[alexamenos]

McCain frets over $5.5 billion in earmarks., or 1.5% of the $410 billion bill.

How is that 1.5% of the bill any more wasteful more wasteful than the other 98.5%? My guess is we think it's more wasteful because it's all the more clear where it's going --

-- a buck fifty goes into something which we readily and immediately recognize as something we wouldn't buy with our own money, like a new homo museum in san fran. But the other $98.5 goes into...i dunno, "the Department of Great Things for Kids", and who doesn't want great things for Kids? The DGTK then spends $98 on two over paid fat women who prepare useless reports for a bureaucrat when they're not eating powdered donuts, and then the bureaucrat files the report and then spends the remaining fifty cents to hire a contractor to do something that isn't worth fifty cents, much less $98.50.

But McCain doesn't bitch about that 98.5%, because he wants his big government and his reform too.