via Junior Florida Republican Party staffer had $1.3 million charged to party credit card – St. Petersburg Times.

And:

Florida House leaders lived big on GOP plastic – St Petersburg Times.

This simply a way for GOP donors to bribe public officials. It’s unlikely that the law will change to knock our so=called leaders off the teat until until it costs the GOP a few seats. It’s hard to get lawmakers to vote for changes that take their plastic away.

The Center for Responsive Politics has taken a look at lobbying expenses for 2009 and found that we have a new record. $3.47 billion was spent by 13,741 registered lobbyists to lobby the Congress in 2009. In 2008 $3.27 billion was spent. And this is only the spending for those folks who have to register under the extremely weak Federal lobbying disclosure laws. Billions more have been spent by PR firms, think tanks, front groups, shadow groups and other entities and individuals operating with carefully designed work-plans crafted to escape oversight and disclosure.

The recent Legislation enacted by the Bush/Roberts Court will flood the zone with even more money. This is another indication of just how deep in the shit our Democracy finds itself in these days.

It has been almost six years since the Abramoff scandal broke on the front page of the WaPost. The story was followed for a while, but now it is just old news. Except that it isn’t. The system of corruption that Jack Abramoff helped to build is as strong today as it ever was. All the scams that Jack used to run are still being run today. The only difference is that Washington is now filled with “Baby Jacks” running these cons. And this corruption is a bipartisan project—perhaps the only bipartisan project that functions inside the beltway.

The only bipartisan project that functions is a joint effort to hide and extend the influence of lobbyist money in Washington? We are quickly becoming the world’s largest Banana Republic. The truly sad part is that for every buck spent, many more comeback in the form of pork barrel projects, targeted tax relief and other shit that we don’t need and I personally don’t want to pay for.

OK, here’s the new plan, finish raising my daughter here because I can make a better living right now. About the time she gets to college age I’m off for retirement in the Philippines. Then I plan to renounce my US citizenship and tell Uncle Sam to take his tax forms and piss off. The Philippines has a definite culture of corruption with public officials. But at least you know you need to slip a little something to public servants to get things going. There’s no false veneer of honesty that hides a more pernicious form of deeper dishonesty and outright theft. We aren’t any better here, I’d argue we’re worse. We just lie about it to ourselves.

That’s the end of today’s bitter diatribe. I’ll probably feel better after a glass of wine and dinner with my little family.

That’s why we call her boogie…

• Getting your wealth from daddy: capitalist.
• Getting your Congressional seat from daddy: capitalist.
• Being a VP at Merrill Lynch and benefiting from billions in government bailout money: capitalist.
• Paying bloated bailouts because they did so well: capitalist.

Suggesting that executive bonuses and pay be limited  in companies that brought us to the verge of a new Great Depression and got billions of dollars, definitely not capitalist.

From the ever verbose Glenn Greenwald:

The incomparably horrific Harold Ford — who sounds ready to challenge incumbent New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in a primary — contradicted himself so egregiously in his cringe-inducing New York Times interview yesterday that it’s hard to know whether one should feel more pity or contempt for him. First, there’s this:

Mr. Ford declined to discuss what he is paid by the bank [Merrill Lynch, of which he is Vice Chairman], but publicly available data suggests that he earns at least $1 million a year. Asked what role outsize pay packages played in fueling the financial crisis, Mr. Ford said he objected to capping executive compensation on Wall Street. “I am a capitalist,” he said. “I believe that people take risk, and there are rewards if they do well; they should lose if they don’t.”

But that was preceded by this:

[Ford] blasted [Gillibrand] . . . for opposing the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry. “It was a mistake,” he said, noting that most Wall Street firms had already paid back the money. “How can you be against ensuring that the lifeblood of your city and of your state survives?”

