Yeah, well, now he's out to lunch. He's scrambling up a defense team. Really, that's what the report said.

People: don't lie about this sh*t!

He's gonna need one.

Typical Republican behavior though. Holier than thou till they get caught doing things they screeched about the day before.

Worthless hypocrites.

Republican ethics in action.


'Ethics' cops hinder probe
By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Sometimes the gods wrap things so neatly you think they're writing a novel. So it is with the latest legal wranglings surrounding Tom DeLay's controversial political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority.


Today lawyers for two DeLay associates who have been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate donations to help elect Republican legislators in 2002 will try to convince Austin State District Judge Bob Perkins that the law is unconstitutionally vague.

The next day, the very same Judge Perkins will hear from state "ethics" officials trying to keep secret the name of a mystery lawyer who worked deftly to try to keep the law vague.


Reminds me of Bush's team asking what torture is, or how far they can go, then approving waterboarding and the other BS. It wouldn't surprise me if they kept it all secret. Like the energy goons all meeting with Cheney to decide how they're going to divide the world up. Secrecy is the cornerstone of this Iran/Contra style administration. Lies and deception are the only possible way they can operate.



For more on today's proceedings, see R.G. Ratcliffe's story on this page. As for tomorrow's hearing, here's the story.

Since 1905, Texas law has been clear that corporate money may not be used to help elect Texas politicians. Nor can union money.

The law was passed in the wake of terrific scandals involving railroads and other corporate titans.

Revisions of the law did allow political action committees to use corporate money for "administrative" purposes.

The apparent thinking was that a corporation that wanted to set up a political action committee to which its employees would contribute could use corporate funds for office space, secretarial help and phones to administer the PAC.

In other words: No
In 1998, someone sent the Texas Ethics Commission a letter saying his or her client, a corporation and other corporations had been solicited "to donate a substantial sum of money" to be used for administrative purposes by a political action committee unconnected to the corporations.

The lawyer wanted to know if his client could give to a political action committee "which has no relationship or connection to the donating corporation" and whether the donation would be reported to anyone.

Two months later, the commission sent the lawyer a draft opinion. Its conclusion, after seven pages of analysis: "A corporation may make expenditures to defray administrative expenses of a general-purpose political committee only if the corporation participated in the establishment of the general-purpose political committee."

In other words: No.

In addition, the opinion made it clear that the expenditure of corporate funds was limited to rent and utilities and such.

"In contrast, expenditures for fund raising for the committee or for support of candidates are not administrative expenses."

TRMPAC allegedly used corporate funds for fund raising, polling to see how favored candidates were doing and targeted mailings praising favored candidates.

The lawyer, obviously knowledgeable of the peculiarities of Election Commission rules and practices, read the opinion and sent the commission another letter.

"My client wishes to withdraw the request for (the opinion)," the letter said. "We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused."

If you ask the attorney general for an opinion, your request and that opinion are public record. If you ask the Federal Elections Commission for an opinion, your request and the opinion (and its draft) are public record.

But with the Texas Ethics Commission, the draft is shown privately to the requestor. If he doesn't like it, he can ask that it be withdrawn. And by law, the requestor's name is secret.

In this case, however, the grand jury looking into alleged abuses in 2002 has subpoenaed the letter with the requestor's name on it.

Since part of the argument of the defense in the indictments already issued is that the accused were acting in good faith based on the advice of their attorneys, the district attorney would like to know if one of their attorneys was the person who asked for the opinion. Lawyers I talked to said it could be devastating for that defense if one of the lawyers associated with TRMPAC was the secret requestor.

Amazingly in the eyes of some law enforcement officials, the Texas Ethics Commission is fighting the grand jury subpoena.

Prosecutors tell me grand juries have very broad powers. They can get bank records, medical records and a wide variety of material not available to the public.

Since grand juries are secret, those records remain secret unless there is an indictment and trial.

The Texas attorney general has refused to represent the Ethics Commission on this issue. His spokesman would not say why, but one possible reason is that his office sometimes obtains subpoenas for confidential information. To argue in favor of the commission would go against the interests of law enforcement, an untenable position for the attorney general.

