“Real war within Republicanism right now: the decency and honor of John McCain and Lindsey Graham versus the incompetence and brutality of Cheney and Rumsfeld. And in army captain Ian Fishback, we have a real American hero. In his words: “We are America. Our actions should be held to a higher standard. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’” That’s the real voice of the U.S. military. And it abhors the brutality this administration has sanctioned and covered up.” - andrewsullivan.com

Today I read House Majority Leader Tom Delay’s insightful quote that “there is simply no fat left to cut from the federal budget.” Then I followed the link on andrewsullivan.com, to the Heritage Foundation website which notes that the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), designed to assess whether government programs actually achieve their objectives, has found that of the 60 percent of all federal programs examined (1,236 programs measured) “only 38 percent were rated “effective” or “moderately effective”. By contrast, 40 percent were deemed either “ineffective” or unable to demonstrate results. Yet in FY 2004, $154 billion was appropriated for programs classified as ineffective or unable to demonstrate results.”

Keep up the good work Mr. Delay.

Citizens Against Government Waste say that pork programs have risen from fewer than 2,000 a year in the mid-1990’s to almost 14,000 this year.

In the New York Times article, “An Economy Raised on Pork”, Robert Reich states “Republicans may collectively oppose wasteful spending, but as individual legislators they’ve created more pork than any Congress in history. The new $286 billion transportation act is bloated with 6,371 “special projects” with a price tag some $30 billion more than the White House wanted. The president reassured the nation that it would, at the least, “give hundreds of thousands of Americans good-paying jobs.” The new $12.3 billion energy bill cost twice what the White House sought because it’s laden with what Senator Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who ushered it through Congress, defends as measures to create “hundreds of thousands of jobs.”