Hollywood Pork: $4 Billion for a park in Beverly Hills

The California elite met to eat at a big pig roast this past week. America’s veterans hosted the party; $4 billion worth of pork was on the platter, earmarked for Hollywood’s wealthy and well connected. You are right if you believed pigs attended.

A spending bill for veterans was Feinstein’s vehicle of choice. When Sen. J Demint (R-SC)…

offered an amendment to strike this wasteful earmark so the funds could be used for VA healthcare, only 25 senators had the courage stand up for America’s veterans and say no to pork for Hollywood’s wealthy and well connected. Here is how the Beverly Hills earmark was described by the Wall Street Journal:

 Rambo’s View
Dianne Feinstein’s $4 billion earmark for Beverly Hills comes at the expense of America’s veterans.

 By Kimberly Strassel  September 7, 2007

 …It takes hard work to come up with an earmark more egregious than that infamous Alaskan bridge, but California’s Dianne Feinstein is an industrious gal. Her latest pork — let’s call it Rambo’s View — deserves to be the poster child for everything wrong with today’s greedy earmark process. The senator’s $4 billion handout (yes, you read that right) to wealthy West L.A. (yes, you read that right, too) is the ultimate example of how powerful members use earmarks to put their own parochial interests above national ones — in this case the needs of veterans…

The pork here revolves around the West Los Angeles Medical Center… 387 sprawling, prime real-estate acres in the middle of tony West L.A. More than twice the size of the National Mall, it is surrounded by the mansions and playgrounds of the city’s elite, including the Bel Air Country Club and the Beverly Hills estates of Sylvester Stallone, Barry Bonds and Tim McGraw (to name a few). Huge portions of the facility are also a veritable ghost town… According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Los Angeles County also falls on the lowest end in terms of the percentage of veterans living in the area…

It turns out the well-to-do in West L.A. consider the veteran’s center grounds their own little rolling, personal park, and they want it to stay that way — thank you very much.

The indefatigable earmark warrior, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, offered an amendment this week to strip Ms. Feinstein’s earmark. California Sen. Barbara Boxer rose in righteous indignation on the Senate floor, and fizzed that she would never dream of leveling such a direct “attack” against South Carolina. The point of this speech was to remind her Senate colleagues that what’s hers is hers, and that the penalty for voting against her and Ms. Feinstein’s California pork would be the targeting of projects in their own states…[emphasis added]

Diverting $4 billion from the VA healthcare system to a park for the 90210 zip code is insulting to the sacrifices our courageous veterans have made for our country. Clearly, we have a long way to go in the battle to change the culture in Washington and close the earmark favor factory.