Conservatives Hit Dems Over “Tattoo Removal” Pork — But It’s An Anti-Crime Program!
Uh oh — looks like we have our next marsh mouse-style talking point.
Conservatives are hammering the House’s new $410 billion spending bill because it contains $200,000 for what they’re derisively referring to as “tattoo removal.” Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Drudge, and at least one GOP official on MSNBC, among others, have been all over this today.
But a little reporting reveals that that this “tattoo removal” program is an anti-crime program in the San Fernando Valley that re-integrates reformed gang members and makes it easier for them to find jobs. Two Los Angeles law enforcement officials I just spoke to — one who identified himself as a “conservative Republican” — swore by the program for reducing crime and saving lives.
The tattoo pork story kicked off in earnest when the New York Post flagged the “tattoo removal” pork in a story this morning. It was subsequently pushed by Drudge with the headline: “Congress: Big Bucks To Canoes And Tattoos.”
Fox’s Hannity then jumped on the tattoo tale, flashing on the screen a list of what Fox dubbed “pure pork” and describing the tattoo money as merely being $200,000 for “tattoo removal,” with no explanation. Hannity blasted the pork as “outrageous.” Click to enlarge:
Hmmm. This program, maybe not so much. I checked in with the office of Dem Rep Howard Berman, the sponsor of this funding, and his aides said the money goes to a program run out of the Providence Holy Cross hospital in San Fernando Valley that helps reforming gang members remove their gang tattoos. I asked Robert Ordelheide, the chief of San Fernando Police Department, for his read on the program.
“It helps people who want to get out of the gang life,” Ordelheide said, adding that the program was “important.”
“It reduces attacks” and causes a “reduction in gang rivalry,” he added. “$200,000 is a good investment if we can save lives.”
Rep. Berman’s office also put me in touch with Harold Gold, a probation officer with a local specialized gang unit. “It can get the kids jobs — if you have gang tattoos, you can’t get a job,” Gold said. “This program is one of the best life-saving and life-changing programs out here. I am about as right wing a conservative as you would ever find.”
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But you could put a couple gangbangers in prison for a year at that price…
hah. point taken.
$200,000?
You mean, 0.00005% of the overall bill?
It’s an outrage!
My wife and I were watching Hannity last night (she’s a bit of a ********* in regards to her TV) and this was the only program that did not, on its face, seem reasonable, so this is exciting — the only semi-valid point he brought up ends up being about a pretty useful program.
For those curious, the vast majority of the programs he spotlighted as pure pork projects were useful science-based ones that either basic knowledge of science or a simple google search could show the need for (e.g., a honeybee research program, which is useful since they’re going through a wave of death).
For clarification: the ****** is for “m a s o c h i s t.” I have no idea why it censored it. I didn’t call my wife a derogatory name, I promise!
every so often the sheer ruthlessness and cynicism of the Rs and their talking heads will turn my stomach…it would be comforting to believe they will be tormented for eternity…they certainly deserve no less…I’m going to throw up now…
Another good one on that list is probably the catfish genome mapping. This completely sounds like the kind of thing where John Stossel would be indignant about it — GIIIIve me a BREAAAAK! — but then it turns out there are actual direct scientific benefits. Fruit fly research, anyone?
I mean, I know nothing about the actual catfish project. But that already puts me ahead of the writer that put that project up on the big board! I *know* that I don’t know anything about it. Maybe it’s useful, maybe it isn’t, but instead of just looking at the name and saying “say, that sounds wasteful”, maybe someone should actually do a tiny bit of research before condemning it?
Yeah, but you can keep DOZENS of gang members out by helping to get them out of the lifestyle. If you do the math, we will actually save money.
Leave it the Fox to miss (and misreprestent) the big picture.
Today’s Republican party: out of touch, out of time.
Based on the failure of the “marsh mouse” lie to catch on outside the wingnut rage-o-sphere and the epic fail of Jindal’s deriding of volcano monitoring, I’m becoming cautiously optimistic that Internet-based transparency may finally render this kind of faux outrage ineffective. The whole tactic is based on digging up something that sounds outrageous if you don’t look any further (and I doubt most of the right-wing shouters do look any further, because they don’t really care if there’s any substance to it or not.) It depends on the average voter not being supplied with real information, but since the truth is now so easy to research and disseminate, it lets the population at large (and as important, more mainstream political reporters) get inoculated against the lie before they are inclined to repeat it.
