Over the weekend, AP reported that email from Tom DeLay’s (R-TX) office to Jack Abramoff’s office reveals that the indicted former-majority leader was quite aware of who was paying for his $75,000 trip to St. Andrews, Scotland to play golf in 2000.
All of which makes it likely that Bob Ney (R-OH) was similarly aware of who was paying for the lobbyist funded vacation to St. Andrews when he took a similar trip with Abramoff in 2002.
All of which makes it likely that Tom Feeney (R-FL), the third Republican Congressman to take the trip to hit the links in Scotland with Abramoff, he in 2003, was also aware of who was paying for it.
Feeney has done a fine job of flying under the radar on this matter up until now. But with DeLay now down and out, and Ney’s chief-of-staff, Neil Volz, copping a guilty plea today — making him the fourth such criminal to implicate Ney in the vast Right Wing Conspiracy — we’d think it only a matter of time before the media start noticing Feeney’s conspiratorial involvement as well.
Along those lines, a couple of notable pieces from from the Volz plea (courtesy of Paul Kiel over at Muckraker)…
That point may be useful as investigators and/or media take a closer look at Feeney and his other questionable trips, several of which are described here as part of CREW’s “13 Most Corrupt” in Congress.
Secondly, Kiel reminds us about Ney’s use of his pet bill, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, to help a few of his closest “friends”:
We’ve discussed how Ney used his authorship of HAVA and control of the House Administration Committee — which he chaired until being forced to step down because of all of this — in the past (almost one full year ago today, as a matter of fact).
More pointedly, however, we’ve reported on the roll Abramoff and Diebold played along with another former Ney chief-of-staff, David Distefano, in both passing HAVA in the first place, and ensuring it stayed intact as Diebold needed it to.
That story, in which funds were apparently funnelled through to Ney from both Diebold and Abramoff’s firm Greenburg Traurig, has also been overlooked by the media in general. If they care to pick up that ball now, they can find a lot of still-uninvestigated open ends in our report right here.
Please feel free to let your media contacts know about both the Feeney issue and the Ney/HAVA/Abramoff issue, since both could use much more scrutiny by many more eyeballs.
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Oh what a tangled web they weave.
Talk about laundering monetary transactions,…
these Party of God – Republicans,…
have graft,.. corruption,… and self enrichment
down to a fine art. Would Jesus condone this ?
This financial skulduggery by these ultra right-wing
Congressional-Capos,… have put likes of
Al-(phon-sus) Capone to shame.
As a Syndicate of Criminality – Par Excellence,…
these Republicans are.
They have dragged our government,..
in to the cesspools and sewers,.. along with them.
About a week before the election, Newsweak will have a story about Ney and the voting machine payoff and then you’ll never hear about it again.
They did it last time. A week before the election thay had a FRONT PAGE picture of people in the voting booth with the caption "Will Your Vote Be Counted".
Larry #3… Yes, I was a long-time subscriber to Newsweek, and cancelled because of their failure to cover the stolen ’04 elections. Usually, the staff at least discusses scandals, although with such equanimity that it makes the reader feel everything will turn out okay in the end, and there’s no need to get outraged. But the staggering statistical anomalies of ’04 voting? They wouldn’t touch that with a ten foot pole. They didn’t acknowledge that the issue even existed.
Imagine a magazine that you didn’t even need to subscribe to unless you could afford it and covered the issues important to you!
BRADWEEK magazine!
Corporate-controlled media. Newsweek is just another status-quo rag, unwilling to offend anyone and trying to get by on its reputation.
The 2004 election is just too hot. Seymour Hersh said exactly that over a year ago. The corporate media won’t touch it because it’s too hot.
There’s a subtle dynamic at work, also. Mainstream media insist on "balance" in their reporting. That’s why Bush has gotten away with so many lies; he or Scottie McClellan tells a whopper, but it isn’t reported as a lie, just as one side of an argument. Then they print a Democrat’s opinion, and the lie dissolves into legitimate political discourse.
There’s no way to report election fraud on a balanced basis. Fraud is fraud. If the media start to investigate and find evidence of vote-flipping or deliberate shorting of machines to minority districts, that can’t be balanced by someone else’s opinion, because evidence isn’t a point of view, it’s evidence.
They don’t want to report on statistical anomalies, because 1) the subject is too esoteric for most readers, and 2) the laws of mathematics can’t be balanced out by somebody’s opinion.
I, too was a long-time subscriber to Newsweek. When my subscription lapsed in early ’05, I just let it go, as I was amazed that they didn’t cover the questions of the election.
What a disapointment that such a part of my life was let go. I’d had a subscription for over 30 years!
Feeney. Still here. Justice has sure been slow for Ray Lemme. It will come.
I watched The Today Show for 20 years. It turned into fluff. I get my news from the net now. CNN is a little better.
The great Paul Krugman put it best:
(Paraphrasing) If Bush said the world is flat, the next day the headlines would read:
"Shape of the World: Views Differ!"
Larry Bergan says:
"Republicans have stolen the last three elections using every imaginable method! Period. Exclamation point!"
RLM, #6, astute, as always!
RLM #6
On Keith Olbermann, who was not really looking for "balance" (a.k.a. grey ops), had Ken Silverstein on for a bit. Silverstein said:
"… the white house is lying …"
See the episode. An article about it is linked here.
and it concerned the HookerGate (not Jeffie) scandal at the watergate.
He was talking about "9 fingers", "Dusty Foggo", and some other agents Porter Goss brought on board to "clean up" the CIA.
I am still laughing at the names of these folk who are entrusted with protecting the fatherland … er uh … wink wink … the homeland.
The direct link to the article (Nine Fingers and The Third Man) at Harpers, which I mentioned in my post #11 above, is linked here.
How in the, (excuse me), F’n hell did I get directed to this thread on 9-08-2006!
Never mind! I am drunk and googled my own name and it sent me here. Nothing special. But as far as i can tell, Newsweak is still making a bad mistake!