From HotAir
More at Politifact
Gateway Pundit counts seven broken promises in one:
1. Make government open and transparent.
2. Make it "impossible" for Congressmen to slip in pork barrel projects.
3. Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public. (Even Congressional Republicans shut out.)
4. No more secrecy.
5. Public will have 5 days to look at a bill.
6. You’ll know what’s in it.
7. We will put every pork barrel project online.
Our old friend at Grits for Breakfast is unhappy with the stimulus funding that went to a federal program called Byrne grants- it was a Byrne grant funded police task force responsible for the disastrous- and unscrupulous- police action in Tulia, Texas. I've mentioned Tulia once before, and here's the pertinent part of that post:...this is what I found at Wikipedia:
Tulia gained notoriety following a drug sting in July 1999 that rounded up 46 people, forty of whom were African Americans. The remaining detainees were white people known to have ties within the black community, and in fact lived in the black part of town. Nearly one in three of Tulia's black males were arrested, about 15% of the town's black population.[4][5] All charges were based on the word of undercover officer Tom Coleman, a so called "gypsy cop" who made his living traveling through impoverished rural Texas offering to work undercover cheaply for short periods of time for underfunded police departments. Coleman claimed to have made over one hundred drug buys in the small town, essentially an impossible feat for an undercover officer working alone. He never recorded any of the sales, but claimed to have written painstaking notes on his leg under his shorts and upper arm under his shirt sleeve when nobody was looking.
During the roundup, no large sums of money, illegal drugs, drug paraphernalia, or illegal weapons were found. The accused drug dealers showed no signs of having any income associated with selling drugs. The drugs Coleman claimed to have bought from the accused did not have the fingerprints of the accused on them or their baggies. No independent witnesses could corroborate Coleman's claims. In his testimony, Coleman gave inaccurate descriptions of the "dealers" he had allegedly bought cocaine from. One suspect had his charges dropped when he was able to prove he had been at work during the times he had supposedly sold Coleman cocaine. Another produced bank and phone records indicating she was in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma at the time of her alleged crime. Many of the accused, however, seeing the long sentences dealt out by all-white juries in the earliest cases, pled guilty in return for lesser sentences, despite their proclaimed innocence. The remaining defendants were convicted solely on the basis of Coleman's testimony. The state attorney general, John Cornyn, awarded Coleman a prize for being "Lawman of the Year." [6][7]
Law Enforcement recipients of the grant have almost unchecked power and have not had to answer for how they spend their money, and this has led to abuses such as Tulia in the past. So we just gave them more money. That might not have happened had somebody read the bill. Sez Grits:
So, sometime this year, Governor Perry will get a larger pot of Byrne grant money than in years past and he'll need to dispense it in a relatively short period of time. Even though the section on rural law enforcement specifically authorizes regional drug task forces, I hope Gov. Perry instead spends the money on new drug treatment and prevention programs simultaneously made eligible under the bill, which are needed in rural areas a lot more than some bastard reincarnation of the old, Tulia-style drug task forces.
I have read a few blogs taking swipes at the Obamas for flying home for President's Day weekend, going out to dinner for Valentine's, and I thought they were churlish, over-reacting, and awfully close to Obama Derangement Syndrome. I mean, I get the point that if from the media's point of view, Bush could never do anything recreational without it being twisted into some version of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, but I thought that was stupid then, I don't want the sort of 'equality' that requires the media to continue to be non-partisanly stupid.
I don't begrudge the Obama's a romantic Valentine's dinner in their hometown. But I do wonder about how this matches up with his rhetoric about this urgent crisis, this emergency so urgent that Congress had to pass the bill without reading it. If the President isn't even going to sign the thing until Tuesday, what was the urgency (other than Pelosi's European trip, I mean)? Pin It
