Ohio 2nd Blog

WCPO > Local Soldiers Must Pay Back Money

Local soldiers from the 216th Engineering Battalion were given notice they were overpaid by the government and must pay the money back.

Congresswoman Schmidt has reportedly launched another one of her infamous “investigations”:

A spokesman for Rep. Jean Schmidt said the Clermont County Republican has launched an investigation. “We called the Department of Defense and asked them to launch an investigation as to if this is a bureaucratic snafu or what is the source of the alleged debts, and they’re doing this as we speak,” said Schmidt spokesman Barry Bennett. Schmidt’s office expects to receive a reply from the Pentagon by the end of this week.

I don’t know… if you ask me calling up another branch of government and asking them to launch an investigation isn’t a very substantive investigation. I guess no one told her that Congress has power to launch their own investigations, and that it’s actually part of the job of being a member of Congress.

What cracks me up in all this is that the Pentagon is the most corrupt bottomless sinkhole of our tax dollars and the people they’re billing for overpayment are soldiers who’ve served in the nightmare that is Iraq instead of the contractors who rake in billions. Support our troops… what a laugh.

Also, the CQPolitics blog has picked up on the potential Schmidt / Wulsin rematch, but does some piss poor analysis of the race:

Wulsin’s campaign is an indication that she is not deterred by the district’s 64 percent vote share for President Bush in 2004 and is determined to give Schmidt yet another tough test. Yet Schmidt’s first campaign finance report for the 2007-08 campaign cycle does not suggest an overwhelming sense of urgency in her camp. She raised a modest $20,065 in this year’s first quarter and had $17,000 cash on hand as April began.

Guys, the reason why Schmidt has raised so little cash is that she is incredibly unpopular with Republican power brokers. The Ohio 2nd has turned from being one of the jewels in the Republican Congressional crown to an embarrassment that brings down the whole caucus.

I watched the classic film, Judgement at Nuremburg, last Saturday (the one with Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland). I hadn’t seen it in a long time and I was so struck by the parallels to the current investigations into the Department of Justice. It’s about a trial of several German judges and a prosecutor post WWII who allowed the Nazis to persecute innocent people. The German characters rationalized their own actions and that of their colleagues and family. They swore they didn’t know about the atrocities. They needed to support their government against their enemies and so had to overlook a few small technicalities and legalities even though it wasn’t really just or right. It was ok to sacrifice an innocent person for a greater cause. It was for the greater good. They didn’t think it would escalate and lead to a disaster. They were honorable people and shouldn’t be held responsible. It was a few others who committed a few atrocities not the German people. They shouldn’t be held accountable even though they enabled overlooked the crimes. They couldn’t or wouldn’t admit to the extent of the atrocities.

(more…)

The Enquirer’s got the latest, what little of it there is.

Meanwhile, this story has got me steaming:

NYT > As Power Shifts in New Congress, Pork May Linger

Meet the new cardinals, as the chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees are known on Capitol Hill. Many have a lot in common with the Republicans they will succeed.

All have worked for years to climb to their posts, where the authority to grant earmarks puts them among the most powerful lawmakers in Congress. Like Mr. Inouye and Mr. Stevens, many have developed unusual bipartisan camaraderie while divvying up projects. By longstanding, informal agreement, the majority typically doles out about 60 percent of the money for earmarks and lets the minority pass out the rest. And they form a united front against limitations on the earmark process.

“What is good for the goose is good for the gander,” Senator Patty Murray, the Washington Democrat who is set to become chairwoman of the transportation subcommittee, said last fall in a speech defending an Alaska Republican’s allocation of more than $200 million in federal money for a bridge to remote Gravina, Alaska, with a population of 50. It became notorious as the “Bridge to Nowhere.”

Thousands of people on the ground didn’t bust their humps so that these pigs could get their turn at the national trough. The Federal Reserve is not their petty cash drawer. Oversight, transparency, and accountability need to be the new watchwords in the corridors of American power and any politician who thinks otherwise should feel Uncle Sam’s boot kicking their fat asses to the curb.

It takes one Democrat to pull a Duke Cunningham before the right wing harpies collectively string up the Democratic Party and use it as a giant pinata. Democrats won the majority not on how well they distribute pork but on how corrupt and incompetent the Republicans were. Any Democrat who doesn’t realize this needs to retire now while the Party is still in the majority.

BTW, it looks like Emanuel gets it. I sure hope so.

Enquirer > Ethics trips up 2 locals

Two Republican state lawmakers from the Cincinnati area received public reprimands Tuesday from a legislative ethics panel for failing to report a free dinner at Nicola’s Ristorante in Over-the-Rhine, and luxury seats at the Bengals’ Monday Night Football game last fall.

Reps. Jim Raussen of Springdale and Michelle G. Schneider of Madeira were ordered to take a one-hour ethics training class and repay $644 apiece – the value of the entertainment provided by a lobbyist for a California biotech company.

