Pete Sessions hearts Allen Stanford

Just hours after federal agents charged banker Allen Stanford with fleecing investors of $7 billion, the disgraced financier received a message from one of Congress' most powerful members, Pete Sessions.

“I love you and believe in you,” said the e-mail sent on Feb. 17. “If you want my ear/voice — e-mail,” it said, signed “Pete.”

The message from the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee represents one of the many ties between members of Congress and the indicted banker that have caught the attention of federal agents.

I don't know about you, but the mental image of Stanford with his tongue in Sessions' ear makes me more than the usual nauseous.

Agents are examining campaign dollars, as well as lavish Caribbean trips funded by Stanford for politicians and their spouses, feting them with lobster dinners and caviar.

The money Stanford gave Sessions and other lawmakers was stolen from his clients while he carried out what prosecutors now say was one of the nation's largest Ponzi schemes.

Sessions, 54, a longtime House member from Dallas who met with Stanford during two trips to the Caribbean, did not respond to interview requests.

Supporters say the lawmaker, who received $44,375 from Stanford and his staff, was not assigned to any of the committees with oversight over Stanford's bank and brokerages.

Sessions is one of Congress' biggest clod-hoppers. He consistently finds himself in the news over idiotic statements. But it's fair to note that this is a bipartisan issue. Besides Republicans including former Rep. John Sweeney of New York and convict Bob Ney of Ohio, the list includes current Ways and Means chair Charlie Rangel (whose name also pops up in seemingly every single ethics investigation) as well as Sen. Ben Blue Ass Dog Nelson ... the one from Florida. They both donated contributions from Stanford to "charities".

In addition, Caribbean Caucus member and former Rep. Max Sandlin of Texas -- who became a lobbyist for damage control experts Fleishmann-Hillard after Tom DeLay's redistriciting knocked him out of Congress -- married another Congresscritter, Stephanie Herseth of North Dakota.

There's also this:

In late 2001, Stanford confronted another threat: A bill allowing state and federal regulators to share details about fraud cases — which would have brought Stanford's brokerages under closer scrutiny — landed in the Senate Banking Committee.

Though the Senate was now controlled by Democrats, Stanford was prepared: He had given $500,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2002 — his largest-ever contribution.

“I told him that the Democrats were going to take over, and he needed to make friends with them,” recalled his lobbyist Ben Barnes, once Texas' lieutenant governor.

Stanford also doled out $100,000 to a national lobbying group to fight the measure.

The bill, which sparked sweeping opposition from brokerages and insurers, never made it to a vote.

How is it that Ben Barnes is always mixed up in every single Texas scandal?

Last-Sunday-of-the-decade Funnies

Featuring the Pulitzer-winning David Horsey of the Seattle (now published only online) Post-Intelligencer.

Let's hope he was freed in time to deliver

... the packages ...

They got theirs

One more grinchy post

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

Consider the president's leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there's a conflict, because if there's a conflict, he doesn't want to be anywhere near it.

Health care is a paradigm case. When the president went to speak to the Democrats last week on Capitol Hill, he exhorted them to pass the bill. According to reports, though, he didn't mention the two issues in the way of doing that, the efforts of Senators like Ben Nelson to use this as an opportunity to turn back the clock on abortion by 25 years, and the efforts of conservative and industry-owned Democrats to eliminate any competition for the insurance companies that pay their campaign bills. He simply ignored both controversies and exhorted.

In the vacuum left by the president's inaction, troglodytes like Nelson and Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snowe and Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln took turns rushing in to fill it.

Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it's uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can't tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead.

The man is just weak. Period.

We have seen the same pattern of pretty speeches followed by empty exhortations on issue after issue. The president has, on more than one occasion, gone to Wall Street or called in its titans (who have often just ignored him and failed to show up) to exhort them to be nice to the people they're foreclosing at record rates, yet he has done virtually nothing for those people. His key program for preventing foreclosures is helping 4 percent of those "lucky" enough to get into it, not the 75 percent he promised, and many of the others are having their homes auctioned out from right under them because of some provisions in the fine print. One in four homeowners is under water and one in six is in danger of foreclosure. Why we're giving money to banks instead of two-year loans -- using the model of student loans -- to homeowners to pay their mortgages (on which they don't have to pay interest or principal for two years, while requiring their banks to renegotiate their interest rates in return for saving the banks from "toxic assets") is something the average person doesn't understand. And frankly, I don't understand it, either. I thought I voted Democratic in the last election.

Same with the credit card companies. Great speech about the fine print. Then the rates tripled.

Obama has trashed himself -- and by extension, the campaigns of other Democrats down the ballot in 2010 -- with the base of Democratic activists who do the heavy lifting: the ones who bank the phones, walk the blocks, knock on the doors.

Using the healthcare reform bill as the lodestone, we have a) weak-tea legislation that the insurance companies are hailing; b) that doesn't accomplish real reform for most Americans -- even though it does for many of the most impoverished; c) resulting in the Republicans' caterwauling to kill the bill intermingled with the Left's identical cries ... for obviously different reasons. But the telling moment was once the Democrats announced they had finally secured 60 votes, the healthcare stocks hit a 52-week high.

But-but-but he won the Nobel peace prize...

What's the mood of other key Democratic constituencies? Gay people -- after their concerns about same-sex marriage and DADT got dissed -- got off the Obama bus long ago. Women? Let's see: we're moving fifty years into the past on reproductive freedom, the insurance companies together with the physicians are sending conflicting messages on health issues like mammograms...

Issues? The same thing that happened/is concluding in the Senate and the Congress happened in Copenhagen last week: a bunch of important people quarreled back and forth about a critical matter and ultimately decided to do ... barely something. Cap-and-trade legislation is on the docket first thing after the New Year. How do you think that's going to go? How about alternative energy? Financial re-regulation?

If the trend continues Obama will give a stirring speech and then leave the particulars to someone else, whose job will be to mash the sausage into something tasteless and slightly disgusting but which we all get to eat a spoonful of.

Not the recipe for re-election of anyone who share his views -- whatever they actually happen to be.

Merry Christmas, every one.

Update: McBlogMan feels the same as me.

The Winter Solstice

Not that anyone needs to remind the snowed-in people on the Eastern seaboard, but today is the first day of winter, known as the winter solstice. ...

The bleak news: It's the shortest day of the year, meaning the earth's tilt is at 23.5 degrees. As LiveScience puts it, the top half of the earth will spin on its axis away from the sun. Most of us will experience daylight for only about nine short hours. But it gets worse: The weather will actually get colder. Without sunlight to warm the ocean, temperatures will continue to drop. There is a bright side: From here on out, minute by minute, each day gets a little bit longer. In other words: Countdown to summer. The summer solstice falls around June 21, marking the longest day of the year. Take that, winter. ...

As the Dscriber blog tells it, the winter solstice has been marked since the pre-Christian days about 4,500 years ago. The word "solstice" comes from the Latin "sun stands still," and the rock monument Stonehenge is believed to be one of the ancient sites for the winter ritual. The Guardian reports that archeologists have dug up what looks like the remains of a really big barbeque that could have been a winter solstice fete, shedding more light on the purpose of the mysterious stone structure. But as National Geographic points out, celebrations of the solstice soon got switched out for Christmas, once the Christian religion spread to the West.

Although the dark days of winter are upon us, it could be so much darker. If you happen to reside in the North Pole (Santa and reindeers, we're looking at you), you haven't seen the light of day since early October. And, sorry to say, you won't until March.