Carol Browner who was Clinton’s EPA director (and one of the worst ever whose policies lead to massive forest fires and higher fuel costs) is now the White House Climate Czar. Browner struck a blow for Obama’s “transparency promise” by instructing execs and staffers to “Put nothing in writing, ever”.
Carol Browner, former Clinton administration EPA head and current Obama White House climate czar, instructed auto industry execs “to put nothing in writing, ever” regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated regarding a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is demanding a congressional investigation of Browner’s conduct in the CAFE talks, saying in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, that Browner “intended to leave little or no documentation of the deliberations that lead to stringent new CAFE standards.”
Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions, so instructing participants in a policy negotiation concerning a major federal policy change could be viewed as a criminal act.
ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: For those concerned about stimulus spending, the General Services Administration sends word tonight that $18 million in additional funds are being spent to redesign the Recovery.gov Web site.
The new Web site promises to give taxpayers more information about where their money is going than the current version of the site.
“Recovery.gov 2.0 will use innovative and interactive technologies to help taxpayers see where their dollars are being spent,” James A. Williams, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, says in a press release announcing the contract awarded to Maryland-based Smartronix Inc. “Armed with easy access to this information, taxpayers can make government more accountable for its decisions.”
The contract calls for spending $9.5 million through January, and as much as $18 million through 2014, according to the GSA press release.
“We are pleased that another major milestone has been achieved,” Earl E. Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, says in the press release. “We thank the GSA for its assistance and look forward to working with Smartronix.”
UPDATE: The firm who got this lush $18 million contract is a big contributor to Democrats.
By: David Freddoso
Commentary Staff Writer
07/09/09 8:28 AM EDT
ABC reports this morning that the Maryland firm Smartronix has won what seems like an enormous $18 million contract to re-design the Recovery.gov website. Approximately $9.5 million would be spent by January in order to make “Recovery 2.0″ out of the site that is supposed to track the spending of federal stimulus funds in detail.
Smartronix, a medium-sized Maryland-based firm (over 500 employees) founded in 1995, boasts a large number of government clients, mostly military. The company appears to have just one important political connection: according to FEC records, Smartronix president, Mohammed Javaid, vice president Alan Parris, and partner John Parris have together given $19,000 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D) since 1999. There is no record of a Smartronix employee contributing to any other federal politician.
UPDATE: Smartronix got $260 million in other federal contracts
Smartronix has received more than $260 million in federal contracts since the year 2000, with the top awarding agencies being the U.S. Navy, Federal Technology Service, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Minerals Management Service, and the Office of Policy, Management and Budget (not clear which department or agency issued this contract), according to USASpending.gov.
Nearly $180 million of the contracts awarded to Smartronix during the period 2000-2009 were awarded on less-than-competitive basis, including $21 million for non-competitive awards. Another $33 million was awarded in competitive processes in which Smartronix was the sole bidder.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has more details on Smartronix government contract awards. — Update by Mark Tapscott.
Of course you’d never know that from reading hit jobs like Todd Purdum’s sepulchral piece on Palin in the current Vanity Fair. Scurrying around Alaska with his notepad, Purdum still managed to find comically little to indict her with. Anyone with a gripe is given the floor; fans are shut out. This exercise in faux objectivity is exposed at key points such as Purdum’s failure to identify the actual instigator of Palin’s extravagant clothing bills (a crazed, credit-card-abusing stylist appointed by the McCain campaign) and his prissy characterization of Palin’s performance at the vice-presidential debate as merely “adequate.” Hey, wake up — Palin cleaned Biden’s clock! By the end, Biden was sighing and itching to split.
The vicious double standard is pretty obvious. Only the tabloids, for example, ran the photos of a piss-drunk Chelsea Clinton, panties exposed, falling into her car outside London clubs a few years ago. If Chelsea had been the scion of Republican bigwigs, those tacky scenes would have been trumpeted from pillar to post in the U.S. as signals of parental failures or turmoil in clan Clinton. As a Democrat, I detest the partisan machinations that have become standard in Northeastern news management and that are detectable in editorial decisions at major metropolitan newspapers nationwide. It’s why I, like a host of others, have shifted my news gathering to the Web.
