Rep. Pete Sessions — the chief of the Republicans’ campaign arm in the House — says on his website that earmarks have become “a symbol of a broken Washington to the American people.”Read more at Politico.
Yet in 2008, Sessions himself steered a $1.6 million earmark for dirigible research to an Illinois company whose president acknowledges having no experience in government contracting, let alone in building blimps.
What the company did have: the help of Adrian Plesha, a former Sessions aide with a criminal record who has made more than $446,000 lobbying on its behalf.
Sessions spokeswoman Emily Davis defends the airship project as a worthwhile use of federal funds and says it could eventually lead to thousands of new jobs in Sessions’s Dallas-area district.
But the company that received the earmarked funds, Jim G. Ferguson & Associates, is based in the suburbs of Chicago, with another office in San Antonio — nearly 300 miles from Dallas...
There's also a good op-ed on The Examiner by Dallas County Republican activist and transportation expert David Smith:
Second verse, same as the first. Unfortunately, nobody in the Republican Party has stepped up to challenge Rep. Pete Sessions. And in the Republican-dominated 32nd District of Texas, that means the lesser of all evils remains our Congressman.
U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions is once again being implicated in questionable practices in his tenure in Washington. Already his name has been linked to Ponzi scheme con artist "Sir" Alan Stanford, Malaysian investor-donors and casino deals in another State. Now the King of Corruption has to answer for why he saw fit to stand up in public and say, "Earmarks are bad" with John McCain then turn right around and gain funding for a hot air balloon company in Illinois, no less...
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