On the front page of today's NY Times, this story:

DENVER, Nov. 19 - Private companies and individuals would be able to buy large tracts of federal land, from sagebrush basins to high-peak hiking trails around the West, under the terms of the spending bill passed Friday by a two-vote margin in the House of Representatives.

Looks like another case where energy interests successfully had GOP representatives slip a seemingly mundane provision into a larger spending bill with the hopes of it either going unnoticed or that politicians would simply ignore it to pass the larger bill.

Of course, jurisdiction for this matter falls under the Interior Dept., and who is the head of that important arm of the government but none other than Gail Norton, a former industry lobbyist herself. More so, Norton's name has come up repeatedly during recent Abramoff proceedings. To me it appears as if she was holding out for a higher sum of $$ paid to the right-wing organization she helped found before a face-to-face meeting was granted. Again, in my opinion, she's skating by here with little media attention paid to this aspect of the widespread Abramoff scandal. Bloggers, please help take up the cause of exposing what appears to be highly questionable behavior.

It's a problem. With all of the current on-going scandals, it's easy to lose track of the many names of those who could be implicated and yet are hovering quietly under the radar, with us instead focusing on just the bigger names hurled into the limelight by the MSM. There's a ton of bat-sh*t stink to go around and the noxious fumes are enough to make anyone turn and flee. However, we must don the gas masks and get to the bottom of every last scandal, for the good of the country.

I'm willing to wager that our soldiers in Iraq will be back on U.S. soil before the last GW administration scandal has been put to rest. Way back in 2000, GW once uttered on the campaign trail, "ask not only what is legal but what is right, not what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves." What a joke. If that were the case, Rove would've been fired by now.

GW has managed to lower the ethical state of affairs in Washington to a point that barely flutters above the Watergate era. When you throw in the lies, distortions, and manipulations concerning everything from Iraq, to the passage of bills, to defending their own incompetence, it's much worse than Nixon's lowest point (as John Dean has already stated in book-length).

Like with anything else he's touched in his life, GW has managed to f*ck this up big-time. He's the quintessential anti-Midas of our time.