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Coburn: GOP’s 2014 Candidates Must Come from ‘Real World’

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Breitbart News recently sat down with Oklahoma Senator Dr. Tom Coburn to get his thoughts on the fiscal cliff and what Republicans can do to win the 2014 midterm elections.

On November 15 Dr. Coburn gave a speech at the American Spectator’s Annual Dinner, addressing these issues. He called the current situation in America a “Valley Forge” moment for conservatives and suggested the GOP concentrate on a few points: truth, oversight, action, and accountability.

Dr. Coburn is famous for keeping an eye on wasteful spending by the government, but the majority of his colleagues ignore his reports. If the government took into consideration his reports and managed the waste instead of making excuses, the current financial mess would not be so difficult to overcome.

“Oversight isn’t very popular in Washington because politicians on both sides prefer to create new programs instead of looking at whether the programs we’ve already created are working,” said Dr. Coburn. “But I believe, oversight resonates with families because that’s how they live their lives every day. In the real world, people look at their budgets and make choices. In Washington, we make excuses, and defer choices to future generations.”

“The task before us is simple,” he explained. “Telling the truth, conducting oversight, taking action and holding politicians accountable will lead us out of our Valley Forge and on to victory.”

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Coburn Calls Out Senate Colleagues For Being Lazy, Biggest Waste in Government

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The Senate’s top waste-watcher says the federal government is bloated with extra spending — including in the halls of Congress itself, where he says senators and staffers are collecting salaries while failing to do very much work.

Twenty senators haven’t had a single amendment considered on the chamber floor this year, and some of the most powerful committees have all but taken the year off, said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican.

The damning critique of his colleagues is part of Mr. Coburn’s “Wastebook 2012,” the latest installment in what has become an annual list of 100 curious federal spending decisions that Congress and federal agencies make each year. The book will be released Tuesday.

Making the 2012 list are a $1.5 million grant to the University of Utah to study building a better computer gaming joystick, $100,000 to send a three-member American comedy troupe on a tour of India, and part of a $325,000 grant used to build a robotic squirrel, all to test whether it could scare a real snake.

The National Institutes of Health spent $939,771 on a study to discover that a male fruit fly, given the choice between a young female and an older female fly, chose the younger.

Read more from this story HERE.