Right?

The group Citizens Against Government Waste released its 2006 Congressional Pig Book last week, itemizing wasteful congressional “earmarks” through which incumbent Washington lawmakers buy friends and votes back home, while ignoring their oaths to spend money only on programs authorized by the Constitution, and then to advance only the “general” welfare, not the limited welfare of parochial hometown freeloaders.

CAGW defines “pork” as allocations that meet at least one of seven criteria, though most meet at least two. Pork spending tends to be requested by only one member of Congress, the group explains; to serve only a local or special interest; to be awarded without competitive bidding; to be absent from the president’s budget proposal; and to be slipped in without benefit of public hearings.

For fiscal 2006, Congress porked out at a record dollar level with $29 billion in pork -- 6.2 percent more than last year’s total of $27.3 billion.

This year’s list includes $13.5 million for the International Fund for Ireland, which helped finance the World Toilet Summit; $1 million for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative; and $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum in Sparta, N.C. (Supporters of the project hope the museum “will expose its visitors to an unexpected art form the teapot.”)

We may be a little short of money to seal the Mexican border, but at least the Teapot Museum is secure.

In between sending foreign aid to all kinds of petty third-world kleptocrats and helping the Russians keep their decrepit space station in orbit, Congress managed to spend $2.3 million this year on Alabama’s International Fertilizer Development Center.

Senate Appropriations Committee member Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, threw in $1.3 million for Alaska berry research and $1,099,000 to develop alternative salmon products. (Salmon glue? Salmonskin rugs?)

Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee member Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., snuck in $3 million for a Kentucky Animal Waste Management Research Laboratory, which might be a good place to dispose of some of Sen. Stevens’ alternative salmon products.

All-time champion porker and Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., decided taxpayers should chip in $160,000 for West Virginia poultry litter composting. (One hesitates to imagine what farmers did with chicken litter before the federal government started paying them to heap it up in piles.)

Into a Defense spending bill, while our troops went without adequate body armor in Iraq, Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ted Stevens slipped $500,000 for the Arctic Winter Games.

Changing out of his Agriculture hat, Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee member Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and a couple of Kentucky congresscritters saw to it that $2,520,000 in “defense” spending went to the Kentucky National Guard Counterdrug and High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.

You don’t think champion porker Robert Byrd of West Virginia was about to take that lying down, do you? Sen. Byrd immediately demanded and got $2.6 million for the West Virginia National Guard’s own drug interdiction and counter-drug activities. (So there.)

Homeland Security? $10 million was added by the House for the Intercity Bus Security Grant Program, intended to improve “driver protection and passenger screening.” (And here we thought those who objected to being carded, fondled, and strip-searched at the airports were welcome to “take the bus.”) Another $10 million went to the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium -- supposedly to guarantee that citizens living in rural areas are “equally protected” against the threat of, um ... rural terrorism.

Some of the most charming nonsense crops up near the bottom of the list. There was the modest $250,000 for the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, Iowa, for instance. (The NCC sponsors an annual fair, charging $7 admission. Fair activities include the Second Annual Cattle Congress Cage Combat; the “Survivor” Family Game Show; Jocko & the J’s Monkey Show, and Steeple’s Wild West Bear Show.)

The House also saw to it that $150,000 of our federal tax dollars went to the Bulgarian-Macedonian National Education and Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, Penn., while $100,000 was donated to the Harpers Ferry Police Department in (are we starting to notice a trend, here?) little West Virginia.

“The population of Harpers Ferry was less than 400 in 2004 and the police force today consists of two full-time and one part-time police officers,” the CAGW researchers explain. “This is the same size police force as the fictional town of Mayberry on ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’ Unfortunately, those are real tax dollars.”

Of course, the insidious dual standard that allows such pork to prosper will grow clear if Nevadans roll their eyes at the wastefulness of any of the earmarks listed above, but then respond, “Well, and it’s a good thing” at news that Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Ranking Member Harry Reid, D-Nev., managed to haul home $79,745,000 worth of pork earmarks to Nevada, including $14.3 million for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; $3.5 million for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s virtual-site office; $2.5 million for Altair Nanotech, and $250,000 for that old favorite, the Mojave Bird Study.

“Due to previous concerns regarding the safety of birds in the area, an environmental impact report, released in July of 2004, revealed that the death toll on red-tailed hawks and other bird species in the area would be minimal following the construction of a wind farm,” the CAGW explains. “According to an article published by Judith Lewis in LA Weekly, the local Audubon groups that led the attack on the Pine Tree Wind Farm offered to pay for a meticulous study that would focus specifically on the songbirds. However, the government insisted on conducting their own study using taxpayer dollars.”

So long as each member of congress keeps getting thanked and re-elected by local constituents for hauling home his or her personal bucket of pork -- regardless of the fact that most of these allocations exceed constitutional authority, and that 98 percent of the money came from residents of other states who gained little from the expenditure and might very well have had better uses for their share of that $29 billion -- we can expect the CAGW’s 17th annual Pig Book to come out right on schedule, fat as ever, again next year.