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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (79961)	5/26/2010 7:01:44 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

Ag Department shuts down embarrassing subsidies database By: Mark Tapscott Editorial Page Editor 05/24/10 5:45 PM EDT Remember Scotty Pippen, the former NBA star? He was also a farmer. That's right, a real hayseed, who was so good at it that the federal government paid him $130,000 over a five-year period not to grow crops. I was able to report that fact back in 2002 because of the work of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in posting on its web site a massive database of federal farm subsidy recipients maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Every couple of years, using the Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and often only after overcoming official resistance, EWG would update the database and there would be a flurry of news stories about celebrities, professional athletes, journalists, and others who clearly were not farmers being paid millions of tax dollars by USDA not to farm. Well, you can forget about updating that story any time soon because USDA is no longer updating the database. Seems that the Democratic Congress in 2008 changed the law that previously required the department to maintain the database to say that doing so was merely optional. The federal farm bureaucrats naturally opted out of disclosing how much they were paying people like former ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson and multi-millionaire David Rockefeller not to grow crops. No doubt the decision was made to "save tax dollars." As you can see from my 2002 column, the action in 2008 by Congress culminated efforts that stretched back at least to the days in 2001 and 2002 when the Democrats controlled the Senate under then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-IA, was chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Now, the Center for Public Integrity reports that USDA paid nearly $16 billion in such subsidies in 2009, but finding out who got those billions will be all but impossible in the future, thanks to the decision against updating the database. What was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's promise in 2006 about the most honest and transparent Congress ever? Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com