Pork Barrel me this!

Admittedly, I have been in a state of heightened agitation lately with the follies of Wall street and the presidential political campaigns. The debate on Friday did very little to sooth my nerves. I was really hoping that we might get some substance out of at least one of these guys. Instead, we got more of their campaign soundbites and doublespeak.

It was really annoying to listen to McCain split hairs regarding Obama's prior statements concerning how he might engage with Iran. McCain made it sound as if Obama was going to invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad out to a strip club with the boys where over a couple of drinks would gently try to convince him to give up his nuclear aspirations. ( for a great laugh on this check out this clip) here If these guys have nothing more to offer us than comparing who has the most bracelets then I'm going to quit watching. Except for the VP debate; which I'm completely stoked for!

Seriously, how many references to 'Pork Barrel' spending and 'Earmarks' can McCain try to make in one speech? I'm speaking out of class and I don't have the data to back this up -yet,( hmmm,perhaps in next blog post? )but I think it's fairly safe to say that McCain has plenty of history directing federal funds to his home state. I applaud his efforts for curtailing this type of under the radar spending, but trying to pin Obama as some kind of big government spender at this time is just plain wrong.

Speaking of government spending, I saw this great graph of how our federal dollars are spent. graph here It doesn't take an economics degree to understand that our spending and unfunded liabilities are too large. Are you seeing this Obama and McCain? We know you, or at least your aides, read the NYTimes so do us all a favor and "Please focus on the bigger picture!!"

The numbers being tossed around these days are amazingly large. Is it even possible to comprehend them? I don't know about you, but I sure wish we would have spent the money used to destroy Iraq and bail out Wallstreet on clean energy infrastructure, education, and health care for children.

But I digress, because this is not what I wanted to write about tonight. Although all of the above is important, it's not nearly as upsetting as the scam I just recently unearthed. This is a scam that I feel is being perpetrated all over America, to both Democrats and Republicans. The scandal that I'm referring to is the complete rip off that buying a BLT at a restaurant has become.

One would think that if you ordered a BLT you would get considerably more bacon than if you ordered a sandwich that had bacon as just a topping. What I'm discovering is that this is often not the case. When I ordered a BLT recently it only had 3 crummy pieces of dried out bacon on it. That's not a sandwich. I didn't order BREAD, lettuce and tomato for goodness sakes.

If this was an one off experience I wouldn't mind so much. But it has happened a few times over the past year to me. That makes it a certifiably trend! What gives? It's an outrage for certain. There really is nothing better than a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on toasted sourdough bread if it's done right. If you throw in some avocado, then you have a combination that was likely created by the Gods themselves! Of course, holding the mayo is vitally important, since mayo is disgusting. But the problem is that restaurants are cutting corners and passing off sorry excuses for a BLT.

As this is truly a partisan issue I'm going to ask all of you to boycott the restaurant made BLT. Hopefully, this call to arms will gather steam and we can affect some real change in this country. Now that is a pork barrel project worth considering!!