I don’t often feel compelled to write to politicians, nor am I naïve enough to think that anything I can say to the Obama campaign will prompt reconsideration of their policy on holding the Bush administration accountable. Nonetheless, for some reason this one was clearly going to bug me until I did it.  So, a few days ago, I sent this letter (below) to the Obama campaign.

The point: Congress (and apparently the Obama campaign, as expressed by legal advisor Cass Sunstein) have made a short term, political "cost/benefit" assessment about holding Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes.  They all seem to have decided that the cost is too high, the benefit too small.  For everyone’s sake, I suggest they recalculate with an eye on the mid-to-long-term costs of NOT holding these criminals accountable.

The SF Chronicle reports on corporate lobbyists taking advantage of a loophole in rules preventing them from throwing lavish parties to "honor"House lawmakers, which exempts parties for groups of Members.

Prominent, a Sunday evening bash thrown by ATT for the "Blue Dogs" to thank them for the FISA amnesty.

Lobbyist parties for lawmakers bend rules

Congress, pledging to clean up Washington's culture of corruption, approved a rule last year to end the practice of lobbyists or their clients throwing lavish events honoring lawmakers at the parties' national conventions.

But the House ethics committee opened a huge loophole in the rule by issuing guidelines in December saying it was fine for lobbyists or their employers to throw parties for a group of House members - just not for a single lawmaker...

...AT&T is among the sponsors of a party celebrating the conservative House Blue Dog Democrats on Sunday night.

Perfect spot for the first appearance of my "STOP GOVERNMENT SPYING" banner.

Remember Georgia? no, not THAT Georgia, I mean the one OVER THERE, you know, next to Russia.

They just had a nifty little war (Nifty except for the death and destruction, of course, but hey, what's a little of that compared with the olympics?)

Of course, the pipeline is undamaged, thank goodness, otherwise somebody might lose money.

and who's making money off this little debacle?

This story has been covered already by a few blogs, but not here, and none seems to have presented the graphic shown below.

Jowie Chen, a doctoral student in political science at Stanford, obtained the records of 2.6 million applications for FEMA disaster assistance in Florida in 2004.  (This happened not because the Bush administration made them available voluntarily, but because four Florida newspapers won a Freedom of Information Act suit.)  Chen then mapped these applications and the subsequent FEMA grants into counties and precincts, added data on actual weather conditions in these locations, their demographic characteristics, and finally local voting patterns in recent Federal elections.  The paper can be found here.  The following map shows part of his results.

</DIV>

John McNicotine is now for the tobacco lobby after years of working against it.  He not only opposes the cigarette taxes he used to support but also opposes FDA regulation of the tobacco industry after years of supporting it.  McNicotine is an ex-smoker and should understand just how addictive nicotine is, and he even acknowledged the exceptionally high death rate for tobacco users when he joked that cigarette exports to Iran were part of his plot to kill Iranian citizens.  For McNicotine to cave in to the tobacco cartel is the ultimate flip-flop:
http://www.boston.com/...

Why has McNicotine caved in to the interests of the tobacco drug cartel?  It couldn't possibly have anything to do with hiring tobacco lobbyist Charlie Black as his senior adviser.  Move along folks.  There's nothing to see here:
http://firedoglake.com/...

Now let's use the traditional Rethug "moral values" and "sanctity of life" frames against McNicotine!  There's more in the flip.

When Pastor Rick Warren asked John McCain to reveal his greatest moral failing a couple of evenings ago, McCain confessed that it was the breakup of his first marriage.  And that, indeed, was ugly.  So ugly it alienated Ronald and Nancy Reagan from him for years.

But in April, 2002, McCain had a very different answer for roughly the same question.  At that time he said attending two meetings with Charles Keating and the notorious Keating Five was "the biggest mistake of my life."  And indeed that was a real doozy of a screwup.

The latest news in the Ted Stevens/VECO bribery case is quite possibly the most shocking.

According to the federal government, in addition to the house additions, Ted Stevens accepted a free generator from VECO CEO Bill Allen.

