Here corporate piggy, piggy, piggy ...

The Houston Chronicle's Cragg Hines on the anatomy of Congress' latest pork barrel giveaway to corporations:

IF you like to sit on the porch at your tobacco farm, while a ceiling fan from Shanghai circles lazily and you sip a frosty punch concocted from Puerto Rican rum, then the ugly porker of a corporate tax bill passed by the U.S. House is just for you. At least it is for the folks who own the tobacco allotment, import the fan and distill the rum.

Those were only a few of the special interests whose long-standing pleas for extraordinary treatment in the federal tax code were fulfilled last week as House Republican leaders kept loading on goodies to get the corporate tax cut bill to market, er, passage. As the final vote was 251-178, it appears they could have stopped handing out giveaways a few billion dollars before they did. But what's a load of pork among friends?

If President Bush were interested in fighting the persistent public impression that he is more interested in helping big business than average families, he would issue a veto threat. In a late March national survey (1,616 sample of adults), the Los Angeles Times Poll found that by a spread of 63-21 percent, respondents believe Bush "cares more about" protecting the interest of large corporations than ordinary people. That finding was largely unchanged from when the poll asked the question in 2002.

But the White House already has said that Bush backs the concept of a corporate tax cut and urges the House and Senate to quickly work out differences in their two versions of the legislation, which, thankfully, may be easier said than done.

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