Since both the White House and Congress no longer consider prosecuting torture as a crime, it is safe to assume that we can begin to legally use these methods as legitimate tools to lobby our Congress and White House for the real changes we expect from our government. These methods that I document will be equally applicable to those who lobby against the interests of average American citizen on these issues.

Congressionally Approved Method of Lobbying #1

Method for lobbying Congressional members and White House administration officials that push for funding of energy non-solutions such as the proven mythical "clean coal":

The symbolism of turning their mythical clean energy into a tool for lobbying for real clean energy solutions ought to shock them into doing the right thing.

I'm sick of primary babble, and today I'm in one of those moods where I'm all about individual people who rawk, and ignoring how the process/nation as a whole sux. I got this in an email, but you can give her some turkee here.

TOMORROW, fourth congressional district candidate Donna Edwards will bring attention to a fundraiser honoring Rep. Wynn by the nuclear energy lobbyist Entergy.

Rep. Wynn is being honored at this high-dollar lobbyist breakfast tomorrow by Entergy, the second largest nuclear operator in the country. As the House Chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials, whose interests is Rep. Wynn serving? Entergy is one of the corporations Wynn is supposed to police. Instead, Entergy spent more than $1.1 million lobbying the federal government in just the first half of 2007, giving $18,500 to Wynn's campaign through the Employees of Entergy Operations Inc PAC and the Entergy Corporation PAC.

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Once, His Lordship the Grey One put up a post comparing stats for his Mighty Blue Implement of Power and that of some Potter fanzine site. The difference was truly Awesome, and the Potterites showed what "dedication" and "popularity" really look like in online communities/causes. In that spirit, I offer the following. Do read the whole thing:

The results suggest a startling conclusion: On average, companies generated roughly $28 in earmark revenue for every dollar they spent lobbying. And those at the very top did far better than the average: More than 20 companies pulled in $100 or more for every dollar spent.

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Sigh. This won't surprise any of you (and good on McClatchy, again). But one little tidbit caught my eye:

But as recently as December, the Sierra Club sued the Bush administration after the Environmental Protection Agency rebuffed a petition to require health-and-safety studies for companies that use lead in children's products. The EPA and Sierra Club settled out of court in April, with the administration agreeing to write a letter to the CPSC that expressed concern about insufficient quality control on products containing lead.

Rules? We don't need no stinking rules, beside "Democrats" passed them- they must be good! Like this one: if you can't pay my way for front seat tickets at the Bob Seger concert, I really don't care what you think. Here, have a "money" quote, it's the closest you'll ever come to the real thing:

“I am not going to hide from the fact that we have to raise money,” said Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican who has invited donors to his political action committee on a wine-tasting tour in June, modeled after the movie “Sideways.” “Only a moron would sell a vote for a $2,000 contribution,” Mr. Nunes said

To me, it seems like there are three choices. 1: Hang them, by their feet, on every lamp post in the 2000X zip code area over a burning fire until you run out of posts or fire 2: Get serious about raising money online until ActBlue and BlogPAC can compete with the "hunting and fishing" lobbyists 3: get serious about the Constitutional amendment it's going to take to clean up campaign financing. Or just keep on feeling like an "effective sucker." Wow, maybe I should turn off the computer. I just noticed I had this rope, a nice stack of dried wood, and a lonely lamp post right outside my window.

Well, well, well. The FBI sure is busy these days. I wonder what will fall from this particular family tree:

MEDIA, Pa. - Three weeks before Election Day, an
FBI corruption probe involving Republican Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record) intensified as agents raided the homes of his daughter and a close friend.

The FBI swept in Monday and searched six sites in the Philadelphia area and Jacksonville, Fla., including Karen Weldon's lobbying firm and one of its clients, a Russian energy company, FBI spokeswoman Debbie Weierman said. The congressman's home and offices were not searched, she said.

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Well, I guess you're not surprised:

Lobbying-money record broken again
By Jim Snyder
Spending on lobbying totaled more than $1.2 billion for the last six months of 2005, another record, according to a tally on the website politicalmoneyline.com.

For the year, spending topped $2.36 billion, according to the site. For the first time, during the last half of the year, spending to lobby Congress and the executive branch averaged $200 million a month.

The biggest single spenders in the second half of the year were the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, General Electric, AT&T (including SBC), the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform and the American Medical Association.

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I don't really have an opinion on the idea of making porn sites use the .xxx address. However, I find this little exchange interesting for the light it sheds on how email and communication in general is managed by our opponents:

ICM says the e-mails show how the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce, were subjected to intense pressure to intervene in some way on behalf of the The Family Research Council, and Focus On The Family, two religious conservative lobbyists.

NTIA members then started keeping watch as to how the .xxx proposal was reported in the media, had drafted letters protesting the .xxx domain addressed to ICANN, helped facilitate meetings between ICANN and concerned groups, and otherwise "marshaled our resources at ICANN," as one NTIA official put it in an e-mail.

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They are really cheap whores, our leaders. I was reading this and wondering, "where's the real money?" Then I hit this passage:

Public Citizen’s Congress Watch The Bankrollers 37

In recent years, Kies has used his remarkable skill and motivation to lobby Congress and the IRS to retain a tax credit that costs the Treasury an estimated $1 billion to $4 billion a year and appears to serve no public policy purpose other than enriching the businesses that exploit it.56 It’s called the synfuel tax credit, and it stems from a 1980 law created by Congress as an incentive to use coal and other fossil fuels to create synthetic natural gas and oil as alternatives to foreign sources of energy.57 But tax sleuths eventually figured out that the law’s loose definition of synthetic fuels could be exploited to claim massive tax credits for producing products that barely differed from conventional fuels.58

By 2006, opportunistic companies – including the hotel chain Marriott and retail electronics chain Rex Stores Corp. – had created 55 plants that were fashioning synfuel by such means as spraying regular coal with diesel fuel, pine-tar resin, limestone or various other substances. Industry critics call the practice “spray and pray,” the prayer being that the IRS doesn’t conduct an audit that results in an unfavorable ruling. Time, which has published a pair of exposés on synfuel, estimated that the tax credit cost the Treasury $9 billion from 2003 to 2005.

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