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Main Entry: pork Pronunciation: ‘pOrk Function: noun In American political slang, it is politics (including government money, jobs, or favors) dealing with funding at the Federal level of local projects with little or no national significance yielding rich patronage benefits. In a literal sense a “pork barrel” is a barrel in which pork is kept, but figuratively speaking it is a supply of money, often the source of one’s livelihood. |
This week’s pork, served fresh, hot, and steamy: Television viewers in West Virginia, Rhode Island and Michigan will get an earful about earmarks and federal pork-barrel spending. A conservative group, Americans for Prosperity, will launch the television ad campaign this summer in those states, urging residents to contact their U.S. senators to tell them to oppose the allegedly wasteful items in the federal budget.
“Grassroots taxpayers are sick and tired of having their hard-earned tax dollars wasted on pork-barrel earmarks, and they have started to make their voices heard in Washington,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity.
“Our goal with this million-dollar ad campaign is to first get the pork-barrel earmarks out of the emergency spending bill, then to fight wasteful earmarks in the regular appropriations bills, and finally to build support for real and lasting earmark reform legislation,” said Phillips.
The ads, narrated by retired Navy Cmdr. Duane Sand focus on legislation to fund the war against terrorism. That bill, Sand declares in the ad, “is being held hostage to pork-barrel spending.”
“It’s called political earmarking — a secret way politicians waste your money to get themselves reelected,” Sand states in the ad.
Byrd, who since 1989 has either chaired or been the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, is famous for carving out federal spending projects for his home state. He announced in 1990 that he wanted to be West Virginia’s “billion dollar industry,” according to the Almanac of American Politics.
The ads, which will run June 7-20, are specific to each of the three states and single out Democratic Sens. Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, as well as Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.
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1 End Muslim Baiting Now! » Blog Archive » Blogger uses Pork Enticement against Muslims. // Jul 20, 2006 at 1:42 pm
[...] The Christian blogger at Common Folk Using Common Sense has resorted to the age-old anti-Semitic badger game of pork-enticement. Creating a double-coded blog entry entitled “Thursday Pork Feast”, the individual known as “Mr. Shamalama” has combined images of a fresh pork cut with those of Islamic “terrorists”. The article is supposedly about “pork-barrel spending” but is clearly meant to insult Muslims or entice them into sin. The horrible vomitus is here: http://www.commonfolkusingcommonsense.com/2006/07/20/thursday-pork-feast-15/ Posted by Le Penseur Islamique Filed in Common Folk Using Common Sense, Pork Enticement [...]