Filibuster by Liberals = John Bolton's Resignation
(Reuters)Despite the support of a strong bipartisan majority of senators, Ambassador Bolton's confirmation was blocked by a Democrat filibuster, and this is a clear example of the breakdown in the Senate confirmation process," Perino said.
Bush planned to meet Bolton in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon
DEMOCRATS CONTINUE TO PLAY POLITICS AND WE ARE LOSING A GREAT MAN.
posted by Michele @ 10:34 AM
24 Comments:
Is it just Democrats "playing politics" that you're against, or is it the "playing of politics" in general that you're against?
Actually I'm for giving a good man a chance to be confirmed.
Can you list any reasons why he shouldn't?
the only one I see is Chaffee does not like the fact that he was appointed by Bush.
I don't care if he serves or not. I don't know if he's a good man or not. My point is that you like to bitch about the Dems "playing politics", but the GOP has have embarassingly dishonorable since they took power in 2000. The complete lack of civility towards the Dems since then would make the Founding Fathers puke. You, on the other hand, would look the other way since the GOP can get away with anything in your eyes.
Is that not fair? I can post a nice article full of examples if you'd like.
I really need to read my posts before I publish. That one sentence should read, "but the GOP has been embarassingly dishonorable...".
I'm still waiting, Maddie. Is it just the Dem's "playing of politics" that you don't like, or do the Republicans sicken you, as well? I hope the Dems do not follow the example given by the GOP since 2000. I'm sure you'd bitch non-stop if they behaved your party did. Just ask and the examples will be provided.
LOL,
We all play politics.....
you, me, republicans, democrats
Some just play more fair than others. :)
And ya,,,,,,,I speak out for what I believe. You always want to lump me with the Bushies....... There are things I like about Bush and things I totally disagree with...and if you read my entire blog, you would see, that I am not a Cheerleader for George Bush.
However, he is our President for the time being, and I believe showing a united front during a time of war...is best for the country.
I would like to see that article full of examples........
I'll post the entire article for you to read. It's clearly written by someone embittered and partisan, but the facts are correct, even if the tone is overboard. I suggest you take notice of the way that the GOP excluded the Dems at every turn, especially when considering how you'd like the GOP to be treated when the Dems take control.
Also, I might note that the reason I continue to batter you is to get you to stop giving blind support to the GOP. You like to say you’re not a Bushie, but he has screwed things up so badly mainly because he received no oversight from the GOP-led Congress, and you continually defend the GOP at every turn. On the other hand, you take every jab you can at the Dems while they have had literally no power in DC. Take this blog topic, for example. You claim that the Dems are “playing politics” again, as if you are against it. So when I take you to task about the GOP, you claim that everybody plays politics, as if it doesn’t matter. Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either you hold everyone accountable or you don’t. It takes an unbelievable amount of gall to accuse the Dems of anything after the last six years of strong handing by the GOP. Plus, I’ve read what you say about Dems and liberals in here and on the GOP blog, and you are not even close to even handed. To hear you tell the story, you’d think the Dems are single handedly ruining the world and that they WANT to do so. That is so ridiculous it makes me cringe, especially considering how you defend the policies of the people who have gotten us into the mess that we are currently in.
I’m not a Democrat. I hate nearly everybody in office, but I love this country. If you loved this country more than your precious party you would understand my rage. Until then, I will haunt your blog for good.
The Worst Congress Ever
How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and perverts -- in five easy steps
By MATT TAIBBI
There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?
These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.
To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way through even the direst political crises is something we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.
But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.
"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles -- and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."
The end result is a Congress that has hijacked the national treasury, frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal government in a private auction. It all happened before our very eyes. In case you missed it, here's how they did it -- in five easy steps:
STEP ONE
RULE BY CABAL
If you want to get a sense of how Congress has changed under GOP control, just cruise the basement hallways of storied congressional office buildings like Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Here, in the minority offices for the various congressional committees, you will inevitably find exactly the same character -- a Democratic staffer in rumpled khakis staring blankly off into space, nothing but a single lonely "Landscapes of Monticello" calendar on his wall, his eyes wide and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape victim. His skin is as white as the belly of a fish; he hasn't seen the sun in seven years.
It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a systematic effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in creating or refining legislation but to humiliate them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces. Washington was once a chummy fraternity in which members of both parties golfed together, played in the same pickup basketball games, probably even shared the same mistresses. Now it is a one-party town -- and congressional business is conducted accordingly, as though the half of the country that the Democrats represent simply does not exist.
American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule by consensus -- so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft -- a fact the Republicans don't even bother to conceal.
"I remember one incident very clearly -- I think it was 2001," says Winslow Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican staffer in the Senate. "I was working for [New Mexico Republican] Pete Domenici at the time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and the Democrats were debating what the final result would be. And my boss gets up and he says, 'Why are you saying this? You're not even going to be in the room when the decisions are made.' Just said it right out in the open."
Wheeler's very career is a symbol of a bipartisan age long passed into the history books; he is the last staffer to have served in the offices of a Republican and a Democrat at the same time, having once worked for both Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Arkansas Democrat David Pryor simultaneously. Today, those Democratic staffers trapped in the basement laugh at the idea that such a thing could ever happen again. These days, they consider themselves lucky if they manage to hold a single hearing on a bill before Rove's well-oiled legislative machine delivers it up for Bush's signature.
The GOP's "take that, bitch" approach to governing has been taken to the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.
"Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good turnout anyway."
Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.
"He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.
For similarly petulant moves by a committee chair, one need look no further than the Ways and Means Committee, where Rep. Bill Thomas -- a pugnacious Californian with an enviable ego who was caught having an affair with a pharmaceutical lobbyist -- enjoys a reputation rivaling that of the rotund Sensenbrenner. The lowlight of his reign took place just before midnight on July 17th, 2003, when Thomas dumped a "substitute" pension bill on Democrats -- one that they had never read -- and informed them they would be voting on it the next morning. Infuriated, Democrats stalled by demanding that the bill be read out line by line while they recessed to a side room to confer. But Thomas wanted to move forward -- so he called the Capitol police to evict the Democrats.
Thomas is also notorious for excluding Democrats from the conference hearings needed to iron out the differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. According to the rules, conferences have to include at least one public, open meeting. But in the Bush years, Republicans have managed the conference issue with some of the most mind-blowingly juvenile behavior seen in any parliament west of the Russian Duma after happy hour. GOP chairmen routinely call a meeting, bring the press in for a photo op and then promptly shut the proceedings down. "Take a picture, wait five minutes, gavel it out -- all for show" is how one Democratic staffer described the process. Then, amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the meeting. "More often than not, we're trying to figure out where the conference is," says one House aide.
In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous "Land Shark" skit from Saturday Night Live, with everyone hiding behind the door afraid to make a sound. "Rangel was the land shark, I guess," the aide jokes. But the real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the door. "This meeting," he informed Rangel, "is only open to the coalition of the willing."
Republican rudeness and bluster make for funny stories, but the phenomenon has serious consequences. The collegial atmosphere that once prevailed helped Congress form a sense of collective identity that it needed to fulfill its constitutional role as a check on the power of the other two branches of government. It also enabled Congress to pass legislation with a wide mandate, legislation that had been negotiated between the leaders of both parties. For this reason Republican and Democratic leaders traditionally maintained cordial relationships with each other -- the model being the collegiality between House Speaker Nicholas Longworth and Minority Leader John Nance Garner in the 1920s. The two used to hold daily meetings over drinks and even rode to work together.
Although cooperation between the two parties has ebbed and flowed over the years, historians note that Congress has taken strong bipartisan action in virtually every administration. It was Sen. Harry Truman who instigated investigations of wartime profiteering under FDR, and Republicans Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker Jr. played pivotal roles on the Senate Watergate Committee that nearly led to Nixon's impeachment.
But those days are gone. "We haven't seen any congressional investigations like this during the last six years," says David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale who has studied Congress for four decades. "These days, Congress doesn't seem to be capable of doing this sort of thing. Too much nasty partisanship."
One of the most depressing examples of one-party rule is the Patriot Act. The measure was originally crafted in classic bipartisan fashion in the Judiciary Committee, where it passed by a vote of thirty-six to zero, with famed liberals like Barney Frank and Jerrold Nadler saying aye. But when the bill was sent to the Rules Committee, the Republicans simply chucked the approved bill and replaced it with a new, far more repressive version, apparently written at the direction of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
"They just rewrote the whole bill," says Rep. James McGovern, a minority member of the Rules Committee. "All that committee work was just for show."
