The Life and Career of Gerald S. J. Cassidy: How Lobbying Became Washington's Biggest Business

Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post

Chapter 15: Propelled by a $4.5 million fee from the government of Taiwan, Cassidy & Associates rises to a new level among Washington lobbyists.

For a lobbying firm whose reputation was built on winning earmarked appropriations for universities and hospitals, helping General Dynamics Corp. save the Seawolf submarine was a thrilling experience -- "one of the biggest lobbying efforts ever," in the words of Vincent Versage, Cassidy's team leader for the project. It put Cassidy & Associates into a new league.

The Republic of China on Taiwan confirmed this new status in 1994 when it picked Cassidy for a sensitive and lucrative assignment -- to persuade the United States government to change its policy toward the leader of Taiwan, and allow him to visit the United States.

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»Jeff Leen, The Post's assistant managing editor for investigative projects, answered reader questions about the Citizen K Street series. Read the Transcript.

"It's great to give positive speeches and talk about hope, but this speech, delivered at the DNC, is the hard-hitting speech that Dems need to give." -- Jenni Charrier

Dennis Kucinich, truthout.org

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Jenni Charrier

It's Election Day 2008. We Democrats are giving America a wake-up call. Wake up, America. In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the neo-con artists seized the economy and have added 4 trillion dollars of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defense, three times more for gasoline and home heating oil and twice what we paid for health care.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their health care, their pensions. Trillions of dollars for an unnecessary war paid with borrowed money. Tens of billions of dollars in cash and weapons disappeared into thin air, at the cost of the lives of our troops and innocent Iraqis, while all the president's oilmen are maneuvering to grab Iraq's oil.

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Setting out to promote her new motivational book, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi found herself under siege by people unhappy that she has not been motivated to try to throw President Bush out of office

Carl Hulse, New York Times

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Ken Mitchell

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set out to promote her new motivational book this month, she simultaneously touched off her national why-haven't-you-impeached-the-president tour.

As she made the coast-to-coast rounds of lectures, television interviews and radio chats the past two weeks (Aug 1-15), Ms. Pelosi found herself under siege by people unhappy that she has not been motivated to try to throw President Bush out of office – even if only a few months remain before he leaves voluntarily.

In Manhattan and Los Angeles, at stops in between, on network television and on her home turf of Northern California, Ms. Pelosi has been forced to defend her pronouncement before the 2006 mid-term elections that impeachment over the administration’s push for war in Iraq was off the table.

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Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman, The New York Times

Jerome R. Corsi, author of “The Obama Nation” and co-author of ”Unfit for Command” (2004).

In the summer of 2004 the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of “Unfit for Command,” the book attacking Senator John Kerry’s record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger damaging campaign against Mr. Kerry’s war credentials as he sought the presidency.

Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up “extensive connections to Islam” — Mr. Obama is Christian — and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday (aug 17) — at No. 1.

The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Mr. Obama and a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday (August 12).

Conservatives have turned a vast government built for our protection into a device for exploiting us.

Thomas Frank, Tomdispatch.com, in AlterNet.org

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

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