Politics as Usual

Tom Delay, again the shining star of his party.

A Travis County grand jury indicted a business organization and a political committee founded by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on Thursday on felony charges of violating election laws by using corporate money to influence state elections.

and

DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden said the majority leader was not responsible for TRMPAC's daily operations and that the indictment has nothing to do with him. Madden said DeLay talked to Travis County prosecutors about the case last month.

"Mr. DeLay assured the district attorney's office that he was not involved in the day-to-day operations of TRMPAC and to his knowledge all activities were properly reviewed and approved by lawyers for the PAC," Madden said.

Something smells off. Delay perpetually strikes me as that dishonest used-car salesman. I don't know if he was involved directly, but the association isn't doing him much good. This does warrant investigation. Though getting a fair investigation is unlikely, in my view.

Then there is all-star Harry Reid's comments on the hurricane funding. (No I won't call it Katrina funding or use Katrina in any description. It sounds bloody stupid.)

"After everything that has happened with FEMA, is there anyone who believes that we should continue to let the money go to FEMA and be distributed by them?" said Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate's Democratic leader.

So a question to the Brilliant Senator from Nevada, if not FEMA who? Who has the means and infrastructure to actually use and correctly distribute the aid? Why start throwing political stones when you obviously have no reasonable alternative. Should we just fire all the personnel in FEMA just because the reaction times for the hurricane didn't match your ideals?

Then there is this swell little bit of logic:

One of the 11 House members to oppose the measure was Rep. Scott Garrett (R-5th Dist.). He said he was concerned not about the amount of the appropriation, but about the lack of any mechanism to guarantee that FEMA spends the money properly.

"Some of us believe there should be accountability tied to the funds so that we actually do assure that the people who need assistance get it. If you simply give a blank check to someone, there is no way to assure accountability," Garrett said.

Ok, what's the alternative? Whose opinion of the spending should say that it's right? Seems to me that FEMA has regulations on how money can be spent. But since this brain trust thinks that FEMA is so poor, I still don't hear an alternative. Accountability tied to the funds is just pathetic. Is Garrett really going to suggest that FEMA is misappropriating the funds? Or maybe we should all just wait while congress figures out how to distribute the funds outside of FEMA. I'm betting all the millions of affected people would think that's just fine. I'm certain the congress would have a solution in a couple of months at the soonest.

Then there is the remarks from yesterdays Jackass of the day:

"Here we are on the floor of the House appropriating $50 billion to an agency that has a record of poor performance and leadership without qualification for the job," said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House Democratic leader.

You just have to love Pelosi. FEMA's leadership is more qualified for their job than she is for hers. Or maybe she's just firing at the political appointees of the system. But then, they aren't the ones actually running the on-site operations now are they?

Which leads to the jewel of the article:

Some of the harshest criticism of President Bush came yesterday on the floor of the Senate from Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.).

"The commander in chief was AWOL," Lautenberg said, standing before a poster-sized picture of Bush strumming a guitar at an event in California the day after the hurricane struck.

"I was angry as hell at the casual manner that the president put forward," Lautenberg said.

Lautenberg just jumped up to the Schumer level of stupidity. The president was AWOL because he was sitting in Washington at his desk 100% of the time during the crisis? You mean to tell us that the president should have been down in NOLA sand-bagging a levee or the like? Would that have been good enough?

God I hate politicians.