Getting Porked

You'll hear a lot in the upcoming political campaigns about the Defense Department Appropriations Act of 2006. Probably several claims about how all that money is going to Iraq, Afghanistan, Halliburton, etc. etc.

Hopefully there will also be some outrage about this. According to the New York Daily News, congress also found room in the bill to fund the following:

- $25 million to a "multispecies fish hatchery" in Montana to increase stocks of pike and walleye for warm water fishing.

- $1.8 million for Los Angeles sixth-graders who are "disrespectful, have poor grades and don't obey rules."

- $500,000 for curling, dog mushing, snowboarding and a snowshoe biathlon at Alaska's Arctic Winter Games.

- $242,000 for South Carolina's National Wild Turkey Federation to show American hunters how to conserve the wildlife habitat of the turkey.

- $200,000 to a group called Weed-It-Now Taconic to rid upstate New York of the Japanese knotweed.

- $850,000 for an educational initiative at the Fort Des Moines Museum in Iowa. "The museum says that Ronald Reagan learned to ride horses at an old cavalry post on the site in 1937. The funds will create "substantive programming.""

The bill is stuffed with more pork than Mike Moore at a Biergarten Buffet. In fact, according to the Daily News, the total score for congress on this one is "a record-breaking 2,966 pork-barrel projects for their home districts at a cost of $11.1 billion".

The bill also budgets $1.7B to armor for the troops.

Porkbusters. 'Nuff said.