Hoo boy! I should be celebrating all of these wonderful road projects coming to Illinois. On the other hand, I'd prefer a massive tax cut--not the $400 miserly "rebate" touted by disgraced CNN reporter Susan Roesgen at the Chicago Tax Day Tea Party.Luckily Illinois, even in the rural area, is populated enough not to have a "road to nowhere" built. I think.
Here's what McClatchey says:
When President Barack Obama proudly announced last week that the government had approved its 2,000th transportation project under the economic stimulus plan, he hailed it as a moment "when a generation of Americans seized the chance to remake the face of this nation."
Many of those Americans apparently live in Obama's home state of Illinois.
The Obama list included 249 Illinois projects, far more than any other state. Six states — Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Alaska and Idaho — had no projects when he spoke, although Georgia has since added 22 projects, and the list has grown to 2,163.
The Illinois collection was explained by Marisa Kollias, a spokeswoman for the state transportation department: "We do have a new governor and a new secretary and they've been working diligently."
Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Peoria is the Secretary of Transportation. He has repeatedly denied steering projects to his home state.
Cary Leahey, an economist at Decision Economics hit the nail on the head, "They knew the system," he said, referring to top administration officials.
Of course most of them are from Illinois, predominately Chicago, the place where the political term "clout" was invented.
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