Pork on a roll

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Pork barrel spending doesn't come up much in the presidential debates, but Hillary Clinton's $1 million bill for a Woodstock Festival museum got much more attention than she wanted in the GOP's candidate forum Sunday in Orlando, Fla.

In the larger scheme of things, Hillary's $1 million earmark isn't even the tip of the iceberg in squandering on Capitol Hill. It is a merely a snowflake in what has become a blizzard of wasteful spending for favored political interests back home in this 9-month-old Congress.

Mrs. Clinton's taxpayer-funded tribute to the Woodstock concert that became a symbol of the drug-crazed, antiwar, free-love era on an Upstate New York farm was raised by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and a fierce anti-pork crusader who has fought such spending throughout his Senate career.

"In case you missed it, a few days ago, Sen. Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock Concert Museum. Now, my friends, I wasn't there. I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time," Mr. McCain said in a mocking tone that led to in a standing ovation for the former Vietnam POW.

In a minor victory last week for the small army of conservatives who have been attacking waste-ridden earmarks, the Senate voted 52-42 to delete the $1 million grant from the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for 2008.

Tragically, the bill is loaded with more than 800 other earmarks that will cost beleaguered taxpayers more than $400 million. Each was inserted by lawmakers, who use these bills as personal political checkbooks, without any evaluation or approval by the committees that send them to the floor for enactment. None of the earmarks were requested by the agencies involved or the administration. "Many have little to do with the missions and priorities at the departments funded in this appropriations bill," said Citizens Against Government Waste.

Lawmakers continue to abuse — steal is a more appropriate word — these funding bills for their purely parochial self-interest. Sen. Richard Shelby, Alabama Republican, added $11 million to the Labor, Health and Human Services bill's health-care building projects for the University of Alabama, of which he is an alumnus. There is $42 million for other senatorial alma maters stuffed into the bill.

The Democrats took control of Congress in January promising to crack down on abusive earmarking. In fact, they have watered down their so-called reforms and are adding election year pork projects with reckless abandon. Despite promises to cut them in half, they are now on track to easily break that pledge.

Brian Riedl, chief budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, has been sifting through funding bills stacked up in Congress, awaiting passage. His finding: They contain another 11,351 pork projects that will needlessly spend tens of billions of dollars more in this fiscal year. Among them:

• $2 million for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York, named after the powerful House Ways and Means Committee chairman from Harlem.