New York Gets Its Serving of Pork

Worst of the Waste: The 100 Outrageous Government Spending Projects of 2010
The Grateful Dead have been named among the top “100 Greatest Artists of All Time” by Rolling Stone magazine. Now, they rank among the 100 worst examples of wasteful Government Spending in 2010. A report prepared by Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) office reveals Taxpayers shelled out $615,000 so the University of California at Santa Cruz could digitize Grateful Dead photographs, tickets, backstage passes, fliers, shirts and other Memorabilia. “This is one of the first efforts to preserve

Confident Senate vows Zadroga bill vote
WASHINGTON - Senate leaders think they have enough support to break a GOP Filibuster of the Zadroga 9/11 health bill - and vowed to start voting Wendesday. House members will hang around the Capitol at least through the evenign Wednesday to quickly sign off on any Senate-backed plan. "This is important to our country," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said as he implored his colleagues to hold off on a holiday Vacation for another day. Roadblocks remain. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has ...

Wednesday Open Thread
It appears even loyal Fox News has turned on Senate Republicans for their obstruction of the 9/11 First Responders bill. Fox & Friends demanded the bill be passed; conservative guests have criticized Republicans’ opposition; and yesterday, host Shep Smith called out a dozen GOP senators by name who had refused to appear on his program to discuss the bill. Today, Smith zeroed in on Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who has said he will block the bill, even if it means 9/11 responders have to wai...

Oklahoma City Firefighters Target Tom Coburn
Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn did not have a good day. Not only did he get hammered by just about everyone with a D after their name for blocking the 9/11 health bill, folks on Fox News ripped into him, and then, at the end of the day, the Oklahoma City Fire Fighters Assocition slammed him but good. And Jim Inhofe. The release speaks for itself. As the First Responders to the tragic bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, the professional fire fighters of Oklahoma call up...

Shep Smith to Tom Coburn: I cant believe youre blocking this 9/11 health care bill
Via Mediaite, I’m paraphrasing — but only a little. Shep’s emphatically in scold mode here, not only devoting a chunk of airtime to sympathetic video of 9/11 responders complaining about the delay but taking care to put Coburn’s photo onscreen at the end of the clip as a sort of lame shame ritual. Cloture on the bill failed last week, but Schumer and Gillibrand said over the weekend that they expect tomorrow’s second attempt to succeed. Quick passage assured, then...

Coburn Threatens to Block 9/11 Bill
(Wall Street Journal) - New York lawmakers were pleading with Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn Tuesday not to use procedural rules to block Legislation that would provide aid to sick Ground Zero workers. Coburn, a Republican, has said he has concerns about the bill and wants to put it on hold until 2011. Proponents of the $6.2 billion measure contend that waiting for the next congressional session is akin to killing the bill because the incoming Republican majority in the House is unlikely to support it...

Shep Smith Zeroes In On Tom Coburn For Opposing 9/11 First Responders Bill
Fox News' Shep Smith has been shellacking Republicans left and right for opposing the 9/11 First Responders bill, and today he zeroed in on Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) for vowing to slow down or block the bill until the next session of Congress. In this latest installment, he showed a picture of Coburn and said: He is the man who is vowing to slow this down or block it, so that the necessary funding for the illnesses of the First Responders who made it to Ground Zero to try to save lives on the d...

Has Tom Coburn (R-OK) Lost His Mind?
I guess in single-party states like Cuba, Syria, Laos, Turkmenistan, Liberia, Vietnam and Oklahoma, there's no sense among the political class that there's any real accountability from voters. The Democrats actually did have someone run against Tom Coburn last month, though you probably never heard of him. Jim Rogers, who also ran for president (of the United States) in 2008, managed to snag 265,519 votes (26%) against Coburn, just about half the number of votes that Andrew Rice got in 2008 wh...

