The PAC that Tom Delay rode for years and used to help him establish his majority in the US House of Representatives is being shut down by the Federal Elections Commission.
The fundraising organization that helped vault former Rep. Tom DeLay to Republican leadership ranks in the House and distributed election money to numerous Republicans has been fined for campaign finance violations and is shutting down.
Under an agreement with the Federal Election Commission, Americans for a Republican Majority's political action committee agreed to pay a $115,000 fine and close. The agreement, reached July 7, was made public late Wednesday.
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"The reason DeLay became so powerful was all about the money, the amounts of money he could pull in and could distribute to his colleagues," said Melanie Sloan, the watchdog group's executive director. "Nearly every Republican in Congress received money from ARMPAC, thus consolidating his power base. They loved him because he kept them flush. Now we find out, they brought in huge amounts of money, but they did it illegally."
Oh, I am just so shocked. The money floating around politicians is too tempting to keep many of them honest for long...and you know, it's usually the ones who manage to spout all the honesty and family values crap who are out there taking til it hurts...on both sides of the aisle, unfortunately.
This certainly can't help Delay's case in court in the long run, and might even be another nail in his coffin in terms of his criminal prosecution. For the last six years (and more) we've had to listen to the republidroids saying that "we should just win elections"...well, now that the corruption in their party that allowed them to buy elections is being revealed slowly but surely, perhaps we will.
Me, I'm looking forward to November. I don't know how well the fear card will play, given the mis-playing of every hand the republican-controlled government has been dealt...and with an almost infinitely stacked deck of cards they've had to play with.
So the V-22 went to Farnborough. Seems that Bell wants to sell that POS to other governments to offset the cost of it's development and production, but at about 70 million a copy there are not too many governments who are going to snap up a fleet of them.
The first squadron of V-22's is scheduled to be deployed next fall and, at the moment, the Marines have been promised 360 of these planes. At a cost of about $70 million each — the total program cost is $49 billion - the Osprey is one of the Marines' most expensive weapons. The Marines have staked their future on this craft, and have about 40 flying today at various American bases, but none overseas or in combat.
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Michael A. Redenbaugh, chief executive of Bell Helicopter, said his company was working with the Marines to try to reduce the cost to around $58 million a plane, and he predicted that it could be done in four years. But for countries whose defense budgets are only a fraction of the Pentagon’s, even $58 million can be a high price for a single plane.
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The Marine Corps had made a big show of announcing it would fly two Ospreys over the Atlantic to arrive before the show - for the first time - to demonstrate its long-range capability. But, on the way over, one of the planes developed engine problems in bad weather and made an unplanned landing in Iceland, where a $2 million engine was replaced before it could continue on its way.
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One of its biggest critics has been Vice President Dick Cheney, who tried to kill the program in the late 1980’s when he was secretary of defense. But his attempts were rebuffed in Congress, where Bell Helicopter and Boeing led a lobbying effort that kept the program alive. Work on the V-22 is spread over 40 states and 200 Congressional districts, giving it powerful grass-roots support.
Besides its safety record, a big criticism of the plane is its high cost. It will largely replace the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters, which date back to the Vietnam era but cost one-quarter the price of the Osprey.
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"We'll pay a little more, but we'll get a heck of a lot," Gen. John G. Castellaw said at the news conference. "The Marine Corps has a lot of wants and needs, but not a lot of money. It's up to me to balance out wants and needs of the Marine Corps with available resources and I think we can do it."
Being a little familiar with the V-22 and it's history as well as the CH-46, I have to say that the Marines have bought a pig in a poke, IMHO. The Osprey is a sexy craft, no doubt about it, but what it's really going to do for the Marines is give them a bunch of rotary-wing guys who can put non-centerline thrust multiengine turbine time on their airline applications.