To ensure that Democrats can't alter any of the last-minute changes, Republicans have overseen a monstrous increase in the number of "closed" rules -- bills that go to the floor for a vote without any possibility of amendment. This tactic undercuts the very essence of democracy: In a bicameral system, allowing bills to be debated openly is the only way that the minority can have a real impact, by offering amendments to legislation drafted by the majority.
In 1977, when Democrats held a majority in the House, eighty-five percent of all bills were open to amendment. But by 1994, the last year Democrats ran the House, that number had dropped to thirty percent -- and Republicans were seriously pissed. "You know what the closed rule means," Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida thundered on the House floor. "It means no discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly undemocratic." When Republicans took control of the House, they vowed to throw off the gag rules imposed by Democrats. On opening day of the 104th Congress, then-Rules Committee chairman Gerald Solomon announced his intention to institute free debate on the floor. "Instead of having seventy percent closed rules," he declared, "we are going to have seventy percent open and unrestricted rules."
How has Solomon fared? Of the 111 rules introduced in the first session of this Congress, only twelve were open. Of those, eleven were appropriations bills, which are traditionally open. That left just one open vote -- H. Res. 255, the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of 2005.
In the second session of this Congress? Not a single open rule, outside of appropriation votes. Under the Republicans, amendable bills have been a genuine Washington rarity, the upside-down eight-leafed clover of legislative politics.
When bills do make it to the floor for a vote, the debate generally resembles what one House aide calls "preordained Kabuki." Republican leaders in the Bush era have mastered a new congressional innovation: the one-vote victory. Rather than seeking broad consensus, the leadership cooks up some hideously expensive, favor-laden boondoggle and then scales it back bit by bit. Once they're in striking range, they send the fucker to the floor and beat in the brains of the fence-sitters with threats and favors until enough members cave in and pass the damn thing. It is, in essence, a legislative microcosm of the electoral strategy that Karl Rove has employed to such devastating effect.
A classic example was the vote for the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the union-smashing, free-trade monstrosity passed in 2005. As has often been the case in the past six years, the vote was held late at night, away from the prying eyes of the public, who might be horrified by what they see. Thanks to such tactics, the 109th is known as the "Dracula" Congress: Twenty bills have been brought to a vote between midnight and 7 a.m.
CAFTA actually went to vote early -- at 11:02 p.m. When the usual fifteen-minute voting period expired, the nays were up, 180 to 175. Republicans then held the vote open for another forty-seven minutes while GOP leaders cruised the aisles like the family elders from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, frantically chopping at the legs and arms of Republicans who opposed the measure. They even roused the president out of bed to help kick ass for the vote, passing a cell phone with Bush on the line around the House cloakroom like a bong. Rep. Robin Hayes of North Carolina was approached by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who told him, "Negotiations are open. Put on the table the things that your district and people need and we'll get them." After receiving assurances that the administration would help textile manufacturers in his home state by restricting the flow of cheap Chinese imports, Hayes switched his vote to yea. CAFTA ultimately passed by two votes at 12:03 a.m.
Closed rules, shipwrecked bills, secret negotiations, one-vote victories. The result of all this is a Congress where there is little or no open debate and virtually no votes are left to chance; all the important decisions are made in backroom deals, and what you see on C-Span is just empty theater, the world's most expensive trained-dolphin act. The constant here is a political strategy of conducting congressional business with as little outside input as possible, rejecting the essentially conservative tradition of rule-by-consensus in favor of a more revolutionary strategy of rule by cabal.
"This Congress has thrown caution to the wind," says Turley, the constitutional scholar. "They have developed rules that are an abuse of majority power. Keeping votes open by freezing the clock, barring minority senators from negotiations on important conference issues -- it is a record that the Republicans should now dread. One of the concerns that Republicans have about losing Congress is that they will have to live under the practices and rules they have created. The abuses that served them in the majority could come back to haunt them in the minority."
STEP TWO
WORK AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE -- AND SCREW UP WHAT LITTLE YOU DO
It's Thursday evening, September 28th, and the Senate is putting the finishing touches on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, colloquially known as the "torture bill." It's a law even Stalin would admire, one that throws habeas corpus in the trash, legalizes a vast array of savage interrogation techniques and generally turns the president of the United States into a kind of turbocharged Yoruba witch doctor, with nearly unlimited snatching powers. The bill is a fall-from-Eden moment in American history, a potentially disastrous step toward authoritarianism -- but what is most disturbing about it, beyond the fact that it's happening, is that the senators are hurrying to get it done.
In addition to ending generations of bipartisanship and instituting one-party rule, our national legislators in the Bush years are guilty of something even more fundamental: They suck at their jobs.
They don't work many days, don't pass many laws, and the few laws they're forced to pass, they pass late. In fact, in every year that Bush has been president, Congress has failed to pass more than three of the eleven annual appropriations bills on time.
That figures into tonight's problems. At this very moment, as the torture bill goes to a vote, there are only a few days left until the beginning of the fiscal year -- and not one appropriations bill has been passed so far. That's why these assholes are hurrying to bag this torture bill: They want to finish in time to squeeze in a measly two hours of debate tonight on the half-trillion-dollar defense-appropriations bill they've blown off until now. The plan is to then wrap things up tomorrow before splitting Washington for a month of real work, i.e., campaigning.
Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont comments on this rush to torture during the final, frenzied debate. "Over 200 years of jurisprudence in this country," Leahy pleads, "and following an hour of debate, we get rid of it?"
Yawns, chatter, a few sets of rolling eyes -- yeah, whatever, Pat. An hour later, the torture bill is law. Two hours after that, the diminutive chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Sen. Ted Stevens, reads off the summary of the military-spending bill to a mostly empty hall; since the members all need their sleep and most have left early, the "debate" on the biggest spending bill of the year is conducted before a largely phantom audience.
"Mr. President," Stevens begins, eyeing the few members present. "There are only four days left in the fiscal year. The 2007 defense appropriations conference report must be signed into law by the president before Saturday at midnight. . . ."
Watching Ted Stevens spend half a trillion dollars is like watching a junkie pull a belt around his biceps with his teeth. You get the sense he could do it just as fast in the dark. When he finishes his summary -- $436 billion in defense spending, including $70 billion for the Iraq "emergency" -- he fucks off and leaves the hall. A few minutes later, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma -- one of the so-called honest Republicans who has clashed with his own party's leadership on spending issues -- appears in the hall and whines to the empty room about all the lavish pork projects and sheer unadulterated waste jammed into the bill. But aside from a bored-looking John Cornyn of Texas, who is acting as president pro tempore, and a couple of giggling, suit-clad pages, there is no one in the hall to listen to him.
In the Sixties and Seventies, Congress met an average of 162 days a year. In the Eighties and Nineties, the average went down to 139 days. This year, the second session of the 109th Congress will set the all-time record for fewest days worked by a U.S. Congress: ninety-three. That means that House members will collect their $165,000 paychecks for only three months of actual work.
What this means is that the current Congress will not only beat but shatter the record for laziness set by the notorious "Do-Nothing" Congress of 1948, which met for a combined 252 days between the House and the Senate. This Congress -- the Do-Even-Less Congress -- met for 218 days, just over half a year, between the House and the Senate combined.
And even those numbers don't come close to telling the full story. Those who actually work on the Hill will tell you that a great many of those "workdays" were shameless mail-ins, half-days at best. Congress has arranged things now so that the typical workweek on the Hill begins late on Tuesday and ends just after noon on Thursday, to give members time to go home for the four-day weekend. This is borne out in the numbers: On nine of its "workdays" this year, the House held not a single vote -- meeting for less than eleven minutes. The Senate managed to top the House's feat, pulling off three workdays this year that lasted less than one minute. All told, a full fifteen percent of the Senate's workdays lasted less than four hours. Figuring for half-days, in fact, the 109th Congress probably worked almost two months less than that "Do-Nothing" Congress.
