Obsidian Wings

Various Things

by hilzoy

(1) Paging von: Apparently, the Democrats agree that "at the end of the day, though, "Bush got us into this mess" is not a foreign policy," not that that was all they were saying at the time. Now, however, they have decided to broadcast their strategy to the high heavens. Probably, no one will notice, since the likelihood that Democrats' ideas on foreign policy will have any impact on the actual world is approximately nil. However, you really can't say that they don't have any, or that they are not trying to publicize it.

Of course, some of these ideas have been around for a while. Take the GI Bill of Rights for the 21st century, which is part of the new plan: it was introduced as a bill on May 5, 2005, and has since languished in committee. We tried to get publicity for that, too. Ha ha ha.

(2) Everyone has probably seen this story already, but hey, it's funny: Howard Kaloogian, a candidate for Duke Cunningham's now-vacant seat in Congress, posted a photo with this caption on his campaign website: "We took this photo of dowtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism."

The "photo of dowtown (sic) Baghdad" does indeed look very calm and happy for a war zone. That's because it's not actually a photo of Baghdad at all; it's a photo of a peaceful suburb of Istanbul. No wonder things look so calm. You can see the photo (which Kaloogian has now removed), along with another picture of the same street, at TPM. As Josh Marshall notes, the fact that the signs are all in Turkish, not Arabic, is a bit of a giveaway. (The intrepid dKos diarist who nailed down where the photo was actually taken is here.)

(3) News of the weird (via dKos), passed on without comment:

"Surgeons operated on a 2-month-old Pakistani girl Tuesday to remove two fetuses that had grown inside her while she was still in her mother's womb, a doctor said.

The infant, who was identified only as Nazia, was in critical condition following the two-hour operation at The Children's Hospital at Pakistan Institute of Medical Science in the capital, Islamabad, said Zaheer Abbasi, head of pediatric surgery at the hospital.

Abbasi, the chief doctor who led the operation, said the case was the first he was aware of in Pakistan of fetus-in-fetu, where a fetus has grown inside another in the womb.

"It is extremely rare to have two fetuses being discovered inside another," Abbasi told The Associated Press, adding that he did not know what caused the medical abnormality. "Basically, it's a case of triplets, but two of the siblings grew in the other."(...)

Abbasi said surgeons removed the two partially grown fetuses, totaling about two pounds, that had died at about 4 months."

(4) I'll be out of town through the end of the weekend. Also, I just put in an offer on a new house. (I didn't even know I was thinking of moving.) Very busy here in hilzoy-land.

Have fun, and discuss whatever strikes your fancy.

Knocking Out One Form Of Corruption

by hilzoy

From the WSJ (sorry; subscription wall):

"Amid broad congressional concern about ethics scandals, some lawmakers are poised to expand the battle for reform: They want to enact legislation that would prohibit members of Congress and their aides from trading stocks based on nonpublic information gathered on Capitol Hill.

Two Democrat lawmakers plan to introduce today a bill that would block trading on such inside information. Current securities law and congressional ethics rules don't prohibit lawmakers or their staff members from buying and selling securities based on information learned in the halls of Congress.

It isn't clear yet what kind of support the bill will garner from Republicans. But its prospects are enhanced by the current charged environment in Congress; lawmakers from both parties in both houses have placed a high priority on passing ethics and lobbying-reform legislation. Such legislation would provide a vehicle to which proponents could attach a measure on stock trades.

In addition to banning trading on inside information, the proposal would require that lawmakers and their top aides disclose within 30 days any stock trades. Congressional rules now require lawmakers to disclose their trades once a year. The bill also would require that companies register with Congress if they sell information about congressional activity to Wall Street investors.

Unlike members of Congress, executive-branch employees already are banned from trading on inside information. Employees of several federal agencies are prohibited from investing in companies that have business before them. In 1934, for example, Congress banned Federal Communications Commission employees from owning stocks or bonds in telecommunications or broadcast companies.

