Well, hi, everybody. Welcome to Hot Mike. I'm your co-host, Bill Whittle. Hot Mike can't be here today. I'm sorry. Unfortunately, he's at home. He's composing a love sonnet to the person he loves more than anyone else in this entire world himself. I expect he's probably going to run out of ink somewhere around Wednesday. So with any luck, we'll see him then.

Well, you all heard the expression that'll happen when pigs fly.

It's an expression designed to evoke a sense of never.

Pigs are not known for their aerial acrobatics, and so nobody has any trouble understanding

that when you say when pigs fly, it means it's just

simply never going to happen. But we may have witnessed something on December 19, 2024,

that may not have happened in, I don't know, 9,000 years. We witnessed a real when

pigs fly moment when it comes to pork barrel spending and i'm not kidding

about the 9000 years either so first of all let's come up with some definitions about what

pork is and and then let's get into why the 19th of the December 2024 was such an astonishing

date in world history although nobody seems to really fully appreciate it just yet.

When we talk about pork, we're talking about earmark spending.

That's another term related to pork.

I used to put tags in the ears of, I guess they still do, when they're selling pigs.

But basically, pork comes from the term pork barrel spending.

And in the 19th century, a gigantic barrel of salted pork was considered something pretty valuable to have.

Wikipedia says that pork barrels originally came from storing meat by the 1870s references to pork were common in Congress.

The phrase originated in a pre-Civil War practice of giving

enslaved people a barrel of salt pork as a reward and requiring them to compete among themselves

to get their share of the handout. More generally, a barrel of salt pork was a common larder

item in the 19th century households and could be used as a measure of a family's financial well-being.

For example, in his 1945 novel, The Chain Bearer, James Fenimore Cooper wrote,

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