Congressional laziness comes at a high price. By leaving so many appropriations bills unpassed by the beginning of the new fiscal year, Congress forces big chunks of the government to rely on "continuing resolutions" for their funding. Why is this a problem? Because under congressional rules, CRs are funded at the lowest of three levels: the level approved by the House, the level approved by the Senate or the level approved from the previous year. Thanks to wide discrepancies between House and Senate appropriations for social programming, CRs effectively operate as a backdoor way to slash social programs. It's also a nice way for congressmen to get around having to pay for expensive-ass programs they voted for, like No Child Left Behind and some of the other terminally underfunded boondoggles of the Bush years.
"The whole point of passing appropriations bills is that Congress is supposed to make small increases in programs to account for things like the increase in population," says Adam Hughes, director of federal fiscal policy for OMB Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "It's their main job." Instead, he says, the reliance on CRs "leaves programs underfunded."
Instead of dealing with its chief constitutional duty -- approving all government spending -- Congress devotes its time to dumb bullshit. "This Congress spent a week and a half debating Terri Schiavo -- it never made appropriations a priority," says Hughes. In fact, Congress leaves itself so little time to pass the real appropriations bills that it winds up rolling them all into one giant monstrosity known as an Omnibus bill and passing it with little or no debate. Rolling eight-elevenths of all federal spending into a single bill that hits the floor a day or two before the fiscal year ends does not leave much room to check the fine print. "It allows a lot more leeway for fiscal irresponsibility," says Hughes.
A few years ago, when Democratic staffers in the Senate were frantically poring over a massive Omnibus bill they had been handed the night before the scheduled vote, they discovered a tiny provision that had not been in any of the previous versions. The item would have given senators on the Appropriations Committee access to the private records of any taxpayer -- essentially endowing a few selected hacks in the Senate with the license to snoop into the private financial information of all Americans.
"We were like, 'What the hell is this?' ?says one Democratic aide familiar with the incident. "It was the most egregious thing imaginable. It was just lucky we caught them."
STEP THREE
LET THE PRESIDENT DO WHATEVER HE WANTS
The constitution is very clear on the responsibility of Congress to serve as a check on the excesses of the executive branch. The House and Senate, after all, are supposed to pass all laws -- the president is simply supposed to execute them. Over the years, despite some ups and downs, Congress has been fairly consistent in upholding this fundamental responsibility, regardless of which party controlled the legislative branch. Elected representatives saw themselves as beholden not to their own party or the president but to the institution of Congress itself. The model of congressional independence was Sen. William Fulbright, who took on McCarthy, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon with equal vigor during the course of his long career.
"Fulbright behaved the same way with Nixon as he did with Johnson," says Wheeler, the former Senate aide who worked on both sides of the aisle. "You wouldn't see that today."
In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully -- but when George Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in Congress -- and only then if he did it during a nationally televised State of the Union address and the babies were from Pennsylvania, where Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was running ten points behind in an election year.
The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct, reviewing more than 2 million pages of government documents.
Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George Bush took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the number of open rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of appropriations bills passed on time.
And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35 million investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer funds spent, when independent counsels are taken into account, was more than $150 million. Included in that number was $2.2 million to investigate former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about improper payments he made to a mistress. In contrast, today's Congress spent barely half a million dollars investigating the outright fraud and government bungling that followed Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in American history.
"Oversight is one of the most important functions of Congress -- perhaps more important than legislating," says Rep. Henry Waxman. "And the Republicans have completely failed at it. I think they decided that they were going to be good Republicans first and good legislators second."
As the ranking minority member of the Government Reform Committee, Waxman has earned a reputation as the chief Democratic muckraker, obsessively cranking out reports on official misconduct and incompetence. Among them is a lengthy document detailing all of the wrongdoing by the Bush administration that should have been investigated -- and would have been, in any other era. The litany of fishy behavior left uninvestigated in the Bush years includes the manipulation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA status, the award of Halliburton contracts, the White House response to Katrina, secret NSA wiretaps, Dick Cheney's energy task force, the withholding of Medicare cost estimates, the administration's politicization of science, contract abuses at Homeland Security and lobbyist influence at the EPA.
Waxman notes that the failure to investigate these issues has actually hurt the president, leaving potentially fatal flaws in his policies unexamined even by those in his own party. Without proper congressional oversight, small disasters like the misuse of Iraq intelligence have turned into huge, festering, unsolvable fiascoes like the Iraq occupation. Republicans in Congress who stonewalled investigations of the administration "thought they were doing Bush a favor," says Waxman. "But they did him the biggest disservice of all."
Congress has repeatedly refused to look at any aspect of the war. In 2003, Republicans refused to allow a vote on a bill introduced by Waxman that would have established an independent commission to review the false claims Bush made in asking Congress to declare war on Iraq. That same year, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, refused to hold hearings on whether the administration had forged evidence of the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Iraq. A year later the chair of the Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, refused to hold hearings on new evidence casting doubt on the "nuclear tubes" cited by the Bush administration before the war. Sen. Pat Roberts, who pledged to issue a Senate Intelligence Committee report after the 2004 election on whether the Bush administration had misled the public before the invasion, changed his mind after the president won re-election. "I think it would be a monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any further," Roberts said.
Sensenbrenner has done his bit to squelch any debate over Iraq. He refused a request by John Conyers and more than fifty other Democrats for hearings on the famed "Downing Street Memo," the internal British document that stated that Bush had "fixed" the intelligence about the war, and he was one of three committee chairs who rejected requests for hearings on the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Despite an international uproar over Abu Ghraib, Congress spent only twelve hours on hearings on the issue. During the Clinton administration, by contrast, the Republican Congress spent 140 hours investigating the president's alleged misuse of his Christmas-card greeting list.
"You talk to many Republicans in Congress privately, and they will tell you how appalled they are by the administration's diminishment of civil liberties and the constant effort to keep fear alive," says Turley, who testified as a constitutional scholar in favor of the Clinton impeachment. "Yet those same members slavishly vote with the White House. What's most alarming about the 109th has been the massive erosion of authority in Congress. There has always been partisanship, but this is different. Members have become robotic in the way they vote."
Perhaps the most classic example of failed oversight in the Bush era came in a little-publicized hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee held on February 13th, 2003 -- just weeks before the invasion of Iraq. The hearing offered senators a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and top Pentagon officials on a wide variety of matters, including the fairly important question of whether they even had a fucking plan for the open-ended occupation of a gigantic hostile foreign population halfway around the planet. This was the biggest bite that Congress would have at the Iraq apple before the war, and given the gravity of the issue, it should have been a beast of a hearing.
But it wasn't to be. In a meeting that lasted two hours and fifty-three minutes, only one question was asked about the military's readiness on the eve of the invasion. Sen. John Warner, the committee's venerable and powerful chairman, asked Gen. Richard Myers if the U.S. was ready to fight simultaneously in both Iraq and North Korea, if necessary.
Myers answered, "Absolutely."
And that was it. The entire exchange lasted fifteen seconds. The rest of the session followed a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched a hearing on C-Span: The members, when they weren't reading or chatting with one another, used their time with witnesses almost exclusively to address parochial concerns revolving around pork projects in their own districts. Warner set the tone in his opening remarks; after announcing that U.S. troops preparing to invade Iraq could count on his committee's "strongest support," the senator from Virginia quickly turned to the question of how the war would affect the budget for Navy shipbuilding, which, he said, was not increasing "as much as we wish." Not that there's a huge Navy shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, or anything.
Other senators followed suit. Daniel Akaka was relatively uninterested in Iraq but asked about reports that Korea might have a missile that could reach his home state of Hawaii. David Pryor of Arkansas used his time to tout the wonders of military bases in Little Rock and Pine Bluff. When the senators weren't eating up their allotted time in this fashion, they were usually currying favor with the generals. Warner himself nicely encapsulated the obsequious tone of the session when he complimented Rumsfeld for having his shit so together on the war.
"I think your response reflects that we have given a good deal of consideration," Warner said. "That we have clear plans in place and are ready to proceed." We all know how that turned out.
STEP FOUR
SPEND, SPEND, SPEND
There is a simple reason that members of Congress don't waste their time providing any oversight of the executive branch: There's nothing in it for them. "What they've all figured out is that there's no political payoff in oversight," says Wheeler, the former congressional staffer. "But there's a big payoff in pork."
When one considers that Congress has forsaken hearings and debate, conspired to work only three months a year, completely ditched its constitutional mandate to provide oversight and passed very little in the way of meaningful legislation, the question arises: What do they do?
