Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush ally stung

by new charge and questions on favours for lobbyist

The new charge came as it became clear that Mr DeLay was being

investigated in a separate scandal, in which politicians are under scrutiny for doing legislative favours for a powerful lobbyist, Jack

Abramoff, in return for expensive gifts such as golfing trips to Scotland – a possible violation of federal anti-bribery laws.

Lady Thatcher’s office confirmed that it had been contacted by police to “clarify” details of a meeting the former prime minister held

with Mr DeLay in May 2000. Mr DeLay went golfing at St Andrews during the same visit, but has said he was unaware Mr Abramoff paid for

the trip, and that it was made for professional reasons, such as the meeting with the retired leader. Lady Thatcher had described the

meeting as a “courtesy call”. …

If the bribery inquiry into Mr Abramoff also reaches Mr DeLay, who once numbered the lobbyist

among his “closest and dearest friends”, the consequences for the Republicans could be even more serious.

Mr DeLay has said he

thought his British trip was paid for by a thinktank, the National Centre for Public Policy Research, of which Mr Abramoff was a board

member. But there is evidence the lobbyist reimbursed the centre for some expenses and paid others directly.

Gov.

Vetoes Same-Sex Marriage Bill – Los Angeles Times
By Nancy Vogel and Jordan Rau, Times Staff Writers

SACRAMENTO — Gov.

Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to legalize same-sex marriage or raise the minimum wage in a flurry of vetoes Thursday that killed a spate

of Democratic-backed labor and consumer protection bills.

On a day when the governor rejected 52 bills, he discarded proposals

that would have helped consumers buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. He refused to expand punishments for employers that flout

minimum wage laws, pay women less than men or resist paying workers’ compensation claims.

He declined to protect nurses from

being required to work overtime or having to lift patients on their own. And he vetoed legislation to allow workers locked out by

employees during pay disputes to collect unemployment benefits.

Pursuing a Fast Track To Party

Leadership

Some of Blunt’s activities have prompted criticism, for instance an unsuccessful 2002 maneuver to attach a

provision banning tobacco sales on the Internet to the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security.

Blunt did not succeed,

but the effort struck many of his colleagues as an overreach, given that his son was a lobbyist for Philip Morris in Missouri, Blunt

himself was dating a Philip Morris lobbyist whom he later married, and the congressman had received more than $150,000 in contributions

from the company and subsidiaries.

Buying of News

by Bush’s Aides Is Ruled Illegal – New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: October 1, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 –

Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s

education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to

analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability

Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

Contract Killers – New York Times
It’s quite a

fall, no doubt about it: from agile insurgency to bloated establishment in just over a decade. So what went wrong? The 1994 Republicans

understood that power in Washington was not simply a matter of who controlled the White House and Congress. Passing legislation also

required the support of powerful unelected business interests and their representatives on K Street, the historic home of the lobbying

trade.

Led by Mr. DeLay in the House, Rick Santorum in the Senate and Grover Norquist downtown, Republicans worked not just toward

the partisan realignment of the country, but of the influence industry, too. They tracked which lobbyists were Democrats and which

Republicans, refused to meet with the Democrats and pressured business groups and law firms to hire the conservatives. Their strenuous

efforts to blur the boundaries between corporate America and the Republican Party came to be known as the K Street Project.

It was

an incredible success. By 2002, if you look at numbers from the Center for Responsive Politics, industries that had long made bipartisan

campaign contributions largely abandoned the Democrats, leaving Republicans with an overwhelming edge in corporate donations. By 2004,

the lobbyists themselves gave the Republicans $1 million more than they gave Democrats. The number of Republican lobbyists grew. And so

did the number of lobbyists, period – from about 9,000 when the Republicans took power to more than 34,000 today.