2006 Elections

Tortured justice

As Democrats scramble to protect detainee rights and their own congressional futures, President Bush is angling for a star-spangled signing ceremony just before the midterm elections. The rush is "very political," says Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- and will likely succeed

The Republican Congress Wednesday moved to the cusp of passing landmark legislation to broaden the definition of “enemy combatants” in America’s global “war on terror” and to eliminate the right of all detainees to have judicial review of their incarceration. With George W. Bush eager for a star-spangled signing ceremony as Congress adjourns this week for the election season, the House approved the administration bill by a 253-168 margin, while the Senate was expected Thursday to reject the last four amendments standing in the way of passage.

The legislation, which was prompted by a June Supreme Court decision applying the Geneva Conventions to prisoners held by U.S. forces, had originally provoked a well-publicized struggle over placing legal limits on interrogation techniques. While a White House effort to redefine the anti-torture provisions of the Geneva Conventions was largely rebuffed by a recent bipartisan Senate rebellion, the compromise that three Republican senators negotiated with Bush officials included provisions eliminating the right of habeas corpus for all detainees.

“This provision would perpetuate the indefinite detention of hundreds of individuals against whom the government has brought no charges and presented no evidence, without any recourse to justice whatsoever,” Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy declared at the start of Wednesday’s Senate debate. “This is un-American. It is unconstitutional and it is contrary to American interests.” Congressional critics argued that, coupled with an expanded definition of “enemy combatant,” the legislation would permit the government to indefinitely imprison any non-citizen — including a long-time resident of the United States who holds a green card — without review by the courts

Despite the far-reaching implications of the legislation, the Senate galleries were virtually empty throughout the day, while most news coverage treated the congressional debate as of far more transient importance than the recent television confrontation between Bill Clinton and Fox TV host Chris Wallace. Many legislators had only a shaky understanding of what was in the Senate bill since its provisions were still being revised, after consultation with the White House, Tuesday night. As California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein complained in a Tuesday interview, “I don’t understand this rush other than to make it very political. This is a huge thing that our people are going to have to live by … It is important not only that it works, but that it also be just.”

The Bush administration has argued that legislation is urgently needed because the June Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld had invalidated the proposed military tribunals to try the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Yet the need for haste was belied by the reality that it would take months for any trials to begin because, among other things under the legislation, the Defense Department would have to appoint judges and establish a new Court of Military Commission Review. As Scott Silliman, a law professor at Duke University who specializes in national-security litigation, put it, “This thing is so spiked with politics. The rush is purely political and for no other reason.”

Congressional Democrats were clearly skittish about the implications of their votes on the detainee legislation so close to the November elections. While the party mustered 160 votes against the legislation in the House, there were prominent defections among those facing tough races. Among those Democrats voting with the GOP majority were Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown (normally one of the most reliably liberal members of the House), Tennessee Senate contender Harold Ford, as well as imperiled House incumbents Leonard Boswell (Iowa) and Melissa Bean (Illinois).

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid had originally agreed Wednesday to a schedule that would have so truncated debate that all amendments would have been considered in one day. After Leahy publicly objected, the vote on four of the amendments and final passage was delayed until Thursday. In the only Senate vote Wednesday — to substitute an earlier version of the legislation (approved by a bipartisan Armed Services Committee majority before being watered down in negotiations with the White House) — Reid managed to hold virtually the entire Democratic caucus together. But the amendment failed when it attracted only one Republican supporter, Rhode Island moderate Lincoln Chafee, who is facing a difficult reelection fight.

But Leahy was clearly frustrated by the white-flag mood among some Senate Democrats. As he said in an interview, “In my own caucus, people say, ‘We can’t oppose this, look what happened to Max Cleland.’” (A Vietnam veteran confined to a wheelchair because of war wounds, Cleland, a Georgia senator, was defeated by GOP attacks ads in 2002 because he had supported a Democratic filibuster delaying the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security). Leahy recounted that his weak-kneed Democratic colleagues also argue, “‘We have to go along with it because we’ll never be able to explain it back home.’” That prompted the Vermont senator to add, “Maybe one way to explain it is to say, ‘I stood up for you and your rights.’”

