Federal grant for studying… duck genitals

J

Justin Time

Verified User
Remember folks, Obama says government is hurting for money and your taxes need to go up

Patricia Brennan received $384,949 from the U.S. government to study duck genitalia.

Last month, that made her a national joke. Now, it’s made her a little bit of a folk hero.

“Genitalia, dear readers, are where the rubber meets the road, evolutionarily,” Brennan wrote this month at Slate.com, defending her work against critics. She argued that if the government wants to support science, it must support all kinds of science. Because the biggest advances in thinking come from the strangest places.

“This mockery of science has to stop,” Brennan said during a recent phone interview.

The federal grant that started this controversy is tiny, at least among the big numbers of the federal budget. The National Science Foundation, which gave her the grant in 2009, got $5.9 billion for all its research this year.

But these debates are about choices embedded in the federal budget. As in: If nobody else will provide funding to study the secrets of duck genitals, does the government have a moral obligation to do it?

The NSF says yes. A civilized culture needs people studying things that might never make anybody any money. One of Brennan’s collaborators, for instance, studies why bluebirds are blue. What he has found could change the way paint is made


http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/s...cle_68cfa923-c365-54ea-80e8-eff3b9f6c4f8.html
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Justin Time said:
Remember folks, Obama says government is hurting for money and your taxes need to go up
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So...you're going to bitch about $384k out of a $5.9B budget in a country where the wealthy are sitting on Trillions and chose NOT to invest it to get more business started and revenue coming in?

Here's a good idea....stop subsidizing the Conglomerate with our tax dollars...take China to task about the damn near trillion dollar trade deficit....those two things alone will cut the deficit considerably... third item....get money out of politics....but....I forgot....money =speech
 
Steelplate said:
So...you're going to bitch about $384k out of a $5.9B budget in a country where the wealthy are sitting on Trillions and chose NOT to invest it to get more business started and revenue coming in?

Here's a good idea....stop subsidizing the Conglomerate with our tax dollars...take China to task about the damn near trillion dollar trade deficit....those two things alone will cut the deficit considerably... third item....get money out of politics....but....I forgot....money =speech
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That is only one item. I have posted hundreds of billions of dollars being wasted and the liberals here ignore it

The fact is no one should pay once cent more in taxes until the carp like this is cleaned up and eliminated

I am glad to see you have such a casual attitude on how taxpayer money is spent

So you want unions to stop extorting money from their workers and funneling it into Democrat campaigns?
 
Justin Time said:
That is only one item. I have posted hundreds of billions of dollars being wasted and the liberals here ignore it

The fact is no one should pay once cent more in taxes until the carp like this is cleaned up and eliminated

I am glad to see you have such a casual attitude on how taxpayer money is spent

So you want unions to stop extorting money from their workers and funneling it into Democrat campaigns?
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Yep....and I want Citizen's United overturned and I want strict regulations on corporate lobbying and I want strict campaign oversight. All of it. If one side doesn't get to buy politicians, then the other side doesn't either.

casual attitude? I noticed you ignored my questions....figures...flip the blame to the wealthy and you boys clam up tighter than Tupperware. Oh....you half assed made mention of vague stuff...but you didn't answer. So...you OK with subsidizing billionaires?
 
Steelplate said:
Yep....and I want Citizen's United overturned and I want strict regulations on corporate lobbying and I want strict campaign oversight. All of it. If one side doesn't get to buy politicians, then the other side doesn't either.

casual attitude? I noticed you ignored my questions....figures...flip the blame to the wealthy and you boys clam up tighter than Tupperware. Oh....you half assed made mention of vague stuff...but you didn't answer. So...you OK with subsidizing billionaires?
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Well we agree on unions

Here are the examples I posted on the "investments" being made with taxpayer money

And these examples do not include the hundreds of billions lost on Obama's "green" energy investments

Yep, give the government more money so they make more "investments" like these








Yea, wanting to cut spending like this is unforgivable to those on left







If you are a federal worker on furlough this week — or an airline passenger delayed by federal furloughs — you might save your blood pressure, and go read another story.


This one is about all the money the U.S. government spends on . . . nothing.

It is one of the oddest spending habits in Washington: This year, the government will spend at least $890,000 on service fees for bank accounts that are empty. At last count, Uncle Sam has 13,712 such accounts with a balance of zero.


They are supposed to be closed. But nobody has done the paperwork yet.


So even as the sequester budget cuts have begun idling workers and frustrating travelers, the government is required to pay $65 per year, per account to keep them on the books.


