CONgressional Ethic(sic)

82 members (40 Democrats and 42 Republicans) paid family members through their congressional offices, campaign committees and political action committees (PACs); 44 members (20 Democrats and 24 Republicans) have family members who lobby or are employed in government affairs; 90 members (42 Democrats and 48 Republicans) have paid a family business, employer, or associated nonprofit; 20 members (13 Democrats and 7 Republicans) used their campaign money to contribute to a family member’s political campaign; 14 members (6 Democrats and 8 Republicans) charged interest on personal loans they made to their own campaigns; 38 members (24 Democrats and 14 Republicans) earmarked to a family business, employer, or associated nonprofit. The next person that says that Democrats are any less slimy than Republicans gets punched. They are parasites.

• Please reference the ethics rule and explain how it has been violated.

• Democrats are less slimy than Republicans. Democrats are working for their families. Republicans are working for their families AND the 1% criminal class.

• Tell me how much Haliburton made off two wars while Bush/Cheney were in office. I'll take putting the wife on the payroll (Republican or Democrat) any day over that.

• Democrats have bigger numbers there in most of the categories than Republicans, r2.

• Your tea party outrages are lame. You provide no context. People have paid family members? lent their campaigns money? Why is this bad, exactly? How much money was involved? This country has many challenges ahead. Your idiotic knee jerk 'all government is BAD' helps to address none of them. YOu also seem not to be peeved about the fraud in the private sector that nearly imploded the global economy. None of it caused by government. None. Where's your outrage about that?

• [quote]Tell me how much Haliburton made off two wars while Bush/Cheney were in office. And how much of those Halliburton billion$ went into Cheney's off-shore bank account?

• OP, you can't cherry pick some data and then come to the conclusion that both parties are equally corrupt. You're a moron if you think so. The Republicans are an order of magnitude worse. The Republican party is SYSTEMICALLY corrupt (see ALEC). In the Democratic party, corruption is more or less an individual thing.

• No they don't, r4. Of the six categories in the list, Democrats led in just two.

• R4 can't count and/or is mathematically illiterate.

• Vote them all out then

  Shrug

• Just vote out the Repugs. That will be a good start. THEN start voting out the corrupt Democrats.

• when we have been dealing with crimes on the order of selling our republic to a handful of billionaires, creating fake economic crises to mask the upwards redistribution of this country's resources, and the massive scale fraud of wallstreet, as well as invading sovereign nations based on lies, i think nepotism is the least of our problems. good try, OP.

• I downloaded the entire pdf file and looked through it. Sorry, but 90% of it is petty cash level bullshit-- reimbursing the wife for $300 in travel expenses or the elected official getting a few hundred out of the campaign fund to pay for "travel expenses." Most of it looks pretty harmless, and certainly not worth spending 10X as much to investigate it. I'm not defending it, and the 10% is probably worth a closer look, but can we talk about the health care plans and retirement plans and all the other perks they openly give themselves instead of this nonsense?

• "when we have been dealing with crimes on the order of selling our republic to a handful of billionaires, creating fake economic crises to mask the upwards redistribution of this country's resources, and the massive scale fraud of wallstreet, as well as invading sovereign nations based on lies, i think nepotism is the least of our problems." And you don't think the Dems are just as culpable? Are you retarded?

• No, they are not "just as culpable". Yes they have certainly played their part as well but the Republican party has consistently played and continues to play a larger role in directing our country in a way to favors the elite and screws over the middle class. The false equivalency argument it was of the laziest most repeated pieces of nonsense I've ever heard.

• The origin ot the word Politics: Poli-Greek meaning many tics-blood sucking parasites And that goes for all of them on both side.

• First of all, OP never posted a link. Therefore, he is an internet liar until proven otherwise.

• It good to see a rethug op admit his disparate group of political thugs are criminals too. He may be attempting to shift focus and blame, but he's still identified some of the scum of his party.

• It reads like a who's who of liberal Democrats: Clinton, Corzine, Dodd, Schumer, Kerry, Markey, Rangel, Bradley, Lautenberg ... and yes, even Obama. And what they all have in common is Bernard Madoff and his company of lies. In fact, the disgraced one-time Nasdaq boss and founder of an investment firm that authorities say brokered one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in Wall Street history also liberally sprinkled a portion of his allegedly ill-gotten billions to help further the political fortunes of his favorite candidates and their campaigns -- it appears to the tune of more than $400,000.

• Just a few months ago Jon Corzine was on the short list to be President Obama's Treasury Secretary, but now he's ignoring a request to testify before a House subcommittee investigating the demise MF Global and setting up a showdown that could have major political implications for the president as his 2012 re-election looms.

• Veteran congressman Rep. Charles Rangel and his campaign have agreed to pay a $23,000 civil penalty in a settlement over the use of a rent-stabilized apartment as his campaign headquarters, according to Federal Election Commission documents. In response to a complaint originally filed by the National Legal and Policy Center in 2008, the commission found that the 21-term Harlem Democrat violated federal law by paying a reduced market price for a space used as the New York headquarters for multiple campaigns for over a 10-year period, and by failing to report the deduction as an in-kind donation.

• Anyone could spend hours posting links to major violations by Republicans AND Democrats. That's the point. BOTH parties are in the pockets of big agribusiness, big banks, big military contractors, big pharma, etc. Anyone who tries to pretend that Dems are any more ethical than Reps is just fooling themselves to feel better about their ignorance.

  OP

• Can anyone name any politician who has a spotless ethical record besides Ron Paul?