So the rugged individualist Harold Ford — who inherited his father’s Congressional seat at the age of 26 — is a self-proclaimed “capitalist” who believes that people “should lose” if they don’t do well: unless, that is, the people who “don’t do well” are his funders and controllers on Wall Street, in which case they should be propped up by the U.S. Government with bailouts and loans and Federal Reserve tricks until such time that they can pay themselves tens of millions of dollars in bonuses, at which point they should be left alone in the name of “free market capitalism” and keeping the Government out of the affairs of industry and away from their “rewards.” What Ford is advocating, of course, is the exact opposite of free market capitalism: it’s risk-free crony “capitalism,” warped corporatism, the essence of decaying emerging-market nations in crisis, in which the coercive power of the Government is harnessed by a corrupt financial elite for its own benefit and at everyone else’s expense, to ensure that people like Harold Ford can maintain their chauffeurs and weekly pedicures and helicopter rides he strangely boasted of enjoying.

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

Welcome to the new Banana Republic that we have become.

They thoroughly failed to do their job for at least 9 years:

Since Commissioners were first informed of the Madoff investigation last week, the Commission has met multiple times on an emergency basis to seek answers to the question of how Mr. Madoff’s vast scheme remained undetected by regulators and law enforcement for so long. Our initial findings have been deeply troubling. The Commission has learned that credible and specific allegations regarding Mr. Madoff’s financial wrongdoing, going back to at least 1999, were repeatedly brought to the attention of SEC staff, but were never recommended to the Commission for action. I am gravely concerned by the apparent multiple failures over at least a decade to thoroughly investigate these allegations or at any point to seek formal authority to pursue them. Moreover, a consequence of the failure to seek a formal order of investigation from the Commission is that subpoena power was not used to obtain information, but rather the staff relied upon information voluntarily produced by Mr. Madoff and his firm.

It appears they asked Madoff if he was doing something illegal. When they received voluntary information from Madoff basically say, nope we’re perfectly legit, they did not bother with any further investigation. I wonder if that will work next time I get stopped for sppeding?

Officer: Do you know how fast you were going, sir?

Me: I was going exactly 55 MPH.

Officer: Well if you say so, I won’t bother checking the radar gun. Have a wonderful day!

If traffic enforecement were handled that way, I’m guessing speeding fines would go way, way down.

Balloon Juice
One would expect Republicans to take it worse than anybody that managers of the embassy project handed the project to a firm that never did embassy work before, mismanaged the proceedings and then buried evidence of major safety issues. They won’t, of course. A central theme of modern Republicanism is that appearing to do something is more important than doing it well. The mentality isn’t limited to the embassy, of course. It pervades contracting throughout Iraq. When Stuart Bowen, the Inpector General responsible for Iraq, uncovered evidence that America’s contracting money was largely disappearing down a fraud hole the White House reponded by trying to sack him. If any right-wing voices complained about that I don’t remember hearing about it.

Take abstinence only education. Studies have variously showed that it either doesn’t work or causes more underage sex than doing nothing, yet ordering teens to cross their legs until marriage remains a central point of the White House’s education agenda. The disparity between goals and results has gotten so stark that some states have given up federal funds so that they can implement sex ed programs that work. Hurricane FEMA. Setting aside programs that are meant to contradict their official purpose, which include mine safety, climate science and environmental protection, more often than not programs which Republicans want to work still collapse from miserable implementation.

Sure, as a guy who shares almost none of their agenda I won’t be supporting modern Republicanism any time soon. The billion dollar question is why anybody would.

Sadly the answer is too many gullible people who prefer to believe their leaders would not, could not mislead them on such a grand scale would still believe them.

Why I Believe Bush Must Go – washingtonpost.com
Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged — perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion — by far the highest in our national history.

Sadly he is correct in saying that we lack the statesmen with the stones to do what is clearly right.

Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry – New York Times
But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

Exactly why is there so much paper they never want anyone to see? “The Wonkette says You better get crackin’, Dick — that evidence won’t destroy itself!”

I’m sure they’re not reaaaaally hiding anything. Who wants a pesky smoking gun laying around? Obstruction of justice anyone?

