corruption | Candorville

Senator Ensign demands Senator Ensign’s resignation

Posted on June 16, 2009

Senator John Ensign demanding accountability

Nevada Senator John Ensign (R), “a leading conservative mentioned as a presidential candidate,” told reporters today that he is shocked and disappointed to learn he had an extramarital affair with an ex campaign staffer. He went on to demand his own resignation. “This wouldn’t be making the national news if it was an ordinary affair,” Ensign said. “But I’m the guy who went on national TV and suggested that my fellow Republican Senator Larry Craig resign because he admitted to lewd conduct.” Indeed, this is not the first time Senator Ensign has taken to the airwaves to demand accountability from another senator. In 2007, when Republican Senator Larry Craig was caught and convicted of trolling for sex in an airport men’s room, Ensign was unforgiving, saying “This wouldn’t be making the national news if it was an ordinary misdemeanor. He pled guilty to something that, you know lewd behavior, that’s not the behavior a United States senator should be engaged in.” When he was informed that Nevada Senator John Ensign has praised Senator Ensign’s decision to call for Senator Ensign’s resignation, Senator Ensign explained that conservatives like him consider adultery to be lewd conduct, no matter with whom it’s committed. “If I held myself to a different standard than that to which I held Larry Craig, I would be admitting two things: First, I’d be admitting I’m a homophobe because I think Craig’s failed attempt at a homosexual tryst was worse than my successful – and very sweaty – heterosexual boot knocking. Second, I’d be admitting I’m a hypocrite. And I’m no hypocrite.” So far, Ensign has received no reply from Ensign.

Of course they let Paris out of jail

Posted on June 7, 2007

Just more proof that the rich and famous live in a different world than the rest of us. Imagine the average inmate being allowed to spend the bulk of her sentence in a luxurious mansion because she didn’t like the prison food.

Paris Hilton was let out of jail Thursday morning, days after she began serving what was to have been a 45-day sentence for violating probation, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. Hilton must wear a monitoring bracelet and remain at her home for another 40 days, said sheriff’s department spokesman Steve Whitmore.Medical considerations “played a part” in the decision to offer Hilton home confinement for the remainder of her sentence, Whitmore said. (Watch Whitmore detail Hilton’s deal )He said privacy rules prohibited him from giving details about the medical issues, but celebrity Web site TMZ.com earlier quoted sources saying Hilton was refusing to eat much of the jail food served her.Whitmore said that after “extensive consultation with medical personnel” it was decided to offer Hilton “reassignment” to home confinement, which she and her attorneys accepted.

Candorville In The Loop

Posted on April 13, 2007

From today’s In the Loop column (Washington Post):

Speaking of the House oversight committee, it’s not often that someone below the rank of Cabinet member can merit a cameo appearance in a syndicated cartoon. But General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan, apparently to the amusement of some folks at the GSA, has won that unusual distinction, becoming a thinly disguised amnesiac in the cartoon Candorville.

Doan won the high honor after she repeatedly told the committee on March 28 that she could not remember details of a Jan. 26 videoconference presentation for top political appointees at her agency by White House deputy political director J. Scott Jennings, who works in Karl Rove’s shop.

Changing Course on Illegal Immigration?

Posted on March 29, 2007

Real life continues to make comedians look like prophets.From Yahoo News:

Two executives at a company that once helped build a fence to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border were sentenced Wednesday to six months of home confinement for hiring undocumented workers. Mel Kay, founder, chairman and president of Golden State Fence Co., and manager Michael McLaughlin had pleaded guilty in federal court to knowingly hiring illegal aliens. U.S. District Judge Barry Ted Moskowitz ordered each to serve 1,040 hours of community service and spend three years on probation.Kay, 64, was fined $200,000 as part of a plea agreement, and McLaughlin agreed to pay $100,000.Federal prosecutors took the rare step of seeking prison time after the men acknowledged hiring at least 10 illegal immigrants in 2004 and 2005. The charges carried a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.However, prosecutors were unable to find a previous case in which an employer had been sent to jail for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.”Prosecution is long overdue in this area,” Moskowitz said. “Honestly, the government’s efforts have been at the border, not with the employer. Obviously, the government has signaled a change with this case.”

…either that, or the sheer amount of irony involved in a company using undocumented immigrants to build a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants was just too much to ignore. One set of prosecutions could just as easily signal a prosecutor who had nothing else to do or a prosecutor with an aversion to blatant, arrogant crimes as it could a substantial change in policy.

