Another "Do as I say, not as I do" republican...

Rep. Pete Sessions — the chief of the Republicans’ campaign arm in the House — says on his website that earmarks have become “a symbol of a broken Washington to the American people.”

Yet in 2008, Sessions himself 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.

What the company did have: the help of Adrian Plesha, a former Sessions aide with a criminal record who has made more than $446,000 lobbying on its behalf.

Sessions spokeswoman Emily Davis defends the airship project as a worthwhile use of federal funds and says it could eventually lead to thousands of new jobs in Sessions’s Dallas-area district.

But the company that received the earmarked funds, Jim G. Ferguson & Associates, is based in the suburbs of Chicago, with another office in San Antonio — nearly 300 miles from Dallas. And while Sessions used a Dallas address for the company when he submitted his earmark request to the House Appropriations Committee last year, one of the two men who control the company says that address is merely the home of one of his close friends.

Jim G. Ferguson IV — the younger half of the father-son team behind Jim G. Ferguson & Associates — told POLITICO that he and his father are trying to build an airship with a “high fineness ratio” that can be used in both military and civilian applications.

Fineness ratio is the technical term for the relationship between an airship’s length and its diameter; the higher the fineness ratio, the longer and more slender the airship is. A blimp with a very high fineness ratio could fly faster and be able to stay aloft longer — the holy grail for airship designers during the past century.

Yet Ferguson acknowledged that neither he nor his father has a background in the defense or aviation industries, nor any engineering or research expertise.

A search of publicly available records shows no history of the Fergusons ever being involved with the airship industry other than their attendance at a February 2005 Pentagon conference on the subject.

Jim G. Ferguson IV said in an interview that he and his father “were business people” and had acquired the patents for building an advanced airship prototype. He said that the two men are playing a supervisory role in the project and “have obtained world-class experts to work for us.”

According to a statement that Sessions included in the Congressional Record last September, slightly more than half of the $1.6 million earmark was to go toward research and engineering costs. The remainder was for overhead and administrative costs.

“This particular project is focused on study and analysis of the high fineness ratio multimission airship for implementation and deployment in support of the persistent [Defense Department] wide shortfall in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability,” Ferguson said in a statement.

The elder Ferguson declined to talk with POLITICO. His son would not provide details on his professional career but did say that he first came to Washington in 1991 to work in the Transportation Department under Secretary Samuel Skinner. He then did advance work for the White House when Skinner became White House chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush.

On Federal Election Commission forms, Ferguson’s occupation has been listed at various times as lobbyist, rancher or self-employed investor. When asked about his activities since the first Bush administration, Ferguson said he was “just working, doing a bunch of different stuff.”

He has also donated money to Sessions and other Republicans. FEC records show that Ferguson contributed $5,000 to Sessions’s leadership PAC in October 2007. Overall, Ferguson and his father have given $18,500 to GOP lawmakers over the past six years.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25599.html#ixzz0MkVH6xp3