I was loooking for a thread to post this in... not wanting to start a new one with a title like, "Corruption in the Bush Administration" or anything like that. That may be what this is, but I figured this thread would do. This story has been going around, but this pretty much sums it up. And it stinks. October 28, 2003 True Believers, Please Rise By DAVID BROOKS ongressional Republicans need to schedule a meeting with the mirror this morning. The agenda item is their soul, and the questions to be addressed are: Why did I run for Congress? Was it to engage in the same pork barrel politics that marked the last decadent days of the Democratic majority? The occasion for this meeting is Speaker Dennis Hastert's effort to ram through an Air Force tanker deal for the Boeing Corporation. This deal isn't just shady — it's the Encyclopaedia Britannica of shady. It's as if somebody spent years trying to gather every single sleazy aspect of modern Washington and cram it all into one legislative effort. It's sort of awe-inspiring when you stop to think about it. Under the deal, the U.S. Air Force would lease 100 refueling tankers, modified Boeing 767's, from an entity controlled by the Boeing Corporation. There are intelligent people in Washington who believe the U.S. needs a new fleet of tankers, to refuel jets over places like Afghanistan. But the details of this particular deal have been shredded by the murderer's row of green-eyeshade, independent-auditor acronym organizations: the O.M.B., the C.B.O., the G.A.O., the C.R.S. and the I.D.A. The main critique is that it is ridiculously expensive to lease planes, rather than buy them. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the leasing option will cost taxpayers an extra $5.6 billion, though scandal connoisseurs will appreciate that the deal also involves the use of "special purpose entities," the accounting mechanisms used by Enron executives in their glory days. But the content of the legislation is as pure as the driven snow, compared with the way it has been pushed through Washington. The chief Air Force official pushing the deal was Darleen Druyun. As The Washington Post reported yesterday, Druyun has recently left the Air Force and gone to work for Boeing. She sold her $692,000 northern Virginia home to a Boeing lawyer. Her daughter works for Boeing. None of this may be illegal or even wrong, but is this what makes you proud to be an American? This is a major contract, but there was no big competition. There was no big study of alternative ways to modernize the fleet. According to U.S. News & World Report (this process has been like a full employment act for investigative journalists) Boeing was given the unusual opportunity to help define the specifications for the plane. Recently released e-mail suggests that some Air Force officials worked intimately with Boeing officials, sometimes to rebut criticisms from other Pentagon officials. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska went around the normal committee process and inserted the deal into a defense appropriations bill during a closed meeting of conferees. According to The Post, in the month before he made that move, Stevens received political contributions from 31 Boeing executives at a fund-raiser in Seattle. Two Republicans, John McCain and Phil Gramm, fought this thing from the start. The conservative columnist Robert Novak condemned it. So Boeing rallied the lobbyists. Senators from Kansas and Washington, the states that stand to benefit, began lobbying. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. kicked in, with unions running ads against McCain. And crucially, Dennis Hastert lobbied the White House. In recent days Senator John Warner has moved to minimize the travesty. He has pushed a deal that would have the Air Force lease only 20 planes, and purchase, less expensively, the other 80. But there are larger issues. First, this whole mess started because the Air Force can't pay for new tankers up front, so it tried to push back the costs by leasing. Maybe it's time to stop trying to run a Bush foreign policy on a Clinton defense budget? More broadly, this Republican majority is beginning to lose the idealism of youth and settle for the spoils of middle age. John Kasich used to rail against corporate welfare. Has that fire burned out entirely? If this deal goes through, it will be a sign that all those fine young crusaders who campaign as fearless fighters against the ways of Washington are slowly but corrosively turning into the sort of creatures they despise. It almost makes one miss Newt Gingrich. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/28/opinion/28BROO.html?pagewanted=print&position=
There is so much stuff out there against these guys, it's almost like nobody is noticing because of the sheer amount of shady goings on these days. In '04 opponents of these people should just make a long list, and read off every chance they get. By the way there is still a felon loose in the whitehouse. I'd like to find him/her and put them behind bars. What's being done by the administration to catch the leaker of covert CIA agents?