The answer is easy: They spend. When Bill Clinton left office, the nation had a budget surplus of $236 billion. Today, thanks to Congress, the budget is $296 billion in the hole. This year, more than sixty-five percent of all the money borrowed in the entire world will be borrowed by America, a statistic fueled by the speed-junkie spending habits of our supposedly "fiscally conservative" Congress. It took forty-two presidents before George W. Bush to borrow $1 trillion; under Bush, Congress has more than doubled that number in six years. And more often than not, we are borrowing from countries the sane among us would prefer not to be indebted to: The U.S. shells out $77 billion a year in interest to foreign creditors, including payment on the $300 billion we currently owe China.
What do they spend that money on? In the age of Jack Abramoff, that is an ugly question to even contemplate. But let's take just one bill, the so-called energy bill, a big, hairy, favor-laden bitch of a law that started out as the wet dream of Dick Cheney's energy task force and spent four long years leaving grease-tracks on every set of palms in the Capitol before finally becoming law in 2005.
Like a lot of laws in the Bush era, it was crafted with virtually no input from the Democrats, who were excluded from the conference process. And during the course of the bill's gestation period we were made aware that many of its provisions were more or less openly for sale, as in the case of a small electric utility from Kansas called Westar Energy.
Westar wanted a provision favorable to its business inserted in the bill -- and in an internal company memo, it acknowledged that members of Congress had requested Westar donate money to their campaigns in exchange for the provision. The members included former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin and current Energy and Commerce chairman Joe Barton of Texas. "They have made this request in lieu of contributions made to their own campaigns," the memo noted. The total amount of Westar's contributions was $58,200.
Keep in mind, that number -- fifty-eight grand -- was for a single favor. The energy bill was loaded with them. Between 2001 and the passage of the bill, energy companies donated $115 million to federal politicians, with seventy-five percent of the money going to Republicans. When the bill finally passed, it contained $6 billion in subsidies for the oil industry, much of which was funneled through a company with ties to Majority Leader Tom DeLay. It included an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act for companies that use a methane-drilling technique called "hydraulic fracturing" -- one of the widest practitioners of which is Halliburton. And it included billions in subsidies for the construction of new coal plants and billions more in loan guarantees to enable the coal and nuclear industries to borrow money at bargain-basement interest rates.
Favors for campaign contributors, exemptions for polluters, shifting the costs of private projects on to the public -- these are the specialties of this Congress. They seldom miss an opportunity to impoverish the states we live in and up the bottom line of their campaign contributors. All this time -- while Congress did nothing about Iraq, Katrina, wiretapping, Mark Foley's boy-madness or anything else of import -- it has been all about pork, all about political favors, all about budget "earmarks" set aside for expensive and often useless projects in their own districts. In 2000, Congress passed 6,073 earmarks; by 2005, that number had risen to 15,877. They got better at it every year. It's the one thing they're good at.
Even worse, this may well be the first Congress ever to lose control of the government's finances. For the past six years, it has essentially been writing checks without keeping an eye on its balance. When you do that, unpleasant notices eventually start appearing in the mail. In 2003, the inspector general of the Defense Department reported to Congress that the military's financial-management systems did not comply with "generally accepted accounting principles" and that the department "cannot currently provide adequate evidence supporting various material amounts on the financial statements."
Translation: The Defense Department can no longer account for its money. "It essentially can't be audited," says Wheeler, the former congressional staffer. "And nobody did anything about it. That's the job of Congress, but they don't care anymore."
So not only does Congress not care what intelligence was used to get into the war, what the plan was supposed to be once we got there, what goes on in military prisons in Iraq and elsewhere, how military contracts are being given away and to whom -- it doesn't even give a shit what happens to the half-trillion bucks it throws at the military every year.
Not to say, of course, that this Congress hasn't made an effort to reform itself. In the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal, and following a public uproar over the widespread abuse of earmarks, both the House and the Senate passed their own versions of an earmark reform bill this year. But when the two chambers couldn't agree on a final version, the House was left to pass its own watered-down measure in the waning days of the most recent session. This pathetically, almost historically half-assed attempt at reforming corruption should tell you all you need to know about the current Congress.
The House rule will force legislators to attach their names to all earmarks. Well, not all earmarks. Actually, the new rule applies only to nonfederal funding -- money for local governments, nonprofits and universities. And the rule will remain in effect only for the remainder of this congressional year -- in other words, for the few remaining days of business after lawmakers return to Washington following the election season. After that, it's back to business as usual next year.
That is what passes for "corruption reform" in this Congress -- forcing lawmakers to put their names on a tiny fraction of all earmarks. For a couple of days.
STEP FIVE
LINE YOUR OWN POCKETS
Anyone who wants to get a feel for the kinds of beasts that have been roaming the grounds of the congressional zoo in the past six years need only look at the deranged, handwritten letter that convicted bribe-taker and GOP ex-congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham recently sent from prison to Marcus Stern, the reporter who helped bust him. In it, Cunningham -- who was convicted last year of taking $2.4 million in cash, rugs, furniture and jewelry from a defense contractor called MZM -- bitches out Stern in the broken, half-literate penmanship of a six-year-old put in time-out.
"Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them Along with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life,"
Cunningham wrote. "I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I made some decissions [sic] Ill be sorry for the rest of my life."
The amazing thing about Cunningham's letter is not his utter lack of remorse, or his insistence on blaming defense contractor Mitchell Wade for ratting him out ("90% of what has happed [sic] is Wade," he writes), but his frantic, almost epic battle with the English language. It is clear that the same Congress that put a drooling child-chaser like Mark Foley in charge of a House caucus on child exploitation also named Cunningham, a man who can barely write his own name in the ground with a stick, to a similarly appropriate position. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence:
"As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you have & will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of the Year...hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border security, Megans law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill...and every time you wanted an expert on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you write About how I died."
How liablest you have & will be? What the fuck does that even mean? This guy sat on the Appropriations Committee for years -- no wonder Congress couldn't pass any spending bills!
This is Congress in the Bush years, in a nutshell -- a guy who takes $2 million in bribes from a contractor, whooping it up in turtlenecks and pajama bottoms with young women on a contractor-provided yacht named after himself (the "Duke-Stir"), and not only is he shocked when he's caught, he's too dumb to even understand that he's been guilty of anything.
This kind of appalling moral blindness, a sort of high-functioning, sociopathic stupidity, has been a consistent characteristic of the numerous Republicans indicted during the Bush era. Like all revolutionaries, they seem to feel entitled to break rules in the name of whatever the hell it is they think they're doing. And when caught breaking said rules with wads of cash spilling out of their pockets, they appear genuinely indignant at accusations of wrongdoing. Former House Majority Leader and brazen fuckhead Tom DeLay, after finally being indicted for money laundering, seemed amazed that anyone would bring him into court.
"I have done nothing wrong," he declared. "I have violated no law, no regulation, no rule of the House." Unless, of course, you count the charges against him for conspiring to inject illegal contributions into state elections in Texas "with the intent that a felony be committed."
It was the same when Ohio's officious jackass of a (soon-to-be-ex) Congressman Bob Ney finally went down for accepting $170,000 in trips from Abramoff in exchange for various favors. Even as the evidence piled high, Ney denied any wrongdoing. When he finally did plead guilty, he blamed the sauce. "A dependence on alcohol has been a problem for me," he said.
Abramoff, incidentally, was another Republican with a curious inability to admit wrongdoing even after conviction; even now he confesses only to trying too hard to "save the world." But everything we know about Abramoff suggests that Congress has embarked on a never-ending party, a wild daisy-chain of golf junkets, skybox tickets and casino trips. Money is everywhere and guys like Abramoff found ways to get it to guys like Ney, who made the important discovery that even a small entry in the Congressional Record can get you a tee time at St. Andrews.
Although Ney is so far the only congressman to win an all-expenses trip to prison as a result of his relationship with Abramoff, nearly a dozen other House Republicans are known to have done favors for him. Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana, who accepted some $36,000 from Abramoff-connected donors, helped prevent the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians from opening a casino that would have competed with Abramoff's clients. Rep. Deborah Pryce, who sent a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton opposing the Jena casino, received $8,000 from the Abramoff money machine. Rep. John Doolittle, whose wife was hired to work for Abramoff's sham charity, also intervened on behalf of the lobbyist's clients.
Then there was DeLay and his fellow Texan, Rep. Pete Sessions, who did Abramoff's bidding after accepting gifts and junkets. So much energy devoted to smarmy little casino disputes at a time when the country was careening toward disaster in Iraq: no time for oversight but plenty of time for golf.
