Pete Sessions and Other Gas Bags

Congressman Pete Sessions (R – TX 32) is again showing what a horrible embarrassment he is to Texas in his hypocritical support of another of his ilk: gas bags.

“Gas Bag” is the industry term for a lighter-than-air aircraft that is commonly known as a blimp.

You know, all of those blimps that – what - circle football games? And all of that other important stuff like life-flighting the injured from the scene of accidents to hospital rooftops.

Oh, you say, helicopters do that better and faster?

Well anyway, Pete Sessions has been caught with his hand in the pork barrel as he “steered a $1.6 million earmark for dirigible research to an Illinois company whose president acknowledges having no experience in government contracting, let alone in building blimps”

Illinois is a far piece from Sessions’ Dallas digs, so you wonder what could be behind all of this generosity. Even the Texas branch of the beneficiary company, G. Ferguson & Associates, is in Austin. Closer, but still not within Sessions’ district.

Perhaps the only thing that relates Sesssions to Ferguson’s company is a $5000 campaign contribution to Sessions’ PAC in 2007.

And that, by my calculations is a 320,000:1 rate of return on that 5K investment.

But I’ll bet there is more to this than meets the eye.

Like maybe Sessions is upset about the plan to float a giant banana blimp over Texas, a plan that went belly-up in 2008 due to a lack of funds.

Or maybe Sessions appreciates the fact that natural gas, abundant in Texas, is the single source of Helium on planet Earth, despite it being the second most common element in the universe. And that Helium is the gas that is used to float blimps on top of air, and that Helium in natural gas is prolific in the Texas panhandle.

Or maybe Sessions is just naturally attracted to other gas bags.