You can fill in the blank.
Courtesy of Captain Ed, we learn that ol' Hairpiece Trent, Hero of Railroads to Nowhere, has a very bad attitude about disclosure of political contributions.
In the next few weeks leading up to Election Day, money will pour into candidates' coffers and voters will be able to see which lobby groups are trying hardest to buy their lawmakers' favor.
Except if the candidates happen to be running for Senate. ...
As it is, almost all senators and Senate candidates deliver their reports on paper (even though those reports are written on computers). The paper filings are laboriously scanned and then key-punched into an electronic system, a procedure that often takes six weeks to finish and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
After the reports are submitted to the Secretary of the Senate (often well past published deadlines), they are placed onto the Federal Election Commission's Web site in a page-by-page format. The listings are not searchable, which makes it almost impossible for anyone to glean useful information Source: WaPost
(This happens to be almost identical to the DiamondJim Doyle reporting method, by the way...his gang of slimebuckets uses Word instead of Excel, making it almost impossible to find out who's getting the next several million in State contracts....)
The Senate has obviously approved tough disclosure rules for House and presidential campaigns, and rightly so. However, the upper chamber has never addressed openness in its own dealings with contributors, and apparently has no plans to do so now.
A bipartisan group approached Trent Lott in July, sending a letter requesting that his Committee on Rules and Administration address this hypocrisy, signed by the seven Republicans and four Democrats and spearheaded by Lott's Mississippi colleague Thad Cochran and Russ Feingold.
The eleven elicited no better response than did Birnbaum, who got stiffed by a Lott staffer when trying to get a comment for his article.
Isn't it about time that Trent Lott gets sent back to a cheerleading squad?
Typical politician, and another poster-boy for term limit throughout the Fed. If they're good enough for the Presidency, the they're good enough for BOTH houses.
ReplyDeleteYah.
ReplyDeleteTry to get THAT through.
One the the few hairpieces I've seen worse than Trent's is that of Sen. Byron "Helmet Head" Dorgan of North Dakota.
ReplyDeleteThat said, Trent can add his name to a list of pols that can be the poster children for term limits?
Me? I'm just the poster child for birth control.