Say Anything Blog

ANCHORAGE - Facing a prison sentence of 3½ years, a former Alaska lawmaker said he’s broke and has lost respect for the U.S. government, but that his conscience is clear.

Former state Rep. Vic Kohring was sentenced Thursday for bribery and two other felony corruption charges, convictions he blamed on prosecutors who twisted his words and a judge with a conflict of interest.

“I refuse to cower before you in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence,” he told U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick.

The seven-term Republican from Wasilla said he had to borrow a truck to drive to the courthouse and it broke down on the way. He hitchhiked and was picked up by a loyal constituent who immediately put him on his church’s prayer chain, Kohring said.

Kohring was convicted in November of accepting at least $2,600 from executives of VECO Corp., an Alaska company with more than 4,000 employees that provided engineering, construction and facility maintenance services to major oil producers. Its officers also carried enormous political clout, sponsoring fundraisers and donating to candidates.

Kohring was the third Alaska Republican lawmaker with ties to VECO convicted last year of bribery charges. The FBI also is investigating remodeling work that VECO employees did at the home of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history. Stevens has said he paid all bills presented to him.

Sorry I let you all down.
This filthy gop was picked up late last month.

State Sen. Randy Scott “berated” Dorchester County deputies after failing three field sobriety tests, according to a Sheriff’s Office report released Monday.

The five-page incident report outlines Scott’s arrest this weekend on a driving under the influence charge. The senator allegedly threatened the arresting sergeant and the county magistrate with their jobs.

The arrest, made late Saturday in Summerville, comes just weeks before a primary election that pits Dorchester County political interests against one another.

Scott, a Summerville Republican finishing his first term in the Senate, is arguing that the arrest is politically motivated. He is running against former state Sen. Mike Rose, a Republican, in June.

According to the report, Scott repeatedly argued that politics were at play while deputies conducted field sobriety tests. At the jail, he “berated and at sometimes appeared to be intimidating deputies,” it said.

H/T to Republican Offenders

REP. FOSSELLA ADMITS TO AFFAIR, LOVE CHILD
WON’T RESIGN FROM POSITION

Rep. Vito Fossella, a married congressman from Staten Island, this morning admitted to having an out-of-wedlock child with a former Air Force officer with whom he carried on a longstanding extramarital affair.

The stunning admission comes exactly a week after the Republican politician was busted for drunk driving in Alexandria, Va. presumably on the way to visit his mistress and their young child.

“I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a three-year-old daughter,” Fossella, 43, said in a statement.

Fay, 45, is a retired Air Force intelligence officer who may have met Fossella when she served as a congressional liaison from the Pentagon

..."While I understand that there will be many questions, including those about my political future, making any political decisions right now are furthest from my mind,” he said.

“Over the coming weeks and months, I will to continue to do my job and I will work hard to heal the deep wounds I have caused.”

Representative Vito J. Fossella was driving with a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit when he was pulled over and faces a mandatory five days in jail if convicted, a Virginia prosecutor said on Friday.

...The report said Mr. Fossella failed several sobriety tests on the street, including a preliminary breath test on which he registered a blood alcohol level of 0.133 percent. After he was arrested, he recorded a level of 0.17 percent on another machine. The legal limit in Virginia, as in most states, is 0.08 percent.

Pressure mounted on embattled Rep. Vito Fossella Wednesday to walk away from his congressional seat in the wake of his drunken-driving bust and relationship with a single mom.

Fossella tried to project calm by attending his eldest son’s Confirmation on Staten Island, but some Republican campaign officials warned donors he was a “huge problem” going into the fall elections.

Some even told donors to withhold checks to Fossella, inside sources said.

Party officials were losing confidence Fossella could hold onto his seat even if he survived fallout from his drunken-driving arrest in Alexandria, Va., last week, the sources said.

The married congressman also faced questions over whether he had a 3-year-old love child with retired Lt. Col. Laura Fay, who rescued him from the drunk tank on Thursday, the sources and others familiar with the conversations said.

“That’s a huge problem for us,” a GOP official told representatives of political action committees who support Republican candidates.

WASHINGTON — More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show.

This reliance on troops found medically “nondeployable” is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million service members to the war zones, soldier advocacy groups said.

“It is a consequence of the consistent churning of our troops,” said Bobby Muller, president of Veterans For America. “They are repeatedly exposed to high-intensity combat with insufficient time at home to rest and heal before re-deploying.”

Sang backup for Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne. Engaged to Eagles singer-songwriter Don Henley. Devastated by a brother’s death in Vietnam.

All are part of the colorful past described by Carrollton Mayor Becky Miller, acquaintances say.

But spokesmen for the famous singers said the three don’t know her. And the mayor’s father said she never had a brother who died in the war.

