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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Carl Hiaasen
Recent polls show that Americans are already disenchanted with the new
Public sentiment is not likely to improve with the news that lawmakers are forcing
It's a lesson in the politics of waste, as practiced by those who pretend to be crusaders for thrift.
When President Obama submitted his 2011 budget plan to
More than
Obama and top
"The truth is, we were not on a sustainable path to get back to the moon's surface," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
Some lawmakers were irate, none more than Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama. This would be the same Richard Shelby who every year introduces a balanced-budget amendment; the same Richard Shelby who piously rails about runaway government spending, and trashes TARP, and frets about the terrible deficit.
But wait. Some of the work on the Ares rockets was taking place at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Shelby's home state, which meant that jobs would be lost. Unfortunately, that's what happens when you eliminate a big federal contract.
So, as a pre-emptive strike, the senator inserted a sentence in the 2010 federal budget that basically barred
But in October, congressional leaders agreed on a
Since then, the so-called Shelby provision -- only 70 words -- has remained intact in the temporary spending measures that have been passed to keep government running. Mysteriously, nobody seems able to get the language deleted, which would shut off the
The largest beneficiary is
In January, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin called for
Last week, a spokesman for Nelson said "partisan politics" had stalled the senator's efforts to fix the spending bill, but he remained confident that he'll be successful.
Meanwhile, tax dollars keep flowing to the abandoned moon-shot program -- about
Politicians who go to Washington are expected to fight for local projects, and over the years Shelby has brought loads of federal pork home to Alabama. This time he lost.
Yet instead of doing what's best for all American taxpayers (and for
A few weeks ago, an aide who didn't mean to be humorous asserted that Shelby wasn't "actively trying" to protect the 70-word budget item that's kept the Constellation money flowing. That's not to say he has tried to stop it, either actively or passively.
Judging from public opinion surveys, the American people might be getting wise to phony deficit hawks who want everyone to sacrifice except for their own constituents and fat-cat supporters.
Shelby is fond of bashing Democrats and warning, "We are on the road to financial destruction."
Given his own not-so-stellar role in the Constellation debacle, he gives new meaning to the term "space case."
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