Democrats: Pork busters?

In this article, the Democrats say that they're going to look over the budget and work on banning special interest "pork" spending for 2007. That's fine and dandy, but why stop at 2007? If the Dems are sincere about cutting the pork and dealing with the "culture of corruption", then there's other things that they can do.

For one, they could insist on absolute transparency on spending, gifts, special trips, and all of the other types of perks that the legislatures take for granted. Another thing they could do is allow for line-item vetoes so that such pork spending that is attached to regular bills can be trimmed from them. Line-item vetoes have been brought up before, but the party that wasn't in power has always voted against them. BUT... if the Dems truly want to get things right, then this might be something that they'll have to seriously consider.

I'm a long way from believing that the Dems are sincere about their intents - and even if they are sincere, they have their work cut out for them because some of that pork and corruption comes from their own party as well as the GOP.

There is a blog named Pork Busters that specializes in this sort of thing. Look them up once in a while and see how your congressional representatives are doing. It's because of blogs like Pork Busters that I love living in the Internet Age. In the pre-Internet years, getting this kind of action going would have taken a lot longer to apply this much pressure, so it was easy for the legislatures to ignore their constituents. Yes, there's a negative to the Internet Age, but I think the pluses make up for them.