Although House Appropriations Chairman Obey and Senate Appropriations Chairman Byrd stripped the $124.2 billion supplemental war spending bill of just about every item that had been ridiculed by President Bush and Republicans in recent weeks, conservatives continue to lambaste the bill as bloated with home-state "pork."

Money for spinach handlers, peanut storage, Mormon cricket eradication, Christmas tree farmers, crop dusters, Louisiana rice farmers, live fish importers and various other items that had been spotlighted by GOP conservatives and lampooned in the media are gone. Before the final bill was completed, Obey told CongressDaily part of his strategy was to eliminate items in the bill that would give his critics the opportunity to "beat you over the head with a lie."

He pointed out that Republicans had successfully sold the $5 million fish importer provision to major media outlets as a handout for "tropical fish," when it actually would aid Great Lakes commercial fish farmers who were affected by the administration's decision last year to halt imports from Canada after a viral outbreak.

Nonetheless, Obey removed it. Even after appropriators scrubbed the bill, conservatives criticized items that remained, such as money to combat marijuana production on federal forest lands, help Klamath River salmon fishermen, deal with flooding in states outside the Gulf Coast region and help the Farm Service Agency process agriculture disaster assistance.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who persuaded the Senate to eliminate $2 million to establish an institute at the University of Vermont named after former Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., was narrowly defeated in his bid to strip the bill of $100 million for security at next year's presidential nominating conventions in Minneapolis and Denver.

Several presidential candidates in the Senate voted for Coburn's amendment, and the writing was on the wall -- the convention money was dropped in the final bill. "Congress shamefully continues to abuse its emergency spending rules," Coburn said in a statement. "However, I'm encouraged my colleagues acknowledged that the presidential conventions, which have happened every four years since 1832, are not an unforeseen emergency that deserved special funding in a war supplemental."

During his news conference today at Camp David with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Bush again criticized what he described as "spending that shouldn't belong in the bill in the first place. Maybe they're important issues, but ... spending issues ought to be debated in the normal course of business."