Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey has had to put up with a lot of false accusations, some of them intentionally timed to cause a lot of doubt about his ethics right around election time. But it’s serious when the Department of Justice is the one hurling the accusations.
If you’re a little jaded about the independence of the DOJ, you might expect them to look the other way about ethical violations committed by a Democratic senator serving in a state with a Republican governor who can appoint his successor.
If the DOJ is not looking the other way then it is a fair bet that the charges are solid enough that the brass couldn’t plausibly blow off the prosecutors.
Another way of putting this is that Menendez is probably screwed because these charges wouldn’t be brought at all if there was much doubt about his guilt or the prospects for a conviction.
One thing the Democrats in New Jersey really need to internalize is that they should want nothing to do with Hudson County machine politicians. It’s a cesspool up there and has been for more than a hundred years now.
Progressives have no reason to lift a finger in support of Menendez, particularly because he’s so egregiously wrong about Cuba and Iran. Even before these charges, progressives should have been treating Menendez as a Liebermanesque persona non grata within the Democratic Party.
If he’s convicted of being a crook, that’ll just make our job easier. But even if he beats this rap, he needs to go. He’s horrible.
Rush Holt (or Pallone) waiting in the wings [I hope].
One of the Hudson Co dems, Albio Sires, voted for Keystone.- there’s absolutely no reason for that, at least as far as voters go. and Brian Stack double dipping as Union City mayor and a state senator, was triple dipping some years back. amazing it only took a decade to elect Dawn Zimmer.
I doubt Rush Holt will leave his position as Director of AAAS, where he can actually make policy and do stuff. Going to the Senate these days is like being sentenced to an endless period of duck-pecking.
One thing the Democrats in New Jersey really need to internalize is that they should want nothing to do with Hudson County machine politicians.
Or Camden County machine politicians.
Oh god yes.
Finally figured it out. It’s not that NJ pols, in the aggregate, are more corrupt than pols in others states, it’s that there so bad at playing the game. As if they went to the Bob McCullough and Duke Cunningham school for corruption. Or maybe they all went to the Torricelli advanced corruption academy.
It’s not that difficult. Simply make sure that the requested “favor” is filtered through one of more innocuous and non-partisan sounding lobby and/or think tank orgs. And the “gifts” are laundered through other groups. IOW — make the money too difficult to follow. Never, ever, been seen with a single, somewhat wealthy individual handing over big campaign contributions, any gifts of value, and going to bat for that individual with regulators or in legislation that obviously benefits that one individual.
Another key element is don’t waste time with somewhat wealthy individuals. Stick with those that can measure their wealth in billions or at least hundreds of millions.
Finally, “bank” the favors and collect the significant gifts when out of office. That’s what the “big boys” do.
“Favors” and “gifts” were not a factor in this tete-a-tete:
Rand Paul on Meeting with Sheldon Adelson
Watch Rand exclude Israel from his stock isolationist schtick. But there is no quid pro quo here. Is there any point at which USians will stop denying the obvious?
Ex-French minister in custody over Gaddafi funds
This was stupid corruption. The Supreme Court has made it nigh-legal and he still messed up.
yes, I’m surprised. he always managed to stay literally legal if not spiritually if you know what I mean. never thought he’d mess up like this
Good to have friends in high places … if not in the White House, at least in Jerusalem.
○ Democrat Sen. Menendez Blasts Obama’s Iran Policy at AIPAC
There is a certain naive streak among liberals and progressives when it comes to corruption in government. The gory details of these allegations ought to make us hesitate more when thinking about how to implement our preferred policies. For every well meaning effort, there will be some corrupt politician or corrupt police force (eg Ferguson) that will exploit and sell us out.
James Risen’s new book appropriately titled “Pay any price: greed, power, and endless war” would seem another example that ought to make us wonder what our friendly politicians are up to. Even the progressive President Obama is implicated in the corruption and subversion.
“Obama performed a neat political trick: he took the national security state that had grown to such enormous size under Bush and made it his own. In the process, Obama normalized the post-9/11 measures that Bush had implemented on a haphazard, emergency basis. Obama’s great achievement — or great sin — was to make the national security state permanent.”
Our country is a cesspool of hatred and corruption and there is little chance we will ever turn from it anytime soon.
Not pretty, but quite nasty … it’s the truth and it moves through society and gets rooted in American culture. Where Bush got plenty of criticism from abroad, Europe et al, President Obama gets away with it not even a decade later. Impressive, but very worrisome. Europe has become compliant through some neat tricks of the great powers … create an enemy (Putin and Russia), increase defense spending and a new arms race, suspend nuclear weapons control and treaty negotiations. Europe purrs like a baby and will consume the new Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement .. Monsanto can’t wait for the year 2016.
And the NRA are having a ball under Obama and the “danger” of the Feds and Washington DC .. increased domestic weapons sales, more aggression and wonderful participation of the gaming industry and Hollywood. Don’t take away those Pentagon toys the County Police are implementing, pullease!
