Michael Scanlon, renowned fraudster, Abramoff’s “evil elf,” and now… expert on Congressional ethics. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Yet another guilty plea implicates Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA).
Ahhh, nothing I like better than a little semi-gonzoish on the scene observational reporting. I sent Justin Rood down to Shirlington Limo headquarters this morning to see what he could find out. Seems the Shirlington folks cleared out about a week ago. But Justin got some fun details and some interesting color before Adam Cope of ‘Signature Aviation’ booted Justin out of the building.
David Sirota and Ed Kilgore in the same room talking. No really. I kid you not. Or at least in the same TPMCafe Bookclub. Ed and David, and Frank Joyce, Andrei Cherny, Ruy Teixeira, Elizabeth Warren and Jessica Clark are digging into David’s new book Hostile Takeover over at TPMCafe Bookclub. Take a look.
Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) on what he and his party have to offer voters: “I have a healthy campaign account, in contrast to the Democrat Party, which is deeply divided and has a candidate with almost no campaign cash.”
We’re still checking with the judges. But it seems that Elizabeth Dole, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee has won the Simon Marshall Award for Unintentional Candor in Presentation of the Republican Message.
It all started earlier this evening when TPM Reader HH was on the receiving end of one of Dole’s blast emails begging contributions for the Republican senate committee.
Says Dole, in her pitch: “If Democrats take control of the Senate in ’06, they will cancel the Bush tax cuts, allow liberal activist judges to run our courts and undermine all Republican efforts to win the War on Terror. Even worse …” Now, here you know it’s got to be bad. Even I got a little worried and considered sending in some money since losing the War on Terror for America would already be a pretty bad thing for the Democrats to do. But … well, let’s rejoin Dole in mid-moonbat. “Even worse, they will call for endless congressional investigations and possibly call for the impeachment of President Bush!”
And there you have it. Democrats won’t stop at surrendering to the terrorists. They’ll go as far as investigating President Bush!
That is the election, at least from the vantage point of the White House and the party they control. The president can’t afford to lose either house of Congress. Because they’ve just got too many bad acts and secrets to conceal.
It’s even more important than the War on Terror.
Okay, this one will go a little deep in the weeds. But bear with me because I think it’ll shed a bit of light on the amount of due diligence the Department of Homeland Security did on Shirlington Limo — the company now implicated in the Wilkes-Cunningham hooker scandal — before awarding them a $21 million contract for limo and shuttle services for DHS employees.
Today, over at his new blog at Harper’s, Ken Silverstein got a hold of and posted Shirlington’s contract with DHS. Now, remember, Shirlington was hired to provide two classes of service — limos for senior DHS executives and shuttle service around DC for DHS employees, mainly to and from public transportation hubs around town.
On page 11 of the 42 contract, there is a description of the limo part of the services Shirlington was supposed to provide.
Here’s the relevant passage …
Using the Government provided executive sedans, authorized staff shall be transported between various locations in the Washington, DC metropolitan area including service to and from Baltimore Washington, Washington Dulles and Washington Ronald Reagan National airports for authorized users departing on, or returning from, official travel.
Okay, sounds pretty straightforward.
The problem is that during the time Shirlington was bidding for this contract and even when it was signed, the Department of Transportation had revoked Shirlington’s right to transport people outside of metropolitan DC. So they weren’t even allowed to take people to Baltimore Washington Intl. airport. They were allowed to drive people to Dulles, but only barely, because the Department of Transportation defines Loudon County, Virginia as part of the DC metro area.
Valerie Plame wants to leak straight to the reader. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
It is with a special anguish that I now read George Packer’s New Yorker dispatches on Iraq. But I thought George captured the moral dimension of our current national predicament in one sentence in his piece in this week’s Talk of the Town, where he describes the president’s strategy as “muddling through the rest of the Bush Presidency, without being forced to admit defeat, until January of 2009, when the war will become a new President’s problem.”
This really is the issue. Brazen it out, burn off men and money, not admit there’s any real problem and then pass it off on the next guy who will take the blame.
The president lacks the courage to change course. The whole country is paralyzed by his cowardice.
Wow. Here are some great poll numbers for Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT). Fully 29% of Montana voters believe he deserves to be reelected. Says GOP pollster Whit Ayres, who is working for Burns Republican primary opponent, Bob Keenan, and conducted the poll: “That is among the lowest ‘deserves re-election’ percentages we have recorded for an incumbent in a quarter-century of polling.”