WASHINGTON - Just weeks after declaring themselves fiscal and ethical reformers, lawmakers are adding billions of dollars in special projects to a spending bill for the Iraq war while retreating from some of the lobbying restrictions they'd once touted as the antidote to a spate of scandals.An out-of-control Congress -- who soon may be just (voted) out.
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Government watchdog groups dismiss the House ethics proposals as cosmetic changes, but because some senior Republicans oppose even those as too binding, the outcome of the vote remained in doubt Wednesday.
In the Senate, lawmakers are working their way through a $106.5 billion bill that would pay for the war in Iraq and for hurricane-related costs. But the Senate version is $14.5 billion more than President Bush requested and could grow even bigger, larded with money for lawmakers' pet causes.
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"My leadership doesn't think we have an ethics problem and doesn't believe in reform," said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., one of the leading Republican advocates for tighter ethics rules. The pending legislation, Shays said, "has no redeeming feature."
Offering truth beyond the mere black and white.
"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." -- Antonio Gramsci
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell
Friday, April 28, 2006
Oh what a surprise. The GOP-controlled Congress has decided to continue to spend up a storm and bury ethical reforms:
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