Mrs. Miller’s challenger in Saturday’s mayoral election, Ron Branson, first expressed doubts that her brother had died in Vietnam, and checks by The Dallas Morning News also raised questions about her singing career and whether she attended Western Kentucky University.

The mayor, who is seeking a second term, said that the singers are wrong and that she went by another name when she associated with them during the 1970s. She initially declined to give that name but said Monday that most people at the time called her Pinky.

And he said the brother that his daughter mentioned couldn't have been a stepbrother or half brother unless his wife of nearly 60 years "has one hidden away I didn't know about."">Her father, Edward Sampson, said his son is alive in Maryland. “He was never in the service,” Mr. Sampson said.

And he said the brother that his daughter mentioned couldn’t have been a stepbrother or half brother unless his wife of nearly 60 years “has one hidden away I didn’t know about.”

Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money.

The double shot of bad news had one veteran Republican House member worrying aloud that the party’s electoral woes — brought into sharp focus by Woody Jenkins’ loss to Don Cazayoux in Louisiana on Saturday — have the House Republican Conference splitting apart in “everybody for himself” mode.

“There is an attitude that, ‘I better watch out for myself, because nobody else is going to do it,’” the member said. “There are all these different factions out there, everyone is sniping at each other, and we have no real plan. We have a lot of people fighting to be the captain of the lifeboat instead of everybody pulling together.”

And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.

“The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Rev. Wright or, if Sen. Clinton wins, anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail,” Gingrich said. “This model has already been tested with disastrous results.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI has raided the office of U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch in an inquiry of whether he obstructed justice by having his computer files erased.

FBI officials said computers and documents were seized from Bloch’s office during the raid Tuesday morning.

Investigators say Bloch is suspected of hiring an outside company to scrub his computer amid a federal investigation of alleged misconduct in his office.

The inquiry has been under way for more than a year and is looking into charges of intimidation and retaliation against whistle-blowers among staff members working in Bloch’s agency.

The Office of Special Counsel is responsible protecting the rights of federal workers and ensuring that government whistle-blowers are not subjected to reprisals.

In a new memoir set to be published May 6, the former commander of US forces in Iraq provides new intimate details of the goings-on at high levels of the Bush Administration in the first year of the Iraq war.

His sharp tongued conclusion: “Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.”

WASHINGTON - In March 2005, one of the Pentagon’s most trusted contractors - Virginia-based MPRI, founded by retired senior military leaders - won a $400 million contract to train police in Iraq and other hotspots. Two months later, MPRI set up a company in Bermuda to which it subcontracted much of the work.

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It was not the first time that MPRI executives had used a shell company in an offshore tax haven to perform government-funded work. A year earlier, MPRI headed a joint venture that won a $1.6 billion contract to provide US peacekeeping forces in Kosovo and elsewhere. Three months later, MPRI set up a company in the Cayman Islands to do the work.

Like MPRI’s Bermuda subsidiary, the Cayman Islands company appears to have no phone number, website, or staff of its own there.

Rick Kiernan, an MPRI spokesman, declined to explain why the company created the two offshore entities and stressed that MPRI operates in “total adherence or compliance with the current law.”

But tax lawyers say that MPRI appears to be avoiding the payment of roughly $4 million dollars a year in Social Security and Medicare taxes for the police-training contract alone and is sidestepping scrutiny by hiring workers through offshore entities based outside the jurisdiction of the Internal Revenue Service.

“The employer is trying to take itself out of the audit reach of the IRS,” said California-based tax lawyer James R. Urquhart III.

House Democrats continued to expand their majority Saturday night after Louisiana state Rep. Don Cazayoux emerged victorious in a special election for retired Rep. Richard Baker’s (R) district.

The win comes two months after Democrats picked up their first seat of the year. In March, Democrat Bill Foster won the Illinois seat of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R). That seat, like the Louisiana contest, was in solidly [33 years] Republican areas. President Bush carried the Illinois district with 55 percent and the Louisiana district with 59 percent in 2004.

Cazayoux benefited from a strong fundraising advantage over Woody Jenkins — $810,000 to $490,000 — with much of the help coming from national Democrats. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) spent $920,000 on the contest.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) only spent $440,000 on the race and Jenkins received less than $40,000 from GOP members.

Rep. Vito J. Fossella (R-N.Y.) was arrested overnight in Alexandria and charged with driving while intoxicated, court records showed today.

Fossella is scheduled to appear in Alexandria General District Court on May 12 for an advisement hearing, the records said.

No other details were immediately available.

Reached by phone, Fossella’s communication director had no immediate comment on the report.

Fossella was elected to Congress in a special election to represent the 13th Congressional District of New York in November 1997, according to a biography on his Web site. The district includes Staten Island and the Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and the Bensonhurst and Gravesend neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

He serves as a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Fossella began his political career in 1994 when he was elected to the New York City Council.