Day: March 23, 2007

We’re Letting Abramoff Out of Jail Early

Trish

Jon provided some background on the highest-ranking former Bushite convicted so far in the Abramoff scandals.

But while Jack is implicating others for doing the crime, it looks like he himself won’t be doing much more time.

I don’t know about you but I must have missed the meeting. Had I been there, I would have voted to throw away the key.

Federal prosecutors took the first steps toward reducing the prison sentence of former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, currently scheduled for release in 2011 for a Florida fraud conviction.

Documents filed in federal court say Abramoff has provided “substantial assistance” in a separate Washington corruption scandal investigation and continues to work with investigators from his prison cell in Cumberland, Md.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul F. Schwartz did not recommend how much Abramoff’s sentence should be cut.

We’re guessing a whole bunch.

Abramoff, in case you forgot, was sentenced to six years for his role in defrauding the owner of the SunCruz Casinos gambling boats and other investors of $20 million, which was leveraged into a staggering $60 million in financing.

Unlike Jack, the fleet’s former owner could not provide incriminating evidence against Abramoff or his partners in crime because of an unfortunate hail of bullets delivered by a mob hit man.

“Federal prosecutors,” as we all know, means the ones who are designated “the United States” anytime it’s “The United States versus, say, Jack Abramoff or Some Other Lowlife Criminal.” So that’s you and me, folks. We evidently decided to let federal inmate No. 27593-112 out of jail early.

I don’t know about you but I must have missed the meeting where we agreed to do that. Had I been there, I would have voted to throw away the key.

Oops, Rudy’s Wife Did It Again

Trish

Oh no, she di-ent say that: Turns out Rudy Giuliani’s third wife is mathematically challenged. She — like her current husband — is currently on her third, not second, marriage.

Rudy’s third wife commenting on their six marriages: “It makes you appreciate marriage a little bit more”

She kind of forgot the five years she was married to some guy in the ’70s. These things happen, but the good news for Republicans is that the Giulianis really respect the sanctity of marriage.

“Rudy and I both have been married three times,” Judith, 52, told the New York Post.

“I’d honestly like to say we got it right the first time around,” she told the paper. “But that was not to be … and so what that has done for us is, I think, it makes you appreciate marriage a little bit more.”

She and Rudy are appreciating the heck out of marriage, with six total between them. And counting…

Bolton: Damned Proud of Blocking Israel-Hezbollah Cease-Fire

Buck Banks

Lest we forget: The Bush administration’s hard-on for Israel has a name: John Bolton. The former U.S. envoy to the United Nations has spilled the beans to the BBC in an interview where he pretty much says that U.S. interests were best served by Israel dropping shitloads of cluster bombs on Lebanon during last summer’s dust-up.

Please either read the whole thing or at least drop down to the end where it gets into the disparate casualties on the Lebanese side versus the Israeli side, keeping in mind that whole thing was supposedly over a couple of Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped.

Mr. Bolton, a controversial and blunt-speaking figure, said he was ‘damned proud of what we did’ to prevent an early ceasefire.
(Emphasis added)

Former ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the BBC that before any ceasefire Washington wanted Israel to eliminate Hezbollah’s military capability.

Mr Bolton said an early ceasefire would have been “dangerous and misguided”.

He said the US decided to join efforts to end the conflict only when it was clear Israel’s campaign wasn’t working.

Israel was reacting in its own self-defence and if that meant the defeat of the enemy, that was perfectly legitimate under international law. The former envoy, who stepped down in December 2006, was interviewed for a BBC radio documentary, The Summer War in Lebanon, to be broadcast in April.

Mr Bolton said the US was deeply disappointed at Israel’s failure to remove the threat from Hezbollah and the subsequent lack of any attempt to disarm its forces.

Britain joined the US in refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire.
The war began when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers, but it quickly escalated into a full-scale conflict.

BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall says the US-UK refusal to join calls for a ceasefire was one of the most controversial aspects of the diplomacy.

British, US and Israeli ambassadors at the UN, August 2006
The UK, US and Israeli were alone in resisting an early ceasefire
At the time US officials argued a ceasefire was insufficient and agreement was needed to address the underlying tensions and balance of power in the region.

Mr Bolton now describes it as “perfectly legitimate… and good politics” for the Israelis to seek to defeat their enemy militarily, especially as Hezbollah had attacked Israel first and it was acting “in its own self-defence”.

Mr Bolton, a controversial and blunt-speaking figure, said he was “damned proud of what we did” to prevent an early ceasefire.

Also in the BBC programme, several key players claim that, privately, there were Arab leaders who also wanted Israel to destroy Hezbollah.

