Tag: Scandals

Not that kind of green: The Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, and TPMmuckraker.com (LCV) have proof that the more lobbyist greenbacks your man and woman in Washington accept, the more likely they will vote brown.

Six years into George W. Bush’s presidency, anti-environmental extremism has become Capitol Hill’s standard operating procedure. Hardly a major bill goes by that someone doesn’t saddle with a rider to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge…

What’s the connection between a bad environmental voting record and corruption? Follow the money. Votes against clean air and water are not cast out of antipathy to summer zephyrs and babbling brooks but to help some favored campaign contributor make an extra buck.

The LCV ranks elected officials based on their environmental voting record. So just to see if the theory would hold, the groups also looked at how involved the low-rankers were in the Abramoff/K Street scandals.

The results are convincing. The list of two-time losers (those with money scandals and anti-environment records) begins with former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.). There’s also a state-by-state roll call of elected officials who earned a score of cold zero from the LCV. My guy, U.S. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) is on it. Is yours?

What letter? There’s a new twist in one of Editor Trish’s favorite investigations — the Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham hookers and limos story. Congress Daily reports that the House panel investigating whether Cunningham used limos paid for by the gubmint to ferry him and prostitutes (paid for by ??) to D.C. hotels has received an affadavit that connects Shirlington Limousine to the Department of Homeland Security via Cunningham.

Shirlington was awarded a $24 million contract by DHS to cart its staffers and executives around Washington. The affadavit, given by Shirlington President Christopher Baker, alleges that Cunningham wrote a letter to DHS extolling the virtues of Shirlington, which supposedly tipped the scales in the limo company’s favor.

Problem is, Baker is an ex-con with links to a defense contractor who is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Cunningham case who may have fraudulently qualified for the contract. See, the company was granted the DHS contract under a set-aside program, the Historically Underutilized Business Zone program, despite the fact that its offices are located in a luxury high-rise.

The other problem is, DHS can’t seem to find a copy of the letter in any of its files. Oh yeah, and Baker has now refused to hand over his copy of the phantom letter and other documents he promised the committee would clearly extablish links between Cunningham, DHS and Shirlington.

Stay tuned, Trish, for more shenanigans that involve more missing documents and false allegations and less sexy stuff like hookers and limos.

State of mind: It matters to Democrat Nick Lampson, who wants to fill the congressional seat vacated when Tom “The Hammer” DeLay resigned this month. Problem is, the D-Guy won the Republican nomination in the March primary and so his name is still offically on the ballot — according to Texas Dems. Whoa, say Texas Repugs, that boy’s done gone and registered hisself to vote and went and voted in the primary by absentee ballot in Alexandria, Va., thereby making him a Virginian. According to Congressional Quarterly:

“We don’t think Mr. DeLay can be conclusively established by public records to be a resident of Virginia,” says Chad W. Dunn, the Texas Democrats’ general counsel and a lawyer with Riddle & Brazil in Houston.

The Democrats won a temporary restraining order earlier this month preventing Texas GOP Chairwoman Tina J. Benkiser from convening a meeting of 22nd District precinct chairmen, who in turn will pick four people to decide on DeLay’s ballot replacement. In court papers, the Democrats maintained that DeLay essentially perpetrated a fraud by campaigning for renomination — because, they allege, he’d already decided to resign the seat this spring — in an effort to leave it to party elders, not the voters, to pick the best possible candidate to face Lampson.

Imagine that — the words “DeLay” and “fraud” appearing together in the same sentence! Even as he was leaving Congress, the worm was manipulating the political process as a final gimme for the home team.

According to the ten-gallon Democrats, DeLay is still taking a homestead tax exemption on his house outside of Houston and is still on Texas voter rolls, both of which are kind of illegal, him being a Virginian and all. Topping that, though, is the fact that for two months after he allegedly obtained his Virginia driver’s license and voter registration, DeLay was still voting as a congressional representative of his district in Texas.

Man, that guy makes me glad I’m not a Texan or a Virginian. So it’s not such great shakes being a Floridian, but at least we don’t have Tom DeLay bringing a new, higher level of professional corruption into Sunshine State politics.

Yesterday a jury convicted former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling on all counts related to fraud and dirty dealing in the collapse of Enron corporation, the giant energy corporation that was headquartered in Houston.

Just as we started taking bets on the demise of Enron when the lights went out in Beverly Hills back in 2000 while the company was playing the GOP-rigged California energy market like a crooked a slot machine, we’re now accepting wagers on when Bush will pardon his friend and former financial backer, “Kenny-Boy” Lay.

Lay gave Bush $100,000 during the 2000 election, and the sent another $10 grand to Florida to help with the Bush v. Gore recount.

After the truth came out about Enron — largely based on reporting by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, whose book, “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” and the movie thereof, are both excellent sources for information on this story — President Bush pretended he barely knew Lay.

But George Bush did know Ken Lay, and tried to help him in all sorts of ways before the truth came out about Lay’s criminal activities:

As Enron’s crisis worsened through the first nine months of Bush’s presidency, Lay secured Bush’s help in three key ways:

–Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush’s resistance to price caps bought Enron extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California’s consumers.

–Bush granted Lay broad influence over the development of the administration’s energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron’s businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron’s complex derivative-financing schemes.

–Bush had his NSC staff organize that administration-wide task force to pressure India to accommodate Enron’s interests in selling the Dabhol generating plant for as much as $2.3 billion.

So when will Lay be pardoned — on last Bush’s last day in office (may it come soon) or before Lay’s first day in jail?