Providence Holy Cross Medical Center Tattoo Removal Program to Get $200K in Earmarks from $787B Stimulus Bill

Photo: Ron Tarver/Philadelphia Inquirer

Did we really need an earmark for tattoo removal? This is really crazy and I am very disappointed that as we grapple with the effects of this economic quagmire, Congress could seek to justify appropriating $200,000 of the $410 billion spending bill it is sending to President Obama for a small California program that helps people get their unstained skin back. You have got to be kidding me!

According to experts, the average cost is $50 per square inch per treatment. Tattoos can be large, and it might take five to eight laser treatments to remove a black and white tattoo; color tattoos may require up to 12 treatments. Also, a lot of people who want to get rid of their tattoos might have several of them. McClatchy DC Bureau

Who cares? You shouldn’t have had the tattoo put on in the first place. It is a colossal waste of money and it speaks to personal responsibility. You paid to put the tattoo on you, then you ought to pay to get it removed from your body. These pet projects that the congressional leaders have are a disgrace and President Obama needs to put his foot down and veto this stuff.

This year’s twist, a fight over a tattoo-removal program that operates in a small clinic in North Hollywood, Calif., is prompted by California Democratic Rep. Howard Berman, the chief sponsor of the earmark. He said that the program, which is run by the Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, wasn’t pork. “It’s priceless,” Berman said.

Since a nun opened the clinic in 1998, the program has helped nearly 12,000 clients remove their tattoos. Physicians donate their time every Saturday, the only day of the week that the clinic is open. Most of the program’s funding comes from grants.

Dimitrios Alexiou, who ran the program for more than five years and now volunteers at the clinic, said the average age of clients was 30 and that most of them were in the job market and needed help getting their skin cleaned up. Source: McClatchy DC Bureau

The free spending ways of Congress needs to be nipped in the bud once and for all. The new spending bill comes on the heels of a $787 billion economic-stimulus plan that Congress approved just last month. Yes, and Nancy Pelosi, who has been itching to travel by military plane where ever she goes, has hinted at more stimulus money being a real possibility.

Here is a long list of questionable items that will be funded under the new bill: $1.9 million for the Pleasure Beach water taxi service in Connecticut, $300,000 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia and $238,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society of Honolulu, which runs sea voyages in ancient-style sailing canoes. Source: McClatchy DC Bureau.

The sooner the powers that be realize that the United States is in an economic tailspin and on the verge of bankrupting everything we ever stood for in the world, the quicker they would realize that these porkulus items need to be vetoed by the President. Sorry, Nancy Pelosi & Co., shame on you!

Filed under: Congress, Democratic Rep. Howard Berman, Earmarks, Nancy Pelosi, Porkulus, Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, Stimulus Bill, Tattoo Removal

President Bill Clinton Doling Out Advice to President Obama Once Again, Says He Should be More Hopeful

President Bill Clinton is back and he’s giving President Obama some advice. All I can say is though he may be right, but we don’t want another fallout from his comments. Hillary, control your man! President Clinton says he thinks President Barack Obama should talk more optimistically about the prospects that the nation will recover from its current deep economic woes.

Clinton said that he wants Obama to assure the people that America will surmount this problem. Was that sort of how he wanted to assure the American people that he did not “have sexual relations with woman [Monica Lewinsky]?” At least we haven’t heard such salacious mess coming out of the Obama marriage. But at the same time he tried to clean it up by saying, in an interview broadcast Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that “I like the fact that he didn’t come in and give us a bunch of happy talk.”

He also said he believes “you will see some good economic news form the stimulus fairly soon.”
For his part, Obama has said he thinks the country will get past the recession, but that it will be a long slog. Sorry President Clinton, stop giving President Obama advice in public. What you discuss privately is a different matter. Hey Hillary, you need to rein in your man! We don’t need the drama coming from President Clinton.

Filed under: Cr, President Barack H. Obama, President Bill Clinton, Stimulus Bill

Is Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post Calling President Obama a Monkey in its Latest Editorial Cartoon?

So, after Rev. Al Sharpton made some off-the-cuff comments about Gen. Colin Powell at a recent speech at Middlebury College, he has rightly criticized the New York Post. He is demanding that the newspaper, which has come under fire in the past for racially-tinged cartoons, explain what it meant in its latest controversial offering. The cartoon suggests that the stimulus bill was so bad, monkeys may as well have written it. The incorporation of violence and, on a sinister level, race into politics is bound to be controversial. Rightly so.

Displayed prominently on today’s editorial pages, the cartoon depicts two police officers – one with his smoking gun drawn – standing over what appears to be a dead chimpanzee in a pool of blood. One officer says to the other: “Now they’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Hmmm. Are they referring to the dead chimp as the president of the United States? That’s weird and I have to wonder what the intent of the cartoon is. Okay, the massive $787 billion stimulus bill was signed into law yesterday and the cops shot a crazy chimpanzee, but what do they have in common? Could it be President Obama being portrayed as a rabid chimpanzee? We all know that blacks are portrayed as monkeys repeatedly, so that is a sound conclusion to draw. With that in mind, Mr. Rupert Murdoch and his posse owe us an explanation and an apology. Funny, Matt Drudge has been a big critic of Barack Obama and his Administration and this cartoon is conveniently absent from the Drudge Report. It is also missing from Fox News Channel’s website, but I expected nothing different.

Filed under: African Americans, Blacks, Chimpanzee, Matt Drudge, Monkey, National Action Network, Portrayed as Chimp, President Barack H. Obama, Stimulus Bill, The Drudge Report