NationStates Jolt Archive

Five hundred thousand dollars is taken from tax payers to paint a fish on an airplane. Thanks to Ted Stephens from Alaska, an Alaskan Air aircraft will sport (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Politics/story?id=1183436) a newly painted picture of a King Salmon.

If the average tax burden in this country is $5000 per household (and that's just a guess) then this is the total federal tax payments of about 100 American households. Every one of these households has needs. Every one of these households has dreams. Senator Stephens has essentially told these households -- every one of them -- that he believes that it was more important for the federal government to seize their $5000 and spend it painting a fish on an airplane than it was for them to use it for medical expenses, education, job training, to pay off bills, to pay the down payment on a new home, or just to enjoy a nice family vacation. This is totally and completely unconscionable.

How long are we going to allow these outrages to continue?

By the way, Tom DeLay says (http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050914-120153-3878r.htm) there is no fat in the federal budget. And he thinks we should believe him?

Sounds like a personal problem to me.

Sounds like a personal problem to me.
So it's okay to spend $500,000 of tax money to paint an airplane that is run by a private company. If you vote in the US, we are doomed.

Well, have fun Americans. I'm that Salmon will go to good use.

Hate this Country... Hate it so freaking much.

I don't hate my country...I hate the greedy nitwits who are running it into the ground and who are too spineless to stand to money pressure.

Well, have fun Americans. I'm that Salmon will go to good use.
OMG!:eek:
NS has been invaded by a flying painting of a fish! Not only that, but he has apparently been here since long before people knew he was going to exist!
That might explain the amount of money going to painting, I'll bet that engineer a time travelling AI out of leadbased paint is one of those things best described as: "tricky".

You know you need to privatise your airlines when...

Two or three questions:

1. Do you believe that the government has a responsibility and/or the right to promote its industries in furtherance of its national economic interests and/or objectives? (I personally do not). If no, go straight to question #3.

2. Given that you believe the government has the responsibility/right to promote its industries, and given what other forms of advertisement media cost to design, produce, and distribute, and given that the industry already advertises in other mediums, don't you think the industry is getting a lot of bang for their buck in this instance? (I personally think that this would be very cost-effective advertising.)

3. Is $500,000 a reasonable price to paint a plane like this? It may be... I don't know what a plane costs to paint... especially a specialty plane.

has the government ever been in control? I hope not

has the government ever been in control? I hope not
Well if the government isn't in control, then why the Hell have I been paying them money? I never signed no stinking social contract!
Thats it boys, gather the weapons and move into defensive positions, the IRS is going to be getting a suprise next year!

Oh, and now I am going to the special dance that I prepared for when I made it onto my 100th government watch list.
*Spasms and twitches awkwardly like he just bit into a power line*
Oh yeah!

Well if the government isn't in control, then why the Hell have I been paying them money? I never signed no stinking social contract!
Thats it boys, gather the weapons and move into defensive positions, the IRS is going to be getting a suprise next year!

Oh, and now I am going to the special dance that I prepared for when I made it onto my 100th government watch list.
*Spasms and twitches awkwardly like he just bit into a power line*
Oh yeah!

think about it this way if everyone completely controlled the government do you think it would work? guess I'd better build a bomb shelter because publicly elected generals will be too busy getting into newspaper scandals

think about it this way if everyone completely controlled the government do you think it would work? guess I'd better build a bomb shelter because publicly elected generals will be too busy getting into newspaper scandals
Wait, you don't already have a bomb shelter? I mean, I've already got one fully stocked and with automated turret mounted machine guns.
However, yes, I would like a government that doesn't do anything because it is to busy imploding to notice the rest of the world. The only way to keep government officials from getting to be busybodies in search of a power grab is by keeping them so obsessed with their public image that they can't accomplish anything unless the time for action is immediate.
The problem is, we let them build bureacracies (so that they are no longer horribly overworked) and they some how reached the point where scandals and public minutiae are only ever a concern in times of import.

However, yes, I would like a government that doesn't do anything because it is to busy imploding to notice the rest of the world. The only way to keep government officials from getting to be busybodies in search of a power grab is by keeping them so obsessed with their public image that they can't accomplish anything unless the time for action is immediate.
The problem is, we let them build bureacracies (so that they are no longer horribly overworked) and they some how reached the point where scandals and public minutiae are only ever a concern in times of import.

isn't the Job of the government to govern you (well in most cases not too excessively) I think there is a reason why leaders emerge

Maybe they should have hired some 'artist' sponging off of the taxpayers to paint the fish... would some leftist then claim that it is a great contribution to our culture?

isn't the Job of the government to govern you (well in most cases not too excessively)
Yes, when we need it. However, alot of the time all government does is clog up money and time that could be better spent a billion different ways. So my plan would have their be structures in place when times of trouble came along for a government, but most of the time it would just consist of a bunch of extroverts worrying about poll numbers.
I think there is a reason why leaders emerge
Except that when "leaders emerge" they don't need government all ready there to lead. If you need someone elses precreated power system to ascend the ranks, you probably weren't the sort of leader we need.

