Well...This certainly can't be good news for the pukesters.

[Justice Is Comin]

This is it folks, the damn is breaking !!!!





The K project is looking more and more like it's going to be the D project. Batten down the hatches. Cut off the head of the snake and the body dies.



~cliperoo~ (And look what page)

Democrats' Stock Is Rising on K Street ......http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/16/AR2006081601598.html
Firms Anticipate A Shift in Power

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 17, 2006; Page A01





Washington lobbying firms, trade associations and corporate offices are moving to hire more well-connected Democrats in response to rising prospects that the opposition party will wrest control of at least one chamber of Congress from Republicans in the November elections.

In what lobbyists are calling a harbinger of possible upheaval on Capitol Hill, many who make a living influencing government have gone from mostly shunning Democrats to aggressively recruiting them as lobbyists over the past six months or so.

"We've seen a noticeable shift," said Beth Solomon, director of the Washington office of Christian & Timbers, an executive search firm that helps to place senior lobbyists and trade association heads.

n June, one of Washington's largest lobbying law firms, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary LLP, transferred the chairmanship of its government affairs practice from a Republican, Thomas F. O'Neil III, to a prominent Democrat, James J. Blanchard, a former governor and congressman from Michigan.

"Being a Democrat didn't hurt me, that's for sure," Blanchard said. "This is going to be a big Democratic year."

[Liberty Belle]

1. Nominating! K St. Hires Dem Lobbyists, anticipating change of power

This is a very good sign.

[rumpel]

2. rats abandoning ship

what a miserable bunch

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. Or in jail

Or under indictment.

It's going to suck to be a Repug.

[Richard Steele]

3. K street doesn't watch which way the political wind blows...

It _IS_ the political wind, in many ways.

This is a very good sign of things to come in November.

[The_Warmth]

4. I agree, I wonder if the...

corps had a large impact on their ability to retain control in spite of the evidence of election theft.

[Rageneau]

5. Bomb K Street all the way to the Litani River!

And bury every lobbiest alive in the rubble.

[magellan]

6. If I could I'd nominate your post

Of course bombing K Street would just scatter the cockroaches. But I support the sentiment.

[Sherman A1]

7. Agreed

We need campaign finance reform that eliminates K street lobbyists entirely. Then we will get our country and government back in the hands of the people.

[sofa king]

8. I'm not so sure about that.

Lobbyists are the closest thing to direct representation that we have. It's the shortest circuit between what we, the people want and what they, our elected representatives, actually do.

If you take them away, you're taking out a valuable component of free speech, and more importantly, you're adding a potentially dangerous level of haughty isolation between the representatives and their constituents. Worse still, the most powerful lobbyists won't actually go away. Instead they'll simply take up informal positions as "advisors" and the like. The wealthiest interests will always be able to pay enough to make sure that their people are inside, but the rest of us will be left out in the cold.

I once had a curious inside-the-beltway conversation with Bill Paxon's former chief of staff. After Newt Gingrich had destroyed Paxon's career, the guy moved over to K Street (so too did Paxon, though he styled himself an "advisor" precisely as I cautioned above). "I don't understand why everyone hates lobbyists so much," he said. "Everyone in America has lobbyists here in DC--they just don't know it." I suppose that to extra-Beltway Americans that sounds absurd, but it's really quite true. Someone out there really is working to forward interests which you support--I'm sure someone's being paid right now to lobby against all other lobbyists.

Anyone who acts as a third-party between you and your Representative is a lobbyist to some degree; that holds as true for moms writing their Congressmen to get their kids back from Iraq as it does for a slick lawyer shilling for the tobacco industry. Though everyone would like to level the playing field in their own personal favor, it's difficult to hamstring one without also crippling the other.

That's not to say that there isn't a heck of a lot of reform that needs to be done. Perhaps we could restrict lobbyists from approaching anyone but their own Representative and Senators in Congress (though it ain't cheap to fly between the Pribilof Islands and DC, as I have seen). We can certainly reduce their influence on the electoral process. And we absolutely must force Congress to make lobbying records public, as they were before the DeLay era and legally should be right now.

But running all the lobbyists off presents the danger of creating a Senate more worthy of the Roman Republic than our own. In those days, the people had a voice (a really smelly one, according to Shakespeare), but that voice really had only one message, which was "if you can hear us, it means we're about to tear this damned city down and kill every last one of you." We deserve the ability to present a more insightful and constructive message, whatever it may be.

Edit: Ooooh, I just did a really bad thing. Nowhere above did I disclose that I myself have acted as a lobbyist! That's very uncool, and I apologize for not stating it clearly and up front. I suppose it doesn't matter whom I've lobbied for, but I have always thought it was for the right people and the right reasons. There are a lot of people like me in this town, too.

[annabanana]

10. Lobbyists are the closest thing ?

Perhaps for corporations they are. It's time to revisit that "corporations are people too" crap.

[emanymton]

13. Yes. And Priests Are Needed To Help People Deal With ...

God.

The members of Congress are the people's lobbyist! Lobbying is not wrong, professional lobbyng bribing members of Congress is wrong!

[w4rma]

14. Agreed. Lobbyists aren't just corporate lobbyists. There are also

environmental lobbyists, and civil rights lobbyists, and voting rights lobbyists, and any issue or group that you can imagine lobbyists.