Plame was covert, but Fox won’t let go of the myth

Posted on March 17, 2007

…Yet Fox News continues to rely on Victoria Toensing, the woman who, as far as I’ve been able to learn – has never spoken to either the CIA or Valerie Plame and has never seen any of the classified information regarding Valerie Plame’s work or role, as an “expert” commentator.And by the way, pay attention to the last minute and a half, where Hannity and Toensing try to tell us how it’s Plame’s and Wilson’s fault that Plame’s cover was blown. Plame apparently donated $1000 to Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 and attended some (gasp) Democratic meetups. In Toensing and Hannity’s warped world, Plame should’ve known that doing so was a dead giveaway that she was a covert CIA agent specializing in monitoring the proliferation of WMD. And Joe Wilson writing that op-ed exposing the lies the President told about uranium tubes from Niger? Well, he should’ve known better. Naturally the White House was going to expose the name of a covert CIA operative, as well as her entire network of contacts, seriously damaging our ability to follow WMD and possibly resulting in the killing of other undercover operatives – all to discredit a critic. Who wouldn’t have expected them to do that?Also, note how the “Fair and Balanced” network doesn’t invite anyone to dispute Toensing:

SF Mayor Proves He’s Not Gay

Posted on February 1, 2007

Ever since Mayor Newsom bravely fought for civil rights when he allowed gay couples to marry in 2004, the country’s knuckledragger population has been speculating he’s gay. These are probably the same dimwits who assumed that if you doubted Hussein had WMD, it meant you were secretly the founder of the “I Want Saddam’s Love-Child” club. Anyhow, Newsom seems to have chosen an odd way of dispelling the rumors. Next time, he might want to try using someone who’s not married to a good friend.

An incipient dictator spends his political capital

Posted on January 10, 2007

His victory was determined by electronic voting machines that are indirectly under his control, he’s consolidating the Media and the now virtually one-party state under his command, and he’s planning to assume special legislative powers – powers previously outside the domain of the executive branch. For those of us who’ve criticized the GOP’s determination to govern without Democratic input the past five+ years and their tendency to ignore or support the President’s legally-dubious domestic spying, it’s tempting to say he’s George Bush’s Liberal mirror image. But here’s one major distinction (among several): Bush and his party never tried to eliminate Presidential term limits. I think it’s necessary to say now that what we have in Venezuela is an incipient dictator.From Yahoo News:

A leading anti-U.S. voice in the world and in the vanguard of a shift to the left in Latin America, Chavez now wants to scrap presidential term limits and lead the OPEC nation for decades.

Many of us agree with most of Chavez’s stated goals; chief among them the novel idea that Venezuelans should benefit more than foreign investors do from their own natural resources, and that the United States’ Monroe Doctrine (used by Presidents to justify numerous invasions and subversions of Latin American governments) is an anachronism. We agree with Chavez that the nations of Latin America have a right to self determination, they have a right to deny foreign exploitation of their own resources and to insist that the United States stay out of their political affairs. But we cannot turn a blind eye to the very real prospect that an even more fundamental right – the right of people to govern themselves – looks like it may be endangered in Venezuela.If Hugo Chavez grows a long beard, we’ll know it’s game over in Caracas.***EDIT: As a reader points out in the comments to this thread, the leaders of Chile and Brazil – whose acceptance has been credited in no small part to the popularit of Hugo Chavez – have so far demonstrated that socialist values are not incompatible with Democracy. Perhaps the teacher should start taking notes.

The SpOILs of War

Posted on January 10, 2007

Colin Powell, 2003:“It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil.”London’s Independent, 2007:

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days. The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?… The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq’s oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise.

Hispanic voters targeted AGAIN?

Posted on November 5, 2006

In honor of the repeated attempt to disenfranchise Hispanic voters, I’ll re-post that last cartoon:

Bradblog has posted a note from a Democratic voter in New Mexico. The voter’s complaint prompted a judge to issue an injunction preventing the Republican Party of New Mexico from calling non-Republicans with precinct information. It seems voters with Hispanic surnames may have been specifically targeted:

Yesterday (11/04), about 1pm MST, I rec’d a phone message from the Republican Party of NM telling me that my polling location was John Adams Middle School. My polling place is usually Longfellow Elementary about 1 block away. John Adams is about 7 1/2 miles away. In my horror and disgust I quickly deleted the message. Thinking that maybe my polling place changed, I then called the **Republican Party** here and simply asked if they could tell me my polling place. They asked my address only, I told them, and they said, “You vote at Longfellow.” This is correct and I hung up.About 5pm MST, the Republican Party of NM called AGAIN and left a message telling me that my election day polling place was West Mesa High School, even further away than John Adams. They gave the full address and zip code. My Caller ID shows “REPUBLICAN PART.” I DID NOT DELETE THIS MESSAGE.Then around 7pm MST, the same thing happened. The Republican Party of NM called and left a message telling me that my election day polling place was back to John Adams Middle School. My Caller ID shows “NEW MEXICO VICT.” I did a Google search on the phone number and this entry came up:New Mexico Republican Party :: CalendarSummary:, Contact your local county party or call the Victory Officeat (505) XXX-XXXX to find out what you can do to help our 2006 Republican candidates. …I DID NOT DELETE THIS MESSAGE.If you want the actual phone numbers, I can give them to you…-Read more at Bradblog.com

So far this is the only complaint about this, but it certainly fits the pattern that’s plagued our elections since 2000. There’s something seriously wrong with your party if you have to keep people from voting in order to win elections.•••

Tag: corruption

Senator Ensign demands Senator Ensign’s resignation

Of course they let Paris out of jail

Candorville In The Loop

Changing Course on Illegal Immigration?

Plame was covert, but Fox won’t let go of the myth

SF Mayor Proves He’s Not Gay

An incipient dictator spends his political capital

The SpOILs of War

Hispanic voters targeted AGAIN?

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