The Clay Pigeon

Glock26 pointed me to a great article published in print in GQ (very metrosexual of you Mr. Glock) about Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn.

I love this guy....a lone wolf even in his own party.....he's been unaffected by Washington and fights to change the business as usual in D.C. where Democrats and Republicans alike sneak pork into every vote the Congress makes on spending money.

The GQ article is long, but worth the read....near the end you'll learn about the strategy calls "the Clay Pigeon" where he invokes an obscure rule forcing colleagues to debate each item in an amendment. He used this when the Senate was looking at approving $92B of emergency funding for designed to provide assistance to crisis victims (9/11, Katrina, etc.)..ok that's fair enough...but the schmucks in D.C. stuck another $14B of additional projects as pork on this thing. Coburn found the 19 most offensive strips of bacon and filed a nineteen part amendment each designed to remove one earmark. Using the obscure rule to force each of his nineteen parts to be debated on the floor he hoped to expose the idiotic thievery each represented.

Interestingly, most of these earmarks where sponsored by a Republican and yet their inclusion in the emergency funding was approved (by only 1 vote so a victory of sorts) by prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy.

If you think Hillary is somehow different, not part of the Washington bullshit, a beacon of hope for sanity and doing the right thing....you gotta read at least this section of this article and ask yourself why would she vote for you and your great-great-great grandchildren going into more debt for the pork attached to emergency crisis victim funding!