municipal swimming pool.
30. $100,000 to the City of Rochester, New York for planning and expansion of the High Falls Film Festival.
31. $500,000 to Jazz at Licoln Center in New York City for facilities construction.
32. $200,000 for construction of the Blowing Rock Performing Arts Center in Blowing Rock North Carolina.
33. $100,000 to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras, North Carolina for facilities construction.
34. $388,000 to the village of Western Springs, Illinois for construction of a parking lot.
35. $121,250 to the City of Los Angeles, California for the rehabilitation of the Echo Park Boathouse.

I expect as time goes by that we will discover many more atrocities that our government has included in this bill.

[Soldier4Christ]

Taxpayer group decries earmark-heavy omnibus

A government watchdog group is voicing outrage over the abundance of pork-barrel projects contained in the more than half-a-trillion-dollar omnibus-spending bill designed to fund the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year.



Among the more than 9,000 earmarks stuffed into 3,500-page bill are: $500,000 for streetscape improvements in Alameda, California; and another $400,000 for the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York. Annie Patnaude with Americans for Prosperity says 114 of those earmarks were inserted into the spending bill in a closed-door conference.

"We've also got $88 million in earmarks for Ted Stevens despite the fact that he is under investigation right now by five government agencies," says Patnaude. "Which we think is outrageous in and of itself that you have a lawmaker, who obviously has some legal problems, getting $88 million of our hard-earned tax dollars." The FBI is investigating whether Stevens, the Senate's longest-serving Republican, accepted illegal gifts from the head of an oil field services company.

Other earmarks include $2 million for a monument honoring longtime congressman Charlie Rangel (D-New York), $100,000 for a 65-foot Monterey Bay catamaran, and $300,000 for a "peace garden" in North Dakota. But Patnaude says it is still unclear whether Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York) will get the $1 million she requested for a "hippie museum" in Bethel, New York.

The watchdog spokeswoman says Americans are "sick and tired of making good budget decisions back home only to see lawmakers take their hard-earned tax dollars and waste them on hippie museums, teapot museums, and bridges to nowhere."

[Soldier4Christ]

Congress funds
'ferry to nowhere'
Alaska senator scores $20 million earmark
for 'expeditionary craft' to rural peninsula

Twice in the past two years, Alaska lawmakers were forced to abandon plans to build two "bridges to nowhere" costing hundreds of millions of dollars after Congress was embarrassed by public complaints over earmarks hidden in annual spending bills.

This year, Alaska Republicans Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens found another way to move cash to their state: Stevens secured more than $20 million for an "expeditionary craft" that will connect Anchorage with the windblown rural peninsula of Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

Now what Alaska has, budget watchdogs contend, is a ferry to nowhere.

"Earmarks are a bipartisan affliction," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group that tracks the projects. "It would take leadership in both parties -- and a lot more shame -- to ever rein them in."

The $555 billion annual "omnibus" spending bill approved by Congress this week and the $459 billion defense bill passed last month collectively contain more than 11,000 earmarks, despite Democrats' vow to use their first year in the majority to slash the number of such pet projects.

The earmark tally did come down, budget watchdogs said, but the audacity of the requests is little reduced. Among routine requests for roads and dams, Taxpayers for Common Sense found $100,000 for signage in Los Angeles's fashion district, $9 million for "rural domestic preparedness" in Kentucky and $250,000 for a wine and culinary center in Prosser, Wash.

President Bush yesterday threatened to cancel thousands of the special projects, saying he has ordered White House budget director Jim Nussle to determine the extent of the president's authority to respond to what he called "wasteful spending" in the mammoth appropriations bill. Aides said that could include simply disregarding earmarks that were not included in binding legislative language.

Earmarks are a crucial way that lawmakers channel money back home for projects from community centers to water-treatment plants. Most members of Congress boast to constituents of their success in winning funding and say they know better than federal agencies what their districts need. A spokesman for Young said the Alaska ferry, for example, would drastically shorten the commute from the borough to Anchorage.

But over decades, earmarks have become magnets for some questionable spending requests, and the sheer number has given them a bad name.

The practice reached a high-water mark in 2005, the year of the first "bridge to nowhere" project, which would have linked the town of Ketchikan, on a southeastern Alaska island, to its airport on a nearby island.

Nussle, a former representative from Iowa who chaired the House Budget Committee, said the earmark explosion badly dented Republicans' and Bush's reputations among fiscal conservatives.

"When I was budget chairman . . . we always held the top line. But what got us in trouble, I feel, are the earmarks," Nussle said in an interview. "People would come up to me at a town meeting, [and] they all want to know: 'How did you have money for this bridge or this rain forest or this cowgirl museum?' "

All told, this year's spending bills contain about 25 percent fewer earmarks than the 2006 appropriations, according to a tally by Citizens Against Government Waste. But this year, lawmakers generally did not count earmarks in bills composed almost solely of regional projects, such as the annual military construction bill.

