A RINO & Two Conservatives Walk Into A Bar.....

....and order a round of earmarks, on the house:

“I don’t think so,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said when asked if she would comply with the resolution. Murkowski said the ban is merely “about messaging” and would give a misleading impression of taking on the deficit. “I don’t think it is being straight up with the public,” she said.

Appropriations ranking member Thad Cochran, R-Mississippi, would not commit to complying with a ban resolution, saying he would see “what other options” are available. And Senator James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, said he was unlikely to honor the ban. He introduced legislation Monday to change the earmarking process, including barring congressional aides from participating in fundraising activities; creating a new database of all earmarks; giving the Government Accountability Office the power to randomly audit earmarks; and requiring lawmakers to certify that a recipient of an earmark is qualified to handle the project being funded…

However, in a Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll taken right before the August recess, funneling money back home was the only factor a majority of the public cited as being a factor in their support for a congressional candidate. The survey, conducted with the Pew Research Center, showed that 53% of the public said they were more likely to vote for the person on the ballot who had brought government projects and money to their home district.

IOW, it's all about optics.  Everybody ELSE's earmarks are horrible and bad and evil and stinky and despicable and budget-bustingly wasteful, but don't you DARE touch OURS!  It is in the microcosm of pork as it is in the horrifying doomsday mega entitlement monstrosity macrocosm of Social Security, Medicare, and eventually ObamaCare: unless everybody has skin in the game, the game will never get started.

That's why I remain diffident about this tighty-righty earmark obsession.  On the one hand, if 'Pubbies - yes, ALL of them - can't forswear this relative appropriations pittance, how will they ever do the mountain-lifting that has to be done to dismantle enough of the federal behemoth to avoid fiscal Armageddon?  But on the other hand, they're the only ones remotely capable of doing so, and how does it make deliverance from economic Judgment Day more likely to murderously turn on them (again) when the alternative is to go right back to the Donk crapola that created this calamity in the first place?

And before you bring up third parties, DON'T.  Ours is a binary system.  Two parties.  Democrats or Republicans.  Those are your choices.  Not the Libertarians, not the Constitution Party, not the OWLs; just the D's and R's.  Wasn't planned that way.  The Founders didn't like it.  But that's how it evolved.  That's what we've got.  If you stick a knife in the R's backs to "teach them a lesson," you'll end up with a bunch of D's who will make everything logarithmically worse.  So the R's are not just your best bet, they're your ONLY bet, earmark ban or no earmark ban.

Even this one - if she remains an R, that is.  And from this clip, it doesn't sound like that can last, no matter how nauseatingly obseqious her erstwhile GOP colleagues get:

I don't look at this diametric in-his-face reversal of Rush Limbaugh's famous (and prophetic) early-2009 declaration as a litmus failure for which the bug-eyed crackwhore should be excommunicated; I simply observe that if she really believes what she says here, I don't see any reason for her not to cross the aisle and become a Democrat.  We've SEEN what happens to the country when Barack Obama is "doing well"; it's why there are now sixty-five fewer House Democrats and six fewer Senate Democrats (at the moment).  If she believes that Obamunist blitzkriegs make the country successful, then she has a definition of "success" that is incompatible with Republicanism.  It's that simple.

As much of a numbers game as politics is, this clinches for me that it would be better for her to leave now than to remain in the GOP caucus as a necrotizing cancer in our midst that would be worse than any earmark kerfuffle could EVER be.  Forty-six can filibuster as well as forty-seven, and this is that rare instance in which addition really does come from subtraction.

Exit question: Is Dirty Harry coming to the GOP's PR rescue, or is he making a pass at Luella?