The argument that the Osprey will be a good and viable replacement for the 46 is silly, if you look at the service record of the Sea Knight. Not only was the venerable CH-46 used by both the Navy and the Marine Corps, it's managed to remain in service for 40+ years, a tribute to some solid engineering and easy, accessible maintenance.
Had the Marine Corps (and Navy) chosen to update the Sea Knight airframe and invest in more research in rotary wing dynamics for things like the Advancing Blade Concept (ABC) which showed promise in overcoming the forward-speed limitations of all helicopter, the problemmatic Osprey might have died as a fledging in it's nest at Boeing/Bell.
Oh, and I love General Castellaw's remark "We'll pay a little more, but we'll get a heck of a lot" ... a little more than what? That's some serious inside-the-Pentagram thinking there folks. Back the future again, I wonder if the Osprey will have $400 milspec toilet seats/relief tubes?
So Preznit Born-again Deke has unsurprinsingly vetoed the stem cell legislation, thus ensuring the disposal of millions of blastocyst Americans in medical-waste company's furnaces and disposal facilities. I guess that at 150 cells per Blastocyst American he's making progress one not-quite sentient American, like himself, at a time.
President Bush vetoed a bill for the first time today, using his constitutional power to reject legislation passed by Congress that would expand federal research on embryonic stem cells, a step he said would be crossing a “moral line.
Glad he sees such bright "moral lines". I guess that ought to be a real comfort to any innocent by-standers sold to US Forces in Afghanistan and locked up in GITMO for the last five years.
Preznit Merkel Massager seems to be able to observe "moral lines" well whenever there's a vote to be pandered, or a constituency caressed. Observing "moral lines" in doing the right thing, eh, not so much.
I guess that scientific advances will have to wait until we can afford to pay for them as a nation anyhow. That ought to be sometime around the yeat 2525, if the Republic is still alive thanks to the short-sighted policies of the republican governance corps.
On a clear, cold morning in February 2003, Nico de Boer heard what sounded like a clap of thunder and stepped outside his hillside home for a look. High above the tree line, the 40-year-old dairy farmer saw a trail of smoke curling across the sky -- all that remained of the space shuttle Columbia.
Weeks later, de Boer was startled to learn that he was one of hundreds of East Texas ranchers entitled to up to $40,000 in disaster compensation from the federal government, even though the nearest debris landed 10 to 20 miles from his cattle.
In all, the Livestock Compensation Program cost taxpayers $1.2 billion during its two years of existence, 2002 and 2003. Of that, $635 million went to ranchers and dairy farmers in areas where there was moderate drought or none at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post. None of the ranchers were required to prove they suffered an actual loss. The government simply sent each of them a check based on the number of cattle they owned.
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...In some cases, USDA administrators prodded employees in the agency's county offices to find qualifying disasters, even if they were two years old or had nothing to do with ranching or farming.
So much for that stereotypical, Hollywood hard-bitten self-reliant rancher, eh? Not much more than a bunch of whining babies at the teat of the government they profess to hate so much.
Like those infomercials, "But wait, there's MORE!!!"...
Shortly before the 2002 congressional elections, the Bush administration faced growing pressure from ranchers and politicians in a handful of Western states that were hit hard by drought. Of special political concern to the White House, sources said, was South Dakota, where Republican Rep. John Thune was close to unseating Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson.
The USDA responded with a plan to give ranchers cash payments based on how much livestock they owned. A beef cow would count for $18; a dairy cow, $31.50. Lesser payments would be awarded for buffalo and sheep. The maximum an individual rancher could get was $40,000.
Who'da figgered that out in places that riggable electronic "voting" hasn't made inroads the 1600 Crew would be looking for vote-whores willing to sell their franchise? My goodness, there's Gambling at Ricks'.
Agriculture officials estimated the program would require $752 million. But so many ranchers and dairy farmers applied that the cost quickly ballooned to $900 million. At the time, a second year of the program wasn't being contemplated.
The article in the WaPo goes on and on with the requisite examples of pork being handed out to pork-producers and virtually every other kind of agricultural "entreprenuer" out there.
