Earmarks, Earmarking, Earmarkers, Earmarked…

Sarah Palin is earmarked, folks, earmarked by Republican higher-ups for big things in the days to come.

Once upon a time she was hot on the gubernatorial campaign trail (September 2006), stopping off in Ketchikan, Alaska to offer her support to the townsfolk.  Assuring the Ketchikans that she felt their pain at being called ‘nowhere’, Ms. Palin went on to say that the bridge was essential for the town’s prosperity.

The fact is, all earmarkers like earmarks and earmarking just fine. Which brings me to what I like best about  an ‘earmark’, i.e. its humble versatility as a part of speech.   ‘Earmark’, for example, can be a noun (including a gerund), a verb, an adjective, not to mention an interjection: Damn! Dickweed! Earmark!

A little focus, please:  An earmark is a line-item inserted into any bill that anonymously funnels cash to a specific project or recipient behind the public’s back.  In other words, any member of our esteemed Congress can direct a large wad of the taxpayer’s cash to his or her town where it can be spent on a pet project, without the Member of Congress having to identify him/herself or the project.

I’ve searched high and low to find some site exclusively devoted to earmarks and found it.  Follow the link if you like, but I did tweak some pertinent info from the FAQ section on earmarking:

How can we, as funders of the earmarks, ferret out the identity of an earmarker? We can’t. Earmarkers are allowed to hide behind any pile of crap they choose; nothing says a member has to identify his or her earmarks.  So just shut up about it.

Some Representatives and Senators are proud, though—-shouting their earmarks from the highest heights via the press, while many refuse to discuss them at all.  One way of finding out an earmarker’s identity is to

look at the project name of the cash recipient—often named after the earmarkers, themselves.

Who gets the most earmarks? Who gets anything in life? The more powerful members of Congress. The surest way to excel in earmarking, however, is to be on an Appropriations Committee. The best position to secure anything, including earmarks, is to be a chair of an appropriations subcommittee.

Speaking of chairs, Rep. Don Young of Alaska has occupied a nice, fat, cushy one since 1973.  Back in 2005, as the head of the Transportation Committee, Young earmarked funds for the now infamous, Bridges to Nowhere. One of these bridges fellow Alaskan earmarker, Sarah Palin, supported—before Congress ended her non-wet dream, that is.

Back to Don Young, though:  in October 2006, Rolling Stone called Don one of “the ten worst Congressmen“. I’m willing to bet the magazine sill stand by its assessment.  If you read a little further, you’ll probably agree that this top ten honor should extend indefinitely.

Don Young on the subject of environmentalists:   a “self-centered bunch of waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots” who “are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.”

Don Young making a pun: The victims of Katrina, he suggested, “can kiss my ear!”

Don Young waving a  penis at Mollie Beattie.  Whipping out the eighteen-inch penis bone of a walrus and brandishing it like a sword on the House floor, Young said to Beattie (director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), “There’s nothing sacred about this bone!”   Young also waved his penis at the rest of Congress, while arguing the right of an Alaskan entrepreneur to sell the sex organs of endangered animals as aphrodisiacs.

As you can see from the picture below, folks, the bone is a mightier weapon than the pencil and gives the term ‘pencildick‘ (a penis of small girth) new perspective.

Thank-you to the blog, A Tiny Revolution, who provided this comparison. I think you’ll agree that the Don Young penis story has much more punch.

Speaking of which, Rolling Stone has a lot more to say about “Mr. Pork’s” deeds as one of the infamous ten:  “Alaska’s Third Senator,” and former tugboat captain knows how to haul home the bacon.  More than $400 million was earmarked for two bridges.   Two separate bridges, folks, to two separate nowheres!

The first, nearly as long as the Golden Gate, was to serve an island community of fifty people. The second, known as ‘Don Young’s Way,‘ would connect Anchorage to a patch of scarcely habitable marshland, making Alaska, the nation’s third least populated state, the fourth-biggest recipient of transportation funds.  “…Stuffed it like a turkey,”  the famous earmarker boasted.

Which brings me to the subject of boasting:  John McCain and Sarah Palin criticized Democrat Barack Obama over the amount of money he earmarked for his home state Illinois, even though Alaska under Palin’s leadership has earmarked 10 times more money per citizen for pet projects.

Pet projects, you know, like the Bridge to Nowhere, the one that Palin was for before she was against.  Thanks to this very same bridge, we have to listen to Palin repeat ad nauseum, “Thanks, but no thanks,”

According to the Anchorage Daily, however, Palin campaigned in 2006 on a build-the-bridge platform, telling Ketchikan residents she felt their pain when politicians called them “nowhere.”

The newspaper goes on to say that they’re still feeling pain today in Ketchikan, over Palin’s subsequent decision to use the bridge funds for other projects — and over the timing of her announcement, which they say came in a pre-dawn press release that seemed aimed at national news deadlines.

“I think that’s when the campaign for national office began,” said Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Weinstein noted, the state is continuing to build a road on Gravina Island to an empty beach where the bridge would have gone — because federal money for the access road, unlike the bridge money, would have otherwise been returned to the federal government.”

Allow me to paraphrase the Washington Post on this ‘thanks but no thanks’ stance:

Palin is failin’ the Pinocchio Test. It would be more accurate to say that Sarah Palin finally killed off a bridge project that had become a national joke then used the money to build a road to nowhere.