Pork by Any Other Name . . .

This story illustrates whats wrong with ALL politicians and why its a shame we don't have term limits, and open ballots. If we weren't at war I would consider NOT voting this election. As it stands now I refuse to vote for my one Senator Arlen the JackAss Specter I have never voted for him. Now don't get me wrong I won't vote for the democrat so I just dont vote on that one section. As a lifelong Republican with Libratarian tendencies I am sickened by the leadership of my party. They have become Democrats on almost every issue. They spend to much, they won't defend our borders, and all they care about is their re-elections. What they don't seem to get is that it was the CONSERVATIVE WING of the party that gave them the majority, and it will be the same wing that WILL NOT come out to vote this fall to support them. Why should we? They refuse to stand together on the War, on Taxes, even on oil exploration. They have become exactly what we voted them in to remove. Democrats.

Washington Post
By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, April 30, 2006; Page B01

Remember the "Bridge to Nowhere"?
Last fall, after House Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska) and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) earmarked $223 million to link the remote town of Ketchikan (population 8,900) to the more remote island of Gravina (population 50), the Bridge to Nowhere became a national symbol of congressional porkmania, lampooned by Leno, Letterman and Limbaugh. It was the most brazen of the record-breaking 6,300-plus earmarks inserted by individual members of Congress into the record-breaking $286 billion transportation bill. Even Parade magazine, not known for its muckraking, featured the project as a poster child for government waste.
Young, a 33-year House veteran, defiantly boasted that he had stuffed the bill "like a turkey." And Stevens, a 37-year senator, furiously threatened to resign if Congress shifted money away from Gravina and another bridge to nowhere near Anchorage -- a bridge named Don Young's Way, near Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. But the projects became such an embarrassment to Republicans that the chairmen agreed to withdraw both earmarks. Budget hawks, green activists and clean-government types hailed the defeat of the bridges as a victory for fiscal sanity.
Except that the bridges weren't defeated.
The Republican-controlled Congress still gave Alaska the $452 million it had requested for the two bridges, merely removing the earmark directing where the state should spend the money. Gov. Frank H. Murkowski (R), who was once Stevens's junior colleague in the Senate, intends to spend that money on the bridges.
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