No Earmark Left Behind and other specialty funding

With the Omnibus spending bill Congress has decided to pack in 9,000 earmarks for spending and this time they released it in PDF form which Heritage took in and indexed at their Omnibusting site. Well, at least as much as the thing can be in that form. So now it is time to do some digging!

Lets get to brass tacks: those in the funding scandals of the past few years really have no business in getting much in the way of Federal support. Pretty much had it with the revolving door funding mentality, so I'm going to get right to the meat of things.

Bob Kerrey, Head of New School University in NY, famous associate: Norman Hsu on the Eugene Lang Board of Governors, NSU and on the Board of Trustees (captured during my first round of documents in my Hsu notebook). Remember him?

Here is what I've found so far in the budget for NSU:

In the Labor, HHS and Education budget, Under the Funding for Improvement of Education section, starting p. 115, p.125 of the Omnibus: New School University, New York, NY, for the Institute for Urban Education $926,000. (Clinton, Schumer)

In the Energy and Water Development and Related Activities, in the Congressionally Directed Projects section starting p.81, p. 83: NEW SCHOOL UNIVERSITY GREEN BUILDING (NY) $2,000,000 (Nadler, Schumer; Clinton) and a bit about this building here.

What a great deal! Associate with a fraudster and get $2.96 million for your university!

I do appreciate what Heritage is doing... the searching is so-so, thus going back to source documents is getting to be necessary. Really, the entire thing starts as a Word document (or set thereof) and then going through the process of printing and scanning introduces errors and problems in searching. It is almost like the Congress doesn't want folks to look at the budget for the good old US of A!


Now on pg. 60 of the State/Foreign Affairs budget we find that Congress has not knuckled under to FARC lobbying and actually bumped the Anti-Terrorism line item up a bit from last FY as seen at FAS archives of a CRS report for Congress this year on Latin American terrorism issues. Amazing that after backing and forthing they finally found that letting resurgent terrorist organization that has been kidnapping folks for ransom for a few years, bustling cocaine out at a record rate and getting support from Hugo Chavez, just *might* be worth worrying about. Stunning compared to the lack of guts elsewhere in the world by Congress.

Of course those FARCLANDIANS may decide to come north, as the Omnibus guts the border fence legislation... Michelle Malkin is on top of that issue.

We are, apparently, ploughing $548 million into Andean counter-narcotics funding... so, while we eliminate crop acres from Colombia, those farmers head into the FARC area, grow there, we help Colombia go after them, they get armed by Chavez and the cost of drugs goes up, getting FARC more money... we can, in all likelihood, spiral that beyond what FARC and Chavez can do, but the question of a regional war starting up becomes a pertinent one, sooner of later.

Lots more at Heritage's site!