That’s the message Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is sending when he ridicules this earmark, according to Huffington Post reporter Jason Linkins. The earmark would accelerate the renovation and replacement of the pier historically used to berth the Coast Guard Training Vessel EAGLE at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.
Requested at $7,700,000 [...]
Yesterday, a couple of resolutions were introduced in the House that I think are noteworthy. Many resolutions have no substance—recognizing “National Brush Your Teeth Day” and such—so we don’t even display them. But the ones that do something we display.
And we are displaying H. Res. 385. It would require congressional committees to publish bills [...]
That’s the allegation made by a commenter on Rep. Bart Stupak’s (MI-1) requests for $1,900,000 to go to Advenovation, Inc.
The money would fund “research to combine robotics technology, machine vision and sensors with software to create platform-independent robots with advanced vision and sensing capability.” Sounds neat!
But is the proposed recipient a legitimate, reliable business? [...]
When it started back in mid-July, I had no idea of the response our earmark hunting contest would get. But people showed up to this party! Earmarks have definitely touched a nerve across the country.
With the help of some good articles and blog posts, and plenty of word of mouth, people went to work chasing [...]
Since the wrap-up of our earmark hunting contest, we have been linking the 40,000+ earmark requests to the earmarks that made it into bills.
It’s a time-consuming and imperfect process, but we have done pretty much all of them in the Commerce-Justice-Science spending bill, which goes to the Senate floor this week.
Take a look at [...]
Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) appears to have no qualms about congratulating himself for how he spends your money. This year, he requested a $10,000,000 earmark to fund a grant program for Iowa schools. It was funded at $7,000,000 in the Senate version of H.R. 3293, the Labor/HHS spending bill for fiscal 2010.
The “Harkin Grant Program” [...]
I’ve been poring over the earmark request data we collected in our big contest, and working to correlate it to the earmarks that made it into bills. It’s slow going, so far . . .
But the excitement level sure builds when you take a look at what the money’s going to!
Do you have your tickets [...]
It looks like some of Rep. Tom Latham’s ag earmarks are not in the database.
Update: Got ‘em!
It’s one of those awful scanned PDFs, but if you can get the missing ones in . . . .
Here are the earmarks we have for him, and you can always download the whole dataset here.
Update: Same goes for [...]
There are amazing similarities between human genes and the gene structure of other creatures.
But you have something more in common with the catfish than you may have known. Congress wants you to pay to map the catfish genome.
Representative Mike D. Rogers (R-AL) requested $1,250,000 in the agriculture spending bill for fiscal 2010 for research on [...]
ArsTechnica has a great write-up of our earmarks project and a top earmark hunter, Andi Osiek.
Back from vacation and digging out, I will be furiously working over the weekend to check the data we collected, flag earmarks that made it into bills, and award the prizes to the top earmark hunters in our contest.
Stay [...]