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Spend Or Starve
...Boorish manners are one thing, but McCaskill's nastiness extends to deceptiveness regarding the financial crisis. Appearing on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, the senator contended that some of the spending in Congress' $789-billion-plus stimulus package "was makeup for a starvation diet under the Bush administration."

Starvation? Bruce Bartlett, who crafted economic policy for Jack Kemp and Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, wrote a book, titled "Impostor," charging the second Bush with unprecedented profligate spending.

The number of pork-barrel projects enacted approached 50,000 from 2001 to 2005 and cost $111 billion, Bartlett noted, citing Citizens Against Government Waste figures. By comparison, in the previous five years under Bill Clinton, there were fewer than 12,000 pork programs, costing $70 billion.

Bartlett's biggest indictment concerns the Bush expansion of Medicare to include a prescription drug benefit, the long-term cost of which was pegged at $18.2 trillion as of 2005, "equivalent to 1.9% of the gross domestic product forever." The Medicare trustees' most recent forecast of the program's costs is "$21.8 trillion, of which $10 trillion would occur during the first 75 years."

If that's a drastic diet, what would a well-fed Uncle Sam look like?...