In this time of austerity, the accounts are a reminder of something that makes austerity hard: expensive habits, built into the bureaucracy in times of plenty. The Obama administration has spent the past year trying to close these accounts with only some success.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...524_story.html


or this pure waste







Congressional frustration may be warranted. The federal government owns or leases between 55,000 and 77,000 vacant properties. But it's impossible to tell exactly how many. No precise inventory has been kept.


Selling them off, though, could save taxpayers between $3 billion and $8 billion a year, according to various analysts. That's nothing to scoff at as the government grapples with a mounting debt and sequester-tied spending cuts.


"These properties could be used first to consolidate agencies that now are in leased buildings," D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told Fox News.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...#ixzz2OsmN9yKX


and this








As budget sequestration continues to level strain and uncertainty on the men and women of our nation’s armed forces, and as we draw closer to the ‘devastating’ effects on our military readiness as foreseen by our former Secretary of Defense, Members of Congress have an even more profound responsibility to account for every taxpayer dollar. Every dollar we waste through pork barrel spending today is a dollar not spent to support our troops and preserve our nation’s security.

“With this in mind, Senator Coburn and I last week made a standard request to be able to review for 72 hours the Continuing Resolution legislation coming before the Senate prior to moving forward and considering it on the Senate floor. Instead, we received the 587-page Continuing Resolution – which totals more than $1 trillion – at 9:00 p.m. last night, and the sponsors of the bill attempted to begin Senate consideration just hours later this afternoon – before anyone could have plausibly have read and considered the bill in its entirety.

“After reviewing this legislation for less than 24 hours, it is clear that our suspicions were well justified. The bill contains numerous examples of egregious pork barrel projects as well as hundreds of millions in spending that was never authorized by the appropriate Committee and not requested by the Administration.

“This is a preliminary, partial list of questionable spending that we have identified in the bill so far:


•Provides $65 million for Pacific Coast salmon restoration for states including Nevada, a program that even President Obama mocked in his 2011 State of the Union address.



•Directs the Department of Defense to overpay on contracts by an additional 5 percent (totaling $15 million) to contractors who are Native Hawaiian-owned companies.



•Provides $154 million for Army, Navy and Air Force ‘alternative energy research’ initiatives, the most recent notorious example of which was paying $26 per gallon for 450,000 gallons of alternative fuel.



•Provides $15 million for the Civil Air Patrol above the amount authorized by the FY 2013 National Defense Authorization bill, paid for by cutting the Air Force’s Operations and Maintenance funding. This is just two days after the Air Force announced that it will reduce pilots’ flying hours by 18 percent because of cuts to its Operations and Maintenance budget.



•Prohibits the retirement of the C-23 Sherpa aircraft, which the Army has asked to retire and which both the Army and Air Force no longer want or need. Last year, Congress granted the Army authority to give these aircraft to any state governor who wanted them and no one took them up on it, now we are preventing the Army from retiring them.



•Directly contravenes the FY 2013 National Defense Authorization bill by providing $120 million for civilian infrastructure in Guam, which both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees explicitly prohibited until a sufficient cost analysis of the proposed movement of troops from Okinawa to Guam is completed.



•Provides $14.7 million for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Watershed Rehabilitation Program, which the Administration has suggested eliminating for years.



•Provides $993,000 in grants to dig private wells for private property owners.



•Provides $10 million for the USDA High Energy Cost Grants program that go to subsidize electricity bills in Alaska and Hawaii.



•Provides $5.9 million for USDA ‘Economic Impact Initiative’ grants, which have become slush funds for local governments to do such things as rehab an exercise room and buy kitchen equipment for city government offices.


“The American people deserve better than this. Our men and women in uniform – whose livelihoods are today threatened by sequestration – deserve far better than what they’re getting out of Washington. I look forward to offering amendments and debating these issues on the floor of the Senate this week.”



Why should anyone or any company pay a penny more in taxes when the Feds are spending out tax money of garbage like this?