The two Democrats who wrote the bill say they were motivated by the trading activity of a former top aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, the onetime Republican majority leader in the House. The aide, Tony Rudy, bought and sold hundreds of stocks from his computer in the U.S. Capitol in 1999 and 2000, according to financial-disclosure forms and other DeLay aides.

Neither Mr. Rudy nor his lawyer returned calls seeking comment. It is impossible to tell from the disclosure forms whether Mr. Rudy traded stocks based on information he gathered while working as deputy chief of staff and general counsel to Mr. DeLay, then the No. 3 Republican in the House.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, the New York Democrat who wrote the bill, said: "Top leadership aides know what is happening before anyone else. The potential for abuse there is incredible." (...)

Congressional Republicans declined to discuss the proposal until they see its exact language. Republican lawmakers could view it as a partisan ploy to hurt Mr. DeLay and another top Republican caught up in an insider-trading controversy: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who has been trying to explain his sales of stock in a hospital firm long associated with his family."

Let's hope Republicans don't fight this one on the grounds that it's a "partisan ploy." Letting Congresspeople and their staff trade on non-public information creates obvious possibilities for corruption, and it should be prohibited. The best way to defuse any partisan angle would be for Republicans to get behind the bill and pass it. I hope they do.

Good News From Africa: Take 2

by hilzoy

I think I might have been too hasty a few days ago, when I wrote that it was good news that Nigeria had decided to turn Charles Taylor over to a human rights tribunal in Sierra Leone.

This is one of those issues, like not negotiating for hostages, in which it's impossible not to be torn between one's views about the individual case and one's views about the right general policy to have. On the one hand, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to rejoice when any hostage is freed. On the other, if a hostage is freed because the hostage-takers managed to get what they wanted, that encourages people to take more hostages, and who could possibly want that? And this is not a question of caring more for general rules than for flesh-and-blood human beings: any hostages who are taken in the future will be just as real as those whose release is negotiated, and they are just as likely to have friends and family who suffer enormously when they are taken, and who are desperate for their release.

Similarly here. Who could possibly not want to see justice for the man whose " crimes include the incitement of wars in four West African countries; the enslavement, rape or dismemberment of thousands of children; and collaboration with al Qaeda"? Or, to make the point another way, who is responsible for things like this:

(© Sebastian Bolesch/DFA/Still Pictures)?

Or this?

(Note: these pictures are from the civil war in Sierra Leone, which Taylor is accused of having incited, and in which a lot of children were conscripted as soldiers, and a lot of people were mutilated by Taylor's side. I said 'things like this' because I don't know that he is responsible for the kids in these specific pictures.)

But*...

A Math Look at Why Pharmaceutical Companies Need to Make Higher Returns

In a recent WashingtonMonthly post I’m once again seeing people who don’t understand why pharmaceutical companies need to earn more profit than average companies in order to attract investment.  As a service I thought I would offer a quick illustration of why they need to.  The non-math answer is that pharmaceutical companies are riskier (lots of them go out business providing a -100% return to their investors.  Those that don’t go out of business lose and gain money at wild intervals.  Investors can invest in other things and have lower amounts of risk.  This risk has to be compensated by higher up-side returns.  For those not math-phobic lets look at that a little more closely.

For purposes of this example we will say that you invest for exactly one year and have exactly $1,000.  We will assume the money is not capitalized at intervals during the year. 

Investment Option 1

Government Bonds.  It is very safe, with a lowish formal rate for a low return.

Lets say you can get a 1 year T-bill at 5.0%.

Your expected return is

1,000+1,000*0.05

That is $1,050 for an expected 5% return on your money.

Investment Option 2

McDonalds Franchise.  Pretty safe with some chance of breaking even and some chance of losing everything.

Lets say you get a 95% chance of getting a 13.7% rate, a 3% chance of breaking even and a 2% chance of losing everything. If you don’t know which franchises are going to be the failures your expected return is .95(1,000+1,000[.137])+0.03(1,000)+.02(0).

