First John McCain ridiculed spending federal money on researching the DNA of grizzly bears, and a three million dollar earmark for an "overhead projector" in Obama's home district. The "overhead projector" turned out to be a state-of-the-art planetarium projector for Chicago's renown Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum. Then Sarah Palin ignorantly ridiculed truly valuable fruit fly (Drosophila) research.
Now "Bobby" Jindal is mocking "wasteful spending" on volcano monitoring (please note there are 93 volcanos in Sarah Palin's home state of Alaska, one of which is fixing to blow any second and could potentially affect 34 villages, towns and cities, including Anchorage and Wasilla) and magnetic-levitation rail (or, Maglev) systems.
While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a "magnetic levitation" line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring." Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.
Time to get real, governor. Follow me downstairs.
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