Posts Made By: Tom Rodstrom

Jim, have you been importing wacky-weed from California?

It has been proven that BOTH sides of Congress have more than enough corruption. I think that Congressmen of both sides should be held to the highest standards because those standards trickle down throughout society and set the examples for our kids.

JB - "As I understand it, the repubs are adjusting the rules to keep the dems from playing their corrupt game."

If politicians on both sides of the aisle hold themselves to the highest standards there would be no problem at all. In order for a Congressman to be reprimanded, he must be investigated and found to be lacking. That is what ethics is all about. The Republicans want to change the ethics rules so that the ethical standard for Congress is "whatever they can get away with". To call Democrats "corrupt" for the time honored practice of pointing out ethical violations is an affront to Democracy and could only come out of an ethically bankrupt ideology.

HISTORY LESSON FOR JB: This proposed rule change is all about one politician who has done more to corrupt our representative democracy than any man alive. Tom Delay, the Republican House Majority Leader, spits in the face of a government "Of the People, by the People, for the People". How did this person, who's biggest qualification before coming to Congress was chasing cockroaches, become such a powerful powerful Republican? ... Money.

DeLay became a sweetheart of lobbyists taking huge sums of money in return for influencing legislation in their favor. This is the common corruption that every Congressman Democrat or Republican faces given the cost of getting elected these days. DeLay took it a step further, he prostituted himself so much that he was able to collect enough money to fund Republican candidates throughout the nation. Soon the House was full or Republican congressmen who owed him a favor. This let him sell even more and bigger favors to the lobbyists and collect even more cash.

These new rules are all about getting even and protecting DeLay. He has already been admonished by the Ethics committee twice. Once for threatening to withhold campaign funding from a Republican congressman if he did not vote is a specific way. THAT IS CORRUPTION, PLAIN AND SIMPLE.

It is common knowledge that the REPUBLICAN congress has been BOUGHT AND PAID FOR through DeLay by lobbyists and it can only be through ignorance or sheer audacity that you have the nerve to call the Democrats corrupt for pointing out that corruption.

Typical response, Jim, when in doubt blame it on Clinton and then make some unsubstantiated allegations. As far as I know the fraud behind the CBS debacle was conceived and executed by one man. If Kerry's people did anything, they only introduced him to CBS if that much. Do you have any proof to the contrary?

The point that was unfortunately lost in that episode was that most, if not all, of the allegations made in the forged letter were true and were corroborated by witnesses who were there at the time.

Jim, there are many of us who never thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that further inspections by the UN would have proven that. After the war started, the "mission was complete", and no WMD's were found, we were told "just wait" by Bush supporters. Well, the wait is over. The White House announced that the search had ended. Needless to say, no WMD's were found. Now there are some questions to be answered.

U.S. Ends Fruitless Iraq Weapons Hunt

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said there no longer is an active search for weapons and the administration does not hold out hopes that any weapons will be found. "There may be a couple, a few people, that are focused on that" but that it has largely concluded, he said.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California said Bush should explain what happened.


"Now that the search is finished, President Bush needs to explain to the American people why he was so wrong, for so long, about the reasons for war," she said.


"After a war that has consumed nearly two years and millions of dollars, and a war that has cost thousands of lives, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, nor has any evidence been uncovered that such weapons were moved to another country," Pelosi said in a written statement. "Not only was there not an imminent threat to the United States, the threat described in such alarmist tones by President Bush and the most senior members of his administration did not exist at all."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=2&u=/ap/20050112/ap_on_re_mi_ea/us_iraq_weapons

Some of us also said that Iraq would become a Vietnam style quagmire where our troops were sitting ducks because they could not identify the enemy among the civilian population. We are still waiting for that not to happen also. In the mean time 1350 of our soldiers and countless Iraqi's have died.

In San Diego they are having trouble finding the rabbit. There are 40,000 Iraqi's in the area, but they have to make two 1 1/2 hour trips (each way) to Orange county in order to vote, once to register and a second trip to vote.

The neocons are still in shock that the Iraqi's are not throwing flowers and kissing their feet in appreciation for all they have done in Iraq.

Brett, Jim's post is just a troll. The "corrupt UN" is one of his favorite catch phrases. I recently saw an article that said about 1.7 billion out of 67 billion was diverted to Hussein. That's about 2.5 percent. Halliburton should do so well!

The UN does not want to monitor the elections it set up for ethical reasons since the entity that set up the elections should not monitor them. They reason that a different entity should monitor the elections to make sure that the UN set up a fair system. As far as I am concerned the dismal security situation is more than enough reason for ANY group to decline to monitor elections in Iraq.

Speaking of Corruption - HALLIBURTON

Meanwhile independent agencies are still skeptical about claimed financial savings from contracting out military support operations. According to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), a February 1997 study showed that a Brown and Root operation in Bosnia estimated at $191.6 million when presented to Congress in 1996 had ballooned to $461.5 million a year later.

All told this former Yugoslavia contract has now cost the taxpayer $2.2 billion over the last several years. Examples of overspending by contractors include flying plywood from the United States to the Balkans at $85.98 a sheet and billing the army to pay its employees' income taxes in Hungary.

A subsequent GAO report, issued September 2000, showed that Brown and Root was still taking advantage of the contract in the Balkans. Army commanders were unable to keep track of the contract because they were typically rotated out of camps after a six-month duration, erasing institutional memory, according to the report. The GAO painted a picture of Brown and Root contract employees sitting idly most of the time. The report also noted that a lot of staff time was spent doing unnecessary tasks, such as cleaning offices four times a day. Pentagon officials were able to identify $72 million in cost savings on the Brown and Root contract simply by eliminating excess power generation equipment that the company had purchased for the operation.

Brown and Root has been also been investigated for over billing the government in its domestic operations. In February 2002, Brown and Root paid out $2 million to settle a suit with the Justice Department that alleged the company defrauded the government during the mid-1990s closure of Fort Ord in Monterey, California.

http://www.warprofiteers.com/article.php?list=type&type=15

I imagine that he is on "vacation" for two reasons.

1. He is a liberal.
2. He posted a picture of some dead nuns on this family forum.

I hope that he comes back. He did have some informed views.

The article talks about $5 million in funding. The recent tax cuts included $25 million to promote dog racing! Is our government out of control or what?

Here's some detail on where the money went:

Add-ons burden tax-cut bill

Congress's task seemed simple enough: Repeal an illegal $5 billion-a-year export subsidy and replace it with some modest tax breaks to ease the pain on U.S. exporters.

But out of that imperative has emerged one of the most complex, special-interest-riddled corporate tax bills in years, lawmakers, Senate aides and tax lobbyists say. The 930-page epic is packed with $170 billion in tax cuts aimed at cruise-ship operators, foreign dog-race gamblers, NASCAR track owners, bow-and-arrow makers and Oldsmobile dealers, to name a few. There is even a $94 million break for a single hotel in Sioux City, Iowa.

Even one of the tax lobbyists involved in drafting it conceded the bill "has risen to a new level of sleaze."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4773772

Who are "they"?