What a guy …
JTA: Pat Robertson announces that God struck down Ariel Sharon for dividing the Land of Israel.
Late Update: Now MediaMatters has the video clip of Robertson’s most recent analysis of God’s work in punitive cardiology.
Annals of co-location. Pat Robertson, fresh from work as medical consultant to God, plans to build evangelical theme park in Israel.
Doesn’t it make you proud?
A headline from the Israeli daily Ha’aretz: “U.S. evangelist: PM’s stroke tied to God’s ‘enmity’ for Gaza pullout.”
In the field I used to work in, Colonial American history, one of the perennial questions was why the colonies were plagued by chronic political instability — particularly, why the colonial legislatures seemed so intractable, so hard to organize or discipline. That’s at least what it seemed like when compared to the Parliament in London, the body upon which each of these mini-parliaments modeled themselves.
There are innumerable explanations. But one focuses on the lack of executive authority and, underlying that, the lack of patronage available to those trying to gain and wield power.
A modern version of this is playing out now in the House of Representatives, and this article in tomorrow’s Washington Post shows some of the centrifugal forces that are released when an effective patronage system begins to break down.
One of the great questions of the last decade is how congressional Republicans managed to maintain such unprecedented party discipline. The standard answer is that that’s how Tom DeLay earned his nickname ‘The Hammer’, by squashing anyone who threatened to get out of line. Only that’s not really quite how the House GOP Caucus functioned. Notwithstanding the reputation DeLay liked to cultivate, he worked a lot more with Carrots than Sticks. And that means money. Lots and lots and lots of money. A lot of it unaccountable money; a lot of it ‘don’t ask where it came from’ money; but lots and lots of money, and as long as you were there with the caucus on the important votes, a lot of it would be yours.
You can’t understand the K Street Project or the sort of slush fund Jack Abramoff was running without understanding that Tom DeLay had built a very effective patronage machine — one that organized a great deal of the money in the city in the hands of the political leadership.
Most people now think that the Abramoff indictments effectively end any realistic hope for DeLay to reclaim the leadership. So the question is whether you end up with DeLayism without DeLay — the same money and machine, just under a new boss.
On the one hand, you have acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt, who ants to push DeLay aside and claim the post for himself. But Blunt is a DeLay Man through and through, part of the machine in every way. On the other hand, you’ve got rebels who just don’t think the GOP can get out from under these scandals without a real change in leadership and direction.
That’s the fight the Post article talks about. But a big part of what’s happening now isn’t just which leadership slate takes over the House GOP Caucus. At a deeper level, the Abramoff scandal may do so much damage to the machine DeLay built — by knocking out key leaders, exposing illegality and ‘legal’ corruption — that whomever comes out on top may not be able to run the place with anything like the party discipline DeLay managed during his years in power.
As a political party, you can’t run on corruption if you’re not running for reform. But as near as I can tell there is no Democratic reform proposal in Congress. Maybe this or that representative or senator has some proposal, but nothing that the opposition party in any way, as a whole, has gotten behind.
So where’s the plan?
How will we know that a reform plan goes far enough? When a lot of members of the Democratic caucus have to be dragged to it kicking and screaming.
I just set up this thread over at TPMCafe to discuss this. Tell us a few concrete, straightforward proposals that you think could go some real way to cleaning up today’s Washington.
In these days of easy ethics, who will take a stand for corrupt Abramoff money? That and other news in today’s Daily Muck.
Scooter Libby signs on as ‘senior advisor’ at the Hudson Institute.
Non-denial denial ain’t just a river in Egypt!
Mark Graul is the former Chief of Staff for Rep. Mark Green (R) of Wisconsin. Now he’s Green’s campaign manager in the congressman’s run for governor of Wisconsin.
Democrats back in the state have been razzing him for a few months over the fact that his name pops up numerous times in Team Abramoff emails we published here back in October. Graul followed up with a series of wiggly non-denial denials.
Now, with the Abramoff story starting to heat up, he’s starting to question the source of the documents themselves, i.e., me.
Yesterday, Graul had this to say to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel …
Graul, who is now managing Green’s campaign for governor, said the report was written by a “liberal blogger with an ax to grind.” Graul said he hasn’t seen the original documents on which the blog was based.
And from today’s Green Bay Press-Gazette …
Meanwhile, the former chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R-Hobart, said Abramoff’s plea bargain has no bearing on his past association with a former colleague of Abramoff.
Mark Graul, who is now campaign manager for Green’s gubernatorial bid, acknowledges attending a Milwaukee Bucks-Washington Wizards basketball game as a guest of lobbyist Jennifer Calvert in 2000.
…
The Wisconsin Democratic Party, citing purported e-mails between Calvert and Abramoff posted by an Internet blogger, claims Graul also obtained free tickets to other events in Washington with Abramoff’s OK.
…
However, Graul denied having attended the other events, saying he was in Wisconsin on the days they occurred.
“I can assure you that I didn’t go to them,” said Graul.
Graul said there’s no evidence the alleged e-mails are authentic and that he never met Abramoff.
Calvert’s relationship with Abramoff as a co-worker ended several years ago, when she left Preston Gates & Ellis to help establish the government affairs business at Washington Strategies, a smaller lobbying firm across the Potomac River from Washington in Rosslyn, Va.
Graul said Thursday that he considered his attendance at the game at the MCI Center in downtown Washington with Calvert primarily a social event. He did not recall what business topics were discussed.
The two became acquainted when one of Calvert’s clients was an association that represented the personal watercraft industry, said Graul.
Calvert’s firm said Thursday she was out of town for the week.
If you’re interested in delving into the minutiae of this, note that Graul is changing his story about the hoops game with Calvert from what he said last year. Also, this talk about whether he showed for this game or that is just more bamboozlement. As we said last October “do we have proof that Graul showed up at the skybox that night? No. What we have are Team Abramoff emails saying he was one of the lucky Hill staffers who they gave tickets to. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”
Now, Graul’s new angle seems to be that he hasn’t seen the letters, isn’t sure they’re real, doesn’t this, that and the other.
Mark, a bit of free advice courtesy of TPM: just admit you got some freebie tickets and move on. These emails were produced by the relevant parties pursuant to a lawful subpoena. They are most definitely authentic.
Graul knows they’re real. And that’s why he’s been ducking my phone calls about them for three months.
If Graul doesn’t have anything to hide here, why won’t he take my call?
Graul is far from the only congressional staffer to snag a few skybox tickets from the Abramoff gravy train. He’s just doing more than any of the others to cover it up.
CNN’s David Ensor has a follow-up here on that weird story about the NSA possibly snooping on CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour.
Says Ensor: “A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Thursday that the National Security Agency did not target CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour or any other CNN journalist for surveillance.”
What we may have here though is an issue of terminology.
Remember that what Andrea Mitchell said or asked in her interview of James Risen was this: “Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net? (italics added)”
To be ‘swept up’ in a net isn’t the same as being ‘targetted’ — just ask dolphins. And toward the end of Ensor’s piece on the CNN website, there’s some hint that this distinction might be what we’re talking about …
The senior official said that from time to time NSA surveillance overseas “inadvertently” acquires recordings or copies of communications involving Americans — or what the government calls “U.S. persons,” which includes most U.S. residents and employees of American companies. By law, however, such materials are required to be erased or destroyed immediately, the official said.
Intelligence officials rarely comment on who they may or may not have collected information about, but because of all the speculation on Internet blogs, the senior official agreed to look into the matter for CNN. Another official privately said he was “puzzled” by NBC’s decision to publish the raw transcript of the interview.
There’s a lot of hinting and vagary here. But I think this gives some clue to where this goes.