It's not the sex, it's the bedfellows

[pecunium]

If you haven't heard, a Calif. legislator embarrased himself by acting the peurile twit in front of a live mike, with locker room crudities about his misstresses. Since he was a "family values" Republican that's been getting all the press.

Me.. I don't care who he's sleeping with, so far as the sex goes. He's an adult (though it seems not so very grown up) and she is too. What seems to have been lost in the whole mess is who she was, and what she did.

She was (though I suspect not for much longer) a lobbyist. She lobbied on behalf of companies who had interests on which his committees sat. While he was seeing her they got a number of favorable laws passsed.

But it's worse than that. It was, by most reports, no secret that she and he were keeping company.

So what did they do... they made him the chair of the Rules Committee, with oversight on ethics.

For really disgusting, one of the few places actually reporting on this, is a PayDay Loans Place.

Comments

[sharon-masters.livejournal.com]

Well of course it got overlooked... overall, we have 2 different sets of ethics in Calif (and America, but i will use Cal. as this happened here).
we have people like us who see a conflict of interest and scream- rightly so.
And we have folks who got into office to get their agenda (and hopefully ours) done, and they trade favors for votes and they work with the lobbyists to get support for re-election thinking that they need to stay there to make things better (which might be true- length of time in office means seniority which means power which means being able to get more done with less vote trading and haggling)and they spend all their time in that pressure cooker where they have to wheel and deal rather than reading laws, making votes, and coming home to their constituents.
Sometimes, their constituents are going to vote for them and reward them for bringing home pork because that is a local job fix to an issue even though it hurts the larger group, and sometimes their constituents are going to reward them for getting a local cut rate on something the locals feel is costing too much.
Either way, if we throw ALL of them out fast enough, and lower the boom on the lobbyists with a HUGE law (say, your COMPANY may not lobby for 2 years when found to be abusing the relationship they are *supposed* to maintain with the congressional members?)as well as having the media get some spine and drag these selfish bastards through the news daily until they ALL get more fear of the people than they have greed in their hearts.

Of course, i have advocated for YEARS that part of my democratic funding ought to go to hiring just one serious 'tail' for every member of congress, state wide as well as national. After uncovering the obvious abuses, we might get back on track with folks that practice what they preach on both sides of the isle.