For those who didn't want to go the black-bag route, there was always the legal jackpot. Billy Tauzin scarcely waited a week after leaving office to start a $2 million-a-year job running PhRMA, the group that helped him push through a bill prohibiting the government from negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. Tauzin also became the all-time poster boy for pork absurdity when a "greenbonds initiative" crafted in his Energy and Commerce Committee turned out to be a subsidy to build a Hooters in his home state of Louisiana.
The greed and laziness of the 109th Congress has reached such epic proportions that it has finally started to piss off the public. In an April poll by CBS News, fully two-thirds of those surveyed said that Congress has achieved "less than it usually does during a typical two-year period." A recent Pew poll found that the chief concerns that occupy Congress -- gay marriage and the inheritance tax -- are near the bottom of the public's list of worries. Those at the top -- education, health care, Iraq and Social Security -- were mostly blown off by Congress. Even a Fox News poll found that fifty-three percent of voters say Congress isn't "working on issues important to most Americans."
One could go on and on about the scandals and failures of the past six years; to document them all would take . . . well, it would take more than ninety-three fucking days, that's for sure. But you can boil the whole sordid mess down to a few basic concepts. Sloth. Greed. Abuse of power. Hatred of democracy. Government as a cheap backroom deal, finished in time for thirty-six holes of the world's best golf. And brains too stupid to be ashamed of any of it. If we have learned nothing else in the Bush years, it's that this Congress cannot be reformed. The only way to change it is to get rid of it.
Fortunately, we still get that chance once in a while.
Well when I saw who the author was of your journalistic evidence......
didn't he write this?
THE 52 FUNNIEST THINGS ABOUT THE UPCOMING DEATH OF THE POPE
By Matt Taibbi
52.Pope pisses himself just before the end; gets all over nurse.
51.After death, saggy, furry tits of dead Pope begin inexorable process of melting away into nothingness, like coldest of Sno-cones under faintest of suns.
50.Pope survives just long enough to be acquired by Isiah Thomas for Stephon Marbury, 2005 #1 pick and cash considerations. "We feel like we've made ourselves younger and more competitive," Thomas says.
49.After beating for the last time, Pope's heart sits there like a piece of hamburger.
48.Whole world waiting until the last minute for a sudden improvement of his condition. Long lines of girls in the Philippines kneeling and praying. Catholics everywhere with ears pressed to radios, transfixed. Pope gives one last groan, spits, dies.
47.Upon death, Pope's face frozen in sickening smile, eyes wide open and teeth exposed, like a baboon.
46.Beetles eating Pope's dead brains.
45.Pope departs Earth at a time when Hitch is top-grossing movie in the world.
44.Gurgling sound during embalming process; real fluids in dead Pope's body sucked out into jars.
43.POV Dead Pope: Last glimpse of overcast Italian sky as coffin lid closes for last time.
42.Get used to that quiet sound.
41.Humming old Polish folk song in there. That kills three minutes.
40.Humming it again, this time getting the words right. Another three minutes.
39.Can't move. Can't reach penis.
38.Somebody taking my job. My job!
37.Getting a little stuffy.
36.Naming all the different types of fish. Flounder, halibut, perch, goldfish, basking shark...no, do the sharks separately...really stuffy in here, gar, swordfish, manta ray, eels... No, don't think about eels. Eels are scary. Boy, is it dark in here. Four minutes gone by.
35.Doctor applies fingers to neck to check expiring Pope's pulse. Pope's ear falls off.
34.In heaven, Pope keeps wrapping cars around telephone poles.
33.Silverfish pops out of dead Pope's vestment for a moment, immediately ducks back in.
32.Priest who administers last rites to Pope excitedly calls mother afterward to tell her how well it went.
31.Dead Pope, still with baboon face, wheeled through corridors of Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, learns answer to Great Mystery.
30.Michael Jackson too broke to buy Pope's bones.
29.New Pope inevitably ambitious cleric burning with earthly vigor and secret desire to undo dead Pope's legacy.
28.Bears everywhere shitting in woods.
27.We'll never get to hear his hilarious post-tracheotomy rendition of "Come on Eileen."
26.Pope recovers and survives until 2009; New York Press columnist Matt Taibbi beheaded by passing garbage truck, March 2, 2005.
25.LexisNexis search on phrase "the inner workings of the Vatican are shrouded in mystery" temporarily crashes system; Eric Alterman unable to search for press references to "What Liberal Media?" for 37 consecutive hours.
24.Pope spends last hours surrounded by cardinals who stand glaring at him with folded arms, silently reminding him of the political necessity of clinging to life.
23.Doctors examining the body discover that the Pope was not only a woman, but also Hitler.
22.Mankind scrambles to choose new leader of inflexible, sexually morbid institutional anachronism; heretofore anonymous bureaucrat will instantly be celebrated as world's holiest man as he travels to AIDS-stricken Africa to denounce the use of condoms.
21.Telltale white smoke emitting from Vatican chimneys announces a) choice of new Pope, and b) the fiery death of the 5000 back issues of Manscape and Hung Inches that had accumulated in the Vatican lobby.
20.Hall and Oates mulling comeback.
19.To the end, the Pope could only think of the poor and the downtrodden.
18.When he died, he stopped thinking of the poor and the downtrodden, and his face was frozen in that baboon smile, and he thought of nothing at all.
17.In his last days, the Pope was in tremendous pain.
16.NBC Nightly News intern pulls wrong tape from drawer full of long-ago archived video obits; world thinks Boris Yeltsin has died, wonders why Brian Williams is calling him an "inspirational spiritual leader."
15.Williams, after broadcast: "Who's Boris Yeltsin?"
14.Matt Lauer to Williams: "He wrote the Contract for America."
13.Just before death, Pope sits up in his bed, shrieks, his body bursts into flames; everyone runs from the room.
12.Sequoia, birch, maple, willow, palm, oak, pine, fir, maple—No, wait, I said maple already...
11.Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal...
10.You dirty rat. You dirty, double-crossing rat... Proxima estacion: Tibidabo. Tenga cuidado de las puertas deslizantes... It means woods and blanche means white, so the two together mean white woods... L'état— c'est moi! Don't think about eels, don't think about eels...
9.Bush on the tragic event: "Our thoughts and prayers go out to this great man and all of his many children."
8.Bush continued: "He touched all of us in places no one else could reach."
7. According to ancient tradition, the slamming shut of the Bronze Door in St. Peter's Square announces the death of the Pope.
6.Normal Vatican schedule closes that door at 8 p.m. every night and reopens it in the morning.
5.According to numerous reports, if the Pope dies at night this time, no one will know what to do. (This is not a joke.)
4.In 1958, reporters paid off Pope Pius XII's physician to throw open the hospital room window when the Pope died.
3.When a monsignor threw the window open to get some air, the Pope's death was erroneously reported all over the world.
2.This is what happens when weird old men in dresses communicate with the world with doors and chimneys.
1.Throw a marble at the dead Pope's head. Bonk!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Volume 18, Issue 9
©2006 All rights reserved.
No part of this website may be reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.
I refuse to comment or argue points made from that man......
And the beat goes on. This time from the Wall Street Journal. Is that a reputable enough source for you, Maddie? They offer this...
Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.
Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare, the federal health-care program for the elderly and disabled.
The unstated goal is to disrupt the Democratic agenda and make it harder for the new majority to meet its promise to reinstitute "pay-as-you-go" budget rules, under which new costs or tax cuts must be offset to protect the deficit from growing.
"I think we're trying to get an accommodation," said Speaker Dennis Hastert (R., Ill.) last evening. "You're digging a hole now and filling up with money from '08," he said of Mr. Thomas's demands. "He says he's trying to move away from that."
So, not only did they fuck everything up for us the last six years, but now they insist on making sure the Dems have a hard time fixing their problems. Well done, I say! Well done indeed.
Even more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/05/AR2006120501342.html
From the article:
"Hoyer and other Democratic leaders say they are trying to repair the image of Congress, which was so anemic this year it could not meet a basic duty: to approve spending bills that fund government. By the time the gavel comes down on the 109th Congress on Friday, members will have worked a total of 103 days. That's seven days fewer than the infamous "Do-Nothing Congress" of 1948."
""Keeping us up here eats away at families," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. "Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families -- that's what this says.""
