Month: November 2005
Is Italia Federici This Year’s Scandal Blonde?
She allegedly took $250,000 from indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff in return for using her influence in high government places to benefit his clients. But when she failed to show up to testify before a Senate committee chaired by Sen. John McCain, he sent U.S. marshals out to bring her in.
It is an odd characteristic of our era that all the big scandals seem to produce a blonde woman near their centers – Fanne Foxe, Donna Rice, Fawn Hall, Gennifer Flowers and Linda Tripp, to name just a few.
The corrupt Republican leaders in the Congress have kept a lid on scandals during the first five years of the Bush Administration, but recent events indicate that the lid is about to be blown off.
“Any way to see if this is something coming from the top?” Abramoff asked in an email. Federici responded: “I will definitely see what i can find out. I hate to bug you, but is there any news about a possible contribution. . . .”
And right on cue comes Italia Federici, complete with honey-colored hair and a swirling cloud of controversy.
She is the president of a Republican anti-environmentalist group based in Washington who has been caught up in the alleged influence peddling of former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon are accused of bilking $80 million from six Indian tribes who had hired the lobbyists to represent their interests in the Capital.
Abramoff donated between $225,000 and $500,000 he collected from his tribal clients to Federici’s nonprofit group, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA).
Investigators allege that, in return, Federici used her influence at the Dept. of Interior to help one of the tribes maintain its monopoly over gambling in its home region.
The “favors” Italia Federici performed for Abramoff’s clients usually involved making requests to her friend Steven Griles, who was a deputy interior secretary.
Whatever she did for Abramoff, it had little or nothing to do with the activities or purview of CREA, which was founded by anti-tax whack job Grover Norquist and Gale Norton before she became interior secretary.
BREAKING: Rep. Schmidt Calls Rep. Murtha a ‘Coward’
“A few minutes ago I received a call from Colonel Danny Bubp, Ohio Representative from the 88th district in the House of Representatives. He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message, that cowards cut and run, Marines never do. “
– Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH)
Fitzgerald Calls a Second Grand Jury in Bush CIA Leak Investigation
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in court filings that the ongoing CIA leak investigation will involve proceedings before a new grand jury, a possible sign he could seek new charges in the case.by…
Earlier this week Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward disclosed that he testified under oath to Fitzgerald that a senior Bush administration official had casually told him in mid-June 2003 about CIA operative Valerie Plame’s position at the agency.
Fitzgerald’s comments about bringing proceedings before a different grand jury were contained in court filings in which he backed off seeking a blanket order to keep all documents in the CIA leak case secret.
Rightwing ‘Intellectual’ Slams Intelligent Design
Calls it phony: Conservatives are, by definition, anti-intellectual, especially in the Bush era, so what gets written by the smarty-pants among them can be viewed with some suspicion. This is especially so if that smarty-pants is Charles Krauthammer, a colunnist for the Washington Post and one of the hordes of Gop apologists on Fox News.
But in a column today under the headline, “Phony Theory, False Conflict: ‘Intelligent Design’ Foolishly Pits Evolution Against Faith,” Krauthammer takes the central tenet at the heart of rightwing anti-intellectualism:
Let’s be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological “theory” whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge — in this case, evolution — they are to be filled by God. It is a “theory” that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, “I think I’ll make me a lemur today.” A “theory” that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science — that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution — or behind the motion of the tides or the “strong force” that holds the atom together?
GOP’s Answer to Crises: Senate Passes $60 Bil Tax Cut
A $60 billion bill the Senate passed to continue expiring tax cuts and shelter 14 million families from higher taxes faces a White House veto threat because it also includes a hefty tax increase for oil companies.
The legislation passed by senators early Friday would spare millions of families from paying increased taxes through the alternative minimum tax. Much of the bill, passed 64-33, preserves tax cuts approved in previous years that are set to expire unless lawmakers keep them alive.
But unlike a bill assembled by the House tax writing committee, it does not preserve lower tax rates for capital gains and dividends scheduled to disappear at the end of 2008. Congress lowered the maximum tax rate on that investment income to 15 percent in 2003, and many Republicans want to act this year to keep those rates in place in 2009 and 2010.
It was doubtful whether the House would vote on its bill before leaving for the Thanksgiving holiday. “It’s a possibility that we’ll move it if we’re ready to move it,” Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said early Friday. “We’ll have to see where the votes are.”
