Bush surrenders to the pork

There was a time not long ago when President Bush felt that pork was not a good thing. Before bacon lovers all over America unite to protest this past behavior, this is congressional pork. The fat that only congress seems to love.

This latest transportation bill was one of the largest pork producers I've seen in recent times. I wonder if there was anyone that voted for it that didn't get something out of it. So what did our former anti-pork President do? Signed it, allowing all of that fat to clog the arteries of our government with the end result if this continues the same as the human body. Eventually the heart will give out unable to carry that extra fat streaming about.

Some examples from the above linked Washington Post article:

....hundreds of millions of dollars will be channeled to programs that critics say have nothing to do with improving congestion or efficiency: $2.3 million for the beautification of the Ronald Reagan Freeway in California; $6 million for graffiti elimination in New York; nearly $4 million on the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; $2.4 million on a Red River National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center in Louisiana; and $1.2 million to install lighting and steps and to equip an interpretative facility at the Blue Ridge Music Center, to name a few.

"There are nearly 6,500 member-requested projects worth more than $24 billion, nearly nine percent of the total spending," executives from six taxpayer and conservative groups complained in a letter to Bush urging that he use his veto pen for the first time. They noted that Reagan vetoed a transportation bill in 1987 because there were 152 such special requests, known in the parlance of congressional budgeting as "earmarks."

In the years since the 2003 budget was introduced, pork-barrel spending has climbed from $20.1 billion to $27.3 billion, with the number of earmarked projects rising from 8,341 to 13,999, according to Schatz's group.

Bush's signature "encourages members of Congress to engage in pork-barrel spending on a massive scale, because there's no restraint on the part of the leadership or the White House," Schatz concluded. "I don't know how else to say it."

I don't know how else you could say it either, or if any of them are bothering to listen.