Trimming earmarks by changing their definition "is like saying you're meeting your weight-loss goal by not counting your backside," Ellis said. "They've taken a step in the right direction, but if all we did was recalibrate the baseline and earmarks start their growth again, we haven't ccomplished much."

The House required lawmakers for the first time to sign their names to earmarks, identify the beneficiaries and locations, and certify that neither they nor their immediate families had a financial stake in the spending. But Democrats' good intentions came undone in the Senate, which failed to trim earmarks as severely and tinkered with the language of the rules, limiting disclosure to only the authors' names, Ellis said.

There are few signs so far that disclosure rules have dissuaded lawmakers from sponsoring earmarks, watchdogs said. They have only made them easier to trace.

The Taxpayers for Common Sense audit turned up, for example, that a handful of lawmakers continued this year to sponsor earmarks worth more than $10 million for ProLogic Inc., a West Virginia company under federal investigation for its role in receiving earmarked money.

The omnibus provides $126,000 for the National First Ladies' Library in Canton, Ohio, a favorite cause of the earmark's sponsor, Rep. Ralph Regula (R), whose wife founded the museum and whose daughter runs it. Regula has requested hundreds of thousands of federal dollars for the museum since 1991, when he persuaded the National Park Service to pay $1.1 million for its headquarters -- the girlhood home of Ida Saxton McKinley, the 25th first lady.

"Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have teamed up to waste taxpayer dollars on silly pork projects and egotistical projects named after themselves," said Brian Riedl, senior budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

The Alaska ferry project is one of the more expensive earmarks. Billed in Stevens's version of the legislation as an "expeditionary craft" to be used by the military, it is considered a passenger ferry by Young, according to his spokeswoman. It would follow roughly the same path as the second of the abandoned "bridges to nowhere." Stevens put the earmark that will fund the ferry into the defense appropriations bill, which Bush signed last month.

Young's son-in-law owns land in Matanuska-Susitna Borough, a remote region two hours by car from Anchorage. A ferry would shorten that commute to 15 minutes, making the borough valuable for housing development.

Meredith Kenny, a spokeswoman for Young, confirmed the family connection to the land. "Many Alaskans own land there," she said.

"They've been working on this since the mid-1990s," she said of the ferry project. "It's bipartisan, well wanted and needed. It's a bridge to growth and development."

[Soldier4Christ]

Bush signs $555 billion spending bill

President Bush on Wednesday signed a $555 billion bill that funds the Iraq war well into next year and keeps government agencies running through next September.

Bush's signature on the massive spending bill capped a long-running battle with the Democratic-run Congress as he left boarded Air Force One to fly from his Maryland mountaintop retreat and flew to his Texas ranch here to see in the new year.

Bush had deep reservations about special "earmark" spending in the bill, but signed it into law nevertheless.

"The omnibus (bill) funds the government at responsible levels that the president proposed without raising taxes," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters traveling to Texas with Bush.

Stanzel said that although he signed the bill, Bush continues to be "disappointed with Congress' addiction to earmarks."

"And soon the president will outline his fiscal year 2009 budget proposal," the spokesman added, "which will hold the line on spending, keep taxes low and continue us on the path to a balanced budget."

[Soldier4Christ]

Black caucus leader wants earmarks doled out to vulnerable Dems

A government watchdog group is echoing calls for a complete cessation of earmark funding in Congress following one House Democrat's demand for the distribution of even more pork-barrel projects.



Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick (D-Michigan), the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, recently called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) to allot more earmarks to black lawmakers in competitive reelection contests. Cheeks-Kilpatrick complained that Black Caucus members are not given "equitable" access to earmarks, and suggested to Pelosi: "There are a few examples of where your help could significantly assist a few members in highly contested races."

In response, Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), who chairs the House Republican Study Committee, called for an immediate suspension of the earmarking process. Hensarling is absolutely correct, says David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste.

"There needs to be a complete cessation of earmark funding. There is no place in Congress for this to occur, and taxpayers really need to be more vocal about this," says Williams. "Earmarks are not good for this country; they're not good for the states or the districts. It's an absolute corruption of the budget process -- and they need to stop immediately."

Williams says while not illegal, securing earmarks so members can win reelection violates the trust of the American people. "It is absolutely ludicrous for the speaker of the House, or anyone in Congress, to say that more earmarks should be used to get these members reelected, regardless of their party affiliation," he says. "Taxpayers should not be footing the bill for these reelection campaigns."

