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The award announcement was for $1.5 million spread over 5 years, which translates to about $300,000 per year.
The NIH reporting database shows $653,190 spent in only two fiscal years -- FY 12 and FY 13. Not clear why the project got a delayed start (awarded in 2009, began in 2012), but the annual amounts are roughly consistent.
Am I ever for this one, I'll be on a committee, for certain!
My hope would be that they'd find people who are, y'know... qualified.
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Years ago, it was up for vote, and honestly, I cannot tell you which election it was, but I always wondered why it never got voted in...now I know, thanks to you.
Not really. They did pass a line item veto bill. In 1996, and it was in effect for two years. Clinton used it 82 times before it was ruled unconstitutional.
GuyNTexas To follow up my previous post, which addressed the specific issue of line item veto being only an act of dousing a fire with gasoline .... the true problem with the process cannot be remedied until the nature of the problem is understood. That's the first step in fixing anything ... realizing what is broken. It serves no useful purpose to patch random holes in a boat that has major structural damage. The old saying ... "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" comes to mind.
you are so right, and it doesn't sound way to hard to do!
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This must first come in the form of the Public realizing what the game is, so they can stop playing the wrong one, and reject rules written that ensure their defeat. The people are playing tic tac toe, one move at a time in reaction ... while the system and it's players are playing chess, who have calculated their moves several steps in advance. There is no way to win in that scenario.
and that is why the radicals become radicals...yanno, this whole thread started this morning, b/c the right was stating, that the left passed a bill giving 1.5 million to Brazil to help women stop smoking, and explained nothing further. This is how each side does things, and it just pisses me off to know end, and helps keep the public in the dark about political problems. Like I always say, this country is full of stupid radicals, and the media/politics prey off of them, keeping American's in the dark.
Listen, I don't claim to know much about politics, but it is high time we all learn, so we can arm ourselves with the information we need to change things.
They don't want us to know what is going on, and want to keep us at each others throats, well, it's about time we all wake up and smell the roses.
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Ask yourselves .... does your vote count when it comes to a matter that benefits Monsanto, when it is a very bad deal for you as a citizen? Do you think that the congress critters care a tiny bit about what is god for the people, when Boeing or Lockheed have a 20 Billion military contract pending congressional authorization? We collectively need to grow a couple of brain cells and realize that the system only presents the illusion of choice, but that there really is no substance to such a fantasy. You have no choice ... you are presented the "choice" of two selected, hand picked options that represent nothing more than the same crap sandwich, on your choice of wheat or white bread. No matter which one you choose, it's still a crap sandwich.
I can't eat seafood, oh, you said crap sanwich silly me... seriously, yes, you are right, and yes, we do need to grow brains, we've become so lazy, and we/most American's do not even understand the process....including myself.
The election process and the tens of Millions of dollars required to run just a congressional campaign, and the hundreds of Millions if not Billions to run a presidential campaign immediately establishes the overriding power of those who fund these races through campaign donations. And I'm not talking about the idiot who donates $500 ... thinking he's supporting his guy. He has no guy ... not for $500 he doesn't. Not when that guy received $100,000 from Boeing .... or $200,000 from Monsanto ... or $75,000 from Merck ... or $2,500,000 from some political action committee that represents another heavily funded front group for special interests. His $500 counts for nothing ... just as his vote counts for nothing. That's just the hard cold reality that too few either possess the intelligence to recognize or the willingness to admit. So the average joe, who donates nothing at all, is allowed to cast a vote, using an electronic voting machine that was developed and manufactured by other entities that do not necessarily have the public interest at the forefront of their agenda.
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How do you actually know that the votes of the American people are counted honestly?
They are not counted fairly and truthfully, for years now...and what other entities manufacture the voting machines?
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Because you assume that to be true, and accept the play by play scoring presented you on the television news? PLEASE. You only know what you are told, and the old adage ... believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see is valid, if not overly optimistic (you probably shouldn't believe what you think you see either).
Yup, many years ago, there was a show on TV about how people could be deceived through Television, and the woman said, way back then, "if people only knew what really goes on!)
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The subject of this thread ... the 1.5 Million to Brazil is pocket change compared to the Billions and Billions doled out for similarly outrageous things ... like Tanks that don't work, to scientific studies that set out to determine whether frogs fall in love or not ... or some other such lunacy. There are thousands of these things, and all of them are just the payoffs to the people who facilitated the campaigns of these bribe takers. That is the only rational answer for why anyone would consider such idiotic expenditures in the first place.
I know, I know, and it is ridiculous! Insane and insulting the American People!