Tom Coburn looks to block passage of health-care benefits for 9/11 First Responders
By Michael J.W. Stickings Full credit, or almost full credit, to Jon Stewart for raising awareness of the urgent health-care needs of 9/11 First Responders at a time when most in the media, and so many in Washington, couldn't be bothered, and for advocating swift passage of the Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. As Slate's Chris Beam notes, examining Stewart's undesired role as partisan Political Activist, "[t]he bill wasn't as far from passage as it seemed -- Stewart just shined a ligh...

Firefighters urge Coburn to drop opposition to 9/11 bill
Oklahoma City Firefighters are pressuring their senator to drop his opposition to a bill that would provide health benefits and compensation to Ground Zero First Responders. The Firefighters association, recalling its own tragic day in 1995 when an Oklahoma City federal building was bombed, urged its senators to support a bill that provides $6.2 billion to workers who got sick at the Ground Zero site in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 Terrorist Attacks. With both chambers hoping to wrap up the...

9/11-bill roadblock boor
Meet the Grinch who stole Christmas for thousands of 9/11 First Responders -- US Sen. Tom Coburn. The Oklahoma Republican announced he will try to block the 9/11 health-care bill from reaching the Senate floor before Congress leaves for its winter break -- possibly dooming the long-stalled Legislation forever. "This is a bill that's been drawn up and forced through Congress at the end of the year on a basis to solve a problem that we didn't have time to solve and we didn't get done," Coburn ...

An Unpaid Debt
Anyone who was in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, remembers how the ash, paper and dust of the collapsing towers blew across Lower Manhattan. For days afterward, there was that peculiar smell — of burned paper and chemicals and death. That was the air that filled the lungs of tens of thousands of Firefighters, police officers, nurses, Paramedics, Soldiers and civilian volunteers who toiled for months to uncover the dead. More than nine years later, many of those First Responders are dead...

Congress clears federal spending budget
WASHINGTON — The US Congress approved a temporary spending bill that will fund the Federal Government for another 10 weeks through March 4 in order to avoid a government shutdown. The Senate adopted the stopgap measure 79-16 followed by the House of Representatives 193 to 165 before the continuing resolution -- a law funding the Federal Government -- was set to expire Tuesday at midnight. President Barack Obama must now sign the bill into law. It freezes the Budgets of government agencies ...

Whither Go the BABs?
Without an extension by the end of December, the 2 year old Build America Bond (BAB) program will expire. As of this writing, both the Senate and House tax bills failed to include BABs as part of their packages. The program, which was birthed as part of the stimulus package, authorizes state and local governments to issue these bonds to finance pretty much any kind of infrastructure project. They are different from standard municipal bonds in that the interest earned is taxable as opposed to ta...

Wastebook 2010: UC Santa Cruz's Grateful Dead Archive Makes List Of Wasteful Spending
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is not grateful for the University of California-Santa Cruz's digital archive of Deadhead Memorabilia. The archive, which contains thousands of Grateful Dead-related pictures, documents and paraphernalia, was completed with the help of a $615,000 Federal Grant -- and comes in at No. 4 on Coburn's list of the most wasteful Government Spending projects of 2010. More from Coburn's Wastebook 2010 (PDF): Grateful Dead chose a public institution to archive the band's memorabi...

Obama Regimes Spends $165K to Digitize Song Catalog of Dirty Hippy Rock Band The Grateful Dead
Hippy punching bags, rejoice!… (The Hill)- Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) accused the government of wasting $11.5 billion in 2010 in his annual “Wastebook” report released Monday. Coburn, a longtime fiscal hawk, detailed 100 spending projects from the past year that he said constituted government waste that contributed to record Deficits. Projects identified by Coburn include $1.8 million in spending this past year to gather and display historic Las Vegas casino signs, and $165,000 ...

GOP Shows Lack of Resolve to Be Dicks
In the first nice, decent thing the Republicans have done in living memory, they passed the Food Safety Bill even though they could have used an administrative error to kill it. All spending bills must originate in the House. We abide by this Constitutional requirement not by honoring its intent but by finding a way to make it technically true. So, for example, congressional leaders will take a House Bill that isn't going anywhere and then pass an amendment to delete everything in that bill and...

