Swine PU
by digby
After reading tristero's (literally sickening) post this morning about factory farming and toxic gasses, I struggled to recall where I had recently heard about studies being conducted into swine odor and manure. I hadn't had my coffee yet and couldn't quite put it together. And then suddenly, I remembered:
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: The House of Representatives passed a $410 billion spending bill. It is loaded with pork, courtesy of both parties.
"The New York Times" reports one watchdog group says the bill includes $8 billion for more than 8,500 pet projects. Among them are these: $1.7 million for a honey bee laboratory in Texas; $1.5 million for work on grapes and grape products, including wine -- this is my favorite -- $1.8 million to research swine odor and manure management in Iowa. They could do the same research in Washington, D.C...
One of his emailers wrote this:
Ed in Iowa writes: "Here in Iowa, we're sure in need of some swine odor and manure management. And I can tell you that for darn sure, since I live downwind to several hog farms. What you don't understand when you make fun of this is that it's a huge problem. Pigs are big business here. Their manure could be used for fertilizer and biofuels, instead of just polluting the air and the water. It is a smart investment that will pay off in clean air, clean water, cheap food, and jobs."
The right went nuts on the this funding for swine studies:
Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) is back at it, taking swipes at federally funded animal research projects. First he took on the grizzlies—lambasting studies to gauge whether the mighty creatures were in danger of becoming extinct— and now he's peeved about pigs—or pig odor, to be precise. The former presidential candidate last week mocked a federal set-aside for pig odor research, listing it on his Twitter feed as one of the "Top 10 Porkiest Projects" allocated funding in the latest federal spending bill being debated in Congress. Sen. Tom Coburn (R–Okla.) chimed in on his own Web site that "This earmark is $1.7 million to take the stink out of manure," and pretty soon the blogosphere was snorting about liberal (and pig) waste.
Amid threats to strip the $410-billion bill of its earmarks, Democratic Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin took the floor to passionately defend his state's swine scientists. "People constantly complain, with good reason, about big farms, factory farms and their environmental impacts," he said, "so it makes good sense to fund research that addresses how people can live in our small towns and communities, and livestock producers can do the same, and coexist."
The problem with federal earmarks for scientific research is that they can be doled out based on political connections and lobbying rather than on a grant review by a panel of scientific peers. In this case, the Swine Odor and Manure Management Research Unit at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Ames, Iowa, had been stripped of funding last year by the Bush administration, and this was designed as a way to reboot the program. As Harkin put it, "This item is only included as an earmark now because the last Bush budget proposed to terminate a number of agricultural research projects in order to come in at a lower budget number, knowing full well that this needed research was likely to be restored by Congress."
Everyone had a good old laugh about the pork for the pork in the stimulus bill, just like they laughed at volcano monitoring and pandemic funding, all things that had been sorely neglected during the Republicans' rule and all of which have been shown in just a couple of months to be vitally necessary public expenditures. (It may be that the pig odor spending wouldn't directly address the swine flu issues, but I think we can all agree after what we've seen of this flu epidemic that neglecting to monitor the effects of factory pig farming is probably not a good idea.)
The Republicans didn't only argue that these things shouldn't be in the stimulus package, although they did make that argument. (And made fools of themselves for doing it since all government spending in a recession is stimulative.) The main thrust of their argument was that this kind of spending was wasteful --- ridiculous, useless profligacy that big spending liberals use to buy votes. They got big laughs on the late night shows and all the gasbags amused themselves to no end making fund of these funny sounding programs that no common sense American could possible believe was a worthwhile use of taxpayer dollars. And they have been proven asses.
Not that it will stop them, or the press, from doing it again. It's the easiest story in the world and lots of fun. But the GOPs simple-mindedness and the media's professional laziness could actually kill us one day.