Bobby Jindal’s denunciations of federal spending to monitor volcanoes is now attracting some serious critcism from a Republican Senator — namely Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, whose state has been recently disrupted by a series of eruptions from Mount Redoubt.
“Recently there were some comments made about federal spending for volcano monitoring being wasteful,” Murkowski said from the Senate floor, without naming Jindal directly. “I can assure you that monitoring volcanoes is critically important to the nation and especially to my home state of Alaska.”
In Jindal’s speech, he said: “While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes … $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.”
The massive eruptions from Mount Redoubt were serious enough to cancel all airport service in and out of Anchorage for several hours — even though the city is about 100 miles away from the volcano. Memo to Bobby Jindal: “Volcano monitoring” in some parts of the country is not all that dissimilar from “hurricane monitoring” on the Gulf Coast.