[dcfirefighter]

15. A few thoughts on lobbyists......

1) when this country was formed, each Congressman represented 30,000 people. Today it's roughly 650,000. If each Congressional Representative represented a much smaller number of people, the need for third-party lobbying would be much less. 435 representatives is large enough to preclude much organized deliberation: 1000 or even 10,000 Congressional Representatives would not much degrade the ability to deliberate. In other words, it's not the size that becomes unweildy - the size is already unwieldy for that purpose - it's the votes that count.

2) when this country was formed, the several states performed most functions of government. The Congress mostly dealt with national issues such as treaties, defense, imports/exports, monetization, and issues between the states. If local & state issues were returned to the states, local representation would reduce the need for (and benefit of) national lobbying. This would also allow much of the 'workload' of Congress to be devolved to the states.

3) I agree that lobbying isn't evil. However, (and I do ask for your knowledge on this) aren't 'groups' of people such as unions and consumer groups limited in how much money they can spend on lobbying? It seems to me that it would be quite easy to rig the laws such that individuals (the rich) could give large amounts while groups (the poor) could not.

[sofa king]

18. I'm not sure about your question.

First of all I don't know how one could limit lobbyist spending. If there are limits, one simply has to change the job description of your lobbyist. I said above I was a lobbyist, but various legal loopholes removed me from the necessity to actually register with Congress. As I (vaguely) recall, firms are only required to name their two primary lobbyists to Congress, so I suspect that most lobbyists are not registered. If they try to restrict lobbying firms, they'll just become activist law firms, or they'll hide under the wing of a larger corporation (I really dislike that "corporations as people" crap, too).

It all surrounds the question, "what is a lobbyist," and the broadest definition probably starts when someone else intervenes on your behalf to Congress. If you start there, it's really hard to nail anyone down.

Second, I think it would be unconstitutional to seriously restrict anyone from lobbying. The First Amendment seems to pretty clearly restrict Congress from adbridging the right of the people "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." And that's pretty much what lobbying is.

What Congress has tried to do is restrict the power of lobbying firms to support candidates in elections. Even that's a dicey issue since there are arguments out there which claim that campaign donations are a part of free speech, and I don't pretend to know what's going on with all that.

And here's something else that I want to get off my chest: I've spent a modest amount of time on Capitol Hill; I've met plenty of Members of Congress and talked with them and kissed ass.

They're all doofuses.

No, really. When it came to the issues I was pimping, damned near none of them knew jack about them--and it was their duty to know. They don't know anything about anything; it's impressive to see a Member who is conversant on more than a few pet issues, and some never even get to that point. (That's part of what made John Kerry so impressive to me--that dude really knows his stuff about a wide range of issues, highly unusual for a Member.)

So Members of Congress are entirely reliant on outside influence for their decisions. That influence can come from other Members, or their staff, or constituents who visit them, or from the hundreds of thousands of emails that they never read, from the phone that never stops ringing, or from the mail that never gets through the Anthrax Office. Or it can come from interested parties who seek to educate the lawmaker while simultaneously taking a position on that issue. But if you're acting as an advocate, you're lobbying, no matter what you're advocating. Like it or not, Members of Congress depend on lobbyists to spell things out for them. We'd all like to see that change, but it won't.

[TygrBright]

21. Yes and no...

...your observations are spot-on, but the conclusions you draw seem to be based on the assumption that we can't change the system effectively, and I disagree.

If we had a public financing-plus-spending limit rule for campaigns, for example, permitting a tiered ballot and proportional-choice voting, we'd have greater freedom of access to then ballot and more emphasis on getting actual voter turnout, which would make populist campaigning necessary for all candidates.

I agree, having been a "legislative advocate" myself, that few if any elected officials can make sufficiently informed decisions about the whole range of issues for which they are responsible. And that having ready access to information provided by groups with a strong stake or 'special interest' in the issue at hand is critically important. Such information has to be balanced, however, with information from legislative staff and intra-governmental sources, as well as more objectively-focused sources.

The poison enters the system when the value offered by lobbyists is no longer information or direct voter support, but money for re-election campaigns or party coffers to cement majorities, etc. We MUST unlink the connection between lobbying and funding.

adamantly,
Bright

[sofa king]

22. I really hope you're right.

I do hope that my conclusions are incorrect, and I agree that as long as the lobbyists can wave around cash under the guise of election funding, it's tantamount to bribery and must be stopped.

My cynicism stems from seeing how years of incremental progress on a particular front can be wiped away instantly, illicitly and without explanation on the whim of a gangster like Tom DeLay. It's so difficult to effect constructive change; it's simple to roll that change back to primitive conservative favoratism.

But I agree that we must keep trying.

[hootinholler]

16. Start with

The Willard Hotel lobby! It's the lobbiest lobby for lobbyists in D.C.

:evilgrin:

Couldn't resist.

-Hoot

[Virginia Dare]

20. Give me a heads up first....

I'm right in the middle of these rat bastards, but I'm on your side!

[annabanana]

9. Time to get those corporate snake oilers pouring some of that

sweet sweet lubrication all over some dems...

[emanymton]

11. Maybe So. But More Of The Same - I Don't Want!!

Not willing to change the criminals in D.C. for new criminals in D.C. with a D next to their names.

Corruption is NOT acceptable!

[YOY]

17. Couldn't agree more

If the ower does truly change hands, I don't want to see a bunch of assclowns let it swing right back in the other direction.

[Virginia Dare]

19. Just covering their bases...

I don't read all that much into this. It could be a predictable mid-term trend.