Curt Weldon, who’s yer daddy?

Watching the explanation for this one should be entertaining.

Over at TPMmuckraker.com, Paul Kiel has been walking you through the Russian energy/’security services’ thread of the Abramoff scandal.

In short, two executives for the energy company Naftasib (Alexander Koulakovsky and Marina Nevskaya) were spreading money around Washington in the late 1990s looking for friends and favors. They hired Jack Abramoff. Abramoff then acted as the pass through by which Koulakovsky and Nevskaya bankrolled the sham nonprofit, the US Family Network, Tom DeLay’s then-Chief of Staff Ed Buckahm set up while he was still on the government payroll. Buckham later used the US Family Network to kick start his lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group. To make this all a little more complicated the Russian money was funnelled through front outfits in the UK and the Netherlands.

I know the trail of money and the details are rather byzantine. But suffice it to say that these foreign energy executives with what newspapers usually delicately refer to as ‘close ties’ to Russian security services were pumping millions of dollars into the Abramoff-Buckham-DeLay syndicate. And they were getting a lot in return.

You’ll also remember that one of the quids Rep. Bob Ney (R-Toast) was trading for Jack Abramoff’s quos were encomiums and hatchet-jobs slipped into the congressional record, for Abramoff’s pals and enemies, respectively.

So with all that as background, here are remarks Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) inserted into the Congressional Record back on February 4th, 1999 …

Now, Weldon does fancy himself something of a Russia hand. Indeed, his daughter, when she was only in her late 20s, set up a lobbying firm that seemed to specialize in getting fat contracts from Russian and Serbian interests which ended up getting favors from her dad. Indeed, one of them was Itera International Energy Corp, another Russian energy outfit with ties of various sorts to Russian government officials.

But I digress.

Whatever the deal with Itera, what was Weldon’s thing with Koulakovsky? This guy was funnelling millions of dollars into the DeLay machine. His shenanigans and deals with DeLay, Abramoff and Buckham are a central part of the on-going federal corruption probe. Weldon seems to have thought he was a really, really great guy.

Why?

McClellan out as press secretary.

Okay, this is pretty funny.

Fox is reporting that Fox’s own Tony Snow may be Scott McClellan’s replacement as White House press secretary.

Isn’t that more like an interdepartmental transfer than a job change?

Giuliani reaches out to the corruption wing of the GOP, headlines fundraiser for Ralph Reed. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

I’m still trying to get my head around whether or not taking the policy portfolio from Karl Rove really means anything. But unless I’m missing something, this ‘shake-up’ has yet to see anyone actually penetrate the Bush White House bubble. Isn’t that right? I have to imagine they’ll pick someone from the outside for press secretary. But two of the three mentioned for the job are former administration press secretaries — Dan Senor and Victoria Clark. The third, Tony Snow, is also a White House communications hand, only he’s seconded to Fox News.

In all seriousness, I think the real story here continues to be that things are so bad at the White House, the level of denial and secrets to be kept, the self-bamboozlement and bad-faith so profound, that they just can’t manage to bring in any new blood.

With Rumsfeld, or any other cabinet secretary, there’s a related problem — the importance of which has, I think, not been fully appreciated or aired. If Rumsfeld goes, you need to nominate someone else and get them through a senate confirmation. That means an open airing of the disaster of this administration’s national security policy. Every particular; all about Iraq. Think how much they don’t want that …

Finally, can they find anyone on the outside who wants in? This, remember, seems to be the problem with Treasury Secretary Snow. He has already, in essence, been fired. But they can’t come up with anyone crazy enough to take the job.

You’ve probably seen the reports that the FBI is trying to get access to the late and legendary muckraker Jack Anderson’s papers and to confiscate any classified documents contained in them. Apparently the FBI agents on the case even stooped to going behind the back of Anderson’s son, who’s an attorney and official custodian of the papers, to trick Anderson’s elderly widow into signing a release allowing them free rein to the papers.

Okay, this is pretty hilarious. Did Trent Duffy really expect his pal John Roberts was going to read this on the air? And who knew there was an official certified short-list?

This from this morning on CNN. We start with host Miles O’Brien speaking to CNN’s John Roberts …

Let’s get back to Scott McClellan, John. Reading the tea leaves on what you just talked about, I gather he’s leaving under his own steam. But by the same token, Josh Bolten was very vocal in leaving the door open and suggesting if you’re high ranking and you’re thinking of leaving, do it now, or there might about few nudges. Was is a combination of him wanting to leave and him, perhaps, expecting to be nudged out?

ROBERTS: I expect that Scott was part of the overall changeover. I really don’t think he wanted to go. He really enjoyed the job, and I don’t think it really was in his heart of heart’s of desires to leave the White House.

I think Josh Bolten — and this is just speculation on my part — but I think Josh Bolten probably came to him and said, Scott, we’ve got to make changes. Bolten has said to various Republicans that we’ve talked to that communications was big problem at the White House, and that the communication shop was probably going to have to be revamped some.

In terms, by the way, Miles, of who could possibly take over for Scott, just got an e-mail from my old friend Trent Duffy, who was one of the deputies, saying, thanks a lot, man. Please include me in the…

M. O’BRIEN: Don’t forget me!

ROBERTS: Don’t forget me. Please include me in the list of people as “The Washington Post” and others are. So, yes, Trent Duffy is a name that’s under consideration there, though we’re not sure at this point who’s going to get the nod on that one.

M. O’BRIEN: Obviously, Trent doesn’t need his own press secretary. He’s doing his own work behind the scenes in realtime.

ROBERTS: Well, if he could do as good a job for President Bush as he’s doing for himself right now, maybe he gets the job.

M. O’BRIEN: He might have just gotten the job, I don’t know.

ROBERTS: Sorry, Trent. Didn’t mean to embarrass you so much.

Somehow I don’t think Duffy did himself any favors. But he is sure is eager.

Turns out Rove’s replacement as policy czar had a hand in the “recount riot” that shut down the vote counting in Florida back in 2000.

You may have heard of Robert Wright’s new site Bloggingheads.tv. You get two bloggers who talk over or debate the issues of the day. And then viewers can watch the video and audio of the discussion on the web — in a pretty high quality feed. I’m not sure that’s the best explanation of it. But you can watch and see what it looks like here.

Today, The Nation’s David Corn and I did a bloggingheads segment where we talked about investigative journalism, the defenestration of Scott McClellan, Niger, the 2006 election and of course Iran and Iraq. I was still getting a handle of how the technology worked. So I probably screwed things up a bit since it was a bit hard to keep my focus. (You can probably notice my on-going inability to figure out how to get the volume control to work on my headset.) I think I’ll do better next time. But you can check it out for yourself.

In his front page piece in Thursday’s Post, Dan Balz writes: “Realigning the White House staff and bringing in new faces appear central to [the] effort … to revitalize this presidency quickly enough to avoid crippling GOP losses in November that could thrust Bush into instant lame-duck status.”

But I can’t get past this point of, where are the new faces?

It’s like they cannot take on anyone who hasn’t a) already taken the Bush omerta or b) works currently for Fox News.