Prepare to be pleasantly surprised!
Local Maine News Channel 13 WGME gave what I thought was a very thorough and fair report on the 6:00 News tonight:
http://www.wgme.com/newsroom/top_stories/videos/wgme_vid_5165.shtml
"no taxpayer money was used"..
FOX local would run it..good!
It's only unethical if you use taxpayer money?
March 15, 2005..House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, on Tuesday categorically denied allegations that two of his overseas trips were paid for by special interest groups
JIM LEHRER: Gwen Ifill takes it from there.
GWEN IFILL: All eyes on Tom Delay.
Joining us to talk about the ethics questions swirling around the House Majority Leader are Chellie Pingree of Common Cause, a 'bipartisan public watchdog group'; and Stephen Moore, president of the Free Enterprise Fund, a Republican lobbying firm. Chellie Pingree, with all these mounting questions rising that are swirling around about Tom Delay, what bothers you most?
CHELLIE PINGREE: Well, I think it's the whole picture that we are looking at here. You have a member of Congress in a position of leadership who clearly has been pushing a lot of ethics questions right to the edge. He was admonished, as you saw, by the committee itself.
And then it looked like Republican leadership decided things had gotten a little bit out of control. They removed Congressman Hefley as the chair of the committee; they also took out two other Republican members and got rid of two senior staffers who had been there for a very long time and at the same time they propose the changes to the rules so the Ethics Committee would have less teeth than before.
Now you have coming to light a variety of new accusations about ethics violations, yet there is no committee to enforce them. I think the questions that it raises is do we have here a fox guarding the hen house in the sense where a very powerful member of leadership can actually dismantle the committee, take away the rules.
And in a kind of ironic way, today he is now saying "Well, I wouldn't mind discussing these trips that I've taken in front of the Ethics Committee. They can feel free to look into them." But we don't have an Ethics Committee. It refused to constitute itself. The process is basically broken, gone. And the irony is where does he even go if he wants to get some discussion of what is going on?
GWEN IFILL: Let's go over some of the questions which have been raised. Does it not bother you at all about who paid for the trips to Britain, who paid for the trips to South Korea, whether a foreign government underwrote them?
CHELLIE PINGREE: One of the challenges, is now whether you say, "the Democrats do it, why worry about it," is that that's the point of having an ethics process. The reason we need a very strong Ethics Committee with teeth who's willing to take on these very difficult challenges is so that we can always make sure that the public has confidence in the body and that the members of Congress don't do anything that would shame or embarrass the body.
That's the whole point here. Now the fact is, the original admonishments to Tom Delay came from a bipartisan vote of a bipartisan Ethics Committee. It was a very unusual move from a committee that had a seven-year truce. Nothing was going to happen.
They finally came out and they said something about its original violations. So you have to look at this as someone who has already come under question and the truth is on these particular trips or these questions, there is now no functioning body with anyone able to decide. ..This is, you know, the most important decision-making body in our country deciding not to police itself. And that is very serious.
I actually think that increasingly you are starting to feel that this is getting closer to the tipping point, that the Republicans are starting to feel the heat, that this is making their party look bad and not having a strong ethics process, making it even worse.
PBS audio/video with real player
"there is now no functioning body with anyone able to decide"
Did Clinton stump for Pingree in Maine yet? I know Rudy was up for Scontras..Clinton's popularity is like a washed up recording artist bringing back his Greatest Hits, 6 more times!!