One way that rights will be eroded by the bill is through a change in the meaning of the legal term “enemy combatant.” Current Pentagon regulations describe an enemy combatant as anyone who “engages in acts” against the United States. The new legislation would broaden that to also include anyone who “has purposely and materially supported hostilities” against America. And to add a further note of confusion, elsewhere in the bill an enemy combatant is defined in circular fashion as anyone so designated by a new Defense Department entity, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

Defending this accordion-like definition on the Senate floor, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham — one of the three Senate Republicans who negotiated with the White House — said, “I am firmly in the camp that when it comes to determining who an enemy of the United States is — who has taken up arms and presents a threat to the nation — that is not something that judges have been trained to do, nor should they be doing. That is something our military should do.”

Many of the provisions of the legislation are so new or so murkily drafted that legal experts and human-rights advocates have not reached a consensus about their implications. There is considerable debate, for example, about whether the bill’s treatment of the Geneva Conventions would permit the CIA to continue such notorious interrogation techniques as waterboarding. There also remains some question whether it might be permissible under the bill to declare an American citizen an “enemy combatant,” thereby stripping him of any access to the courts. Graham and other Republican senators stoutly denied this possibility during Wednesday’s debate.

The Senate’s rush to judgment underscores the dangers of negotiating with the Bush administration once the White House takes an extreme position. The three GOP dealmakers (Graham, John McCain and Senate Armed Service Committee chairman John Warner) succeeded in their effort to get the president to retreat from his deliberate attempt to eviscerate the Geneva Conventions and undermine the Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan case. The Senate Republican troika were aided in their headline-making efforts to outlaw torture by an army of former military lawyers and such high-profile recruits as former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But history may judge this to be a Pyrrhic victory. In exchange, the White House was allowed to blatantly rewrite the pending legislation in regard to habeas corpus and the definition of enemy combatants. This time around, amid the mind-numbing blur of end-of-session legislative maneuvers, these aggressive efforts by the administration to be allowed to hold detainees for years (and even maybe decades) without judicial review has provoked only dutiful resistance from most congressional Democrats and a so-what shrug from the press and the public.

Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in Washington, D.C. Read his other articles here.

Walter Shapiro is Salon's Washington bureau chief. A complete listing of his articles is here.

Do we really have to take Michele Bachmann “seriously” now?

With a history of rapid staff turnover and embarrassing past escapades, she's more credible than Cain how?

Possible 2012 presidential hopeful, U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn. speaks during a dinner sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, Friday, April 29, 2011 in Manchester , N.H. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)(Credit: Jim Cole)

There is talk, now, that we should all be taking Michele Bachmann a bit more “seriously.” She is, after all, polling better than Tim Pawlenty, whom we are all definitely supposed to take seriously, no matter how difficult he makes that for us. Jon Chait lays out the case for taking Bachmann seriously at the New Republic. It’s hard to argue with the basic point — true conservatives like her and basically hate the rest of the candidates — but I take some issue with this:

But while Bachmann may be even crazier than Palin on questions of public policy, she seems to manage to hold things together as a candidate. She can answer questions from the news media. She is putting together a professional campaign rather than relying on amateur advisors. She takes care to point out frequently that she is a former tax lawyer, and she does not engage in Palin’s visceral anti-intellectualism, giving herself the aura of a plausible president, at least in the minds of Republican voters. Bachmann may well combine Palin’s most powerful traits without her crippling organizational failures.

Sometimes she skillfully answers questions from the press, and sometimes she has meltdowns. She can also do anti-intellectualism with the best of them — she got into politics in part in order to attack educational standards and push “Intelligent Design” — and while she is not quite as organizationally challenged as Palin, she has had her problems.