Because the Legislature wants the Ethics Commission weaker than boarding house tea, it has no budget to hire a lawyer, so two lawyers who are commissioners will argue before Judge Perkins. I hope they sweat.

For ethics commissioners to suggest that their agency, of all agencies, is immune from criminal investigations is, itself, a brazen assault on the spirit of public ethics.


http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/m...politan/3176747

My Totally Gay Boy Scout Leader
The tormented Republican mayor of Spokane might have molested young boys. Boys like, well, Mark Morford

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, May 11, 2005


I was, in my youth, a Boy Scout of America. It's true.

This is my confession. I was a Boy Scout in the late '70s in Spokane, Washington, where I grew up, because I was a skinny-ass middle-class white-bread kid in suburban skinny-ass middle-class white-bread America and this is just what you did and for the most part it was fine and good and normal. What can I say. I am now fully recovered.

But here's the interesting part. Growing up, there was a man named Jim West who was our troop leader at the time and West was also, if I recall which I admittedly can't with perfect clarity, a pillar of the community. Upstanding. A Good Guy. All the boys knew him. Liked him. I know I did.

Jim West was also a sheriff's deputy, a community activist, outgoing and up-and-coming, and at that time was apparently slowly wending his way into local politics, and I have vague memories of him being very nice and well liked and I definitely recall him standing up there more than once, on the little elementary school stage, handing out cheesy plastic trophies to the wide-eyed boys at the Pinewood Derby, the geeky annual Boy Scouts model-car race that was the only part of the Scouts I actually cared about or remember in any detail, except for the waking nightmare that was Boy Scout summer camp, which I hated like white-hot death. But that's another column.

And now, this: Jim West, the Republican mayor of Spokane, a longtime serious player in regional politics and the former majority leader of the state senate and a potential Republican gubernatorial candidate and apparently one of the fiercest and most hot-tempered and most powerful Republicans in the state of Washington, is in deep trouble.

Claims are now rampant that West has used his position of power for years, even since the '70s, ever since he was a Scout leader, ever since he was handing out cute plastic trophies to young preteen boys exactly like me and actually to me in particular (I won a couple -- what can I say?), West has used his position to lure men and teenage boys into having sex with him.

It's a scandal. Big. It's all over the Spokane papers -- er, paper. Jim West has, according to the slightly stodgy local rag the Spokesman-Review, has now admitted to soliciting young-guy action on Gay.com, more than once, particularly from an 18-year-old teen to whom he offered an internship and lots of nifty perks, who was then substituted for an expert hired by the Review to draw West, quite literally, out of the closet.

Want to read some lukewarm, semiarticulate chat transcripts between a secretly gay Republican mayor and the guy hired by the newspaper to pose as an 18-year-old gay stud? Right here, baby.

<snip>

I couldn't care less that West might be gay, or bisexual, or whatever the hell else he tells himself he is when he goes to sleep at night and dreams of, I don't know what. Bunnies. In leather chaps. On fire.

Here's what does it. Here's what makes West and people like him rife with potential for, well, some of the nastiest and most dishonest and dangerous abuses humans are capable of.

It's the ability to ignore the incredible hypocrisy of your own life, the staggering amount of self-loathing, the pathetic insincerity. It's the ability to join a political party that not only openly loathes, but actually violently condemns, your choice in sexual partners, a sexually ignorant platform that claims to have some sort of direct line to a gay-hating war-loving God, and then, in the middle of who knows how many gay affairs, to feel no shame as you step right up and endorse that exact same hateful agenda as public policy.

It's the fact that, in West's case, you can still sleep at night after you've voted against gay love and railed against healthy teen sex and bashed women's rights and criticized adult/youth sex when you are, in fact, so confused and lost and deeply engaged in much of it yourself that it's very likely your mangled, hypocritical mind has lost the ability to distinguish between informed, consensual, happily kinky adult relationships and, say, abusing the honest trust of a pre-teen boy. Or, for that matter, many boys.

Join that party and toe that line and swallow that nasty doctrine and spit it out into the world like oozing red-meat dogma while you secretly use your power to lure in teenagers and men for sex, and I don't put anything past you, Jim. To my mind, you're capable of anything. Anything at all.

And for that, my old troop leader Jim, I can never forgive you.


http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/

Got link?

sorry. link awaaaay!!


