PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Sean Davis of Senator Coburn’s office sends this argument against pork:

Pork projects, sometimes referred to as earmarks, are wasteful spending projects that are directly requested by members of Congress and are not subject to competitive bidding requirements. One of the most well-known examples of these projects is the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska. However, Congressional spending bills are littered with these types of projects. According to Citzens Against Government Waste, a government watchdog that tracks federal spending, the number of pork projects in 2005 totaled nearly 14,000 at a cost of more than $27 billion, up from 1,439 projects in 1995. Thus, in only ten years, the number of wasteful pork projects increased by 970 percent! . . .

The problem with pork, however, is not just its size. The entire earmarking process corrupts Congressional decision-making and erodes the confidence of the American public. To give you a recent example, last June Senator Coburn offered a series of amendments to strike entirely unnecessary pork projects from a spending bill to fund the departments of Transportation, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development. Specifically, Senator Coburn questioned the propriety of spending taxpayer dollars on a parking garage in Nebraska and a sculpture park in Washington. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who is also the highest ranking Democrat on the relevant appropriations subcommittee, took to the Senate floor and threatened those who were inclined to eliminate her sculpture park. “What is good for the goose is good for the gander,” she said. “And I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next.” Her threat apparently worked, as Senator Coburn’s amendment was defeated by a vote of 86 to 13.

At times, however, Senators never even have the option or ability to vote for or against specific earmarks. In a practice that has become all too common, brand new earmarks and pork projects that were never voted on or considered are often added in a conference report, long after a bill has passed each chamber of Congress – and Senators never have the chance to strike the new projects. To make matters worse, it is not uncommon for Senators to have mere minutes to read a spending bill that may be hundreds of pages long and chock full of pork.

The effect of this process is that high-paid lobbyists who get their project requests inserted at the last minute end up with more power than those who are actually elected to be caretakers of taxpayer dollars. John Fund wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Jack Abramoff “bragged that appropriations committees were ‘earmark favor factories.’” Relatives of elected officials even benefit from their proximity to power. The wife of Tom Daschle was an airline lobbyist while he was Senate Majority Leader, the sons of Minority Leader Harry Reid work as lobbyists in Nevada, and the son of Senator Ted Stevens (a senior member of the Senate appropriations committee) is the chairman of an Alaskan marketing organization that received $500,000 in federal appropriations to paint a salmon on a Boeing 737. The Los Angeles Times reported in June 2003 that “at least 17 senators and 11 members of the House have family members who lobby or work as consultants on government relations, most in Washington and often for clients who rely on the related lawmakers’ goodwill.”

Todd Purdum, a former reporter for The New York Times, recently wrote that the lobbying problem is “broader than Mr. Abramoff” and added that “it also has to do with the astounding growth of the lobbying industry, a growth that has tracked the growth of the federal government itself.” Representative Martin Meehan, quoted later in Mr. Purdum’s article, added, “The scandal here is not that the rules were broken; the scandal is the rules themselves.” When a government spends $2.6 trillion a year, inserts itself into nearly every facet of daily life, and few rules exist to effectively curb (or even illuminate) untoward behavior, should the current lobbying scandal surprise anyone?

Lobbyists can get questionable earmarks inserted into bills at the last minute and elected members of Congress have no ability to amend or strike the earmarks. Through earmarking, members of Congress have the ability to steer taxpayer money to whomever and whatever they wish regardless of the merits. But shouldn’t elected officials also have the ability to strike wasteful earmarks that are added to conference reports under the cloak of night? Shouldn’t members of Congress have more than a few hours to review legislation that spends hundreds of billions of dollars? Shouldn’t taxpayers know which members Congress inserted which earmarks into federal appropriations bills? As they say, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

He’s right — it’s not just the waste, it’s the corruption. See this earlier post, too.

I THOUGHT that getting people’s library records was supposed to be beyond the pale.

THE AMERICAN FILM RENAISSANCE festival is this weekend, a mecca for filmmakers who don’t march in lockstep with Michael Moore. Here’s the lineup.

DEREK CATSAM IS IN SOUTH AFRICA, and blogging on South African politics. Here’s his latest.

SCIENCE FICTION UPDATE: Just read Jeff Duntemann’s nanotech-gone-wrong thriller, The Cunning Blood, and liked it. Much of it takes place on a prison planet called Hell, where new arrivals are greeted with: “Welcome to Hell. Here is your accordion.” I hope he sent a copy to Gary Larson.

