I am of the opinion that we could pay for every college student’s tuition, everyone’s health-related expenses and deductibles, and every elderly person’s nursing home care if we could get control of the runaway spending in this country.
On Oct. 22, writer Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times reported that Tom Coburn, Republican senator from Oklahoma, the champion of the U.S. taxpayer, is retiring at the end of this year after a decade in the Senate. During his tenure in the Senate, Coburn published a yearly account of “tens of billions of dollars in pork, boondoggles and extravagance that have contributed to the government’s trillions of dollars of debt.”
“The only way to stop wasteful Washington spending is by shining a light on it whenever and wherever it occurs, even if it is in your own state,” said Sen. Coburn.
On Oct. 22, Sen. Coburn released his last “Wastebook,” a 239-page, meticulously footnoted volume of wasteful government spending on subsidies for professional sports stadiums, a study detailing the effects of Swedish massage on rabbits, grants to study gambling monkeys, and the $5,210 that the State Department tried to spend on a blowup, human-size foosball field for an embassy in Belize, which was canceled after the senator’s staffers asked the State Department about it.
Read more at: www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/22/tom-coburn-highlights-ridiculous-government-spendi/?page=2
Evidence points to the National Institutes of Health as being one of the biggest offenders in the country. Washington conservative political consultant and columnist, Mary Matalin (wife of democratic consultant, James Carville), was appalled to learn of this latest example of wasteful spending by the National Institutes of Health.
In November, in the Washington-based Daily Caller, Mary Matalin wrote, “Last week, Sen. Tom Coburn released his new Wastebook, which exposed a litany of obscene federal expenditures. Taxpayers paid $387,000 for experiments in which rabbits at Ohio State University were given Swedish massages. For a cool $856,000, three mountain lions were trained to walk on a treadmill. At the University of Rochester, $171,000 was frittered away on experiments that concluded that monkeys like to gamble. And the government spent $331,000 learning something that James and I could have told them for free: People who feel angry as a result of being hungry will stick more pins into voodoo dolls representing their spouses.
“An NIH laboratory just outside the beltway has received $30 million in the last seven years to breed hundreds of depressed baby monkeys, take them from their moms at birth, lock them all alone inside tiny cages, systematically scare the heck out of them with loud noises and mechanical snakes, among other things, and addict them to alcohol in order to make their depression worse. In other words, 30 years of bullying baby monkeys on the American taxpayers’ dime hasn’t helped humans, so the obvious solution is to throw more money at the monkey experiments.”
Matalin continues, “The timing of the report is ironic, as Francis Collins, head honcho at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ”“ the agency that funds many of these absurd projects ”“ recently made headlines by charging that if funding to NIH hadn’t been cut in recent years, we would have had an Ebola vaccine by now. And we wonder why we don’t have a vaccine to protect us against Ebola. In the face of such out-of-control spending on these ridiculous projects, it’s difficult to take Collins seriously when he whines about NIH’s budget cuts.”
Matalin concludes, “Forget that NIH already commands $30 billion annually. Forget that President Obama has pledged to increase NIH’s budget by more than $600 million for 2015. And forget that Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH office in charge of Ebola research, publicly disputed his boss’s accusations.”
Read more at http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/03/of-rabbit-massages-baby-monkey-abuse-and-multimillion-dollar-government-boondoggles.
Blogger Beverly Mitchell of Inhabitat.com also wrote, “in a series of wasteful duplicate research studies, Dr. Ned Kalin from the University of Wisconsin”“Madison is also subjecting baby rhesus macaque monkeys to a controversial series of experiments designed to maternally and socially isolate them, then terrify them for over a year, before killing them to examine the effects of fear on their brains. The purpose of the experiments is ”˜to understand the effects of early adversity, as this is the most important environmental component that contributes to risk of developing anxiety and depression.’ But many UW alumni are speaking out against the experiments, saying the techniques are outdated, inhumane, unethical, clumsy, oversimplified, and quite simply ”˜relentless torture.’”
Dr. Ruth Decker, an alumna of UW-M’s School of Medicine, has started a petition on Change.org requesting that the University’s Board of Regents cancel the tests, and the alumni group, Not In Our Name, have a website where UW alumni can express their opposition to the project.
Read more at “http://inhabitat.com/help-prevent-wisconsins-dr-ned-kalin-from-torturing-and-killing-baby-rhesus-monkeys/.
Those of us who are of a certain age can remember reports of experiments on baby monkeys with substitute cloth mothers in decades past, which to no one’s surprise caused psychological harm to the monkeys. Incredibly, due to videotapes and records recently obtained by PETA under the Freedom of Information Act, it has come to light that these same experiments on baby monkeys, which began in 1934, have continued for the past 80 years. I will spare you the ghastly details of videotaped footage of researchers laughing at drugged female monkeys trying to care for their offspring, rape racks for female monkeys, and “pits of despair” cages for baby monkeys designed to isolate baby monkeys and cause lasting psychological harm all on the taxpayer’s dime. There is currently a breeding colony of about 200 rhesus monkeys at the NIH to ensure a ready supply of monkeys available for this so-called research. We all ought to be furious, not only at cruelty involved in this type of “research” and the money spent, but the sense of entitlement behind it whereby the ends justify the means of funding these “researchers” with nothing more to show for it than a bunch of terrified monkeys huddled in cages.
Read more at http://investigations.peta.org/nih-baby-monkey-experiments/#action/
— Val Philbrick works in the production department of the Journal Tribune as a pre-press person. She is a member of PETA and the Humane Society of the United States.
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