Sens. Snowe and Collins voted for a pork-laden emergency war funds appropriations bill on May 4 that includes such items as $700 million to move a railroad line in Mississippi that will mostly benefit the casino industry there. Some $300 million in Hurricane Katrina funds had recently been spent on that same rail line to restore it after having been damaged by Katrina and, now with this latest vote, that just-restored rail line will be ripped up, and a new one will be built in a different location.

Last year a “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska was approved by our Congress with a cost of $223 million. The bridge will replace a five-minute ferry ride and connect a town on the Alaska mainland with a population of 8,000 to the island of Gravina with a population of 50. That figures out to be approximately $4.5 million for each Gravina citizen.

It would be cheaper for our reckless-spending government to buy each Gravina citizen a $4 million yacht to cross the channel.

Our national debt has soared to $8.5 trillion, and last year just the interest that our government paid on the debt was $400 billion. And how did we pay that $400 billion? We borrowed it, of course.

The Republican Party has always considered itself the party of conservative spending, but in the last six years, with its astronomical deficit spending, it has become the party of borrow and squander.

Jim Bossie, Lewiston