PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Grunwald takes a broken-windows approach to pork:

[C]onventional wisdom is congealing around the notion that Congress is what it is, and can’t be changed.

But that was once conventional wisdom about New York, too. “The most important thing we’ve learned since the mid-’90s is that there’s plenty we can do to clean up bad neighborhoods,” said Northeastern University criminologist Jack Levin. It turns out that aggressive policing really can defeat an anything-goes mentality, that entrenched criminal cultures really can be reformed, that potential offenders tend not to offend when they believe their crimes will be witnessed, reported and punished. “At some point, people have to say: Enough is enough,” said Carnegie Mellon University criminologist Alfred Blumstein, author of “The Crime Drop in America.”

In Congress, unlike cities, reducing crime is less of an end in itself than a means to the end of better government; members of Congress, their aides and the lobbyists who schmooze them can victimize taxpayers without breaking any laws. Still, in this moment of runaway cynicism, it’s worth asking whether the strategies that cleaned up the mean streets can clean up K Street.

“Sure, why not?” Levin said. “You’ll have to change the culture. But we’ve learned a lot about how to do that.”

Thus culture change, and the broken-windows approach itself, is the underlying philosophy of PorkBusters, of course. Let’s keep it up.

Sen. Tom Coburn certainly is, as George Will notes:

Coburn is the most dangerous creature that can come to the Senate, someone simply uninterested in being popular. When House Speaker Dennis Hastert defends earmarks — spending dictated by individual legislators for specific projects — by saying that a member of Congress knows best where a stoplight ought to be placed, Coburn, in an act of lese-majeste, responds: Members of Congress are the least qualified to make such judgments.

Recently, when a Republican colleague called to say “his constituency” would not allow him to support Coburn on some measure, Coburn tartly told the senator that “there is not one mention in the oath [of office] of your state.” Senators are just not talked to that way under the ponderous rituals of vanity that the Senate pretends are mere politeness. . . .

Civilization depends on the ability to make even majorities blush, so it is momentous news that shame may be making a comeback, even on Capitol Hill, as a means of social control. Embarrassment is supposed to motivate improved education in kindergarten through 12th grade under the No Child Left Behind Act: That law provides for identifying failing schools, the presumption being that communities will blush, then reform. And embarrassment is Coburn’s planned cure for Congress’s earmark culture.

“Quite time-consuming” was Coburn and John McCain’s laconic description, in a letter to colleagues, of their threat to bring the Senate to a virtual standstill with challenges to earmarks. In 1999, while in the House, Coburn offered 115 anti-pork amendments to an agriculture bill — in effect a filibuster in a chamber that does not allow filibusters. Collaborating with Coburn makes McCain, the Senate’s dropout from anger management school, look saccharine.

When Coburn disparaged an earmark for Seattle — $500,000 for a sculpture garden — Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) was scandalized: “We are not going to watch the senator pick out one project and make it into a whipping boy.” She invoked the code of comity: “I hope we do not go down the road deciding we know better than home state senators about the merits of the projects they bring to us.” And she warned of Armageddon: “I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next.” But Coburn, who does not do earmarks, thinks Armageddon sounds like fun.

I suspect that a lot of people will be doing their best to undermine Coburn as a result, but I also think that it’ll be pretty obvious what they’re really about.

UPDATE: Couldn’t find it earlier — I was rushed trying to get out of DC and into the blizzard — but here’s N.Z. Bear’s post from September on culture changes and the “broken windows” theory as applied to pork and PorkBusters.