“There were many not – how should I put it – resistant to the thought that the Israelis should thoroughly defeat Hezbollah, who… increasingly by Arab states were seen as an Iranian proxy,” said UN special envoy Terje Roed Larsen.

More than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and an unknown number of Hezbollah fighters were killed in the conflict.

Israel lost 116 soldiers in the fighting, while 43 of its civilians were killed in Hezbollah rocket attacks.

Poll: Bush Is Killing the Republican Brand

Jon Ponder

Pew Finds 15 Percentage Point Drop in Self-Identified Gops

A new Pew poll has detected a “dramatic shift” in party identification over the past five years:

[In 2002] Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, 50 percent of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, whereas 35 percent aligned with Republicans.

What’s more, the survey found, public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats’ values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has decreased.

While Bush’s devastation of his party has isolated the rightwing’s base — a coalition of paranoid fringe types, Christian nationalists and Dittoheads who have nowhere else to go — it has not swelled the ranks of the Democratic Party.

A sizable group within the 15 percent who have moved away from the GOP are socially liberal, fiscally conservative suburbanites — many of whom felt burned by the Republicans’ impeachment of Pres. Clinton over a sex lie but gave the GOP no less than three more chances, voting for Bush in 2000, the GOP Congress in 2002 and Bush again in 2004. As you can imagine, these folks have had it with the Grand Old Party.

And yet it appears they are giving Rudolph Giuliani his current lead over John McCain. Still, it’s theoretically possible they might be convinced by Hillary Clinton or maybe even Barak Obama, providing they keep their distance from the moonbat left.

The Sanjaya of Secretaries of State

Jon Ponder

Condoleeza Rice and Sanjaya.

Sanjaya Malakar is the long-haired guy on “American Idol” who seems to think a big smile can mask his inadequacies as a singer.

I knew he reminded me of someone, and then it hit me: Condoleeza Rice. As Donald Trump said about her, “She gets off the plane, she waves, she sits down with some dictator – 45 degree angle, they do the camera shot. She waves again, she gets back on the plane, she waves – no deal ever happens.”

…Smiling all the while to cover her inadequacies as a diplomat.

Former Bush Interior Official Pleads Guilty to Lying to Congress in Abramoff Case

Jon Ponder

Stephen Griles, a former oil company lobbyist who served as second-in-command in the Interior Department during Pres. Bush’s first term, pleaded guilty today to lying to Congress about his relationship with the lobbyist and now convicted felon Jack Abramoff.

In November 2005, Griles told the Senate Indian Affairs Committee that he did not know Abramoff. However, emails showed that he had carred out requests inside the Interior Department for Abramoff to benefit Abramoff’s Indian-tribe clients that had been funneled to him by his girlfriend, Italia Federici. Federici was head of a Washington, D.C.-based anti-environmentalism front group, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), which appeared to have little other funding than donations from Abramoff.

The timing of emails from Abramoff to Federici requesting “favors” from Griles at Interior with donations to CREA from Abramoff’s clients suggests a quid pro quo. Abramoff donated between $225,000 and $500,000 to Federici’s group in the early years of the decade.

CREA was founded by Grover Norquist, the rightwing idealogue and associate of Karl Rove who issues daily talking points to GOP operatives, and Gail Norton, the anti-environmentalist whom Bush installed as his first secretary of the interior. It appears to have no offices, just a mail drop. Recent checks found that CREA’s website (GOP4environment.org) is gone, and that there is no corporate registration for the group in Washington, and no record that it ever paid taxes.

Griles was sentenced to five months in jail and five months in a halfway house or under house arrest.

Brainless Florida Republicans Attempt to Brainstorm Tax Cuts

Trish

Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature is wrestling with property tax reform, and hardly a day in session passes without some new and even more ridiculous proposal to solve the problem.

So many proposals have been tossed about to increase taxes that a t-shirt from a Disneyworld hotel gift shop will cost about $19.95 and the tax will be $124

The St. Petersburg Times nailed the current state of lunacy in an editorial.

Republicans in the Florida House have achieved something truly extraordinary. They have managed to rewrite their terribly flawed tax relief proposal and make it worse, a feat previously thought to be impossible. It is time for adult supervision from the governor and the Senate to steer this debate back into reality.

Forcing drastic cuts in government spending through property tax rollbacks, abolishing property taxes on homesteads and replacing some of the money by raising the state sales tax by 2.5 cents would be short-sighted and irresponsible…Better ideas have been drawn up on cocktail napkins as bartenders served a final round.

I won’t bore non-Floridians with the details but suffice it to say that property values (and therefore, assessments) have skyrocketed over the past few years. Homeowners are getting it on two ends — increased property taxes and out of sight insurance premiums.