Flat top: FOAD.

Go back to bed, davis. The world has got to be just too much for you.

You have chosen to ignore Bart Katz. View this post · Un-ignore Bart Katz

Peekaboo I see you.

It's a long article but a good one.

The Super-Lobbyist's 'Friend'


Take pity on poor Bob Ney, who insists he's just another victim of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and public-relations consultant Michael Scanlon. Unlike the half-dozen Indian tribes that paid about $82 million to that scamming duo, however, the U.S. representative at least got campaign donations and a lavish trip to Scotland's legendary St. Andrew's golf course out of them. Whether he got more than that is now a matter of interest to Justice Department investigators, according to a knowledgeable source who says that the probers are seeking to discover whether Ney received any illegal donations from Abramoff.

An affable, 50-year-old conservative Republican from Ohio, Ney now portrays himself as a "dupe" of Abramoff and Scanlon, the pair of rapscallions targeted by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Justice Department for their alleged defrauding of tribes seeking increased clout.





http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/10/...ain694222.shtml

Ney and Abramoff blaming Dodd for something he didn't even know about.


The hopes of the Tigua evaporated in October 2002, when Abramoff called to say that Dodd had purportedly decided to renege on his support of the tribe's legislation, supposedly out of anger that his own bill to reform Connecticut tribal recognition was defeated in the Senate.

The Dodd bill provided a perfect cover story -- and in his best David Mamet tough-guy style, Abramoff called Schwartz on his cell phone to complain. "Dodd focked us!" he said. "Ney is fuming that the bastard went back on his word. We were focked by a Democrat!" He then urged Schwartz and the tribal officials to scramble to find other legislators who could persuade Dodd to support the measure, but those last-ditch efforts failed.

Dodd's supposed support was always a phony pipe dream that Ney and Abramoff sold to the Indians. At the Senate hearing last year on the Tigua mess, Dodd released a statement explaining that he hadn't even learned about the Tigua proposal until very late in the process. "Congressman Ney's staff," said the senator, "did approach my office during the waning hours of negotiations over the HAVA legislation to inquire whether recognition provisions for the Tigua tribe could be included in the bill. The suggestion was summarily rejected."

Nevertheless, a few days after the crushing October defeat for the tribe, Abramoff arranged for Ney to speak to the tribal council by conference call to offer his condolences for the legislative failure. Schwartz says that Ney told the council about a supposed conversation with Dodd. "I begged him to put it back in," said Ney. "I'm apologizing for us in Congress, but he went back on his word. I was so disappointed. … I almost decided to let election reform die." He vowed to continue to work on the issue. (A Ney spokesman toldThe Hill newspaper, "The congressman has no recollection of that conference call.")

Just a thought
Bolton’s nomination could be construed as an analogy.

A representation of which senators are paid for by the machinery and other special interest groups. This bully power moved the electoral machinery into Washington DC. Moreover, these powers want to remain in power, whatever the cost. 1 billion dollars can buy some senators and congressmen. These groups and some of the representatives or the power mongers can be called neither patriots nor the poster child for the population of the US.

People, representatives and corporations who rape and pillage the environment steal retirement accounts and double talk like the sneaky personality that they are should be challenged. Vote those representatives out of Washington.

Even the news media, which no longer has investigative reporters, need to be held accountable. When they put half-truths and miss construed information on the airways let them know.

This strange movement in Washington DC appears to be herding this country and citizens towards supporting their life style. This is a lifestyle of subjugation, which many religions practice, while at the same time proclaiming that this is their right.

They are declaring their right of power while practicing corruption and thievery.
We need to start the campaign to vote some of those people out of our government, from the local to the national, and it is not too early to start.
csh

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?.../a112519D66.DTL

Now here's a guy who really believes in family values!

Not to mention, one who really opposes frivolous lawsuits.

that is really weird. You can't say 6, it was 5.

Weeeellll, any more than 5 makes you trash. Up to 5 and you are OK. But what if you remarry one of the first?

Ask Repub

It'd be ok for davey...long as he married his brother.
Anything to keep him out of sin.

?

Uh, davey musta misunderstood?

