Murtha Inc. Going Strong

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After all that has been written exposing the rate John Murtha uses earmarks, heads and tails above every other member in Congress, you would think the man would slow down.  You would be wrong:

In the massive 2008 military-spending bill now before Congress — which could go
to a House-Senate conference as soon as Thursday — Mr. Murtha has steered more
taxpayer funds to his congressional district than any other member. The
Democratic lawmaker is chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on
Defense, which will oversee more than $459 billion in military spending this
year.

Johnstown’s good fortune has come at the expense of taxpayers everywhere
else. Defense contractors have found that if they open an office here and hire
the right lobbyist, they can get lucrative, no-bid contracts. Over the past
decade, Concurrent Technologies Corp., a defense-research firm that employs 800
here, got hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to Rep. Murtha despite poor
reviews by Pentagon auditors. The National Drug Intelligence Center, with 300
workers, got $509 million, though the White House has tried for years to shut it
down as wasteful and unnecessary. Another beneficiary: MTS Technologies, run by
a man who got his start some 40 years ago shining shoes at Mr. Murtha’s
Johnstown Minute Car Wash.

A review by The Wall Street Journal of dozens of such contracts funded by Mr.
Murtha’s committee shows that many weren’t sought by the military or federal
agencies they were intended to benefit. Some were inefficient or mismanaged,
according to interviews, public records and previously unpublished Pentagon
audits. One Murtha-backed firm, ProLogic Inc., is under federal investigation
for allegedly diverting public funds to develop commercial software, people
close to the case say. The company denies wrongdoing and is in line to get
millions of dollars more in the pending defense bill. …

But for his 33 years in Congress, his overriding focus has been the revival
of his hard-luck hometown. In addition to using taxpayer money to build a local
defense industry, Mr. Murtha has funded by legislative fiat miles of new roads,
water projects, medical facilities and federal offices for his district. He even
brought a Marine attack-helicopter squadron here; it’s next to the John Murtha
Johnstown-Cambria County Airport. Mr. Murtha has steered at least $600 million
in earmarks to his district in the past four years, according to Taxpayers for
Common Sense, a nonpartisan Washington group. The nonprofit group estimates he’s
sent $2 billion or more to the district since joining the appropriations
committee.

~~~

His earmarks in the current bill are $166.5 million, more than any other House
member

Who are some of the others that use earmarks like a heroin addict uses needles?  Outside the Beltway provides a graph:

murtha-pork-king-chart.gif

And what did Nancy Pelosi promise to do when she and her party became the majority?  Why, drain the swamp of corruption. 

Instead when she came into power, she picked Murtha (a man after her own earmark heart) as her second in command and off they went.  Of course Murtha’s rise was beat down, and Hoyer went in, but the fact of the matter is that her first plan of action to drain the swamp was to install one of the worst earmark users in Congress.  And we see she isn’t much better.

The man is a walking advertisement of everything that is wrong with Washington.  Democrat or Republican this kind of crap needs to stop. 

Ed Morrissey:

the contracts awarded for performance in Murtha’s district in 2006
hardly display a model of government accountability. Only 23% were awarded as
competitive bids. That comprises $32 million out of $136 million spent in
Johnstown that year. For 2007, the numbers are even worse. Only 15% — $27
million out of $174 million — came from open, multibid competition. In the past
three years, Murtha has sent $352 million directly back to his district, and
only 19% of those contracts had multibid competition.

One of his biggest beneficiaries has been Concurrent Technologies, which has
received hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts every year from the
federal government, thanks to the intercession of Murtha. How has CT won its
contracts? Almost entirely through non-competitive means. In 2006, only 19% of
their contracts had another bidder, but that beats 2005 and 2007, which has 5%
and 4%, respectively. In contrast, Halliburton’s parent KBR won 95% of its
contracts in multibid competition in 2005, 93% in 2006, and 99.4% in 2007.

Johnstown and Murtha’s cronies have made out like bandits, a particularly apt
term. The rest of us have seen our money disappear into ratholes, helped along
by a corrupt politician who has eliminated the competition for himself and for
his allies through the earmark process.

The swamp hasn’t drained an inch, instead its rising at a record pace and where are the Democrats?  No where to be seen except hiding money in freezers and sliding millions of earmarks into their own pet projects.  Projects that some people would call bribes.

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