That's some nice spin by Kingston. Where the hell did he think he would work as a congressman?
Indicted / Convicted/ Pled Guilty
* Scooter Libby - Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff - resigned after being indicted for Obstruction of Justice, Perjury, and Making False Statements in connection with the investigation stemming from the leak of a CIA operative's identity.
* Lester Crawford - Commissioner, FDA - resigned after only two months on the job. Pled guilty to conflict of interest and making false statements.
* Brian Doyle - Deputy Press Secretary, DHS - Resigned in wake of child sex scandal. Pled no contest to 32 criminal counts.
* Claude Allen - Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy- resigned, pled guilty to shoplifting from Target stores.
* David Safavian - former head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the Office of Management and Budget - convicted of lying to ethics officials and Senate investigators about his ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
* Larry Franklin - intelligence officer, Defense - resigned, pled guilty to passing secrets to Israel.
* Roger Stillwell - desk officer, Interior Department - pled guilty to failing to report Redskins tickets and free dinners from Jack Abramoff.
* Frank Figueroa - senior DHS official, former head of anti-sex-crime Operation Predator - pled no contest to exposing himself to 16-year-old girl in Florida mall. Girl says he fondled himself for ten minutes. Figueroa forfeited his badge, gun, and access to databases; employment status pending internal DHS review.
* Darleen Druyun - senior contracting official, U.S. Air Force - pled guilty and sentenced to nine months in prison for her role in the Boeing tanker lease scandal.
* John Korsmo - chairman, Federal Housing Finance Board - pled guilty last year to lying to the Senate and an inspector general. He swore he had no idea how a list of presidents for FHFB-regulated banks were invited to a fundraiser for his friend's congressional campaign. On the invites, Korsmo was listed as the "Special Guest." Got 18 months of probation.
Resigned Due to Investigation
* Carl Truscott - Director, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau - resigned. A report by the Justice Department's Inspector General found that Truscott wasted tens of thousands of dollars on luxuries, wasted millions on whimsical management decisions and violated ethics rules by ordering employees to help his nephew with a high school video project.
* Joseph Schmitz - Inspector General, Defense - Resigned amid charges he personally intervened to protect top political appointees.
* Steven Griles - Deputy Secretary at the Interior Department - resigned, currently under investigation by the Justice Department for his ties to Jack Abramoff.
* Susan Ralston - assistant, White House - resigned amidst revelations that she had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts from Abramoff without compensating him, counter to White House ethics rules.
* Dusty Foggo - Executive Director, CIA - stepped down following accusations of corruption in connection to the Duke Cunningham scandal. Under investigation.
* Janet Rehnquist - Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services - resigned in the face of allegations she blocked a politically dangerous probe on behalf of the Bush family.
* Ken Tomlinson, Board Chairman, Corporation for Public Broadcasting; member, Broadcasting Board of Governors - resigned at the release of an inspector general report concluding he had broken laws in spending CPB money to hire politically connected consultants to search for "bias" without consulting the board. At BBG, a separate investigation found he was running a "horse racing operation" out of his office, and continuing to hire politically-wired individuals to do "consulting" work for him. He's still there.
* George Deutsch - press aide, NASA - resigned amid allegations he prevented the agency's top climate scientist from speaking publicly about global warming.
* Richard Perle - Chairman, Defense Policy Board - resigned from Pentagon advisory panel amid conflict-of-interest charges.
* James Roche - secretary, U.S. Air Force - resigned in the wake of the Boeing tanker lease scandal, after it was revealed he had rather crudely pushed for Boeing to win a $23 billion contract.
* Marvin Sambur - top contracting executive, U.S. Air Force - Druyun's boss, Sambur resigned in the wake of the scandal. Investigations cleared him of wrongdoing.
* Philip Cooney - chief of staff, White House Council on Environmental Quality - a former oil industry lawyer with no scientific expertise, Cooney resigned after it was revealed he had watered down reports on global warming.
* Thomas Scully - Administrator, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services - shortly after Scully resigned in 2003, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General found that Scully had pressured the agency's actuary to underestimate the full cost of the Medicare reform bill by approximately $100 billion until after Congress passed the bill into law. Scully was also charged wtih conflict of interest allegations by the U.S. attorney's office for billing CMS for expenses incurred during a job search while he still headed the agency. He settled those charges by paying $9,782.
* Michelle Larson Korsmo - deputy chief of staff, Department of Labor - Helped her husband (see Frank Korsmo, above) with his donor scam. Quietly left her Labor plum job in February 2004, about two weeks before news broke that she and her husband were the targets of a criminal probe.
Nomination Failed Due to Scandal
* Bernard Kerik - nominated, Secretary, Department of Homeland Security - withdrew his nomination amidst a host of corruption allegations. Eventually pled guilty to a misdemeanor relating to having accepted improper gifts totaling tens of thousands of dollars while he was a New York City official in the late 1990's.
* Timothy Flanigan - nominated, Deputy Attorney General - withdrew his nomination amidst revelations that he'd worked closely with lobbyist Jack Abramoff when he was General Counsel for Corporate and International Law at Tyco, which was a client of Abramoff's.
* Linda Chavez - nominated, Secretary of Labor - withdrew her nomination amidst revelations that an illegal immigrant lived in her home and worked for her.
Go GOP!!
With the latest revelations from Jack Abramoff, I thought we'd publish a list of individual Democrats who have received Abramoff-connected cash from 1990-2006 (via CapitalEye.org):
Patty Murray (D-Wash) - $40,980
Charles B. Rangel (D-NY) - $32,000
Patrick J. Kennedy (D-RI) - $31,000
Harry Reid (D-Nev) - $30,500
Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) - $28,000
Tom Daschle (D-SD) - $26,500
Brad R. Carson (D-Okla) - $18,300
Chris John (D-La) - $15,000
Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) - $14,500
John Breaux (D-La) - $13,750
Mary L. Landrieu (D-La) - $11,500
Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md) - $11,000
Dale E. Kildee (D-Mich) - $10,500
Barney Frank (D-Mass) - $9,000
Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo) - $9,000
Max Baucus (D-Mont) - $9,000
Peter Deutsch (D-Fla) - $8,500
Dick Durbin (D-Ill) - $8,000
Frank Pallone, Jr (D-NJ) - $6,000
Nick Rahall (D-WVa) - $6,000
Jon S. Corzine (D-NJ) - $5,000
Fritz Hollings (D-SC) - $5,000
Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md) - $5,000
Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) - $5,000
Deborah Ann Stabenow (D-Mich) - $5,000
Xavier Becerra (D-Calif) - $4,523
Tim Johnson (D-SD) - $4,250
Kent Conrad (D-ND) - $4,000
Maria Cantwell (D-Wash) - $3,000
Kalyn Cherie Free (D-Okla) - $3,000
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) - $3,000
Richard M. Romero (D-NM) - $3,000
Ed Pastor (D-Ariz) - $3,000
John B. Larson (D-Conn) - $3,000
James L. Oberstar (D-Minn) - $3,000
Brad Sherman (D-Calif) - $3,000
Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) - $2,500
Max Cleland (D-Ga) - $2,500
Gene Taylor (D-Miss) - $2,250
Doug Dodd (D-Okla) - $2,000
Jay Inslee (D-Wash) - $2,000
John D. Dingell (D-Mich) - $2,000
Joe Baca (D-Calif) - $2,000
Carl Levin (D-Mich) - $2,000
C. L. "Butch" Otter (R-Idaho) - $2,000
Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) - $2,000
Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss) - $2,000
Robert Menendez (D-NJ) - $2,000
Robert T. Matsui (D-Calif) - $2,000
Rodney Alexander (D-La) - $2,000
Sander Levin (D-Mich) - $2,000
Ron Kind (D-Wis) - $2,000
Ronnie Shows (D-Miss) - $2,000
Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn) - $2,000
Willie Landry Mount (D-La) - $2,000
Tom Carper (D-Del) - $2,000
Thomas P. Keefe Jr. (D-Wash) - $2,000
Nita M. Lowey (D-NY) - $2,000
Maxine Waters (D-Calif) - $2,000
Ned Doucet (D-La) - $2,000
John Neely Kennedy (D-La) - $2,000
Lane Evans (D-Ill) - $2,000
Norm Dicks (D-Wash) - $1,500
Rick Weiland (D-SD) - $1,000
Ron Wyden (D-Ore) - $1,000
Tim Holden (D-Pa) - $1,000
William J. Jefferson (D-La) - $1,000
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) - $1,000
Paul Wellstone (D-Minn) - $1,000
Pete Stark (D-Calif) - $1,000
Peter DeFazio (D-Ore) - $1,000
Mike Thompson (D-Calif) - $1,000
David Phelps (D-Ill) - $1,000
Derrick B. Watchman (D-Ariz) - $1,000
Charles S. Robb (D-Va) - $1,000
Bill Luther (D-Minn) - $1,000
Barbara Boxer (D-Calif) - $1,000
Brian David Schweitzer (D-Mont) - $1,000
Charles J. Melancon (D-La) - $1,000
Eliot L. Engel (D-NY) - $1,000
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) - $1,000
Gloria Tristani (D-NM) - $1,000
Grace Napolitano (D-Calif) - $1,000
Joe Lieberman (D-Conn) - $1,000
Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif) - $1,000
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) - $1,000
Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) - $500
John Kerry (D-Mass) - $500
Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif) - $500
Shelley Berkley (D-Nev) - $500
It's nice when mommy has her own political action committee isn't it?
