Ralph Reed,, Tom Delay, and casino money...

[kentuck]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/opinion/17rich.html

<snip>
This time the plot begins with money. Two K Street fixers, a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff and a flack named Michael Scanlon, managed to snooker six American Indian tribes into handing over $82 million in exchange for furthering their casino interests. According to The Washington Post, some of their tribal takings, cycled through a nonprofit center for "public policy research," helped send Mr. DeLay golfing in Scotland. The pious congressman, a gambling foe, says he had no idea of his trip's sinful provenance. Never mind that Mr. DeLay was joined abroad by Mr. Abramoff, whom he has described as one of his "closest and dearest friends," or that Mr. Scanlon had once been his spokesman. Mr. DeLay was as innocent of the goings-on around him as a piano player in a brothel.


<snip>
Another Abramoff crony is the political operative Ralph Reed, whom Mr. Abramoff hired for his College Republicans operation in the early 1980's. Mr. Reed, who has called gambling "a cancer on the body politic" and is running for lieutenant governor in Georgia, is now busily explaining that he, like Mr. DeLay, had no idea that some of his consulting firm's Abramoff-Scanlon paydays ($4.2 million worth) were indirect transfers of casino dough. Mr. Reed, of course, is best known for his stint as the public altar boy's face of Pat Robertson's political machine, the Christian Coalition.

[oneighty]

1. And Bill Bennett (Mr. Ethics)

was a heavy contributor?

180

[Warpy]

2. Another sanctimonious fraud, Dobson, is mixed up

in this whole thing, too, in greasing palms and accepting dirty money in order to get selected casinos approved and others denied.

This one's going to be a lot of fun to untangle if we ever get rid of the thieves and their dreary DLC enablers.