“Kiss my ear!” Tom Delay & Associates are NOT Compassionate Conservatives

But we already knew THAT, from Instapundit:

PORK UPDATE:

Today Alabama Senator Richard Shelby (Republican) said he would be willing to give up some of his allocated Federal monies for pork projects in his state to help fund recovery efforts from Hurricane Katrina. Which raises the question whether California Congressman Adam Schiff (Democrat-29th District) would be willing to shift funds as well?

Nancy Pelosi is!

House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said Tuesday she was willing to return to the federal Treasury $70 million designated for San Francisco projects in the new highway and transportation bill and use the money to help pay for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

But Tom Delay (same story) isn't:

Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said that while he would consider cutting all other domestic discretionary spending to raise the tens of billions of dollars needed for Katrina relief, it was a bad idea to take money from transportation projects.

His suburban Houston district is slated to get $64.4 million under the bill, and DeLay has said that he brought home an additional $50 million for freeway projects in the metropolitan area. He also helped secure $324 million in funding credits for Houston's light rail construction.

Neither is Alaska Rep. Don "bridge to nowhere" Young:

“Kiss my ear!” Rep. Don Young, an Alaska Republican, told a Fairbanks newspaper reporter when asked whether he would return the $223 million he “earmarked” for a bridge so that residents of Ketchikan won’t have to pay $6 to ride a ferry to get to the airport. Young is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

You can't make a silk purse out of a pig's ear, I guess.

But Rep. Mike Pence is looking like the hero of this story so far:

Indiana Congressman Mike Pence is leading a call for cuts in the federal budget that would match the spending for hurricane relief. "Operation Offset" is the name of the effort.
The details were made public on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning. The 23 pages of proposed cuts in the federal budget come from 110 members of Congress who belong to the Conservative Republican Study Committee chaired by Mike Pence.
Bring it on! But if people aren't willing to support cuts in their own districts, they're not going to be taken seriously.

UPDATE: Pelosi backpedals:

But by the afternoon she had backtracked, saying she wouldn't give up all of the $128.6 million going to her district. She said the $58.8 million slated to retrofit the Golden Gate Bridge to protect it from earthquakes is a safety issue too important to forgo.

That might be a fair cop, actually, though it looks bad. Still, her colleagues need to be stepping up. And perhaps she can find some other pork to take its place, if she looks hard . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: John McCain wants to ditch the hugely expensive prescription drug benefit: "'We’ve got to go back and look at the Medicare prescription drug bill. It was supposed to cost $400 billion. It’s now up to $700 billion.' McCain added, 'It was a bad idea to start with.'" Follow the link for an alternative proposal.