Paglia comes to the same conclusion we have a long time ago, journalism as an ethical profession and art form, is dead.
NPR’s Dollar Politics series looks at the business of crafting legislation, specifically the big three issues now before Congress: health care, climate change and financial regulation.
In this installment, Andrea Seabrook and Peter Overby report on how lawmakers juggle that work with their other big job — raising money to get re-elected.
Lobbyists As Fundraisers
Senator Chris Dodd
The fundraiser was a $1,500-a-plate luncheon, hosted by two lobbyists, with proceeds going to support Dodd’s re-election campaign.
The lobbyists hosting the fundraising event work for U.S. Oncology, a major provider of cancer drugs and services. Their business is all wrapped up in the health care proposals.
According to Dodd’s campaign manager, there were other donors in attendance — not just those with a stake in health care policy. But this scenario is a snapshot of something that happens all the time on Capitol Hill.
A member of Congress will routinely spend part of the day legislating — and part of the day raising money. And that money often comes from the industries that will gain or lose from that legislation.
Paying To Play?
Some people call it the way the system works. Others call it bribery — but not the Supreme Court. The high court has said that campaign contributions are not bribes.
Lobbyists don’t think so either, especially because the money usually comes from political action committees — a step removed from corporations themselves.
Nicholas Meyers, who runs the lobbying operation for the American Psychiatric Association, representing 38,000 psychiatrists, says it’s simply the price of admission.
This is exactly what we predicted would happen. Go back and see if you doubt me. Government largess spending does not work to stimulate the economy because the money is spent for political reasons and not economic ones.
Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in ‘08
By Brad Heath, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Billions of dollars in federal aid delivered directly to the local level to help revive the economy have gone overwhelmingly to places that supported President Obama in last year’s presidential election.
That aid — about $17 billion — is the first piece of the administration’s massive stimulus package that can be tracked locally. Much of it has followed a well-worn path to places that regularly collect a bigger share of federal grants and contracts, guided by formulas that have been in place for decades and leave little room for manipulation.
Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows. That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college.
The reports show the 872 counties that supported Obama received about $69 per person, on average. The 2,234 that supported McCain received about $34.
WASHINGTON – Sweeping healthcare legislation working its way through Congress is more than an effort to provide insurance to millions of Americans without coverage. Tucked within is a provision that could provide billions of dollars for walking paths, streetlights, jungle gyms, and even farmers’ markets.
The add-ons – characterized as part of a broad effort to improve the nation’s health “infrastructure’’ – appear in House and Senate versions of the bill.
Critics argue the provision is a thinly disguised effort to insert pork-barrel spending into a bill that has been widely portrayed to the public as dealing with expanding health coverage and cutting medical costs. A leading critic, Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, ridicules the local projects, asking: “How can Democrats justify the wasteful spending in this bill?’’
It’s time to put a stop to the high priests of musicology, the arts and academic world in general from trying to put a straitjacket on people’s creativity and thinking. In this video I look at the way the Emperors Clothing Syndrome has dominated the arts and humanities over the past half century, with the help of academic practitioners looking for theories to build on, trying to carve out some academic territory for themselves and becoming the high priests or priestesses of their chosen domains. In music, it ended with meaningless and very irritating noise. (The ECS is a tendency to pretend to see or believe something out of fear of being thought of out of step with others, or out of fear that you might be attacked or ridiculed if you show your true feelings). Now I make some sweeping generalizations in this video, and may be overstating my case for effect, but that does not necessarily dilute the reality of what I am saying.
According to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records by the Center for Responsive Politics, the 2008 Obama campaign received $12.6 million from Wall Street “Securities and Investment” firms versus McCain’s $7.9 million
The top three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan
Employees of Lehman Brothers alone gave Obama $370,000, compared to about $117,000 to McCain. (No wonder Bush let them go under.)