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The ONLY way I see to stop such madness is to create a useful law for once .... and it would be a simple one. Pass a law that prohibits any piece of legislation to exceed 50 pages of type written text. That text must utilize plain common English, and not legalese. Demand that each voting member of congress, senator and representative alike, read every single word of the bill ... understand the need for such a bill, and issue in writing a signing statement outlining their reason for either passing it or rejecting it, including the benefits such a laws or legislation offers the American public.
They will never do it, b/c this is how they sneak pork barrel spending in under the wires. However, it's a good idea...
We could start sending around a letter electronically, getting signatures, with an explaination on the top about one line vetos right? Then send the signed signatures to our Congressmen and senate...yes? But this has to happen before the 16 election.
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And finally, each new law or legislation must then be comprehensively reviewed after the fact, and periodically reviewed to ensure that such claimed benefits are actually realized, and if not, the law becomes automatically repealed.
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The truth is, law making was never intended to be a full time job to begin with. And it certainly was never intended to become a club to which crooks aspire to joining for the purpose of conspiring to figure out new ways each day of how to line their own pockets and attain greater individual power to continue doing that. We already have such a disastrous volume of laws already on the books that serve no reasonable benefit to the people, while costing hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The congress of the United States could keep busy full time for the next decade just reviewing current laws and getting rid of the ones that cost the American people enormous sums with no benefit to the people at all.
well, if they started now, it would indeed be a start, wouldn't it?
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In other words, we have too many laws now ... 80% of which serve the interests of crooks, much to the detriment of the people, and we need 90% of the effort focused on repealing those laws, rather than creating new ones.
well, we've got to clean them up, yanno?
It is a shame how we've allowed our systems to get all screwed up and complex as such, isn't it?
John Dark My hope would be that they'd find people who are, y'know... qualified.
well, thanks a bunch hun, I luv ya to...
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Not really. They did pass a line item veto bill. In 1996, and it was in effect for two years. Clinton used it 82 times before it was ruled unconstitutional.
ok, see, this is what I asked for you not to do....uninformed comments, are literally not constructive and educational...
#1 Obama didn't have anything to do with voting this bill in....
#2, comment only please if you know any thing about 1 line vetos, I want to know if I'm on the right track....I need constructive input on this, b/c I want to learn.
Can this type of spending be stopped with one line vetos, which then, everyone would know, who voted a bill in, or didn't vote for it, so we would be able to better pressure our house and senate to stop this type of spending?
Thanks so much
Sure, this kind of thing could be stopped by giving the line veto to the President. But that doesn't mean you can stop there and give the President line item veto. The Constitution intended for Congress to control funding as part of the system of checks and balances in government. If you give the President that line item veto then you are upsetting that balance.
It's similar to the delay of the business mandate in Obamacare. At first it seems curious. The President wants to delay implementing a mandate in Obamacare. Republicans hate the mandates in Obamacare. And yet they are opposing the President delaying the mandate. Seems to make no sense. But the problem with the President doing that, is that the ability to delay one of the mandates isn't written into the law. Which means, irrespective of what you think about Obamacare itself, as a general principle he is assuming the power to break the law.
So even if we consider sending a million dollars to Brazil for some anti-smoking campaign while we've got people right here at home desperately searching for a job, giving the President the power to simply strike that down isn't necessarily a good thing. It essentially lets him rewrite the budget.
Sure, this kind of thing could be stopped by giving the line veto to the President.
No it couldn't. A line item veto would be applied to the federal budget, not to individual grants made by the agencies funded through that budget. In other words, no budget would contain a list of projects funded by the NIH, or the EPA, or the DOE. Therefore, there would be no "line" showing the Brazil study for the President to whack (even if it were permitted by the Constitution).
Yanno, bottom line is, you don't spend money you don't have, and I don't care if it's a dollar. American's have become so frivolus with charge cards, and our culture has become so, that we spend, spend, spend. We've created a monster for the next generation, and no one cares. When you stop spending money you don't have, (i.e. stop giving money to other countries and build America up first by spreading the wealth around, right here, investing in lucrative business building) which would create jobs...
this spending fiasco we've gotten ourselves in is way out of hand.
Yanno, bottom line is, you don't spend money you don't have, and I don't care if it's a dollar. American's have become so frivolus with charge cards, and our culture has become so, that we spend, spend, spend. We've created a monster for the next generation, and no one cares. When you stop spending money you don't have, (i.e. stop giving money to other countries and build America up first by spreading the wealth around, right here, investing in lucrative business building) which would create jobs...
this spending fiasco we've gotten ourselves in is way out of hand.
All foreign aide amounts to ~ $40 billion a year, which is not an item driving deficits. It also does many good things in terms of foreign policy objectives.
I don't know what personal spending with credit cards has anything to do with this topic.
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seriously, yes, you are right, and yes, we do need to grow brains, we've become so lazy, and we/most American's do not even understand the process....including myself.
