ALLEN, JOHNSON AT ODDS OVER EARMARKS 20APR12

george allen continues his propaganda campaign in an attempt to deceive, mislead and flat out lie about his fiscal record as governor of Virginia and as a US Senator from Virginia. He is against earmarks and proud of all the earmarks he got for Virginia. He says legislators should publicly claim their earmarks and then refuses to do so. He claims to have reigned in spending in Richmond while increasing it over 45%. And now he has famed earmark hunter Sen ron johnson r WI coming to campaign for him. We know allen is a liar, it is interesting Sen johnson is willing to put his reputation on the line with this endorsement. One can only conclude they are birds of a feather. This from Tim Kaine's campaign......
As Anti-Earmarker Ron Johnson Visits VA, Will George Allen Explain What Made Him So "Proud" Of "Every Single Earmark" He Sponsored As A Senator?

Richmond, VA - Just one week ahead of his first primary debate with Tea Party challengers Radtke, Jackson, and Marshall, George Allen is trotting out Tea Party darling Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson.  As a Senator, Johnson co-sponsored the "Earmark Elimination Act of 2011" -- making his visit to Virginia today to campaign with 'proud' Senate earmarker George Allen even more awkward.  Johnson's endorsement is just the latest attempt by George Allen to disguise a career-long record of big spending.

"No amount of elbow-rubbing from the Tea Party will erase the $3 trillion George Allen added to our national debt or the tens of thousands of earmarks he supported as a Senator," said Kaine for Virginia Communications Director Brandi Hoffine.  "Time and again, George Allen has promised Virginians that he would govern as a 'fiscal conservative.' But instead, he grew spending by more than 45 percent as Governor and turned a record surplus into a record deficit as Senator.  Now, he's campaigning for reelection on the same hypocritical rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, but Virginians aren't buying it.  In fact, the harder George Allen tries to rewrite his fiscally reckless record, the more obvious it is that he helped create our economic problems during his last term in the Senate and has no solutions to fix them.

"There's only one candidate in this race with a proven record of balancing budgets and cutting spending, and that's Tim Kaine."

Johnson's rescue mission to Virginia to help excite conservatives who aren't buying Allen's claims of fiscal conservatism must be particularly embarrassing for Allen who likes to call himself the "original tea partier."

Background:

ALLEN'S EARMARK HYPOCRISY

March 2006: Allen Said, “Every Single Earmark I’ve Gotten, I’m Proud Of;” Allen Said Legislators Who Attach Earmarks Should Be Identified.PolitiFact reported, “Allen clearly sought pork for Virginia. ‘Every single earmark I’ve gotten, I’m proud of,’ he told a town hall meeting in Chesterfield County on March 20, 2006, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch article. Allen said then that legislators who attach earmarks to appropriations bills should be identified.” [PolitiFact, 4/18/12]
• A Few Months Later, Allen Refused To Identify Earmarks He Requested In Fiscal Year 2006.  PolitiFact reported, “A few months later, Allen and other members of Virginia's congressional delegation refused cooperate with a Times-Dispatch reporter’s request to identify the earmarks they requested during fiscal 2006.” [PolitiFact, 4/18/12]
2012: Allen’s Current Position Is That There Should Not Be Earmarks Until The Budget Is Balanced. PolitiFact reported, “In this year’s campaign, Allen is calling for a ban on earmarks until the federal budget is balanced. Afterwards, earmarks would require a two-thirds majority.” [PolitiFact, 4/18/12]
• Allen Helped Turn A Surplus Into A Deficit In His Very First Full Fiscal Year In The Senate. [Office of Management And Budget, Historical Data]
April 2012: Allen Said Earmark Sponsors Should Be Identified, Acknowledged That “Surreptitious” Earmarking Was A Problem In The Past. On the Leland Conway Hour, Allen said, “I don’t think there ought to be any earmarks whatsoever until you get to a balanced budget and then there should be a 2/3rds vote for earmarks. And there ought to be the, obviously, the transparency. If there’s an earmark, a Member should put their name associated with it rather than making it surreptitious approach of earmarking, which was one of the problems previously.” [Leland Conway Hour, WRVA 1140AM, 4/19/12]

JOHNSON HAS WORKED TO END EARMARKS

Johnson Cosponsored The Earmark Elimination Act of 2011 On January 30, 2012. [S.1930, Cosponsored on 1/30/12]

