What Was Bought, What Was Sold

A lobbyist working the Texas state legislature gets wind of a bill that would go against his clients' interests, so he goes around offering campaign funds to willing legislators to drop the bill. A particular official is tricky to get but the lobbyist finally gets him to commit with a $10,000 donation. When the bill comes to a floor vote, the lobbyist is outraged to watch that official vote for the bill. He angrily confronts the man later on to find out the opposition had paid him off with a $50,000 donation. The lobbyist keeps cursing out the legislator, who finally shrugs and answers "you knew I was weak when I took the ten thousand."
-- one of many Molly Ivins' apocryphal yet likely-true stories

The corruption of Far Right, holier-than-thou, hypocritical, two-faced conservatives is easy to spot when the rot is sitting atop the entire federal judiciary.

Clarence Thomas got on the Supreme Court bench in 1991 under a cloud of legitimate sexual harassment allegations, aided by Republican Senators who bullied Anita Hill and Democratic Senators loathe to rock the boat. That there were other accusers who were ignored or blocked from testifying remains an injustice to this day.

Ever since then, Thomas has worked under a cloud of unethical behavior that kept getting swept under the rug because those in charge - the Chief Justice is responsible for overseeing investigations into SCOTUS misconduct - would rather keep the conservative majority unified and in control of the Judiciary. 

Never mind the many times Thomas should have recused himself from cases that involved his politically active wife Ginni, especially her involvement in the January 6th Insurrection.

Never mind the calls for investigations like this one in 2013 into Thomas' attending fundraising events for the Federalist Society, a violation of judicial ethics banning judges from any political fundraising.

There's been other questionable and unethical judges on the Supreme Court before: Samuel Chase was impeached in 1805 but it was more over partisan politics than direct misconduct, James Clark McReynolds was personally unlikeable and anti-Semitic, and Abe Fortas was forced to resign over revelations of an annual retainer from a Wall Street financier that compromised impartiality.

But have any of them sank to the levels that Thomas has, given the reveal of Thomas' ties to a deep-pocket Far Right billionaire?

ProPublica broke the story last week about how Clarence and Ginni Thomas would receive lavish gifts, rides on luxury yachts and private jets, and enjoy expensive vacations all on the dime of one Harlan Crow, billionaire real estate developer and a major Federalist Society funder (Via Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski):

In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.

If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said...

The law in question appears to be the Ethics In Government Act, passed in 1978 as part of the post-Watergate reforms. Thomas apparently refused to file the paperwork that thousands of federal employees - from the President on down to the janitors at the Smithsonian - file every time they receive ANY kind of gift from persons who have or even might do business with the U.S. government.

Even Thomas' fellow Justices reported gifts as simple as fishing rods or as ornate as bronze sculptures, all because these things could be considered acts of bribery and influence peddling by rich people looking for favors if any legal matters come to the fore.

Thomas refused to apply the laws to himself, exposing his judicial authority as hypocrisy, himself as a fraud. His claims to not understanding the law, or that he went by other people's bad advice, violates the common legal concept that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

And today the story got worse when ProPublica (again by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski) uncovered how Crow directly paid Thomas in a land deal that Thomas failed to report. 

In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.

The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.

The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica...

This wasn't a misunderstanding or the gift of a friend, this was a business transaction and a clear violation of ethics.

It ought to be treated as violation of federal law.

Given the broken nature of Congress, and the historical failures of impeachment where partisan loyalty overrode the best interests of the nation, we should not expect any action out of them other than public posturing. The House Republicans will never turn on one of their justices responsible for the extremist rightward bent of the Supreme Court: The Senate Democrats may hold committees about Thomas' failures but can't get the two-thirds vote needed to remove him.

This is a matter that has to go to the Justice Department. Never mind the screams from the Far Right that this is "yet another witch hunt" against a Republican figure. Thomas is refusing to abide by the expected ethical norms of the office he holds, and he is flouting the legal system he is supposed to defend. If he's breaking a law, any law, he needs to be held accountable like any other citizen. No one, not a President nor a Senator nor a Justice should be above the law.

How can anyone accept a legal ruling from a Supreme Court Justice who will not hold himself accountable to the laws he applies to everyone else?

