- Coming off of the Dow Jones Wires an FEC report released along with the announcement of a $3.8 million settlement with Freddie Mac notes that Freddie Mac's top lobbyist R. Mitchell Delk had a "bold and unprecedented" political model for Financial Services Chairman Michael Oxley (R-OH). Delk's "bold" plan went something like this, "we proposed to Chairman Oxley a political model that was bold and unprecedented. We offered to use our fundraising model to marry his interests as Chairman with our interest in assisting committee members supportive of the continued strength of America's housing finance system..." That's about as out in the open that you can get about your intents.
- Pharmaceutical companies are costing the federal government billions of dollars by lobbying against bipartisan legislation that would "speed the approval of new generics," according to the Washington Post.
- Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC) fights back in today's Ashville Citizen-Times against charges that he accepted money from Jack Abramoff's lobbying firm in exchange for favorable action on the Saginaw Chippewa school construction earmark
- Pennsylvania lobbyist and ex-aide to former Governor Tom Ridge (R) pled guilty to felony charges of mail fraud and embezzlement, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
- The Kansas City Star reports that the Missouri House is considering a lobbying and campaign finance reform bill that would create more transparency in the state capitol. The bill requires lobbyists report all gifts and spending on lawmakers, including when they give to groups of lawmakers. It would also require lawmakers to post electronically all campaign contributions so that they can be audited by the State Ethics Commission. Inaccuracies and mistakes in lobbyist disclosure forms and lawmaker campaign contribution receipts would be posted online by the Ethics Commission.
- The Hill takes a look at the new DefCon ad that focuses the Jack Abramoff scandal.
- Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington has filed a complaint against Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) alleging that he accepted bribes from a San Francisco defense firm in exchange for his support of earmarks that benefited the company.
Golf Golf Golf!!!
TPM Muckraker Paul Kiel has a great post on David Safavian's e-mails with Jack Abramoff. Apparently, they contain the itinerary for the infamous Scotland gofing junket... excuse me, the trip to see Scotish Parliamentarians and visit the British Parliament. As Kiel notes, I bet Bob Ney didn't think that these e-mails would get out.
Continue readingDo your research:
If you're going to accuse a politician of improperly spending money or you are questioning disparities in their statements you should really think about what you are talking about before you shoot your mouth off. You might get embarrassed:
When Jim Barnett tried to raise eyebrows about a Bernie Sanders television ad buy last week, Sanders' campaign had a ready response. A Sanders spokesman said the campaign had spent about $30,000 on the ad buy. Records at South Burlington TV station WCAX showed him spending only $13,668, said Barnett, the chairman of the Vermont Republican Party. "Right now, there is a $16,000 gap in the facts," said Barnett. "U.S. Rep. Sanders needs to explain where the rest of this money was spent." That's easy, said Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager. "There's more than one broadcast station," he said.Continue reading
Disclosing your sister…
When I was at the Center for Public Integrity, we once asked the Pentagon for some financial disclosure forms and were told that yes, they had the forms on file, but no, we couldn't see them, because these disclosures were not to be dislcosed to the public. This "kissing your sister" form of disclosure, as I thought of it then, came to mind as I read some of the disclosure provisions in the Executive Refrom Act, particularly those that call for federal procurement officials to disclose all job offers made to them or their family members by contractors (see page 13 of the PDF).
Continue readingMore News:
- Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV), under fire for possible connections between his skyrocketing finances and earmarked provisions, aimed to rebut the charges by detailing his finances in an interview with the Charleston Daily Mail.
- An energy industry lobbyist whose company Xcel Energy is facing an EPA lawsuit attended a controversial fundraiser in Colorado headlined by the current EPA chief administrator Stephen Johnson, according to the Denver Post.
- Soon to be retired Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) brought in $484,475 in campaign contirbutions between February 15th and March 31st which he can now convert over to his legal defense fund, according to the Houston Chronicle. Continue reading
Congratulations!
Congratulations to the Washington Post and the San Diego Union-Tribune/Copley News Service for their Pulitzer Prize wins! The Post's reporters James Grimaldi, R. Jeffery Smith, and Susan Schmidt won for their coverage of the Jack Abramoff scandal and the U-T/Copley won for uncovering the corruption of now imprisoned former Rep. Duke Cunningham. Hopefully this encourages more journalists to dig deeper into what members of Congress are up to.
