Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Frequent commenter Krista suggested that I feature some pics of the pets from you commenters. You ask, I deliver.
Here are some snapshots of frequent commenter Stormy’s pets.
Meadow, on the floor lounging.
If you have some pics of your loved ones, send ’em in. I will put up one set of pictures a day until there are no more to feature.
In honor of global phenomenon and resident fly-in-the-ointment DougJ, here’s your link to one of the best Abramoff wrap-ups yet written, by Susan Schmidt and James Grimaldi at the Washington Post.
A reconstruction of the lobbyist’s rise and fall shows that he was an ingenious dealmaker who hatched interlocking schemes that exploited the machinery of government and trampled the norms of doing business in Washington — sometimes for clients but more often to serve his desire for wealth and influence. This inside account of Abramoff’s career is drawn from interviews with government officials and former associates in the lobbying shops of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP and Greenberg Traurig LLP; thousands of court and government records; and hundreds of e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, as well as those released by Senate investigators.
…Abramoff’s lobbying team was made up of Republicans and a few Democrats, most of whom he had wined and dined when they were aides to powerful members of Congress. They signed on for the camaraderie, the paycheck, the excitement.
“Everybody lost their minds,” recalled a former congressional staffer who lobbied with Abramoff at Preston Gates. “Jack was cutting deals all over town. Staffers lost their loyalty to members — they were loyal to money.”
A senior Preston Gates partner warned him to slow down or he would be “dead, disgraced or in jail.” Those within Abramoff’s circle also saw the danger signs. Their boss had become increasingly frenzied about money and flouted the rules. “I’m sensing shadiness. I’ll stop asking,” one associate, Todd Boulanger, e-mailed a colleague.
The first act, of course, introduces a seemingly unstoppable hero and his seemingly-minor tragic flaw.
…Even in those early days, there were hints of the troubles to come. “If anyone is not surprised at the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff, it is me,” said Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Abramoff and his crew busted the College Republicans’ budget with a 1982 national direct-mail fundraising campaign that ended up “a colossal flop,” said Bond, then deputy director of the party’s national committee. He said he banished the three from GOP headquarters, telling Abramoff: “You can’t be trusted.”
You can just imagine an eleven-year-old Abramoff borrowing against dad’s car to swing the sixth-grade class elections. Ah, the memories.
Abramoff wallowed in his access, real and imagined. When his crack administrative assistant Susan Ralston bolted for a position with White House political adviser Karl Rove, Abramoff told colleagues he had gotten her the job even though it was Ralston’s old boss, Reed, who made it happen, her former colleagues said.
Even glowing profiles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal noting Abramoff’s extensive influence and impressive income were not enough. Abramoff quietly paid op-ed columnists thousands of dollars to write favorably about his clients, including one writer for Copley News Service who disclosed this month that he had been paid for as many as two dozen columns since the mid-1990s.
When you tally up the respective efforts of the various corners of the Executive branch, Abramoff and the Pentagon you get a picture of some awfully busy little media whores.
And of course, the inevitable closing of the third act.
Alan K. Simpson (R), the former Wyoming senator who was in Washington during the last big congressional scandal — the Abscam FBI sting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which six House members and one senator were convicted — said the Abramoff case looks bigger. Simpson said he recently rode in a plane with one of Abramoff’s attorneys, who told him: “There are going to be guys in your former line of work who are going to be taken down.”
I’ve barely quoted a tenth of the juicy stuff. Read, weep, discuss.
More Abramoff coverage here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
***Update***
Via a commenter, is Steno Sue up to her usual tricks? Atrios argues that the point of this whole exercise may be to undercut Abramoff’s credibility if he flips. I have to admit that the part about DeLay barely even knowing Abramoff’s first name (or whatever she’s implying) sounded pretty strange. The suggestion that DeLay is some backwoods fundie who can’t shake hands with a Jew insults the intelligence a bit more every time I think about it.
Mr. and Mrs. Vodkapundit give birth to what we will assume is a young Formulapundit. For now, at least.
Congrats!
I have stated repeatedly that I think the fight over some form of nationalized health care is over, and that we will one day have a European-style system in place. The only question is when big business will successfully pressure the government to take over and how much of their current health care funding responsibilities they can manage to lay at the feet of government.
Yesterday, the NY Times has a piece stating that some of the real firm opposition to nationalized health care comes from, of all places, unions:
Most advocates of universal health care focus on the opposition of Republicans and insurance companies. But perhaps the most important factor keeping an overhaul off the national agenda is one that few Democrats acknowledge: most of Mr. Gettelfinger’s fellow labor leaders don’t support a single-payer system either.
