Call it Pork or Necessity, but Alaska Comes Out Far Above the Rest...NYT

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - Toward the bottom of the 16-inch stack of paper called the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005 is a list of grants for communities in Alaska: $950,000 for a recreation center and $150,000 for a botanical garden in Anchorage, $300,000 for a senior center in Fairbanks, $1 million for housing upgrades in the Kenai Peninsula, $900,000 for an aquarium in Ketchikan, $525,000 for a quarry upgrade in Nome and many more.

No one on the outside knows for sure how grants for special projects like these - called earmarks in the Congressional lexicon and pork barrel by critics - got into the $388 billion spending bill that cleared Congress on Saturday. But it is a safe bet that Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, in his final year as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, was responsible for most of these.

Now in his 36th year in the Senate, longer than any other Republican, Mr. Stevens, who turned 81 on Thursday, is the master at bringing home the goods. Since 1997, when he became chairman of the committee, which has jurisdiction over nearly all government spending except automatic benefits like Social Security, per capita federal spending in Alaska has grown by more than 50 percent, to nearly $12,000 last year, by far the highest in the country and almost double the national average.
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"No one is saying these are bad projects," said David E. Williams, a vice president of Citizens Against Government Waste, another watchdog group on spending matters. "What we are saying is that the process is chaos. Instead of having projects go through the competitive vetting process by experts in the agencies, Congress is deciding what needs to be spent where."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/politics/21spend.html?oref=login

Plenty of quotes in there from Republicans kicking Republican butt, too.

the evil triad of Young-Stevens-Murkowski <crosses myself>