If the Patriot Act Goes Through, No Matter How Bad It Gets for Bush, We Still Lose
We are close, very close, to a big victory for the American way. Let the senators who are trying to prevent parts of the USAPatriot Act from being made permanent know you’re behind them.
Contact your own senators, along with the six true patriots who don’t want to quit being Americans in order to protect America
The senators are Republicans Larry Craig of Idaho, John Sununu of New Hampshire and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Ken Salazar of Colorado.
Congress is facing two deadlines. Lawmakers want to leave before week’s end for Thanksgiving and many parts of the Patriot Act are to expire by year’s end if Congress does not renew them.
The Republican-controlled House hoped to approve the compromise on Friday. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., told senators on Thursday that they will have to address the legislation “before we leave.”
But Feingold, D-Wis., the only senator to vote against the original Patriot Act in 2001, said there are several different delaying tactics available to stop the bill in the Senate.
Feingold said he had cleared his schedule through Thanksgiving. “And this time I don’t think I’ll be alone,” he said.
Added Murkowski: “We have worked too long and too hard to allow this conference report to eliminate the modest protections for civil liberties that were agreed to unanimously in the Senate.”
No matter how far Bush slips in the polls, no matter how much other bad legislation we defeat, if the Patriot Act is allowed to be exempted from public review forever, we lose. See this earlier story on exactly what’s at stake, and then contact your own senators, along with the six true patriots who don’t want to quit being Americans in order to protect America.
MSBNC: All Senior WH Officials Have Denied Being Woodward’s Source – Exept Cheney
MSNBC’s David Schuster just reported that his network asked each top White House official if he or she had been the unnamed source who revealed the identity of a secret CIA agent to Bob Woodward. All of them denied except for the vice president, who issued a “no comment.”
Earlier Woodward described the source as a senior official he had interviewed several times.
Manny “Concrete” Diaz Wins, But Gets No Mandate
Manny’s moribund mandate: In another win for the concrete crowd, Miami Mayor Manny Diaz won easily in Tuesday’s Miami City election. Of course, a campaign war chest of $1 million donated mainly by developers and a cast of unknown opponents made it a sure thing.
The mayor should be credited with bringing Miami’s finances and bond ratings out of the cellar and back to fiscal health. He has also refrained from beating his wife, punching commissioners, placing his hand over news video cameras or running around the city in his bathrobe trying to get the early edition of the Miami Herald to see what lies they wrote about him today — all common behaviors among his predecessors.
But it is his endorsement of aggressive development, wildly unplanned and unmanaged development, that is a problem for Miami. Diaz is a lawyer, but has aligned himself with developers, stacked the Miami Commission with developers and has one of his former proteges in a runoff for the commission seat left open when Arthur Teele blew his brains out in the lobby of the Miami Herald building. If Michelle Spence-Jones wins the runoff, and Manny and his political goons have been beating up her opponent, the Rev. Richard Dunn (who, by the way, was asked to say the invocation at Diaz’ first swearing-in ceremony), hizzoner will have locked up the commission. Period.
But the election was no mandate. A mere 17.8 percent of the 150,000 registered voters even bothered going to the polls. That’s just 27,000 voters, and only 17,000 of them voted for Manny “Concrete” Diaz.
Of course, having the election delayed two weeks by a major hurricane couldn’t have helped the turnout. Neither could the still-frazzled condition of most of the residents of South Florida just less than a month after we were hammered.
However, the electorate is not Manny’s constituency; the developers are. And they got what they wanted. And they will continue to build McMansions and knock down trees and fill in wetlands and pave every last inch of the tip pf the peninsula because they can, and because they have the full blessing and cooperation of our mayor and city commission.
Goddamn the bastards!
… And the Horse She Rode In On
Unhappy trails: Katherine Harris is eating Bill Nelson’s dust on the campaign trail in her challenge for his U.S. Senate seat. Behind by 24 points, with a campaign manager who quit the ranch either due to differences of opinion or to allow savvy Florida political gunslingers to run the dog and pony show, Harris’ hopalong campaign is hobbled with lackadaisical fundraising.
In true GOP fashion, however, she’s standing tall in the stirrups and blaming it on the goll-dang hurricanes. Smells like a load of horse manure to us.
