Thread: Bush questions Hillary's $1 million Woodstock pork

Bush questions Hillary's $1 million Woodstock pork
Spokeswoman calls plan 'not good use' of taxpayer funds

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Posted: October 27, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern



© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com


The White House is challenging the fiscal priorities of senator and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in light of the $1 million she wanted the federal government to spend on a project critics characterize as "a taxpayer-funded LSD flashback."

The issue is the $1 million in federal money backed by both Clinton and New York's other senator, Chuck Schumer, to create a memorial for the 1969 counterculture music festival Woodstock in upstate New York.

"I heard that Woodstock was quite a cultural event," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and a candidate for the GOP nomination for president, said this week.

"I happened to be in prison at the time," said the former Vietnam prisoner of war. "Though I wasn't able to see it, I understand that it was quite a pharmaceutical marvel. But let me tell you, I don't think we ought to be spending 1 million of your tax dollars to have a museum there."

He compared the spending proposal by Clinton and Schumer to an earlier plan – later abandoned – to spend $229 million to build a bridge to an Alaskan island with a population of 50.

He called it an example of a broken and corrupt system.

At a White House news brief, WND correspondent Les Kinsolving raised the issue for the administration branch to consider.

"Sen. McCain said that while he is sure Woodstock was a cultural and pharmaceutical event, no one who supports spending $1 million for a Woodstock memorial, as Sen. Schumer and Clinton have, should be president. Does President Bush agree or disagree?" he asked.

"I think the president would disagree with that earmark," said his spokeswoman, Dana Perino. "It's not a good use of taxpayer dollars."

The $1 million plan was debated this week in Congress, and struck down. It had been attached as an earmark to the federal health and education spending bill and supported by both senators.

Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz, and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., worked to remove the earmark, and they won a key 52-42 vote.

Critics have labeled the plan a hippie museum and a taxpayer-funded LSD flashback.

In a second question, Kinsolving raised the issue of work on the border fence, which has been approved by Congress and the president for several hundred miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.

"The AP reports that there is considerable opposition from landowners in Texas to federal plans to build a border fence. And my question: What is the president's position on resistance to this fence that he and Congress agreed is needed?" Kinsolving asked.

"The president, as former governor of Texas, knows that there are many people on the border who disagree with having a fence on their private property, and we – the president has asked Secretary Chertoff to work with them as we try to secure our border," Perino said.

The AP reported that the government had been offering property owners $3,000 to exchange for permission to conduct surveys for the fence project, but some landowners were refusing. The offer later was withdrawn.

The AP concluded that the plan to build 370 miles of steel fence is "widely opposed" in the Rio Grande Valley, because the region depends economically on cross-border traffic.

Congress' plan has approved $1.2 billion to finish construction of about 700 miles of fence along the border, including part of that total in "virtual fence," which would include cameras, high-tech sensors and other technology.


http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/artic ... E_ID=58371

this sure is a good example of the pot calling the kettle black...