Disclosure statements also show that Senator Barbara Boxer, ... directed $15,000 from her political action committee in 2003 to a consulting firm run by her son.
Roll Call also reported in May of 2003 that "Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) funneled $115,000 last cycle to Douglas Boxer & Associates, a company run by her son, from PAC For A Change, her leadership political action committee."
Recently, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has had a number of press conferences where she spoke of lobbying reform and address ethical issues, including banning House members from accepting gifts from lobbyists... Her rhetoric is laughable considering she voted against a ban on gifts lobbyists back in 1995!!!
In November of 1995, Rep. Pelosi voted against a provision "to prohibit registered lobbyists from giving gifts to members, officers, or employees of the House and Senate," and was joined by the number-two Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer.
UPDATE: Today, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following comments in response to recent statements from Pelosi and other Democrats on the need for passage of lobbying reform measures in the United States Congress:
"When I hear Democratic Party leaders throwing around terms like 'culture of corruption,' I have to think: 'You oughta know.'
Chuck Schumer's researcher at the DSCC has plead guilty to stealing Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele's credit report, and — as Democrats tend to — will avoid jail time...
A former Democratic staffer pleaded guilty today to computer fraud for snooping on Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele.
I can get more, but you get the pic.......it happens
Yes, I get the pic, that's why I think they all suck. On the other hand, you hold one side accountible while defending your side. That's my point. When this country goes into the shitter, you need only look into the mirror for someone to blame. You are an enabler for all of those chumps to continue screwing the American people.
By the way, I kow you'd like others to think that Abramoff gave equally to Dems and Republicans, but that's total BS. Here is some proof.
http://www.capitaleye.org/abramoff_recips.asp?sort=N
Dems Don’t Know Jack
A new analysis of Abramoff tribal money by a nonpartisan firm shows it’s a Republican scandal.
A new and extensive analysis of campaign donations from all of Jack Abramoff’s tribal clients, done by a nonpartisan research firm, shows that a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans. The analysis undercuts the claim that Abramoff directed sums to Democrats at anywhere near the same rate.
The analysis, which was commissioned by The American Prospect and completed on Jan. 25, was done by Dwight L. Morris and Associates, a for-profit firm specializing in campaign finance that has done research for many media outlets.
In the weeks since Abramoff confessed to defrauding tribes and enticing public officials with bribes, the question of whether Abramoff directed donations just to Republicans, or to the GOP and Democrats, has been central to efforts by both parties to distance themselves from the unfolding scandal. President Bush recently addressed the question on Fox News, saying: “It seems to me that he [Abramoff] was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties.”
Although Abramoff hasn’t personally given to any Democrats, Republicans, including officials with the GOP campaign to hold on to the Senate, have seized on the donations of his tribal clients as proof that the saga is a bipartisan scandal. And the controversy recently spread to the media when the ombudsman for The Washington Post, Deborah Howell, ignited a firestorm by wrongly asserting that Abramoff had given to both. She eventually amended her assessment, writing that Abramoff “directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.”
But the Morris and Associates analysis, which was done exclusively for The Prospect, clearly shows that it’s highly misleading to suggest that the tribes's giving to Dems was in any way comparable to their giving to the GOP. The analysis shows that when Abramoff took on his tribal clients, the majority of them dramatically ratcheted up donations to Republicans. Meanwhile, donations to Democrats from the same clients either dropped, remained largely static or, in two cases, rose by a far smaller percentage than the ones to Republicans did. This pattern suggests that whatever money went to Democrats, rather than having been steered by Abramoff, may have largely been money the tribes would have given anyway.
The analysis includes a detailed look at seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients, and a comparison of their giving with that of approximately 170 other tribes. (Abramoff is often said to have had nine tribal clients. But Morris omitted two of the tribes – the Pueblo of Santa Clara, whose donations were virtually nonexistent, and the Tigua Indian Reservation, because it isn’t listed in Federal lobbying files as having a lobbyist and Abramoff worked on contingency. At any rate Santa Clara’s post-Abramoff donations to the GOP were overwhelmingly higher than to Dems, so including them would have added even more to the GOP side of the ledger.)
The analysis shows:
# in total, the donations of Abramoff’s tribal clients to Democrats dropped by nine percent after they hired him, while their donations to Republicans more than doubled, increasing by 135 percent after they signed him up;
# five out of seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients vastly favored Republican candidates over Democratic ones;
# four of the seven began giving substantially more to Republicans than Democrats after he took them on;
# Abramoff’s clients gave well over twice as much to Republicans than Democrats, while tribes not affiliated with Abramoff gave well over twice as much to Democrats than the GOP -- exactly the reverse pattern.
“It’s very hard to see the donations of Abramoff’s clients as a bipartisan greasing of the wheels,” Morris, the firm’s founder and a former investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times, told The Prospect.
Bloomberg News published a similar, more limited analysis last month, which relied on a small amount of data also from Morris’ firm.” But that analysis didn't look at all of Abramoff's tribal clients, and didn't provide a detailed year-by-year analysis of their donations or a detailed comparison to other tribal giving. Since then, some observers, such as blogger Kevin Drum, have argued that a comprehensive look at the donations of all of Abramoff’s tribal clients would help shed light on the scandal.
The Prospect asked Morris to do two things: First, compare the contributions of all of Abramoff’s tribal clients before they’d signed on with Abramoff versus after they’d become his client. And second, compare the contributions of all Abramoff tribal clients with the contributions of all non-Abramoff tribes.
Here are Abramoff’s seven tribal clients, according to Morris’ analysis, complete with their pre-Abramoff and post Abramoff contributions:
1) Tribe: Saginaw Chippewa (Michigan)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 9/2000): $371,250
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 9/2000): $285,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (9/2000 - 2003): $191,960
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (9/2000 - 2003): $401,500
2) Tribe: Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 9/2000): $61,320
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 9/2000): $48,560
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (9/2000 - 2003): $64,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP(9/2000 - 2003): $162,590
3) Tribe: Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 4/2001): $1,000
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 4/2001): $750
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (4/2001 - 6/2004): $40,500
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (4/2001 - 6/2004): $168,750
4) Tribe: Pueblo of Sandia (New Mexico)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 3/2002): $24,000
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 3/2002): $15,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (3/2002 - 6/2003): $18,500
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (3/2002 - 6/2003): $11,500
5) Tribe: Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians (California)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 7/2002): $371,250
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 7/2002): $400,200
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (7/2002 - 6/2004): $70,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (7/2002 - 6/2004): $216,708
6) Tribe: Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 1/2003): $35,470
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 1/2003): $6,050
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1/2003 - 12/2003): $250
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1/2003 - 12/2003): $0
7) Tribe: Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 1995): $4,600
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 1995): $31,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1995 - 2004): $409,273
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1995 - 2004): $884,927
As the above numbers show, four out of seven tribes -- Saginaw, Chitimacha, Coushatta and Mississippi – saw their contributions to Republicans increase significantly, even vastly, after they became Abramoff’s clients.
At the same time, two of those four tribes -- Saginaw and Chitimacha -- saw their giving to Democrats drop or remain static. The other two -- tribes Coushatta and Mississippi -- did see their giving to Dems rise under Abramoff, but by amounts that were dwarfed by the increases in giving to the GOP.