That is $1,110.15 for an expected 11% return on your money.  We will round that to $1,110.

Investment Option 3

Lets say we don’t know anything about it other than the risk profile.  The risk profile is somewhat worse than McDonalds but not crazy (risk of losing money is 10% or less).  The exact profile is a 90% chance of getting the up-side return (‘X’) a 5% chance of losing 10% of the value and a 5% chance of losing everything.  The formula to find out what the up-side rate would have to be to break even with McDonalds is

.9(1,000+1,000X)+.05(1,000-1,000[0.1])+.05(0)=1,110 

Solving for X we find that the rate to break even with McDonalds is .1833 or 18.33%. 

What would happen if we gave Investment Option 3 a McDonalds level upside return?

Your expected return if you didn’t know which ones would lose money would be .9(1,000+1,000[.137]])+.05(1,000-1,000[0.1])+.05(0)=$1,068.3 for an expected 6.8% return.  This is very close to the return rate on the government bonds (which are theoretically 100% safe). 

So in order to have an expected ending value equal to the McDonalds investment you would need to earn 18.33% on the up side of the riskier investment compared to the 13.7% rate of the McDonalds investment.  Of course you would be a fool to make the investment at only 18.33% because your chance of losing money is greater in the risky investment while your expected value is the same.  So you need to earn even more if you are going to bother with the riskier investment.  Now I don’t know exactly what McDonalds investment returns are, but I did set it up so that Investment Option 2 tracks the average annual return of the general US stock market, 11%.  Pharmaceutical companies are much riskier than the general US stock market, so they need much higher returns on the upside to make the risk worthwhile. 

Sorry about the font weirdness, I performed a cut and paste from word and apparently that didn't work well.  I don't have time to fix it right now. 

Card Resigns

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. announced his resignation this morning after nearly 5-1/2 years as President Bush's top aide. Bush said Card will be replaced by Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. (...)

Card has held the top staff job at the White House longer than any person since Sherman Adams under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and had earned enormous respect within the building and around Washington for his calm professionalism and stamina. But his stewardship of the Bush team had come under question in recent months after a series of mishaps, including the failed Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the slow public disclosure of Vice President Cheney's shooting accident and the unexpected Republican revolt over a plan to turn over management at a half dozen ports to an Arab-owned company.

Bush said Card had approached him earlier this month about the possibility of stepping down, and Bush accepted his offer this weekend, when the two were at Camp David.

"He's been here 5-1/2 years. The average tenure of chief of staff is two years," said a senior administration official, who spoke before the announcement, but refused to be named so as not to upstage the president. "Change can be good and necessary and that's what they had discussed."

The official said the decision was Card's, not Bush's: "Andy initiated it with the president."

Bolten is among the most respected officials within the administration and a trusted confidant of the president's--not at all the kind of independent, outside voice that some pundits have said the White House should bring on board. His selection as chief of staff suggests the likelihood of a smooth transition, but officials anticipate that he might want to make further changes to a team that has largely been intact since the beginning of the Bush presidency in January 2001.

Bolten served as deputy White House chief of staff in Bush's first term and then was moved over to head the budget office at a time when spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Medicare benefits and the recovery from Hurricane Katrina pushed up deficits. In an attempt to deal with the new spending demands, Bolten oversaw two consecutive budgets that actually cut overall non-security discretionary domestic spending. But many Republicans in Congress have complained that the administration has not done enough to tighten the federal belt.

Bolten, a former Goldman Sachs executive, is known as a detail-oriented workaholic who often stays at work for hours after the early-to-bed president has gone to sleep. The son of a CIA executive, he grew up in Northwest Washington and attended the prestigious St. Albans school, Princeton University and Stanford Law School.

Taking the microphone this morning after Bush, Bolten said he was "eager to get to work" on the president's agenda, which he described as protecting Americans at home, promoting freedom abroad and expanding economic prosperity."

