Eight and half months ago, my beloved Mississippi Gulf Coast was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The proposed funding is money that is badly needed. Highway 90 is one of the main roads and it was heavily damaged by Katrina. Two bridges were totally destroyed along it.

The money requested is to move the CSX railroad tracks so that Hwy 90 can be moved further inland. Hwy 90 currently parallels the beach. It was closed for three months after Katrina and in some places, it is still inaccessible because of washouts.

Just so you know, it’s not all pork.

Not surprised at all, Hausfrau. If it doesn’t stick with your leftist agenda, you’re clueless.

Is this supposed to be responsive to something that I wrote? If so, it is very obscure.

It seems to me that moving goods by rail across Mississippi would be a need the same as getting back to building Navy ships and destroyers, but that’s just me. That may be petty to some others though.

If the US had a parliamentary form of government, you might have a point. Since it doesn’t hae a parliamentary form of government, you don’t. Have a point, that is.

Pardon me, but how are these earmarks considered pork-barrel?

They may or may not be. However, consider:

(i) Earmarks may be directed to goods and/or services that the gov’t really needs. On the other hand, they may instead be directed to goods and/or services that the contractor can–presumably–provide, but that are not really needed by the gov’t. I recognize that “need” is in the eye of the beholder, but paying somebody to build a road from nowhere to nowhere–as allegedly happened in, for example, WVa–does not strike me as being a gov’t need.

(ii) Even assuming that an earmark is directed to a good or service that the gov’t needs, since it is directed to a particular company–essentially on a no-bid basis–the gov’t may not be getting the best price it could for a good or service. Legitimate government contracting is actually a fairly complex process (RFPs, generating specifications for bids, RFBs, and so forth), and earmarking essentially side-steps that process. Of course, it is possible for the process to ensure that a particular company gets the contract–that is done by generating specs that are so narrow in scope that only one company can provide a bid based on the spec.

There is no contradiction between working to reduce the federal budget and simultaneously making sure that your own constituents are not played for patsies in the process, and still get their share of whatever pie there is.

Come to think of it, so does Bush on this issue.