Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, of the famous "bridge to nowhere," has been indicted according to Politico and the AP:
Stevens' Washington office is shut down right now and no one is answering phone calls, and a spokesman in Alaska declined to answer questions. The Associated Press is reporting that the criminal charges are related to false reporting of hundreds of thousands in renovations to his Alaska resort home.
The indictment would be a stunning development in an extraordinary Senate career that has spanned four decades. Stevens is undoubtedly the most powerful politician in Alaska's 50 year history of statehood, but his relationships with contractors and lobbyists have come under intense scrutiny over the past year.
Another member of the party of personal responsibility down for the count... from the AP, via the WaPo:
Stevens, 84, has been dogged by a federal investigation into whether he pushed for fishing legislation that also benefited his son, an Alaska lobbyist.
From May 1999 to August 2007, prosecutors said Stevens concealed "his continuing receipt of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of things of value from a private corporation." The indictment released Tuesday said the items included: home improvements to his vacation home in Alaska, including a new first floor, garage, wraparound deck, plumbing, electrical wiring; as well as car exchanges, a Viking gas grill, furniture and tools.
Justice Department officials were holding a news conference later Tuesday to discuss the charges.
Matthew Friedrich, acting assistant U.S. attorney general, said Tuesday that the government is charging the legislator with seven felony counts of making false statements between 1999 and 2006. Stevens was chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2005, except for the 18 months when Democrats controlled the chamber.
The Justice Department is alleging that Stevens, who is 84, accepted gifts from oil-services company Veco in the form of material and labor to renovate his private residence in Alaska.
"These items were not disclosed" on Stevens' Senate financial-disclosure forms, according to Friedrich. ...
...The indictment alleged that Stevens received substantial home improvements to property he owns in Girdwood, Alaska; automobile exchanges in which the senator got new vehicles worth far more than the used vehicles he provided in return; and household goods. ...
... The indictment of Stevens is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation in Alaska. There have been seven criminal convictions to date from the investigation. Former Veco Chief Executive Bill Allen and Richard Smith, the company's former vice president of community affairs and government relations, pleaded guilty in May 2007 to providing more than $400,000 in corrupt payments to Alaska public officials.
As for Friedrich, I just heard on Randi Rhodes' show and confirmed for myself that he is "acting" because he replaced Alice Fisher, the U.S. attorney who cut the plea deal with Jack Abramoff in 2006, and who mysteriously left the Justice Department this May. More on Friedrich's background from a May 22 post on the Legal Times blog:
A veteran prosecutor and top aide on criminal matters to Attorney General Michael Mukasey has been tapped to lead the Criminal Division at Main Justice. ...
... [Matthew] Friedrich is Fisher's former chief of staff and also was a principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division.
Friedrich has served on the department's Enron task force and previously worked as one of the lead prosecutors in the Arthur Andersen case when he served in the Eastern District of Virginia. A former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Texas, Friedrich joined the department as a Tax Division attorney in 1995.
Meanwhile, Fisher's May 1 departure came at an awkward time for the DOJ, as she was probing a number of big cases:
Her departure leaves the Justice Department even more short-staffed. Fisher is one of only four remaining division chiefs who have navigated the Senate confirmation process.
Among the ongoing investigations Fisher has been overseeing are cases involving members of Congress and executives at mortgage companies caught up in the credit debacle.
Her prosecution of the Abramoff cases had raised some eyebrows, according to Sourcewatch:
"I was more than a little tweaked to turn on CSPAN and see Alice Fisher giving the press conference on behalf of" the Justice Department in the Abramoff case, Jane Hamsher wrote January 4, 2006, in The Huffington Post.
"Alice Fisher should have recused herself from this matter long ago," Hamsher said. "Fisher is a Republican who in her former job was registered as a lobbyist for HCA, the healthcare company founded by Bill Frist's father.
Her appointment was also controversial due to the fact that like her boss AbuGonzales, Fisher has no trial experience and with [James] Comey gone there would be no senior member of the Justice Department who was an experienced criminal prosecutor. But Senatorial oversight was dispensed with and BushCo. continued on its Brownie-esque rampage to replace experience with cronyism."