Discuss.

Statistics: Pop Quiz

by hilzoy

For as long as I can remember, the degree to which our country is separated along class lines has really bothered me. It's not just possible but easy for people who are, say, upper middle class to have virtually no opportunity to talk to people who are poor, except during commercial transactions (getting a meal at a fast-food restaurant), or when a homeless person asks them for money, or during some similarly impersonal encounter; and it's equally possible for those who are poor not to have any meaningful contact with people who are well off.

Obviously, this matters for politics. If someone proposes a law that would primarily affect people I'm familiar with -- philosophy professors, for example -- it's relatively easy for me to figure out its pros and cons. But if someone proposes a law that would primarily affect people I'm not familiar with -- native Alaskans, say (in my case) -- it's an awful lot harder. So to the extent that we don't know anything about whole groups of people, we're likely to make much worse policy. Thus, one of my mottos has always been: cross class boundaries whenever you can. (Not, I want to add, as a sort of socioeconomic tourist; there are all sorts of other ways to do this. Working in the biker bar and in the battered women's shelter were two of mine.)

I was thinking about this because I happened to be looking at income statistics (pdf) recently, and found that while I can imagine living on the 2004 US median household income -- after all, my household consists of me and my two cats -- I had a very hard time imagining managing with that income if I had a family. And I'm not nearly as fussy as, say, Tom DeLay, who once said: “I challenge anyone to live on my salary”, at a time when his salary was $158,000 a year. I do just fine on a lot less than that. As I said, I'd do just fine on our median income, as long as I didn't have a spouse, children, or anyone else to divide the money with. Moreover, I have in my time been pretty broke, so it's not that I just haven't ever had to try. (The period when I was supporting myself by throwing newspapers leaps to mind. $425/month income; $225/month rent; the remaining $200 for food and gas -- and gas is a necessity when your job is delivering several hundred papers a day with your car.) But I have a hard time imagining living on that income if I had, say, a family of four. And yet half of all households, presumably including a lot of families, manage to do just that.

And if that's hard to imagine, I really, really can't imagine surviving at the poverty level.

So here's the pop quiz:

(a) What was the US median income for households in 2004? (For those of you who have forgotten stats: if you took all the households in the country and lined them up from richest to poorest, the income of the household in the very middle is the median income. 50% of the population makes less; 50% makes more.)

(b) What is the median income for a male full-time, year-round worker? For a female? (The figures I have are broken down by gender.)

(c) What was the poverty threshold for a family of four (two parents, two kids) in 2004? (The poverty threshold is the point below which a family officially counts as living in poverty, according to the US Census Bureau.)

(d) What percentage of Americans lived at or below the poverty threshold?

(e) What percentage of American children under 18 lived at or below the poverty threshold?

(f) What percentage of workers over 16 live below the poverty threshold?

You don't need to give your actual answers; just see how accurate they are. I'll be curious: I'm not posting this because I assume anything one way or the other about the results, but because I really have no sense at all of how accurate people's views about this are, and I thought it would be interesting to find out for the unrepresentative sample that is our readership.

Answers below the fold.

Help! IANAL (Scalia And Hamdan Edition)

by hilzoy

When I talk about the law here on ObWi, I tend to try to restrict myself to construing bits of text and applying them in fairly straightforward ways. I can do that. But mastering reams of case law, legal niceties, and all that: above my pay grade. (Literally as well as metaphorically.) So while I would have thought, offhand, that this is not appropriate for a judge who has yet to hear the arguments in a case, I don't know enough to be sure:

"The Supreme Court this week will hear arguments in a big case: whether to allow the Bush administration to try Guantánamo detainees in special military tribunals with limited rights for the accused. But Justice Antonin Scalia has already spoken his mind about some of the issues in the matter. During an unpublicized March 8 talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions, adding he was "astounded" at the "hypocritical" reaction in Europe to Gitmo. "War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by NEWSWEEK. "Give me a break." Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don't have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: "If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy." Scalia was apparently referring to his son Matthew, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Scalia did say, though, that he was concerned "there may be no end to this war."

