Welcome to 570 KLIF's Pork Barrel spending report!
The same people who bailed out the banks and the car companies, have voted to spend nearly $20 billion taxpayer dollars on pet projects in their districts back in their home states. Even though President Obama promised to end such "earmark spending" during his run for the White House, he signed a budget appropriations bill loaded with more "Pork" than a pig farm in east Texas.
Our thanks to the Citizen's Against Government Waste for digging through the slop to find these projects.
If you're not mad about this government waste, you soon will be. Be sure to check back frequently for more "Pork" updates on klif.com.
This is Your Federal Government at work!
$492,940 of our taxpayer dollars are being spent to "sell" the Obama Administration's "Stimulus" program. In effect, the government is paying a newly created state office in North Carolina to produce PR campaigns, news stories and other "propaganda" to convince Americans that the stimulus program is a good idea.
If you ever travel to Bladenboro, N.C., be sure to stop by and see the Town Hall you helped build there. We're not sure why, but we...the American taxpayer...spent $300,000 to build a local government's office.
It's only a paltry $71,000, but we're funding research on monkeys who are cocaine addicts. The official line is it's to "study the effects of self-administering cocaine on the glutamate system on monkeys." But how do you get them to stand still for the testing!
Finally, while in North Carolina be sure to visit the insect collection at North Carolina State University. In that boondoggle, they're not saving jobs...they're saving dead bugs and it only cost US taxpayers $253,123.
If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid loses his election this fall in Nevada, more than $44 million taxpayer dollars will have been wasted. That's how much "Pork" the Senator has scored for his state to help his re-election, including more than a million dollars for the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation's Alternative Energy School of the Future.
Here's a package of "gifts" that will make Republicans squirm...$41,500,000 for President Libraries: the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. And the Bush library? And the "W" Library?
Republican Senator Richard Shelby's shopping list includes $900,000 for fish management at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama...$800,000 for the University of South Alabama for oyster rehabilitation...and $2,600,000 for the conservation of the monk seals and pacific crustaceans...Tiger Woods needed re-hab, but Oysters?
Democrat Senator Charles Schumer of New York and others from the New York delegation received $2.2 million dollars for the Center for Grape Genetics...even though New York's wine and grape industries had $6 billion dollars in annual sales!
$1.8 million dollars is the prize for Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin...to research Pig odor and for manure management...
Texas Democrat Chet Edwards and others scored $1.7 million dollars for a honey bee lab in Weslaco...
Democrat Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska is spending $866,000 to control stable flies in Lincoln, Nebraska...
Two North Dakota Senators appropriated $3 million dollars to help make NASA satellite images more accessible to the public, even though NASA TV is free...
In all, 10,160 Earmark projects were approved for a total of $19.6 billion dollars.