Free Republic

Move over Bridge to Nowhere. Congress is back in town, and clearly back to business even uglier than usual. It takes hard work to come up with an earmark more egregious than that infamous Alaskan bridge, but California's Dianne Feinstein is an industrious gal. Her latest pork--let's call it Rambo's View--deserves to be the poster child for everything wrong with today's greedy earmark process. The senator's $4 billion handout (yes, you read that right) to wealthy West L.A. (yes, you read that right, too) is the ultimate example of how powerful members use earmarks to put their own parochial interests...

One has to go digging into the jobbers' trade press for the stunning statistics about the extent of Vietnam's trade growth with the U.S. About $1.8 billion in apparel exports will be sold by the Vietnamese to the U.S. in 2004, and that's a bit of a decline over last year. But it's not just MADE IN VIETNAM tags on the baby clothes at Target anymore. There's another $2 billion in trade with fish, electronics, cashews, shrimp, furniture, pepper, shoes and other goods from Vietnam coming into the U.S., showing a 28% rise over the previous year. Ten years ago,...