Word: barrelers
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SOMETIMES WHEN the weather is right I'll check in on the Cambridge City Council. This is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I keep on hoping that one day they'll make a mistake, like misfiling some documents and banning Honduran refugees instead of nuclear weapons. But it hasn't happened yet. It would be unethical to create a furor merely for the sake of writing about it, so I couldn't submit a proposal to outlaw chrome-and-nylon eight-wheeled baby strollers. Maybe I will anyway...
...Jackson in 1830, and he had enough political clout to make his veto of the Maysville Road Bill stick. The graveled National Road that aroused Old Hickory's ire has, of course, evolved into today's 44,000-mile Interstate Highway System. But the 19th century conflict between pork barrel and public purse endures as a staple of American democracy, often pitting a fiscally conscious President against a Congress determined to deliver better transportation to the voters who elected...
...full force of the presidency into his search for that elusive final vote. In fact, as jarring as the defeat was, it could end up strengthening the President: the personal energy he put into defeating the bill reinforced his image as a warrior against Congress's profligate pork-barrel ways, and it is likely to quiet fears that he is detached, out of touch and content to serve out the last 21 months of his presidency as a ceremonial caretaker...
...million here and a million there eventually add up to real money, that is a pretty meager sum alongside the public-works projects that used to be whooped through Congress in the days before the deficit doldrums. As Republican Congressman Jim Bunning of Kentucky cracked, "Calling this a pork-barrel bill is like calling a strip of bacon a luau...
...fuss over the pork-barrel issue masks a significant turnabout in the condition of the nation's highways. In 1982, the last time Congress passed a comprehensive highway bill, the debate was dominated by scare talk of decaying roads and crumbling bridges, complete with suggestions that the nation's transportation system would soon go the way of New York City's abandoned West Side Highway. Experts bandied around figures like $3 trillion for rebuilding America's decaying infrastructure. In truth, the Interstate Highway System was in trouble. Traffic had far outstripped the projections made when the system was initially planned...