In fact, Andy Barr just wrote about those issues in February, when Bachmann’s spokesman and district director both left their jobs:

But even without any fireworks, the two exits add to a long a long line of recently departed Bachmann aides, as her office has had an extremely high turnover rate since the Minnesota Republican was first elected to Congress in 2006.

Bachmann has had four chiefs of staff leave since coming to Congress — Rich Dunn, Ron Carey, Michelle Marston and Brooks Kochvar. The Minnesota firebrand also had her campaign finance director Zandra Wolcott leave during the middle of her reelection campaign last year.

I think Barr may have left out one of her chiefs of staff or two? As an unnamed “conservative Republican House member” told Politico when Marston quit for unknown reasons in 2009: “When your captain’s crazy, it’s time to find a new ship.” (Her current chief of staff is taking a “leave of absence” in order to work on her presidential campaign.)

So, how seriously should we be taking Bachmann? Isn’t it more or less appropriate to continue treating her as a very popular sideshow? (And if she ran for real would she really want people dragging out stories like the time she claimed lesbians kidnapped her and trapped her in a bathroom?)

The fact that she has managed to convince 50% of suburban voters in a Republican district to send her to Washington does not actually make her more a more credible candidate than Herman Cain, who has at least run a major industry lobbying organization.

I agree Jennifer Rubin on one thing: The similarities between Bachmann and Sarah Palin are mainly superficial; they’re both attractive ultra-conservative women who routinely say stupid, extreme things on television. I am pretty sure Michele Bachmann is smarter than Sarah Palin. I also think she more sincerely believes the sort of rube-pleasing bullshit Palin cranks out primarily for attention. Bachmann is relentless, while Palin is erratic. Palin actually governed for a while, before giving it up for celebrity. Bachmann has never legislatively done anything, at all. Palin seems driven primarily by resentment, paranoia, and profit, whereas I imagine Bachmann probably thinks she’s doing the Lord’s work. She really would like to impose some sort of libertarian theocracy, where the government has no authority to regulate anything beyond the stoning of abortionists and homosexuals.

So I dunno. She might do OK in Iowa but the wheels would come off that campaign very shortly afterward.

Continue Reading Close
Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Michele Bachmann thinks the world is ending and the pope is the antichrist

Her friends want to bring about the end times in Israel and her church has an issue with the papacy

Michele Bachmann

Mother Jones writes about Rep. Michele Bachmann’s, R-Minn., connections to Olive Tree Ministries, an evangelical Christian operation founded by a former Jew for Jesus and longtime friend of Bachmann’s named Jan Markell.

Olive Tree Ministries, based out of Maple Grove, Minn., produces a weekly radio show and a newsletter, and it is also obsessed with Israel because it believes we are living in the end times. Bachmann’s been on Markell’s radio show multiple times, attended an Olive Tree Ministries conference, and left a testimonial on its website. As MoJo says:

When Minneapolis’ City Pages first reported [6] on Bachmann’s relationship with Markell in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she’s known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann’s church in the late 1970s. “My hunch is that they misquoted her,” Markell says. “She’s been at my conference. Why she would have said [otherwise], I don’t know.”

And boy, according to Olive Tree Ministries, we live in very interesting times:

So Bachmann stands with Israel because she needs the Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so that Christ can return, rapture the Christians up to Heaven, convince the Jews to worship him during the Tribulations, and then rule over the Earth from Israel for 1,000 years. (This is what these people believe, very, very literally.)

But wait! Before all that happens the antichrist needs to show up and convince everyone he’s the Messiah! But who could that end up being? Some people say Obama, but Bachmann’s church fingered a different suspect.