MICHAEL TOTTEN wants you to send him to Iraq. I just sent him fifty bucks, as I think his reporting is worth at least that much to me.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: George Will writes:

The way to reduce rent-seeking is to reduce the government’s role in the allocation of wealth and opportunity. People serious about reducing the role of money in politics should be serious about reducing the role of politics in distributing money. But those most eager to do the former — liberals, generally — are the least eager to do the latter.

He also has some thoughts on the Majority Leader contest:

Roy Blunt of Missouri, the man who was selected, not elected, to replace DeLay, is a champion of earmarks as a form of constituent service. If, as one member says, “the problem is not just DeLay but ‘DeLay Inc.’ ” Blunt is not the solution. So far — the field may expand — the choice for majority leader is between Blunt and John Boehner of Ohio. A salient fact: In 15 years in the House, Boehner has never put an earmark in an appropriations or transportation bill.

Read the whole thing. Those interested in cutting pork may want to let their Representatives know.

MORE ON AVIAN FLU PREPAREDNESS, from Henry Miller.

See also my TCS column on what we’ve learned from avian flu already.

UPDATE: Lou Minatti emails with what he says is unreported good news: “There is very good news about avian influenza. It is far more widespread than previously thought, and few people infected by it are killed.” Here’s his post on the subject. I hope he’s right, but I still think we need to prepare for the possibility that he’s wrong. Most of the preparation, after all, will be equally useful in the face of other disease outbreaks.

MORE INTERESTING DEVELOPMENTS IN IRAQ, from Iraq the Model.

BLOGS THAT SHOULD BE TV SHOWS: But, really, “sweatshop” is such a pejorative term. I prefer to think of it as an “opportunity facility.”

REUEL MARC GERECHT on propaganda in war:

Once again we are confronted with stories about how the Pentagon and its ubiquitous private contractors are undermining free inquiry in Iraq. “Muslim Scholars Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda,” reports the New York Times. Journalists, intellectuals or clerics taking money from Uncle Sam or, in this case, a Washington-based public relations company, is seen as morally troubling and counterproductive. Sensible Muslims obviously would not want to listen to the advice of an American-paid consultant; anti-insurgent Sunni clerics can now all be slurred as corrupt stooges.

There is one big problem with this baleful version of events. Historically, it doesn’t make much sense. The United States ran enormous covert and not-so-covert operations known as “CA” activities throughout the Cold War. With the CIA usually in the lead, Washington spent hundreds of millions of dollars on book publishing, magazines, newspapers, radios, union organizing, women’s and youth groups, scholarships, academic foundations, intellectual salons and societies, and direct cash payments to individuals (usually scholars, public intellectuals and journalists) who believed in ideas that America thought worthy of support.

It’s difficult to assess the influence of these covert-action programs. But when an important Third World political leader writes that a well-known liberal Western book had an enormous impact on his intellectual evolution — a book that, unbeknownst to him was translated and distributed in his country at CIA expense — then it’s clear that the program had value. It shouldn’t be that hard for educated Americans to support such activity, even though one often can’t gauge its effectiveness.

Read the whole thing.

THE MAZDA KABURA: I’d like one, please.

BILL HOBBS calls it quits.

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

SOME ADVICE FOR BUSH, from Iraqi blogger Alaa.

DECLAN MCCULLAGH: “Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity. . . . This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.” Based on Declan’s description, this seems absurd, and almost certainly unconstitutional, to me. (And where does it fit within the federal government’s enumerated powers?) Naturally, we have Arlen Specter to thank for it.

UPDATE: Kaimi Wenger says that Declan has misread the statute. There’s some interesting discussion in the comments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Orin Kerr, posting at 1:12 A.M., parses the statute and informs us that Declan is wrong. “It looks funny if you don’t know the relevant caselaw, but in practice it simply takes the telephone harassment statute we’ve had for decades and applies it to the Internet.” It’s aimed at VOIP, apparently.

TIM BLAIR is rounding up the best quotes of 2005.

THE INSTAPUNDIT / DR. HELEN PODCAST is now on iTunes.

So, by the way, is the last Mobius Dick album, Embrace the Machine, thanks to a digital-distribution deal with Disgraceland Records. This deal consisted of me having beers with Disgraceland’s Paul Noe, and having him say “want me to put your music on iTunes?” and me saying “yes.”