Since 1998, the financial sector has given a total of $37.6 million to Obama, compared to $32.1 million to McCain. But Obama ran for his first national office only in 2004. So McCain got less from the financial industry in a decade that included two runs for president than Obama did in four years.
Tammy Bruce interview with Palin insider Rebbecca Mansour
Palin made legislators come to her office to explain to her and justify the pet projects they tried to tack onto spending bills. That is a great way to fight cronyism and corruption. It is also a great way to royally piss off slimy politicians.
A multi-million pound initiative to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving.
The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex.
But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were ’significantly’ more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice.
A total of 16 per cent of those on the Young People’s Development Programme conceived compared with just 6 per cent in other programmes.
It gets worse -
The £5.9million YPDP programme was also designed to slash cannabis use and drunkenness among teenagers, but made no difference whatsoever.
CableNewsCritic.com a popular cable news industry blog, now predicts that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow will be canceled since the ratings are so low that it has fallen behind CNN’s Lou Dobbs re-runs.
I have watched Rachel Maddow. She has a cute smile and a very entertaining rhetorical style. She has spunk and in spite of the bad hair and wardrobe she is a likable character to be sure. Where Maddow falls down is on the substance. Once you have seen her show for a couple of weeks you have seen it all.
Maddow spins hard for the left, much like Sean Hannity does for the right, and while spin has its place, the spin still has to be directionally accurate and has to hold up so anyone doing 20 minutes of internet or public records research to see if it mostly holds up and more and more this is where Maddow gets in trouble.
We have taken Rachel Maddow to task a couple of times (1, 2), only to realize that correcting her could turn into a full time job. Apparently her viewers are figuring that out.
This is the heart of the reason why the leftist elite media and Democrats attack her the way they do. In spite of a media onslaught of smears that has been unprecedented in US history, with a reasonably well run campaign she can win.
A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Monday night found that 53 percent of Americans felt the media coverage of Palin was unfairly negative and that 70 percent said their opinion of Palin hadn’t changed since she decided to step down as Alaska governor.
While it remains to be seen whether Palin will seek the presidency in three years, 19 percent of voters said they would be very likely to vote for her in 2012 and another 24 percent said they would be somewhat likely.
UPDATE: Time Magazine has a very fair (amazing) interview with Gov. Palin HERE. Palin says that 2012 is not off the table.
Too many loons manage to become professors. Many of these loons do so because they just cannot make it in the real world. They create groups to hand each other awards and tell each other how great they are, but only if you sling hate at the “right” people.
The latest example of truly mindless, sexist, hate is from Prof. Walter Brasch whose very foolish behavior managed to get him mentioned here and likely in my upcoming book.
Now keep in mind that the following remarks are from a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His remarks are about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin who cleaned up what used to be one of the most corrupt states in the union:
Walter Brasch
You betcha! Half my salary is already taken up on clothes and jewelry so I can be the best darned governor in these here greatest United States of America!
Trust me, babe, we don’t want your wisdom, but that’s how this business works. You want to ride, you have to pay the operator. Now, about punditry.
Sweet cheeks, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet! Make the audience salivate when they see you on air, and we’ll get you a regular slot. An hour, maybe more every week night.
Whatever you want, we’ll get. You’re a money machine. So what can we get you? Maybe a full time babysitter for Todd and the kids. They might be lonely without a wife and mother.
~
Talk about a slap in the face to every working mother in America. On a side note, who is this turkey to be making comments about a woman’s looks? If Hollywood tried to cast an aging pervert who roams the park and flashes people from under a trench coat could they do better than this clown? In either case hateful, sexist and without a residue of journalistic ethics or professional detachment seem to be required resume material for so many professors today.
Prof. Brasch is a quintessential example of what is wrong with not only journalism, but the failures of public university education.
What is Crony Capitalism? It has several names like corporatism and like “political market economics” and what does it mean?
Corporatism is political market economics on steroids. Political market economics is not like regular market economics which is a meritocracy (where you make the best product at the best price for consumers), in political market economics the goal is to manipulate and lobby regulators and politicians to tilt the rules in your favor, which in turn enriches politicians by donations.
