Word: mccains
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...leading approaches to covering the 45 million uninsured and reining in costs. One, which President Barack Obama is putting forward, would force more employers to offer coverage to their workers, with subsidies and other incentives to make it more affordable. The other, advocated by Republicans (including Senator John McCain in the recent presidential campaign), would take away some of the tax advantages that come with getting coverage at work and thereby put many Americans who are now covered by their employers into the marketplace on their own. The idea is that they would be the ones best equipped to decide...
...oversaw an unprecedented explosion of earmarks when they controlled Congress, resisted efforts by Obama and other Democrats to inject accountability into the earmark process, and even grabbed over 40% of the earmarks in the current bill, yet have the gall to blast Obama's cave-in? Even John McCain, the leading crusader against earmarks, who railed against Obama's acceptance of the spending bill on the Senate floor this week, made exceptions during his presidential campaign for earmarks for Israel and military housing, as well as a ferry service for an impoverished Alabama town he visited over the summer...
...often conflated with "pork." In fact, "pork" is often defined as earmarked spending. And sure, many of the controversial earmarks in the current budget bill do sound porky, like $332,500 for a school sidewalk in Franklin, Texas, or $75,000 for a Totally Teen Zone in Albany, Georgia. McCain has twittered snide comments about $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics ("quick peel me a grape"), $209,000 to improve blueberry production and efficiency in Georgia, $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa. But those earmarks sound porky because they sound wasteful, not because they were earmarked...
...true, as McCain pointed out during his unsuccessful effort to delete all the earmarks in the spending bill, that earmark abuses have landed politicians like former Republican congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham in prison. Those abuses were especially rampant when congressmen were permitted to slip earmarks into legislation without taking responsibility - non-earmarked earmarks, in a way - but Obama helped spearhead an effort to eliminate that practice after Democrats took back Congress. It is also true that earmarks can be a sneaky way for boondoggles to bypass hearings, public comment periods, cost-benefit analyses and other forms of scrutiny...
...like the Super Bowl. If your team isn't in it, you root for the team you hate less. That's McCain." - on his dislike for John McCain, The New York Times Magazine, July...