Holy Pork Batman

Motivated by Mary Catherine Ham, the guest blogger at Hotair, I decided to go to Porkbusters.org and see just how much slopping at the government's trough our congressmen and senators have been doing with the latest appropriations bill. This bill is supposed to be for Health and Human Services and the Department of Labor, two departments I have to believe we'd be better off without. But let's research a bit and see what our good tax dollars are paying for:

-South Bend IN- $1,000,000 to St. Joseph Health center for a new health information technology system. Yep, a million bucks to let St. Joe upgrade their system. No, we shouldn't expect a hospital to actually pay for their OWN STUFF...heck no. And a million dollars? That system better cure cancer.

-Manchester IN- $1,000,000 for Manchester College for facilities and equipment for the Health and Physical Recreation Center. Um...Manchester College is a private liberal arts school. A RELIGIOUS private liberal arts school. Where it costs $28k+ to attend. And you're going to tell me that they need a million bucks of taxpayer $$ to pay for a Gym?

-NYC, NY- $3,000,000 to City College of New York for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service to prepare individuals for careers in public service, which may include establishing an endowment, library and archives for such center. Now at least the previous two had SOMETHING to do with health and human services or labor....but Charles Rangel and labor in the same sentence would only be appropriate if you're talking about what he has to do to get his fat ass out of a chair.

-Charlottesville, VA - $1.025 mill to University of Virginia Center for Politics for the Youth Leadership Initiative. Again, WTF does this have to do with HHS or Labor?

-NYC (again) - $1,000,000 to ReadNet Foundation, for an online literacy program for at-risk youth in Hudson, NY. Wouldn't this be better porked funded in a Department of Education bill? I mean, if you're going to hide stuff, makes sense to hide it in a bill that's already laden with fat

-Fairfax, VA- $1,000,000 to United Mine Workers of America for the UMWA Career Center's mine worker training and reemployment programs. Because those union dues were pissed away spent to support you.

-Odanah, WI- $750,000 to Bad River Tribe for facilities and equipment for health services. Guess those Casinos aren't working out as well as they thought they would in WI. Hell in Michigan they could buy a hospital for each member of the tribe. Twice.

And it just goes on and on. Read it yourself at Porkbusters.org. It's ridiculous. The funny thing is, they could take this entire bill, throw it out the window, and increase the reimbursement to hospitals for Medicaid/Medicare 10% with the money they would have spent, and the hospitals wouldn't need this additional bureaucracy to help them buy this stuff.

But that would be logical, and we certainly can't have that.