Found the link:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...notes051105.DTL

FOAD maggot.

Flat top (Repub bub):

Fuuck off and die.

What ethics? What morals, and where the hell are the values?

Indignation Grows in U.S. Over British Prewar Documents


# Critics of Bush call them proof that he and Blair never saw diplomacy as an option with Hussein.

By John Daniszewski, Times Staff Writer

LONDON — Reports in the British press this month based on documents indicating that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had conditionally agreed by July 2002 to invade Iraq appear to have blown over quickly in Britain.

But in the United States, where the reports at first received scant attention, there has been growing indignation among critics of the Bush White House, who say the documents help prove that the leaders made a secret decision to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein nearly a year before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to that aim and never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy.


The documents, obtained by Michael Smith, a defense specialist writing for the Sunday Times of London, include a memo of the minutes of a meeting July 23, 2002, between Blair and his intelligence and military chiefs; a briefing paper for that meeting and a Foreign Office legal opinion prepared before an April 2002 summit between Blair and Bush in Texas.

The picture that emerges from the documents is of a British government convinced of the U.S. desire to go to war and Blair's agreement to it, subject to several specific conditions.

Since Smith's report was published May 1, Blair's Downing Street office has not disputed the documents' authenticity. Asked about them Wednesday, a Blair spokesman said the report added nothing significant to the much-investigated record of the lead-up to the war.

"At the end of the day, nobody pushed the diplomatic route harder than the British government…. So the circumstances of this July discussion very quickly became out of date," said the spokesman, who asked not to be identified.

The leaked minutes sum up the July 23 meeting, at which Blair, top security advisors and his attorney general discussed Britain's role in Washington's plan to oust Hussein. The minutes, written by Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide, indicate general thoughts among the participants about how to create a political and legal basis for war. The case for military action at the time was "thin," Foreign Minister Jack Straw was characterized as saying, and Hussein's government posed little threat.

Labeled "secret and strictly personal — U.K. eyes only," the minutes begin with the head of the British intelligence service, MI6, who is identified as "C," saying he had returned from Washington, where there had been a "perceptible shift in attitude. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy."


<snip>

"While the president of the United States was telling the citizens and the Congress that they had no intention to start a war with Iraq, they were working very close with Tony Blair and the British leadership at making this a foregone conclusion," the letter's chief author, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, said Wednesday.

If the documents are real, he said, it is "a huge problem" in terms of an abuse of power. He said the White House had not yet responded to the letter.


Both Blair and Bush have denied that a decision on war was made in early 2002. The White House and Downing Street maintain that they were preparing for military operations as an option, but that the option to not attack also remained open until the war began March 20, 2003.

In January 2002, Bush described Iraq as a member of an "axis of evil," but the sustained White House push for Iraqi compliance with U.N. resolutions did not come until September of that year. That month, Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly to outline a case against Hussein's government, and he sought a bipartisan congressional resolution authorizing the possible use of force.

In November 2002, the U.N. Security Council approved a resolution demanding that Iraq readmit weapons inspectors.

An effort to pass a second resolution expressly authorizing the use of force against Iraq did not succeed.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/ir...a-iraq-complete

Tom DeLay Says Democrats Have 'No Class'


DeLay Tells Crowd of Conservatives That Democrats Who Raise Ethics Questions About Him Have 'No Class'


By SHARON THEIMER Associated Press Writer
The Associated PressThe Associated Press

WASHINGTON May 13, 2005 — Rep. Tom DeLay fired back at Democrats raising ethics questions about him, telling a crowd of conservative activists that the GOP's opponents have no ideas and "no class." The House majority leader's supporters among them a dozen conservative organizations staged a high-profile show of support by throwing a $250-a-plate gala in his honor Thursday night that brought roughly 900 people to the Capital Hilton.

When the Texas Republican took the stage after other speakers had hailed him for his leadership in the Republican Party and the House, he made only a passing reference to the problems that have sparked calls for an ethics probe, joking that one speaker's anecdote had tipped reporters off to another foreign trip he took.

Instead, DeLay told the crowd that as Republicans helped Americans find jobs and helped the country recover from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Democrats offered the country nothing.