THE CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up!

IDEABLOG SINCESLICEDBREAD, where I’m a guestblogger, has opened up voting on the reader-suggested ideas.

I WAS BUSY, but SCOTUSBlog liveblogged the Alito hearings today.

UPDATE: More here.

AVIAN FLU: READY, OR NOT? My TCS Daily column is up.

BOTH BARRELS ON THE GOP’S PROBLEMS: The WSJ editorializes that the GOP Congress has favored incumbency over ideas, with predictable results. Meanwhile, John Fund notes that pork is now political poison: “Republicans face being outflanked if they don’t get ahead of the earmark scandal.” And John McCain has jumped on the PorkBusters bandwagon with Tom Coburn, meaning that it will get a lot more media attention.

STANLEY KURTZ has responded to my earlier post on polygamy. His big worry: I’m too influential! Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that, and I’ve got to get ready for a committee meeting followed by two classes, so further reply on my part will have to come later.

UPDATE: Well, the polygamy post generated considerable email. Reader Cameron Gressly sends a rather lengthy email, but here’s the key part:

Polygamy may sound fairly innocuous to someone who has not lived in a polygamous culture, but if you were able to take a year or two off to live in say, Mali, you would not find it so impressive. The olygamous culture produces weak families with serious inter sibling and inter spousal rivalries – something that spills out into the society at large. Men marry, deceiving their first wives into believing that they will not do to them as their neighbors have done, then blithely bring home wife number two, then wife number three or more. The women, the wives, are expected to work to maintain their own offspring. African women have asked me why they should be expected to invest much in their marriage when the husband betrays them with co-wives. I have had African men tell me they did not understand why their father betrayed their mother with another wife. I have lived nearly 20 years in Africa, so this comes from first hand witness.

I’ve never been to Mali, but though my Nigerian family are not polygamous (Anglicans seldom are, with the quasi-exception of Prince Charles and his ilk), the stories I hear of polygamous wives asking how monogamous women can stand being the only one to look after a husband without help don’t jibe with this. But there you are.

Clayton Cramer, meanwhile, sends a link to this post, arguing that child abuse, etc., is common in “polygamous subcultures” within the United States, such as splinter Mormon groups and the David Koresh cult. Well,this is no argument: When polygamy is criminal, it makes sense that criminals will be polygamists. Cramer also links to an earlier post of mine on Rick Santorum, but seems to miss the point.

However, this passage of Clayton’s pretty much matches my view:

If two (or three, or four, or five) adults want to live together in “plural marriage” or have a “polyamorous” arrangement, I don’t see any strong argument for the government knocking on the door and asking them to explain their actions. But I also don’t see that the government has an obligation to give them any recognition or financial support. If your argument for your sexual relationships is based on a right to privacy, don’t demand public recognition or assistance.

But why does any relationship produce an obligation on the part of the government to provide recognition or support? It’s certainly true, as some other readers pointed out (and as Clayton’s linked Mormon story reports) that some polygamous arrangements now are basically welfare scams. But that’s a welfare issue, not a marriage issue.

Kurtz, on the other hand, says that Western marriage is based on “companionate love.” I certainly hope so, but I wonder whether the cultural concern that he describes forms an adequate underpinning for legal requirements. (And wouldn’t that, in itself, be an argument in favor of gay marriage, so long as it was based on companionate love?)

He also writes: “For me, the key issue is polyamory.” Well, that’s been around since the ’60s (and still is: someone was just telling me that “the Knoxville swinger scene is unbelievable”) — though in my observations of those many who tried it in in my parents’ generation, it fails a lot more than it succeeds. Not being a polyamorist myself, I’ll leave the practical details to Eric S. Raymond or someone who can say more. But I do remember a conversation I had with Saul Levmore years ago, when U. Va. was thinking about banning student-faculty relationships. I observed that in my observation those usually didn’t work out. “So what?” he responded. “Hardly any relationships work out!”

Having watched my parents’ generation make fools of themselves experimenting with open marriage, I’m not overenthusiastic about polyamory or polygamy. But on the other hand, my experience is that people can make the most unpromising relationships work out well, and the most promising ones turn out badly. I’m also not at all convinced that the state is better at picking winners in this field than in others.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to say that I’ve gotten no hatemail on this post. Pejman may not be so lucky.

MYSTERY POLLSTER: “Do blogs represent the Democratic ‘base?'”