The GOP's Ted Kennedy

This is Alaska Senator Ted "bridge to nowhere" Stevens, who'll defend to the death his right to waste your taxes: In a caucus of Republican senators, 82-year-old, six-term Sen. Ted Stevens charged that freshman Sen. Tom Coburn's anti-pork crusade hurts the party. Stevens then removed from the final version of the Defense Department appropriations bill Coburn's "report card" requiring the Pentagon to grade earmarks. The House passed, 394 to 22, the bill, stripped of this reform and containing some 2,800 earmarks worth $11 billion. That made a mockery of a "transparency" rule passed by the House earlier this year, supposedly intended to discourage earmarks. "You would think that with a war and all the controversy surrounding earmarks that the appropriators would hold back a little," said Steve Ellis of the non-partisan Taxpayers for Common Sense. "But with an election just weeks away, they dug into the trough to find pearls to send home to their districts." ...after an angry Stevens took Coburn to task for undermining party unity, the rookie was supported by the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Sen. John McCain asserted that the people backed Coburn, who then made clear he was not intimidated by Stevens. Like the esteemed Senator from Massachusetts, the Congress will be a better place when these dinosaur tax and spenders are gone. http://www.townhall.com/columnists/RobertDNovak/2006/10/12/pork_for_defense

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