Republicans did WHAT?? HELPED THE COUNTRY?? THEY HELPED THE COUNTRY?? They USED 9/11 as a political weapon. PERIOD. They have no concience, no morals, no values. They are the biggest political opportunists on the planet. God damned maggots use the death of over 3,000 people to sieze power of the government and these dumbsheet DeLay supporters have the watermelon sized balls to slam anyone? Fork em all.

"No ideas. No leadership. No agenda. And, just in the last week, we can now add to that list, no class," DeLay said in a reference to Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid's remark to school children that President Bush was "a loser." Reid later apologized to Bush adviser Karl Rove.


The ethics questions DeLay faces from Democrats and other critics stem in part from foreign travel arranged by Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist accused of defrauding clients of millions of dollars.

DeLay has asked the House ethics committee to review his travel records. He has portrayed the ethics questions raised about him as a Democratic-organized smear campaign, a message that went over well with conservative activists at the gala.

"I think the message tonight is, if they pick a fight with Tom DeLay, they pick a fight with all of us," Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said.

The crowd dined on filet mignon and salmon and a dessert of red-white-and-blue frosted cake decorated with candy hammers, a reference to the nickname DeLay earned when he was House majority whip.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=753749

DeLouse is so full of it oozes out of his mouth 24/7. He's the original unemployed teacher, no "principal" and no class.

He sure does make Republicans look like a pack o' opportunistic, greedy, lowlife hypocritical profiteers.

The Republican cult has surpassed even the Moonies.

DeLouse, after Newt, is the poster boy of the Republican "revolution." I hope they continue to stand behind him and be identified with him. Newt had the good sense to run before he was publicly exposed and filleted; it was shame, I was looking forward to that pseudo intellectual charlatan’s exposure.

touche`!

Well, y'gotta admire his gall. Praying for humility in preparation for a fancy fundraising dinner in praise of Tom?

pass the reynolds wrap

admiration? Not likely. That would be like admiring the Republicans for using 9/11 as a springboard for political dominance. It may have been a shrewd move but it was as low as it gets.

They and he in particular are deserving of nothing but scorn.

So the fork what? Thank you Captain Obvious. As if we're scared to pick a fight with 'them'. That's the whole idea.

No surprise



Overuled?

By whom?

Tommy, we hardly knew ye.

What we have here is one Republican calling another out for lying for a lobbyist. How unusual. A rarer sight than that endangered woodpecker.

Paying for Asbestos


By ARLEN SPECTER
Published: May 16, 2005

Washington

FOR over two decades, Congress has wrestled unsuccessfully with the difficult problem of asbestos. Now, with Congress about to produce legislation that will compensate Americans hurt by asbestos without clogging the courts and causing undue economic hardship, Dick Armey, a Republican and the former House majority leader, has led a huge and misleading advertising campaign to defeat the bill.


The bill, which Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and I introduced last month with broad bipartisan support, would use a $140 billion trust fund to pay asbestos victims in a no-fault program similar to workers' compensation. Workers exposed to asbestos would be paid based on severity of injuries without proving in court who would be liable under existing tort laws, eliminating the high costs of litigation. Unlike current law, under which those who have been exposed to asbestos may be compensated for potential future injuries, damages can be collected only on proof of existing harm. These and other provisions are the result of 40 bargaining sessions over the last two years among manufacturers, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., insurers and trial lawyers.

But in radio ads that have run in 15 states, Mr. Armey says the bill would levy $140 billion in new taxes to create a federal trust fund for asbestos victims. He knows better. Manufacturers, which are liable for asbestos injuries, and their insurers have offered to create the $140 billion trust fund to avoid further liability. The bill is explicit that the federal government would pay nothing into the fund.

Mr. Armey also asserts that the fund would set aside billions of those tax dollars as payoffs to trial lawyers. In fact, the bill caps lawyers' fees at 5 percent, compared with current contingent fees of 33 percent.

What Mr. Armey didn't tell his radio listeners was that, as reported by the Washington newspaper Roll Call, the lobbying firm that he works for has received nearly $1 million from Equitas, a British insurer that has fought to stop this legislation. Posing as a disinterested spokesman on behalf of the public interest, Mr. Armey is instead just another paid lobbyist spreading disinformation.

