Is there a worse public speaker in the Senate than Susan Collins (R-ME)? It must be the way she puts AN. EQUAL. EMPHAISIS. ON. EVERY. WORD. SHE. SPEAKS.

As if that weren’t painful enough, Collins’ latest news conference had her paired up with Sen. Joe “Lullaby” Lieberman (D-CT). This dynamic duo stole the show yesterday with *shocker* criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of Katrina.

As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, it was Collins’ pleasure to annouce the committee’s new best seller, “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared.” You heard right — according to the United States Senate, we’re still unprepared for a hurricance that hit last year. Actually, isn’t that pretty much par for the course for big government?

The big recommendation of the report is this: to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and replace it with “a stronger authority” called the National Preparedness and Response Authority (NPRA). So the Senate wants to fix a “bumbling bureaucracy” by creating an even larger bureaucracy; leave it to government to fix big government with bigger government.

Meanwhile, Collins’ Republican colleagues were hard at work drafting “solutions” to our nation’s “energy crisis.” The plan’s centerpiece involves mailing out $100 tax rebate checks to help taxpayers purchase gasoline. How does the Senate plan to offset tax revenue? According to Senator John Thune (R-SD), the legislation “would suspend a number of tax credits and royalty waivers received by oil corporations.”

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