McCaskill gets a Softball from Chris Matthews

Chris Matthews gives Claire McCaskill plenty of time to gather herself so she can answer the question that Senator Kirk Watson could not answer about Barack Obama's accomplishments in the Senate. Even leading up to the interview Chris Matthews seemed to stall to allow Senator McCaskill to form her answer (Let's not even point out that her only reason for showing up was to give this response). She came up with four answers:

Earmark Reform:

She said that Senator Barack Obama created legislation related to earmark reform. Porkbusters.com gives Senator Obama a 25 out of a possible 100. It rates Senators based on their support for earmark reform on 12 votes between 2005 and 2007. Senator Clinton had a rating of 16.66.

“Wounded Warriors” of Walter Reed:

Senator McCaskill introduced a bill along with Senator Obama to fix Walter Reed hospital. I enter a quote from the Washington Post below:

Seizing on an investigative report by The Washington Post's Dana Priest and Anne Hull, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) will introduce legislation next week to require more frequent inspections of hospitals providing treatment to active-duty military personnel.

Co-partison proposal on finding Nukes:

McCaskall nearly makes a misstatement when she says that Barack Obama, along with Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana proposed an amendment to expand the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to include conventional weapons along with finding and dismantalling nuclear weapons in former Soviet blocks. The Nunn-Lugar act of 1991 had already created the CTRP with one of the goals being dismantalling nuclear weapons well before Barack Obama ever entered the United States Senate. McCaskall made it sound as if Obama had proposed the law that was already in place. The most credit that could be given with regard to nuclear weapons is that the new proposal made the program interdict weapons of mass destruction shipped by sea.
I consider it to be an exaggeration when Obama and Lugar said shoulder-fired missiles, abandoned land mines and other weapons could be as dangerous as a nuclear threat.

Cohort Spending

I'm either too tired or too ignorant to know what she was talking about here. I know Obama did a lot of work on ethics reform and I wonder if it has something to do with nepotism in Washington, but I'll have to get back to it if I ever figure it out.

I hope I can get a video of McCaskill's appearance on Hardball today so I can go over what she said.