Year: 2006

Corruption eruption: Last month, a potential bombshell story concerning the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee went largely unnoticed in the traditional media. On Dec. 23 — yes, Christmas Eve “Eve” — the San Diego Union-Tribune published a story alleging that Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) has been engaged in Abramoff-Dukester style scratch-backing with a powerful K Street lobbyist:

From powerful positions on the House Appropriations Committee, California Rep. Jerry Lewis has greenlighted hundreds of millions of dollars in federal projects for clients of one of his closest friends, lobbyist and former state Congressman Bill Lowery.

Meanwhile, Lowery, the partners at his firm and their clients have donated 37 percent of the $1.3 million that Lewis’ political action committee received in the past six years.

The story made headlines again last week when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Department of Justice against Rep. Lewis, citing the newspaper story and alleging that:

[At] least one staffer has moved back and forth between Rep. Lewis’s and Lowery’s offices: Jeffrey Shockey left Rep. Lewis’s employ in 1999 after which he joined Lowery’s lobbying firm. He remained with the firm until 2005, when he left to return to work for Rep. Lewis. When he left, Lowery’s firm hired Shockey’s wife, Alexandra, to represent some of her husband’s old clients, with the result that on behalf of her husband’s former partners, she now lobbies staffers who work for her husband.

Doling out $480,000 to get hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts sounds like a very good deal. The question is, is it legal?

“Questions about my record are clearly an attempt to distract attention from the real issue, which is that our brave men and women in uniform are dying and being injured every day in the middle of a civil war that can be resolved only by the Iraqis themselves.”

“I volunteered for a year’s duty in Vietnam. I was out in the field almost every single day. We took heavy casualties in my regiment the year that I was there. In my fitness reports, I was rated No. 1. My record is clear.”

— Rep. John Murtha

A blunt object: National Journal’s Insiders Poll asked denizens of the Hill about who they favor for Tom DeLay’s replacement as House Majority Leader. While Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., claims to be first in line for the top spot, some insiders bluntly disagree.

More Republicans chose Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, to assume the job — 48% of Republicans said they preferred Boehner, compared to the 34% who picked Blunt; 18% named someone else.

Blunt claims more than 100 commitments from members in the race; Boehner reports 86. “Boehner is more of a statement than Blunt,” said one GOP insider, and another suggested that “Blunt would be a huge mistake: more ‘same old, same old.'”

More Democrats picked Boehner than Blunt as well, although a majority said they’d prefer to see another candidate. Boehner garnered 23% and Blunt got 15%. Republicans should elect someone else said 56%, with one Democrat saying, “They need a fresh face, untainted by the corruption and sleaze of the current leadership. Too bad it’ll never happen.”

Yeah, too bad.

Working on his tan: Here’s a new theory on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden: He’s on the beach somewhere relaxing, or at Disneyland – or wherever you go to get some downtime after you’ve won a war.

If bin Laden’s goal was to destroy American democracy, it certainly does appear that he has been successful – and he couldn’t have done it without his accomplice, President George W. Bush.

Bin Laden’s attack on the United States in 2001 enabled the president to use the fear of terror to manipulate the public will. Instead of reassuring Americans they “have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Bush’s message is, “Be scared – be very, very scared.” He also used fear as an excuse for shredding the Constitution by flagrantly violating United States law.

When the attacked us on 9/11, Bush says, bin Laden and al Qaeda changed the world so drastically that documents like the Geneva Accords and, evidentally, the U.S. Constitution were “rendered quaint.”

President Bush says that because we should fear bin Laden more than we love our freedom, he can ignore laws like FISA as well as constitutional edicts preventing the government from spying on its citizens.

And his stooges, the corrupt Republicans who run Congress, are unwilling to stop him.

Game, set, match. We are toast.

The picture of bin Laden savoring his victory, sunning himself on the beach, hit me when I read this from Bob Geiger:

[…]

Friend of Jack: The hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich is, and always has been, magnificent to behold. And he never disappoints. In fact, his latest turn is positively jaw-dropping. Gingrich, who is floating a bid for the presidency in 2008, is now positioning himself as a critic of the Republican culture of corruption that he created over a decade ago:

Gingrich … was the architect of the so-called K Street Project, which is at the center of the current corruption scandals. As the [Washington] Post reported in 2002, “Starting in the mid-1990s, some Republicans, including then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and [Representative Tom] DeLay, have advocated tracking the political affiliation of lobbyists, as part of an effort to place more conservatives on K Street.” In return, K Street would help the GOP ram through corporate-written legislation and fill GOP coffers with campaign contributions.

It worked perfectly. The American Prospect reported in 2000 that within the first six months of Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker, “the Republican leadership introduced a spate of controversial bills gutting regulatory agencies” and that “business contributions more than doubled from what they had been during a comparable period in 1993.”

By 1998 Gingrich wasn’t even trying to hide the K Street Project, as he “held up a vote on intellectual property legislation in protest of the Electronics Industry Association’s plan to hire a Democrat to run the group,” according to the Post. In fact, when Gingrich resigned at the end of 1998, the Hill newspaper ran a story headlined NEWT’S DEPARTURE DEFLATES KEY LOBBYISTS, which detailed the unsuccessful effort by Gingrich and corporate lobbyists to help him hold on to power and preserve K Street’s bridge into Congress.

Gingrich has made it clear he’s ready to lead the GOP lynch mob that is after disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff – but Abramoff was a political operative asociated with Newt back in the day. In fact it was Abramoff’s close ties with Speaker Gingrich in 1994 that got him hired at Preston, Gates & Ellis, where the seeds of today’s scandals were planted.

Of course, these example of Gingrichian hypocrisy pale next to his Clinton era shenanigans, especialy when he was leading the GOP assault on President Clinton’s adulterous affair while concurrently carrying on an adulterous affair with Callista Bisek, a former staff member. In 1999, Gingrich lost the speakership because of this affair and left the House in disgrace. (And his wife at the time, Marianne Ginther, should have this one coming. In 1981, Newt dumped his first wife – who had recently been diagnosed with cancer – for Ginther.)

Which brings to mind the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that then-Speaker Gingrich helped pass into law in 1996. DOMA was an attempt by the GOP to put a wedge between Clinton and some of his most loyal supporters. The Republicans’ timing underscored the cynicism of their effort: DOMA was scheduled so that President Clinton had to sign it in September – just as the final heat in the presidential campaign was starting.

Gingrich was just one of several known or soon-to-be revealed adulterers among the men who enacted DOMA; others included then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-KS), then-Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), who drafted the legislation and of course our own President Clinton who signed the bill.

Of course, Newt Gingrich will never be president – not because he’s a hypocrite but because he has no friends or supporters on the left and an ever-growing army of enemies on the right. So I hope he does run. It would be fun during the primaries watching Newt taking incoming flak from his fellow Republicans.