Pork
The crack reporting team at the New York Times have broken the story on how Pet Projects Are Flourishing in Congress. Never mind that “the Democratic totals are less than half than the record set by Republicans when they controlled Congress in 2005,” because “they are far higher than the levels just 10 years ago.” Just ten years ago! The rest of the article is copy and pasted from congressional reports and the same quotations repeated by different members of congress. If you make it past the headline towards the end of the first page of dribble you might learn that thought “the volume of earmarks in spending bills has exploded in the past decade, from about 3,000 in 1996 to almost 16,000 in 2005,” in fact “critics acknowledge that the Democrats have made the system less secretive and slightly less of a free-for-all.”