The figures are in. Officials at the National Porn Foundation actually spent some of their time our time and tax dollars investigating scientific discoveries. Why would they be doing that when they could be helping poor women overseas who earn their living posing for porn? From FoxNews:

For instance, one senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women without being detected, the records show.

When finally caught, the NSF official retired. He even offered, among other explanations, a humanitarian defense, suggesting that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women. Investigators put the cost to taxpayers of the senior official’s porn surfing at between $13,800 and about $58,000.

No word on how many Bushco appointees were involved in this travesty, but if they are publicly shamed for viewing science on the Federal dime, they likely will never get a job representing a Republican any time soon.

OK, maybe John Ensign didn’t blame Bill Clinton for his own marital infidelities, but he sure used the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal to deflect attention from his own sorry moral behavior. From the Associated Press via wbaltv.com:

When President Bill Clinton’s relationship with a White House intern erupted a decade ago, Sen. John Ensign called for his resignation.

But the Nevada Republican says that situation is different from one he faces after admitting to an extramarital affair with a former campaign aide. Ensign told The Associated Press that he didn’t lie under oath like Clinton did and that he hasn’t “done anything legally wrong.”

“President Clinton stood right before the American people and he lied to the American people,” Ensign said. “You remember that famous day he lied to the American people, plus the fact I thought he suborned perjury. That’s why I voted for the articles of impeachment.”

Ensign made the remarks Wednesday before speaking at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in rural Fernley.

The event was Ensign’s first public appearance in his home state since acknowledging in June that he had an affair with his friend’s wife, former campaign aide Cynthia Hampton.

I’m here to say that screwing his good friend’s wife puts Ensign in a sad moral position, and he has zero room to talk about anyone else’s morals. Alas, the Chamber of Commerce before whom he was speaking generated nothing but softball questions for this morally bankrupt Republican.

The US Attorney scandal from the Bush Administration broke this afternoon. While Rawstory has a story on the subject, their site is swamped due to a link from fark.com. Still, reporting from the Washington Post, Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo flesh out the story. This story is big and may result in indictments.

I’ll not go into analysis here. Suffice it to say that testimony by Harriet Miers and Karl Rove in front of John Conyers House Committee shows that they moved on the David Iglesias firing far previous to what was earlier disclosed, and that the driving force behind that movement was clearly political, as a way to ensure the election of Heather Wilson to Congress. From the WaPo:

The House focused most of its attention on Iglesias, a rising star in New Mexico who came to displease his political patrons. Miers told investigators that Rove called her in September 2006, “agitated” about the slow pace of public corruption cases against Democrats and weak efforts to pursue voter fraud cases in the state. In the call, Miers said that Rove had described Iglesias as a “serious problem” and said he wanted “something done” about it. Miers testified that she called then Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty to pass along the concerns.

The state’s congressional delegation amplified those grievances in conversations and messages to several White House aides, documents show.

According to e-mails and interviews with people familiar with the investigation, GOP figures in New Mexico believed that if Iglesias pursued public corruption cases against Democrats, it could have helped Wilson in her run for reelection.

A mid-October 2006 e-mail chain that started with Wilson indirectly criticized Iglesias for not bringing public corruption prosecutions in the run up to the midterm elections. Wilson attached attaching a news report about an FBI investigation of Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) in that state as a point of contrast. The same day, Steve Bell, chief of staff to Domenici, e-mailed Rove’s deputy Scott Jennings to say that it “seems like other U.S. attorneys can do their work even in election season. . . . And the FBI has already admitted they have turned over their evidence to the USA in NM and are merely awaiting his action.”

There are literally thousands of documents that were dumped on this subject today, and there’s going to be surprises and an awful lot of incriminating evidence. There will also be whining by Republicans.

In the wake of the trashing of Sonia Sotomayor by the Republicans, and in the wake of the only Latino Republican Senator, Mel Martinez, resigning the other day, I’m thinking the underhanded firing of David Iglesias, also a Latino, is not going to help the Republicans win back the Latino vote. Perhaps this attack on people of color by Republicans is the meme that ought to be promoted.

Larry Craig has set up shop as an oil lobbyist, with New West Strategies LLC. Yes, the guy is sleazy, and it surprises nobody that he would set up shop as a lobbyist. Given Craig’s evident homosexual encounters in airports, one wonders, though, if he’s not doing it for a lifetime supply of lube. The story is here, at grist.org.

Seriously, are energy companies really going to hire this guy? Where’s his office, in the Men’s room outside the Senate cloakroom?

How long are we supposed to wait?

How long are the American people going to put up with this crap?

How long are we willing to blindly accept the ministrations of a federal government that clearly subscribes to the Buck Turgidson School of Social Darwinism?

“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops!”

At the end of July, 2009:

More Americans are without access to basic healthcare or medical insurance than ever before.

More Americans died in Afghanistan during the month of July than at any time since the start of hostilities in that country.

More Americans are unemployed tonight than in recent memory.

More Americans will go to sleep hungry tonight (or worried about where the next meal for their families will come from) than at any time in history - even as foodbanks and feeding programs are stressed at unimaginable levels.

State after state - it’s not just California - is laying off or not paying state workers. Essential services are being cut beyond the bone: entire governmental limbs are now being severed.

I actually, for a few months, entertained the audacious thought that health care reform might really get done, and get done right. My “audacity of hope” has been rapidly transformed by the “mendacity of nope”. DKos diarist teacherken wrote a series of diaries over this past weekend regarding a rural health care event that literally made me cry with sadness and anger.

I am sick to death of listening to the gasbags on NPR blather on about how much healthcare reform is going to cost. The banks should have been allowed to collapse, and single payer, universal health care should have been a no brainer. Instead, the banks got a trillion and the sick, uninsured, and poor are gonna get bupkis.

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

I am sick to death of being sick to death.

Oh, and before anyone slams me asking what I’m doing about it - yeah, I’ve done my time. I’ve pissed into the tide of social activism so many times that I’ve lost count.

Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer never had the time to consider that giving up their lives would make a profound difference. But each of them contributed immeasurably to a true, real, movement (and a single cause) that changed the course of history.

I would quite literally give up my own life for this stuff if I thought it would make a difference. But in this day and age, I fear it wouldn’t.

With each passing day, it feels more and more like we’re all drowning in a roiling, angry sea of ineffective national leadership. A riptide of malignant political indifference has washed over the government of the United States of America, and it seems as if we proles are powerless to escape the undertow.

Yesterday I wrote how reports are showing Tom Coburn counselling John Ensign to end his affair and hand over some hush money to his mistress Cindy Hampton. This story is developing quickly, though, so quickly that one expects everything to fall apart, and soon, for Senator John Ensign. We’ve got what appears to be payoffs ($96,000) in some sort of equavalence to small, unmarked bills, from Ensign’s parents. And though those payments seem seem legal, strictly speaking, there’s also a hint that a man was fired, former Ensign friend Doug Hampton, because he was upset at Ensign screwing his wife. That sounds like litigation in the works, and that’s reflected in the Las Vegas Sun article:

In the interview, Hampton’s language indicated that a lawsuit is forthcoming.

“You’ll see all of this through this discovery,” he said at one point, using a word — discovery — often used to describe the deposition procedure of a lawsuit, which would involve under-oath testimony.

Hampton indicated that he considers his wife, who has not spoken about the matter publicly, a victim of coercion while she was working for Ensign.

Ensign “uses that as leverage to contact Cindy. She’s trying to get away from John, but he’ll leave messages like, ‘It is about your job; it is a work issue I need to talk about,’ ” he said.

The Republicans will not want a big lawsuit, and now it is past time to put up enough hush money to quash this thing. With the GOP performing so poorly with women, and also with their so-called family values mantle as moth-eaten as it is, one would think the GOP would act quickly, cut Ensign from the herd, and try to move on as soon as possible. Inexplicably that isn’t happening.

Sure, Tom Coburn got sucked into this and now his office is putting out press releases with denials and with criticism for Senator Ensign. But that’s a small potatoes response for a party that used to go into overdrive for a mere blow job. This Republican Senator put two marriages in peril, which is two more than all the gay marriages in this country have put into jeopardy. But the worst happened last night. Keith Olbermann borrowed from Ben Smith of Politico in discussing Ensign’s parents $96,000 gift tot he Hamptons. That gift was reportedly “consistent with a pattern of generosity,” a phrase Smith notes could enter the lexicon as “wide stance” did. I’m telling you, with “Pullin’ a Palin” entering the Urban dictionary yesterday, the GOP doesn’t need any more clever linguistic help.

In the last couple days the Senator Ensign scandal has rehit the news. First there was the simpering letter ensign sent to his lover Cindy Hampton. I guess that and $25,000 in severence makes everything alright. But the big bombshell seems to be that Senator Coburn and others tried to stage an intervention for the philandering Senator Ensign, and according to Cindy Hampton’s husband, they suggested paying off the woman. Of course, Senator Coburn’s people, not on the record, are telling a different story. From Politico, with my emphasis:

Doug Hampton – the husband of Ensign’s mistress – told Las Vegas Sun columnist Jon Ralston in a television interview Wednesday that Coburn and others had urged Ensign to give the couple “millions of dollars” so that they could pay off their mortgage and move away from Ensign’s hometown of Las Vegas.

Asked about that allegation Wednesday, Coburn’s office confirmed that the he knew about Ensign’s affair and had urged him to end it.

“Dr. Coburn did everything he could to encourage Sen. Ensign to end his affair and to persuade Sen. Ensign to repair the damage he had caused to his own marriage and the Hampton’s marriage,” Coburn’s office said in a remarkable public rebuke of his friend and fellow Christian conservative. “Had Sen. Ensign followed Dr. Coburn’s advice, this episode would have ended, and been made public, long ago.”

Sources familiar with the facts say that Hampton and Coburn confronted Ensign in February 2008 at a Christian fellowship home on Capitol Hill where Ensign, Coburn and several other lawmakers live.

A source familiar with the incident said that any discussion between Coburn and Ensign about a payment to the couple was “an expression of restitution and not in any way ‘hush money.”

First, I think counselling a friend to end his wicked, wicked philandering ways is a good thing. But why the heck would Tom Coburn suggest Ensign needed to provide restitution to his mistress? It was an affair, but I’ve seen no suggestions that it was anything but consensual. sure, one shouldn’t sleep with subordinates, but I’ve seen no credible source suggest Cindy Hampton is claiming harrassment. What was the harm Coburn is suggesting that required restitution? “Hush money” makes a whole lot more sense to those of us who live in the real world. If Cindy Hampton does decide to claim sexual harrassment, could this supposed offer of hush money be an ethical violation on Senator Coburn’s part? You betcha!

In October 2008, Senator Ted “Bridge to Nowhere” Stevens (R-Alaska) was convicted on several charges of official corruption. He subsequently lost his reelection bid in November. Since then, there have been a variety of defense motions to overturn the conviction and have a new trial.

Today, the Department of Justice announced that it’s dropping all charges against Stevens:

The Justice Department said Wednesday it would drop corruption charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens because prosecutors withheld evidence from the senator’s defense team during his trial.

The reversal is an embarrassment for the department, which won a conviction against the Alaska Republican in October and is now asking to overturn it…

Was the “fix” in from the very beginning by the Bush administration DOJ, and were the prosecution errors committed on purpose so there was no way that the conviction would ever be upheld? Or was it just garden variety legal incompetence that became a hallmark of Alberto Gonzales’ tenure as US Attorney General? The conspiracy theorist in me leans toward the former. The pragmatist in me leans toward the latter, because it seems quite hasty for current Attorney General Eric Holder to totally drop the charges, unless the errors were so egregious as to prevent a retrial.

There’s gotta be one hell of a backstory to this case. I wonder if we’ll ever hear it?

Update: Daily Kos has a short diary that explains why AG Holder’s decision was the right one.

Pete Sessions is a a Representative from Texas. Waco. Maybe that explains it. He’s also Chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. The other day he likened the House resistance to the stimulus plan to Taliban insurgency. I’m thinking there are no lessons one wants to learn from the Taliban, but Sessions went there, really he did. From Hotline:

Frustrated by a lack of bipartisan outreach from House Democratic leaders, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said House Republicans — who voted unanimously last week against the economic plan pushed by President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — will pitch a “positive, loyal opposition” to the proposal. The group, he added, should also “understand insurgency” in implementing efforts to offer alternatives.

“Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,” Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors. “And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes. And these Taliban — I’m not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that’s not what we’re saying. I’m saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.”

What this is is a pouty Republican whine gone wrong. No, I don’t think Sessions means that the Republican Party is just like the Taliban, but it is clear he has learned the lessons of the Taliban, lessons the Bush Administration did not learn, thus failing to wipe them out. Maybe Sessions sees himself as a glorious freedom fighter who when he takes charge will force women into bhurkas. Heck, I don’t know. The guy really pulled a stupid one here.

But this really is just a whine. His poor party was not invited to control the legislation. Barack Obama invited all sorts of Republican leaders to the White House, travelled to and made unprecedented trips to the House and Senate to consult with Republicans, and Sessions is whining that he and his fellow insurgents couldn’t control the election. Hey, maybe if they hadn’t supported Bush as he trashed the constitution, ran up record budget deficits, ruined the economy (I could go on), then Sessions and his cohorts wouldn’t have lost so many seats in the House and Senate. After all, that’s the real reason they aren’t controlling the legislative agenda. That’s how it works in our democracy, after all, the ones who got the votes run things. Hey, Pete — tough!

But let’s be clear. Sessions’ statements about running his Party as if it were the Afghanistan-based Taliban insurgency is in fact the new core value of the Republican Party. Obstruction is the word of the day, and has become the core ethic for the GOP. As Eric Cantor describes it, it is the political strategy of “Just say NO!” Here it is from the Washington Post:

Three months after their Election Day drubbing, Republican leaders see glimmers of rebirth in the party’s liberation from an unpopular president, its selection of its first African American chairman and, most of all, its stand against a stimulus package that they are increasingly confident will provide little economic jolt but will pay off politically for those who oppose it.

After giving the package zero votes in the House, and 0with their counterparts in the Senate likely to provide in a crucial procedural vote today only the handful of votes needed to avoid a filibuster, Republicans are relishing the opportunity to make a big statement. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) suggested last week that the party is learning from the disruptive tactics of the Taliban, and the GOP these days does have the bravado of an insurgent band that has pulled together after a big defeat to carry off a quick, if not particularly damaging, raid on the powers that be.

“We’re so far ahead of where we thought we’d be at this time,” said Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), one of several younger congressmen seeking to lead the party’s renewal. “It’s not a sign that we’re back to where we need to be, but it’s a sign that we’re beginning to find our voice. We’re standing on our core principles, and the core principle that suffered the most in recent years was fiscal conservatism and economic liberty. That was the tallest pole in our tent, and we took an ax to it, but now we’re building it back.”

The second-ranking House Republican, Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), put it more bluntly. “What transpired . . . and will give us a shot in the arm going forward is that we are standing up on principle and just saying no,” he said.

We succeeded in the last several years in attaching the phrase “culture of corruption” to the GOP brand. Now it is time to find a new phrase. The “Architects of Obstruction?” There’s a good one. But I’m thinking you all can do better. Think of it as thinking up a band name for a punk rock group. It has to be offensive and descriptive at the same time. “The American Talibanskis” might be a good name. But I’m never any good at this. You all feel free to come up with some suggestions, willya?

This time the corruption does not seem to involve Mr. Abramoff. It involves Michael Steele, newly elected Chair of the Republican Party, and money his campaign paid to a company owned by his sister, evidently eleven months AFTER his sister folded the company. Money paid for services that could not possibly be rendered? Gee, that seems odd. Maybe we should investigate. A Republican US Attorney is doing just that. From the Washington Post:

Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors.

The claim about the payment, one of several allegations by Alan B. Fabian, is outlined in a confidential court document. Fabian offered the information last March as he was seeking leniency for himself during plea negotiations on unrelated fraud charges. It is unclear how extensively his claims have been pursued. Prosecutors gave him no credit for cooperation when he was sentenced in October.

Let’s see, a Republican US Attorney is investigating, and would not do so if he didn’t think this was a complete waste of time. Meanwhile the Republican Party thinks it is just peachy letting this guy make decisions about millions of dollars of its money.

Well, if they looked for someone free of corruption to run the RNC, they’d be looking for a long time.

Hey, this Washington Post article is well-researched and lengthy. That in itself does not make Mr. Steele guilty, but it outlines some shoddy practices at the very least. Gee, it’s either dishonesty or incompetence. . . isn’t that the Republican way? To that end, Michael Steele seems perfect to run the GOP.