John Nichols: Ted Stevens -- and Senate GOP -- In Trouble

[marmar]

From The Nation:


BLOG | Posted 07/30/2007 @ 11:41pm
Ted Stevens -- and Senate GOP -- In Trouble
John Nichols


Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is in big trouble.

And when Stevens is in trouble, so are Senate Republicans.

In a high-profile raid on the senator's home, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internal Revenue Service agents raided the home of 83-year-old senatorial schemer Monday, as part of an investigation into his relationship with an oil field services contractor jailed in a public corruption investigation.

Bill Allen, the contractor who is suspected of providing expensive favors such as a massive home renovation to Stevens, has already pleaded guilty to bribing Alaska state legislators.

Allen's VECO Corp., an oil field services and engineering company, has reaped tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts during the years when Stevens chaired the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and a fellow Alaska Republican, Congressman Don Young, chaired the Resources Committee and then the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the House.

Young is reportedly the subject of a federal investigation relating to Allen's campaign fund-raising on behalf of Alaska Republicans.

Young is the third most senior Republican in the House, which Stevens is the senior Republican in the Senate.

Both Young and Stevens face reelection in 2008.

If Young is beat, it will just be another case of a Republican seat falling to the House Democrats, who are unlikely to lose the relatively comfortable majority they secured in 2006.

If Stevens is beat, it is a different story. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=218868

[othermeans]

1. I'm loving it! The freepers are going crazy ! They don't know what to do now

Their world is falling in on them. Deny it all they want they are the party of corruption.

[Demeter]

2. There's Gonna Be a Push for Term Limits

But that will be for the Big House, not the House and Senate.

At 83, Stevens should have retired and counted his blessings.

[tom_paine]

3. Swollen with Loyal Bushie hubris, perhaps even thinking himself a Royal Bushie

A courtier trusted so highly by the Imperial Family and their Party (it will continue to remain so) that he thought himself as one of them. Although I'll bet the Royals themselves did not.

In either case, let us thank God that there are still parts of the American System that function relatively honestly. It simply amazes me that, even with the nearly Full Sovietization/Bushification of the Executive Branch and all the myriad pressures that can be brought to bear on honest investigatiors and prosecutors to make them stop, that even at this late date so many myriad scandals are actually investigated & prosecuted at least at levels below the Royal Bushies and Consieglieres/etc.

So much of America still does work, it is just that few if any of the working parts are anywhere near the actual levers of power.

In either case, so long as these honest elements still exist (and if we are paying attention we will notice when they go fully silent), people's worst nightmares about the future, including my own, probably won't happen.

It's nothing close to the happy certainty of living in a strong democratic free nation with a vigorous and independent press, but it will have to do because it is all we have left.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Something behind all this. The Bush Junta recruited highly corruptible people

for Congress, then let them run rampant with all sorts of deeply corrupt activities, and was meanwhile spying on everybody in the country, and, most especially, on every politician and office holder--on their bank accounts, their credit card use, their emails, their meetings, their phone calls, their reading habits, their bedroom conversations, their travel, their properties, their business deals, their friendships--you name it, they were "data-mining" it.

Why? In the case of politicians, obviously, to control their votes, to keep them in line--to threaten, to bully, to blackmail.

Corruption among the lower order Bushbots made them manipulable.

That's the story behind this story, I think. Not just how corrupt Republicans have become, but corruption as a method of control, just like the Mafia.

[0007]

5. Even the most patriotic loving american republican can deny

they haven't been screwed by their Neocons leaders and the simpleton monkey face so-called president.

And there's a hell of a lot more to come.