Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn’t personally owned the property for three years, property deeds show.
In the process, Reid did not disclose to Congress an earlier sale in which he transferred his land to a company created by a friend and took a financial stake in that company, according to records and interviews.
That stench that makes you want to puke is coming out of a political sewer called Washington – a place littered with the rotting corpses of American idealism and drowning in the blood from a wounded and dying republic.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office may have learned of ex-Rep. Mark Foley’s inappropriate conduct toward male pages in 2002, 2003 or 2005, depending on who is telling the story.
This week, the House’s internal investigators are starting to sort it all out.
Kirk Fordham, Foley’s one-time chief of staff, is scheduled for questioning Thursday before a House ethics committee investigative panel. He said he notified Hastert chief of staff Scott Palmer in 2002 or 2003 about Foley’s inappropriate conduct, and that he subsequently learned that Palmer met with Foley.
President George W. Bush and Republicans are sinking under the weight of the Iraq war and the Capitol Hill sex scandal, according to a flurry of polls, endangering their control of Congress in the November 7 elections.
Democrats hold a growing advantage heading into the final four weeks of the campaign, with analysts moving more Republican-held seats into the high-risk category and improving the odds of Democrats seizing control of at least the House of Representatives.
Now that so many supporters of the Iraq war have moved beyond denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and accepted the fact that the war is being lost, the elaborate dance preceding the withdrawal of American troops has begun.
For decades, America’s elected public servants have paid great lip service to the grand political principle of hearing and heeding the vox populi.
And for decades, America’s politicians had little trouble doing this. Because in election after election, the voice of the people has been loud and clear: “Please lie to me!”
The Roman Catholic diocese where Mark Foley went to church as a child demanded Tuesday that the disgraced ex-congressman name the clergyman who he claims molested him 40 years ago.
California Rep. Richard Pombo has insisted he was never lobbied by Jack Abramoff. Records show the disgraced lobbyist billed a client for at least two contacts with Pombo a decade ago.
The lobbying records released by the Northern Mariana Islands show that Abramoff billed once for calls to Pombo, chairman of the House Resources Committee, and a second time for a discussion with him, while lobbying in 1996.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert met Tuesday with an evangelist who hoped to persuade the Illinois Republican to step down because of the congressional page sex scandal.
Hastert had no comment after the meeting at his home in Plano, Illinois, with Christian evangelist K.A. Paul, founder of the Global Peace Initiative who is best known as a spiritual adviser to Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president in jail awaiting trial before a war crimes tribunal.
Politics is a water-cooler topic, a dinner-table subject, an issue to discuss after Sunday services, and this year the interest of American voters is at its highest level in more than a decade.
That renewed attention could translate into higher voter turnout on Nov. 7, according to an Associated Press-Pew poll.
Seventy percent say they are talking politics with family and friends, and 43 percent are debating the issues at work. Among churchgoers, 28 percent share their political views, a number that rises to 34 percent among the congregations in the South.