From
MyLeftNutmeg:
by: BranfordBoy
October 09, 2005 at 15:28:14 EST
The New York Times' Glen Justice exposes Washington's dirty little secret of cohabiting lobbyists and legislators.
PERHAPS it was inevitable in a city where passion and power live side by side: people who start as colleagues or contemporaries often wind up cohabitating. Journalists marry spokespeople. Government workers marry activists. Lawmakers marry lobbyists.
It's the last category that often leads government watchdogs to grind their teeth. How can a member of Congress possibly share a bed and a bank account with a member of the persuasion industry without a life laced by conflicts of interest?
"This is way up there on the unseemly scale," said Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch.
The text and accompanying graphics single out Dems Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad, Tom Daschle, and William Delahunt, along with Republicans Richard Lugar, Orrin Hatch, Ted Stevens, Roy Blunt, and Dennis Hastert.
Missing from the list is our own junior Senator Joe Lieberman and wife Hadassah, who is in the employ of high powered lobbying firm Hill and Knowlton, hard at work on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.
Why Justice and his editors found it in their hearts to omit Joe Lieberman and wife Hadassah from their little perp walk is beyond me. At the very least, it would have evened up the article's list of Democrats and Republicans, suggesting that neither party is any worse than the other (as the SCLM does with religious fervor these days).
Perhaps so much unseemliness, so close to home, was just more than the newspaper of record could bear.