Money Well Spent?

The health care sector has spent $263 million this year lobbying Congress for changes to reform plans, a government watchdog group estimates.

That works out to roughly $500,000 per Congressman and Senator just this year, quite a bit higher for many key committee members and none for people like Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, Marcy Kaptur, Ron Paul, et al. (Hopefully et al.)

Blagojevich Might Skate

I previously marveled that the Blago case broke with the tradition of political corruption cases because no money had actually changed hands. Turns out there's a reason. The Chicago Tribune blew it for federal prosecutors by ending its cooperation with Fitzgerald, who had requested they hold a story, by running it on Dec. 5th. The run-down is given in a dynamite inside-reporting WSJ online article:

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald ordered the FBI to arrest Rod Blagojevich before sunrise Tuesday in order to stop a crime from being committed. That would have been the sale of the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

But the opposite is true: Members of Fitzgerald’s team are livid the scheme didn’t advance, at least for a little longer, according to some people close to Fitzgerald’s office. Why? Because had the plot unfolded, they might have had an opportunity most feds can only dream of: A chance to catch the sale of a Senate seat on tape, including the sellers and the buyers.

The precise timing of Tuesday’s dramatic, pre-dawn arrest was not dictated by Fitzgerald, nor was it dictated by the pace of Blagojevich’s alleged “crime spree.” It was dictated by the Chicago Tribune, according to people close to the investigation and a careful reading of the FBI’s affidavit in the case.

At Fitzgerald’s request, the paper had been holding back a story since October detailing how a confidante of Blagojevich was cooperating with his office.

Blago read the story, called his brother, and told him to "Undo that thing." Slimeball? Yes. But it is not a crime to advance agendas, or to go over a list of preferred candidates and discuss one's future political career, and Blago can honestly say he didn't take a dime for the governor's prerogative regarding appointment of vacated Senate seat. That's why he's not resigning. The way he sees it, having a third party set up a charity which he and/or his wife could run is not illegal, and I don't know that he's technically wrong on that. He figures a local jury will see it his way. Expect taped evidence and testimony that makes him look like a pig, but America has elected worse.

As for the rumors that Rahm Emanuel or Obama are mixed up in influence peddling? Hopeful tempest, meet pretty teapot. They promised nothing but appreciation. It's right in the complaint.

(Update: The pic is of Ann Cavello of the Bay City Bombers, inspiration for Jim Croce's hit, Roller Derby Queen, "the meanest hunk o' woman anybody ever seen, wham-a-bam, whoa, wham-a-bam.")

A Melting Pot No Longer

The Supreme Court is thinking, maybe, you know...of trying out a caste system. It just issued an education and race ruling that appears to be so contorted not even court clerks and former Attorneys General can figure it out. Brown v. the Board of Ed was challenged, and here is what came out Justice Roberts' other end:

Race cannot be a factor in determining racial diversity.

Lucky for you, I am smarter than Supreme court clerks. I'll prove it. For starters, I was smart enough to NOT go to Law School, even when they begged me and offered me free money and women of easy virtue. Having passed that test, I can now correctly interpret what the Court means, without reading all of Justice Kennedy's 15-page masterpiece of ambiguity, moral bluster, and bug-like vacillation. I got it by page #1.

Let's compare the American educational system to a restaurant. The meals it serves are not to be from melting pots, they shall not be bouillabaisse, nor even wretched ratatouilles. They're to be a partitioned smorgasbord. On one end is the great food, educationally speaking. It's available in wonderful variety in the private dining room. Out on the main floor is a long table once of pretty high quality, only now it's mostly fast food. There are still the occasional specials, and sometimes even three-day old leftovers show up from the gourmand section. These don't last long and there is some rather unseemly behavior when deciding who gets to eat those choice morsels. Then there's the dumpster behind the restaurant, which can be surprisingly nutritious for those who are absolutely determined to eat.

How can I assert this? Because it's the Republican-theocratic end game. With this decision, the New Court moved one step closer to realizing one of their dearest visions, a vision you could see coming like a far-off freight train. It's not so far off now. The radical social darwinists who call themselves conservatives (Scalia, Alito, Roberts, et al) do not believe government should have any part in education. At all. They don't believe in public schools to begin with, and that's what informed their latest decision.

