Culture of Corruption

Would it surprise you to read that Status Quo Joe is trying to woo lots of Republican donors? It shouldn't-- and he is. What it should do, however, is alarm you. What's Biden telling these Republican millionaires and billionaires about how he'll govern the country? He could be saying "Just look at my record." Or is he going further? He's the only top contender not calling for Trump's impeachment.

Back in the day, Ventura Republican congressman Elton Gallegly was a regular-- albeit minor-- character here at DWT... a crooked little shit and a worthless backbencher. He was like a barnacle on the ass of more outrageously crooked colleagues like Buck McKeon, especially when it came to the Countrywide bribery scandal.

I was shocked once when a friend in Texas told me a Blue Dog candidate for Congress-- an eventual winner-- didn't really care about being a member of Congress as much as he cared about getting prepared for a career as a federal lobbyist.

Let's not wait for President Beto to get to the White House before taking action on FacebookFirst a caveat: I don't really "get" Facebook and my page is pathetic and 95% of the time I just use it to promote my DWT posts.

Calk (left) with Swamp Monster (right)As Bess Levin wrote yesterday for Vanity Fair, "scoring a presidential favor or a gig in the administration is fairly straightforward: simply kiss the ring and/or line Trump’s pockets.

How do you measure how red a state is. Well, there's the PVI, of course. Tennessee's is R+14. Only Wyoming, West Virginia, Utah, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Kentucky and Arkansas are worse. Trump's victory over Hillary was a rout-- 1,522,925 (60.7%) to 870,695 (34.7%). Trump won 92 of Tennessee's 95 counties. The only 20th Century presidents to do as well as Trump were Nixon (against MCGovern) and FDR. Currently, all six of the state's executive officers-- from governor to comptroller of the Treasury-- are Republicans.

Biden is better than TrumpWriting for The Hill yesterday, Niall Stanage asserted that Trump's climb to reelection is steep and unlikely, albeit not impossible.

Yesterday, OklahomaWatch reported that 5 former legislators just joined the ranks of the army of state lobbyists working their former colleagues. The new malefactors are:

Many Americans are unaware of just how important an event in world history the French Revolution was. Before we talk about what Ryan Grim termed a counterrevolution for an The Intercept piece about reactionary Blue Dog and DINO Josh Gottheimer, let's remember, for a little context, that the French Revolution, gave hope to all Europe other than to the nobles, ecclesiastics, and some bourgeois (the 1%).

Congressional Committee Chairs tend to be paragons of corruption. They are charged with raising immense sums of money from the special interests their committees oversee.