Thousands of asbestos victims suffering from deadly diseases are uncompensated because of the insolvency of the asbestos-related companies that are prospective defendants. I stand ready to work with responsible critics to resolve any remaining issues. Each month, additional companies join the more than 70 already in the bankruptcy courts. The economy has taken a terrific beating with these bankruptcies and the losses of thousands of jobs. If we can put the finishing touches on this bill, we can produce a triple-win for asbestos victims, companies facing bankruptcy and the economy in general.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/opinion/16specter.html?hp

Good for Spectre. No wonder the Repubs are trying to get rid of him.

I thought the government was supposed to be in charge of that.

Silence off, yet again. (Who keeps making posts that require me to set forth info, when I'm trying to take time off!???!)

I am an absolute EXPERT on asbestos. My grandfather died of asbestosis, and my mother of mesolthelioma, as a result of my grandpa having worked, during WW2, as grandpa's contribution to the war effort. First, grandpa worked at a job manufacturing asbestos at the Johns Manville plant in Denison, TX, and later in the war through accepting a transfer to the McDonnell Douglas plant in Long Beach, CA, as an expert on how to install the manufactured asbestos insulation used in war planes.

And my mom got exposed caused, back then, no one knew, and she was just a kid shaking out the menfolk's clothes and laundering them, because back in those days of not knowing, the workers just wore regular coveralls to and from work, and the women washed them as a normal household duty.

It never occurred to me or anyone else to sue because they died of it, and feel no need to be "compensated", even now.

It remains that there IS a real and legitimate need, for once, for a government program to bring all these suits to an end. It's like Superfund, except hopefully not going to go that stupid route. It simply will cost too much to try to sort this out. The legal fees involved in sorting out WHERE someone worked, 40 years ago, for what now-defunct company, and who/which successor company of a company that's been acquired twice already, and what company has inherited what liablities in this matter, simply boggles the mind. As with Superfund, the legal costs of apportioning "blame" and divvieing up the costs are likely to far exceed the costs of simply PAYING those harmed.

So yes, some legislation is needed, to form a fund to compensate those who are or have died or been disabled by asbestos. But this is the lousiest piece of legislation on the subject that could have ever been thunk up. It's modelled on the Black Lung fund, which has gone berzerk, and now (no kidding) has a budget of $292 million dollars to administer a program with fewer than 50,000 benefiaries who are suffering from black lung.

It's idiocy, and we're about to repeat it, and so far, I've at least succeeded in persuading my own Senator, Larry Craig, the primary sponsor of the bill, to put a hold on his own bill for a few months, while his staff seeks other options.

I'm just asking you all to please, please, write your own senators and reps, bring this matter to their attention, and to ask them to pretty, pretty please, not repeat the past mistakes of Superfund and the Black Lung fund.

Please! There is a time when it's just plain flat-out NOT cost-effective to try to sort out who did what to whom 50 years ago, and this is one of them.

I'm not going to reply because I don't want to be the one (Who keeps making posts that require me to set forth info, when I'm trying to take time off!???!)

But think of the lawyers! Have you no heart at all?

An Ethically Challenged Congress

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 16, 2005; 6:33 AM

Newspapers and magazines have been hammering Tom DeLay over all kinds of questionable activities: foreign trips financed by lobbyists, flying on corporate jets, putting relatives on his political payroll.

Only now it turns out that -- guess what -- lots of members of Congress have been doing these things.



That doesn't let the House majority leader off the hook -- he has been admonished three times by the ethics committee and is headed for a fourth investigation -- but it raises the question of why journalists have been slow to discover such seamy behavior across Capitol Hill.

"There's no question that the higher the profile of the congressman, the better the story is," says Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org, who has written about money and politics for decades. "If it's Congressman Schmendrik, a first-termer from Nowhere, Utah, that's a big story back in Utah but not a national story."

The recent slew of reports on congressional ethics (or lack thereof) brings to mind the long-ago observation by Michael Kinsley that the real scandal in politics is what's legal.

The Washington Post has reported that lobbyist-under-investigation Jack Abramoff financed DeLay's jaunt to England and Scotland -- a violation of House rules. But the same rules say it's perfectly okay for a big corporation or trade association to write checks for lawmakers' junkets and even send their lobbyist along. If the purpose of the House rule is to prevent lobbyists from exercising undue influence on faraway beaches and golf courses, how can this distinction be justified?

