May 13 2009
F for Responsbiity
About a month ago, ABC News committed a flagrant act of journalism, something you won’t hear me say very often, when they reported on the remarkable pork spending at the John Mertha Airport in Pennsylvania. Literally millions of dollars of tax money have been spent on an airport that serves twenty passengers a day, no lie, an average of twenty passengers a day. Despite this fact, this airport has a reinforced runway that is long enough and strong enough to handle any of the largest jets that fly in the continental U.S. Of course, they never fly there but they could. Don”t ask the obvious why, that would be requiring a common sense check. It’s named after the Democratic Congressman, John M. Mertha, from Pennsylvania, who is arguably the greatest pork vendor in Congress. Three flights a day to Washington D.C., with every ticket on every flight being subsidised by our tax money.
Despite this expose, yesterday the FAA approved $800,000 of stimulus money for this airport, to resurface an alternate runway at the sight. Why do they even need an alternate runway? Common sense again. Stimulating the economy or buying more votes for Mertha? About $50 million total during Mertha’s tenure and still counting. I’m glad the Obama administration is monitoring stimulus dollars so closely that none of it is being wasted. You and I will never know how much has just been flushed down the toilet in the time it took me to write this. Transparency and responsibility promised but not being delivered. What a surprise.
