Word: pork-barrel
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McCain also wants to halt a practice Congress holds dear--"earmarking" federal funds in budgets for pork-barrel projects back home. The appropriations bills for 2002 have more than 7,800 earmarks. The waste "has become outrageous and obscene," says McCain. Earmarks in the 2002 defense bill, which he calls "war profiteering," would cost $3.6 billion...
...Methanex case is complicating Bush's efforts to win "trade promotion authority," which would require Congress to vote yes or no, without amendment, on any treaty the President offered. The idea is to protect hard-bargained agreements from pork-barrel politicking. The bill passed the House by only one vote last December, as even longtime free traders worried about the potential threat to the U.S. of the Methanex case and other investor challenges. Waving 5,000 pages of trade agreements, Representative Robert Matsui, a California Democrat, argued that new treaties could affect federal laws on matters from food safety...
...shape. Reformist Yamaguchi, however, now that he is in office, supports the highway. "Of course I am lobbying the Ministry of Transportation that we have to build more roads," he says, explaining that a new road would encourage development at the district's nano-technology research center, an earlier pork-barrel project. Besides, Yamaguchi needs to show the folks back home that he can be as effective as his predecessor, a veteran LDP power broker: "I have to show that even though I am not in the LDP, I can deliver," he says...
...Senator Trent Lott's hometown of Pascagoula, Miss. The company hit the rocks last fall, citing a decline in tourism due to terrorism and leaving its debts unpaid and its ships at the dock. Republican Congressman Gene Taylor of Mississippi came up with a plan to solve this pork-barrel mess: more pork barrel. Taylor wants the U.S. Navy, already strapped for cash trying to keep its dwindling fleet of 320 warships afloat, to spend several hundred million dollars to buy the cruise ships. Taylor got language added to the 2002 defense bill suggesting the Navy finish the vessels...
That doesn't mean that Amtrak, a creature of pork-barrel politics, is the right entity to revive rail travel. Burdened by the conflicting missions of providing comprehensive nationwide service and making a profit, Amtrak has failed at both. Now many experts are concluding that Amtrak as we know it will probably have to be scrapped--perhaps to be replaced by semiprivatized, regional passenger-train networks...