It's not about overturning Brown v. the Board of Ed. It's about not having a Board of Ed at all. When placed into that context, their legal teamwork is elegant. A thing of beauty, really. There's not a Board of Ed in the country that is going to be able to successfully interpret this decision, and they'll be agonized over it for years. It's bureaucratic Zen. It guarantees that every public school in the country, when faced with an issue of race, will be in automatic violation no matter what they do. There's no way to avoid violating a policy which isn't a policy to begin with. It's an intentional tautology.

Correction To Slap-Down

Al C. writes in to slap down a falsehood in my last post. Al is something of an LBJ career buff, and he pointed out that Lyndon Johnson was never Governor of Texas, as I asserted in the context of voting fraud. Rather it was Johnson's successful run for the 1948 Senate run which was plagued by flagrant vote fraud of the old-fashioned sort. Here's the Wikipedia entry on it:

1948 contested election
In 1948, Johnson again ran for the Senate and won. This election was highly controversial: a three-way Democratic Party primary saw Johnson facing a well-known former governor, Coke Stevenson, and a third candidate. Johnson drew crowds to fairgrounds with his rented helicopter dubbed "The Flying Windmill". He raised money to flood the state with campaign circulars, and won over conservatives by voting for the Taft-Hartley act curbing unions and by criticizing unions on the stump. Stevenson came in first, but lacked a majority, so a runoff was held. Johnson campaigned even harder, while Stevenson's efforts were poor. The runoff count took a week as the two candidates see-sawed for the lead. The state Democratic committee handled the count (not the state, because it was a party primary), and it finally announced Johnson won by 87 votes. There were many allegations of fraud on both sides. Thus one writer alleges that Johnson's campaign manager, John Connally, was connected with 202 ballots in Duval County that had curiously been cast in alphabetical order. Robert Caro argued in his 1989 book that Johnson had rigged the election in Duval County as well as rigging 10,000 ballots in Bexar County alone.[9]
However, the state Democratic convention upheld Johnson. Stevenson went to court, but—with timely help from his friend Abe Fortas—Johnson prevailed. Johnson was elected Senator in November, and went to Washington tagged with the sobriquet "Landslide Lyndon".

Thanks, Al! Especially for the picture above, a Google Image returned from the search terms "eating crow."

Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran Redux

In response to an audience member's question, "When do we send 'em an airmail message to Tehran," the good Senator from Neverland quipped, "You know that old, ah, Beach Boys song, 'Bomb Iran?'" And then he actually starts in on the first few words. Guess his staff must've played him the YouTube mash-up that went around a few months ago. How viral. Bye-bye-bye, John-John McCain. Here are more extensive and touching performances on his album, 'John McCain Sings Streisand.' (No, really. Honest to God. I'm not sure what the hell this is, but you've GOT to watch it.)

Syria Using Liberal Congress-Woman As Human Shield

Nancy Pelosi looks like she's having fun in Damascus, going all Zen and dishing out quotes about realism-Hamas and improvement-Hezbollah after cozying up to Israeli PM Olmert over the weekend. She should remember the rules a little better. See, it's ok for 'Pug congress-critters to visit Syria, but it's verboten-land for the Dims. Even in the picture above, you can see the Syrians literally hiding behind her! Those sand-sucking scalliwags. I wonder if Speaker Pelosi would look so calm and assured when a stray JDAM drops on the building? The White House would never do that, of course. But they want to.

(Seriously, I think this is great politics. It's a good way of showing the world that America split, that there's real progress against those who hate us for our freedoms.)

Strolling To Cafes On Balmy Nights In Baghdad

Below is a snippet of Wolf Blitzer interviewing CNN's Michael Ware in the wake of John McCain saying Iraq is getting hap-hap-happy, video courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

BLITZER: Michael, when Senator McCain says that there are at least some areas of Baghdad where people can walk around and -- whether it's General Petraeus, the U.S. military commander, or others, are there at least some areas where you could emerge outside of the Green Zone, the international zone, where people can go out, go to a coffee shop, go to a restaurant, and simply take a stroll?

WARE: I can answer this very quickly, Wolf. No. No way on earth can a westerner, particularly an American, stroll any street of this capital of more than five million people.

