I made an offhand comment during a long car ride that the Republicans were a horrible bunch of Congressmen. Pressed for details, I began a rundown of the two cornerstones of Republican power: controlling lobbying activity via the K-Street project and strong party control via strong PACs controlled by Delay et al funded by suspect money, for example via Jack Abramoff.

I can explain the K Street Project pretty easily (here’s Wikipedia and SourceWatch), but I struggled to actually remember the charges filed against Abramoff and to completely lay out the depth of corruption his activities represented.

Wikipedia came to the rescue once again with a solid entry on Abramoff and another on the litany of charges against him. In case you ever find yourself in a similar position, and, like me, would like to focus on specifics rather than generalities, read that list.

The Jack Abramoff scandal is the “largest federal investigation in American political history,” worse than Watergate or Abscam. The scandal not only taints Abramoff himself, but involves corruption at the highest levels of the Republican party. Those implicated (and in many cases indicted or convicted) as a part of this scandal include former aides to former Majority Leader DeLay, Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), and some of their former aides. What’s even more important, in my mind, is that the scandal lays out in detail how corrupt the Republican leadership is. For example, Abramoff represented gambling interests and would lobby (successfully) politicians who publicly would make gambling a major “values” issue to their constituents. They would say one thing to their voters and then vote the complete opposite way in exchange to fundraisers and campaign cash.

Your modern Republican party: working only for some Americans.

(yes, the title is hyperbole for effect…)

Many Republicans, including Sen. Martinez (R-FL), have returned campaign contributions linked to Rep. Bob Ney or Jack Abramoff as a statement against the corruption. Well, Sen. Martinez has a tough choice: Abramoff co-chaired a $250K fundraiser for him. Will he return all of it? Read the rest.

There’s an interesting bit of reporting over at TPM. It’s not clear if this means anything, but a private photo studio that does the photo shoots for a lot of Republican events deleted all the photos in their archive with Bush and Abramoff together. They keep the photos they take and resell them along with rights to publish, etc. Thus they have them all cataloged and available. TPM called the studio as part of their research into what kind of relationship Bush and Abramoff had. Read the story, it’s hard to believe why the studio would do this on their own… The existence of these photos aren’t secret.