Washington Babylon — March 16, 2009, 8:39 am
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Just because there’s still a Justice Department investigation rattling around you doesn’t mean lobbyists can’t contribute to buying a portrait for you to hang in your congressional committee’s hearing room. But don’t reach for those checkbooks. The effort to raise $30,000 for a portrait of Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), former chairman and now ranking GOP member of the House Appropriations Committee, has met its goal, we hear.
The investigation, a subset of the probe of disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, apparently has been dormant for a while, indicating Lewis is in pretty good legal shape. And even if the investigation heats up, there’s no worry that Lewis’s portrait won’t be hanging soon in the hearing room — even if he’s indicted and convicted. After all, former House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud in the House Post Office scandal and did over a year in the slammer, and his portrait proudly hangs in that hearing room.
More from Ken Silverstein:
Commentary — July 25, 2012, 2:20 pm
Washington Babylon — September 29, 2010, 11:37 am
Ratio of military recruiters to college counselors at East Los Angeles’s Roosevelt High School:
The majority of young Swedish women are attracted to both men and women.
“My body was quite happy,” said ISS mission commander Chris Hadfield. “I learned to talk with a weightless tongue.”
“This is the heart of the magic factory, the place where medicine is infused with the miracles of science, and I’ve come to see how it’s done.”