I mean, if al Qaeda doesn't get wind of you, or if one of the Sunni insurgent groups don't descend upon you, or if someone doesn't tip off a Shia militia, then the nearest criminal gang is just going to see dollar signs and scoop you up. Honestly, Wolf, you'd barely last 20 minutes out there. I don't know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad.

The Lame Report

Here's a nice snippet to make sense of the motive and means behind the US Attorney Firings Scandal:

Congress continued its inquiry into the role of the Bush
Administration in last year's firing of eight U.S
attorneys. D. Kyle Sampson, the chief of staff for
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, resigned after
claiming, in an apparent attempt to save Gonzalez from the
charge of lying to Congress, that he did not tell his
superiors at the Justice Department that the White House
wanted to fire the prosecutors. The Justice Department
released a March 2005 email from Sampson to then-White
House counsel Harriet Miers, in which he ranked all 93
U.S. attorneys on their loyalty to the Administration and
made a "target list." In other emails, he cited a
little-known provision of the Patriot Act that authorizes
the Attorney General to replace U.S. attorneys without
Senate confirmation, and consulted with Miers about the
possibility of replacing between 15 and 20 percent of
U.S. attorneys, "the underperforming ones," and leaving
the "loyal Bushies."

(Excerpted from Harper's Weekly Review)

The White House is offering Congress interviews with Harriet Miers and Karl Rove, accompanied by two deputy White House counsels. No testimony, no transcripts, no transparency. Lame!

Bring Me The Head Of Alberto Gonzales

Digby predicted months ago that the attorney firings were going to be huge. In addition to being a lot smarter than I am, Digby apparently has nothing else to do but sit around his apartment and blog, so of course I took his words as nothing short of oracular, and lo, they are now coming to pass.

Congress is all about procedure, so to a regular schmo in the lumpeninvestoriat like myself, focusing on the attorney firings is like going up to a naked employee who is in the act of vigorously committing incest on his office desk on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, tapping him on the shoulder, and saying, "Excuse me. We have to talk. Your attire is only permitted on Casual Friday." My approach would be to first drop a copy machine on his head, and begin to sort out an obvious debacle from there.

The US Congress seems remarkably incapable of talking about big issues, strongly preferring to attack them elliptically, probably so We The People don't set up a guillotine. As I understand it, here is the attorney hubbub in a nutshell: Bush can fire whatever attorneys he wants, but is supposed to inform Congress about it first. The fact that they got fired for threatening to investigate corrupt Republicans, or for failing to prosecute innocent Democrats is, congressionally speaking, a secondary issue. What bugs Congress most is that they were kept out of the loop. And for that, there will be hell to pay.

Or, more precisely, there will be Congress-persons to pay. The back-room is where I'm fairly comfortable, given that it's where I dwell in my line of work. The Dims loooove the attorney firings because it gives them leverage. They know they can get a lot promised in return for "not going there," i.e., not exposing just how dirty the inner workings of the White House have been under Rove, and take the resignation of Abu Gonzales as a public victory in the bargain. But if I were a Senator, I'd have to be pretty dumb not to realize by now that the Bush Administration never, ever negotiates in good faith. They're incapable of following through on a promise they don't like, and they never pay up in good money.

So in this case, I'd sit in that back room, shake hands with a big smile and say, "We have a deal. You give me my propers and the head of Alberto Gonzalez, and we'll stop digging into your ribs on this one." Then I'd let Gonzales resign. And then I'd go right ahead and subpoena Bush's inner circle, starting off with Rove and Miers. Then, amongst other things, I would make sure not to fly on any private planes for awhile.

(As for the graphic and title above, they refer to the Sam Peckinpah movie, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. If any of you were wondering what it would be like to live in a Sam Peckinpah movie, we've been doing it for a few years now.)

The Gift That Keeps On Giving...To Itself

Those good ol' boys in the Grotesque Old Party are trying to vote themselves one last raise before they lose control. $3,300. Admittedly, it's not much in comparison with the trillions upon trillions of dollars in debt they've approved for "Defense" or bridges to nowhere, and it is the holiday season. $3,300, coincidentally, is just enough for a primo flat-screen TV and home entertainment system. But why stop there? Hell, why not give themselves $20k? Or $50k? What's with the restraint? Come on, you guys can do better than a few thousand! Even the Dims think it's unseemly, and are holding out for more.