Political Ruminations

Morning Quote: Tom DeLay

Former Republican Speaker of the House, Tom DeLay, responding to a question about the Arizona shootings on NBC's "Today" show with his usual utterly with out conscience, crap:

If I was still in congress I would welcome and urge those who can carry to come to my town meetings, I'd feel safer having them there. Gun control and grandstanding doesn't help anyone.

Via HuffPost

Morning Quote: Frank Rich on Tom DeLay Conviction and Wall Street

Oddly enough, the crime for which Tom DeLay was finally convicted last week, money laundering and conspiracy to launder money, well, that’s no longer a crime thanks to the SCOTUS ruling on Citizens United. Frank Rich on NYT:

It’s an industry that can buy politicians as easily as it does dwarfs, which is why government has tilted the playing field ever more in its direction for three decades. Now corporations of all kinds can buy more of Washington than before, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and to the rise of outside “nonprofit groups” that can legally front for those who prefer to donate anonymously. The money laundering at the base of Tom DeLay’s conviction by a Texas jury last week — his circumventing of the state’s post-Gilded Age law forbidding corporate campaign contributions directly to candidates — is now easily and legally doable at the national level.

Morning Quote: Matt Taibbi on Tom DeLay

A striking description of the once powerful GOP Majority Leader, now convicted felon, Tom DeLay, from Matt Taibbi’s book, Smells Like Dead Elephants:

What made Tom DeLay different is that Tom DeLay was a little guy. He had more in common with Bill Clinton (whom not surprisingly he despised, probably precisely for this reason) than with Gingrich or Norquist or Bush. He came from the dirt of the South, with a drunken reprobate for a father and nothing but white trash in his family tree. Unlike Clinton, however, DeLay was not blessed with personal gifts -- looks, brains, charm. Instead of Oxford and Yale, DeLay dropped out of Baylor after being inveighed in a childish campus-vandalism scandal. His pre-politics career as a rat and bug killer was marked by a continual failure that has to be considered shocking in a state so teeming with vermin. An exterminator failing in southeast Texas is like a pimp failing in Bangkok during tourist season.

Via Deux ex Malcontent

Tom DeLay Found GUILTY on Money Laundering & Conspiracy Charges

Finally!

AUSTIN, Texas — Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay [R-TX] – once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress – was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.