It also includes billions of dollars more for flood control, restoration and other projects favored by individual lawmakers, which was a key to its passage in Congress.

Which proves that when the issue is pork, Democrats and Republicans can come together in the spirit of compromise.

Pork?

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"Respect mah authoritah!" - Fred Cartman Thompson

Where does representing the concerns of your constituents and advocating for your district as you were elected to do end and pork barrel spending begin?

I believe the answer has to do with the nature of the spending, not the party of the spenders.

"any discretionary spending that does not directly affect my district."

One man's pork is another man's tenderloin!

I agree it's a problem. I'll even go so far to say that the $1 million for a Woodstock memorial was a really bad recent example. But both sides are guilty, although I seem to recall that it has increased exponentially under a Republican controlled Congress.

Harold Ford Jr. proposed some solutions, like making legislatures sign their name to last-minute spending amendments and justify it, making all bills available on the internet for all to see before a vote, more disclosures by lobbyists and generally more overall transparency.

Probably won't solve all of the problems, but at least people would know what's going on and remember at election time.

And wasn't there some kind of earmark reform bill passed a couple of years ago? I don't remember what it was.

No Pork.

The one good thing about being pessimistic is - at least it shows you understand the situation. -- Unknown

Walter Lippmann explains the purpose of patronage:

"[L]egislation of a national character is prepared by a few informed insiders, and put through by partisan force; or that the legislation is broken up into a collection of local items, each of which is enacted for a local reason. Tariff schedules, navy yards, army posts, rivers and harbors, post offices and federal buildings, pensions and patronage: these are fed out to concave communities as tangible evidence of the benefits of national life. Being concave, they can see the white marble building which rises out of federal funds to raise local realty values and employ local contractors more readily than they can judge the cumulative cost of the pork barrel.

"It is fair to say that in a large assembly of men, each of whom has practical knowledge only of his own district, laws dealing with translocal affairs are rejected or accepted by the mass of Congressmen without creative participation of any kind. They participate only in making those laws that can be treated as a bundle of local issues. For a legislature without effective means of information and analysis must oscillate between blind regularity, tempered by occasional insurgency, and logrolling. And it is the logrolling which makes the regularity palatable, because it is by logrolling that a Congressman proves to his more active constituents that he is watching their interests as they conceive them."

The big difference between today's Dems and GOPers is that the latter tried to systematize local patronage into a national political machine. That's what made it so scary; it's like the mafia rolling up all the city's pimps and bookies into a large and powerful crime syndicate.

it's like the mafia rolling up all the city's pimps and bookies into a large and powerful crime syndicate.

Sounds pretty much like the vision statement of the K Street Project.

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"Respect mah authoritah!" - Fred Cartman Thompson

Bush has no credibility when trying to stop spending. I'm very suspicioius of anything that comes from the government or from either party at this point.