A friend emails:

You make some excellent, persuasive points in your critique of the Porkbusters and their latest stance on the war funding bill. Surely you would agree with me, however, that their objectives are sound, their hearts are in the right place and spending is a problem that cost us last November. I do agree most wholeheartedly that the vehicle they have chosen to wage their lastet campaign is wholely inappropriate — the far better approach is to get a bill clean of deadlines and then shame the ear-markers in public, over and over again. And throw Jerry Lewis, the congressman not the comedian (though both are sometimes amusing), into the Potomac with lead weights around his ankles as a warning to other members of the Appropriations Committee.

I do agree that their objectives are sound and their hearts are in the right place, but I’m not wholly in agreement about the effects of overspending on the election last year. An anti-spending agenda would have been better than the perceived Republican agenda last fall–to keep losing in Iraq, take bribes, and hit on interns–but I don’t think the survey evidence suggests that it would have been the best possible Republican agenda to win the independent voters the party needed. In any case, as I point out in the article, opposition to pork has only an incidental connection with opposition to excessive federal spending.