But For Supporting Robbers

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for providing a link to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round Up this Tuesday May 14th. I wanna thank all of checking in here, and if any of you are up for some summer reading I am part of an upcoming humor/horror anthology Strangely Funny V that should be out later this month! (I should be crowing aboot it when it gets released) Also, take a moment to - okay, maybe a month of reading by now - check out the rest of the blog! Now, back to the grindstone...)

It's hard to write something other than just a screaming rage at the Gods both Old and New about the ongoing revelations into trump's malignant racism, corruption, incompetence, and greed.

It's a little easier to link to articles like Conor Friederdorf's shaming of Republicans who applaud or ignore the train wreck that is trump:

This betrayal of the American public warrants more attention. Trump voters who wanted to rid Washington of sellouts should be most upset, but no one wants to admit that the person they voted for was misrepresenting his intentions. And those who rely on commentators like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, and Tucker Carlson for information lack many relevant facts.

Here’s what Trump voters should know. Michael Cohen was the president’s personal attorney. He stepped up when someone was needed to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels on the eve of the election, even using a shell corporation created under a pseudonym to hide the matter.

But that corporation wasn’t just for paying off the pornography actress. He also used it to receive huge sums of money from folks with powerful interests in influencing the U.S. government...

Remember when Trump told you that he would release his tax returns and then never did? Remember when he said that if he won the election he would put his business interests aside? “Ever since Trump and his family arrived in Washington they have essentially hung a for-sale sign on the White House by refusing to meaningfully separate themselves from their own business interests,” Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien notes. “That’s certainly not lost on the companies that do business in or with Washington. They know that in Trump’s swamp, you pay to play.”

Much of this will surprise folks who get all of their news from Fox commentators and talk-radio hosts, with whom they are in a dysfunctional relationship.

The GOP base is drawn to media figures who support their president and quickly turn on those who criticize him as if they are guilty of a betrayal; for that reason, many populist-right pundits are reluctant to criticize the president or to delve deeply into the behavior of the swamp creatures he has enabled. Instead, they pander to the GOP base, keep them in the dark about important corruption—and so fail to keep the president and his associates accountable...

And yet you tune in to listen to the rallies trump still holds to keep his enraged base hooked, and yes they are still obsessed with the fantasy that Hillary and Obama are the "real" crooks. The trump crowd boos Obama and cheers Kim Jong Un. They hoot and holler as they mock John McCain for daring to speak against the Cheney torture regime that's staging a comeback.

The goddamn wingnut voter base doesn't care for the facts. They only care to kick libruls early and often as though that solves all ills.

The horrifying truth is that even if Mueller is able to complete his investigations, and even if he proves on a legal level that trump sold the nation out to Putin by teaming up with Russians to hack and subvert our elections, and even if the New York District's investigations into Cohen prove massive money laundering and bribery, all of that will never convince the Far Right. They'll buy the fantasy narrative from the conspiracy blowhards like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh that this is all a "Deep State" revenge coup against a "noble and honest" trump who's defending them from godless baby-killing Fascist Liberal un-American Muslim Hill-bots.

Never mind trump using his political office to pull off financial scandals on a scope not seen since Teapot Dome. trump's voters knew he was a viper when they voted for him. That's WHY they voted for him, because he was the giant middle finger to the rest of the world for them.

Even if we can get trump out of the White House before he can cause more damage than he already has, this nation is already lost to a civil war between the Reality Based Community and the Far Right Narrative. We can't deal with a segment of the population that refuses to deal, ever.

We are so very royally goddamned fucked.

Buying and Selling Mulvaney

What the ever-loving fuck was this (via Vox.com)?

Want a favor from a member of Congress? Give him money. That was the advice Mick Mulvaney, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and head of the Office of Management and Budget, gave to a group of some 1,300 bankers and lending industry professionals at a conference in Washington, DC.

Mulvaney, a former South Carolina representative, said he would only meet with lobbyists who had donated to his campaign while speaking at the American Bankers Association conference on Tuesday, the New York Times reported. “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mulvaney said. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

So even if a lobby group needed to speak to Mulvaney on the merits - on an actual issue that impacted his state/district/citizenry - that group STILL couldn't speak to him without paying up a campaign contribution first?

HOW THE HELL IS THAT NOT BRIBERY???

