From AP: 

Embattled Rep. Tom DeLay decided Saturday to give up his post as House majority leader, clearing the way for new leadership elections among Republicans eager to shed the taint of scandal, two officials said.

Laura Rozen found this tidbit about Denny Hastert making House Republicans go through a course on ethics rules and their instructor is....the infamous Rep. Bob Ney.

Let me get this straight, the President had a meeting with most of the Secretaries of State and Defense going back to the Kennedy administration billed as an opportunity to get some constructive advice and then only allows 5 to 10 minutes for discussion?  What was the point?  Forty minutes of a rah-rah presentation, a few minutes for Madeline Albright to tear him a new asshole and then let's all line up for a photograph.

World O'Crap brings us the sad tale the Rev. Lonnie Latham, member of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee and outspoken critic of the homosexual lifestyle who was picked up attempting to do some "pastoring" to an undercover police officer at a local hotel.

I was very critical of Florida when it passed a "Shoot First" law last year and now the Gun Guys bring us a story of Colorado's "Make My Day Law" in which a man basically got away with murder.  Appears Gary Lee Hill shot John David Knott in the back with a rifle as Knott drove away from Hill's house following a confrontation with Knott's girlfriend Amanda Padilla and friend Anthony Padilla.  A jury found that Hill met the minimum requirements to call what he did self-defense and let him go even though there is no mention of any threatening behavior from Knott and the party was leaving Hill's property. 

Looks like a law supposedly proposed to discourage assault was used as an excuse for an indiscriminate revenge killing after the fact.  Any reason the NRA is pushing for more states to adopt such a horrendous piece of legislation?

The Republicans are going to try to spin the Abramoff affair as a bunch of individuals making bad choices with no overarching ulterior motives beyond self enrichment and as much as the media has already bitten on that line I would suggest the only way to make sense of Abramoff scandal is to look at his central role in the K Street Project as Jane Hook and Mary Curtius do in this LA Times article.  Abramoff wasn't totally some lone wolf but intimately connected with a concerted effort by the Republican Congressional leadership to cement Republican control in Washington by making K street an arm of a new Republican political machine.  They shook down the lobbying firms, coordinated legislative efforts, let lobbyists write or rewrite bills and pressured lobbying firms not to hire Democrats while placing loyal Republican staffers in prominent positions in a number of major DC lobbying firms.  Abramoff was one of their go-to guys in this political strategy as seen in the amount of money he moved into Republican coffers and if there is any justice we should be hearing more about the K Street Project in the months to come!

I  remarked a couple weeks ago that the media would go out of its way to describe the Abramoff scandal as a bipartisan affair with no sense of proportionality and that appears to be where we're headed.  Although we are still waiting for information on who Abramoff will name, Think Progress gives us a chart with a list of members of Congress and others who we know to have either taken money from Abramoff and or his clients or been involved in one Abramoff scheme or another. 

Now I don't know about you, but from that list I count at least 35 Republicans and only 3 Democrats.  35 to 3!  If one were to look at this objectively, I would have to say that the majority of the people either indicted or linked to Abramoff's many schemes are Republicans.  Furthermore, almost all of them have strong links to another paragon of ethical behavior, Tom Delay, and if we can put things in proportion (at least 11 R's to every 1 D) most everything suggests this should be primarily reported as a big problem for the Republicans who control not merely Congress but the Executive, and some would say Judiciary, branches of government as well.  Nevertheless, am I to believe that if a large number of prominent Republicans are implicated in the corrupt schemes of a Republican lobbyist/operative that because a couple Democrats are also implicated that both parties are obviously "equally" culpable in the corruption? 

The last big scandal involving a number of House members that I can remember was the House Banking scandal, which involved well over 350 members of Congress, including a large number of Republicans (Newt and most of his opportunistic bomb-throwers included) yet it was clearly a problem for the Democrats who had run things on Capital Hill for 40 years and it was rightfully reported as such.  I think I'll hold my breath this time....