Big business loves big government, which is why big business loves domestic taxes and regulation because it keeps the small and medium sized competition out of the competition. It also causes inflation, so ultimately it is you who pays and the poor who are hardest hit. (Big business often gets loopholes written in the laws for themselves such as Nancy Pelosi trying to get a part of the tuna industry exempted from the minimum wage law).
We have written about the dangers of crony capitalism many times and how it leads to more and more government corruption (1, 2, 3, 4,).
Want to get ahead in business? Make friends in Washington.
by Fred Barnes
First President Bush, then President Obama poured billions into General Motors and Chrysler to keep the companies alive but barely breathing. That was just for starters. Next came Obama’s creation of an Auto Task Force to oversee the auto companies. To head the task force, the president picked Steve Rattner, a Wall Street investor with no experience in automaking but lots in raising campaign money for Obama and Democrats.
GM and Chrysler were quickly restructured, mostly to the benefit of the United Auto Workers, the union which spent millions in 2008 to elect Obama and Democrats. The UAW now owns 17.5 percent of GM and 55 percent of Chrysler–quite a return on an investment of zero dollars. Obama said all parties should “sacrifice,” but only bondholders did. They got a fraction of what they were legally entitled to receive. UAW retirees, in contrast, got a gift of $9.5 billion at GM and $14.2 billion at Chrysler.
There’s an epilogue. Delphi, the auto parts manufacturer once owned by GM and still its biggest supplier, has been in bankruptcy for four years. To acquire its assets and run the company, Delphi and Obama’s Auto Task Force picked an affiliate of the private equity firm Platinum Equity. There was no auction or competitive bidding, though Platinum stands to make millions in the deal. Why Platinum? The UAW favored it, sources said.
There’s a name for all this: crony capitalism. Obama insists he believes in capitalism, but it’s not the free market variety that he’s been promoting since he became president. Obamanomics is a different strain entirely.
Crony capitalism is usually identified with Third World despots, like Hugo Chávez, who reward their friends and allies in the business and financial communities. Some might be appointed to top government jobs, as Rattner was. But the chief characteristic of crony capitalism is favoritism for some companies or organizations (unions, for example)–in loans, grants, giveaways, and specific policies.
There’s another aspect. Obama isn’t merely rewarding a few cronies, he’s seeking more and more favored groups to reward. One way he’s doing this is through his energy, health care, and other policies, which would boost certain companies and industries over others. Another way is by providing cheap capital, which gives firms an advantage over competitors who must acquire capital at higher interest rates in private markets. The Federal Reserve, along with Obama’s Treasury Department, plays a big role here.
The effect of Obama’s approach to business has been enormous. In less than six months, he’s changed the relationship between the private sector and Washington. Companies increasingly “compete for government favoritism, not for consumer choice or preferences,” says Republican representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
“Members of Congress are being besieged with calls from businesses who have an expectation of getting a check from Washington,” Ryan says. “The business mindset is, if the government is going to pick winners and losers, I want to be a winner. What it means is all roads lead to Washington.”
Thirty-three other states also filed an amicus brief supporting incorporation, though they weren’t the surprise that California’s brief was — 31 of them filed an amicus brief in Heller that also endorsed incorporation (footnote 6). The two new additions are Maine and North Carolina. One of the states that joined both of the multistate briefs, Minnesota, is one of the six states that doesn’t have a right to bear arms provision in the state constitution; California is another.
At a time when so many politicians go into office poor and come out rich, a $500,000 legal bill is a lot of money for a family that isn’t on the take.
In video two, Karl Rove tells what should be expected of Governor Palin now that she isnt stuck in Alaska and intends to go national.
The Wall Street Journal explains how transparency laws can be abused to bring a state government to a standstill:
Contrary to most reports, her decision had been in the works for months, accelerating recently as it became clear that controversies and endless ethics investigations were threatening to overshadow her legislative agenda. “Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration,” someone close to the governor told me. “She was fully aware she would be branded a ‘quitter.’ She did not want to disappoint her constituents, but she was no longer able to do the job she had been elected to do. Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself.”
