For instance, the agency has spent $2,873,440 trying to figure out why lesbians are obese, and $466,642 on why fat girls have a tough time getting dates. Another $2,075,611 was spent encouraging old people to join choirs.
Neat.
Congratulations to the Washington Free Beacon, and Elizabeth Harrington in particular, for good research!
Lets talk about the United States budget for Fiscal Year 2009.
The left has tried repeatedly to blame Bush for the FY 2009 budget, and most of the time, this would be completely legitimate. After all, when Obama came into office, it was in the middle of FY 2009. So logic would dictate that whatever budget was in place when he came into office, he had no say over. Moreover, one would think that the previous president had his voice in the FY 2009 budget.
But then you'd be wrong.
Let me explain. As soon as the Democrats came into office, they started ignoring Bush's budget. By the time Bush turned in his FY 2009 suggestion, it was dead on arrival.
Then the Democrats proposed their budget.
They loved their budget compared to the president's budget, because it didn't involve cuts:
When the Democrats proposed their budget, Bush similiarly declared it dead. This is from Feb 2009, Bloomberg:
Democrats postponed work on the appropriations bills last
year after they were unable to reach an agreement with former
President George W. Bush on how much to spend on domestic
programs. Bush had demanded lawmakers freeze most domestic
spending. Most federal agencies, except those related to defense,
have been funded by a stopgap measure that expires March 6.
Democrats did vote on the "idea" of the budget in March of 2008. However, it was a non binding budget... meaning, it meant nothing. According to USA today:
Democrats gave final approval on Thursday of a
budget blueprint for 2009 that rewards domestic agencies and the
Pentagon with generous budget increases while leaving wrenching
decisions about curbing Medicare costs and increasing taxes to the next
president.
The House approved the $3.1 trillion budget plan
by a 214-210 vote; senators passed the measure Wednesday. The nonbinding
measure does not go to President Bush but instead sets guidelines for
future action by Congress.
The House-Senate compromise relies on
questionable assumptions to predict a small budget surplus by 2012 after
seven years of deficits under the Republican president.
Wait... what was that?
The next president actually will inherit a
deficit in the $400 billion range, or higher, under current estimates.
Some Wall Street economists fear record deficits of up to $500 billion.
Republicans lamented the lost opportunity to
tackle the biggest budget challenge: the rapidly spiraling cost of
Medicare, Social Security and the Medicaid health care program for the
poor. The Democratic plan would not impose any cost-cutting on them.
Democrats are generous, however, in the near term
with the annual spending bills passed by Congress. Over the five years
of the Democratic plan, appropriated spending would rise $241 billion.
In line for large increases are education, energy and public works.
It appears as though the Republicans were solidly against the Dems non-binding budget proposal.
And of course, the vote in the Senate:
Where you'll find that only 2 Republicans voted for it.
So instead of freezing spending, Democrats passed parts of the budget piecemeal in order to keep the government going. But that's not all. Democrats waited until Obama got into office, and then passed the final portion of FY 2009 under him... in March 2009! Again, via Bloomberg:
The U.S. Congress gave final
approval to a $410 billion spending bill that includes an overall
8 percent budget increase for some federal agencies and thousands
of congressional pet projects.
The Senate approved the so-called omnibus measure on a voice
vote, sending it to President Barack Obama for his signature.
Moments earlier, the bill cleared a procedural vote 62 to 35. The
House approved the plan Feb. 25.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said
before passage that he was “very” surprised at how long it took
lawmakers to reach agreement on the legislation. He said the bill
will provide needed funding increases for federal agencies that
saw too many lean budgets during former President George W.
Bush’s administration.
Please note that Harry Reid wrote that there were "too many lean" budgets under GWB. Now, with Obama in charge, he was much happier, and fatter.
HR 1105 caused a little bit of a ruckus over the pork laden in it.
But you might wonder who actually voted for it?
Well, here's the roll call of the House:
Of the 62 "Yeas", only 8 were Republicans.
Which means this bill swept through, despite Republican opposition.
If you say that either Bush or Republicans were responsible for the FY2009 budget, you are beyond wrong. You're in that special category of dishonesty or ignorance.
Earlier, I wrote about how Jon Stewart can't admit that he was wrong about Fox News viewers being the most "misinformed" viewers. I did a bunch of research on one of Fox News' rivals, and applied the same standard that Jon Stewart did. Which I thought was kinda brilliant.
Shortly after that, a number of people all started using the same argument that Politifact used (a few of) the wrong studies. That there was a thin difference between being 'misinformed' and not knowing what the facts were. If one person had come to this conclusion, I'd chalk it up to one person splitting hairs. But it wasn't one person. It was a herd of Dems. So I googled, and came up with the FireDogLake post that seems to be the source of it all:
...The three Pew polls measure how informed viewers are. They don’t even belong in the discussion, because they don’t go to Stewart’s point.
Let's go back to Stewart's point:
Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? … Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.
If we constrain our definition of "misinformed media viewers" to the FireDogLake version of what Stewart meant, then we're not talking about 'every poll'. We're talking about one polling service: PIPA. Moreover, we're talking about what PIPA asked people, and what PIPA felt was 'misinformation.' I ran into this study before, which is why I wanted to focus on it. A lot of the questions are subjective, but no question was more wrong in my opinion then this one:
When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it
NOTE: the second vote, while not initially appearing to be connected to TARP, does have TARP bootstrapped onto it. Read the text.
Now keep in mind, PIPA said that Fox viewers were 'misinformed' if they believed that most of the Republicans were against TARP. How do they form that opinion? Wait. Let's do this. Suppose you asked viewers who supported TARP more, dems or reps? What do you suppose the vast majority of MSNBC viewers would say? I'm going to jump into the pool and suggest that their 'misinformation' rating would go way, way, way up, along with those who listen to NPR.
