THE OTHER WHITE MEAT
Annually – usually around budget crunching time - far too many of our elected officials turn chicken on pork
The list of pork barrel projects funding with taxpayer money by our Congress grows longer and meatier year by year.
You will know when the list is first available because that ls the day your local newspaper will devote at least a portion of their editorial page to boxed display of the rather impressive list. I have often wondered what enterprising newspaper editor will feature the list as just another comic feature striped in with the rest of in the funnies in their proper section.
The long list usually presents the cost of the project, the exact location, and few words making it sound unnecessary and usually without additional critical comment. So often the sole editorial comment is in the terse headline: “T'sk, T'sk! Or, some have been known to head it all up with the words: “For shame...”
It all makes good breakfast talk,for a day or so – largely because the local radio and TV shows look forward to the coming of the pork list each year and dwell on it at great length – as it relates to other areas than their own.
A prime concern this year is fifty-million dollars to go to the founding a giant, indoor rain forest in the State of Iowa. It is needed as an educational tool, it reported.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, will get $200,000 of your money.
The Senate Office Building in D.C. will get a new exhaust fan for their kitchen thanks to your gift of $108.000.
You may never be aware of the fact that when the Luveme, Alabama needed new sidewalks and street furniture you helped out a bit by giving them one hundred thou.
Elsewhere, $6.2 million went to “Wood Utilization Research”. A cool million was spent for a DNA sampling studies of bear in Montana.
These, and many others, are to be found in the annual omnibus spending bill. They are listed every year in hundreds of our nation's newspapers, on radio and TV and nothing whatsoever is ever done to try to prevent others from being added in the future.
A.L.M. December 10, 2003 [c381wds]