The reason comes down to simple self-interest. The United Auto Workers is one of the few private-sector unions that doesn’t run its own health plan. Rather, most have created huge companies to administer their workers’ plans, giving them a large and often corrupt stake in the current system.
Opposition to a national health care plan is as much a part of the American trade union tradition as the picket line. It goes back to Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, who railed at early Congressional efforts to pass a law mandating employer coverage as Britain had done, which he said had “taken much of the virility out of the British unions.”
This line of thinking led to the notorious decision in 1991 by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s health care committee to reject a proposal that the federation support a single-payer plan. The majority said a national system simply had no chance in Congress, but others saw a conflict of interest: government-supplied health care would put union-run plans out of business.
Which, of course, would mean that opposition to nationalized health care would create some strange bedfellows. Anyone have more on this?
*** Update ***
More here from Ezra Klein.
Health Care, Coming to a Government Near YouPost + Comments (63)
When I read this, I flashed back to my teens when this first hit my radar:
An immigration judge on Wednesday ordered John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker accused of being a Nazi concentration camp guard, deported to his native Ukraine, but the 30-year legal battle still may not be over.
Mr. Demjanjuk, 85, has been fighting to stay in this country since the 1970’s.
The United States first tried to deport him in 1977. Mistakenly suspected of being a guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka concentration camp, he was extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to be hanged.
But the Israeli Supreme Court determined that Ivan had been someone else.
Mr. Demjanjuk lost his United States citizenship in 2002 after a judge ruled that documents from World War II proved he was a Nazi guard at various death or forced labor camps.
Have any of you followed this case and have an idea whether or not he really is who he is accused of being? I would have thought the ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court would have ended things, but apparently it has not.
In what I can only describe as the op-ed version of a nine paragraph sneer, the Opinion Journal mockingly derides Tom Tancredo and his immigration legislation:
So there you have it. Tom Tancredo has done everyone a favor by stating plainly the immigration rejectionists’ endgame–turn the United States into the world’s largest gated community. The House took a step in that direction this month by passing another immigration “reform” bill heavy with border control and business harassment and light on anything that will work in the real world.
***Given that record, it’s hard to see the House Republican bill as much more than preening about illegal immigration. The legislation is aimed at placating a small but vocal constituency that wants the borders somehow sealed, come what may to the economy, American traditions of liberty or the Republican Party’s relationship with the increasingly important Latino vote.
Besides mandating the construction of walls and fences along the 2,000-mile Mexican border, the bill radically expands the definition of terms like “alien smuggler,” “harboring,” “shielding” and “transporting.” Hence all manner of people would become criminally liable and subject to fines, property forfeiture and imprisonment–the landscaper who gives a co-worker a ride to a job; the legal resident who takes in an undocumented relative; a Catholic Charities shelter providing beds and meals to anyone who walks through the door.
Read the whole thing. Obviously, the WSJ’s pro-business leanings are what motivated this piece, but it is striking in how mercilously they attack Tancredo.
NSA site installed ‘illegal’ cookies:
The National Security Agency’s Internet site has been placing files on visitors’ computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most files of that type.
The files, known as cookies, disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week. Agency officials acknowledged yesterday that they had made a mistake.
Nonetheless, the issue raised questions about privacy at the agency, which is on the defensive over reports of an eavesdropping program.
“Considering the surveillance power the N.S.A. has, cookies are not exactly a major concern,” said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington. “But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government’s very basic rules for Web privacy.”
Until Tuesday, the N.S.A. site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035.
The question I want answered is “Why are they even installing cookies at all?” Again, I am not going to move to Montana and go off the grid because of this (add to it I have never been to the NSA site), but I do want to know why this was even done in the first place.
*** Update ***
Not sure why some of you think I thought this was a big deal, because I don’t. That is why I had quotes o’ sarcasm around ‘illegal.’ All I wanted to know was why NSA would even bother to install cookies, and this explanation from the comments seems to be the best description of what probably happened:
Their files are all .cfm, which strongly implies that their website was developed using Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion handles session state data by storing a session key in a user cookie. In all likelihood, they didn’t know or didn’t remember to turn off the creation of these session cookies.
Cookies are passed from the browser to the appropriate site when an HTTP request is made. There’s no way that a NSA cookie could give the NSA information it doesn’t already have, unless the NSA was embeddeding content in other websites. And that would be obvious, because hiding it would make it not work.
If anything, this story serves to discredit those who are bleating about it.