Good point!:
Recent Texas governors, including George W. Bush, took major donations from people and then appointed them to state boards and commissions.That comes from an article in the Houston Chronicle, spotlighting a common political practice that landed former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman in federal prison--under the Bush Department of Justice.
Neither Bush, nor other Texas governors, was investigated or prosecuted for their appointments.
The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas Governor Rick Perry (a Republican) has received almost $5 million in donations from people he appointed to state boards and commissions. And the newspaper reports that other Texas governors, including one who goes by "Dubya," have followed the same practice.
Siegelman, you will recall, accepted a $500,000 donation for an education-lottery campaign from Birmingham businessman Richard Scrushy and then appointed Scrushy to a health-care oversight board--one he had served on under three previous governors.
That transaction led to their prosecution and conviction on federal corruption charges. Scrushy is serving a federal-prison sentence as we write this, and Siegelman might be headed back to prison after the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld most of his conviction.
So why isn't Rick Perry on his way to the federal pen? There are several reasons: (1) He's a Republican, and only Democrats have been targeted for such "crimes" in the era of Bush. (Why do you think they call them political prosecution?); (2) Such transactions, while they might appear unseemly, have never been considered crimes under federal law. They only became crimes when Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain," initiated a jihad against Democrats over the past eight years.
No comments:
Post a Comment