Digging a Little Deeper: More Hill Earmarks for His Former Employer

Today, the Majority Accountability Project has a post up detailing the earmarks Baron Hill has gotten for clients of his former lobbyist employer, mCapitol Management.

The earmarks total some $625,000 and include an earmark for $375,000 that went to a registered client (Schneck Memorial Hospital of Seymour, Indiana) of lobbyist Ryan Guthrie, who was once and is again Baron Hill's chief of staff.

Hoosierpundit first reported on that shady earmark here (and addressed defenses of these questionable dealings made by Hill partisans here).

But wait!

There's more!

It turns out that the earmark obtained for Guthrie's former client is not the only earmark that Baron Hill got for clients of mCapitol Management, his former employer.

In addition to the Guthrie-Schneck earmark, Baron got an earmark for Next Wave System of Pekin, Indiana, which became an mCapitol client in 2007.

It would appear that there is considerably more to Baron's earmark requests than merely asking for assistance for businesses and institutions within the 9th District.

He has a definitive history of requesting earmarks for clients of his former employer.

One earmark for an mCapitol client could be dismissed as a coincidence.

Two is no coincidence, it is a distinctive pattern of questionable behavior in the allocation of taxpayer dollars via the earmark process.

That should raise serious questions about the integrity of someone who campaigned upon a platform of "cleaning up Washington."

Now, here at the end, this is where I should undertake a Gary Welsh rant about how I was given no credit by MajorityAP for first posting this (and this is not the first time), but I digress.

I am humble in ways that only people from southern Indiana can be, and it is enough for me that this is getting more attention.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant (boy, there is a much-quoted cliche), and it will take an awful lot of disinfectant to clean up and disinfect someone like Baron Hill.