“In a different era I’d be killed on the street or have poison poured into my coffee.” Matt Drudge previews a forthcoming Vanity Fair interview with Casino Jack, and interspersed among the delusions of grandeur are more indications that GOP higher-ups — among them Dubya, DeLay, Newt, Burns, Mehlman, and McCain — knew Abramoff better than they’re letting on. “You’re really no one in this town unless you haven’t met me.” Update: Reuters confirms.
Category: Politics (2005-2006)
Enron’s End Run.
“Fastow, in a nervous but steady voice, spent most of his first six hours on the stand describing quid pro quo deals he arranged with Jeffrey K. Skilling, then Enron’s chief executive. He said Skilling was so obsessed with making the company look good for Wall Street that Skilling approved of sham deals that helped the company meet its earnings targets while Fastow…personally skimmed millions of dollars off the transactions.” Following last week’s damning testimony by Kevin Hannon (“They’re on to us“), former Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow took the stand yesterday as part of a plea deal. The prosecution’s star witness in the Enron case, Fastow is “also prosecutors’ most personally tainted witness, a man who admitted to stealing and involving his wife in fraud and who described himself Tuesday as sometimes ‘obnoxious’ and ‘opportunistic.’” Sounds like he was in good company. Update: On Day 2, Fastow implicates Ken Lay, and the defense sharpen their knives.
Dubai Dare.
“‘Listen, this is a very big political problem,’ said House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), explaining that he had to give his rank-and-file members a chance to vote. ‘There are two things that go on in this town. We do public policy, and we do politics. And you know, most bills at the end of the day, the politics and the policy kind of come together, but not always. And we are into one of these situations where this has become a very hot political potato.’” Content to curl up like lapdogs when civil liberties are on the table, Republicans remain livid over Dubaigate, with House leaders setting up a voice vote to kill the port deal in the next few days. Update: It has begun — the House Appropriations Committee votes 62-2 to add a block of the deal to a war funding measure.
Voice of Harold.
Are the Clinton 2008 team taking their toys and going home? With financial backing from George Soros, Clinton lieutenant Harold Ickes announces he’s kicking off a private Dem-data mining firm, which will amass information on left-leaning voters and, theoretically, sell it to interest groups and campaigns that get the Clinton stamp of approval. “Officials at the Democratic National Committee think that creating a modern database is their job, and they say that a competing for-profit entity could divert energy and money that should instead be invested with the national party. Ickes and others involved in the effort acknowledge that their activities are in part a vote of no confidence that the DNC under Chairman Howard Dean is ready to compete with Republicans on the technological front.“
Well, I’d like to know more about the supposed deficiencies of the DNC’s voter outreach system, but this sounds like a troubling development all around. A house divided against itself cannot stand, particularly one as divided as the Democrats these days. (And, given how lackluster many Dems feel about a prospective Clinton candidacy anyway, a seeming attempt to put her own 2008 prospects before the good of the party is, to my mind, probably going to redound badly.)
Payne Prevention.
Conservative judicial nominee James Payne, whom Salon‘s Will Evans outed as corrupt this past January, withdraws his name from contention for the bench…or has it withdrawn. “A Senate confirmation hearing for Payne that would have been likely to highlight the ethical problems…could have proved embarrassing to the Bush administration, Oklahoma’s Republican senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn — who have backed Payne so far — and the judge himself.“
The Gray Zone.
“Any disclosure of the PDB beyond its intended narrow audience — the President and his most senior advisers — increases the possibility of damage to the national security.” The Libby legal team’s attempt at graymail receives a highly unwelcome reception from the CIA.
The Treason of the Senate, Redux.
“‘The committee is, to put it bluntly, basically under the control of the White House through its chairman,’ [Senator Jay Rockfeller (D-WV)] told reporters. ‘At the direction of the White House, the Republican majority has voted down my motion to have a careful and fact-based review of the National Security Agency’s surveillance eavesdropping activities inside the United States.’” Once again, on a party line vote and at the behest of Chairman Pat Roberts (by way of the Dubya administration,) the GOP members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence vote down an investigation into the NSA warrantless wiretaps….meaning presumed committee moderates Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel buckled under pressure again.
And, speaking of buckling under pressure, the House pass the Patriot Act 280-138. “‘I rise in strong opposition to this legislation because it offers only a superficial reform that will have little if any impact on safeguarding our civil liberties,’ [Congressman Dennis] Kucinich said…’Congress has failed to do its job as a coequal branch of government…The administration’s attack on our democracy has to be reigned in.‘”
You like the rug?
“For whatever reason, Bush seems fixated on his rug. Virtually all visitors to the Oval Office find him regaling them about how it was chosen and what it represents. Turns out, he always says, the first decision any president makes is what carpet he wants in his office…Sometimes Bush describes it as a metaphor for leadership. Sometimes he relates how Russian President Vladimir Putin admired the carpet. Sometimes he seems most taken by the lighting qualities.” Ah, the glory days…I guess it was only after that tough second decision — the drapes, maybe? — that the job started getting to Dubya.
Huck & Jack.
“‘We will name names,’ Lowell said by telephone at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Paul C. Huck. ‘That is not a good thing for law enforcement.‘” In troubling news for the Justice Department’s corruption probe, a federal judge refuses to postpone Abramoff’ s sentencing, despite pleas from both sides to do so. “Huck said the government can always request a reduction in Abramoff’s sentence later and that he probably would allow both Abramoff and Kidan to remain free for a reasonable amount of time after they are sentenced.”
Snatching Defeat…
“You know what I think? I don’t think we have a message.” With the administration faltering weekly, multiple investigations into GOP corruption coming to a head, and several congressional Republicans calling it quits (including longtime House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas), the Post surveys the varying Democratic strategies to win back Congress in 2006. Frankly, folks, it doesn’t look good, even given the great hand we’ve been dealt of late. As you might expect from Will Rogers’ famous dictum, no two people mentioned in this article — Reid, Pelosi, Dean, Emanuel, Schumer, Vilsack — seem to be on the same page.