New Pork Busting Game You Can Play

Now it's just a coincidence that this is about pork. And it's a really big coincidence that I'm linking to a great blog writer with the last name of Ham. Remember this isn't a conspiracy...

I was introduced to Mary Katherine Ham reading Power Line blog. She's an incredibly bright light in the main stream media (MSM) and another blogging female inspiration.

Mary Katherine is guest hosting for Michelle Malkin's website making you hunger for more of her delicious posts such as today's "Pin the Pork on the Politician: It's Sweeping the Nation" about Congress spending your hard earned money secretly. That's just not right. Are you aware of where your money is going? If you've had it up to here with pork spending, you have to play Mary Katherine's new game.

I've got a fun game for all of us to play, the object of which is to make the worst of the Congressional appropriators pee their pants...err, get really nervous (because I couldn't think of a more Congressionally-appropriate figure of speech). Are you in?

All right. Here's how it goes. This is what the pork from one appropriations bill looks like-- 1,800 projects, worth more than $500 million total, averaging $268,000 apiece.

Go ahead and look at it. There are pictures. I'll wait here. That's the Labor/HHS Appropriations bill, set to possibly come up for a vote in September sometime.

Now, normally all those earmarks aren't available in any easily accessible form. They're snuck into bills and conference reports, whispered about between politicians, rarely talked about on the floor, tucked away from the public who pays for them.

Wouldn't it be cool if someone took the time to enter each earmark into an electronic database, which would then be made available to the taxpaying and blogging public to comb through if they were so inclined? You know, given that it's their money being spent and all.

And, wouldn't it be double-cool if the taxpaying and blogging public were so inclined, and began identifying which pork project belongs to whom and ever-so-politely inquiring of their duly elected representatives just what the heck they were thinking funding the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service?

Learn how you can play here.