• r21 that example is so minor. No covert wars, nobody died. A congressman's harlem office that had low rent didn't report the difference in rent and market value as a gift? That's amazing how trifling it is. Is that the best you can do?

• R24, Rangel (and Pelosi, Reid, etc.) voted for the war in Iraq. And Afghanistan. And Syria, and Libya, and all the rest. There is as much blood on his hands as Bush or Obama. Quit trying to pretend that Democrats are any less bloodthirsty than the Republicans. We shouldn't forget about his votes to bail out the big banks, or support of The PATRIOT Act, or the NDAA. He is no better than Santorum or Romney.

• Bump

• I

• A U.S. Justice Department source has told The Daily Caller that at least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives who were indicted under court seal within the past 13 months, but never arrested or prosecuted. The sitting governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, his attorney general and an unspecified number of Virgin Islands legislators also accepted bribes, the source said, adding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is aware prosecutors and elected officials were bribed and otherwise compromised, but has not held anyone accountable. The bribed officials, an attorney with knowledge of the investigation told TheDC, remain on the taxpayers’ payroll at the Justice Department without any accountability. The DOJ source said Holder does not want to admit public officials accepted bribes while under his leadership. That source said that until the summer of 2011, the two compromised prosecutors were part of a team of more than 25 federal prosecutors pursuing a financial crime ring, and at least five other prosecutors tasked to the case were also compromised by the criminal suspects they were investigating, without being bribed. TheDC is withholding the name of the source, a knowledgeable government official who served on the Justice Department’s arrest team and was involved in the investigation, in order to prevent career retaliation from political figures in the Obama administration. A former high-level elected official vouches for the government source’s veracity. “[The source] was trustworthy … and you could tell [the source] information or [the source] could hear information and [the source] would keep things close to [the source’s] chest,” that former official told TheDC. “You could trust [the source] with your life.” The identities of the prosecutors who accepted bribes and others who were compromised have not yet been made public, and TheDC has not yet independently confirmed their identities. The prosecutors themselves are now cooperating with Justice Department investigators. (RELATED: Full coverage of the Justice Department)

  http://news.yahoo.com/bribery-compromised-officials-leave-indicted-financial-crime-suspects-031612503.html

• I lived part time in the USVI for 5 years, and know this personally. The corruption there is almost as bad a DC.

  R28

• Remember, congress is also a synonym for getting fucked.

  Anomynous%20

• Ain't it, R30. Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.---HLMencken

• After earlier none other than Obama stepped up and invoked an executive privilege, hoping the next step would be avoided, Darrell Issa just called the president and the AG's bluff: HOUSE PANEL VOTES TO HOLD ERIC HOLDER IN CONTEMPT - BBG But wait, there's more: HOLDER CALLS CONTEMPT VOTE `EXTRAORDINARY' AND UNNECESSARY HOLDER CALLS CONTEMPT VOTE `ELECTION-YEAR TACTIC' ... And now to give some illegal immigrant voters pseudo-amnesty. So aside from this soaring acrimony between Republicans and Democrats, the "Fiscal cliff" issue will be promptly resolved. Promise. From Bloomberg: A U.S. House committee brushed aside President Barack Obama’s claim of executive privilege and held Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over documents related to a law enforcement effort to track guns to Mexican drug cartels.   In a party-line vote, the Republican majority on the House Oversight and Government Reform panel voted to approve the first contempt citation for a Cabinet member in 14 years. Republicans said Holder failed to comply with a subpoena for documents in the Fast and Furious gun operation, which allowed illegally purchased firearms from the U.S. to wind up in Mexico.   The 23-17 committee vote marks an escalation in a standoff that began last year between Republican lawmakers and the Obama administration. The full House would have to approve the measure before it could refer the case to the U.S. attorney in Washington to determine whether prosecution is warranted for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena.   The House panel is seeking documents describing internal Justice Department discussions about a February 2011 letter to lawmakers that Holder later said mistakenly contained incorrect information.   The Justice Department says it already has provided more than 7,600 pages of documents in the case.   This is the first time Obama has invoked executive privilege, according to the White House.   Executive Privilege   Executive privilege is a principle that says the executive branch can’t be forced by the legislative branch to disclose confidential communications when they would harm operations.   Documents responsive to the House panel’s subpoena relate to “sensitive law enforcement activities, including ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions,” said Deputy Attorney General James Cole in a letter today to Republican Representative Darrell Issa of California, the chairman of the House panel.   Guns in Fast and Furious ended up “lost” and will turn up at crime scenes on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border for years, Holder told lawmakers last year.   Two of about 2,000 guns that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed to be carried away were found at the scene of the December 2010 murder of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in Arizona, according to a congressional report.   Holder has said he didn’t learn of the tactics in the operation until after it was the subject of news reports. Since then, he has banned the use of similar law enforcement methods.   Holder last year told a Senate hearing that he regretted a Feb. 4, 2011 letter the Justice Department sent lawmakers that indicated the ATF hadn’t “knowingly allowed” the tactics in the law enforcement operation to be employed. Information in the letter turn out to be inaccurate, he said.

• The Goldman Sachs unit Goldman Sachs Asset Management has hired Andrew "Buddy" Donohue, a former head of the division of investment management at the Securities and Exchange Commission, as deputy general counsel, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters. It's always nice to hire your former regulators.

• Wow. Trolldar R14, and it's like a giant yellow wall of right-wing crazy.

• Paragons of virtue.

• Congress has ethics?

• Congresional ethics is an oxymoron. The opposite of progress is Congress.

• Gotta love double standards. But libertarians are crazy for wanting ALL laws to apply to everyone.