Oh, right. This is why:

The anticorruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech here in question. Indeed, 26 States do not restrict independent expenditures by for-profit corporations. The Government does not claim that these expenditures have corrupted the political process in those States... A single footnote in Bellotti purported to leave open the possibility that corporate independent expenditures could be shown to cause corruption... For the reasons explained above, we now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption...

I call bullshit, Justice Kennedy. Mulvaney just made it perfectly clear that as an elected official he would listen only to those who Pay-To-Play. Any excuse he has now about "oh, we will listen to our constituents too" is too much ass-covering on his part.

And what the hell would be stopping Mulvaney from playing this Pay-To-Play scam now that he's in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an office he is openly undermining by telling the banks and financial institutions under its review ways they can limit and shut the Bureau down.

Money is not Free Speech, you goddamn Conservative Greedheads. Money is a tool to buy and sell things. And with enough money, you can buy up politicians and sell out our nation. The ones who don't have any money can't play this fucking game.

Citizens United ruling is one of the key factors our nation is fucked up now with the corruption of trump drowning us all in the rot.

We are so very royally fucked.

It's Schadenfreude Time: Crooks In Virginia Edition

Yesterday's post was about a court ruling that angered me: not the ruling itself, but the bastards - BP Corporation - being held to account for their reckless greed and destruction.

There was another ruling that day that amused me: because it was ex-Governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell's jury finding him and his wife guilty on various counts of bribery, corruption, and sheer arrogance.

So now I'm getting around to the schadenfreude portion of this blog.  This is the part of the malicious enjoyment where I lean my head back and guffaw.  A deep, throaty, almost maniacal laugh.  Kinda goes like this:

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

McDonnell is... was... one of those defendants where the sympathy train left the station years ago.  An up-and-coming Republican pol from Virginia, with enough charisma to swoon a room full of fund-raisers and a background catering to the social conservative platform of "family values" (aka Full-Me(n)tal Patriarchy, Pro-Fetus agenda).  He lucked into the national stage as a successful governor of a swing state, able to retain his Far Right credentials yet position himself in public as the "sane and normal" one when compared to his fellow Virginian wingnuts (Hi, Cuccinelli!).  This was a guy getting vetted for being Veep in 2012.  This was a guy who could have parlayed his position into a front-runner for (what is turning out to be wide-open for Republicans) the Presidential ticket in 2016.

This was a guy who couldn't figure out how to keep his corruption on the down-low and in the back rooms.  I mean, corruption is a bad thing no matter which politician is committing it, but there's something to be said about being savvy enough to keep it off the radar...

The feds were able to catch McDonnell's family hanging around with a deep-pocket fund-raising buddy (Jonnie Williams), not only taking money and gifts from him but also turning around and avidly promoting their buddy's diet supplement company.  While Quid Pro Quo is painfully rampant in modern politics, most other politicians tend to be a little more subtle about their deals.

The trial just finished was a soap opera drama worthy of a Lifetime Channel miniseries.  Rather than present a unified defense, Bob and his wife Maureen decided on a finger-pointing approach of accusing each other of being manipulated by a sweet-talking businessman who took advantage of a crumbling, loveless marriage.  Bob especially went with a "crazy wife" defense that essentially threw Maureen under the bus (figuratively, but if someone brought a bus to the front of the courthouse he well could have tried it literally).  For a politician who once stood on the virtue of a husband "defending and providing for his family," this was pretty hypocritical.  It was also pretty tone-deaf.

But the signs were there early: when first charged, McDonnell was offered a plea deal on just one felony charge (meaning minimal jail-time) that would have included all charges on his wife getting dropped (it's a standard practice by prosecutors to pile on charges to make sure a deal can get enforced made).  Even then, McDonnell said no to the deal, figuring he was better off winning over a jury and walking away clean.

Turns out the prosecutors were able to win more than one felony conviction after all.  Hindsight can be a pain, right Gov?

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

As Jim Newell at Salon noted, How could McDonnell be so stupid?:

...In modern politics, corruption charges are usually more tediously complex: Money was wired here and then laundered via a pass-through, which made its way through another pass-through and was distributed through a foundation before ending up at a nonprofit designed to help such and such’s interests with a client trying to change regulations in foreign markets, or whatever. Not in this case. The prosecution just had to show the jury images of the idiot governor showing off his flashy watch that was given to him by the rich businessman for whom he did favors in return. How much simpler could this get? It’s only a degree of reality or two away from an old-timey political cartoon of a tuxedoed plutocrat, smoking a cigar, handing over a big bag marked “$$$,” to a crooked politician slapping his back and cackling.