How can anyone not acknowledge what this administration does versus what it said it would do? I am proud to say that even the most conservative members of my extended family have started pledging to never vote for GWB again, and the primary reasons are his fiscal absurdity and his continual breaking of promises (to put it nicely) or, if you prefer, his intentional (or/and incompetant) misrepresentations of the truth.
Ah, Beltway wheeling and dealing. I have an idea for an HBO comedy show that could be shot as if it was a documentary every episode and the whole show would be about ridiculous and ubelievable shady stuff that is based on true things happening on Capitol Hill.
Excellent points. I still can't believe some people still defend EVERY policy Bush has. They contort themselves into horrible positions to justify the atrocities, and are so blind they refuse to acknowledge that many (if not most) of Bush's policies are, at best, mediocre.
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GEORGE BUSH: “[My] Clear Skies legislation...mandates a 70% cut in air pollution from power plants over the next 15 years.” THE TRUTH: The Bush plan will allow more than 100,000 additional premature deaths by 2020 than alternative legislation developed by the Environmental Protection Agency. The plan does not regulate carbon emissions and allows far more sulfur and mercury emissions. I guess a lot of states are starting to realize that Bush's version of Clear Skies is not what they had in mind... States, Cities Sue EPA Over New Air Rules By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Lawsuits filed Monday by 13 states and more than 20 cities, which seeks to block changes to the Clean Air Act, contend new rules from the Bush administration would weaken protections for the environment and public health. The Environmental Protection Agency regulation makes it easier to upgrade utilities, refineries and other industrial facilities without installing additional pollution controls. The rule, proposed in December and signed by EPA's administrator in August, was made final Monday. It will take effect in two months, and states have up to three years to comply. The agency said in a statement it does not believe the rule will result in significant changes in emissions, and it "preserves the public health protections" under law. Attorneys general for 12 states — New York, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin — and legal officers for New York City, Washington, San Francisco, New Haven and a host of other cities in Connecticut complained of what they contend will be the regulations will weaken protections for the environment and public health that Congress put into the law. Illinois filed a separate but similar claim, and other states, including California, are considering legal action. Their filings could be consolidated later with the 12-state suit. They argued only Congress can make sweeping changes to such a bedrock law. "We are not going to sit by quietly and allow the energy interests in this country to receive special treatment while so many of our children and elderly are needlessly suffering from respiratory problems that are, in essence, brought on by bad environmental policy," Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly said. The rule broadens EPA's interpretation of routine maintenance for older plants. Before the rule change, operators who did anything more than routine maintenance were required to add more pollution-cutting devices. Under the new rule, industrial facilities avoid paying for expensive emissions-cutting devices if the cost of improvements totals less than 20 percent of the plant's value. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer called the rule an attack on the Clean Air Act. "The president is taking the nation in the wrong direction on environmental policy," Spitzer said. Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a group of power companies that support the rule change, argued it would clarify regulations, and "no litigation from the Northeast attorneys general can produce anything but confusion." The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A similar group of states also filed suit in that court to challenge a previous batch of the administration's related changes to the Clean Air Act. OK, so the EPA is now making it easier for plants to delay adding equipment to lessen pollution when they do maintenance. How is that Protecting the Environment exactly?
Yeah, but isn't K Street supposed to be serious? Mine wouldn't have any real politicians and it would be an obvious comedy/parody type thing. Though, the idea is to similar to get off the ground now. So ends my brief career in television.
I don't care if 100,000 people die. Wussy ass liberals need to stop trying to block progress because a bunch of weak lunged losers are gonna die early Who am I
You have intentionally misunderstand our commander in chief. This is a much better environment for the energy industry.
LOL Interesting fact: Since Bush took office, the pollution-control industry has seen sales plummet more than 80 percent (Mother Jones, December 2003). That should tell you everything you need to know about Bush's environmental policies.
He is protecting us from the environment... Vowing to "restore the pristine splendor of America's natural treasures," President Bush Monday unveiled "Project: National Parks Clean-Up," an ambitious program to remove all toxic petrochemical deposits from national parks by 2004. On a serious note, David Corn's new book is a must read. http://bushlies.com/
