Sen. McConnell wrote the following response to the latest in a series of biased editorials from The Courier Journal.

There is always a danger in aping partisan press releases in an editorial, not the least of which is factual inaccuracy. Friday's editorial is a perfect example.

The editorial, much like a slew of recent press releases and talking points memos from a certain New York senator and liberal Washington, D.C., special-interest groups, claimed that Senate Republicans this year "set a modern-day record for blocking action, by forcing a 62nd cloture vote" (cloture is used to end debate and move forward on a bill).

But just because a liberal, out-of-state political group said it doesn't make it so. And a quick review of the facts exposes the truth behind the spin.

Of the 62 votes on cloture motions this year, half were votes where Republicans and Democrats joined together to move a bill forward. Four were party-line votes where Democrats voted to "block action on the bills." Four were unanimous, bipartisan votes. And two, from earlier this month, were Democrat filibusters of vital national security legislation: the Terrorist Surveillance Program and the McConnell-Stevens bill to fund U.S. troops in the field.

In other words, what liberal interest groups in Washington -- aided by editorial boards -- call Republican obstruction was in many cases a bipartisan effort to move vital legislation, as a brief call to my office or a quick visit to the Senate Web site would have made clear. But the editorial board has always seemed to prefer copying liberal press releases to doing its own research.

To be fair, some of this year's cloture votes did involve Republicans "blocking action." For example, when liberals in Washington tried to raise taxes, my fellow Republicans and I blocked action. When they tried to pull the rug out from under our troops in Iraq, a bipartisan group of us stopped that, too. And when the roll was called on a bill giving amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, I voted "no."

I also took action when liberals in Washington tried to use an energy bill to raise the price of gasoline and utility rates here in Kentucky. And when the Democrat majority in Congress tried to create a permanent, multi-billion-dollar tax hike in exchange for a one-year delay in the middle-class tax increase known as the AMT, Republicans said "no."

The bottom line is that the "record for blocking action" The Courier-Journal complains about has saved Kentuckians from spending more at the pump, paying higher electric bills, and from a very unpleasant surprise on April 15.

It is easy to understand the frustration of special-interest groups or The Courier -Journal editorial board when they are unable to raise taxes, cut funding for our troops, make it easier for terrorists to communicate, increase utility rates in Kentucky, and give amnesty to anyone who broke our immigration laws.

If I'm the source of their frustration because I won't make it easy for liberals in Washington to take more tax dollars out of Kentucky to fund bad policies and because I support funding for the troops, so be it.

But that frustration certainly doesn't excuse misleading, inaccurate editorials based on liberal complaints that are all too common in the editorial pages of this paper. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts." You might want to check yours the next time you cut and paste "research" from my political opposition.