Before Bachmann was a Tea Party-affiliated Ron Paul fan obsessed with “liberty,” remember, she was a traditional religious right fanatic with a degree from Oral Roberts University, who got into politics through antiabortion activism and who became famous for a school board run during which she and her allies supported teaching creationism in government-funded charter schools. (She is a home-schooling activist, which made a school board run kind of weird, but she was outraged at the idea of state standards forcing her to teach her children about anything other than Austrian economics and eschatology.)

When Bachmann was running for Congress in 2006, her official website bio said she was a member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS is one of the very conservative “confessional” Lutheran denominations that maintains that the “antichrist” is the pope. You know, the leader of the Catholic Church? That pope. WELS confirms that they still “identify this ‘Antichrist’ with the Papacy,” in case you’re curious.

Bachmann has denied that her church believes this, but … it is definitely one of the fundamental doctrines of her church, according to her Synod’s doctrinal statements. I mean, if Bachmann doesn’t believe it, there are some very nice mainline Lutheran denominations to choose from, though they might be a bit squishy on biblical literalism and hatred of homosexuals.

In 2008, as I’m sure you remember, Michele Bachmann repeatedly called Barack Obama “anti-American” because of his “mentor,” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And here, via Dumb Bachmann, is Bachmann’s good friend and minister Bradlee Dean calling the pope “that devil disguised as a minister of righteousness.”

It seems more than fair to ask whether Michele Bachmann is anti-Catholic, and whether, should she be elected president, she’d purposefully sabotage a Middle East peace deal in order to bring about the Second Coming. Or whether she’d launch some sort of tactical strike against Vatican City. I think she would. Look who she pals around with!

Continue Reading Close
Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Five political books that were doomed before they were even published

"Donald Trump on policy" and other ideas that briefly sounded very good

Donald Trump

On May 12, it was reported that Donald Trump was working on a “policy book,” to be released this summer by the right-wing Regnery Publishing. No surprise there: All candidates and would-be candidates for president release either memoirs or policy books, or both. On May 16, less than a week later, Trump announced that he will not be running for president. Whoops! Now that book is pointless, months before the ghostwriter has finished it.

Trump’s is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It’s not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

“Where’s the Birth Certificate?” by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn’t have realized that your entirely pointless search for the “long-form” birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book’s publication.

Corsi has a lot of other arguments against the president’s constitutional eligibility (he’s British!), but there’s no getting around the fact that the title of the book has been rather definitively answered.

“Condi vs. Hillary” by Dick Morris, 2005

Shameless Republican P.R. guru Jim Wilkinson, inventor of the entirely false Jessica Lynch story, went to work for Condoleezza Rice when Rice took over at the State Department. He did his usual effective if slightly heavy-handed image management. The lowlight was probably when he literally slipped a note to Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley asking if Rice planned to run for president, a thought that had not yet occurred to anyone, because Rice had never run for anything.

While the Beltway press entertained the notion, because it was fun to play pretend, only one man wrote a book about how Condi must run for president, because she and only she could beat Hillary Clinton, who was a 100 percent lock to win the Democratic nomination. That man: Dick Morris, who is wrong so often about so many things that it’s hardly worth pointing it out anymore, except for the fact that this book is such an amazing time capsule of a bizarre time in American politics.

Rice never expressed any interest whatsoever in running, making this book irrelevant before it was ever written.

“The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, 2006

Just go back and read this fawning tribute to the influence and genius of Matt Drudge that ABC News published to promote this book upon its publication. “The Way to Win” posited that a campaign based around sucking up to Drudge and emulating Karl Rove in every way was the key to victory in 2008. A month after this lengthy tribute to his infallible genius came out, Rove suffered the humiliation of the 2006 midterms.

“The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,” by Peter Beinart, 2006

Peter Beinart is the former editor of the New Republic, and under his leadership, that magazine really, really loved war, a lot. (He is also responsible for the New Republic endorsing Joe Lieberman in 2004, which even sometime owner and all-time nutjob Marty Peretz thought was a bit odd.) Beinart went all-in on the Iraq War, and his magazine spent much more time and energy berating antiwar liberals than it did questioning the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. After John Kerry lost in 2004, Beinart was pretty sure it was the fault of squishy antiwar Democrats, and Michael Moore.