“By almost all accounts, this Administration has done more to improve government effectiveness than any previous Administration, ever.”
–Clay Johnson, Bush buddy turned deputy director of OMB who also chairs the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which oversees all government inspectors general.

Exactly how does he define “by most accounts”? A poll of Bush boot lickers and sycophants? The Bush administration has been a clinic in how not to run a government. It’s a detailed study in management failure, greed and stupidity.

House Democrats Press Bush on Subpoenas – washingtonpost.com
House Democrats threatened Monday to hold President Bush’s key confidants in contempt of Congress unless they comply with subpoenas for information on the Justice Department’s purge of federal prosecutors last winter.

The White House shrugged off the ultimatum, saying the information is off-limits under executive privilege and that the aides in question _ White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former presidential counselor Harriet Miers _ are immune from prosecution.

“It won’t go anywhere,” predicted White House press secretary Dana Perino.

So, executive privilege covers ideological purges to eliminate any signs of independence by US Attorney’s? Either Congress needs to grow some spine and send the Sargent of Arms after Bolten and Meirs to enforce subpeonas. Or concede that they are in agreement with the president’s concept of the supremacy of the executive branch and they’ll have shredded the constitution.

The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us – New York Times
…As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.<snip>

…But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.<snip>

…Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great “success” in bringing security to Baghdad.<snip>

…Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

So, are you a “Good German”?

We pay more for a rent-a-grunt foot soldier then we do for Gen Patraeus. We get less accountablity, but what the heck who’s really coutning the deaths over over-paid mercenaries? Muuuuch easier than asking Congress for the necessary manpower for the military. Man are the taxpayer getting screwed, but as long as the money goes to GOP supporters, it’s all good. Right?

Lawmaker says Rice interfered with Iraq inquiry | Markets | Reuters
A leading Democratic lawmaker on Tuesday accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of interfering in congressional inquiries into corruption in Iraq’s government and the activities of U.S. security firm Blackwater.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman said State Department officials had told the Oversight and Government Reform Committee he chairs they could not provide details of corruption in Iraq’s government unless the information was treated as a “state secret” and not revealed to the public.

“You are wrong to interfere with the committee’s inquiry,” Waxman said in a letter to Rice. “The State Department’s position on this matter is ludicrous,” added Waxman, a vocal opponent of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.

It will be interesting to see exactly what might have been caught on tape.

King of Zembla
Paradigm Shift
Old joke: conservatives believe that government is incapable of accomplishing anything good, and from the moment they assume power set about trying to prove it. Right-wingers, disgusted by government waste-and-fraud, seek reflexively to replace it with corporate waste-and-fraud — at a substantial markup. Sure, the taxpayer gets a little less bang for his buck, but the look of porcine glee in the eyes of the campaign contributors is unquestionably worth it.

It’s  worth a read.

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 08/17/2007 | Commerce, Treasury funds helped boost GOP campaigns
Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the White House’s political briefings to at least 15 agencies, including to the Justice Department, the General Services Administration and the State Department, violated a ban on the use of government resources for campaign activities.

Under the Hatch Act, Cabinet members are permitted to attend political briefings and appear with members of Congress. But Cabinet members and other political appointees aren’t permitted to spend taxpayer money with the aim of benefiting candidates.

The Times opines that if the Solicitor General’s office does not appoint a special prosecutor, then Congress should remove the Attorney General.  I don’t think the “Decider” will decide to cooperate. They need Gonzo to continue his very real and public obstruction of Congressional oversight to prevent others from taking the heat from various Bush Administration misdeeds.

There’s another investigation of Gonzo’s brewing. This one (who can keep them all straight?) is about a meeting with Monica Goodling. First he lied about it in congressional testimony. (maybe he can share a cell with Scooter!) Secondly, it can easily be construed as witness tamper and/or obstruction of justice. Way to go Gonzo! When the going gets tough, they tough get stupid. Did he miss the class in law school where they explain that it’s bad to lie undr oath? Or the part about not tampering with witnesses?