The Audacity of Pork

In one of his ever increasing spells of passivity, President Obama let himself be cowed by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and abandoned his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles and allowed Congress to lard up the budget with over 9,000 (as Chucky Schumer would say) porky little earmarks.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

Here are some of the more audacious jewels of 'fiscal responsibility' in his budget:

• $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. (The Prune that ate NYC.)

• $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Weslaco, Tex (Uhhh Boy!)

• $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa. (Congress, the self-proclaimed smartest people on the planet, must not know the source of pig odor; which is surprising since they themselves are so full of it!)

• $1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah (Great! Another family planning initiative! Why target only Mormon crickets? Genocide anyone?)

• $819,000 for catfish genetics research in Alabama (just another bottom crawling, scum-sucking scavengers – the catfish is only a poor fish!)

• $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi (You do not want to turn me loose on this one!)

• $951,500 for Sustainable Las Vegas [Are people not losing enough money in the casinos? Guess where Senator Harry Reid (d) is from?]

• $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii (more star-gazing is just what we need!)

• $167,000 for the Autry National Center for the American West in Los Angeles (Ol' Gabby Hayes would be so proud!)

• $238,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii (I give up!)

• $200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past (bet the National Endowment of Arts gets their tutu in a knot about this.)

• $209,000 to improve blueberry production and efficiency in Georgia (just what we need…a more efficient blueberry…how about a more efficient Congress!)

“When do we turn off the spigots?” Senator McCain said in his speech on the Senate floor. “Haven’t we learned anything? Bills like this jeopardize our future.” Where was this John McCain during last year’s campaign?

Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.

B. Hussein reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like socializing the American economy.

Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.

On “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as “last year’s business,” because most of it was written last year.

But that is not Americans are beginning to see as they watch their futures go up in smoke. They see this pork as THIS year’s business and all belongs to B. Hussein & Co.

Yea, Change we can believe in! Methinks all those goo-goo eyed Obama voters are learning the meaning of "caveat emptor"?