House Will Stay to Pass 9/11 Bill
The House will stay in session tomorrow to pass the 9/11 health bill, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) declared this afternoon, removing one more potential obstacle to passing the measure that woudl help ailing First Responders. “My expectation is there is a high likelihood of a vote on 9/11 sometime tomorrow," Hoyer said of the ongoing effort in the Senate to pass the $6.2 billion James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. "As a result, I would be asking all of you to st...

In Sunday-evening Surprise, Senate Unanimously Passes Food Safety Bill
© Unknown The Senate unexpectedly approved Food Safety Legislation by unanimous consent Sunday evening, rescuing a bill that floated in limbo for weeks because of a clerical error. The Senate passed the Food Safety and Modernization Act on Nov. 30 by a vote of 73-25. But the bill was later invalidated by a technical objection because it was a revenue-raising measure that did not originate in the House - Senate staff had failed to substitute the Food Safety language into a House-originate...

Crucial Vote On 9/11 Health Care Bill Expected Wednesday
NEW YORK (CBS 2 / WCB S880)  - In the the nation’s capital, New York Senator Chuck Schumer said Wednesday was decision day for a vote in the Senate on the long-stalled 9/11 Health Care bill, Jay Dow reports. “We will see once and for all who will keep their promise to never forget the heroes of 9/11,” Schumer said. The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act is named for former NYPD detective James Zadroga, whose supporters said died of res...

Group pushes for nationwide wolf restoration
BILLINGS, Mont. — Environmentalists said Tuesday they intend to sue the Obama Administration to force it to restore gray wolves across the lower 48 states — even as Republicans in Congress sought unsuccessfully to strip the animals of protection. The Center for Biological Diversity said in a formal notice to the Interior Department that it will sue the agency in 60 days unless the government crafts a plan to bring back wolves throughout their historical range. "Wolves once roamed nea...

Senior Safety Nets at Risk in 2011
When Texas Governor Rick Perry recently threatened to pull his state out of Medicaid, he was hardly alone. Across the country, state Budgets continue to be strapped. Federal stimulus dollars are running out. And the latest Federal Tax and stimulus package will not provide much relief at the state and local levels. Meanwhile, looming provisions of health reform will add a projected 16 million to the Medicaid rolls. Where are the facilities to take care of these folks? Where is the money? [See 1...

Police arrest 'unruly' female Santas
DAYTON, Ohio, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- Police said a pair of female Santas arrested at an Ohio mall were part of an "unruly group," but members said they did nothing wrong. Miami Township Police said several Law Enforcement agencies responded to a call from Dayton Mall security Saturday to help "deal with an unruly group" and officers arrested Jacqueline S. Sallee, 41, of Dayton and Susan Rudolph, 46, of Washington Township, the Dayton Daily News reported. The group, which had arrived in two buses, incl...

Tom Barrett fights to keep Talgo jobs in Wisconsin
In a last ditch effort to try to retain as many Wisconsin jobs as possible from Spanish train manufacturer Talgo, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett met with Talgo President & CEO Antonio Perez in an effort to convince him to maintain a presence within the state.  Talgo, which announced recently that they will abandon their plans for adding new jobs after Gov.-elect Scott Walker refused federal money to bring High-speed Rail to Wisconsin, assured Barrett that they will leave some jobs in the s...

No. 9 Sooners try to end Fiesta Bowl funk
Eric Mensik twice got to go to the Fiesta Bowl as a young player at Oklahoma. Counting up all of his cherished memories from those two BCS bowl trips doesn't take long to do. "Honestly, none," said Mensik, now a starting offensive tackle for the ninth-ranked Sooners. "The hotel was nice and the food was great, but other than that if I had to choose if I wanted to go to Arizona, I would rather go to Florida or something else." The Fiesta Bowl has been no party to Oklahoma. During a five-game Bowl...