Thursday, January 12, 2006

Politics: Abramoff Scandal Update

In other news, it's gratifying to see that some of the counter-spin (as posted here and by other folks) is managing to penetrate the newspapers, at least. Clarence Page (Chicago Tribune) has this to say:

Unless you've been on the moon for a while, you probably have heard that Abramoff is a formerly well-connected Republican who has pleaded guilty to federal charges tied to his lobbying operations. Right-wing bloggers and others pounced on Dean and flailed away, since a number of Democratic senators and congressmen already have given Abramoff-associated money to charity. How, then, could Dean say otherwise? But I checked it out and, guess what? Dean was right. Although both Democrats and Republicans did, in fact, receive money from Abramoff's clients, only Republicans received personal donations from Abramoff himself.

If anything, the tribes are one of the true victims in the Abramoff saga. Investigators say Abramoff referred to his Indian clients with racist slurs in his e-mails and represented some tribes while also representing their rival tribes who were competing for the same casino turf - the mother of all conflicts of interest!





Also, Billmon at the Whiskey Bar has some neat quips and excerpts from the pre-scandal days. It looks a little bit like a Lexis-Nexis search for anything with "Abramoff", but there are some nice quotes in there.

3 comments:

Terr said...

And this compelled you to make a wholly new account in order to post a single message? It must be working somehow.

Terr said...

Stop, I'm blushing.

Terr said...

Actually, I'm realizing blogger doesn't quite have the feature set that I want.

But I'm flattered you came back. Unless, of course, you're just too much of a troll that you can't help it.