In 2006, Congress allocated a record $71.77 billion “to 15,832 special projects, more than double the $29.11 billion spent on 4,155 pork-barrel projects in 1994.” In 2005, Congress inserted 15,877 pork projects into spending bills. In his weekend radio address, President Bush called on Congress to reform this earmarking process:

[O]ne of the best ways we can impose more discipline on federal spending is by addressing the problem of earmarks. … My administration will soon lay out a series of reforms that will help make earmarks more transparent, that will hold the members who propose earmarks more accountable, and that will help reduce the number of earmarks inserted into large spending bills.

Pork is a problem. But Bush should also address reform in his own administration. Bush’s earmarks are much tougher to find, often appearing “only in closely held supplements separate from the public budget books. … [A]s head of the executive branch, the president often doesn’t need earmarks: Once federal agencies get funding from Congress, his appointees are fairly free to steer sums to places, programs and vendors as the administration decides.” A few examples of Bush’s bacon:

– “While the Education Department’s budget would be cut, Mr. Bush propose[d] a 16% increase to $204 million for teaching sexual abstinence in high schools, a popular cause for social conservatives.”

– Rep. Anne Northup (R-KY), “a target of Democrats in this year’s midterm elections,” secured “a $3.5 million research grant for a local surgical team. The funds came not from congressional earmarks but from Pentagon accounts, according to the report.”

– Bush requested “$10 million for Preserve America grants for communities’ historic preservation efforts and $50 million for the Helping America’s Youth Initiative — also among programs championed by Mrs. Bush.”

Bush may say he’s against pork, but in his six years as President, Bush has never once vetoed any of Congress’s pork-laden spending bills.

The New York Daily News reported last month that President Bush and “his truest believers” are launching “their final campaign — an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library.”

Bush is attempting to raise $500 million to build a library and think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the alma mater of First Lady Laura Bush. “The more [money] you have, the more influence [on history] you can exert,” one adviser said. Much of the money will be used to build a “legacy-polishing” institute:

The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an institute, which several Bush insiders called the Institute for Democracy. Patterned after Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Bush’s institute will hire conservative scholars and “give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President’s policies,” one Bush insider said.

Now, SMU faculty, administrators, and staff are speaking out. In a December 16 letter to R. Gerald Turner, president of the Board of Trustees, members of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology have urged the board to “reconsider and to rescind SMU’s pursuit of the presidential library.”

We count ourselves among those who would regret to see SMU enshrine attitudes and actions widely deemed as ethically egregious: degradation of habeas corpus, outright denial of global warming, flagrant disregard for international treaties, alienation of long-term U.S. allies, environmental predation, shameful disrespect for gay persons and their rights, a pre-emptive war based on false and misleading premises, and a host of other erosions of respect for the global human community and for this good Earth on which our flourishing depends.

The letter concludes, “[T]hese violations are antithetical to the teaching, scholarship, and ethical thinking that best represents Southern Methodist University.”

Digg It!

Donald Rumsfeld’s term as Secretary of Defense is officially over.

(Image HT: First-Draft)

outgoing counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was reportedly “eased out last month because he wasn’t on the same page with the administration. Some insiders felt there were suspicious leaks of his internal memos — taking issue with administration policy on Iraq and the Middle East — in books and articles.”