An Idiot's Guide to the Abramhoff Scandal

Here's a concise little article I found that deftly sums up how disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's arrest (and his willingness to testify against GOP co-conspirators) will cause the GOP stranglehold on America to crumble.
I made bold the second to the last paragraph, just because I loved it so much.
Enjoy...


The man with the inside track now persona non grata

09.01.06
By Rupert Cornwell
The New Zealand Herald


WASHINGTON - The wood-panelled restaurant Jack Abramoff owned on Pennsylvania Ave, where he wined and dined his pals in Congress, now stands shuttered and empty.

The millions of dollars he showered on the politicians in campaign contributions are being hastily turned over to charities. But official Washington will not be rid of him so easily.

Barely two years ago, Abramoff was the uncrowned king of the Washington lobbying industry. Now he is the central figure in the biggest political sleaze scandal in the US in a generation - a morass of kickbacks, fraud, influence peddling and bribery that could bring down some of the biggest names on Capitol Hill.

Last week his disgrace was complete. The erstwhile super-lobbyist shuffled out of a Washington courthouse just four blocks from his Signatures restaurant, after completing a plea bargain with federal prosecutors.

The young Jack Abramoff first made his name as chairman of the College Republicans. He went to Hollywood and produced a couple of movies, before riding into Washington on the crest of the Republican takeover of Congress at the 1994 mid-term elections.

With his College Republican friends, the conservative Christian leader Ralph Reed, and the tax-cutting Grover Norquist, he was part of a powerful network that expanded to include ambitious Texas Congressman Tom DeLay. Lobbying is about money and access - and in both Abramoff had the inside track. DeLay was his crucial contact and ally. Simultaneously, Abramoff struck a financial gusher, in the shape of six Indian tribes ready to spend mega-dollars to protect their lucrative casino gambling interests.

With his sidekick Michael Scanlon, Abramoff got US$80 million from the tribes to advance their cause in Washington. Some of the Indian money they kept, some they used to shower favours on congressmen, some they used to show they were very powerful people.

Abramoff counted Pakistan's military among his many clients. His pace was frenetic, yet he found time to set up ventures including Signatures and a Jewish prep school. By the end of the decade, he ran a veritable industry of influence-peddling.

Abramoff kept four luxury skyboxes at DC-area sports arenas, where he held 72 fundraising events - mostly for Republicans - between 1999 and 2003. In an average year, Signatures provided US$80,000 worth of free meals for his chums; for the most favoured there were trips to St Andrews and other shrines of golf, organised by Abramoff and paid for by the tribes.

The tawdry saga came out at hearings in early 2004, complete with emails from Abramoff and Scanlon describing their tribal clients as "monkeys" and "troglodytes".

The FBI started an investigation, and in late 2005 Scanlon struck a plea bargain, fingering Abramoff. To reduce a possible 30-year sentence to a maximum of 11, Abramoff followed suit, admitting tax evasion, fraud and conspiracy to bribe and agreeing to co-operate with prosecutors. In other words, he'll name names. The FBI is believed to be probing at least 20 members of Congress and senior aides.

Abramoff's confession has turned on the kitchen light in the middle of the night. The cockroaches are scuttling for cover, handing back money and repeating, mantra-like: "Jack Abramoff? I never knew him."

But heads will roll. Among them is DeLay, who yesterday confirmed his role as House majority leader is over.

In 2000, he accepted an Abramoff trip to Scotland. So in 2002 did the Republican congressman Bob Ney, who is set to be ousted from his chairmanship of a powerful House committee - and possibly worse. Dennis Hastert, the Speaker, has hastily given the US$69,000 of funding he received from Abramoff to a fortunate charity, but it may not be enough to save him.

The scandal hardly brushes George Bush. But it could yet be a disaster for the President. Most of those involved are Republicans, and voters could punish the party by handing control of Congress back to the Democrats at this autumn's mid-term elections. That in turn would allow Democrat-controlled hearings into Iraq and other embarrassments, making Bush's final two years in office a misery.

By then Abramoff will likely be behind bars. Back when he was the star, a colleague sensed the disaster that lay ahead. Be more careful, he warned Abramoff, or he would be "dead, disgraced, or in jail". The second prediction has been fulfilled. The third will be.
As for the first, suffice it to quote Conrad Burns, a Republican senator: "Frankly, I wish Jack Abramoff had never been born."

AFTERNOON UPDATE
Monday, January 9, 2006

Texas high criminal court denies DeLay's requests
Justices refuse request that money laundering charges against DeLay be dismissed or be sent back to lower court for immediate trial..."

Hey, Delay! That stench you're smelling is your ass on fire.
You're toast. You're done.
You're out with a whimper, like a sprayed cockroach.
Nobody likes you anymore.
You bullied your way into criminal obscurity.
You were the first neo-con artist to fall, so do it with dignity so that Frist, Rove, Cheney, Bush, Rice and Rumsfeld will have someone to emulate when they take their dives.

I hope you meet someone nice in prison, you know, someone who'll use Vaseline the first few times.

As my big sister says, "Adios, MoFo."