Two or three questions:

1. Do you believe that the government has a responsibility and/or the right to promote its industries in furtherance of its national economic interests and/or objectives? (I personally do not). If no, go straight to question #3.

If a state wants to set up a bureau of tourism, that's fine. There is no reason that can't be done. On the other hand, there is no provision in our Constitution that gives Congressmen the right or ability to buy votes with tax revenue. That's what Stephens is doing. That's what they*all do every time there is a 'highway' bill passed and signed. 'Highway Robbery' is more like it. Then to read that DeLay doesn't think there is any waste that could be cut from the budget to fund the hurricane relief efforts just compounds the atrocity.

I'm just surprised that more people don't think that spending $500,000 of our money to paint a fish on an airplane is an outrageous act.

Well, a couple of things, since he's the Senator of my state.

One, it's Stevens, and he and his son are both considerably corrupt as public knowledge is concerned.
Two, Ted wears his "Hulk" tie in the Senate when he is arguing about drilling in ANWR. No joke.
Three, his son is currently embroiled in a HUGE lawsuit regarding his dad using his influence to rig spending to help his son's interest in a specific fishery, knowledgably.
Four, that son, Ben, got appointed to head of the Alaska Senate with no prior experience in those kinds of matters - just a consultant and a fishery guy.
Five, Ted has publicly stated that, although he was vacating the seat of Head of Appropriations (AK takes in $4bil but puts in $2bil btw), he would be ineffective IN THAT INFLUENCE unless Republicans were in the majority of Alaska politics, ref'ing specifically Lisa Murkowski election status.
Six, Ben has publicly referred to some of the constituency of a neighboring area in Anchorage as "valley trash" - almost no discernable apology for it whatsoever.
Seven, and finally, over the lawsuit chasing Ben, Anchorage Daily News and KTUU-2 News were both following the leads when Ted publicly threatened them for doing their job. The responses have been hilarious, including Ted coming to terms with the fact that his own son's lack of public disclosure IS a matter of record, not muckraking.
Eight, Ted also proclaimed “clinical depression” regarding the difficulty of passing the ANWR bill – and in the same press statement admitted that he hadn’t been CLINICALLY diagnosed with anything – certainly nothing that would affect his judgment as a legislator – that after his advisors took him aside following the first statement.
I've got almost all this stuff somewhere, maybe i'll post it.

:Pertinence?
Well, another point is that our Rep. Don Young (AK) is THE Don Young ref'd to for Transportation Bill "bridge to nowhere" hubbub. He thinks "My opinion is as valid as any scientist's" in regards to climate change.
Also ... he's being prompted to reimburse due money he may have been paid by certain currenty-assailed Republican leaders in their other-than-legal fundraising tactics.

...long story short, this state is firmly embraced by corruption, in lesser or greater degree.
What might have been a smidge funnier would be if that had been a $500,000 spawned-out salmon.

With all due respect to the enormous corruption that goes on in Alaska, it isn't any different than any other state. West Virginia has every other street and federal building named after Byrd. He manages to channel quite a bit of our money up there to buy the votes that he needs to get re-elected. We get a ton of federal money to study mass transit, here in the Atlanta area. We never do anything but study it.

I guess the thing that really irritated me more than anything else was when DeLay said there wasn't any fat in the budget and he couldn't find anything to cut in order to offset the hurricane relief spending. Wonder how much his district gets?

I think the pork funding is called 'set-asides' in the highway bill. I recently read that Montana is sending all their set-asides back to DC. Probably to be redistributed to Alaska and West Virginia, huh?

With all due respect to the enormous corruption that goes on in Alaska, it isn't any different than any other state.
To be fair, i have enough corruption in this state to focus on that i mightn't ever get around to studying many of the others.

I think the pork funding is called 'set-asides' in the highway bill. I recently read that Montana is sending all their set-asides back to DC. Probably to be redistributed to Alaska and West Virginia, huh?
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
I figured i'd catch a few of y'all up with a current summary - although this post doesn't include everything from my last.

*ahem*

Salmon jet lures federal fund questions
MARKETING: How has $29 million in federal money been spent so far?

By LIZ RUSKIN
Anchorage Daily News

Published: October 6, 2005
Last Modified: October 6, 2005 at 06:43 AM


WASHINGTON -- The Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, created by U.S. Sen. Ted
Stevens in 2003,
made a big splash this week with a high-profile project: a
$500,000 grant to Alaska Airlines, mostly to paint a giant king salmon on
one of its jetliners.


But what else the marketing board has bought with the $29 million in federal
funds it has received isn't so clear.

