Tom DeLay Gets Massive Broadband Loan from Farm Funds For His Own Fat Cats

Rural Net funds go to Texas commuter towns | CNET News.com: "Nearly $23 million meant to bring the Web to rural America instead will underwrite fast Internet service to affluent Texas suburbs, a situation Democrats and other critics called outrageous.
The loan, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development (USDA), includes work in communities outside Houston, in House Republican Leader Tom DeLay's district.
Farm and telephone groups on Thursday questioned the wisdom of the $22.7 million loan to ETS Telephone & Subsidiaries, a Houston firm that advertises itself as providing telecommunications for 'quality master-planned communities.'
The loan would help bring broadband service to 9,272 households and businesses just outside the Texas city, the Agriculture Department said.
Congress created the loan program in 2002 to help rural areas, including communities of less than 20,000 people, gain Internet access. The ETS project qualified, a USDA official said, because it was in a traditionally agricultural area and met the population limits.
Critics said the USDA loan was misspent.
'It doesn't seem...bedroom communities would be the highest priority,' the National Farmers Union said.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, of California, said the loan was 'one more example of the Bush Administration's willingness to rain down gifts on the wealthy while leaving hard-working rural Americans high and dry.' "