The Crap Sandwich™: Now Fortified With Extra Porky Goodness! (Updated) (Updated Again)

Ug and double ug.  The Senate bailout bill has grown to 451-pages of pork-laden [insert profanity here].  Instead of just the bailout (Emergency Economic Stabilization, Division A, pages 1-113), the bill now also contains the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008 (Division B, pp. 113-261) and the Tax Extenders and Alternative Minimum Tax Relief (Division C, pp. 261-451).  Earmarks are tucked here and there throughout, but it is this last part that is stuffed  full of the pork.  I don’t have the stomach (or time) to actually read through it all, but  Michelle Malkin pulls out some of the worst examples.

Wooden arrows? Wool research?

And both of our illustrious leaders-to-be support it.

I think something is necessary, but the Paulson plan isn’t it.  And a thoroughly larded Paulson plan even less so.

UPDATED:

Apparently, since these ’sweeteners’ are structured as tax exemptions/deductions, they are not technically earmarks.  I grasp the distinction, but reject it.  It still costs the government (and thus the people), just on the back end instead of the front end.  With the added disadvantage of complicating the tax code that much more.

Lower taxes good; earmarks bad; loopholes bad.

Paulson plan really bad.

ANOTHER UPDATE – STUDIES SHOW LESS PORK:

Apparently the tax cuts/earmarks (however you want to look at them) are not as bad as I thought — at least in a procedural sense.  Since any spending bill must originate in the House, the Senate has tacked the bailout onto the pork-laden bills (which had already passed the House) as an amendment in order to get around this procedural rule.  Rather than tacking the pork-laden bills onto the bailout, which would have been a new low in a body not known for its nobility of purpose.

Whatever you may think of this ruse to avoid the constitutional requirement that “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives” (U.S. Const. art. I, sect. 7.), and whatever you may think of the Paulson bailout plan, at least our noble Senators did not muck up the bill in the way it first appeared that they had.

The pork is still crap, and probably got far more attention than it otherwise would have (which I find amusing), but at least the Senate was not so pathetic as to attach this junk to the bailout.

Oh, and it passed, by the way, in case you hadn’t seen.