I mentioned the omnibus bill in my article today. Donald Lambro takes a look at the earmarks found in that monster:

This is just a sampling of the 11,331 “earmarks” (a 426 percent increase over last year) that this Congress snuck into its annual appropriations bills and accompanying reports for fiscal year 2008 — nearly 10,000 of them in the omnibus bill alone. Want more?

– $700,000 for a bike trail in Minnesota.

– $200,000 for a post office museum in downtown Las Vegas.

– $1 million for a river walk in Massachusetts.

– $150,000 for the Louis Armstrong Museum in Queens, N.Y.

– $200,000 for the Hunting and Fishing Museum in Pennsylvania.

– $113,000 for rodent control in Alaska.

– $4 million for a Beverly Hills veterans’ park.

– $37,000 for the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

– $8.8 million for the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium at Eastern Kentucky University.

– $2.4 million for renovations in the Haddad Riverfront Park in Charleston, W.Va.

– $250,000 for construction work at the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center in Prosser, Wash.

– $126,000 for the National First Ladies’ Library in Canton, Ohio.

– $10.4 million to the ProLogic company, a firm in West Virginia that is allegedly under federal investigation.

If one special interest in the country has been left out of these bills, it would be hard think of one. It contains money for everything from New York’s Center for Grape Genetics to peanut production in Georgia, from
Pennsylvania’s Center for Dairy Excellence to the Bronx River Restoration Project.

Keep in mind, these are projects that the administration did not request money for, nor were they recommended or formally evaluated by any of the appropriating committees. These are items that were inserted into spending bills, with the full approval of the majority leadership of Congress, to buy political support in their states and districts to help them win another term in the 2008 elections.

This is the kind of spending that is going to ruin this country. How many of those things should the federal government be involved in, according to James Madison or Thomas Jefferson? Zero. Not one. Yet our COngress finds more and more ways to spend your money to insure their re-election. It’s time for this to end. Call your representatives. Tell them to stop spending what they don’t have. We have to regain control of this entity before they get us all in a world of hurt.