- The role of the torture lawyers in crafting the system is far more intimate than they have acknowledged. John Yoo, Michael Chertoff and Alice Fisher reviewed specific techniques which clearly amounted to torture and blessed them as fine to use, and then lied publicly and to Congress about their involvement. Yoo is said to have given his legal blessing to torture techniques and their application by DOD operatives on the squash court as he played rounds with Jim Haynes.
So we're likely well rid of her, and perhaps the wiser about why she suddenly vacated the premises. If she did indeed lie to Congress about her involvement in torture, all the Jack Abramoff prosecutions in the world might not have saved her from testifying, even at the Dems' sham hearings, and even though no one will likely ever be prosecuted for the various crimes committed by the current administration...
'Senator No' heads for the big cotton wagon in the sky
Helms celebrates victry in 1972. From a March 9 story in the Washington Post
Former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms is dead at age 86. Says the WaPo:
He supported prayer in the public schools, free enterprise in business, a strong military, a balanced budget and "decency, honor and spiritual and moral cleanliness in America." In 1989, he drew national attention for an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts after it funded works he considered homoerotic and anti-Christian.
To his opponents, Helms was divisive, mean-spirited, race-baiting and manipulative. He was a pioneer of negative television attack ads, which he used frequently and effectively in his political campaigns.
When Helms announced in 2001 that he was retiring from the Senate, Washington Post columnist David S. Broder described him as "the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country."
Helms's opposition to social change and what he considered legislative overstepping led to his nickname of "Senator No," a title he wore he came to relish. In 1977, he angrily denounced a treaty advanced by President Jimmy Carter to turn over the Panama Canal to the country of Panama. He blocked nominations for federal office, withheld funding for the United Nations, opposed gun control and threatened to cancel federal support for arts groups and school busing. A staunch opponent of Communism, he sought to isolate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and refused to relent on strict U.S. trade embargoes of Cuba.
And the Raleigh News & Observer serves up some memorable Helms quotes, courtesy of the Associated Press. Take this one, for instance:
"Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and commentators and columnists, have struck out again." — Helms after defeating black Democrat Harvey Gantt for Senate in 1990.
Lovely. Here's one to bring a tear to your eye on this Independence Day:
"I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year's Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day." — Helms writing in 1956 on life in his hometown of Monroe, N.C.
Gotta love those cotton wagons ... Oh, and who can forget this classic:
"To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing." — Helms responding in 1956 to criticism that a fictional black character in his newspaper column was offensive.
Babwa Wawters reveals she nearly created a little Barack Obama of her own, back in the day:
NEW YORK (AP) — After three decades of keeping mum, Barbara Walters now says she had a past affair with married U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, whom she remembers as "exciting" and "brilliant."
Appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" scheduled to air Tuesday, Walters shares details of her relationship with Brooke that lasted several years in the 1970s, according to a transcript of the show provided to The Associated Press.
A moderate Republican from Massachusetts who took office in 1967, Brooke was the first African-American to be popularly elected to the Senate. Both he and Walters knew that public knowledge of their affair could have ruined his career as well as hers, Walters says.
At the time, the twice-divorced Walters was a rising star in TV news and co-host of NBC's "Today" show, but would soon jump to ABC News, where she has enjoyed unrivaled success. Her affair with Brooke, which never before came to light, had ended before he lost his bid for a third term in 1978.
Brooke later divorced, and has since remarried. Calls to a listing for Brooke in Miami by The Associated Press were not immediately returned Thursday.
Walters is the guest of Oprah Winfrey to discuss her new memoir, "Audition," which covers her long career in television, as well as her off-camera life. On "Oprah," Walters recounts a phone call from a friend who urged her to stop seeing Brooke.
"He said, 'This is going to come out. This is going to ruin your career,'" then reminded her that Brooke was up for re-election a year later. "'This is going to ruin him. You've got to break this off.'"
Winfrey asks Walters if she was in love.
"I was certainly — I don't know — I was certainly infatuated."
"Infatuated."
"I was certainly involved," Walters says. "He was exciting. He was brilliant. It was exciting times in Washington." ...
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%>
Tell a friend
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Else
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'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
email = request.form("email")
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'put the webmaster address here
sendmail.From = "webmaster@aspbasics.com"
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sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
sendmail.Importance = 1
sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
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End if
%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
