Frank Wolf

Sometimes you just have to scream at the top of your lungs.  Given that it's currently very early in the morning and my beautiful and talented wife (The BTW) is still asleep, I'm going to post it here instead.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) likes everyone to think he's the ultimate fiscal conservative.  He routinely rails against earmarks, puts holds on bills that will spend money, and castigates his colleagues for doing things that spend federal dollars needlessly.

That's why I found this article in Roll Call so infuriating:

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) is one of the sponsors of the legislation that would create a budget commission to reduce the deficit. 

He's also my congressman and the person who over the weekend sent me an expensive four-page mailing that promotes his commission and his role in proposing it.

This is an expensive piece of propaganda.  It's four colors, printed on heavy, coated paper, complete with pictures and bleeds.  It states that it was "prepared, published, and mailed at taxpayer expense" to what appears to be a large purchased list.  I'm going to assume that he only sent it to people in his congressional district, but there's no way to know that.

This mailing would have been acceptable had Wolf used campaign funds or personal money to pay for it.  But using taxpayer dollars to ask people to give him credit for trying to reduce the spending of taxpayer dollars is totally inappropriate and utterly ridiculous.  The fact that he didn't realize this makes you question rather than admire his budget cutting credentials.