Sen. Burr Touts Funds From Stimulus Bill He Opposed
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on October 21st, 2009 4:37 am by HL
Sen. Burr Touts Funds From Stimulus Bill He Opposed
Earlier this year, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) — commonly referred to as the stimulus — with the votes of only three Republicans in the Senate. Since then, a whole host of legislators who opposed the stimulus have jumped at the opportunity to personally deliver stimulus funds to their cash-strapped districts. Now, […]
Earlier this year, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) — commonly referred to as the stimulus — with the votes of only three Republicans in the Senate. Since then, a whole host of legislators who opposed the stimulus have jumped at the opportunity to personally deliver stimulus funds to their cash-strapped districts.
Now, the Hickory Daily Record reports that the latest senator to engage in stimulus hypocrisy is Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC). Last week, Burr appeared in Bethlehem, North Carolina, to deliver ARRA funds for a fire station there:
This summer, the department applied for and won a $2,008,515 federal grant that will pay for a new 19,000-square-foot fire station.
On Friday, U.S. Sen. Richard Burr was in Bethlehem to present the grant to the department.
“This is a great thing for this county,” he said. “We’re not accustomed to federal dollars in that magnitude finding their way to North Carolina.”
“This will serve a huge need for us,” said Chief Shannon Lowrance of the Bethlehem Community Volunteer Fire Department. “This is a very fast-growing community. We’re building for the next 50 years.” […]
Having the plans ready to go helped the department win three American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Assistance to Firefighters Station Construction Grants issued this year from the Federal Emergency Management Agency / Department of Homeland Security, Lowrance said.
Last winter, Burr slammed the stimulus on Fox News, telling one of their anchors, “This isn’t a stimulus package, this is a spending package.” The senator even delivered the official Republican response to President Obama’s weekly address on the stimulus, warning ominously that “the federal government is obligating the American people to a similar fate” as that of a family choking under credit card debt. He ended up voting against the funds he is now happy to tout.
Right Wing Activist Launches College Social Networking Site To ?Smash Left-Wing Scum? On Campus
Campus Progress reports that Morton Blackwell, founder of the right-wing young adult organization, the Leadership Institute (LI), has launched a new social-networking site for young conservatives called CampusReform. The purpose of the site is to expose “bias” in universities “completely dominated by the left” and give students a forum to report and organize against professors […]
Campus Progress reports that Morton Blackwell, founder of the right-wing young adult organization, the Leadership Institute (LI), has launched a new social-networking site for young conservatives called CampusReform. The purpose of the site is to expose “bias” in universities “completely dominated by the left” and give students a forum to report and organize against professors perceived as abusive leftists. Blackwell described the motivation behind his ambitous project to the American Prospect:
“I have had a long-term awareness of how the campuses have become left-wing indoctrination centers, and many, many students can go their entire college educations and never see any representations of conservative principles on their campuses — but they see innumerable amounts of propaganda both in campus curriculum and with speakers and in campus newspapers. It has always bugged me that conservatives have not done likewise.”
In other words, CampusReform’s young conservatives want to “smash left-wing scum,” as Tony Listi, a graduate of Texas A&M, wrote on the site. There is a CampusReform subsite for each of the 2,376 four-year colleges in the US which contains a blog, event listings, membership roster, and “access to a variety of powerful weapons to identify, expose, and combat leftist abuses on campus.” Those weapons consist of a system which allows students to review “biased” textbooks, rate faculty and “hold professors accountable,” report “leftist abuses,” and take a survey to record “specific injustices.” Currently, LI is offering a $100 prize each day in October for reporting “leftist abuse.”
Ken Johnson, a humanities professor at the University of Southern Indiana who was recently flagged by CampusReform as an academic who “continually degrades the Bible,” offers a seperate interpretation. “Students sometimes confuse the presentation of ideas” with his own, Professor Johnson told Campus Progress. “Some students, as soon as their thinking is challenged, the challenger becomes the evil one.”
LI has already bred conservative leaders like chief GOP strategist Karl Rove, Sen. Joe ‘You Lie’ Wilson (R-SC), and Grover Norquist, head of American’s For Tax Reform. CampusReform also proudly points out that James O’Keefe, the “filmmaker” who posed as the pimp that led to the ACORN scandal, attended ten different LI schools in addition to receiving funding from the Institute.
