Yoono, What’s Up With You?
Yoono, a bookmarking program that powers my mini-blog on the right, isn’t working at the moment. Mini-blog post, you are hereby promoted to main blog post! Huzzah! Here it is:
Candidates’ Earmarks Worth Millions - washingtonpost.com
The impression one gets from the lead may be misleading — I would think a more accurate way of measuring Senatorial earmark spending is to focus on money per constituent, not total spending — but there are lots of illustrative tidbits on the three major candidates in this article.
Sen. McCain’s anti-earmark stance is symbolically powerful. Earmarks are the type of thing that is easy for people to rail against. They symbolize waste, even though they are a small fraction of total government spending and probably serve a good purpose in some cases (although that’s more on a guess than knowledge). Then again, they seem like an under-the-table way to reward donors and political friends.
I hope that if any changes are made to how earmarks are handled, that the people supporting these changes think hard about the potential unintended consequences of those reform. Well-intentioned changes can end up making situations worse.
Chris said,
February 14, 2008 @ 10:30 am
And I shall call him Mini-blog!