Ted's reason for wanting a generator is shocking enough.

a new court filing from the federal government suggests that Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, was one of the people who was concerned that the transition from "99" to "00" would wreak havoc on the nation's electric grid.

But the real shocker is that Ted Stevens requested the free generator via e-mail

Over the past few weeks, we've spent a lot of time attempting to divine the identity of Obama's VP pick.  And although the Chicago version of Kremlinology has been fun, it's clear that we've been lax in studying the entrails of the sacrificial Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Rudy Giuliani.  It's time that we focus on McCain's choice.

Analysts generally agree that McCain needs to look for a candidate who meets a few key criteria.  He should go with: A) someone from a major swing state, preferably in the Midwest; B) someone who's not too young -- so as to avoid making McCain look ancient by contrast -- but also; C) someone who isn't that old, so as to avoid making the GOP ticket appear to be a Boca shuffleboard partnership; D) a candidate with serious Washington experience, to bolster the message that the Republicans can be trusted more than the brash young Obama, but also; E) a candidate who's spent some recent time outside of the Beltway, and who can credibly run as an outsider.

It's a tough set of guidelines, one that rules out most contenders.  But there's one clear choice who satisfies all of them -- and while he had appeared to be out of the running for circumstances beyond McCain's control, he's now available for service.  This 54 year-old Ohio native spent a decade in the House, during which time he rose to chair a key committee.  But he left the House a few years ago, retreating to a contemplative life in the heartland of America.

Did you guess Rob Portman?  Well, good try.  But that's not the Buckeye McCain should be tapping.

Robert W. Ney -- the former congressman now officially known as federal prisoner No. 28882-016 -- will complete his sentence Friday, less than two years after pleading guilty to corruption charges stemming from the investigation of now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with Congress.

Ney, 54, an eight-term Republican from eastern Ohio, entered a federal prison in Morgantown, W.Va., in March 2007 and transferred to a halfway house in Cincinnati in February, according to federal prison officials. Sentenced to 30 months, Ney will have served 17 1/2 months.

McCain-Ney '08!.  The words roll off the tongue.  

Cross-Posted At Democrashield

Right now, Fox News is asking me "Which candidate is better handling the Georgia conflict?"

The growing consensus in the media seems to be that it's John McCain.  But, if you look at what's going on, it becomes immediately clear that Georgia is a losing issue for McCain.

Let's take a look at why...

Its out!  From the Bismarck Tribune this morning.  I won't quote the story because their isn't a distinct headline in it.  Here's the scoop: Bob Stenehjem, the North Dakota State Senate Majority Leader's(and everybody's favorite failed State Public Service Commissioner candidate) day job is at the city of Bismarck as a street foreman in the department of public works.

Senator John McCain's long list of Lobbyists-that's what.  How destructive are his merry band of lobbyists?  Well let’s take a look at a handful of our favorites and the most recent to be elevated to the status of dangerous warmongering neo-con lobbyist that ecourages war-Randy Scheunemann.

As John Edwards has become the issue du jour and too many people are salivating over whether his political career is over, we now have yet another hypocritical and needless diversion from what is really important.  Just like the recent overexposure of Paris Hilton and McCain’s passing the buck on his increasingly nasty and spiteful campaign, none of this means a damn thing to, oh, 300 million or so Americans.

But since it is a Democrat and since it has to do with sex and since the real horrors of what has been impacting many people on a day to day basis is getting buried and ignored just to create yet another diversion for people to either say "HA" or to get on their moral high horse (all while probably keeping their own skeletons in their closet), that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be called for the complete and utter crap that is really is.

Of course, if you want to talk about sex and politicians and the impact on their career, why not look at Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Foley and the years of covering up his actions, Newt Gingrich serving his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital with cancer and of course McCain’s tossing his first wife to the curb and having an affair with Cindy the heiress?  

