Putting Porkbusters to the Test

In the aftermath of a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration, I was poking around the blogosphere and came across a growing site called "The Truth Laid Bear", which styles itself as a "fully developed portal to the blogosphere". It's pretty impressive too, with something like 7K visits per day and close to 50,000 blogs registered as part of the "TTLB Ecosystem". OK, so I registered my small blog with the group and was immediately branded an "Insignificant Microbe". Dudes, you might want to check with your publicist on the wisdom of that initial Out of the Box Experience. Subsequent scans by their software promoted me to "Slimy Mollusc". I feel so vindicated.

In any event it looks like a pretty nifty community to bop around in. One part of the site that drew my attention, being the hopeless would-be polysci wonk that I am, was a campaign called "Porkbusters". This brainchild of Instapundit is a great idea. It invites all bloggers to identify some particularly noisome example of government waste or pork and blog about it. We're also asked to pressure our Congresscritters to eliminate said pork forthwith. Porkbusters also promises to post each example on their site so that the whole community can share in the outrage.

Well I'm going to put this to the test. You see, the whole campaign appears to have a decidedly rightward tilt. Looking through the pork cited, all of it comes from domestic non military spending. Yet about 50% of the discretionary budget is devoted to the military, not including the Iraq and Afghanistan operations. My suspicions were confirmed by Porkbusters' highlighting of a right wing attempt to cut social programs, framed as the "Fiscal Watch Team Offset Package", an attempt to offset the expenses of cleaning up after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

So my next post will highlight some Pentagon pork. Let's see if the TTLB Ecosystem is up to including that in their efforts.