My friend said "Florida State is going for the JoPa heartattack."  I said a JoPa heartattack helps him focus.  He wins on play calling alone.

Uff da, check out the gal overseeing the Criminal Division at the Justice Department and marvel at a quintessential Bush political appointee in action.  Let's see: Recess appointment, supports torture, Delay crony, lobbyist for Bill Frist's family, oversees a large department of government prosecutors yet has never been a prosecutor nor does she have any trial experience, and, since she hasn't done so yet, me thinks it is doubtful she will recuse herself in the Abramoff matter despite ties to a number of his associates.  Wow!  Classic...

Jack who?  Oh yeah, that guy. 

Jack Abramoff is charged via criminal information in the Miami side of his case.  Its just the start. 

6. From at least as early as 1997 through at least April 2004, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the defendant,

JACK A. ABRAMOFF,

did knowingly conspire and agree with Scanlon and with others to committ the following offenses against the United States  .  . .

you like your life in a free-form style
you'll take an inch but you'd love a mile
there never seems to be quite enough
floating around to fill your lovin' cup

(A) to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud and deprive defendant ABRAMOFF's Clients of their right to defendant ABRAMOFF's honest services, peformed free from deciet, fraud, concealment, conflict of interest and self-dealing, in violation of 18 U.S.C. ss 1341 and 1343. . .

don't try to tell me that you're not aware
of what you're doing and that you don't care
you say it's easy, just a nat'ral thing
like playing music but you never sing

There's been a lot of discussion on the blog of late about the health of the Iraqi economy of late.  Well here's the tough numbers, folks:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's oil exports hit their lowest level since the war, according to figures released on Monday, heightening a sense of crisis as fuel supplies grow scarce and political leaders struggle to form a government.

Iraq exported 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil in December, a senior official said -- less than any month since exports resumed in mid-2003 after the U.S. invasion and about half the level seen during sanctions under Saddam Hussein.

Sabotage is damaging plants and blocking investment, keeping exports at a fraction of targets officials say should be met if Iraq's vast reserves are to provide its people with the prosperity that might draw the sting of civil conflict.

Bush needs to do something, fast.  He's the one in charge.

 

Hot off the presses--the Justice Department is looking into the leak of the NSA Spying Scandal.  How do we know?  Justice Department officials leaked the information:

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about President Bush's secret domestic spying program, Justice officials said Friday. The officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, said the inquiry will focus on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Good idea to leak the existence of the leak investigation.  They've known about these leaks for a year at least, because the New York Times sat on the story.  Yet they didn't start an investigation right away, instead waiting an entire year before looking for the leaker.  Politics, anyone?

The only task for the President right now is to try to convince the public that he is being dragged down by partisan attacks of Democrats, not the consequences of his own foolish decisions.  The problem is that Bush is fighting his own weight, not the Democrats.  Having lied and failed, he lacks the ability to sway the people.  Ironically, his own successful drive to control all of the levers of power created a situation where Democrats really don’t have the ability to play the role of opposing force, dooming Bush’s efforts from the first.  Right now we are getting a good lesson in the ultimate wisdom of the founders—where the other two branches will begin to correct the problem without reference to partisanship.  Democratic efforts should focus on the arrogance of Bush’s style of government without engaging him in any false debate on merits in which he can control the definition of terms.

Digby gives us this David Cole review of John Yoo's opus on the unlimited power of the Presidency in times of war.  If you want a feel for the Bush administration's current ideological view of presidential power this review will give you the basics and it ain't pretty.  I especially like the part where Yoo consulted 18th century dictionaries, parsing word definitions to show that the Constitution really didn't intend for the Congress to have any role in declaring or conducting a war. 

Is it just me or was the constitutional originalist movement ever serious or after being in power a few years has it just run its course and become a parody of what it was supposedly against?  I really can't see how a serious "original intent" constitutional scholar can look at the historical context of the founding of the Republic, yet alone the debates at the constitutional convention, and say flat out that the founding fathers, even after fighting a war against a monarch they considered a despot ,would just turn around and give monarchical powers to the president.