There is an excellent post on Greg Palast’s blog linking the Eliot Spitzer scandal with the recent bailout of Bear Stearns:

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”

Bush, Spitzer said right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.

It looks like Gov. Spitzer wasn’t the only one getting screwed.

(h/t: Crooks and Liars)

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Law Student Jill Filipovic has two excellent posts up on Feministe this week, which follow up on that 1 in 99 statistic that was recently reported.

In “America Behind Bars”, Filipovic discusses the economic and social impact of the incarceration rate:

And entire communities depend on prisons for their economic stability. They have disproportionate political power — prison inmates count as residents, meaning that the areas are allocated greater resources that the inmates don’t benefit from and they’re counted in the population of Congressional districts. And inmates, of course, can’t vote — and in many states, they can’t vote once they get out, either.

Piggybacking on that post in “Judicial nominees, prison exploitation and discriminatory country clubs”, Filipovic takes a closer look at the prison-industrial complex and those who profit from it:

…like the private military contractors that the Bush administration pays to do our dirty work in Iraq, private prison employees were long not subject to the same laws that federal and state prison employees are…

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The good folk at the Sunlight Foundation have highlighted earmarks by Rep. Harold Rogers:

After it hired a lobbyist and its employees’ contributed to a member of Congress’ leadership political action committee, a Kentucky company saw its defense business quadruple thanks to earmarks.

Over the last three years, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., says he has earmarked at least $10.4 million in defense funds for Phoenix Products, Inc., a small company in McKee, Ky., that makes aircraft accessories, including custom V.I.P. interiors for Black Hawk helicopters that “offer the finest leather,” fabric, naugahyde and carpet, according to the firm’s Web site.

In 2006, Phoenix added Kentucky-based McCarthy & Speaks Strategic Solution, a lobbying firm that has strong connections with Rogers, to its Capitol Hill representation. Partner Jeff Speaks worked in Rogers’ congressional office as projects director for 10 years, according to the firm’s Web site; Speaks represented Phoenix Products, the firm’s lobbying disclosure forms show. The other partner, John T. McCarthy III, was the chairman of the Kentucky state Republican Party.

Since 2004, Martin, Fisher, Thompson and Associates and McCarthy & Speaks Strategic Solution Phoenix Products have reported that Phoenix Products has paid them more than $240,000 to lobby on its behalf.

During that same time period, the firm’s employees have given $12,400 to Rogers’s campaign and have been contributors to his leadership PAC as well. In 2007, Peggy Wilson and Thomas Wilson each made $1,500 donations to Rogers’s leadership PAC, Help America’s Leaders (HALPAC); their first campaign donations to HALPAC came in 2004, Federal Election Commission records show. They’ve also contributed to other members of the Kentucky delegation including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.).

Must be nice in that ivory tower!

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DM-KY reader Dee brought something to my attention that had flown under my radar in the past weeks. Via e-mail, she shared with me a letter she’d sent to Sen. Mitch McConnell recently, asking for his reaction to this article:

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

…

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics “reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”

If you’d also like a response from our senators about the reprehensible actions taken against these men and women, please contact them at the following locations:

Sen. Mitch McConnell
361-A Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-2541

Sen. Jim Bunning
316 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-4343

To contact our senators at their regional offices, please refer to their websites.

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With all the tragedy as of late in our nation’s coalmines and with Kentucky’s Senator Mitch McConnell and his wife Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao at the center of a web of money-grubbing and influence-mongering in Washington that has left these many coalmines the deathtraps that they are for the sake of the almighty campaign contribution and a few ticks on the profit margin, I think the analogy of Kentucky’s gubernatorial election this year being the GOP’s canary in a coalmine is a fitting one.

Watch this latest video from Jim Pence of DitchMitchKY and the HillbillyReport. What’s going on in the video with security personnel at the Kentucky State Fair trying to end an anti-war protest (until they’re set straight by the State Police) is fascinating enough, but what’s even more fascinating is what’s going on in the background: all those cars honking in support of the protest.

Recall that thirteen years ago in 1994, on the cusp of the so-called Republican Revolution, Kentucky served the Democrats in a similar capacity. Then the death in March of that year of Democratic Congressman William H. Natcher (KY-02)—who had represented the district since 1953 and who continues to hold the all-time record for consecutive votes in Congress at 18,401—set up a special election for the seat.

I was only 17 years old at the time, but I had been politically aware since the 1988 presidential campaign, when a longtime Democratic activist in my church started hauling me to rallies, the biggest of those being Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen’s appearance at the Big Tobacco warehouse in Owensboro, today the largest city in the Second District. I don’t remember anything about the substance of what was said there, but I remember the energy, the pomp, and the confidence among the Democrats gathered.

