Hurricane Sandy Relief Bill: All Pork - Little Relief

$150 million for Alaskan fisheries, $2 million to the Smithsonian to repair roofs and $8 million to Homeland Security and the Justice Department to buy cars. And that's just the start. No, this is not Stimulus Part 2, this is the Hurricane Sandy Relief Bill.

The bill, whose total price tag is $60.4 billion, also contains:

• $58.8 million for forest restoration on private land.
• $197 million “to… protect coastal ecosystems and habitat impacted by Hurricane Sandy.”
• $10.78 billion for public transportation, most of which is allocated to future construction and improvements, not disaster relief.
• $17 billion for wasteful Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), a program that has become notorious for its use as a backdoor earmark program.

Thousands of people were affected by Hurricane Sandy, many perished, homes were destroyed, communities annihilated and lives forever changed. But rather than focusing on providing desperately needed assistance to storm victims, politicians seek to capitalize on their tragedy by paying off cronies back home under the guise of emergency aid.