Good things come in threes. Today something I've been looking forward to for years finally happened: the Justice Department announced the indictment of the execrable Alaskan porkmeister Sen. Ted Stevens on seven counts of felonious thievery relating to kickbacks from billionaire oil contractor and VECO owner Bill Allen. [Pause for a deep draught of LR Crystal - hmm, tickles the nose just right.] My experience is that the Feds don't indict anyone unless they calculate a 90%+ likelihood of a conviction. Add another five points to that because they caught Uncle Pork on tape and it looks certain that his Huey Long Lifetime Achievement Award will have to be sent to his suite in the gray-bar motel.

Behind Door Number Two: Tom Coburn (not the movie star's brother AFAIK) and a few other Republicans in the Senate are fighting the good fight against theft from taxpayers; their latest victory was against attempts to quash debate over the porcine but cutely named Advancing America’s Priorities Act. Coburn, who doesn't play a doctor on TV but is an OB/GYN in real life, has a long history of fighting against earmarks, set-asides, non-roll call appropriations voting and other thefts from the commonweal. This time around, the useful idiots with room temperature IQs at the New York Times have branded him "Dr. No" (Get the double entendre? Clever, huh?) because he is blocking Harry Reid's ten billion dollar bag of loot. Dr. No's radically undemocratic position: openly debate the bill and each of its subparts, a billion dollars worth at a time. Way too much for Reid, apparently.

If you can judge a man by his enemies, Coburn has all the right ones according to this me-too piece from the WaPo. Even the most diehard liberal has to admire someone James Inhofe hates.

DownsizeDC.org has the particulars regarding the amateur but typical efforts by the Senate to conceal extravagantly wasteful spending in the bill, who supported that, and how Coburn and his small posse stopped them.* Hoystory has the back-story on how the online and print versions of the Times persistently omitted this text from the original wire version:

Maybe I should have left out that Robin Williams "group hug!" part. But even the printed version of the Times piece ends up praising Sen. Coburn with faint damns:

Let's see, pissing off two of the biggest horse's a$$es in Congress, thumbing his nose at pseudo-fiscal conservatives with "R"s next to their names, and peeing on the "go along to get along", smoke-filled room, non-accountability mindset of the Senate in one swell foop? Drink that shampagnee while it's still cold, I'd say.

Completing the trifecta is the news that a major al-Qaeda chemical munitions expert, Mursi al-Sayid Umar, was killed by a US airstrike while eating a ploughman's lunch somewhere in Pakistan. Apparently the Pakistanis are peeved that they weren't given advance notice and thus couldn't warn the guy to listen carefully for whistling sounds from the sky. Hey, live by the bomb . . .

I'll be traveling in the Mainland for awhile (taking my son on a road trip to Yosemite and points north before Atzlan [née California] burns down or is ceded to Guatemala by the UN) so if I respond sporadically, that doesn't mean that anyone disagreeing with this diary is right.

_______________________
*Though I disagree with them, you may also want to check out DownsizeDC's thread on a referendum vote on Iraq - by the Iraqis themselves, of all people. Or their thoughts on why asset forfeiture should be barred, which I do support.

--

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.