Earmarks? Are those like Skidmarks?

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God, History and You [HERE]

Briefly: Earmarks
Thursday, March 12
During his Presidential campaign, then Senator Barack Obama vowed to fight this policy that was referred to as 'earmarking', or 'earmarks'. I seem to remember that...am I mistaken? At the time, I thought I had a pretty good handle on what, exactly, earmarking was - based on the conversational context, inference, etc. As I am reading today's Washington Post article on our now President Obama's signing of a $410 billion spending bill that includes these notorious earmarks, I'm now wondering - do I understand earmarking? (Posted by Christina HERE)

Call it Pork, call it Foxy; we, the last of the Boomers, are just doing to society what has been done to us for our whole lives: Prodded and poked, experimented on and over- analyzed from childhood. Tangents of psychology have been used by its agents to unlock late blooming Boomer's behavior and isolate it, remove all other possibilities, and punish "the first ever batch of Understood Children" to hatch out a virtual developing market in the USA... with dangerous "has-went by the wayside" products.

Destroying hope and capitalizing on plenty of brains to mess with... inventing Brain Industries, NASA and militaristic agencies that skirt God, and develop their own self-guided bluffing humanism organizations... based on experimentation of a boomer group third sons and daughters, only to vamp the age we live in. We go about our work criminalized, and apish. [MooPig\ pdnf\ I got a bone to pick right here]

As you can see, one fact stands out pretty clearly: Alaska bags a lot of earmarks. The runner up states tend to be smallish states. And that's a clear effect of the disproportionate weight small states get in the senate. But, still, Alaska gets almost four times more in federal earmark dollars than the next runner up, Hawaii.

Another interesting way to look at this is, look at the top three states: Alaska, Hawaii, and West Virginia. All smallish states but each also have senators that have been in office, respectively from 1968 (Stevens), 1963 (Inouye) and 1959 (Byrd).

Earmarks can be a good thing. An example of an earmark that we should be outraged at:

In the emergency stimulus bill (you know, the massive one that was suppose to turn our economy around), Harry Reid included an earmark to double the budget of the Pacific Salmon Foundation. He then added a provision in the bill to allow Nevada (which doesn't border the Pacific) access to said Pacific Salmon money.

The real problem with earmarks is when they have nothing to do with the bill they are included in. It is a way of sneaking money out of the treasury under the cover of night. (Andy D; HERE)