The comments provoked "quite an uproar," said Samantha Besson, a member of the Freiburg law faculty who had invited Scalia to give his talk, which was mostly about his "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution. This isn't the first time Scalia has commented on matters before the court: two years ago he recused himself from a Pledge of Allegiance case after making public comments about the matter. "This is clearly grounds for recusal," said Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a human-rights group that has filed a brief in behalf of the Gitmo detainees. "I can't recall an instance where I've heard a judge speak so openly about a case that's in front of him—without hearing the arguments." Other experts said it was a closer call. Scalia didn't refer directly to this week's case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, though issues at stake hinge in part on whether the detainees deserve legal protections that make the military tribunals unfair."

That's the great thing about blogging, though: when I don't know something like this, I can just ask. So: can anyone tell me what the actual rules, as opposed to my tingling Spidey-sense, say about something like this?

And Speaking Of Plagiarism...

by hilzoy

Ben Domenech has company:

"THE career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics
thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.
Putin was labelled a plagiarist yesterday after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the Russian president’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978.

According to the Kremlin’s official biography, Putin, 53, obtained a PhD in economics from the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997. But the US researchers also established that his thesis was for a lesser degree that would not have entitled him to a full doctorate.

The embarrassing revelation that Putin, a former KGB agent, may have cheated and lied about his qualifications follows a long search by US scholars for evidence of the president’s academic prowess. A copy of the thesis was eventually located in the electronic files of a Moscow technical library.

According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Putin’s work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, written by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-
related institute in the early 1990s.

The Washington Times reported yesterday that six diagrams and tables from the 218-page thesis also appeared to “mimic” similar charts in
the US work. The newspaper quoted Gaddy as saying: “There’s no question in my mind that this would be plagiarism.” (...)

While plagiarism has come to be regarded in America as a fatal blot on any US politician’s copybook — Senator Joe Biden has never recovered from allegations that he stole sections of a 1988 speech by Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader — the issue is not taken especially seriously in Russia, which is second only to China as a producer of pirated copyright goods."

Nice snark at the end. I suspect nothing will come of it, since, to put it tactfully, honesty does not seem to be a make-or-break issue for Russian politicians. Still, it's always good to have a clearer sense of what President Bush saw when he looked into Vladimir Putin's soul.

Good News From Africa

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"Nigeria announced Saturday that it was ready to hand over former Liberian president Charles Taylor to a U.N. tribunal, a move that would make him the first former African head of state to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

The tribunal has accused Taylor of instigating wars that devastated two West African countries, killed 1.2 million people and left millions homeless and maimed. He also allegedly harbored al-Qaeda suicide bombers who attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Taylor has been living in exile in the southern Nigerian city of Calabar since he was forced from power under a 2003 accord that ended a rebel assault on Liberia's capital. But Nigeria had resisted extraditing him, arguing he was given refuge under an internationally brokered peace deal. (...)

David M. Crane, the American prosecutor who drew up Taylor's indictment, said his extradition would send a powerful message. "Certainly African leaders, members of the good-old-boy network, are under notice that you cannot destroy your own citizens for your own personal gain, and you don't go after women and children, don't rape women, don't turn children into monsters," he said.

Taylor started a civil war in his homeland that brutalized tens of thousands of boys and girls drafted as rebel fighters. He also is blamed for a savage war in neighboring Sierra Leone where rebels terrorized victims with a maiming campaign.

Taylor allegedly started the Sierra Leone war to enable his fighters to gain access to its rich diamond fields. In Liberia, he enriched himself from diamonds, timber and rubber."

That's great, especially since he has reportedly been trying to destabilize Liberia from exile. West Africa needs closure on this, and justice for someone who brought incredible misery on his country and its neighbors.