"The scandal here isn't DeLay so much as a system designed to get representatives and their spouses free trips to gay Paree and other desirable locations, even as they pretend to labor under a strict ethics regime," writes National Review Editor Rich Lowry.

Congress allows its members to fly on corporate planes for the price of a first-class ticket, which is a small fraction of the real cost of using a private aircraft. After the initial DeLay stories, the Wall Street Journal reported that corporations and industry groups spent $3 million last year to sponsor almost 2,000 trips for members of Congress and their staffs. The Post reported that members of the House and Senate leadership, Democrat and Republican, have flown on corporate jets at least 360 times from 2001 through 2004. DeLay was No. 3 in the number of trips, and former Senate minority leader Tom Daschle was just behind him. The Chicago Tribune found 835 trips by Illinois lawmakers and their staffs since 2000, with two Democrats filing no disclosure forms.

The New York Times ran a front-page story on DeLay's wife and daughter being paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by the Texas Republican's political committees. But local papers soon found dozens of lawmakers paying their relatives, from the $357,000 paid to California Rep. Richard Pombo's wife and daughter (Los Angeles Times) to the more than $150,000 paid to the wife and stepdaughter of Vermont Rep. Bernard Sanders (Brattleboro Reformer) to the $107,000 paid to the wife of Arizona Rep. J.D. Hayworth (Arizona Republic).

"These stories are always cyclical," says Fred Wertheimer of the advocacy group Democracy 21, a longtime critic of lobbying rules. "They get triggered by events. The focus on this area was triggered by the stories that flowed out of Jack Abramoff's activists and then became tied up with Majority Leader DeLay."

DeLay has delighted in blaming the "liberal media" for his woes. But The Post and Times also led the investigative charge that prompted the resignation of two top Democrats, then-Speaker Jim Wright and then-Majority Whip Tony Coelho, in 1989.

Dan Allen, DeLay's spokesman, blames a "carefully orchestrated campaign" by such groups as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Its director, Melanie Sloan, as the Journal recently reported, is a former aide to two Democratic lawmakers -- a point regularly omitted in news stories.

Asked why DeLay hasn't granted interviews on the allegations, Allen says: "With the feverish pitch with which the press has covered him over the last several months, we hope the fairest forum will be the ethics committee."

Belatedly, the media have now widened their scope, with editorials calling for tightening the rules. In arguing that he didn't do anything his colleagues didn't do, a USA Today story said, DeLay "has a point."

The details involving DeLay are sometimes different. After Abramoff paid for two DeLay staffers to visit the Northern Mariana Islands, which he represented, the congressman -- who later visited the U.S. territory on a trip arranged by Abramoff -- led the fight to block Congress from boosting the minimum wage there. It later emerged that Abramoff had paid for two Democratic members of Congress to take the same trip.

"Maybe sometimes it takes a new generation of reporters to come at it with a fresh sense of outrage," Jackson says. "This kind of stuff looks really awful to anyone not completely familiar with Congress, and if you're completely familiar with Congress, maybe you become co-opted."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5041100587.html

"These stories are always cynical," did he say? Heh.

Man I wonder how it is that in this day and age of terrorism and the "war on trrrr' it could be that pat (liquor officer) robertson can say things that marginalize Americas enemies (al queda) in the same sentence as he calls actual Americans more dangerous as well as saying that the state department should be nuked. Do any bushlovers or anyone from the "administration" refute it at all or anything of the sort?

No its fine. They like people like robertson and h(ins)annity and limpbag the druggie inciting violence.

You have been noted and will be looked at.

A Lou Dobbs appearence by Warren Buffet. Good interveiw.

BUFFETT: Well, it's an interesting idea that a deficit of $100 billion a year, something, 20 years out, seems to terrify the administration. But the $400-plus billion dollars deficit currently does nothing but draw yawns. I mean the idea that this terrible specter room looms over us 20 years out which is a small fraction of the deficit we happily run now seems kind of interesting to me.

