Last November, many voters who went with a democratic candidate cited the number of scandals among the GOP as the reasoning for their decision. Many of the Republicans who were locked in scandals were given the boot, but for those who escaped the elections with their jobs intact, an important question had to be answered: who do we make the ranking member of a panel charged with investigating financial institutions? Apparently, the answer was Gary Miller (R-CA), who is currently locked in investigations regarding shady land deals.

So to review: The best that the GOP, (a party which lost power due in large part to corruption), can do when it needs to fill a position on a committee which itself deals with corruption, is to appoint someone who is himself under investigation by the FBI for corruption. Why was the post open? Because the last person to hold it, John Doolittle (R-CA), had close ties to Jack Abramoff.

According to The Hill's article:

Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), said the leadership team would act "decisively" if a member were found to have violated the law or House rules.

Why was decisively in quotations? Probably because that was the same word that Dennis Hastert's spokesman used when he referred to how they would handle the Foley scandal.

Wait. They didn't handle the situation.

Regarding the charges against Rep. Miller:

...Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said Republicans are in the minority because they have operated under just that kind of policy for the past several years. The group filed a complaint about Miller's land deals with the IRS last August. "Until you can understand that your members have to do better than just avoid indictment, then you're going to stay in the minority for many years to come," Sloan said. "We're gratified that there is an investigation. Miller has been clearly engaged in illegal activity and hopefully this will put an end to it."

Jonathan is the editor of SkipperStyle, a political blog.

The day after President Bush's State of the Union speech, most pundits have addressed the fact that the bulk of his remarks pertained to domestic issues. While problems still exist in Iraq, he (not surprisingly) is absolutely sure that things will take care of themselves. I don't share his confidence regarding Iraq's future, and I certainly have my doubts about the quality of the democracy which he seems to have forgotten here at home (this is still a democracy, right Alberto Gonzalez?).

I have discussed the haphazard job that the Diebold Corp. has been doing in carrying out its duties as the defenders of the purest element of democracy: voting. You might think that a company whose only task is creating voting machines could take care of business. However, after last summer's nightmarish stories about how easily their machines can be hacked, it became clear that they couldn't. Now, as if we didn't already have our doubts about these machines, a new flaw is discovered: they post pictures of the master key on their own website. And by master key, I mean the ONE key that opens EVERY Diebold voting machine. It was only a matter of time before someone recreated a key based on the photo, and tried it out.



I'm no locksmith, but is the only thing between a clean election and a full-blown scandal nothing more than a mini-bar key from Motel 6? Isn't there something wrong with entrusting the duty of manufacturing voting machines to a company whose CEO made substantial donations to a particular political party? (Republican, in case you were wondering).

I find myself asking this a lot recently, but is this really the best we can do?

Jonathan is the editor of SkipperStyle, a political blog.