But the cure could be worse than the disease. Republicans, who adore “not taking anything off the table,” offered up the idea of just eliminating all property taxes. Hold on, Florida’s 67 counties said, what will we do for money? Cut back, the brave legislators replied. Yes, and then what, the counties rejoined.

So a new plan was hatched — raise the state sales tax! After all, it’s you tourists who will pay most of it, they said, plus all those freeloading renters. So many proposals have been tossed about to increase sales and bed tax rates, and to tax things that were previously exempt that a t-shirt from a Disneyworld hotel gift shop will cost about $19.95 and the tax will be $124. Should do wonders for tourism.

Mystery of Tainted Pet Food Might be Solved

Trish

The world’s bread basket imports wheat from China? Who knew?

As surprising as that fact is, it’s even more amazing that the rat poison they use on the wheat in China could be so potent that it kills animals when it gets into processed pet food.

Ever since the government under the neocons abdicated its regulatory role, food has been unsafe for both man and beast.

With the death count at 241 and counting, there’s finally been a break in the Menu Foods case. A press conference will be held this afternoon, and it’s likely a chemical called aminopterin, which is illegal in this country, will be revealed as the source of the pet poisonings.

If, like me, you’ve been wondering with every can of dog and cat food you open if this is the one that will kill your beloved pet, here’s help. ABC deserves a public service award for posting all the brands of all the pet food in the recall, along with specific batch numbers. They also list the symptoms of you should watch for in your pet:

    Uncharacteristic lethargy
    Severe loss of appetite
    Vomiting
    Profound changes in eating and drinking
    Increased urination

While this chemical might not be the problem, and there might be more tainted food than currently identified, it’s a start.

Once they get the bad food off the shelves and the dying stops, can someone please look into how this happened? Ever since the government under the neocons abdicated its regulatory role, food has been unsafe for both man and beast.

Did a ‘Bushie’ U.S. Attorney Give a GOP Pol a Pass on Fraud Charges?

Jon Ponder

The investigation into Pres. George Bush’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys last December has prompted a second look at some questionable actions by federal prosecutors since Bush took office.

“My information was that [Attorney General John Ashcroft] prohibited the U.S. Attorney’s Office in North Carolina from interrogating Charles Taylor.”
— Attorney for defendant in fraud case at Taylor’s S&L

In 2003, a U.S. Attorney in western North Carolina was accused of deliberately failing to interrogate a powerful Republican congressman who was directly implicated in a bank fraud matter. The accuser also stated that the federal prosecutor, Robert Conrad Jr., excluded the congressman from being investigated at the behest of then-Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft. The record shows that within two years of the case in question, Conrad was appointed to the federal bench by Pres. Bush.

The congressman was Rep. Charles Taylor, who represented N.C. 11th for 16 years before his defeat last year by former pro-football player, Heath Shuler, a Democrat. Taylor was a member of the Appropriations Committee, and was listed as one of the 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress. He was also the owner of Blue Ridge Savings, based in Asheville, which was the subject of a federal investigation in 2001 into fraudulent loans that produced guilty pleas from Taylor’s campaign manager and one of his biggest donors, although Taylor was never charged.

The case involving questionable practices by U.S. Attorney Conrad was tried in 2003, and resulted in the conviction of Thomas Jones for attempting to defraud Blue Ridge Savings with bad loans:

Testimony in the trial, along with FBI interviews that were introduced as evidence, raised questions about [Rep.] Taylor as well. Jones and other defendants testified that Taylor knew about and even encouraged the fraudulent loans… In Asheville, investigators never interrogated Taylor…

“My information was that [Attorney General John Ashcroft] prohibited the U.S. Attorney’s Office in North Carolina from interrogating Charles Taylor,” [Jone’s attorney, Forrest Ferrell,] recalled last week. He’d give no other details. “My information was confidential,” he said…

The U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina at the time, Robert J. Conrad Jr., filed a vigorous response, saying the claims of interference weren’t true.

“The premise of the defendant’s motion is simply wrong,” Conrad wrote…

In 2005, Conrad was appointed a U.S. district judge. He couldn’t be reached for comment.

Revelations in the investigation so far show that staffers in Attorney General Abu Gonzalez’ office rated U.S. Attorneys based on their loyalty to Pres. Bush. The USAs rated most loyal to Dear Leader were referred to as “Bushies.” Conrad was not on the DOJ list of federal attorneys because he’d already been promoted, so we don’t know whether Gonzalez’ people thought of him as a loyal Bushie.

Still, on the face of it appears that powerful Republicans obstructed justice in the Blue Ridge S&L fraud case. How will we know unless Ashcroft, Taylor and Conrad are interrogated about it under oath?

Big H/t to GBacon