DOBBS: In point of fact, the Congressional Budget Office, which is considered to be the bipartisan objective standard of such things, has research that suggests that the deficit in Social Security would be only 0.4 percent of our GDP over 75 years as compared to the other large deficits percentages that associated with trade in the budget deficit. Do you have, we're talking about fixing the fixes we're in, a quick answer for Social Security?

BUFFETT: I personally would increase the taxable base above the present $90,000. I pay very little in the way of Social Security taxes because I make a lot more than $90,000. And the people in my office pay the full tax. We're already edging up the retirement age a bit. And I would means test ... I get a check for $1,700 or $1,900 or something every month. I'm 74. And I cash it. But I'll eat without it.

DOBBS: You will eat without it. So will literally more than a million other Americans, as well. Means testing, the idea of raising taxes, the payroll tax. In 1983, Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, he had a very simple idea: raise taxes. That's what you're saying here.

BUFFETT: Sure. But I wouldn't raise the 12-point and a fraction payroll tax, I would raise the taxable base to above $90,000.

DOBBS: That's a progressive idea. In other words, the rich people would pay more?

BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good.

DOBBS: What a radical idea.

BUFFETT: It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be.

DOBBS: Exactly. Your class, as you put it, is winning on estate taxes, which I know you are opposed to. I don't know how your son Howard feels about that. I know you are opposed to it.

At the same week the House passed the estate tax, Congress passed the bankruptcy legislation, which they had the temerity to call bankruptcy reform, Democrats and Republicans passing this legislation, which is onerous to the middle class. Half of the bankruptcies in this country take place, because people fall ill, serious illnesses result in bankruptcy. Nearly half of the people involved. How do you -- you have watched a lot of politics. What is going on in this country?

BUFFETT: The rich are winning. Just take the estate tax, less than 2 percent of all estates pay any tax. A couple million people die every year, 40,000 or so estates get taxed.


http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/10/buffett/index.html

He also talks about nuclear proliferation.

A Politician’s New Cause
Thirteen-term congressman and cancer survivor Billy Tauzin says a new drug saved his life. Now he’s hoping to resuscitate the drug industry’s image as the head of its trade association.
Tauzin gets a warm reception at the Louisiana State Capitol building, as he announces a new drug industry effort to provide medicine to the uninsured

By Martha Brant
Newsweek




CORPORATE WHORE.




Updated: 8:23 a.m. ET May 24, 2005May 24 - Billy Tauzin, the colorful former congressman, comes from a tradition of Bibles and blackjack. “I always said that if they put slot machines in the church, I’d never see my mother again,” the Louisiana native quipped recently. Last year he learned something else also ran in his family: cancer. His mother survived three bouts of the disease. Now Tauzin is a cancer survivor too, and he’s not just proselytizing about the drug that saved him but the whole pharmaceutical industry.



In January, the 61-year-old Republican, who served 13 terms as a U.S. representative, became the head of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade association for drug companies. “I don’t know if PhRMA has ever had a president that’s been a patient,” Tauzin told reporters last week. But that perspective may be a much-needed shot in the arm for an industry that Tauzin says needs to “recapture the trust of the American public.”

Like I'd trust you or the megacorp pharmacy industry.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7963313/site/newsweek/

Both the drug industry and Iraq warhawks need to learn a lesson about public diplomacy: Some pigs just don't look any better with lipstick on.

No amount of PR is gonna make the Middle East like us after we've been screwing them for 50 years. The only thing like to change their minds is for us to, DOH, quit screwing them, and then try to improve our image. And ditto for drug companies: If you want the American public to like you again, quit price gouging.

These folks seem to think, often rightly, that you can paper over ANYTHING with the right spin.

Image is everything.

From NCLB to Clear Skies, from Healthy Forests to the Culture of Life it doesn't matter what you actually do it's how it appears on TV and in the media.

The self-righteous, 30 second soundbite, Madison Avenue generation.

I'll just assume everything they say is a lie or has a hidden ulterior motive until they prove otherwise, then I'll suspect them of pulling a fast one.


999 out of 1000 times I'll be right.

Update. It isn't called "image" anymore, davey-darling. It's called framing. Use it, abuse it, burn it into your brain.

I didn't start using suiciders why would I frame it like that?

Never heard of it.