Yet, a mere six years later the entire region of the Second District was seething against the political establishment and its status quo, its distance, and indifference. That establishment was Democratic.

Perhaps that environment is best encapsulated in a scene that has now been immortalized in Michael Moore’s latest film SiCKO. On August 29, 1994, at a rally in Owensboro, “Tobacco Rights Activists” burned an effigy of then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in protest of President Bill Clinton’s health care plan. With a bluegrass band playing the back ground, Stan Arachikavitz, president of the Kentucky Association of Tobacco Supporters, chanted “burn, baby, burn,” as the effigy was doused in gasoline and two women set it ablaze. When asked for comment by a reporter, Arachikavitz replied, “Hillary didn’t last as long as my Marlboro.” The nation was outraged, but there was a quiet satisfaction among many across western Kentucky.

At that rally was Ron Lewis, the Second District’s newly elected Republican congressman. In what had been a shock to Kentucky’s political establishment—if no-one else—Lewis had defeated longtime Kentucky State Senator Joe Prather in the May special election to succeed Natcher. Lewis had won with 55 percent of the vote on a turnout of less than 20 percent. A fundamentalist Christian, Baptist minister, and religious bookstore owner, Lewis had been recruited to the race by Senator Mitch McConnell, who had been narrowly elected to his own seat ten years earlier in 1984 on the coattails of Ronald Reagan.

You may recalled that Lewis’s campaign commercials in the special election had famously morphed Prather’s head into that of Bill Clinton, who was then near the height of his unpopularity. The national GOP considered the technique a success and went on to use it widely in the general election that year. Meanwhile, rumors had circulated in the district that Joe Prather was in Washington to look for a house. Perhaps it was just a rumor spread by the McConnell machine, but it might as well have been true, such was the arrogance and sense of entitlement of Kentucky Democrats of the day.

McConnell went on to recruit Republican Ed Whitfield—who had just as much personal dynamism as Lewis—to run in the First Congressional District in the fall. Both Lewis and Whitfield won; Whitfield became the first Republican ever elected to the First District.

My point with all this is that the political establishment in Kentucky at that time—conservative Southern Democrats—was a bloated and opaque bubble. Its bloated-ness allowed the good old boys to make room for more of their own inside and its opaqueness kept their less-than-altruistic dealings hidden from the masses, but those very same qualities kept the good old boys from witnessing the trouble that was brewing for them on the outside–in the real world.

Mitch McConnell burst their bubble.

Unfortunately, the Kentucky Republican Party that Mitch McConnell replaced the good old boy Democrats with was a political machine that set about inflaming the ugliest elements of Kentucky’s own culture: its racism, its bigotry, its sexism, its churlishness, its phobias, and its anti-intellectualism.

The thing to remember about Mitch McConnell (and this is something that his fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate are discovering now about him in his capacity as Minority Leader) is that McConnell always has McConnell’s interests first. He’s not at all concerned about the long-term consequences of his tactics and actions on the people of Kentucky. What he’s counting on is that Kentuckians and the state’s chattering class will never fully digest the disaster that was McConnell’s Senate career so long as there’s plenty of pork named after him spread around the state.

Mitch McConnell took Kentucky, a state already at the bottom of the cultural and economic barrel of the nation, and he exacerbated the very social qualities of the place that had kept true progress (making gains on its peers, rather than playing catch up) out of reach for so long. McConnell’s strategy was to spear his political legacy with a wicked trident of slash-and-burn partisan politics, redneck populism, and moneyed corporate interests.

McConnell’s Kentucky GOP is today the political establishment in the state, and you can see what sort of establishment it is by the criminal behavior and incompetence of the administration of Governor Ernie Fletcher (R).

As I write, that Republican establishment is bunkering itself deep beneath the political reality on the ground in Kentucky. While Ernie Fletcher and his minions ratchet up their language of fear on expanded gaming and hate against sexual minorities and while Mitch McConnell continues to cultivate the corrupt environment of campaign finance in Washington that he fathered and stands steadfast behind the reckless presidency of George W. Bush, neither Fletcher or McConnell is making headway among Kentuckians.

Both are indeed consolidating support among their conservative base, but that base is shrinking. Kentuckians are waking up to the reality of what Fletcher, McConnell, and conservatives truly are.

The people of Kentucky are once again seething against their political establishment, but this time there is an energized and organized progressive Democratic party waiting in the wings. Whereas last time when Kentuckians cleaned political house they replaced bad with worse, this time the alternative to entrenched Republican corruption is a Democratic party that offers the hope of change and a better future for us all.

