While our Congress lectures us about how often we can use our thermostats, what cars we can drive, how we need to tighten our belts for the sake of the Country, how we are in a horrible recession and financial constraints, and regulating the salaries of Corporations,  they are gallivanting around the world with their families and friends on our dime.

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WASHINGTON — Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.

The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That’s a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.

The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among lawmakers as “codels,” has risen nearly 70% since 2005, when an influence-peddling scandal led to a ban on travel funded by lobbyists, according to the data.

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In mid-June, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D., Hawaii) led a group of a half-dozen senators and their spouses on a four-day trip to France for the biennial Paris Air Show. An itinerary for the event shows that lawmakers flew on the Air Force’s version of the Boeing 737, which costs $5,700 an hour to operate. They stayed at the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand Hotel, which advertises rooms from $460 a night.

The lawmakers were invited to a dinner party at the U.S. Embassy and had cocktails at a private party at the Eiffel Tower. Mr. Inouye attended a dinner sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association, a U.S. trade group. Another senator on the trip, Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, took a cruise on the River Seine with defense-industry executives and elected officials from Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.

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In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation of Democratic lawmakers to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a day. Before landing in Kabul, the eight lawmakers and their entourage of spouses and aides spent eight days in Italy, spending $57,697 on hotels and meals.

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Documents obtained by the Journal show that the cost of flying a small group of lawmakers to the Middle East is about $150,000. Larger trips on the Air Force’s version of the Boeing 757 cost about $12,000 an hour. Two federal agencies pay for most of the travel — the Defense Department and the State Department.

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{It only gets worse: – The Rest of The Article}

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DON’T JUST SIT THERE…..DO SOMETHING!

This has got to stop immediately! Help this Thread go viral by forwarding it to everyone you can think of, and contact Congress.

Tags: congress, Democrats, Graft, Hypocrisy, Over Spending, Republican Party, Vacations

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Democratic Party, Politics, Republican Party, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.