Monday Mashup (6/9/08)

McClatchy reports the following today…

WASHINGTON — Convicted superlobbyist Jack Abramoff influenced White House actions while his firm wooed administration officials over expensive meals and plied them with sports tickets, according to a House of Representatives committee report released Monday.

Abramoff, who's cooperating with federal prosecutors after pleading guilty in an expanding corruption investigation, previously had reported that his firm had more than 400 contacts with White House officials.

…

"The new documents and testimony show that Mr. Abramoff had personal contact with President Bush, that high-level White House officials held Mr. Abramoff and his associates in high regard and solicited recommendations from Mr. Abramoff on policy matters," the committee said.

The committee, however, added that it had "obtained no evidence" that Abramoff lobbied the president directly.

I’m not sure exactly what the difference could be between “personal contact with President Bush” and “lobby(ing) the President directly.” I guess all ol’ Jack ever did was ask Dubya about Jenna’s wedding plans, right?

And Little Katie Couric was just so “spot-on” here in her allegations that Democrats took money from Abramoff, wasn’t she (the report from the Center for Responsive Politics probably stated that the Dems took money from Abramoff clients, which is totally legal; I’m not going to pursue it any more than that because it is a total non-issue).

Paul Krugman theorized as follows today (from here)…

Let me add one more hypothesis: although everyone makes fun of political correctness, I’d argue that decades of pressure on public figures and the media have helped drive both overt and strongly implied racism out of our national discourse. For example, I don’t think a politician today could get away with running the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.

Unfortunately, we may find out about that; this tells us the following (h/t Daily Kos)…

On a website he calls ExposeObama.com, Floyd G. Brown (pictured), the producer of the "Willie Horton" ad that helped defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, is preparing an encore.

Brown is raising money for a series of ads that he says will show Barack Obama to be out of touch on an issue of fundamental concern to voters: violent crime. One spot already on the Internet attacks the presumptive Democratic nominee for opposing a bill while he was an Illinois legislator that would have extended the death penalty to gang-related murders.

I have a feeling we’re going to see antics by all manner of GOP simpatico pond scum before this election is over (including Roger Stone – Jeffrey Toobin wrote an excellent feature piece on this cretin in a recent issue of The New Yorker).

Update 10/9/09: Still a dick...

Also, I really don’t have anything to say here, but I just want to give a plug to the book “Final Salute” by Jim Sheeler, reviewed by the Times’ Janet Maslin here…

While “Final Salute” is not a muckraking book, it is still quietly horrifying. It bears witness to the ways in which casualties from Iraq are shielded from sight. Mr. Sheeler’s readers may not have realized, for instance, that dead soldiers’ coffins have been hidden in cardboard boxes (ostensibly to protect the coffins), toted by forklifts and stowed in the cargo holds of passenger planes.

Among the eloquent Rocky Mountain News photographs included…is a shocking image (shown in the story) — by Todd Heisler, now of The New York Times — of commercial airline passengers looking out plane windows at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada, trying to see what is happening beneath them. Down there, in the cargo hold, a Marine honor guard is preparing to deliver the flag-draped coffin of Second Lt. James J. Cathey to its final resting place.

And just to refresh our memories, I present this WSWS story.

My understanding is that Defense Secretary Robert Gates modified department policy to effectively ban the use of commercial transport for our heroes who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I could be wrong about that; I couldn’t confirm it through multiple Google searches, but I’m pretty sure I heard it once the furor first broke over this travesty.

Kudos to Sheeler for keeping this matter “front and center”; when I read about stories that are this monstrous, I find myself at a loss to the point where I can only state the following:

224 days and counting, people…