a surprisingly good article in the mainstream press...

[campaignstaffer]

**EDITORIAL**
GOP's hands caught in the cookie jar

Tuesday, June 20, 2006Congress is so addicted to the corrosive influence of lobby money that

Comments

[cowbert]

personally I don't know what the woodpecker research is about but how do we know that was totally useless?

And the oft-quoted "national debt in the trillions" is alarmist journalism, mostly because it is meaningless without context. Even the absolute rate at which the national debt increases doesn't mean much, because you have to compare it to the scale of the economy (usually via GDP and GDP growth).

[campaignstaffer]

How thorough. Honestly, it's not the debt that frightens me so much as just the rampant and selfish earmark spending. Spend a couple hours browsing through our latest highway bill, HR 3, and you'll see too. It's mind-boggling.

Woodpeckers? Well, they're cute and all, but even if the study got us more information on the birds than anything's ever done before, there's still nothing in the Constitution about spending money on bird studies. It's not about whether it was useless, but whether it was legal.