And so he expanded his essay on the subject of how antiwar liberals are as bad as Communists, plus they love terrorism, into a book, about how Democrats must once again embrace complete and total war, everywhere, like they did in the good old days of the Cold War.

Of course, on the way to filling out his Very Important Foreign Policy book, the Iraq War got worse and worse, and the extent of the Bush administration’s malfeasance became clearer and clearer, so Beinart is a bit apologetic about having been dead wrong about the defining foreign policy issue of his time as a serious and respected political thinker. (He is currently a “senior fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

Being antiwar helped the Democrats generally in the 2006 elections and a candidate who spoke out against Iraq from the very beginning ended up actually winning the presidency in 2008. (Whereupon he began acting a bit Beinartian, so maybe Peter got the last laugh, as the Democrats who take “tough stands” against pinkos usually do.)

Honorable Mention, Finance and Economics division:

“Dow 36,000,” by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett, 2000.

“The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy,” by Jerry Bowyer (foreword by Larry Kudlow), 2003.

Continue Reading Close
Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

When George W. Bush killed bin Laden: An alternate history

Or: An exploration of Dick Cheney's recent daydreams

The White House said on October 29, 2003 that it had helped with the production of a "Mission Accomplished" banner as a backdrop for President George W. Bush's speech onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare combat operations over in Iraq. This file photo shows Bush delivering a speech to crew aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, as the carrier steamed toward San Diego, California on May 1, 2003. REUTERS/Larry Downing/FILE KL/GN/GAC(Credit: © Larry Downing / Reuters)

President Bush announces the news to the nation on May 24, 2006, immediately following the East Coast airing of the finale of “American Idol.” He appears in military fatigues and, for some reason, spurs. Behind him, an oversize Osama bin Laden “Wanted” poster, with the word “LIQUIDATED” stamped on the terrorist mastermind’s face. The camera pulls back to reveal that the president’s East Room audience is in fact made up entirely of firefighters. The Marine band plays “Stars and Stripes Forever” as the president speaks, forcing Bush to address the room, and the nation, through a bullhorn.

“America has won the war on terror,” Bush shouts. “Tonight, I am proud to say, Osama bin Laden is in hell.” The president explains that the terrorist mastermind was “taken out” by American forces in Afghanistan, along with the entire senior leadership of al-Qaida. Crowds spontaneously gather in celebration outside the White House, with handmade signs (“THESE COLORS DON’T RUN,” “LET’S ROLL”) in plain view of cable news cameras set up beforehand according to a White House communications office suggestion. A professional-quality sound system blares Lee Greenwood. Then, fireworks.

Thrilling night-vision footage of a daring firefight in a labyrinthine cave is immediately provided to news channels. All of them air it, without noting that the video was edited by the Pentagon prior to release, and its contents unconfirmed.

In background briefings to national security journalists, the Pentagon credits the kill to one lone unnamed but slightly Schwarzeneggerian special forces officer acting on intelligence procured by one lone unnamed but remarkably Jack Bauer-like CIA officer who personally “interrogated” the al-Qaida courier until he revealed bin Laden’s whereabouts.

One senior administration official speaking on deep background reveals the courier was interrogated instead of monitored and trailed because of credible intelligence indicating an imminent attack — possibly biological or nuclear — on an unknown American landmark.

Files on bin Laden’s captured cellphone reveal him to have been in constant communication with al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a Pentagon source.

Editorial writers at most major U.S. newspaper proclaim a second moment of harmony to rival the first one directly after 9/11. Once again, there are no Republicans and Democrats, just Americans.

The following day, the president flies to New York where he gleefully models a profane anti-Osama T-shirt sold by a ground zero-area vendor. The photo makes the front page of the New York Post under the headline “LAST LAUGH.” Bush proclaims a “National Day of Celebration” and gives everyone the following Monday off from work.

