Exclusive: Earmark critic steered cash to blimp, former aide

[bloomington-lib]

Source: poltico

Rep. Pete Sessions — the chief of the Republicans’ campaign arm in the House — says on his website that earmarks have become “a symbol of a broken Washington to the American people.”

Yet in 2008, Sessions himself steered a $1.6 million earmark for dirigible research to an Illinois company whose president acknowledges having no experience in government contracting, let alone in building blimps.

What the company did have: the help of Adrian Plesha, a former Sessions aide with a criminal record who has made more than $446,000 lobbying on its behalf.

Sessions spokeswoman Emily Davis defends the airship project as a worthwhile use of federal funds and says it could eventually lead to thousands of new jobs in Sessions’s Dallas-area district.

But the company that received the earmarked funds, Jim G. Ferguson & Associates, is based in the suburbs of Chicago, with another office in San Antonio — nearly 300 miles from Dallas. And while Sessions used a Dallas address for the company when he submitted his earmark request to the House Appropriations Committee last year, one of the two men who control the company says that address is merely the home of one of his close friends.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090730/pl_politico/25599

[harmonicon]

1. fucked up

... not even delivering pork for his constituents but only for rich buddies. Shit, if you're going to fuck over other tax payers at least do it for the benefit of your constituents, I would think.

[Soylent Brice]

2. nice catch.

K&R

[formercia]

3. Why is the GOP so stupid?

If Sessions had just kept his mouth shut, nobody would have noticed.

Hypocrite.

[high density]

4. 360% return on that $446k investment

Obviously government pork is the place to be in this market.

[sofa king]

5. A blimp is not a dirigible.

Blimp: Uses its own inflated gasbags to provide structural integrity.

Dirigible: Contains its gasbags within a skeletal structure to provide integrity.


The Hindenberg was a dirigible. Thanks to its strong hull, it could maintain speeds high enough to avoid storms while crossing the Atlantic.

Rush Limbaugh is a half-inflated blimp. He's a gasbag with no backbone and no integrity.


Edit: Since the original poster is relatively new, I'll point out that my criticism is directed at Politico, not the original poster.