This situation developed because Alaska’s transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy. Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin’s use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.
By the way, it was determined that Palin was well within state law to bring her small children along. What is she supposed to do, leave them at home to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when Todd is working on the North Slope? JFK had small children tag along, so did Clinton, Carter, Obama and countless governors and members of Congress, but for some reason a different and very sexist double standard is applied to Sarah Palin.
The corrupt governor Palin replaced ran up 80% more personal expenses than she has, and ran up less than the Democrat governor before him, yet they are fine and she is waistfull with the states money???..ridiculous.
That was $500,000 in legal bills in six months and she had 18 months left in her term, so add on another 1.5 million in personal legal bills and another 6 million of the state’s money. This is what the Democrats have done to Alaska state government. How can anyone but the very rich run for office with Democrats behaving this way?
It has been discovered through Sotomayor’s documents released to Congress that she belonged to an activist group that opposed testing as an avenue for promotion.
Judge Sotomayor had dismissed the Ricci fire fighter case with next to no comment causing protests by her fellow judges. The case was elevated to the Supreme Court where once again Sotomayor was overturned.
Sotomayor should have recused herself from the case because she was adamant against any kind of testing as an avenue for promotion as her own documents show.
A civil rights group advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in the 1980s brought several discrimination lawsuits that sought to scrap the results of job tests because too few Hispanics scored well, according to new documents.
WASHINGTON – A civil rights group advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in the 1980s brought several discrimination lawsuits that sought to scrap the results of job tests because too few Hispanics scored well, according to new documents that are fueling GOP criticism of the judge.
The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund represented Hispanic sanitation workers in New York City who wanted to stop white employees from getting promotions because, they argued, the qualifying exam unfairly disadvantaged minorities. The case unfolded as Sotomayor chaired the organization’s board of directors’ litigation committee, although there is no evidence that she had any role in the group’s decision to participate in the lawsuits, or in formulating or drafting any of their legal arguments.
Still, the case bears strong similarities to a much-discussed case Sotomayor ruled on last year as a federal appeals court judge, which involved the reverse discrimination claims of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who sued after the city threw out its promotion test because too few minorities qualified. A panel she joined ruled against the white firefighters in the case, Ricci v. DeStefano. The Supreme Court reversed the decision last Monday.
From my endless archives, a few samples of how the major media wrote off Ronald Reagan repeatedly:
Newsweek, 1971, “Ronald Reagan’s Slow Fade,” ended with the judgment that “the somber truth is that Sacramento may mark the end of Ronald Reagan’s political road. . . By every normal measure, Ronald Reagan ought to be entitled to any political future he wants.A close aide said, ‘The Presidency?Oh, he’s not interested.Four more years and I think you’ll see Ronald Reagan riding one of his horses off into the sunset.’” And see Stephen Roberts in the New York Times Magazine: “In 1976, the reasoning goes, Reagan would be 65, and too old to run.” “When a guy’s built on celluloid,” Democratic State Senator George Moscone said, “he goes up fast, but he burns out quickly.”
After the 1976 campaign, Newsweek offered a reprise, “Into the Sunset”: ”The concluding line of Reagan’s convention speech—’There is no substitute for victory’—could also turn out to be a epitaph for his own political career.”
And not to be left out, John Coyne wrote in some magazine called National Review that “Reagan seems somewhat out of step with the new political stirrings, a man very much of the Sixties. . . For a decade he has been a central symbol of everything that is best in what we call the conservative movement, and if his approach and his ideas are obsolete, then so are those many of us who believe in him.And it’s never much fun to be a middle-aged anachronism.”
Everyone should apply the appropriate discount to the Palin commentary and analysis they read today.
Palin talks about what Obama tax policy, economic policy, central control, judicial nominees, Obama/Bidens foreign policy naivety. Everything she has said has come true.
It is prophetic.
Is this a candidate who doesn’t have command of the various issues?
