According to CNN Jack's been cooperating (their word, not mine) with the DOJ for over a year. Not negotiating a plea, cooperating. This is ABSCAM all over again except that nobody can claim entrapment. And at least 90% of the people caught in it are Republicans, if not 100%.
As a Democrat, I hope that the Dems aren't lazy and just ride this scandal. It's true that they lack ideas, and an infrastructure to get those ideas out. In the long run, it would help the GOPs and hurt the Dems if they coast this scandal to gains in Congress, and stop doing the tough spade work of building a proper infrastructure. People will choose the party of bad ideas over the party of no ideas, and the Dems need to stop being the latter.
Forget the political implications of this for now (though they are juicy to consider) -- we're talking about the bribery of elected national officials through fully-paid international vacations, tickets to elite sporting events, and political jobs for family members. When you read into what Abramoff had Bob Ney do for him, it's not just illegal, it's immoral. And still, we have CATO-types who say that we shouldn't have campaign contribution limits. Eliminating those limits would lead to a few hundred Jack Abramoffs setting up shop on K Street, with congressmen walking from storefront to storefront collecting whatever goodies were being handed out that day.
This is great news of course-anyone think otherwise?! Maybe this means Tom Delay learns what Hell is like By the way f the CATO Institute
I've noticed their so-called "free market" support which can crush the middle- and lower-class How about this from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute) which is current to the topic: In December 2005, Doug Bandow, a senior scholar at the Cato Institute, admitted taking secret payments from Republican Party lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing columns for the Copley News Service favorable to Abramoff clients
That's not even immoral, let alone illegal. A lobbiest giving money to a special interest group to write nice things for a special interest news service. Shocking.
You're correct that it's neither illegal nor immoral, but it is unethical. There was an unquestionable conflict of interest involved. From the sound of things, that potential conflict was not mentioned in the article.
You don't think it's immoral to secretly get $ from Jack Abramoff and go off writing articles in his cause posing as an "independent" writer?
Doesn't matter. The writer was given money specifically to write a favorable column. In medical publishing, for instance, it's now the norm for any financial support, potential conflicts of interest (e.g., an author has received honoraria from a drug company in the past), and industry-provided help (e.g., a drug company helped edit the text) to be noted in the article. It's to avoid even the implication that the article is as much advertising as objective research.
As far as I can tell, Copley is a conservative news source. That's like feeding conservitive news to the NY Post. You know what you are getting when you read that paper.
This Abramoff Scandal just might be the biggest thing to hit Washington in years. Like rats from a sinking ship, there are going to be droves of congressmen and senators running as fast as their little legs will allow them trying to put as much distance between them and Abramoff. While both Republicans and Democrats are in trouble, Abramoff was not an equal opportunity offender. From various sources, the count is something like 80-90% Republican. And given that he has now made a deal - to get 10 years instead of 30, still considerable jail time - he will be telling the feds where the bodies are buried, pardon the pun in Florida anyway. He will names names and give up everyone to save his hide. The feds can always withdraw the plea-deal if they don't think he's cooperating enough or if he's still hiding stuff; he knows this, so cooperation will be at a maximum. DeLay is in trouble and this thing could mushroom into the biggest political scandal on the Hill since Abscam, if not bigger. Personally, I believe the Plame and the Domestic Spying scandals are more egregious breaches, but this one will have more traction because it will reinforce the notion of business as usual in Washington. And because more Republicans than Democrats (Byron Dorgon) will be named, it doesn't bode well for them. The Democrats should be able to split or wedge the public by saying, Yes, some of ours were involved, but look at the number of Republicans who were involved'. Expect Reid and Pelosi and the Democratic Echo Chamber to be ramping up about now. It will expose the seamier side of K Street, especially when DeLay issued the edict that no lobbyist firm that hired Democrats could expect to do business on the Hill. Stuff like that will appeal to the public's sense of outrage, no matter that the Democrats might have done the same thing when they called the shots. It wouldn't surprise me to see DeLay's lawyers calling for a mistrial or something like that on the basis that this scandal has poisoned the well of jurors. And by the time the mid-terms roll around, it's more than a little possible that there revelations will only be ever increasing. This spells serious trouble for the Republicans, not the Democrats, unless there's a whole warren of Democrats who were sucking at the Abramoff teat which we don't know about. Watch in coming weeks as the Republicans try to get out ahead on this one. Not all of them will to able to own a dog called Checkers.
What's really weird is that a Google image search for Schadenfreude had this picture as its first hit:
They didn't. That's the thing. The K Street Project is wholly an invention of Delay and his ilk who wanted to make permanent the Republican majority. The deeper one digs into the facts of the case, the more one sees how big and how bad it is. The devil really is in the details in this scandal.