According to the Washington Post, House Majority Leader Tom Delay, that bastion of integrity and morals, has once again been plucked from the iron jaws of justice and delivered safely into the arms of his faithful party. I don't know what deal he made with Lucifer, but I hope that some day it comes back to bite him.
Read the story here.
According to the article: "The ethics committee, the House's mechanism for enforcing rules for members, has operated for exactly one day since the 109th Congress convened in early January. In May, after Republicans broke an impasse with Democrats by backing off an effort to change the rules for investigations, the committee voted to organize for the year.
But it has not met since then. No session is scheduled, and both parties say any investigation is months off. The latest logjam relates to a decision by Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) to try to name his 10-year chief of staff, Ed Cassidy, as a co-director of the committee staff."
[snip]
"The staffing dispute concerns a rule of the ethics panel governing the hiring of the committee staff. The rule specifies that the staff will be nonpartisan and chosen by a majority vote of the committee. But in what Democrats consider an effort to circumvent that requirement, Hastings has cited another provision of the rule that allows the chairman and ranking minority member to each name one staff member without the other side's concurrence."
In related news, the Environment got buggered along with the Truth this week when Tony Blair was unable to convince Bush to back the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming.
Apparently, Blair was no match for ExxonMobil who, according to The Guardian, was extremely influential in Bush's decision.
"Potus [president of the United States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you [the Global Climate Coalition]," says one briefing note before Ms Dobriansky's meeting with the GCC, the main anti-Kyoto US industry group, which was dominated by Exxon.
Lovely. One of the worlds biggest oil companies gets to make decisions on U.S. policy for global warming.
That's like putting Tom Delay in charge of writing laws. Wait...