Raussen said he repaid the money in June to Richard G. Colby, the Chiron Corp. lobbyist who provided the meals and Bengals’ tickets

He said would take the ethics training next month.

Schneider did not return a call for comment.

The last time the 12-member Joint Legislative Ethics Committee publicly punished a state lawmaker was in 1997, when it censured former Rep. Michael A. Fox of Butler County for failing to report airfare and Arizona lodging from a lobbyist.

U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt of Loveland also accepted Bengals tickets as a former Ohio House member, but she is no longer under jurisdiction of the bipartisan committee. She repaid the lobbyist $644 in June. (more…)

Wouldn’t it be a great gesture if Congresswoman Schmidt volunteered to take ethics training? I wonder if they offer those kind of courses in Washington DC. If they do it sure doesn’t look like many have been taking advantage.

From Roll Call:

In a show of solidarity with the one and only Hammer, many GOP Members donned little gold hammer lapel pins and began hammering away at each other on the House floor. Fine, the last part didn’t actually happen, but they did wear their pins to the floor for votes to show some love for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas). Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) is responsible for hammermania. He bought more than 100 of the lapel pins and handed them out. “Tom DeLay is an outstanding man and a great Republican leader,” he told HOH. “By wearing this pin we wish to demonstrate our unified support of Mr. DeLay and the high esteem in which we hold him.”

Congresswoman Jean Schmidt has been sighted as one of the members wearing the pins. Schmidt has been a passionate supporter of Tom Delay.

As one of the recipients of Delay’s tainted largesse the Congresswoman received a letter from The Campaign for America’s Future asking her to “contribute the same amount of money you received from ARMPAC to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. We have enclosed an envelope for your convenience.” Schmidt was one of the twenty-six lawmakers that received the maximum contribution allowed from Rep. DeLay’s political action committee this election cycle.

Congresswoman Jean Schidt has come out swinging defending former House Majority Leader Tom Delay in the Loveland Magazine:

The Congresswoman said she was not going to return the money that Texas Congressman Tom DeLay gave her campaign. “Even if I return it, someone is still going to remind everyone that I took it in the first place. So, for some people it wouldn’t make a difference.”

She also said that DeLay hasn’t yet been found guilty of anything. “He has only been charged with a crime by a Texas Prosecutor who is thinking about his own election in Texas.” She said Prosecutor Ronnie Earl went after Delay because he is so powerful and has built a huge following of other conservative House members in Washington. Schmidt’s office is across the hall and four doors down from DeLay’s.

Schmidt said she did not receive any of the money DeLay is accused of conspiring to “launder” from Texas businesses, through the Republican National Committee, and back to other Texas Republican hopefuls running for a seat in the Texas State House. Critics say it was these State office holders, that once elected, pushed through a scheme to divide Texas voting districts in a way that favored the election of Republicans to the U.S. House. “So, by hoping to bring down Tom DeLay, Ronnie Earl hopes to break up and destroy Delay’s power and national influence. Delay has been very good at pushing the conservative agenda in Washington,” Schmidt said. She also said the public would be hearing more about Earl’s own behavior, in the near future.

I wonder if this tough talk also applies to the members of the grand juries that issued the indictments.

BTW, one of the ways that Tom Delay is “pushing the conservative agenda” is by protecting sweat-shops in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands:

Because they were produced in a territory of the United States, garments traveled tariff-free and quota-free to the profitable U.S. market and were entitled to display the coveted “Made in the USA” label.

Among the manufacturers that had profited from the un-free labor market on the island were Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap, Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne.

Moved by the sworn testimony of U.S. officials and human-rights advocates that the 91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants — from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh — were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, Murkowski wrote a bill to extend the protection of U.S. labor and minimum-wage laws to the workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas.

So compelling was the case for change the Alaska Republican marshaled that in early 2000, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Murkowski worker reform bill.

But one man primarily stopped the U.S. House from even considering that worker-reform bill: then-House Republican Whip Tom DeLay. _(more…)

Perhaps this is Jean Schmidt’s vision for Ohio.

Jean Schmidt’s night of dinner and football gifted to her by the California biotech company Chiron Corporation that she failed to report is back in the news. AP is reporting that the legislative inspector general sent information on lobbyist Richard Colby to Attorney General Jim Petro on Friday. Although Congresswoman-elect Schmidt is no longer under the committee’s jurisdiction since she was voted out of office, one could assume if the three lawmakers are charged with the same failure to report charge that Gov. Bob Taft was convicted of any legal action by the Attorney General could also be applied to Ms. Schmidt.

This is a follow up to yesterday’s post.

I was sure that the big story yesterday morning was going to be the long awaited debate at Chatfield College between Paul Hackett and Jean Schmidt. However, that story was quickly bumped on much of the local media when the Columbus Dispatch reported that Ms. Schmidt was one of several legislators under investigation for ethics violations in relation to a night of dinner and football paid for by Chiron Corporation, a biotech company based in Emeryville, California. (more…)