Remember earlier this year when the Abramoff scandal spawned urgent bipartisan calls for lobby and earmark reform legislation? Might wanna get ready to throw that, along with reinstatement of PAYGO rules and a minimum wage increase, in the tax-and-budget Do-Nothing congressional trash can.

Rebecca Carr of Cox Newspapers is reporting that West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd has also had an annonymous hold on S. 2590 in addition to Sen. Stevens. I'm immediately inclined to wonder: Is this characteristic of Senators in their 80's? Unlikely. Here's an explanation from Byrd's press spokesman Tom Gavin for the Senator's hold:

OMB Watch has been trying for the past year or so to connect the dots to expose the farce that is the administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Here's another great example: The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was reviewed under the PART survey in 2003 and given the highest rating of "effective." Some excerpts from the PART survey itself:

• [NCES] makes a unique contribution to knowledge about the conditions and outcomes of education in America.

It's official - the secret hold on S. 2590 is none other than Sen. Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens (R-AK). Sen. Stevens is the former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and all around Senate curmudgeon. What's interesting about the fact that Stevens put a hold on the bill is his rationale. According to Stevens' spokesman Aaron Saunders, the Senator is worried "that the bill would create more bureaucracy. He wants to see a cost-benefit analysis." Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK)