Over at Helium Heaven today, John Cole mulls over the ongoing shenanigans in the Massachusetts legislature, and concludes:
There is no excuse for this kind of nonsense. I fully understand there are times for partisanship, but not when dealing with the law. This kind of gamesmanship, jiggering the law to put ideological allies in office, destroys confidence in the system, pisses away the moral high ground, and gives people the right to make arguments about "the Democrats are no better," because in this case, they aren't.
Well, yes and no. Yes, it's gamesmanship, and in retrospect, the Brahmins would have been wiser to leave well enough alone and allow Mittens to appoint his Kerry successor; recall if you will that Romney had not yet descended into the nether regions of Galtistan at the time and was deemed by most observers to be a fairly rational man. On the other hand, I don't think that this kind of procedural maneuvering, while patently cynical, is really that big of a deal in the grander scheme of things. Maybe in Massachusetts, but does the rest of the country really give a rat's ass about this? Does a game of parliamentary dodgeball really undermine Americans' faith in their political system any more severely, or promote the "dime's worth of difference" meme more convincingly, than stuff like this?
Federal prosecutors have accused a major Democratic fundraiser with ties to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that involved swindling several major banks out of hundreds of millions of dollars, and using some of the proceeds to fund political candidates and PACs.According to a Justice Department press release, Hassan Nemazee was indicted this afternoon by a grand jury, charged with using fake documents and signatures to bilk Citibank, Bank of America, and HSBC out of over $290 million, in an alleged scheme that dates back to 1998. Nemazee alleged used the Citibank money to repay the B of A loan, and vice versa. And even after being questioned by FBI agents about the Citibank loan last month, Nemazee allegedly went to HSBC to fraudulently draw down a line of credit, which he tried to access funds to pay back Citibank . . .
Nemazee, 59, was Hillary Clinton's finance chair during her 2008 presidential run. He then became a top bundler for Barack Obama's campaign. He has also been a prolific contributor to Democrats himself.
And crap like this, to my mind, is simply the absolutely fucking worst:
Arkansas Rep. Mike Ross -- a Blue Dog Democrat playing a key role in the health care debate -- sold a piece of commercial property in 2007 for substantially more than a county assessment and an independent appraisal say it was worth.The buyer: an Arkansas-based pharmacy chain with a keen interest in how the debate plays out.
Ross sold the real estate in Prescott, Ark., to USA Drug for $420,000 -- an eye-popping number for real estate in the tiny train and lumber town about 100 miles southwest of Little Rock.
"You can buy half the town for $420,000," said Adam Guthrie, chairman of the county Board of Equalization and the only licensed real estate appraiser in Prescott.
But the $420,000 was just the beginning of what Ross and his pharmacist wife, Holly, made from the sale of Holly's Health Mart. The owner of USA Drug, Stephen L. LaFrance Sr., also paid the Rosses $500,000 to $1 million for the pharmacy's assets and paid Holly Ross another $100,001 to $250,000 for signing a non-compete agreement. Those numbers, which Ross listed on the financial disclosure reports he files as a member of Congress, bring the total value of the transaction to between $1 million and $1.67 million.
And that's not counting the $2,300 campaign contribution Ross received from LaFrance two weeks after the sale closed.
Shit like this is the real reason why we can't get sensible healthcare legislation passed in this country, and why we don't see any meaningful regulation of the financial markets being proposed, and why we never hear any discussions of reducing defense spending, and why a one-percent increase in the top marginal tax rate is branded as Mugabe-style totalitarianism, and why no one in Washington---but no one---ever suggests raising the corporate income tax, now and forevermore; and it's why, quite frankly, we will never be allowed to have anything resembling genuinely liberal government in the United States again. And in this sense, too many Democrats have become exactly like Republicans---not necessarily for their stated positions on any specific issue but because the means they've come to rely on to achieve the ultimate end of keeping their jobs are mirror-image identical to the GOP's: The obsequious and ceaseless deference to the corrosive demands of corporatist cash.
One of the truly tragic lessons we've learned from the current healthcare-reform debate, to my mind, is this: in a bizarre yet undeniable way, a nutjob like Glenn Beck is absolutely right on the money if you think about it---for all practical purposes, we as individual voters are nearly completely disenfranchised from our current government in Washington, just not for the reasons that Beck and his amen chorus believe. The bat-handle buffoonery in Boston, from a public-relations standpoint, strikes me as child's play by comparison.
Sadly, it looks a though our Federalist Society strict constructionist Supreme Court is about to rule that there isn't enough corporate money slushing around our political system, and they're going to do their damnedest to open the spigots ever wider. How any of this bodes well for the commonweal, I am at a loss to explain.
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