Due to the threat of returning jihadists in Belgium, the police are allowed to take their pistol home .. the danger of Muslim fighters!! The first victim has fallen, the wife of a policeman used the weapon to commit suicide. Create fear and exploit fear, who profits??
Two suspects in the high-profile murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov have been detained, the Federal Security Service (FSB) reported. According to FSB chief Aleksandr Bortnikov, the suspects were identified as Anzor Gubashev and Zaur Dadayev.
Bortnikov said both suspects come from Russia’s southern region of the North Caucasus, a restive place with insurgency and crime problems. The investigation into the crime is ongoing …
[Earliest reports mentioned the car used in the murder had license plates from the Caucases, from memory South Ossetia – Oui]
Appears a closer link to the Boston bombing than to Putin and the Kremlin. Don’t tell the GOP though, or NATO commander General Breedlove, bad for western anti-Putin propaganda.
See my new diary – Nemtsov Murder a Chechen Provocation.
well, let’s hope Europe eventually matures and learns to think for itself
I’m interested to hear more about what you mean when you say that liberals and progressives should hesitate more whent thinking about how to implement our preferred policies. It seems to me that Hamletesque hesitation, whatever it is worth, is something that we do reflexively and constantly. But maybe I misunderstand your comment.
I agree that the malfeasance runs deep — is systematic, in fact — but for that reason, I don’t think it’s helpful to look for the cause or solution in prominent individual actors. Bush may have been especially solicitous respecting the demands of the security state, but he was not the architect of those demands, and he faced no significant institutional resistance in implementing them. Congress, in particular, was deeply complicit on both sides of the aisle. The criticism of President Obama seems to be cut from a similar template: There’s an idea that the president is independently decisive in these questions.
This is not just the country that elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. This is the country that, in 2010, voted Russ Feingold out of office — the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001.
If as progressives, let alone as a country where progressives must build coalitions, we really care about rolling back the security state, we have done precious little to show it. I would extend an indictment of our collective naiveté to include the idea that showing up every four years entitles us to expect every item in our long list of policy demands to be scratched off by the few people we have elected to work out the details.
(Correction: Feingold was voted out in 2012. So much the worse.)
No. 2010. Sorry. I’m going to go drink some coffee now.
I think this gets back to something I read a while ago (maybe here!) that the first batch of Progressives were process warriors – they thought a lot about the institutions and process changes that we needed to eliminate corruption and actually perform well. The Social Security Administration runs pretty well because it was designed to run well, as free of corruption as possible. The article argued that the modern Progressive movement doesn’t have the same focus, but it should. I thought those were good points, but I can’t seem to find the article now.
Was it this from the Washington Monthly?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/januaryfebruary_2015/editors_note/why_a_second_progressive
_era_i053469.php
“The second great difference is the almost complete lack of attention being paid by modern progressives to public administration and government structure. Many of the most important leaders and thinkers of the original Progressive Era–Teddy Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lester Frank Ward, Gifford Pinchot, Robert La Follette–put tremendous stake in the design, functioning, and reform of government bureaucracies and of the broader political economy.”
Yes! That was it!
Where is Francis Perkins in that list?
Francis Perkins — the architect of FDR’s federal social/welfare programs. FDR gets some credit because he hired Perkins — or more correctly had to beg her to join his team because she didn’t want such a large job and for personal reasons didn’t want to relocate to DC.
She’s one of my few American Heroes.
An example of this lack of focus on process is how health care reform is being picked apart by its opponents. In this environment, policy has to be bullet proof.
Lack of focus on process and organization is how we got federal legislation imposing modest regulations on health insurers and expanded access to private health insurance through federal government funding and called it health care reform. Would have been a good enough solution a few decades ago when US health care only consumed 8% of GDP. However, as we can see from the Canadian single-payer insurance model that was instituted in the early 1970s when its health care costs were 5-6% of GDP, the health care costs inflation rate since then has been significantly higher than in the UK.
Finland is the only country I’ve been able to find that came late to a national health care system and did it right. Significant improvement in aggregate health and longevity of its citizens, everybody eligible, and costs/inflation controlled.
I have seen suggestions that the weakness lies in the support staff of congressmen. That is why ALEC is so useful to the Republicans.
I believe we need to do a better job of anticipating how the goal might be hijacked by other interests. I think the Ferguson PD is a great example. Who would have thought that they would end up using their police power to essentially run a protection racket? Apparently few even noticed before the Brown shooting. Who would have thought that our perfectly reasonable desire to protect ourselves after 9/11 would go so horribly wrong with Bush and then who would have thought that Obama would preside over this national security and surveillance apparatus? Then there are the examples of what we like to call regulatory capture which became so clear to all back in 2008.
I admit it can result in policy paralysis to spend to much time thinking about these things. We can’t make perfect the enemy of good, but I have a much greater sensitivity now to the danger of empowering government to do things than I did before.
he should have been primaried eons ago
yes