Thursday, August 02, 2007

Jack Murtha's At It Again

Jack Murtha, the Sultan of Swine, the Prince of Pork, is at it again, to the tune of $150.5 million in 48 separate earmarked appropriations in the Defense Appropriations bill that will be taken up by the House tomorrow.

That represents just under 5 percent of the earmarked appropriations in the entire bill.

Membership has its privileges, as the ad says, but Chairmanships apparently have it all. Instead of getting 1/435th of all the pork in the bill, Murtha's chairmanship of the Defense Approps subcommittee gets him one dollar of pork for every twenty dollars of swine to be found.

That's not a bad take.

Put another way, if every Member of Congress were able to pull as much pork out of that one bill as Jack Murtha has, the pork alone would balloon from $3,070,000,000 to $65,467,500,000.

That's $65 billion, with a "B."

Thank God there's only one Jack Murtha.

To read more, see Roxana Tiron's piece in today's The Hill.

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