Burns is a Liar Liar Pants On Fire

Conrad Burns is such a liar that it constantly amazes me that his pants are not on fire. What am I talking about? Let's examine the headlines of several of his most recent press releases:

Burns Secures Funding for Butte Airport
Burns Announces Vital Support for After School, Online Predator Programs
Burns Delivers for Tribal Law Enforcement
Burns Secures Major Funding for Important Montana Economic Development Projects

Let's look at the language used here to discover why these are 'lies'. These press releases use words like 'secured' and 'delivers' when in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. He has only placed these items in a spending bill that has not even made it through committee yet! After reading this article in The Hill, I wouldn't bet on it even making it out of committee, and certainly not on it seeing a vote on the floor.

Even as he touts his Capitol clout back home, Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) is having trouble moving the spending bill he oversees as chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior.

Burns, one of the most politically vulnerable Senate incumbents, has been telling voters how much money he has delivered to the state. But the interior spending bill, including about $60 million he earmarked for Montana, looks like a bad bet to see Senate floor action before voters go to the polls in November.

Even if it does make it to the floor, it doesn't look too positive that it will see passage. You see, GOP senators from other states are trying to explain to their base that they are fiscally conservative even though we have the largest national deficit in history. Pork barrel politics and bridges to nowhere aren't going to play too well in November.

The floor can be unpredictable, and Burns could be forced into tough votes on a bill he wrote if the measure were to make it there.

In addition to possible Democratic amendments, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has made clear that he intends to continue his war on earmarks during consideration of domestic spending bills, creating a potential nightmare for the manager of any of appropriations measure.

What if it doesn't make it? Will Burn's retract his statements and expose his own lies? He does care about 'delivering' for Montana?

Whether the bill gets a vote on the floor may not matter much to Burns, who, as one Appropriations staffer noted, already “put out the press release” on the projects.

What can we do about this? Well, we can vote for Jon Tester and bring honesty back to Montana

Burns’s Democratic challenger, Jon Tester, has made ethics a central theme of his campaign.

“We need to let Washington know now that the ‘For Sale’ sign has to come down, and Conrad Burns’s days of ‘pay-to-play’ are ending,” Tester says on his website.

Here are some relevant links:

Conrad Burns: Not Bringing It Home to Montana from Intelligent Discontent
Election is problem for Burns’s bill from The Hill
Counting Chickens from Tester Time