I guess that in farming, if it's not a "sure thing" that you have a good season in an America controlled by the republican party, just whine a little more and some money will magically appear in your mailbox. I'd be the last person to say I want to see farmers fail, but let's face it, there's risk in agriculture like anything else, it just seems that farmers/ranchers/whatever seem to feel that they are entitled to have that risk mitigated out by our tax dollars.
And those of my great-grandchildren who will pay for this republican 'free money' madness for about a century and a half.
Who knew? Well, someone must've, since I've never read James Dobson's autobiography.
People who abuse animals are people with problems. Big problems. People who do it for fun, and then "brag" about it, are even more sociopathic, IMHO. via the Carpetbagger Report:
Even more alarming, Dobson admits in one of his books that as a child he arranged a fight between two mismatched dogs. The battle involved a tenacious bulldog and a "sweet, passive Scottie named Baby," and Dobson provoked it by throwing a tennis ball toward Baby. He writes what happened next: "The bulldog went straight for Baby's throat and hung on. It was an awful scene. Neighbors came running from everywhere as the Scottie screamed in terror. It took ten minutes and a garden hose for the adults to pry loose the bulldog's grip. By then Baby was almost dead. He spent two weeks in the animal hospital, and I spent two weeks in the doghouse. I was hated by the entire town."
As any child psychologist will tell you, this type of cruelty toward animals is a sign of a serious psychological disturbance.
Wow. Talk about serious perversion, next he'll be all for whacking defenseless children. What. A. Man!
Dobson wants to remake our military in his fantasy-land christofascist image, snoop into every bedroom and be the power behind the Preznit's Throne for as long as he can.
Ambitious for a prissy little bully-boy isn't it? But not really wholly unexpected either.
Oh, my. Beloved Leader said the word "shit" at a G-8 conference luncheon. I guess the FCC will be calling in panels of experts at the request of Brit Hume, Donald Wildmona and James Dobson to see if our republic will fall because Bunnypants the Younger used one of their Officially Proscribed Words!
All over Wingnuttia, women are creaming and men are feeling manly (in a good way) because their Beloved One sounded positively Texan!
The immigration debate, which the more racist wing of the republican party is staking part of their 2006 electoral hopes on, sure has some ah, "interesting" people arguing their side for them. From an article on the carpet industry in Georgia, which is trying to toss every illegal alien out of the state, is this little gem about Preening Chickenhawk Hypocrite Extraordinaire Saxby Chambliss: (my emphasis)
Another turning point came in 1998, when immigration agents raided the Vidalia onion fields, putting the valuable harvest in jeopardy, only to be called off after Georgia congressmen protested to the Clinton administration. One protest came from then-Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R), now a senator and an advocate of deporting illegal immigrants.
So, just like his "bum knee" that he runs on everyday now, but kept him out of the Army and service to his country during Vietnam, Chambliss conveniently stood up for the onion-growers the same way his knees stood up for him. Convenient, isn't it?
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't know what the percentage of Georgia state income tax revenue comes from the workers in the carpet mill, whether they are legal or illegal, but it can't be small numbers. The total amount of money that the state collects from the mills is significant enough that if they were to move over the border because of the Mohawk lawsuit or pure economics, I suspect that the backlash would be pretty severe...Ol' Saxby might have more time every day to run more miles from his home office in Unemployment, Georgia than he is currently counting on following his next election cycle.
Georgia politics being what they are now, it'll be interesting to watch how this plays with the good ol'boys vs. the conservative republican-leaning companies that are enabling the illegals tenure with jobs and a piece of the American Dream. Some companies and industries that have never been particularly 'sociall conscious' might find themselves wondering what hit them if the good ol' boys prevail...some good ol' boys might find themselves wondering what happened to their local economies if they prevail too, but then again, maybe not. For them, lily-white is just alright. Even if it's at $5.15 an hour.