The NRCC is out with its new "waste list" which totals more than $18 billion. So what exactly is the government spending your money on? How about:
-$1 million on a fruit fly sexual attractiveness study
-$1.3 million for old fashioned x-rays of prisoners. x-rays of prisoners
-$1.5 million on designing a video game controller
-$100,000 on taxpayer funded comedy group tour in India
-$547,430 on a dancing robot that connects to an iPhone
-$25,000 funding a course about "How to be happy"
-$145,000 on a sculpture garden
-$25,000 on an Alabama Watermelon Queen tour
-$697,177 on a climate change musical
-$10,000 on talking urinal cakes (just in case the boys need some company or to prevent drunk driving)
-$35 million on an old fashioned trolly car
-$150,000 for a toy exhibit
-$320,000 for robot squirrels
-$1.4 billion in improper food stamps purchases which included alcohol, condoms, junk food and diapers
You can read the entire list here.
We can pay to study the sexual attractiveness of fruit flies and robot squirrels but by all means please, lets cut the working hours for Border Patrol to save some money.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepa...money-n1551772
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Justin Time said:
Well we agree on unions

Here are the examples I posted on the "investments" being made with taxpayer money

And these examples do not include the hundreds of billions lost on Obama's "green" energy investments
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But yet you have no problem with a military that cost 10x the amount of our next biggest competitor to try to keep things stable in the ME so the cash keeps rolling in for Oil. Add that shit to the price of a gallon of gas and UT's estimated that we spend between 10-15 dollars/gallon.
 
Steelplate said:
But yet you have no problem with a military that cost 10x the amount of our next biggest competitor to try to keep things stable in the ME so the cash keeps rolling in for Oil. Add that shit to the price of a gallon of gas and UT's estimated that we spend between 10-15 dollars/gallon.
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Did you bother to read my previous post? there was a list of military expenses that can be done away with as well?

Seems to are to quick to pull out the talking points rather then comment on what I posted
 
Justin Time said:
Did you bother to read my previous post? there was a list of military expenses that can be done away with as well?

Seems to are to quick to pull out the talking points rather then comment on what I posted
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Yes...and the big one was your pet peeve against alternative energy
 
Steelplate said:
Yep....and I want Citizen's United overturned and I want strict regulations on corporate lobbying and I want strict campaign oversight. All of it. If one side doesn't get to buy politicians, then the other side doesn't either.

casual attitude? I noticed you ignored my questions....figures...flip the blame to the wealthy and you boys clam up tighter than Tupperware. Oh....you half assed made mention of vague stuff...but you didn't answer. So...you OK with subsidizing billionaires?
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BTW puddin pop. You claim that you make $40,000 a year and your old lady makes $70,000 a year. You do know that puts you in the top 5% if wage earners in the country or the evil rich you keep railing about. Where did all if this self loathing come from?
 
I Love America said:
BTW puddin pop. You claim that you make $40,000 a year and your old lady makes $70,000 a year. You do know that puts you in the top 5% if wage earners in the country or the evil rich you keep railing about. Where did all if this self loathing come from?
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What's your point? I don't hire employees at minimum wage with no benefits, make billions, and expect government to make up the difference with our tax dollars.

And the fact that my wife and I are doing OK doesn't excuse that. We both work for our money....we don't hire others and collect off of their Labors..

Cue the "you live off taxes" bullshit in 3, 2, 1.....
 
I remember a similar study done on shark skin a decade or so ago. The research lead to both new medical treatments for burn victims and a new coating for submarines that both made them quieter and faster.

But those who know nothing of science, would think that knowledge of one thing cannot affect knowledge in other areas.
 
Steelplate said:
Yep....and I want Citizen's United overturned and I want strict regulations on corporate lobbying and I want strict campaign oversight. All of it. If one side doesn't get to buy politicians, then the other side doesn't either.

casual attitude? I noticed you ignored my questions....figures...flip the blame to the wealthy and you boys clam up tighter than Tupperware. Oh....you half assed made mention of vague stuff...but you didn't answer. So...you OK with subsidizing billionaires?
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Don't worry, we ALL want free speech overturned.
 
Steelplate said:
What's your point? I don't hire employees at minimum wage with no benefits, make billions, and expect government to make up the difference with our tax dollars.

And the fact that my wife and I are doing OK doesn't excuse that. We both work for our money....we don't hire others and collect off of their Labors..

Cue the "you live off taxes" bullshit in 3, 2, 1.....
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Yeah, only a slaveowner would collect off the labours of people they employ/pay-off.
 
Re: Federal grant for studying… duck ge

Threedee said:
Your bullshit line about labour vs. capital.
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So....Don't care for Lincoln?

Look...I am of the opinion that if multi billion dollar companies pay their employees so little that they need government assistance to live in this country... we are subsidizing the Company with our tax dollars.
 
You posted a quote where Lincoln said labour was more important. I posted one, far more definitive, where he called out your ilk for being fools and demagogues.
 
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