These patterns strongly suggest that Abramoff’s representation of the tribes manifested itself largely in a dramatic rise in contributions to the GOP. And it also suggests it’s likely that Abramoff had little impact on giving to Democrats.
Nor does it appear likely that Abramoff steered contributions to Dems from the remaining three tribes who didn’t see their giving to the GOP climb. Of those three tribes, one tribe -- Pueblo of Sandia -- saw a negligible shift in donations to both parties. The second -- Agua Caliente -- slashed its contributions to both parties, but even so, the percentage of that tribe’s giving that went to Republicans still rose dramatically. The third -- Cherokee Nation -- simply stopped giving altogether.
The big picture is also compelling. Taken together, Abramoff’s tribal clients gave $868,890 to Dems before hiring him; afterwards, they gave $794,483 -- a decrease of nine percent. By contrast, the tribes’ donations to Republicans went from $786,560 pre-Abramoff to $1,845,975 after he became their lobbyist -- an increase of 135 percent. In other words, when Abramoff entered the picture, contributions to Dems dropped, while donations to Republicans more than doubled.
Adding to the case, the Morris firm also did a year-by-year analysis, from 1991 to the present, of the giving of scores of tribes -- Abramoff’s clients included. The firm’s look at the year-by-year giving of his clients is eye-opening. It shows even more clearly that in some cases clients’ giving to the GOP jumped dramatically just after Abramoff signed them.
For example, the Saginaw Chippewa became Abramoff’s client in late 2000, and in the election cycle that immediately followed, the tribe’s giving to Republicans more than doubled -- from $78,000 to $167,000 -- while giving to Dems rose only $12,000.
“The giving of Indian tribes in general has increased dramatically over the last decade,” Morris told The Prospect. “But if you single out Abramoff’s clients year by year, you can see that the giving increases far more to Republicans when Abramoff became their lobbyist.”
Finally, Morris did an extensive comparison of the donations of both Abramoff tribes and non-Abramoff tribes. Morris added up giving from 1991 to the present by virtually all of the approximately 170 tribes that gave politically but are not affiliated with the lobbyist.
The totals show that in the past 15 years, the tribes gave more than $15.5 million to Democrats and just over $6 million to the GOP -- well over twice as much to Democrats as to Republicans.
By contrast, if you total up all the contributions Abramoff’s clients made, it comes to $1,845,975 to Republicans and $794,483 to Democrats -- well over twice as much to Republicans as to Democrats. So the pattern of giving of Abramoff’s clients, who gave with far more generosity to Republicans, is almost exactly the reverse of that of virtually all other tribes not connected with Abramoff. Those tribes, by contrast, gave far more to Democrats.
“If you’re going to make the case that this is a bipartisan scandal, you have to really stretch the imagination,” says Morris. “Most individual tribes were predominantly Democratic givers through the last decade. Only Abramoff’s clients switched dramatically from largely Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican donors, and that happened only after he got his hands on them.”
Note: The analysis The Prospect commissioned is available here. The first chart refers to the tribes’ pre- and post-Abramoff donations. The second is the total giving of non-Abramoff tribes. The third is a year-by-year breakdown of tribal giving.
Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, writes bi-weekly for The American Prospect. He can be reached at greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com.
* * *
UPDATE: Some in the right-wing blogosphere have seized on a single fact in “Dems Don’t Know Jack,” Greg Sargent’s January 27 article on political contributions made by Indian tribes represented by Jack Abramoff.
Those critics, in an effort to discredit the whole piece and its conclusions about Abramoff's strongly Republican influence on the political donations of the Indian tribes he advised, have argued that we were wrong when we asserted that the donations to Democrats from Abramoff's tribal clients fell 9 percent after he became their lobbyist.
In the interest of accuracy, the Prospect asked Dwight Morris, the professional analyst who did the original research for our article, to take another look at the data. His conclusion is that the 9 percent figure -- an overall average which was based on our reading of his numbers -- can't be validated statistically; indeed, he thinks it's statistically invalid to do any before-and-after comparisons in this fashion.
But in reanalyzing the data, Morris came up with several new and perfectly sound ways to compare those numbers, and guess what: His new analysis demonstrates even more compellingly that when Abramoff came along, the ratio of Republican contributions over Democratic contributions soared dramatically. In other words, his latest conclusions offer even stronger proof that our original conclusions were accurate.
Morris also gave us a statement, which fully supports the conclusions of our article while taking issue with the headline. We never meant that headline to be taken literally. Indeed, the story's lede makes it clear that we weren't arguing that no contributions to Democrats rose under Abramoff; just that any uptick to them was dwarfed by the rise in donations to Republicans. Still, given the heat around this issue, it’s possible that we should have written a different headline. Whatever Morris's misgivings about the headline, however, he clearly reaffirms that the data he provided fully support the main conclusions of the piece -- and regards the debate over the 9 percent figure as a distraction from those findings.
Statement by Dwight L. Morris, president of Dwight L. Morris & Associates:
Up to now I have remained largely on the sidelines of the “blog hysteria” surrounding the recent piece by Greg Sargent in the
Prospect on political donations by Native American tribes that were clients of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. While neither the data we prepared nor the first paragraph of Sargent’s piece support the story’s headline, “Dems Don’t Know Jack,” most of the criticism leveled at the piece deals with one small paragraph well down in the story. In part -- the offending part, apparently -- that paragraph states, “the donations by Abramoff’s tribal clients to Democrats dropped by nine percent after they hired him.”
I can say two things about that figure: 1) it was not prepared by my firm because there is no statistically valid way to calculate this number given the way the data were compiled, and 2) focusing on it to the exclusion of all other data distorts the analysis laid out in the bulk of the piece.
As background, we were asked to document donations by the tribes from 1992 to the present (which at the time included part but not all of 2005). In doing so, we carefully researched the exact dates on which Abramoff began representing each tribe and the dates he ceased to represent them. We then divided the donations for each tribe into two pots: One pot represented the periods in which he did not represent the tribe; the second represented the periods in which he did represent it.
Based on our research, if I had written this piece rather than simply preparing the data, I would have pointed out the following calculations, which serve to buttress the piece’s main thrust:
•Overall, the tribes gave a total of $1,663,400 to Democratic and Republican candidates and party committees during the periods when Abramoff did not represent them. Of that total, 53 percent was donated to Democratic candidates and party committees, and 47 percent was donated to their Republican counterparts.
•During the periods that Abramoff represented the tribes -- which spanned a considerably shorter timeframe than the “non-represented phase” -- the tribes collectively donated a total of $2,866,858 -- an increase of 72 percent when compared with the periods in which he did not represent them. Of that total, only 30 percent went to Democrats and 70 percent went to Republicans (see chart).
•In the periods when they were not represented by Abramoff, six of the eight tribes gave more to Democrats than to Republicans, although in several cases the difference was small.
•In the periods when Mr. Abramoff was their lobbyist, six of the tribes gave more -- and in each case significantly more -- to Republicans than to Democrats.
In short, whatever one thinks of the 9 percent figure, these numbers demonstrate the undeniably Republican shift in giving in a far more compelling way. The nature of the giving switched from marginally Democratic to significantly Republican. The data do not show that Abramoff steered no money to Democrats. Congressional testimony from tribal leaders themselves shows that he clearly did so. However, Sargent made no such claim. As his article puts it, “a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans.” That was and remains the central point of the piece, and if that did not come through, then hopefully the record has been set straight.
I'm thinking about some money in a refrigerator.................
some classified documents stuffed in socks
Ted Kennedy drinking, driving, and drowning
Scandal rocks both sides........scandals rock humanity...
but somewhere you have to align yourself with something that you can believe in for government to work.....
I align myself with the Republican/Independent/Libertarian parties....everyonce in a while a democrat or two....
who believe in more powerful state governments; and less power nationally
I believe in a government that taxes fairly
So......I choose those who I feel best represent what is important to me.
Bush - Kerry
Bush had my vote
Bush - Gore
Bush had my vote
Are any of the men above perfect? Nah.............but the one I chose represents more of my beliefs than the others.....
EASY PEASY
I'm thinking that you are a tunnel visioned simpleton who looks at one party and makes excuses for the other. That is why this country is in trouble. I don't disagree that the things you listed are shady. They should be voted out. I would not vote for them. But then I actually have a moral compass for all of the assholes that represent us.
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