***

More good news from Africa: apparently, we're making progress towards the elimination of Guinea worm, which the NYT describes as follows:

"For untold generations here, yardlong, spaghetti-thin worms erupted from the legs or feet — or even eye sockets — of victims, forcing their way out by exuding acid under the skin until it bubbled and burst. The searing pain drove them to plunge the blisters into the nearest pool of water, whereupon the worm would squirt out a milky cloud of larvae, starting the cycle anew.

"The pain is like if you stab somebody," said Hyacinth Igelle, a farmer with a worm coming out of a hand so swollen and tender that he could not hold a hoe. He indicated how the pain moved slowly up his arm. "It is like fire — it comes late, but you feel it even unto your heart."

Now, thanks to a relentless 20-year campaign led by former President Jimmy Carter, Guinea worm is poised to become the first disease since smallpox to be pushed into oblivion. Fewer than 12,000 cases were found last year, down from 3 million in 1986.

Mr. Carter persuaded world leaders, philanthropists and companies to care about an obscure and revolting disease and help him fight it. His foundation mobilized volunteers in tens of thousands of villages to treat the drinking water the worms live in."

The article itself is fascinating, and gives a very good picture of why eradicating the very last cases of a disease is very, very difficult. Well worth a read.

Giving To Charity

by hilzoy

Tomorrow's Washington Post has a long story on the U.S. Family Network, a supposed charity founded by one of Tom DeLay's aides:

"A top adviser to former House Whip Tom DeLay received more than a third of all the money collected by the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit organization the adviser created to promote a pro-family political agenda in Congress, according to the group's accounting records.

DeLay's former chief of staff, Edwin A. Buckham, who helped create the group while still in DeLay's employ, and his wife, Wendy, were the principal beneficiaries of the group's $3.02 million in revenue, collecting payments totaling $1,022,729 during a five-year period ending in 2001, public and private records show.

The group's revenue was mostly drawn from clients of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to its records. From an FBI subpoena for the records, it can be inferred that the bureau is exploring whether there were links between the payments and favorable legislative treatment of Abramoff's clients by DeLay's office. (...)

In the late 1990s, when DeLay's influence was growing, the lawmaker depicted the USFN in a promotional letter as a nationwide, grass-roots organization. In fact, it had a tiny staff that barely registered an impact on Capitol Hill. The group appears to have served mostly as a vehicle for funneling corporate funds to DeLay's advisers and financing ads that attacked Democrats.

The group's payments to the Buckhams -- in the form of a monthly retainer as well as commissions on donations by Abramoff's clients -- overlapped briefly with Edwin Buckham's service as chief of staff to DeLay and continued during his subsequent role as DeLay's chief political adviser.

During this latter period, Buckham and his wife, Wendy, acting through their consulting firm, made monthly payments averaging $3,200-$3,400 apiece to DeLay's wife, Christine, for three of the years in which he collected money from the USFN and some other clients. (...)

Wendy Buckham was not the only spouse of a DeLay staffer to benefit from the USFN revenue stream sustained by Abramoff's clients. A consulting firm owned by the wife of Tony C. Rudy, DeLay's deputy chief of staff, was paid $15,600 by the group in 1999 and another $10,400 in 2000. Rudy resigned to work with Abramoff in 2001. It could not be determined what the payments were for. (...)

A previous article in The Post detailed how USFN had drawn its largest checks from Abramoff's clients, including $1 million from what several former Buckham associates described as Russian oil and gas executives and hundreds of thousands of dollars from an Indian tribe.

Records obtained by federal investigators after that article appeared and reviewed by The Post make clear just how unusual USFN's spending was. Its revenue was lavished not only on DeLay's advisers but on a variety of expenses that experts say are atypical for such a small nonprofit: $62,375 for wall art, a vase listed at $20,100, airfare and meals for Abramoff that cost $11,548, and $267,202 in travel and entertainment expenses that appear to have mostly benefited Buckham, the group's board members, and its tiny staff. (...)