Despite the bitching of the Dems about the intrangence of the Repugs concerning tax increases, which is matched by the carping of the Repugs about the wild spending of the Dems, we are not having a budget crisis in California. What we are experiencing is a crisis of corruption. This crisis has been brought on by the shared environment of institutionalized corruption that makes the Dem and Repug parties partners in corruption.

The budget crisis we are experiencing is nothing more than the annual demonstration of the failure of democracy in California. The gridlock of the annual budget crisis is the result of these corrupted parties having divided up every electoral district in California between them.

The fact is that there is not one election district in California that is not the property of one party or the other. This division of our democratic rights was made by mutual private agreement between the parties.

The blogosphere has been questioning the "sources" of ABC New/Ross reporting of the anthrax scare back in 2001. ABC News/Ross reported falsely that (1) the anthrax contained Bentonite and (2) this showed it came from Iraq.

But the issue is much bigger than that. Glenn Greenwald, the Salon magazine blogger, has taken the lead on this issue. But he became rather vehement when I challenged the basis for his main concern: there is NO evidence that ABC News/Ross ever had any sources.

The larger issue is that ABC News/Ross sensationalized this concocted story in order to obtain money, and there is every evidence that they did so fraudulently.

John McCain has been getting away with a lot of crap, partly because political reporters -- the people he calls "my base" -- don't want to ask him rude questions.  But just in case one of them were to wake up one morning feeling cranky (or professional), I've put together a list of questions for McCain, to be asked in the same hectoring tone that reporters use when demanding that Obama explain why he hasn't learned to love The Surge.

Since it seems unlikely that reporters will actually use them, I commend them to the attention of attendees at town hall meetings, and for use if the public is asked to submit questions for the debates this fall.

1.  Don't you think you were presumptuous when you claimed to be "the American president Americans have been waiting for"?  Weren't George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, JFK, and Ronald Reagan "American presidents"?  

2.  Why did your campaign make an attack video poking fun at the idea of Barack Obama on the $100 bill, and, having done so, how could you attack Sen. Obama again for saying that you would try to point out that he didn't look like the pictures on the currency?

Please add your questions in comments; I'm going to keep updating this list until November.

For many months now friends and family have been urging me to document all I know about the Traffic.com scandal and my three-year effort to "out" it in a book, because this scandal is so involved and has been going on for so long. I've finally taken their advice, and am knee deep in writing a book called, fittingly...

Outing Traffic.com:

How the Internet Proved Invaluable in Exposing Big-Time Fraud and Corruption in Our Federal Government

Recently Rep. Kucinich filed Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush.  I wrote my Congressman in the House to see if, after several attempts at getting him to support impeachment, not to mention corresponding with him on other issues of importance which I found him to be on the repugnant side of, I could persuade him to behave like a reasonable representative of the people for once.  Predictably, I could not.  The language I used in the letter is not my custom, neither is the tone of this particular blog, but in exasperation one resorts to terms and attitudes not normally considered one's favorite recourse.
 
Here is the letter I sent to Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young regarding Rep. Kucinich's Article of Impeachment.  Since such action is long overdue and Rep. Young has long opposed any action on any similar measure, I consider the language used fully justified:

Jul 23, 2008 Representative C.W. Young
Independence Avenue and 1st Street, SW
Washington, DC 20515-0910

When I first saw in a comment in another thread that McCain was seriously considering Eric Cantor (R-VA7) for his running mate, I thought it was a joke.  After all, Cantor would be a gift from the gods for us.

About the only plus Cantor brings to the ticket is that he would presumably appeal to Jewish voters.  But the minuses?  Oh, they're aplenty.  A Bushbot conservative representing an insanely Republican district--yeah, that's a good way to win swing voters.  He has never really had to campaign--he represented an insanely Republican district in the Virginia House of Delegates for nine years, and now represents an R+11 district in Congress.  You have to go all the way back to Gerald Ford to find the last Republican veep who didn't have to break a sweat at least once in an election before becoming veep.

But the biggest minus?  Eric Cantor would be the poster child for the Republican Culture of Corruption.