Jeff Mazur's blog

Today's NY Times has a profile piece on Mississippi's lobbyist-turned-Governor Haley Barbour which recounts the ways in which Barbour's lobbying acumen --honed during his years as one of K Street's heavyest hitters-- has aided him in his dealings with the Federal government since his election to office.  The profile also provides Barbour a national soapbox from which to reinforce popular farcical myths upon which Republicans rely to misdirect American voters.  

Stuart Rothenberg, a reliably right-leaning national elections analyst, uses his column this week in Roll Call (subscription only) to list his picks for the ten most endangered U.S. House members of the 2006 cycle.  It says volumes about the current political landscape and the way it is shaping up disastrously for the national GOP that 9 of Rothenberg's 10 most vulnerable are Republicans.  

Rothenberg's Top Ten are listed below, ordered by his assessment of most endangered.  (Commentary following each entry is mine.)

Todd Boulanger --a longtime Jack Abramoff protege whose Abramoff-related lobbying business and personal connections have been examined closely by Fired Up!-- is now at the center of his own firestorm involving a contract to lobby Congress for the State of Texas.

Today's issue of Roll Call has a (subscription only) story about the Congressional GOP making different funding arrangments for a caucus retreat that traditionally had been funded largely by DC lobbyists.  Apparently, these Republicans are wary of taking gifts from lobbyists --now that they know the public is watching...

House Republicans’ high-profile embrace of lobbying reform and the possibility of a sweeping private travel ban has prompted GOP leaders to change the funding formula — and the list of attendees — for their upcoming retreat just three weeks before the event is scheduled to take place.

In a NYTimes story on the Congressional GOP's day-late-dollar-short rollout of an ethics reform package, House Speaker Denny Hastert lets America know how big a bunch of suckers he thinks we are.  Clearly thinking he was responding to an electorate and press corps that would believe any old garbage he tossed out, Hastert offered up the gem relayed in this excerpt...

Hastert, at his news conference, shrugged off criticisms that he had put off action on lobbying reform and was only responding when his own party faced a crisis.

Judging by the scare that the Abramoff scandal has sent through GOP Washington, you could be forgiven for thinking that Congressional Republican wrongdoers would be the ones doing the bulk of the post-facto public relations damage control.  But some members of the so-called liberal media have seemingly become just as intimately involved in trying publicly to mitigate the damage that the scandal inflicts on the Republican machine. 

Since the first rumblings of the Abramoff scandal issued forth during the first quarter of 2004, the story's scope has steadily expanded to the point where it may bring down "up to 20 lawmakers and their staff members."  Yet traditional media have been reticent to explore fully the probability of criminal misfeasance perpetrated by some of Jack Abramoff's longtime lieutenants. 

As Congressman Duke Cunningham (R-CA) pled guilty Monday to bribery, conspiracy, and tax evasion charges and subsequently resigned his seat in the House of Representatives, Fired Up Missouri discussed its previously reported links between one of Cunningham's criminal co-conspirators and GOP House Leader Roy Blunt (R- K Street).

A telling statement from a spot-on story.  From today's Washington Post piece by Dan Balz and Juliet Eilperin comes this statement from Representative Tom Davis of Virginia on the Administration leak scandal. 

"They should have taken care of this a long time ago. They should have done their own investigation. They're going to get very little sympathy on Capitol Hill, at least from me... They brought this on themselves."

However, with Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, conservative opinion leaders are no longer willing to serve as his silent handmaidens and have begun speaking out angrily.  Witness the opinion of Rich Lowry, editor of movement conservatism's flagship publication, the National Review, writing on the Miers nomination earlier today.