Johnson Co-Sponsored DeMint’s Resolution On Earmarks, Saying "As I Promised During My Campaign, I'll Vote For The Elimination Of Earmarks Every Opportunity I Get.”On his campaign website, Ron Johnson said, "As I promised during my campaign, I'll vote for the elimination of earmarks every opportunity I get and am pleased to co-sponsor Senator DeMint's resolution. I'm looking forward to the orientation sessions next week as an opportunity to begin learning the rules of the institution so I can be effective for Wisconsin.” [Ron Johnson For Senate Blog Post, 11/12/10]
• Johnson On Helping To Stop Earmarks: "This Is An Important Signal To The American Public That We Are Serious About Restoring Fiscal Sanity To This Nation."[Wisconsin State Journal, 11/18/10]
ALLEN CALLS HIMSELF 'ORIGINAL TEA PARTIER'

Allen Claimed He Was “The Original Tea Partier” During A Radio Interview. According to WMAL, Allen claimed he was “the original Tea Partier” in an interview: “Former Virginia Senator George Allen wrapped up the first day of his campaign to regain the seat he lost to Democrat Jim Webb in 2006 with an extensive interview on the Mark Levin Show on 630 WMAL.  The interview covered a broad range, from Allen's contention that he is 'the original Tea Partier' to his legacy as the son of a Redskins football legend, to his analysis of the upcoming Super Bowl between the Steelers and Packers.”  [WMAL, 1/25/11]

ALLEN HAS LONG HISTORY OF FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY; HELPED CREATE OUR CURRENT ECONOMIC MESS
  PolitiFact: As Governor, Allen Increased Spending 45.6%; His Claim That He Reined In Spending Rated “False.” In September 2011, PolitiFact Virginia wrote, “The general fund was almost $6.8 billion when Allen took office. At the end of his term, he proposed a $9.9 billion general fund budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1998. That means Allen endorsed $3.1 billion in additional general fund spending when he was governor -- a 45.6.percent rise. . . . Our ruling: Allen takes credit for ‘reining in state spending’ when he was governor. . . . We rate the statement False.” [PolitiFact Virginia, 9/12/11]

Allen Took America's Largest Budget Surplus And Turned It Into A Record Federal Deficit. When George Allen took office in the United States Senate in January 2001, “the federal budget surplus for fiscal year 2000 amounted to at least $230 billion, making it the largest in U.S. history,” according to CNN. By July 2003, after Allen was in office for only two years, the budget deficit had already hit a record $455 billion. [CNN, 9/27/2000; Chicago Tribune, 7/16/03]

As Senator, Allen Voted For Every Appropriations Bill That Came Up, Adding Over $3 Trillion To The National Debt. PolitiFact Virginia wrote, “Under the budgets approved during Allen’s term, debt climbed by $3.202 trillion. Congress sets budgets through a series of appropriations bills, and Allen supported all of the roughly four dozen bills to hit the Senate floor during his term. . . . Radtke said debt increased by $3 trillion during Allen’s Senate term, a figure equal to $16,000 per second. The actual figures were $3.202 trillion, or $16,896.68 per second.”  [Richmond Times-Dispatch, “PolitiFact Virginia,” 4/15/11]

Allen Voted for Every Deficit-Growing, Budget-Busting Bush Budget. [Vote 74, 3/16/06; Vote 363, 12/21/05; Vote 114, 4/28/05;  Vote 58, 3/12/04;  Vote 134, 4/11/03; Vote 98, 5/10/01; Vote 86, 4/6/01]
http://www.kaineforva.com/news/allen_johnson_at_odds_over_earmarks#When:17:04:23Z

 

The Pentagon Budget's Stealth Earmarks from MOJO 6JUN11

I can't even claim surprise or amazement at this hypocrisy, it is just another example of the twisted depravity practiced in congress, and yet people time after time send the same liars and cheats back to congress only to have them continue lying and cheating the taxpayers out of an honest and transparent budget process......WHEN will we ever learn???? This from MOJO....

How House Republicans hope to fund their pet Pentagon projects while dodging their party's ban on earmarks.

Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Armed Services committee, talks a tough line on the defense budget. Members of his committee, as well as "the broader Congress—and the nation—must make tough choices in order to provide for America's common defense," he said when unveiling the panel's budget plan a little less than a month ago. He was echoing the House GOP's talking points on cost-cutting—an agenda that had spurred Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to target earmarks last year. "Earmarks have become a symbol of a Congress that has broken faith with the people," the incoming speaker proclaimed last November, after his incoming majority banned the age-old maneuver of sneaking pork spending into budget bills. Since then, McKeon has repeatedly declared how he and his colleagues have slashed fat from the Pentagon's and White House's military budget requests.
However, as it stripped money from the proposed budget, McKeon's committee quietly set aside $1 billion in a newly created fund, buried within section 1433 of its 920-page bill under the heading "Other Matters." Called the Mission Force Enhancement Transfer Fund, the money is ostensibly held in reserve so that the DOD can fund necessary projects at its discretion. In fact, the House budget would funnel more than $650 million from the MFET back to representatives' pet projects. Critics say this stealthy bit of accounting violates the House leadership's ban on earmarks and is little more than a "slush fund" for pork-barrel spending.

Details on the size or beneficiaries of the projects funded by the MFET are hard to discern from the defense bill's lengthy list of procurements. But armed services committee members on both sides of the aisle have left clues. In the days following the voice vote approving their budget, they pumped out press releases trumpeting the projects they'd scored for their districts. Since the MFET funds came from other cuts in the Pentagon budget, the members could claim their projects would be offset by spending cuts elsewhere. Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a tea party freshman who sees himself as a budget hawk, secured $8 million for engines for Army drones, funded by savings from "wasteful DOD offsets." Rep. Chris Gibson (R-N.Y.) bragged that he'd secured a federal study to open a nanotechnology lab on the SUNY-Albany campus in his district, as well as $7 million in funding for additional nanotech research. Rep. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), announced $3 million in funding for a nonprofit called the Technology Ventures Corporation, which would "help expand innovation in New Mexico's emerging satellite industry."
These moves have angered deficit hawks from both parties. The new fund's workings are so mysterious that even the congressional rank and file have only a vague sense of where the money's going. It "not only circumvents the current moratorium [on earmarks] but is actually less transparent than the earmarking process that was in place prior to the moratorium," complained Rep. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who is aligned with some tea party Republicans in opposing the fund's creative accounting methods. "This is disappointing and disingenuous." McCaskill sent a brusque letter (PDF) to McKeon and Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the armed services committe, decrying the MFET kitty as a "slush fund" for earmarks cobbled together from "unexplained and unjustified" cuts elsewhere.
Rep. Jeff Flake, a conservative Arizona Republican, also expressed dismay over the scheme. "To identify a billion dollars in savings, then to move it into a new fund and then allow members to designate their own priorities and take $650 [million]—I am just not sure what this is all about," he said on the House floor. In sponsoring an amendment to apply the fund's unspent balance—about $350 million—to paying down the national debt, Flake cited news reports describing the fund as a pet-project jackpot. "This would be similar to the earmarking culture that we have had around here, a culture that hopefully has ended and that we can move beyond," he said. "So I hope this is not what we are seeing here." Asked whether Flake considers the MFET funding to be earmark spending, a spokeswoman for the representative would only say that "Congressman Flake has some concerns and is working to get them addressed."
Does the MFET fund violate the spirit of the earmark ban? "It violates a lot more than the spirit," laughs Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information and a former staffer for senators from both parties. The current defense bill contains earmark-style procurements, just like all its predecessors, he says. "The only difference is that we don't even have the cursory nod toward transparency that we did in the earmark process," he asserts, referring to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's requirement that members disclose their pet Pentagon projects. "It's a real step backwards."
Armed Services Committe chairman McKeon defended the MFET funding scheme on the House floor, saying the cash would only be spent "in furthering national security objectives" with Pentagon approval. "If we find any member pressuring the Department of Defense to use any funds other than to comply with competitive, merit-based solutions, we will go after them," he said.
That's plausible deniability, says Wheeler. While the Defense department has control over the fund on paper, members of the armed services committee can use their sway with informal military contacts to funnel the dollars straight to their pork projects. "If it survives the legislative process," he says, "the Pentagon will start getting phone calls and letters saying, 'Of course, the appropriations budget actually meant this.'"
The plan's survival is not assured. The Senate is expected to come up with its own defense budget proposals this month, and whatever bill it passes will have to be reconciled with the House plan before heading to President Obama's desk. In the meantime, debate over the House's fund for stealth earmarks could further inflame tensions between veteran Republicans and their junior tea party colleagues. "An awful lot of activists in the tea party movement are veterans who had hands-on experience with wasteful and inefficient spending in the Defense Department," Dick Armey, the former House majority leader and cofounder of the tea party group FreedomWorks, told Bloomberg earlier this week. "If you think you can sit in office and be a zealot on cutting everything except your pet projects, it don't work that way."

Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' national security reporter. For more of his stories, click here or follow him on Twitter. Get Adam Weinstein's RSS feed.

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Senate GOP Candidates In Hot Water Over Taking Earmarks, Government Funds 26AUG10

THE song remains the same for the gop, scream, bitch, moan, groan about the budget deficit, TARP, earmarks and the stimulus to deceive the public into believing they are against these things while working the system to get as much as they can, often for their own benefit or for the benefit of wealthy corporate contributors. Yes, Democrats do the earmark thing too, but at least a majority of them will admit to it and tout the benefits of the spending programs they sought funding for. From HuffPost....
There has been and, it appears, always will be tension between the strict anti-earmark and government spending philosophy of the modern Republican Party and the occasional demands of governance.
In the past week, a series of stories have surfaced in local papers calling Republican candidates to task for making a big show about government spending in public while either requesting or taking federal funds in the former or current capacities.
The most glaring example was surfaced by the Denver Post on Thursday. The paper reported that Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck had requested at least $5 million in earmarks for projects in the county where he served as attorney general. On the campaign trail, Buck has railed against pork-barrel projects including signing a pledge to refuse earmarks in the next session of Congress.
A similar scenario has taken place in Wisconsin, where a local television station reported that Senate candidate Ron Johnson received a $2.5 million government-issued loan in the 1980s to expand his factory. Like Buck, Johnson has made railing against government spending a main feature of his run for office.
In Indiana, meanwhile, Senate candidate Dan Coats has run on a platform of preventing a government takeover of private enterprise, only for it to be discovered that he lobbied the Senate on the TARP for a company he represented.
Coats isn't the only one facing charges of duplicity in his state. Gov. Mitch Daniels -- a much-discussed potential presidential candidate -- reversed course this week on a pledge he had made to reject federal aid for teachers and Medicaid. (Daniels had actually been supportive of the aid before he came out against it during a national television appearance).
Each of these lawmakers had individual explanations. Buck said that by accepting federal funds he didn't forfeit his beliefs that government spending needed to be axed. Johnson's campaign has insisted that his loan was not a payment or subsidy. It was, in the end, paid back in full. Daniels, meanwhile, had his hand forced predominantly by state lawmakers who recognized a need for the stimulus money and pushed him to accept it.
The anecdotes, nevertheless, are already being used as fodder for Democrats intent on labeling the Republican Party as housed with fiscal conservative frauds.
Whether howling about contradictions can be an effective political charge seems doubtful. Shortly after the stimulus package was passed, Democrats made a major fuss over revelations that GOP officials were not only appearing at ribbon-cutting ceremonies for stimulus projects but also privately lobbying government agencies for the funds. Republicans kept on criticizing the stimulus, however, and have suffered little in the realm of public opinion for the seeming hypocrisy.

• 2010 Elections

There has been and, it appears, always will be tension between the strict anti-earmark and government spending philosophy of the modern Republican Party and the occasional demands of governance. In ...

There has been and, it appears, always will be tension between the strict anti-earmark and government spending philosophy of the modern Republican Party and the occasional demands of governance. In ...

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HOUSE LEADERS BAN EARMARKS TO CORPORATIONS 11MAR10

March 11, 2010

With the midterm elections approaching, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are battling to claim the clean-ethics crown.

That's one reason Rep. David Obey (D-WI), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said he's killing off one of lawmakers' most lucrative perks: corporate earmarks.

Obey said the panel will stop approving earmarks that lawmakers request on behalf of for-profit corporations.

"Earmarks to private entities present opportunities for corruption and getting members in trouble," says Ryan Alexander of the advocacy group Taxpayers for Common Sense. "It's not the best way to spend taxpayer money to have individual members of Congress direct money to private companies."

Most of the corporate earmarks come from the subcommittee that oversees defense spending. The House ethics committee just wrapped up a probe of that panel's earmarks and campaign contributions. Nearly half of the subcommittee members were involved. They were all exonerated.

That subcommittee's new chairman, Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA), joined Obey in announcing the earmarks ban. They said the Pentagon now will evaluate corporate pitches for defense earmarks, and the committee will set up a single Web link for all House members' earmark requests.

House Republicans tried to beat Obey to the punch.

Minority leader John Boehner called for a ban on all earmarks.

"I think it's time for our conference to sit down and have a real adult conversation about whether we're really willing to do what's necessary to come all the way back," Boehner said.

But GOP members have rejected that idea before.

And at the Senate, Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) said there's nothing inherently corrupt about earmarks for corporations.