Whole Hog—The Washington watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste keeps a sharp eye on the under-reported phenomenon of pork barrel politics. That’s the antiquated system used by members of Congress to invisibly slip a total of billions of taxpayer dollars into legislation that steers big chunks of cash back to projects in their states and […]

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Last month, as more voting machine glitches turned up in a special election in Florida, and earlier mistakes that were discovered elsewhere last year remained uninvestigated, former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker announced the formation of a bipartisan, non-governmental commission to scan the whole federal election system. They […]

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Trumping the Right Wing—Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, was already in trouble when he toiled to engineer the controversial congressional intervention into the Terri Schiavo drama. It was an example of “justice DeLayed is justice denied.” Among other discoveries following DeLay’s drive to push Congress to do […]

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The next time you see one of those yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons on a passing car think about what happens after the soldiers come home from war. They become veterans, and supporting veterans usually costs more money than a supposedly grateful nation cares to spend. This seems to happen after every war, but now […]

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Out of Town—But not soon enough? Just when we were exclaiming “at last!” as the 109th Congress was fleeing the Capitol for a two-week Easter recess, some hard-line Republican conservatives, led by Representative Tom Delay of Texas, maneuvered themselves into the life-or-death case of Terri Schiavo. She is the 41-year-old Florida woman now in her […]

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