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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Obama, Biden and the Earmarks That Bind


The Washington Post reports today that "Senator Obama sought more than $3.4 million in congressional earmarks for clients of the lobbyist son of his Democratic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden.

And we thought Obama was inexperienced in the ways of Washington!

According to The Washington Post, the younger Biden "has registered to represent about 21 clients that have brought in $3.5 million to his Washington firm, according to lobbying disclosure forms.

Dad works the system pretty well too. According to the Post, "Senator Biden has collected more than $6.9 million in campaign contributions from lobbyists and lawyers since 1989."


4 comments:

  1. I'm actually shocked that you didn't read the meat of the article, that the money went to a Catholic University to expand Early Childhood Education and trainign for nurses who were going into underserved areas of the state of Illinoise.

    "Obama requested $1.4 million for St. Xavier, including $900,000 to establish an early-childhood teacher training center "to meet the demand in the southwest Chicago metropolitan area," according to a news release on the Web site of Obama's Senate office. Obama requested the early-childhood money in both 2006 and 2007.

    Obama also in June 2007 sought $500,000 for a skills laboratory for St. Xavier's nursing school, which has one of the largest nursing programs in the state.

    In the end, Obama's $1.4 million in requests resulted in $192,000 for the nursing facility.

    Murphy said that a big selling point was the diversity of the nursing students, who often ended up working in communities where nurses were in shortage."

    How obviously shortsighted of you.

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  2. What a win-win, Matheus -- avoid the Congressional appropriations process through which most of these pork projects would never see the light of day, thousands of dollars siphoned off for a Democrat lobbying firm which then forks over "pay for play" money to the likes of Biden, "free money" for constituents, and then they can all blame George Bush for the resulting deficit. What an enchanted world you Dems occupy!

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  3. So will you next be posting how much money and how many recent lobbyists John McCain has working for him? If you didn't know, McCain has over 40 ex-lobbyists (who will so either be appointed or go back to their firms) working for him. So your post of such a small amount equals an accusation of Obama of being to old and white.

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  4. Brian -

    I have over 500 posts on this blog; please find so much as a phrase indicating that I support John McCain. He and Obama are two sides of the same bad coin as far as I am concerned.

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