TURNING DEAF EAR TO EARMARKS

Earmarks - or no earmarks. That is the question causing the ringing of hands in Republican Senate ranks on Capitol Hill. Especially since the queen of earmarks, Republican Lisa Murkowski (name spelled correctly, thank you very much!), appears to be holding onto her crown.
The Republican leader in the senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is arguing earmarks are but a small drop in the very large budget bucket. And anyway, McConnell says, the Obama Administration will just use grants and other bureaucratic paths to funnel money to states for pet projects of favored members of Congress.
Read my lips (or this blog) Mitch - just say no. No is a wonderful word when applied to most federal spending. McConnell's vacillating in the wake of the resounding NO heard from voters shows just how entrenched the old guard is in Washington, on both sides of the aisle.
Last year our tax dollars funded 19.6-billion for earmarks. Indiana ranks 43rd on the government earmark dole list per pork dollars received per person. Alaska is number one.
No wonder Alaskans brushed up on their spelling.
Republicans in the house have already made their New Years resolution early - pledging a 2011 budget free of earmarks. My congressman, Mike Pence, made that pledge in 2009. And kept it.
No so Senator Lugar.
While earmarks are smallfry spending in the gargantuan federal budget, they are used as bribes to secure the support of wavering members of congress for bills that might not have garnered their support without the pork for their district included.
Congressional bills were stuffed with more than 9,000 earmarks last year. And who can forget the "Louisiana Purchase" or the "Cornhusker kick-back" during the debate that ended in passage of that debacle we now call Obamacare.
If you would use some wax remover Senator McConnell, you would hear the American electorate speaking loud and clear - no more earmarks.
And as for back-dooring money through presidential mandate there is a simple solution. Just cut off the funding. Congress holds the purse strings, not the White House.

CORRUPT "BASTARDS"

The height to which media bias has risen gives me neck strain.
In Alaska, the topper is Anchorage television station KTVA. Unbeknownst to news staffers, they were recorded plotting to identify "registered child molesters" among the crowd attending Tea Party Republican Joe Miller's rally and instigating a little chaos, ala Rand Paul.
A chagrined Miller supporter, Sarah Palin, denounced the CBS affiliates smear strategy and called them "corrupt bastards" today on Fox News Sunday.
Appropriate words for unthinkable activities on the part of so-called professional journalists.
The station manager excused the recording as saying it was too "garbled" and nothing actually happened.
Well, gee. That's a really lame excuse for shockingly unethical behavior.
Another Anchorage Media outlet, KTUU Radio, suspended conservative talk show host Dan Fagan Thursday after he encouraged his listeners to sign-up as write-in candidates in the Senate race after he accused the state supreme court of electioneering by allowing a list of write-in candidates to be handed out to voters at the polls. That decision defies the spirit of a write-in vote. Write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski supporters called for Fagan's head and threatened to put pressure on station advertisers to boycott KTUU if he wasen't fired.
While I disagree with Fagan's tactic - which prompted 150 people to add their names to the write-in candidate list, swelling that list from one page to eight - I understand his anger toward a judicial decision that clearly favors one candidate over another. Fagan should not be fired.
In most states, including Indiana, any handout or literature with a candidate's name on it is banned from the actual polling place. That is the way it should be.
Voters in beautiful Alaska have an ugly choice on the Republican side - power hungry Lisa Murkowski, who got her current seat in the Senate from daddy in 2002, when then Gov. Frank Murkowski appointed his daughter to fill a vacancy.
Joe Miller is not pristine either. He was cited for ethics violations while employed as a part-time local government attorney in Fairbanks. He has admitted using office computers to do political work on his lunch hour.
Whatever his faults, Miller does not deserve to be targeted in the way the Anchorage CBS affiliate television station plotted.
Fortunately, this dark side of media bias was exposed to the cleansing rays of public scrutiny. The voices on that call should be summarily fired.

THE MURKOWSKI RESOLUTION

Three cheers for Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). Her resolution to prohibit the Obama Administration from back-dooring Cap and Trade legislation by allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to impose the bill through regulation will be voted on Thursday.
The Murkowski resolution has garnered some surprising support - West Virginia's staunch liberal Jay Rockefeller for one. And several other leading Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is carrying the water for the White House and predicts the resolution will fail. Let's hope he is wrong.
No where, other than perhaps West Virginia, will the devastating economic impact of Cap and Trade regulation be felt more than here in Indiana. We mine coal in this state, especially in the southern part. Most of our plants which generate electricity are powered by coal. If the EPA gets a congressional green light to impose onerous greenhouse gas regulations, it will put Hooiser coal miners in unemployment lines.
And it will, as President Obama so famously forecast before his election, skyrocket utility bills.
Over the years average Americans have become environmentalists without joining militant environmental activists groups. We routinely recycle cardboard, aluminum cans, plastic grocery bags and newspapers, among other everyday items.
We have watched our monthly utility bills double and quadruple in the past twenty-five years without a lot of uproar as coal-fired power generating plants recovered the costs to switch from coal to natural gas or added costly electrostatic precipitators to sharply reduce sulphur dioxide and particulate emissions.
Indiana senators Bayh and Lugar need to join Murkowski.
Even as the science behind global warming is being exposed as fraudulent, there is still drum beating from Progressives and the Obama Administration to enact Cap and Trade, which is the biggest fraud of all. Unfortunately both Bayh and Lugar bought into the global warming scam.
Under the Cap and Trade bill proposed by Obama, utility bills could quadruple very quickly because it would force power generating companies to purchase so-called clean energy credits to offset any greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere. That would make George Soros, Al Gore and their cohorts happy. They own a big chunk of the company that would trade such credits and the Chicago-based exchange that would buy and sell such credits.
Will the air we breathe be cleaner?
No!
What's worse, there will be less money to refurbish old power plants and build new, more environmentally friendly plants.
Cap and Trade, the bill itself or the EPA regulations, is a lose-lose for Americans. Just ask the Spanish. Spain went green in a big way several years ago. Now Spain is going broke and a quarter of its workforce have no jobs, leaving all those "green" workers in Spain singing the "blues."