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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (18201)	7/25/2002 8:23:32 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Scrap the rule of law. Let's revert to bannana republic status... No need to scrap it. Just live with the knowledge that the boys on top will bend it when they can, and try to keep the bending within some sort of reasonable bounds. Those bends have been going on for the last 200 years, and they haven't destroyed the nation yet. Seems to me like you see evasion of the law as a major issue when you dislike the person doing the evading. That's normal enough, I suppose. <edit> This was posted elsewhere, and should appeal to you.... Message 17791961 America, Mark Twain once said, is a nation without a distinct criminal class "with the possible exception of Congress." If anything, the Congress of today is even worse than it was in Twain's time more than a century ago. The 535 men and women who make up the House and Senate of the United States include, at best, a collection of rogues, con artists, scofflaws and bad check artists. At worst, they comprise, as Twain once observed, a distinct criminal class. Over the past several months, researchers for Capitol Hill Blue have checked public records, past newspaper articles, civil court cases and criminal records of members of the United States Congress. We have talked with former associates and business partners who have been left out in the cold by people they thought were friends. What emerges from this examination is a disturbing portrait of a group of elected officials who routinely avoid payment of debts, write bad checks, abuse their spouses, assault people and openly violate the law. They include current Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla), whose trail of bad debts, lies to Congress and misstatements to the Internal Revenue Service have spawned a number of investigations. Then there is Rep. James Moran (D-Va) whose wife has charged him with abuse, who has assaulted other members of Congress on the floor of the House and is a former stockbroker whose judgment in trades is so bad he is broke from poor investments. The list also includes Joe Waldholtz, a con man and husband of former Rep. Enid Greene Waldholtz (R-UT) who kited more than a million dollars in bad checks and ended up in prison. Others, like former Ohio Senator John Glenn, have driven creditors into bankruptcy because of unpaid debts left over from aborted Presidential campaigns. Even millionaire Senator Ted Kennedy has left a trail of unpaid debts from past campaigns. In recent years, members of Congress have gone to jail for child molestation, fraud and other charges. Our research found 117 members of the House and Senate who have run at least two businesses each that went bankrupt, often leaving business partners and creditors holding the bag. Seventy-one of them have credit reports so bad they can't get an American Express card (but as members of Congress, they get a government-issued Amex card without a credit check). Fifty-three have personal and financial problems so serious they would be denied security clearances by the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy if they had to apply through normal channels (but, again, as members of Congress they get such clearances simply because they fooled enough people to get elected). Twenty-nine members of Congress have been accused of spousal abuse in either criminal or civil proceedings. Twenty-seven have driving while intoxicated arrests on their driving records. Twenty-one are current defendants in various lawsuits, ranging from bad debts, disputes with business partners or other civil matters. Nineteen members of Congress have been accused of writing bad checks, even after the scandal several years ago, which resulted in closure of the informal House bank that routinely allowed members to overdraw their accounts without penalty. Fourteen members of Congress have drug-related arrests in their background, eight were arrested for shoplifting, seven for fraud, four for theft, three for assault and one for criminal trespass. Over the next five days, Capitol Hill Blue will take a closer look at some of the more notorious members of America's Criminal Class - the Congress of the United States. We will not run lists of every member who has written a bad check, punched somebody out or been charged with slapping a spouse. Rather, we will examine those whose pattern of behavior suggests a blatant disregard for both law and propriety.