The law that created the board says AFMB must submit an annual report
detailing its expenditures to the secretary of commerce. But the board's
executive director,
Bill Hines, said he is not allowed to release the report
to the public.

"A lot of that information is confidential and proprietary," he said.

The board's chairman is state Sen. Ben Stevens, R-Anchorage, who did not
return telephone calls Wednesday.

His father, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, created the board in a 2003
appropriations bill, saying he wanted to help Alaska seafood compete against
imported farm-raised stocks. The state's commercial salmon industry was in
crisis, with a value that had plunged 73 percent in a decade. The board was
one of several initiatives aimed at reviving the industry.

Sen. John McCain, a regular critic of special funding programs Ted Stevens
establishes for Alaska, took a shot at the marketing board when it was up
for its second $10 million appropriation.

"Is there something wrong with these fish that warrants such an expensive
program to convince us to eat them?" the Arizona Republican asked during
debate last year.

The board's structure, as Stevens established it in federal law, is unusual.
The board is an independent nonprofit, and its members are appointed by the
commerce secretary. Hines, the director, remains an employee of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The board's money -- about $10 million a year -- comes from something called
the Saltonstall-Kennedy Fund. The fund is derived from duties on imported
fish and awards grants to develop American fisheries.

The Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board hasn't produced an annual report for
public review, Hines said.

It also has no official Web site, he said. Some of its meetings have been
open to the public, he said, but the locations and meeting times aren't
advertised.

Hines did, however, provide a PowerPoint presentation that gave a general
accounting of the board's budget. The bulk of the money, $12 million, has
gone to salmon processors, and more than half of that has gone to the
processing titans: Ocean Beauty, Peter Pan, Icicle, Trident.

Hines said the board took a new "performance-based" approach with salmon
marketing. Rather than award grants based on merit of individual proposals,
the board offered grants based on the amount of salmon each processor had
bought.

"It's all based on the amount of fish purchased, so the more you purchase,
the more you get," he said.

The grants, though, do come with restrictions.

"They have to submit a proposal for how they would spend that money, and
that proposal has to do with marketing," Hines said.

Grantees have to file reports, which the board scrutinizes, he said.
Information provided to the board is often sensitive, he said, because
companies wouldn't want competitors to know their plans.

The PowerPoint slides also show the board gave $4.5 million to the Alaska
Seafood Marketing Institute, a state-chartered organization created in 1981,
$3 million to a group that promotes Alaska pollock, and $1 million to
promote herring in Japan. It also gave out numerous smaller grants.

Some of the grants, such as the money to promote a branding initiative
called Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers or the Japanese herring campaign,
have received attention in Alaska fishing circles.

Hines was willing to discuss how some of the companies proposed to spend
their grants but said the full accounting was in the report he could not
release.

"I am not allowed to just release that report," he said. "That's what I was
told (when) I talked to folks in D.C."

He didn't want to be more specific about where the instruction came from.

"I don't think that's important," he said.

He also said that the report didn't belong to the board because he had filed
the original, as required by law, with the Department of Commerce.

The Daily News has filed a formal request for the report from the Commerce
Department and is awaiting a response.

Mark Vinsel, executive director of the United Fishermen of Alaska, said he'd
like to be able to tell his members of the grants available through the
marketing board.

"I've been looking forward to them having a Web site," he said. "Without a
Web site, I haven't been able to regularly communicate to UFA's 1,300-member
e-mail list in the way we have with (other grant programs)."

Actually, the AFMB does have a Web site, although it's still under
construction.

The site alaskafisheriesboard.org contains information about the
organization.

"It's not an official Web site. It should not be launched," Hines said when
asked about it Tuesday. On Wednesday, the site was carrying a red disclaimer
saying it was under construction and that "none of the information contained
herein has been approved as official content."

The site listed the agency's 11-member board of directors and gave a partial
breakdown of entities that received grants and for how much, although it
doesn't say what the grants were for. The AFMB board includes
representatives of seafood companies, fisheries groups, Carrs/Safeway,
Lynden Transport and former Ted Stevens aide Trevor McCabe, who is a
business partner with Ben Stevens.

The official location of the agency's office was also unclear. The bylaws on
the unapproved Web site say the principal office is in Juneau, where Hines
said he lives. Hines, though, said that the office is actually in downtown
Anchorage and that the board pays for an apartment for him to stay in there.
His business phone is his cell phone, he said, although the organization
does have a phone in the Anchorage office.

He declined to disclose his salary, which is paid through the Department of
Commerce. Hines said his board members do not receive salaries but are paid
$500 per meeting, in addition to per-day expenses.

Ben Stevens, the board chairman, did not list his AFMB membership on his
Alaska Public Offices Commission financial disclosure forms for the past two
years. The APOC form requires legislators to list profit and nonprofit
boards on which they serve. Stevens did list his membership on other
nonprofit boards. He was appointed to the AFMB board in late 2003.