While pork certainly exists, a lot of these programs will be judged worthwhile by the average person if they are told more than the outrageous-sounding half-sentence soundbite. (And that’s true all the way back to the victims Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” awards.) It’s still possible that people will judge that they shouldn’t be funded, but that’s not what conservatives are after — they want a snap judgment that government is wasting your tax dollars.
I wonder how many iterations we’ll have to go through of conservatives braying about something followed by an almost immediate debunking before most people will start to assume they’re lying from the start?
I’ve been a public defender for 5 years, and a juvenile defender for 3, and I can tell you from personal experience, this is an extremely worthy and effective anti-crime program, and there is nowhere near enough money available to implement it like it ought to be implemented. Judges love it, too, by the way, *especially* the harda** judges. Which makes Hannity’s faux-outrage even more laughable.
I knew immediately this was a gang thing.
Makes it kind of hard to be a delivery guy when you’re like “oh, I’m sorry, I can’t do into any of 50 neighborhoods because 49 of them will see this tattoo I got when I was TWELVE and kill me for being in the wrong gang, and the 50th will kill me for having quit their gang.”
Seriously, this is kind of shocking. There’s, like, NO garbage in this bill. It’s like when we went into Iraq–I knew Bush was lying about WMDs, but I figured he’d find a crate of rusty Iran war surplus stuff and say “aha! There it is!” But the same way each of Bush’s “mobile weapons labs” turned out to be fertilizer trucks, each of the Republicans’ “wasteful spending” turns out to be for stuff where you’re like “okay, that actually makes sense.”
I mean, volcano monitoring? I’d think keeping an eye on something that can suddenly explode and wipe out a town is worthwhile. And I’m not alone in that. Likewise, getting tattoos off of guys who have quit gangs so they can get a job seems to make sense to me.
Greg
.
153 Republicans in the House voted for the bill which hardly makes it a Dem bill anyway. And of course all of them voted against the spending bill. Hypocrisy much?
spending bill should be stimulus bill
Another point…
I’ve been involved with one tattoo removal program in California, and those folks getting their tattoos removed must put in volunteer times with nonprofits before getting each treatment… teaches them to give back to society… pretty good deal!
Any chance you can give us a list of the s e x y words that get bleeped? Or is this just trial and error? So far it’s been fun.
Catfish farming is about a $1 billion business in this country. Mapping their genome for $819k so those farmers can more efficiently raise their product seems like a good business deal.
This has been one of the most striking things about the current debate — the way the opponents to the stimulus bill appear to have a remarkably limited view of what business is. The intrinsic message appears to be, “If your business doesn’t fit into some Rockwell sepia image, it’s not a business.”
The funny thing about that is, every time I heard examples of the “outrageous spending items” in the stimulus, I’d think over to myself the business usefulness of the item in question. And I kept going, “Yeah… I can see the point in that.”
Which is probably why, according to the New York Times, “…for the whole period from 1948 to 2007, during which Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, [the data] show average annual growth of real gross national product of 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.”
The cited article goes on, “That 1.14-point difference, if maintained for eight years, would yield 9.33 percent more income per person, which is a lot more than almost anyone can expect from a tax cut.”
Republicans just don’t have a head for business.
open thread roundup posted for anyone who wants it…
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/president-obama/happy-hour-roundup-17/
This is precisely why I HATE the GOP. They are despicable, dissembling, immoral, amoral, loathsome, hypocritical liars and cowards.
Finally – their misinformation is catching up to their unwillingness to do research.
AllButCertain: Off the top of my head, there’s ****, ********, ******, *****, and ****************.
As an aside — I think a fair criticism would be to consider how many gang tatoos get removal assistance for $200K. If it’s 10 that’s very different than if it’s 1000.
Leaving aside the merits of the program, criticizing a $410B spending bill on the basis of a $200k item is statistically akin to criticizing Major League ballparks (as a whole) on the basis of a perceived issue with a single seat in a single big league park.
$200k / $410B = 0.00005%
1 seat / total MLB seating capacity across all 30 parks (1.32M) = 0.00008%
The fact that anyone is attempting to make a national issue out of this is just intellectual bad faith.
“The fact that anyone is attempting to make a national issue out of this is just intellectual bad faith.”
Shocking. Simply shocking.
The DoD still pays for “command directed tattoo removal” removing ink considered racist, indecent, sexist or extremist. Why? It’s ultimately a benefit to good order and discipline. The same reasoning applies for civilian jobs programs.
Yeah, well, these are the same folks who called a Zeiss Mark VI an “overhead projector.”