James Frey:
You Can't Even Trust an Honest Drug Addict/Alcoholic Anymore

Like millions of other suckers, I bought and devoured James Frey's nonfiction account of his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction called, "A Million Little Pieces."
Today, The Smoking Gun.com published a detailed account of how and where he lied, and lied, and lied in his book to sound badder and more fucked up than he apparently was.
Thank God I didn't rush out to buy his next book, "My Friend Leonard."

Even with his first book, I wondered how he could truly recover without working the 12 steps.
Now I see he's got no program of stringent honesty and accountability--he's just another liar with a substance abuse history and a two-bit rap sheet.

Oprah Winfrey chose his book as a recent Oprah's Book Club recommendation.
He was the only guest on her show the day she interviewed him about the book. There, he continued the lies and self-aggrandizing that made his book so compelling.

Don't buy the book until it hits the dollar fiction table at Half Price Books.
That's about all it's worth.

Read about the lies he told here:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html

One Step Closer to Hell...

Big Dick Cheney was taken to George Washington Hospital early Monday experiencing shortness of breath, a spokeswoman said. He was released four and a half hours later. Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride said Cheney was taken to the hospital at 3 a.m. He was released about 7:30 a.m. Doctors found his electrocardiogram unchanged and determined he was retaining fluid because of medication he was taking for a foot problem...

After four heart attacks, several cardiac procedures and a pacemaker implant, it's a wonder VP Lord Voldemort is still alive.
Someone get a silver spike, please.

The L Word Premiere

Just as I suspected, season three looks like it's going to be just as lousy as season two.
A brief rundown of the characters' latest antics:

Bette & Tina: all about that stupid baby. Unemployed Bette looks slightly yellowish gray.
Dana: back with that chef chick, Laura. Looks like Dana will develop breast cancer this season.
Alice: on RX drugs, stalking Dana, crying a lot.
Helena: a psychic predicted Alice would be her next victim. She also bought a movie studio.
Shane: dating Carmen, hairstyle worse than ever.
Carmen: still hot.
Jenny Schecter: still crazy and tortured, plus her mother is played by equally crazy Margot Kidder. Their dramatic scene together was painful to watch.
Kit: Woo hoo, menopause is dawning.
No new characters, except for an exceptionally unattractive butch Jenny was shtupping back at her mother's house in the midwest. Of course they got caught.
Unfortunately, the producers opted to keep that same horrible theme music by Betty.
The writers all need to be beaten with sticks, then fired.
All in all, I think I'm done with the L Word.
It's a real pile of crap.

Pentagon Study Links Fatalities to Body Armor
By MICHAEL MOSS
Published: January 7, 2006
NY Times
A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials...

To read the rest of this article, go to

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/politics/07armor.html?th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1136649690-V3UtxFgtOVxeud4Tl4be3Q

Lou Dubose: The Pimping of the Presidency

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/010606Z.shtml

Jack Abramoff was so closely tied to the Bush administration that he could, and did, charge two of his clients $25,000 for a White House lunch date and a meeting with the president. From the same two clients he took to the White House in May 2001, Abramoff also obtained $2.5 million in contributions for a non-profit foundation he and his wife operated.

Bush to Give Away (part of) Abramoff Donations

Jack Abramoff raised at least $100,000 for Bush's 2004 re-election effort, earning him the honorary title "pioneer" from the campaign.

Now that Bush has been caught with his paw in the honeypot, pudgy White House spokesfag Scotty McClellan said the Bushies plan to give "part of" the $100,000 to charity.

What's this? Bush gets caught with dirty money and he thinks donating part of it after the fact will somehow exonerate him?

WTF? Can this guy's balls get any larger?


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010406I.shtml

Why the Long Face?

Oh, no. John Kerry wants to run again for the presidency.
I voted for him once but I won't do it again.
I think he had good ideas but he couldn't articulate them.
He let Karl Rove and the Swift Bloat phonies bully him.
Wrong man, wrong time.
Sorry Kerry, you had your shot.
What do you think?

The Happiest of Happy New Year's Days

I went to see "Brokeback Mountain" with a very cute companion on Sunday evening.
The best part was standing in line, watching people walk by and spying my ex rush by with her latest girlfriend to another screening room.
I don't think they saw us, which was good because they would have seen my jaw drop in shock.
It seems the ex got a radical haircut and what looked like a very inexpensive home perm.
It would be tasteless to say her hair looked positively elderly and clown-like, so I won't. But Phyllis Diller might be suing for trademark infringement.
The shocking new 'do managed to extinguish any microscopic embers of attraction that might have remained. With one fell swoop, she fell from a misty watercolor memory to a jolt of relief that I got out...well before the unfortunate makeover.
Sayonara, ex. Go in peace.
Anyway...
The movie was lovely. Go see it.
When the first sex scene occurred, two straight couples immediately got up and rushed to the exit in a huff. They must have needed to crawl back under the rock that hid them from the kazillion media mentions of the gay cowboy movie.
The story was bittersweet and highly credible, the acting was superb and the cinematography was gorgeous. Oscar time for Heath Ledger. The Aussie actor nailed the part of a Texas cowboy, including a picture perfect accent.
The theater was chilly, so we huddled under her fleece jacket and held hands, surrounded by queens and lesbians who were doing their own cuddling. It was very, very nice.
And my companion's shoulder length, perfectly coiffed golden brown hair with natural highlights looked absolutely, positively wonderful.

I have a feeling I'm gonna like 2006. Onward and upward!