Williams says if members of Congress cannot give up their earmarks, it will be impossible for them to adequately address larger fiscal issues such as Medicare and a Social Security system that is "on the brink of disaster."

According to Congressman Hensarling, "Democrats said they'd clean up the pork and instead they attempted to roll back transparency and accountability, and the earmarking process continues to get worse for American taxpayers." Hensarling was recently recognized as the 2007 "Friend of the Taxpayer" award by the non-partisan National Taxpayers Union, which noted that the Texas lawmaker had the least expensive spending agenda in the entire House during the 109th Congress.

[Soldier4Christ]

Bauer calls approval of tax-funded needle exchanges 'outrageous'

A conservative evangelical leader warns that lifting the ban on tax-funded needle-exchange programs in the District of Columbia may unintentionally further the spread of diseases like AIDS.

President Bush recently signed a massive omnibus-spending bill that includes language allowing D.C. to use tax dollars for programs that provide clean needles to drug addicts. District officials have already announced plans to put $1 million towards needle-exchange programs in 2008 in hopes of reducing the city's soaring HIV/AIDS rate.

Gary Bauer, president of American Values, decries that no research has been conducted showing that needle exchange programs work. "The problem is not dirty needles, the problem is not unprotected sex," he points out. "The problem is that large numbers of people in urban areas continue to engage in behavior that is guaranteed to spread disease and make it more likely that if they don't contract AIDS they'll contract something else."

Bauer believes that government subsidizing of "bad behavior" will actually increase its occurrences and leave more people vulnerable to HIV\AIDS. He says that it is "outrageous" that even one tax dollar would be used to pay for such programs. The American Values president says that liberal politicians hid these provisions in the omnibus-spending bill because left alone the provisions would not pass.

Since 1998, federal spending packages had blocked needle exchange programs. Bauer says this year's $555 billion omnibus-spending bill highlights the need to reform the legislative process.

[Soldier4Christ]

Congress' bloated pork
will never fuel your car
Tom DeWeese blasts fluffy energy bill,
insists U.S. must begin building new oil refineries

When Congress passed the energy bill in December, it did everything necessary to please a horde of special interests and very little to actually help Americans with their energy problems. Truth is, America still has no energy policy – just a lot of pork for those feeding at the tax-paid trough.

Political correctness comes from special interest groups who lay down the law with politicians (read: we won't give you any more money unless you say and do things our way). In such an atmosphere there is little room for reasoned thought on the consequences of the legislation Congress enforces on the rest of us. The energy bill is the prime example of law by sound bite.

The new law mandates that auto makers must boost mileage by 40 percent – to 35 miles per gallon – by 2020. The reason given by the politicians is that this move will help make America less dependent on foreign oil. Funny though, there isn't a word in the bill about drilling for American oil in Alaska or increasing drilling off shore. Both areas have proven to have near unlimited reserves that could easily free the nation from the Middle East oil czars. Why? Drilling American oil simply isn't politically correct.

The main reason for the mandate is to satisfy the massive environmental lobby that nearly rules Capitol Hill. They have big bucks and a lot of power. Their ultimate goal is to get people completely out of their cars and onto public transportation. That's why you see little in the way of road improvement in transportation bills, but lots of money being thrown at public transportation. Public buses, subways and trains are politically correct. The problem is they just don't necessarily go where the average traveler needs to go – at the time they need to go there.

Of course, mandating higher mileage will force automakers to charge more for the cars because the technology to do it will cost more. And that works perfectly to the anti-car agenda of the environmentalists. The mandate will also force the automakers to produce smaller cars – something the American people have made perfectly clear they do not want and won't buy. Alternative? Fewer cars. That's why public transportation is politically correct.

Another major provision of the energy bill is the production of ethanol – again, a measure promoted as a way to get us off the foreign oil fix. The trouble is, American farmers can't raise enough corn to supply what is needed for the mandated ethanol production, let alone supply enough to feed us. And the cost of corn products is already through the roof. As a result, to meet the congressional mandate, the U.S. now has to import corn to produce ethanol. The main source is communist China. So, perhaps the ethanol mandate will help reduce our foreign oil dependency … but, it seems we are just going to shift the pain to an even worse source – Red China. Ain't globalism and free trade grand? And it's politically correct.

Of course, the wise men in the Congress foresaw this problem, so the bill mandates a large portion of ethanol to come from the conversion of other cellulose materials. The problem is, that technology has not yet been developed. So Congress passed a law for something not yet invented. And that helps our energy needs … how?

In a bold move, Congress managed to ban the incandescent light bulb. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said such action was "proper congressional action." Instead, Congress is mandating the politically correct compact fluorescent bulbs that use as little as one-fourth the power of the conventional bulbs.