Editor’s note: These are the comments I left on Patterico’s blog today (7/5) -
Guys, no one can run any kind of national media or fund raising campaign while stuck in Alaska. No one can start collecting political IOU’s from there also.
Look at how Obama has used TARP and other programs to pick winners and losers of companies who will get our tax dollars and will now cycle some of that money back to his re-election campaign.
Anyone who plans to take Obama on needs to start raising money now. Obama is the wall street corporate/lobbyist owned candidate and lobbying reports from DC is making that pretty clear.
Obama did not hold one hearing for the subcommittee he chaired as a senator, not one. He made a speech to the DNC and used one office to immediately start running for the next. Obama was a do nothing senator.
Palin at least made it clear that she got her legislative agenda passed and instead of just collecting a paycheck and doing nothing she is moving on. – Really some of the comments (seen across the blogosphere) show that some of you just are not thinking.
Governor Palin said today that most of the pundits told her to stay quiet and go with the flow, well my husband and I are commercial fisherman and we know that the only ones who do that are dead fish.
What does she have to do to make it more clear? Perhaps she should have said, “If you want a fight , I’ll give you one?
She also said, “I can now effect change on a different scale”.
John Batchelor, who is considered one of the finest intellects in conservative news radio, has a great piece in the Daily Beast (LINK). Batchelor really gets it and his piece is a must read. Palin is the party nominee, she can step into the void of Republican leadership now and start raising money.
Palin took shots today directly at Obama’s policies and then said that she was “not retreating, we are advancing in a different direction”.
Palin Spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton tells Fox News Sarah Palin is “not running from pressure” and “this is a fighting move”.
It’s on.
In the last election, as the bottom of the ticket she was subject to the mishandling of Steve Schmidt and others on the McCain team. Now we will be able to see how she can perform with Sarah in charge.
Palin has a book to write and a new Washington PAC to run. She also needs to raise money and redefine herself because of the hatchet job the media has done to her.
While Palin has her critics, notice that you don’t see critics talking about Palin’s record as governor, or taking her to task on the policy positions she has taken. If they did they would lose, which is why they just keep tossing insults and smears and unspecific platitudes at her.
My advice to Palin, it is time to do the “maverick” ticket the right way (that means not sabotaging your campaign brand as the McCain campaign did) and position yourself as the experienced corruption fighter who is willing to take on her own party if need be. Get John Bolton on the horn too and see if you can get him on board. Make another call to Dick Morris and have him start making ads for you.
Palin is no fool, she is going to start raising money now, it is no secret that she is a fund raising machine.
Also Palin will not be beholden to what were incompetent communications strategists like Steve Schmidt and others like she was in the last campaign. Expect hostile and grossly unfair media figures to be treated as they deserve to be treated, like political opponents.
UPDATE – Todd Palin just told Fox News that Palin will be addressing Alaskan as well as national concerns. Chuck Heath, Sarah Palin’s brother, tells Fox news the same.
WASHINGTON — Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.
The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That’s a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.
The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among lawmakers as “codels,” has risen nearly 70% since 2005, when an influence-peddling scandal led to a ban on travel funded by lobbyists, according to the data.
More!
In mid-June, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D., Hawaii) led a group of a half-dozen senators and their spouses on a four-day trip to France for the biennial Paris Air Show. An itinerary for the event shows that lawmakers flew on the Air Force’s version of the Boeing 737, which costs $5,700 an hour to operate. They stayed at the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand Hotel, which advertises rooms from $460 a night.
The lawmakers were invited to a dinner party at the U.S. Embassy and had cocktails at a private party at the Eiffel Tower. Mr. Inouye attended a dinner sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association, a U.S. trade group. Another senator on the trip, Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, took a cruise on the River Seine with defense-industry executives and elected officials from Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.
Mr. Inouye and Mr. Shelby declined to comment.
More!
Often, lawmakers combine trips to war zones with visits to more tranquil spots. In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation of Democratic lawmakers to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a day. Before landing in Kabul, the eight lawmakers and their entourage of spouses and aides spent eight days in Italy, spending $57,697 on hotels and meals.