Continue readingDoolittle Lawyers Up:
According to the Sacramento Bee, Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), who has come under fire for his connections to Jack Abramoff and his wife's job as a fundraiser, is hiring a lawyer. Doolittle's lawyer is David G. Barger "the former president of the Virginia Bar Association's criminal law section and a former assistant U.S. attorney, who later was an associate of Starr's in the Whitewater investigation." Barger is perhaps best known for his prosecutorial harrassment of a 52-year old single mother in connection to unsubstantiated claims made by Kathleen Willey that former President Bill Clinton groped her. This Washington Post story from over the weekend provides a good look as to why Doolittle is hiring a lawyer this week.
Continue reading(Glass) House Government Reform Committee?
I haven't read it all yet, but this looks like a promising reform...for executive branch officials. I won't complain--there needs to be a lot more transparency in procurement--but I can't help noting that, if all these provisions are needed to prevent unethical behavior in the executive branch, wouldn't they also do the same for members of Congress and their staffs?
H.R. 5112, “The Executive Branch Reform Act of 2006,” would: Continue reading
Justice:
Thanks to ordinary people another corrupt politician is heading to prison. Former Illinois Governor George Ryan (R) was found found guilty on all counts and faces up to 95 years in prison. I liked this article in the Chicago Tribune:
"Ordinary people like us were able to make a decision," said juror Jill DiMartino of the jury led by forewoman Sonja Chambers. Ordinary people. Those are two extremely frightening words. Boss politicians in Illinois pretend to have something in common with ordinary people, but if they did have a connection once, they lost it long ago, with their drivers and their first-class air tickets, and from having their behinds smooched by people who suck up to power.Ordinary people need to stand up and shine the light on what those in power think they can get away with.
Ordinary people who become jurors don't usually make fortunes in public relations. So they don't spin out the too-often-repeated lie that politics as usual is no crime, just politics. Ordinary people don't bestow millions upon millions of tax dollars on their friends in government deals, or send $100 million in affirmative-action contracts to white Outfit-connected stooges, or smirk and play dumb as their family becomes wealthy beyond imagining. They don't hire unqualified 19-year-old city building inspectors, or build a patronage army in violation of federal court orders to crush any dissenting voice, or purchase millions of dollars worth of office furniture from an 11th Ward family with clout. Ordinary people don't take free vacations to Jamaica as George Ryan did, or pretend to live on $77 in cash while gambling and drinking and steakhousing their way across the country. They don't squeeze the janitors and the cleaning ladies for Christmas money.Continue reading
Reoriented Express:
Today the Washington Post picked up the "Reoriented Express" story that Bill Allison has been covering down the hall at Under the Influence. Mississippi's Senators Trent Lott (R) and Thad Cochran (R) inserted an earmarked provision to relocate a Gulf Coast railroad that had recently been destroyed and then rebuilt further north to make way for a highway. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who doesn't mind knocking heads with members of his own party, is in his typical state of outrage at government waste, "It is ludicrous for the Senate to spend $700 million to destroy and relocate a rail line that is in perfect working order, particularly when it recently underwent a $250 million repair ... American taxpayers are generous and are happy to restore damaged property, but it is wrong for senators to turn this tragedy into a giveaway for economic developers." As always you can find out why the railroad is being relocated if you just follow the money. As the Post notes:
For more than half a dozen years, Mississippi officials, development planners and tourism authorities have dreamed of the complex restructuring of Mississippi's coastal transportation system that Lott and Cochran now want to set in motion. Under the plan, the CSX line -- which runs a few blocks off the coast line -- would be scrapped. CSX would move its freight traffic to existing tracks to the north owned by rival Norfolk Southern. Then U.S. 90, a wide federal highway that hugs Mississippi's beaches, would be rebuilt along the CSX rail bed. The route of the federal thoroughfare would be turned into a smaller, manicured "beach boulevard" through cities such as Biloxi, where visitors could "spend more time strolling among the casinos and taking in the views," as the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal put it.Allison has even more details from the Tri-State Economic and Transportation Benefits Study produced just before Hurricane Katrina devastated the coast line:
But the Tri-State Economic and Transportation Benefits Study calls for a project that's bigger than just moving CSX's seaside tracks north; it would create an additional north-south rail corridor, parallel CSX tracks that wouldn't be replaced, replace some line currently operated by the Canadian Northern Illinois Central railroad, and generally be much more ambitious in scale than the original effort to move some CSX tracks further north.The Study goes onto to detail the other beneficiaries of the railroad relocation/highway construction. Go to Under the Influence to check it out. Continue reading
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