comments

1. Daryl Scroggins on March 25th, 2007 at 8:35 pm

   I agree–pork makes me mad too. But it’s important to look at how it comes to be what it is. Representatives require local support in order to have any chance of serving at all, so they see important votes as a chance to “sell” their cooperation, in order to secure jobs (and donations) from those who elect them. Lots of things need to change before anybody can, without hypocrisy, point the finger at anybody else in this game.

   What really should make people mad is this squandering of money pointed out by Jim Hightower in his article “Still Passing the Buck” (The Texas Observer, March 9, 2007):

   “Meanwhile, there’s the little matter of missing bucks in Iraq. Beaucoup bucks. L. Paul Bremer III, the first overseer of the Iraq operation, now concedes that he OK’d shipping $12 billion from the U.S. Treasury to the Iraqi interim government. In cash. Pallets of shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills were flown to Baghdad. It was 363 tons of cash. Where it all went, no one knows.”