I’ve been covering agriculture for 29 years, and am currently in the #3 catfish state of Arkansas. I don’t know specifically why they have a catfish genome project, but we’ve got other ones going for everything from rice and soybeans to cows and pigs. It’s simply a breeding technique; we’re looking for genes that convey favorable or unfavorable traits, so they can be identified early in breeding programs and cut the time it takes to get a new variety or an improved livestock breed to the market in half. It will also benefit the new area of pharmacological genetics; the FDA just approved drugs from the milk of genetically altered goats that control bleeding in people with limited clotting ability during operations and childbirth. The other thing is, you can basically rely on Republicans, when they’re ripping Democratic bills, to ridicule agricultural stuff. Reagan slammed blueberry and cranberry research; Bush Sr made fun of prickly pears, because it had a funny name–he obviously had no clue his home state of Texas is the leading producer of prickly pears. They know urban people know little about agriculture, and ridiculing farm products is an easy way to inspire a reaction.
The LA Times has been running stories about tattoo removal programs for former gang members for months. The GOP can’t use Google News?? I knew John McCain couldn’t, but sheesh!
If they’re going to have columns and websites and talk shows, they’ll have to lie. They couldn’t possibly tell the truth, or say anything about what they want, what their vision is for the country.
Their actual product, nobody wants. Sad, really.
reminder: iraq war = 2 billion a week
The Zeiss Mark VI *is* an overhead projector! And teaching and inspiring kids and adults to learn about physics and astronomy leads to people who want to be scientists and engineers which leads to more people to dream up, invent, design, build, and manufacture new tools and products… cellphones? flat-screen tvs? new tech in your fancy car?
wouldn’t it be great if we made more of those things in the US? Fortunately, Intel invests in the US… and they’re products are making all of our computers faster, and that leads to more advanced software applications.
AND YOU ARE USING A COMPUTER IF YOU ARE READING THIS.
cheers,
oops, I do know my grammar:
“they’re products” should be “their products”
and a quick review for some of you…
they’re = they are
their = plural possessive
there = adverb
Over 85% of outstanding murder warrants in Los Angeles are for illegals and Obama thinks removing tattoos will help? LOL
Control the borders and you might actually help honest, legal citizens.
If removing the tattoos at taxpayer expense will help people get jobs and get away from gang life, why can’t a percentage of money be deducted from their paychecks to pay back the money “loaned” to them? It should be reciprocal.
check out what Republican Senator Tom Coburn has to say about money for research on swine odor He states pig odors aren,t that bad the odor isn,t as bad as it is in the cities. I just wonder what his intent was, well I guess I am pretty sure what he was saying I wonder any others will pick up on it
Why is the federal government concerned with tattoo removal? This is ludicrous. What else should the federal government do start a task force on haircuts? Setup a special police unit for pedicures and manicures? Here is a novel concept- personal responsibility. Find a way to pay to have the tattoo removed just like you found a way to purchase the tatto to begin with.
Ditto to BKH……gosh, and here we’ve spent our lives working to make do in retirement when we could of sat back and waited on the Stimulus Bill to pay our way. Nothing in there for ingenuity and hardwork?
No no no no no no no no You,s got us into this and doing everything You can to keep us in it Rushbo ought to share is drugs with all of you
Gang tattoo removal is not a federal responsibility. If L.A. officials deem it a worthy program then they should fund it with local tax dollars. Congress’s authority is set forth in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. This is clearly outside the scope of its authority.
Why does it seem likes since Obama became the President, proks spending is a no no, please give me a break the Rs has been doing it for century, but now that Os is in the house it a big thing. Give everybody a break.
Demos and R’s have done it for years …please get it correct. Only now it has been said before and after the election…..NO PORK! And guess what our plates are loaded with…..greedy, greasy stuff.
Yes, as usual, Fox Noise shows their contempt for anything that benefits anyone who doesn’t fit into their radical, right-wing world vision. I am the co-owner of a Tattoo Removal company, and I can say with full, first-hand knowledge of the situation that removal of gang-related tattoos is absolutely and without question a vital component of any program which endeavors to reintegrate these young people into the mainstream society. If anything, the amount of stimulus money for such programs should be increased, as it will most certainly have the end effect of enriching our society with employed, productive human beings.
Personal responsibility. I know its not a popular concept among liberals, I mean why be personally responsible when the Obama admin is gonna take care of you from the cradle to the grave?
Did federal dollars pay for the tattoos in the first place? Gee, the gang bangers didn’t whine about not having enough money to buy it in the first place…… strange.
And its not the amount of the earmark in question, it is the principle of the thing. I guess that since the libs think because it is a minuscule part of the budget, that it is okay to violate the constitution.
Great place you have here. I’ll be coming back often
Hi, I