Ed Fuelner writing in the Chicago Sun-Times reminds us that Senators Trent Lott (R-MS) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) were against pork before they were for it:

Back in 1993, Lott and Cochran helped defeat President Bill Clinton's ill-advised "stimulus" package, a $16.3 billion pork-barrel measure (ironically, almost the same amount that's been wastefully added to the current spending bill). "And where are we going to get the money?" Cochran asked Congress then. "We are going to increase the deficit, which requires the government to borrow more money and to pay more interest. That is not economically healthy, that is economically dangerous."

Today the Washington Post picked up the "Reoriented Express" story that Bill Allison has been covering down the hall at Under the Influence. Mississippi's Senators Trent Lott (R) and Thad Cochran (R) inserted an earmarked provision to relocate a Gulf Coast railroad that had recently been destroyed and then rebuilt further north to make way for a highway. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who doesn't mind knocking heads with members of his own party, is in his typical state of outrage at government waste, "It is ludicrous for the Senate to spend $700 million to destroy and relocate a rail line that is in perfect working order, particularly when it recently underwent a $250 million repair ... American taxpayers are generous and are happy to restore damaged property, but it is wrong for senators to turn this tragedy into a giveaway for economic developers." As always you can find out why the railroad is being relocated if you just follow the money. As the Post notes:

For more than half a dozen years, Mississippi officials, development planners and tourism authorities have dreamed of the complex restructuring of Mississippi's coastal transportation system that Lott and Cochran now want to set in motion. Under the plan, the CSX line -- which runs a few blocks off the coast line -- would be scrapped. CSX would move its freight traffic to existing tracks to the north owned by rival Norfolk Southern. Then U.S. 90, a wide federal highway that hugs Mississippi's beaches, would be rebuilt along the CSX rail bed. The route of the federal thoroughfare would be turned into a smaller, manicured "beach boulevard" through cities such as Biloxi, where visitors could "spend more time strolling among the casinos and taking in the views," as the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal put it.

But the Tri-State Economic and Transportation Benefits Study calls for a project that's bigger than just moving CSX's seaside tracks north; it would create an additional north-south rail corridor, parallel CSX tracks that wouldn't be replaced, replace some line currently operated by the Canadian Northern Illinois Central railroad, and generally be much more ambitious in scale than the original effort to move some CSX tracks further north.