This is a GREAT read by Conason! It's long, but FUN.
Republican leaders say they're reformers!
House of Representatives reinvents itself as home of idealism
<snip>
Following the example of the Speaker, the men seeking to succeed Mr. DeLay as House Majority Leader all insist that they, too, are born-again reformers. The leading candidate is Roy Blunt, the Missouri Republican who rose to leadership as majority whip under the DeLay regime. He's a bit gamy to be minted as their fresh new boss, as the Republicans poised to choose him surely understand.
What they know, although you may not, is that Mr. Blunt is quite literally wedded to influence peddling: His current wife is a lobbyist. (She used to be his girlfriend, before he demonstrated his unbending morality by leaving his first wife of 31 years to marry her.) One of his sons is a lobbyist, too.
Wife and son both work for Altria, the tobacco company once known as Philip Morris, which has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Mr. Blunt's political accounts. He returned the favor a few years ago, while in the throes of illicit romance, by sneaking an amendment benefiting the tobacco industry into the bill that created the Department of Homeland Security. So blatant was this maneuver that even Mr. DeLay and Mr. Hastert objected. Electing Mr. Blunt won't put much distance between the House Republicans and the scandals that threaten their power. Mr. Blunt's former chief of staff is a lobbyist, too -- of course -- who hired Mr. Abramoff as a rainmaker in 2004, after the initial revelations about his swindling of Indian tribes led to his dismissal by his old firm. And Mr. Blunt himself accepted favors from the same crooked defense contractors whose generosity led to the indictment and guilty plea of Mr. Cunningham.<snip>
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20249
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