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Between hiring a stealthy campaign strategist for his 2008 reelection campaign, working to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and reluctantly voting for greater transparency in government, how on earth does Sen. Mitch McConnell find the time to draft some b.s. anti-family and anti-children legislation and find the nerve to call it the “Kids First Act”?

Being a literary sort of person, I should probably recognize this whole nonsense of cleverly naming legislation so that Americans will not be outraged at what the legislation really says and does as an ironic device. Fortunately, my low-brow aesthetic most always trumps my literary one, and from here on out I will refer to this practice (system, manner, or condition) as it occurs in politics, as “oppositism.” The noun “oppositicity” will describe the state or quality of being of an “oppositist” mindset. An “oppositist” shall henceforth refer to any politician who insults my intelligence by engaging in oppositism.

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The Courier-Journal today ran an insightful piece written by E.J. Dionne Jr. on the myth of “big government.” Big government is, of course, a scare tactic used to justify lots of awful things, from lax gun control laws to not providing for the nation’s poor. Just exactly how big our government has actually gotten under the leadership of a Republican president, however, is worth a closer look.

In slightly unrelated news, Mark Hebert reports that nearly two-thirds of Kentuckians want some sort of U.S. troop withdrawal in Iraq.

Also, I’ve been meaning to blog about abstinence-only (mis)education for a number of weeks now, but Mary Q. Burton at the LEO does such a first-rate job in “Sex, lies and abstinence” that I’ll just quote in part:

Teri Lloyd was surprised when the sex education books her children brought home from school seemed woefully incomplete. The books omitted certain parts of the female anatomy — specifically, the clitoris.

“That’s got to be a shame, fear-based thing,” says Lloyd, 49, whose daughter, now 23, attended school at Myers Middle. “We just failed to educate them about their own bodies. What we leave out can be shaming, too. I wondered why that part wasn’t mentioned. I’m not opposed to teaching abstinence; what I’m opposed to is pairing it with shame or with lack of information about birth control and the human body.”

They can give enough of my tax money to fund religious anti-choice pregnancy centers, but can’t find a few hundred bucks for an accurate scientific rendering of the female anatomy? Nice.

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How’s this for an obvious headline: “Senate Republicans block tax hikes for big oil companies”? Meanwhile, Senators Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning are wanting to funnel more money to Peabody Energy.

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Senator Mitch McConnell last week introduced a bill meant to curb fatties from suing the fast food industry:

To keep eating habits out of the courtroom and in the kitchen where they belong, my bill will throw out lawsuits that blame the restaurant or grocery store for what a customer chooses to eat.

Sen. McConnell has introduced this bill before, to which Senator Patrick Leahy replied last year:

This legislation does not create any alternative method for keeping a check on corporate misconduct that has a detrimental effect on the health of all Americans. If this bill passes, American consumers will only be left with the thin hope that suddenly the Bush-Cheney Administration will begin true regulation of corporations on behalf of American consumers.

I am unable to find full text of the Sen. McConnell’s current proposal, so I can’t say for sure whether or not Leahy’s former criticisms of the Commonsense Consumption Act still apply. However, I do think it’s telling that, once again, personal responsibility is given more weight than corporate social responsibility. People do need to be more conscientious of how they treat their bodies, for sure, but is it really the poor widdle industry giants that need protecting from the mean trial attorneys? Methinks not.

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There’s a reason for the high cost of gasoline it is called greed. Last year Lee Raymond former head of Exxon, retired with nearly a $400 million dollar Exxon retirement package. Lee Raymond doesn’t have to worry about rising gasoline prices and neither does Senator Mitch McConnell. These guys have taken care of themselves very well.

According to some experts the high cost of gasoline is due to the lack of refinery capacity. Ain’t that nice. The oil companies own the oil and the refineries. Why would the oil companies build new refineries or drastically increase refinery capacity to lower the price of their product? Perfect business model, the less you produce the more you can charge.

The Bush administration and the big oil companies are so tight you couldn’t drive a lubricated toothpick between them with a 10 pound sledge hammer. The Cheney “Energy Task Force” is reminder of how tight these guys are.

Lee Raymond’s gaudy retirement package would have gone a long way towards building and or increasing refinery capacity, but that’s not how these pseudo patriots work. They put their own monetary gain before national security.

My representatives, Senator Mitch McConnell and Congressman Ron Lewis, by their unpatriotic silence, have proved they also put monetary gain for themselves and their big oil pals before our national security.

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