Rep. Cleaver’s website listed an astoundingly large earmark request — $48 billion — from one constituent hoping to fund a massive anti-poverty/redistribution of wealth project out of his home-based non-profit child care center in Kansas City.

It was this particular request, listed at the tail end of an earmark request spreadsheet posted on Rep. Cleaver’s website, which caught the attention of Mike Jensen of the Southeast Missourian. In a column titled “Redistribution on Steroids,” Jensen correctly identified the $48 billion request as the “granddaddy of all earmarks.”

Proposed by a gentleman named Lamar Mickens, president of the not-for-profit Quality Day Campus, the $48 billion earmark would funnel money into the inner cities to give money to the poor and thereby produce a much larger consumer class to buy the goods and services produced in this country.

Just call this redistribution on steroids. …

Cleaver’s communications director, Danny Rotert, told The Blaze Thursday that the story is a case of the blogosphere run amok and the notion the congressman would ask such an appropriation is ridiculous. According to Rotert, the $48 billion request was posted on the congressman’s website in accordance with his commitment to transparency for his constituents.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal also confirmed with press assistant Mary Petrovic that the earmark request was never given a second thought.  “We did not propose it, we do not promote it, and we did not submit it to the House Appropriations Committee,” Petrovic said.