Marti Oakley (c)copyright 2010 All Rights Reserved

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JACKASS ALERT!

This week’s Jackass Award goes to Senator Tom Harkin.  While the country founders in debt, Senator Harkin maintains that he has the constitutional right to create debt through the use of earmarks!  Makes him look really good at home come election time!

__________________________________________________________Yesterday I sat through about 45 minutes of arguments on the Senate floor via C-SPAN, regarding the use of earmarks which by the Senates’ own admission, costs the country an average of 350 BILLION dollars per year.  This is money spent by elected officials which amounts to an indirect tax on the country as a whole; a tax which will be converted to campaign slogans and bragging about how Senator “So&So” brought home the bacon.  Unfortunately, the entire country has to buy that pig although few us will get to sit down to the meal.

Much to my amazement Senator Harkin (D) IA. , gave a long and tedious speech about how the “sun shines” on all the earmarks and these are public knowledge, and how this is somehow the right of Senators to continue to spend us into un-repayable debt while indirectly taxing us to promote their campaigns.  Using the words “sunshine, transparency, and the CONSTITUTION, Harkin claimed it was their constitutional right to spend money we don’t have just to make themselves look good at home. 

I found this speech all the more amazing as Mr. Harkin just voted for cloture on S.510, the fake food safety bill, which assaults any number of constitutional rights of individuals.  It appears obvious those “rights” only apply to the Senate as far as Harkin is concerned.  During his high drama speech on S.510, filled with skewed data, and the usual bleating and crying about people “dying and suffering” right now!,  which he claimed he had personally worked on for years, it seems the Senator didn’t recollect anything about the Constitution as it pertained to the citizenry.  Must be some kind of congressional Alzheimers; selective memory or expedient mis-recollection.  Whatever it is, Harkin seems to be in advanced stages of the disease.

It also seems glaringly apparent that few Senators, nor any one else in government for that matter, have any comprehension or concern for the enormous debt that is piling up as we are systematically driven into a debt so massive and so incomprehensible to the average person, that the actual numbers cause the mind to go numb. 

I find it appalling that with 22 million Americans out of work, 48 million families on food stamps, the Federal Reserve poised to collapse the dollar, no one willing to buy any more of our treasuries due to our massive and unrepayable debt load, that any government official, much less a Senator would advocate for a practice that costs the country annually, 350 BILLION dollars! With annual revenues in the toilet due to massive unemployment, the idea that any Senator would be enraged by the idea that one of his cash cows was about to be tipped over while the country slips further into economic collapse,  just infuriates me.

So, to Senator Harkin and all those other government officials who obviously believe that money does grow on trees:

 KNOCK! KNOCK! PUDDIN’ HEAD!   WE’RE BROKE!  STOP SPENDING MONEY WE DON”T HAVE! 

I personally believe that any Senator or Representative who obtains the benefits of indirect campaign promotion through the use of earmarks, should be required to pay taxes on those funds and should also be required to forfeit their annual salary as an act of good faith to offset the debt they created through the practice of earmarks.

Hitting them in their pockets while they pick our pockets might slow the progression of one of the most corrupt practices in congress.