Republicans are shocked, shocked that House Democrats sweetened their Iraq spending bill with non-germane goodies like subsidies for peanut and dairy farmers. How could they desecrate the issue of war and peace by laying on the pork?

But it isn’t just in America that the legislative process marries the sublime and the mundane. According to the Times of London, this week’s historic agreement for a Protestant-Catholic power-sharing government in Northern Ireland was pushed across the finish line by a threat from British authorities to raise water bills for people in the North if Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams didn't make nice.