Lets Look At Facts

[MM38084]

It's that most wonderful time of the year.
While the rest of us are jamming shopping malls to spend our hard-earned wages on holiday gifts for loved ones, members of Congress are jamming a year-end bill with pet projects - only they want to pay for them with even more of our hard-earned wages.
It's called pork or pork-barreling. Congressman A introduces a bill, say on a national energy program, and Congressman B attaches a project to the bill for his home district in hopes it slides by under the radar. It's the great American tradition in Congress: You can have yours, but where's mine?
Pork, it's not just the other white meat, it's the green that greases palms and buys votes.
Let's focus the spotlight on the hog of the week, U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons, as he shamelessly shoves his way to the public trough.
It seems Gibbons, a Republican from Nevada, feels ongoing guilt for a childhood prank that damaged a swimming pool in the town of Sparks, where he grew up. He said he and his friends put frogs in the pool. Frogs being frogs, they made lots of tadpoles. Those tadpoles clogged a drain, causing the pool to be temporarily closed in the 1950s.
While confession may be good for Gibbons' soul, it's not necessarily easy on our pocketbooks. Gibbons wants Congress to OK $225,000 to repair the 61-year-old pool that he damaged more than 40 years ago.
And he expects the American taxpayers to cough up for his mea culpa.
"I have an enormous guilty conscience for putting frogs in the swimming pool when I was about 10 years old," he said.
Mr. Gibbons, how about letting your guilty conscience extend to having the American taxpayers pay for your prank?
But like others who defend the federal money they secure for pet projects, Gibbons is not ashamed to funnel the cash to his district. After all, he reasons, everybody in Congress does it.
"This is a very meritorious project, one that I am not embarrassed about at all," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
While there's never a shortage of taxpayers' dollars to shunt to frivolous projects, there is a dearth of embarrassment and shame among politicians.
Gibbons should be ashamed. Here's an idea: If you put the frogs in the pool, Mr. Gibbons, why don't you dig into your own wallet and pay for it rather than have the rest of America cover for your stupidity and vandalism?
The $250,000 that Gibbons wants is small change compared to the $50 million it appears Sen. Charles Grassley is going to secure to develop a rain forest in, of all places, Coralville, Iowa.
The project, which would cost $225 million, is the brainchild of a Des Moines businessman who fell in love with the rain forest a couple of years ago. Now Ted Townsend wants to build a 20-story dome to house a man-made ecosystem. Townsend plunked down $5 million of his own money for his new hobby.
Grassley, a Republican, wants to help the millionaire along with another $50 million in U.S. funding. He originally stashed the money in an energy bill. He yanked it after some pressure from congressional leaders.
But the funding for the giant terrarium has resurfaced in the year-end $373 billion spending bill now before Congress.
I just can't fathom spending our money to make an Iowa rain forest.
I would, however, be willing to pitch in for a sign for Gibbons' swimming hole: I won't pee in your pool; you don't swim in my tax dollars.