Cutting pork could be dicey

Voters might find that
projects that benefit them are on the chopping block.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Earmarks are pork only when someone else is feasting on them. On your plate, they’re veggies.

They are the train that takes you to visit Aunt Betty, or the health clinic down the street, or the waste treatment plant that makes your water safer to drink. They’re not all bridges to nowhere. They’re also bicycle trails to somewhere.

If John McCain is true to his rhetoric in the Republican presidential campaign, he would take a broad ax to spending that voters, upon closer examination, might wish were cut in a more discerning way. The two dozen states voting in presidential primaries Tuesday are home to thousands of projects financed by earmarks, the pet pork that members of Congress carve out of the federal budget.

The Arizona senator’s criticism of pork pleases crowds, for no one likes to see tax dollars thrown at silly things. “No earmarks,” he says.

And he got an unintentional assist from President Bush, a convert to the anti-pork cause after he signed a spending law that legislators had stuffed with 10,000 local projects costing more than $10 billion.

A small taste of the earmarked spending sought in 2007 by lawmakers from Super Tuesday states:

UIn California, $438,000 to Monterey County for gang prevention and intervention.

U In Illinois, $5 million for the Red Cross to buy backup generators, cots, shelter trailers, emergency vehicles and more.

U In New Haven, Conn., $487,000 to help families and children exposed to violence and trauma.

U In Oneonta, N.Y., $243,000 for hospital equipment and facilities.

U In St. James, Mo., $412,000 to expand services to abused and neglected children.

U In North Dakota, $390,000 to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe for a methamphetamine prevention program.

McCain has been celebrated for years by watchdog groups cheering his fight against waste, and there’s always plenty in the budget to raise eyebrows if not hackles. A $50 million indoor rain forest for Iowa, anyone?

Earmarks in a literal sense refer to the marks cut on the ears of livestock for centuries to claim ownership. Now, it’s more specifically about pigs.

Evidence that pork can be filling at times was under McCain’s nose recently, although he apparently did not know it.

Campaigning in South Carolina, he visited a factory and praised the armored, mine-resistant military vehicles made there to be used in the war.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a McCain ally, noted to an Associated Press reporter that the plant, on a shuttered U.S. naval base, had received money from an earmark.