Originally Posted By: the G-man
Wow. McCain MUST be the GOP frontrunner. The ... media is starting to attack him.


McCain's War on Pork Could Cut Services
  • Earmarks are only pork 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.

    Pork haters like McCain say an agency with its eye on the national interest and an objective way of looking at a region's needs should decide on such spending, not members of Congress currying local - sometimes very local - favor.

    But McCain's spending plan does not make such distinctions between waste and worthy. In his accounting, if it's an earmark, it's bad and it's gone. He counts on saving all the money now spent on earmarks to help pay for his tax cuts.