Congressman touts benefit of law he voted against

 

U.S. Representative Gary Palmer (first image), who represents Northern Alabama, took credit for an  $350M highway earmark in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, a.k.a., BIF).

He voted against the bill.

This may be obnoxious but not hypocritical.

The BIF is one of those aggregate bills with thousands of earmarks (the bill language contains over 1400 earmarks in 1700 pages) and covering many different types of infrastructure including highways, transit, ports, broadband, electrical transmission and more.

Unfortunately, I have personal experience with administering portions of previous aggregate bills, which if they cover most of the government are called Omnibus Bills or if they only cover a portion, miniBus Bills. These typically have worthwhile projects and wasteful projects and sometime the project is so poorly defined it takes considerable time to figure out what it was supposed to be.  

 

My own Representative has lauded several earmarks he got into the bill for replacing diesel buses with electric buses on the premise that this will relieve traffic congestion. Although obviously a false claim (it might even make traffic congestion worse as the current generation of electric buses brake down more often than the current generation of diesel buses but it might save money if the information in the chart is correct, it is from a 2016 study by a graduate student) that is not hypocritical either.

An article on a fire involving an electric bus is here

Yahoo article with image is here

 Earmark summary is here.

Hyprocrisy Airlines

This is another in the 'fighting climate change by emitting more carbon' stories.  I've done this before but because the Daily Mail used 'hypocrite' in a cute headline and because they had excellent photography, I decided to do yet another post on it (although I ended up using BBC photos because of a formatting issue - the first image is of a 787 from Bangladesh, the second an Airbus A 319 from Cyprus)

I'll give the Daily News and BBC thoroughness credit for covering the various pieces of aircraft and the motorcades (the US had I think the largest motorcade and largest delegation). 

The Daily News also did various calculations, e.g., the private jets alone put some 13,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (I have no way of checking these figures) and the US delegation put some 2.2 million pounds of carbon in the atmosphere counting planes, helicopters and motorcade (I don't know why they used different metrics).

I wonder at thought process of the world leaders involved. Did President Biden say, "I want to make sure we send more people than any other country, that will show leadership".  This seems pretty stupid but I've heard important people say similar things when I worked for the government. Did Jeff Bezos say, "Well it will be a good chance to meet people and make contacts to expand Amazon." Did the leaders of Cyprus and Bangladesh say, "This will be a good way to get money from rich countries."

It seems to me that President Biden could defend the large delegation saying that 'we need to improve staff knowledge so we can develop better legislation" or something like that.  Of course, this seems so silly as to be laughable (you could read and call people on the phone or have zoom meetings to get knowledge after all) but perhaps Biden thinks like that. Thus, I will not declare it hypocrisy on his part.

The Daily Mail article is here.

An article a bit less critical of the political leaders from the BBC is here.