It's interesting to note that the major manufacturers of incandescent bulbs are not upset by the new legislation; in fact they helped write it. Why? Well, could it be that the standard incandescent bulb costs about 50 cents each, and the new ones cost as much as $3? Of course, they tell us they last longer, so the cost is only up front – and so are the manufacturers' profits. Certainly they will be able to help write legislation to ban something else to increase their market share before the full mandatory transition to the new bulbs in 2012.

One more note on the new lights: Reports are now coming out that they cause migraine headaches for many people because they work like standard fluorescent tubes which subtly and constantly flicker. Epileptics are especially affected. Moreover, they make a very harsh, cold, white light. Gone will be the warm, cheery mood lighting of the incandescent bulbs. Again, Congress bans a product with only the information fed to them from global corporations who stand to gain. But, more importantly, the new lights are politically correct.

The compromise energy bill did resist the demands of environmentalists to eliminate tax breaks for oil companies (money they wanted used for the development of green energy sources). The greens wanted to mandate that power companies produce certain amounts of energy by renewable means such as solar and wind. However, while that bullet was dodged this time, alternative energy is still wildly popular and most definitely politically correct. So it is important that all Americans understand the worthlessness of alternative energy in solving America's current crisis.

Here are some facts concerning energy production: Producing 50 megawatts of electricity using a gas-fired generating plant, as is in use today, requires two to five acres of land. Getting the same amount from photovoltaics means covering a minimum of 1,000 acres with solar panels. Of course, there also has to be access for trucks to clean the panels. Using the sun to meet California's energy needs would mean paving over hundreds of thousands of acres of desert habitat – along with their resident plant and animal life. And if the sun doesn't shine for, say six months, as in Alaska, well, we freeze in the dark.

A 50-megawatt wind facility requires even more land: at least 4,000 acres. The 100-200 feet tall wind turbines ruin habitat and scenic vistas and represent "an imminent threat" to millions of birds and bats. Today, just in Northern California's Altamont Pass, wind turbines kill thousands of birds every year, including eagles, hawks, owls and other birds of prey. Some call the wind turbines "Cuisinarts in the air." In addition, wind energy is unreliable. If the wind doesn't blow, no energy.

If produced by wind, the 7,000 to 10,000 megawatts of additional electricity California needs immediately would require sacrificing over 400,000 acres to wind turbines, foundations and road access. If solar power were used, more than 100,000 acres would have to be blanketed with panels.

On a national scale, the environmental impacts of wind and solar alternative energy become truly staggering. Former Deputy Energy Secretary Ken Davis has calculated that, to produce the 218 gigawatts of "additional" electricity America will need by 2010, using only wind or solar power, we would have to blanket 9,400,000 acres with wind mills or solar panels. That's almost 10 percent of California. It's an area equal to Connecticut, Delaware and Massachusetts combined. Moreover, to get all of this electricity into urban areas, miles and miles of wind turbines and solar panes must be linked to miles and miles of high tension power lines – the same kind all other energy sources need. There is no gain from solar or wind power – only loss of energy.

A true energy policy would see government getting out of the energy business and standing aside as the real experts fix the problem in a free market where consumers could pick their power of choice. A few acres for nuclear power plants would solve much of the nation's energy needs. Drilling for oil off shore and in Alaska will give us complete independence from foreign sources and will also keep America out of a lot of foreign turmoil.

Above all, American energy policy must allow for the building of new oil refineries. There hasn't been a new one built since the 1970s, and several have been shut down – 10 in California alone. Every time one shuts down simply for repairs, gas prices spike.

Yet these ideas are rejected for the politically correct alternatives. Such ideas are the current "wisdom" of our day. The source of such bad policy is special interest groups lining the pockets of mindless politicians to get their own agenda locked into federal mandate – but it doesn't solve America's energy problems. In fact, it adds to them. As we fool around with such silly, unworkable dreams of a "carbonless footprint," Americans are paying $3 at the pump, and potential power blackouts threaten our cities. This is no way to run a country.

[Soldier4Christ]

House plans to pass defense spending bill with troop pay raise

The House is expected to pass a new defense policy bill as early as Wednesday that includes a pay raise for troops.

President Bush rejected an earlier version of the legislation, saying it would expose the Iraqi government to expensive lawsuits. Democrats sent the bill back to the House Armed Services Committee to quickly redraft the measure and drop the foreign lawsuits provision.

The new bill authorizes nearly 700 billion dollars in defense spending, including about 190 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It aims to increase troop pay by 3.5 percent.

The legislation's primary purpose is to guide Pentagon policy, in part by setting restrictions on the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar acquisition program.