Although senators are not required to disclose information about their mortgages, Politico put the question to them. Earlier this week, Politico staffers called every Senate office and asked for the answers to three questions:
- Who is the senator’s home mortgage lender (or lenders, if the senator has more than one residence)?
- Whom did the senator contact to arrange the loan?
- Did the senator receive any special terms?
This chart reflects the answers received as of Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 10 AM EST. It will be updated as more arrive.
The early line: A substantial number of senators ” being on average older and wealthier than the U.S. population ” don’t have mortgages at all.
Meanwhile, the $300 million mortgage bailout steams ahead in Senate, 83-9
Corruption everywhere we look: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hNJ9wW3eYDl4jikU8pHXosAJyJDQD91GM9MO0
The DOJ report
The Inspector General’s report on political hiring at the Department of Justice was released yesterday. And yes it does seem to show that the Bush administration went to lengths to hire more conservative young lawyers into the Honors track.
And what on earth might have prompted them to do such a thing?
From page 16:
Is there evidence to support this “perception”? Why yes!
On pp. 20-21, we find the numbers that establish that the DoJ career staff in 2002 nominated twice as many identifiable liberals as identifiable conservatives for the Honors track program: 100 vs. 46.
And on page 27, we read that the DoJ bureaucracy advanced nearly three times as many identifiable liberals as conservatives for summer internships that year, 81 vs. 29.
If anything, the ideological bias of the DoJ bureaucracy seems to have become more entrenched with time. In 2006, it nominated five times as many liberals as conservatives for Honors track positions, 150 v. 28, and more three times as many liberals as conservatives for summer internships, 68 v. 16. (See p. 41 and p. 54.)
The evidence suggests that DoJ hiring was contaminated by ideology long before the Bush administration came to town. The Bush administration may have erred and over-corrected. But let’s not allow the permanent government and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) to get away with spreading the claim that things were done in a neutral fashion beforehand.
So, the Bush admin is just carrying out affirmative action for conservatives, huh? Just “trying to be more inclusive”? =))
And why, exactly, is the DoJ keeping tabs on which applicants are “identifiably liberal” anyway? Has this always been the policy?
As for the substance of the remarks…
Keep in mind that what you’re linking/pasting is an example of individuals who have been accused of illegal activity trying to cover their asses. Of course they’re going to say that they only wanted to level the playing field, or whatever.
On the other hand, if five times as many liberals are being nominated for the positions, it seems even stranger that an inordinate amount of the actual positions are going to conservatives. For example, if twenty males and one hundred females were recommended for twenty positions, and all twenty males and no females got them, wouldn’t you agree that something fishy is going on…
My sense is that you can approach a situation like this in one of two ways:
1) You can search the archives for an example in which the other side did something questionable and then say, “Oh well, politics as usual!”
or
2) You can condemn the criminal actions of Democrats and Republicans for what they (equally) are: criminal actions.
The latter seems a bit more ethical.