A spokeswoman for Ted Stevens said he recommended his son and other members
of the marketing board to the commerce secretary for appointment, but she
said the senator made his recommendations from a list Gov. Frank Murkowski
sent.

The Alaska Airlines promotion is getting national attention, not all of it
positive.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told ABC News this week that the money was a
waste.

"I don't think anybody's going to buy Alaskan seafood because they see a
fish on the side of an airplane," he said in a segment broadcast Wednesday
on "World News Tonight."

Keith Ashdown, spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense, acknowledged the
plane has a lot of "wow" factor. He e-mailed news of the publicly funded
paint job, saying "We couldn't make this up if we tried."

Hines said the salmon jet has been a big hit. He called it a "flying
billboard."

"It's advertising," he said. "For four to six years, we're going to have
that plane flying our message."

In fact, he said, he the message may outlive the board.

"In light of what's going on today, with (Hurricane) Katrina, with Rita and
other problems, I'm not optimistic that we're going to get another
appropriation this year," he said.

The board was created when the market for Alaska fish was terrible, and it's
now much better, he said.

"We have fulfilled our mission," he said. "We have run our course."

---------

With all due respect to the enormous corruption that goes on in Alaska, it isn't any different than any other state. West Virginia has every other street and federal building named after Byrd. He manages to channel quite a bit of our money up there to buy the votes that he needs to get re-elected. We get a ton of federal money to study mass transit, here in the Atlanta area. We never do anything but study it.

I guess the thing that really irritated me more than anything else was when DeLay said there wasn't any fat in the budget and he couldn't find anything to cut in order to offset the hurricane relief spending. Wonder how much his district gets?

I think the pork funding is called 'set-asides' in the highway bill. I recently read that Montana is sending all their set-asides back to DC. Probably to be redistributed to Alaska and West Virginia, huh?

That's the truth. I've visited most of the 50 states and three other countries, but I've never seen anything even close to the Robert Byrd memorials all over West Virginia. You can't go a half mile without seeing some public work project named after him. It's actually pretty impressive that one guy could carry that much clout.

OMG!:eek:
NS has been invaded by a flying painting of a fish! Not only that, but he has apparently been here since long before people knew he was going to exist!
That might explain the amount of money going to painting, I'll bet that engineer a time travelling AI out of leadbased paint is one of those things best described as: "tricky".


Im laughing so hard over that... :D

So it's okay to spend $500,000 of tax money to paint an airplane that is run by a private company. If you vote in the US, we are doomed.
You've never looked at the money that the national arts endowment gives out each year have you? They paid 70,000 to a woman so she could use aborted fetuses in her 'art'. 40,000 to a guy who created pornographic art using bibles. Yet they passed on a 10,000 for a program that would teach basic drawing skills.

You've never looked at the money that the national arts endowment gives out each year have you? They paid 70,000 to a woman so she could use aborted fetuses in her 'art'. 40,000 to a guy who created pornographic art using bibles. Yet they passed on a 10,000 for a program that would teach basic drawing skills.
LOL. I've said several times that the easiest way to find a federal building in any town is to look for the most butt-ugly piece of sculpture that you can find. Then look at the building behind it. That's the federal building. The NEA can be eliminated.

Eh, details, details...

Almost all of the federal budget is spent on:
1) Social Security
2) Medicare/Medicaid
3) Military.

Everything else combined is somewhere around 1/4 of the federal budget... any individual program is pretty insignificant compared to those...

LOL. I've said several times that the easiest way to find a federal building in any town is to look for the most butt-ugly piece of sculpture that you can find. Then look at the building behind it. That's the federal building. The NEA can be eliminated.

Amazing.. I always say... My mother is an oil painter (I'm a singer) and her things haven't been displayed in a big show in a while...

Maybe they should have hired some 'artist' sponging off of the taxpayers to paint the fish... would some leftist then claim that it is a great contribution to our culture?
If it was painted somewhere, where the public could enjoy it... maybe.

You Know When the Government is Out of Control When...

Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Knowegde

and that other one :p

*Starts singing and playing guitar badly*

North, to Alaska.
We're goin' north in a jet plane.
North, to Alaska.
We're goin' north for King Salmon.

Damn you, Supreme Court, for outlawing the Line Item Veto.

DAMN YOU!!!!

Those Alaskan Congressmen are shoving pork in barrels like it is going out of style.

Those Alaskan Congressmen are shoving pork in barrels like it is going out of style.

Pork Fetish?

Pork Fetish?
I guess it is because you can't raise pigs in Alaska.

I guess it is because you can't raise pigs in Alaska.

True, True.

On the topic of the Line Item Veto, It really isnt SCOTUS's fault. The presidential Line-Item Veto is really unconstitutional.

Damn you, writers of the Constitution!


DAMN YOU!!!