Can you say oink

Homeland Security spending: idiotic pork: "Cory Doctorow:
The USA has earmaked billions for 'Homeland Security' but the money is being allocated by capricious, idiotic bureaucrats who take funding away from Democrat-leaning coastal cities like New York and shower it on 'heartland' towns, with bizarre stipulations. A tiny Massachusetts hamlet was given the largest grant in Mass, but with the stipulation that the money not be spent on useful equipment like fire-engines.

When the fire department in the tiny Berkshire hamlet of Cheshire needed a new fire truck, it asked Uncle Sam for a little help.

The response last month was stunning: a $665,962 homeland security grant.

The award was nearly 26 times the annual budget of the volunteer fire department in the town of 3,500. And the rub: The department is not allowed to spend it on a fire truck...The town does have the Cheshire Cheese Monument, a sizable concrete sculpture of a cheese press commemorating a 1,450-pound cheese hunk given by town elders to Thomas Jefferson in 1801. But its value as a terrorist target is not readily apparent...

'We really needed the truck,' he said.

Link

(via Schneier)

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(Via Boing Boing.)