We weren’t so surprised at the announcement from RINO-Lefty Arlen Specter to leave the GOP and find friendlier waters with his Liberal buddies.

Specter is an opportunist and I was glad to see him leave and not surprised by his reasoning. His final act of RINO stupidity was voting for the $787 billion spending package advertised as economic stimulus.

“Well, I was sorry to disappoint many people. Frankly, I was disappointed that the Republican Party didn’t want me as their candidate,” Mr. Specter said on “Face the Nation.” “But as a matter of principle, I’m becoming much more comfortable with the Democrats’ approach.”

Now as a Democrat we find Specter having Joe Biden moments which are an embarrassment to himself and his new party. Seizing on the death of Jack Kemp in a crude attempt to score a rhetorical point against his erstwhile former party Specter became as distasteful in his opportunism as a politician can get.

“And one of the items that I’m working on, Bob [Schieffer], is funding for medical research.”

Mr. Specter continued: “If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.”

If Republicans killed Kemp by blocking cancer research, how is it that the research they blocked prolonged Specter’s life?

Moreover, if Specter really believes the Republicans are the party of cancer, wasn’t it despicable of him to have stayed in the GOP as long as he did? It can’t be that Kemp’s death sparked a Specter epiphany. When Specter changed parties, Kemp still had four days to live.

Specter’s delusion should be used against him during the next election cycle and hopefully some Pennsylvanian’s will decide Specter time to retire has come.

Between 1994 and 2006, when Republicans controlled Congress or the White House or both, NIH biomedical R&D spending more than doubled in real terms, jumping to $25 billion in 2003 from about $10 billion in the early 1990s. During the Bush years, it fell slightly after that, though holding relatively constant as a share of discretionary spending.

Innovation in America is what separates the US healthcare system from the world and Specter should not play politics with an important matter that his new found brethren wish to socialize.

Democrats are now hoping to import those same models state-side. Nationalized health care inevitably results in large government bureaucracies that try to contain costs by restricting access to new therapies by limiting or denying payment or even restricting what doctors are allowed to prescribe. Yet the freedom, innovation and quality of health systems are all closely meshed, and the tragedy of “universal” health care will be the medicines that are never developed at all.

Arlen Specter is the ultimate self-serving politician and the GOP needs to work on Conservative principles, not worry about losing more Congressional seats.

Sticking to principles of Conservatism, discussing the benefits and re-writing a “Contract with America and Conservatives” will do more to re-establish the party of Ronald Reagan than offering a “big-tent” filled with Liberal ideals.

Olympia Snowe (RINO-ME), Susan Collins (RINO-ME), Lindsey Graham (RINO-SC), John McCain (RINO-AZ) and others should be put on notice. The GOP cannot be a party of Liberals, a mirror image of the Left or a party of compromise when you abandon your principles for “bi-partisanship.”

RINOs, THE ENEMY WITHIN THE GOP. Indeed!