Political Quotes

“Madam President, today marks the 54th version of ``Waste of the Week''--54 times I have been down here in the Senate to highlight documented examples of waste, fraud, and abuse. When I first started this endeavor, I told my staff: I hope we can reach $100 billion or so--some target. Do you think there is that much waste, fraud, and abuse floating around through the Federal Government? Well, we hit that $100 billion a long time ago--I think about the 20th week--and we now have moved to a pretty staggering number, which is more than one-third of a trillion dollars of waste that has been documented by independent agencies of the government that are supporting us with information as to why this money should not have been spent or how it was wasted or lost through fraud or abuse. I have had a number of serious issues here that run into the billions of dollars that could easily be fixed. Some of them we started by pointing this out with legislation to try to fix these things, but it just keeps piling on here. So every once in a while, I throw in something so ridiculous, people will understand the fact that there may have been some benefit to that program--we don't understand what the benefit was--but surely these ridiculous examples of money spent, hard- earned tax money spent, are not used for this purpose. Tell me it is not true. Unfortunately, it is true. So today I am adding two more examples of something where people say: How can this be possible?…”