Word: weatherly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Score one—or better yet, make it one hundred thousand—for the Punxsutawney Weather Discovery Center. Low-income students: zero...
Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home to the lovable groundhog-cum-weather prophet Punxsutawney Phil (popularized in the 1993 Bill Murray film Groundhog Day), got a boost last week when residents learned they had found favor in the traditional year-end Congressional appropriations bill. Thanks to some last minute wrangling by Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., the federal government will be allocating $100,000 for the creation of a weather museum there. According to a website maintained by the local chamber of commerce, the “discovery center” will “educate a variety of groups, individuals, ages...
Practically buckling under the weight of its frivolity, the $388 billion annual spending bill budgets billions of dollars for projects that, like the Punxsutawney Weather Discovery Center, were tacked on by legislators to curry favor with their constituents. While no one can come to a clear consensus on whether a certain issue qualifies as so-called pork barrel spending, estimates of the total set aside for these pet projects range from $11 billion to $16 billion. Other questionable giveaways in the bill include $250,000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, $500,000 to renovate ski trails...
These projects might seem harmless enough. (After all, who doesn’t love historic bathhouses and weather folklore?) But what Peterson and his fellow champions of pet projects presumably won’t be including in their glossy re-election campaign brochures is that Congress also approved an adjustment to the chronically under-funded Pell Grant program, the principal means by which American students receive need-based government grants to attend college. Eligibility for the awards is determined in part by an examination of state tax information, but lawmakers chose to use tax tables that were out of date...
...assume that the irony of their simultaneous pork barrel spending is lost on the rest of us. It seems that, for now, economically disadvantaged students hoping for a college education will just have to settle for a trip to Pennsylvania and a crash course in weather history instead...