Brad Blog

One week after the November 2004 election, we blogged an item we called "Why It Matters: The World is Watching". The piece covered the way in which Russia's Pravda wondered aloud, "Did Bush fix the election"?

Just over two weeks later, Ukraine's own fixed election, and the Bush administration's infuriatingly hypocritical outrage brought more condemnation from Pravda, this time as they chastised the American administration for having the gall to question anyone else's election after our own -- which was even more askew than Ukraine's. Our item headlined "Home to Roost - or, Democracies That Live in ...   more »

By Alex Knott, The Center for Public Integrity

Special interests and the lobbyists they employ have reported spending, since 1998, a total of almost $13 billion to influence Congress, the White House and more than 200 federal agencies. They've hired a couple thousand former government officials to influence federal policy on everything from abortion and adoption to taxation and welfare. And they've filed--most of the time--thousands of pages of disclosure forms with the Senate Office of Public Records and the House Clerk's Office.

Washington's lobbyists reported billing $2.4 billion in 2003, the most recent year for which complete data ...   more »

April 6 (Bloomberg) -- One of the surest paths to riches in Washington is to have these five words on a resume: ``Office of Representative Tom DeLay.''

Eleven lobbyists who once worked for the Texas Republican and House majority leader helped bring in at least $45 million in fees for their firms in the past two years. By comparison, former aides of House Speaker Dennis Hastert lobbying during that period helped bring in about $2.1 million.

Along the way, Delay's former assistants have aided clients such as ChevronTexaco Corp., Wyeth and Reynolds American Inc. in achieving legislative victories. They have also given DeLay the kind of Washington-insider clout he once criticized when Democrats were in power…

``This is very damaging for the political system,'' said Amo Houghton, a Republican who represented a congressional district in upstate New York for 18 years before retiring in January. ``It doesn't help the Republican Party. It doesn't help anybody in politics.''…

Full article

(Meanwhile, more and more Americans are hungry.)

By FRANCIS X. CLINES, The New York Times

The 1,130 soup kitchen guests, as they're respectfully called, began gathering outside the church doors an hour early, curling around the corner in a long line to await a free main meal - their safety-net highlight in another day of being down and out, part of the working poor, or surviving somewhere in between.

The repast, at 2,500 calories a serving, steamed aromatically: chicken à la king, rice, buttered spinach, peaches. A staff member in the nave of the building, the Church of the Holy ...   more »

DeFazio on the Latest Bush Atrocity

On the House floor:

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, well, the President was on the road again today with yet another tightly controlled scripted, so-called town hall, before a carefully screened, invitation audience to tout to his plan to privatize Social Security.

Now, that is not unusual; in fact, the scripted town halls are all so similar that they can save the taxpayers a lot of money if he just stayed at Camp David or Crawford, Texas, and they just replayed the recordings of his earlier scripted, rehearsed town halls.

But the President ...   more »