Word: barreled
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...reason the $388 billion spending measure that Congress rushed to approve by Thanksgiving is 3,320 pages long is that lawmakers have stuffed it with pork-barrel prizes. The bill has 11,772 pet projects costing a total of $15.8 billion, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group. Congressional leaders of both parties have always allowed appropriations bills to be larded with stuff to ensure votes for the final measure. But in the past decade, when Congress has been dominated by the supposedly fiscally conservative G.O.P., the amount of pork in appropriations bills has more than tripled...
...billion annual spending bill budgets billions of dollars for projects that, like the Punxsutawney Weather Discovery Center, were tacked on by legislators to curry favor with their constituents. While no one can come to a clear consensus on whether a certain issue qualifies as so-called pork barrel spending, estimates of the total set aside for these pet projects range from $11 billion to $16 billion. Other questionable giveaways in the bill include $250,000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, $500,000 to renovate ski trails in Alaska, $4.9 million to refurbish historic bathhouses in Arizona...
...meantime, however, Congress is wrong to let low-income high school students slip through the cracks—and to assume that the irony of their simultaneous pork barrel spending is lost on the rest of us. It seems that, for now, economically disadvantaged students hoping for a college education will just have to settle for a trip to Pennsylvania and a crash course in weather history instead...
Herded into concentrated areas without armed security, the refugees, are now like fish in a barrel for the janjaweed. For those women (mainly widows) who dare stray too close to the borders of the camps in their foraging for food or water, not only will they be captured, beaten, raped and murdered, but recently the janjaweed have taken to slicing the skin off the faces of the women’s corpses so that they will be unrecognizable by their families—that is, if they have any family members that survive the camps...
...Pork-barrel politics is one thing when the federal government is running surplus a la Bill Clinton. But now that the country is facing a huge and dangerous budget deficit, Congress still passed an omnibus spending bill filled to the brim with gratuitous appropriations. In the wake of another bumper crop of cash for the unnecessary to the absurd in pet Congressional districts, some belt-tightening has to happen somewhere. Congress’ latest bright idea? Cut Pell Grants to poor college kids to make up some of the difference...