God, the stupidity...

...Because the defense — the now infamous defense — that they took in court reeked of desperation all the way through. If you’re willing to testify for days about the stunning levels of dysfunction in your marriage, as the best hope for your exoneration, doesn’t that suggest that you may not have the strongest case? Doesn’t that suggest that perhaps you would’ve been better taking a plea deal? It didn’t even cohere...

I would argue it wasn't stupidity.  It was arrogance.  Hubris, the Greek word for Pride: Pride, the highest of the seven deadly Christian sins.  You'd think a rock-solid self-promoting Christian like McDonnell would have learned about the price of Pride in Sunday schools.  That it leads to one hell of a fall.

And What Does All That Money Buy?

Just to get you up-to-date about an election cycle that's still half-a-year away.  Rick "All I Need Are Rich Friends" Scott may be down in the polls but he's raking in record contribution funds:

Scott's political machine, Let's Get to Work, raised a whopping $4.6 million in the first three months of 2013, raking in cash at the rate of $50,000 every day while chasing a goal of up to $100 million to fund his 2014 re-election campaign.  It's an unheard of sum even in Florida politics, where money has always been critical.
Individual checks of $10,000 or more flood Scott's campaign daily, many from businesses and individuals with a heavy stake in legislation, from Blue Cross Blue Shield to U.S. Sugar to an array of law firms with rosters of lobbying clients at the Capitol...

So you see, it doesn't matter to Rick "What Part of Medicare Fraud Will Voters Forget Again in 2014" Scott if he's polling about as popular as Marlins' owner Jeff Loria in Miami/Dade (which is about as popular as bird flu).  All that matters is that there's a ton of deep-pocket corporations and financial entities plugging in enough money for Scott to buy every TV ad spot, enough radio air time, enough campaigners to swamp every voter in Florida into thinking he's the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan.

...Governors typically raise money for their political parties between elections, but Scott is the first Florida governor to keep his personal campaign apparatus permanently up and running...

Dear Florida voters: please try to recognize that anyone getting campaign support from Donald Trump isn't working in the best interests of the state of Florida.  At all.  EVER.

...Driving Scott's need to stockpile millions is the expected candidacy of Crist, a Republican-turned-Democrat who has a big lead over Scott in early polling and who is known as a highly effective fundraiser.
Scott can accept checks in unlimited amounts because his campaign fund is an electioneering communications organization, or ECO, that's not subject to the $500 contribution limit that typically applies to candidates. The only limitation on activities by Let's Get to Work is that it can't "expressly advocate" Scott's re-election by using words such as "vote for" or "elect."
Edwards, a Treasure Island businessman and entertainment mogul who operates St. Petersburg's Mahaffey Theater, recently wrote Scott's campaign its largest single check, for $500,000. That's nearly as much as the $600,000 Edwards paid last year to erect a vertical gateway sign on Interstate 275 in St. Petersburg...

And what do you think all that money is buying?  This isn't campaign fundraising: this is legalized bribery.  The ultimate quid pro quo racket, because they don't even need to hide it anymore.

While the current polling shows Crist thumping Scott in a 2014 match-up with numbers at 50 - 34 (at 34 percent he's bound to be losing even Republican voters), never underestimate Money's power to buy enough negative ad time and buy enough bullsh-t for the media to consume to get those numbers in favor of Scott.  I'm terrified of the possibility that there's enough money to create an ad that has Scott hugging rabbits and painting rainbows and getting enough out-of-state actors to smile while standing next to him, rather than in-state residents being forcibly prevented from punching him in the nose.

The only solution is to defeat Rick "HE'S A CROOK" Scott.  Make all those millions of dollars get wasted for nothing.  Stop making elections about those who can raise the most money and make it about those who honestly will do the right things in office.

Saying it now: Vote Crist for Governor.  Don't Vote for Scott.  For the love of GOD do NOT VOTE Republican.  Not for the next ten generations.