The Guardian notes that British Ministry of Defense officials cannot confirm any details of the Pentagon’s story.

Newsweek magazine puts Donald Rumsfeld on the cover, naming him “Washington’s King of the Comeback.” (Time goes with a write-around feature on the American Commando.) To combat Rumsfeld’s sudden popular resurgence, Condoleezza Rice aide Jim Wilkinson instructs Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley to ask Secretary Rice whether the death of bin Laden makes her more likely to mount a presidential run in 2008. Rice’s demurrals do nothing to end gleeful cable news speculation that she’ll run against Hillary (and win) in 2008. Chris Matthews can barely contain himself.

Mainstream journalists join a chorus of Republicans and right-wing commentators in jeering and mocking liberals casting doubt on the official story of bin Laden’s death. Those with reservations, based on actual evidence, about the official story are compared to Truthers by Richard Cohen, Joe Klein, Michelle Malkin, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and just about everyone else.

A month later, a BBC investigation reveals that bin Laden’s death cannot be confirmed and the entire story as presented to the American media was most likely false. The American press, reluctant to “politicize” the death of bin Laden in the face of overwhelming national support for the president, is very cautious in reporting “new information” out of Afghanistan.

Well after the 2006 midterm elections, leaked memos prove that high-ranking U.S. military commanders warned the White House that the story that OBL had died in a U.S. raid was false and the rumors of his death elsewhere were still unconfirmable.

The next year, a book reveals that the crowd outside the White House the day of the announcement was made up mostly of off-duty Republican congressional aides, lobbyists and political consultants. (None of the firefighters present were from New York.)

In 2007, the Washington Post’s ombudsman and managing editor agree that printing the inaccurate story provided to them by administration officials was the right thing to do. “Each piece had multiple, credible sources,” the M.E. explains, naming none of them.

“We may never know the full truth about the ‘death’ of Osama bin Laden,” Time magazine writes shortly after a Senate committee investigation into the administration’s exaggerations and falsehoods is unable to issue a final report due to a partisan split. While “it seems certain that media accounts of the mission were distorted,” the liberal bloggers and foreign news outlets that exposed the distortions are almost certainly “guilty of exaggeration themselves,” with their claims that the Pentagon “manipulated information.”

President Bush wins a third term.

Continue Reading Close
Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

John Boehner’s policy director gave out Abramoff favor money

He greased the wheels for the symbol of GOP corruption, now he works for the leader of the new majority

Jack Abramoff and Sen. John Boehner

John Boehner is so obviously a favor-trading tool of monied interests — this is the man, it must never be forgotten, who literally handed out tobacco company checks on the floor of the House — that sometimes it hardly seems noteworthy when he again proves that he is nothing but a puppet of well-heeled lobbyists. But we must guard against cynicism and always take opportunities to remind the nation that Speaker Boehner is a corrupt tangerine.

So documentarian Alex Gibney writes today of Boehner’s recently hired policy director, Brett Loper. Before joining team Boehner, Loper was, naturally, a medical device lobbyist, whose job was to protect the profits of the medical device industry at the expense of, among other things, the federal deficit. And before that, he worked for the gloriously amoral Tom DeLay.

While working for Mr. DeLay, Loper took a trip to the Marianas Islands with Michael Scanlon, super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s co-conspirator. They went to the Marianas Islands to deliver favor money to two legislators in order to bribe them into switching their votes to support an Abramoff ally in his campaign to become speaker of the House. They switched their votes, Abramoff’s buddy got the job, and Abramoff was rehired and “resumed lobbying for the continuation of abusive labor practices in the islands.”

This guy, a bagman for a corrupt lobbyist before he became a corrupt lobbyist himself, is now in charge of policy, for the speaker.

Continue Reading Close
Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Page 1 of 89 in 2006 Elections