McCain's tweet not sitting well with one newspaper
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/02/11/art.getty.mccain.face.jpg caption="McCain has been Twittering his '10 Porkiest Projects.'"]WASHINGTON (CNN) - A South Carolina newspaper isn’t too happy with what John McCain’s been Twittering.
McCain has been using the microblogging site to post a near-daily list of the “10 Porkiest projects” in the omnibus spending bill. On Wednesday, the Arizona senator posted “#6. $950,000 for a Convention Center in Myrtle Beach, SC.”
The Myrtle Beach Sun News editorialized Friday that McCain is using the site “to make congressional earmarks a political wedge issue for the Republicans” by posting such earmarks without context.
The paper wrote that “readers of McCain's Convention Center tweet are now invited to think - without the inconvenience of critical reflection - that the Myrtle Beach Convention Center project has no value.”
The editorial argued instead that the convention center project has the potential to create long-term wealth and jobs in the coastal resort city.
“The irony in all this,” the paper wrote, is that the earmark was inserted into the spending bill by one of McCain’s closest friends: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.
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Earmarks: Monies that are already allocated to state but the state's representative specifies where some of it will be spent.
Earmarks do not increase the total amount of expenses in a bill.
For example, when Sarah Palin's "Bridge to Nowhere" earmark was ridiculed, the earmark (specifying that the money had to be used for that particular project) was withdrawn. BUT Alaska got the funds anyway. They just didn't HAVE to spend those funds on that bridge.
All this hoopla about earmarks is posturing. And McCain can posture with the best of them.
Hopefully this convention center will have a big closet in it that Lindsey Graham can finally come out of.