Thoughts on Health Care reform

Things to consider during this current tumult over Obama and the Dems' push for Health Care reform:

1) The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation (think France, Germany, UK, Canada, Japan, anyone else in the G-8 group I missed) without universal health care. India has universal health care. Israel has it. Brazil has it. Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert probably have it. In fact the question is which country DOESN'T have universal health care... and the U.S.A. tops that list.

1a) Which makes the argument about "Universal Health Care" = "SOCIALISM ZOMG!!1!1" rather specious: you can't accuse some of the most prominent Capitalist nations on the planet (England, for God's Sake! Thatcher is living on universal health care!) of being Socialists for having universal health care. This isn't the Cold War era anymore: why use labels to oppose something that, you know, works in every other pro-business nation?

2) The two biggest problems with health care in the United States are:

2a) Not everyone is covered: the number bandied about is 47 million uninsured (roughly 15 percent of the nation), although critics point out that includes illegal immigrants... so the real number would be really around 32-37 million. WHICH IS STILL TOO MANY. And I'm not sure if this includes children and college-age teens. The problem is these uninsured people still require health care, and the costs of treating the uninsured gets shifted over to those who are insured.
2b) Rising costs: partly from the fact the insured are paying for the uninsured, but mostly from the fact that the managed-care system that came about in the 1990s (the HMOs) basically have monopolies in each of the states. Ezra Klien's op-ed in the Washington Post (highlights mine):

In the modern health-care system, there is no higher power than the insurance market. And the insurers who populate that market have grown all the stronger. The Justice Department judges an industry "highly concentrated" if a single company controls more than 42 percent of the market. By that definition, 94 percent of statewide insurance markets are highly concentrated. A recent study by the advocacy organization Health Care for America Now showed that in Indiana, WellPoint controls 60 percent of the insurance market; in Iowa, Wellmark accounts for 71 percent; and in Alabama, Blue Cross/Blue Shield holds 83 percent. In the past 13 years, there have been more than 400 corporate mergers involving health insurers.

Economics textbooks tell us that concentrated markets reduce the competitive behavior that benefits consumers and lead to outsize profits for the dominant firms. Predictably, health-care premiums shot up more than 90 percent between 2000 and 2007, while the profits of the 10 largest insurers increased 428 percent over the same period.

Without government regs encouraging competition, companies can basically charge what they want, deny coverage to those they deem at-risk to their profit margin, and pass the savings on to the Senators and Congresspersons they 'bribe' with massive campaign contributions. But that's just me being cynical I suppose...

3) A solid majority of Americans - 76 percent - want a public option as part of the health care reform. Problem is, Obama has only 33 percent or so of those polled actively supporting his reform plan.

4) Another problem is that he doesn't have the full support of his own party: nimrods like Max Baucus seem obsessed with the idea of bipartisanship by dealing with a Republican Party that's gonna want health care reform nuked now and forever. Instead of legislation covering things the people want, Baucus' committee is trying to offer this up. Also consider Baucus receives HOW MUCH?! in campaign funding from the Health Care industry and you have a hypocrite reeking of Quid Pro Quo. I will always think of campaign funding as legalized bribery and it sickens me we can't do anything to stop it ('cause the bastards who profit from it are the damn politicians who like it this way and won't vote away their deep-pocket advantages).

5) This reminds me, I gotta see about my COBRA coverage payments. I think I gotta start paying them again this August. Maybe September, I hope.

The unwashable stain

Just when you think it was safe to go back into Illinois politics...

Reporting in right now that Ill. Governator Rod "Greedy Dumbass Mofo" Blagojevich has been taken away in handcuffs by the Feds on corruption charges, mostly relating to his attempts to sell off Obama's now-open Senate seat to the highest bidder.

I call this the unwashable stain because we keep seeing this in politics: the greed; the quid pro quos; the unbelievably massive amount of greed; the self-serving ego-driven destructiveness; oh and the GREED of it all. And it's not all Republicans (cough, DeLay/Ted Stevens/Ney/Cunningham) and it's not all Democrats (cough, William Jefferson/Robert Torricelli/now this bozo), and I hate generalizing it like that, but this is where we're at. Politicians not interested in serving the public trust: politicians interested in lining their own pockets and letting their friends do the same.