In the version of the group's official, typewritten ledgers, supplied to the FBI last month under subpoena, several of its most unusual expenditures are partially crossed out and relabeled in ink. The $20,100 purchase of a vase in October 1999 from a Royal Doulton dealer in Miami was relabeled "office equipment," and the $62,375 purchase in January 1999 of a collection of Salvador Dali and Peter Max prints was relabeled "office fixtures.""

Because every charity needs a twenty thousand dollar vase. Of course.

The U.S. Family Network claimed to promote "families, the economic prosperity, social improvement, moral fitness, and general well being of the United States." What did it actually advocate? Well:

"One of the first policy issues to be discussed by the group's board, according to its March 1997 minutes, was a "free-market research project" in the Northern Marianas Islands, a U.S. protectorate in the Pacific Ocean.

At the time, Abramoff was under contract with the Marianas government to lobby against congressional legislation to impede the free flow of immigrant labor to the islands from China and elsewhere in Asia, and impose a minimum hourly wage exceeding the island's standard rate of $3.05. (...)

In 1998, the group lobbied Congress against new regulations on cigarettes and collected a $100,000 donation from the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. It also spent $75,863 that year on radio ads that called for President Clinton's resignation and attacked Democrats, according to the group's ledger and transcripts of the ads.

The following year, the National Republican Congressional Committee gave the USFN a $500,000 check to finance additional radio ads in the districts of vulnerable Democrats. Buckham told the FEC he solicited the check, and others told FEC investigators it was paid over the objections of the NRCC's director and chief counsel."

The Northern Marianas, cigarettes, and attack ads in vulnerable democrats' districts. Sounds pro-family to me!

Buckham didn't even do right by all the members of his very own family:

"The board also agreed at its final meeting in January 2001 to pay $150,000 to the Dorothy Joan Morris Foundation. The minutes state this was done at the request of "the gentleman who donated the largest amount of money to USFN" -- a term that Geeslin said is a euphemism for Buckham's fundraising.

Incorporation papers on file with the Maryland Secretary of State list the foundation's location as an insurance company office in a strip mall in Frederick.

The papers state the foundation is in turn owned by another group, Foundation Ministries Inc., which has its legal address at the Frederick home of the Buckhams.

Dorothy Joan Morris is the name of the 79-year-old mother of a former Buckham assistant named Roger Albanese, who is described in USFN documents as collecting roughly $20,000 from the group for "program services related to prayer." She says she never authorized the use of her name for the foundation, was never told about the $150,000 donation and never saw any of the proceeds.

"What rights does he [Buckham] have to put that in my name?" asked Morris, who said she lives with her husband in a trailer home parked in Las Vegas. "It's fishy.""

You could say that.

***

It is not news that Tom DeLay and his aides have engaged in conduct that is, at the very least, pretty dubious. But what bears repeating is this: the Republicans in the House voted for this man as majority leader again and again. What do you think the odds are that they didn't know about the various shakedown schemes that he and his aides had going? And what does it say about them that, apparently, they didn't care?

***

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman has an interesting suggestion about one reason, besides the IMF loan, why the Russians might have been interested in paying off DeLay:

"But there was also the little matter of Serbia, where Russia was openly supporting Milosevic in his genocidal campaign and Bill Clinton, over strong Republican objections, was trying to stop him. Recall that it was DeLay who engineered a public humiliation for the President while the (eventually successful) bombing campaign was going on. The Republican leadership told Clinton that there would be enough Republican votes to pass a resolution supporting the war effort. But that was a lie. DeLay actively lobbied to bring the GOP patriot count down to 31, defeating the motion on a tie vote. No one can say for sure how much that gesture of support for Belgrade against NATO extended the bombing campaign, or how many Serbs and Kosovars were killed or displaced as a result. But the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, at a time when American airmen were risking their lives in the face of the enemy, chose to help the enemy.

With Russian money in his pocket. Feh."