Is there really $30 million in the new stimulus package devoted to saving the salt marsh mouse in Nancy Pelosi’s district?
That’s what some conservatives are now charging, and the claim seems to be gaining some traction with elected GOP officials and conservative media outlets, who are using it to argue that the bill is stuffed with Dem pork.
But there isn’t any such money in the bill. And Pelosi’s office is saying that the claim is a “total fabrication.”
How did this one get going? Yesterday a House Republican leadership staffer circulated a background email, which I obtained, charging that GOP staffers had been told by an unnamed Federal agency that if it got money from the stim package, it would spend “thirty million dollars for wetland restoration in the San Francisco Bay Area — including work to protect the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.”
The GOP staffer’s email didn’t say what agency it was. It didn’t say the money was actually in the package — just that an unnamed agency had said they would spend it on that if they got it.
And how do we know the Cons are making shit up? Because they’ve admitted they are:
But I just contacted the House GOP staffer who wrote the initial email laying out this talking point, and he conceded that the claim by conservative media that the mouse money is currently in the bill is a misstatement. “There is not specific language in the legislation for this project,” he said.
Yet they’re still yawping about mouse money. Un-fucking-believable.
It would still be ridiculous if they were whining about something that was actually going to happen. Wetlands are nothing to sneer at. But the fact they’re shrieking “Eek! Mouse money!” over a nonexistent earmark just so they can get people riled up against the stimulus is pathetic.
Have they always been this psychotic?
