Washington Babylon

As I reported here yesterday, the lobbying firm APCO was well-represented at Congressional hearings concerning Kazakhstan’s bid to chair the 56-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). A…

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Will Folks is president of Viewpolitik, LLC, a political consulting firm based in Columbia, South Carolina. He is also the founding editor of FITSNews.com, a widely-read political blog. Folks previously…

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Update Thursday, October 25, 2007: This story was correct in identifying APCO as Kazakhstan’s lobbying firm, and the firm did dispatch several lobbyists to the hearings. But I have no…

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My piece in the November issue of Harper’s, already on newsstands, takes a look at the Republican presidential race in South Carolina, focusing on the role of Mitt Romney’s handlers…

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Ken Silverstein will take part in a panel discussion today on the KCRW radio program To the Point, hosted by Warren Olney. The topic will be the CIA’s investigation of…

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Bob Drogin is the author of the newly released book Curveball, the code name for the Iraqi defector whose pre-war claims about Saddam Hussein’s alleged mobile germ-warfare labs were seized…

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I was out Thursday night and missed Howard Kurtz’s appearance on the Daily Show to promote his new cure for insomnia, Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War.…

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Well over a year ago I reported on a brewing revolt within the CIA over the Bush Administration’s use of renditions, “enhanced interrogation” techniques (otherwise known as torture) and other…

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Remember Jeffrey Shockey? He’s the former top aide to Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis, a powerhouse on the House Appropriations Committee. Shockey left the Hill in 1999 to become a lobbyist…

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The National Republican Congressional Committee is technically insolvent, with millions more in debt than it has in the bank. The GOP can’t raise money–Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each brought…

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When I lived in Brazil in the early 1990s and worked for Associated Press, I filed a short item on a study by a pro-choice group that revealed the staggering…

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I gave a radio interview yesterday during which I extolled the British press for being far more open about the political views of reporters than we are in the States,…

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Turns out there’s more on those supposedly neutral public servants in charge of the Pentagon’s blogger outreach program that I’ve been discussing over the last few months. The Washington Post…

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As expected, Bruce Springsteen had no idea that a Democratic congressional campaign was using him as bait for big donors. I reported yesterday that Congressman Ed Towns of New York…

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I just posted an item about Washington lobbyists raising money for Republican members of Congress. I should also note here an upcoming fund-raiser being planned for Congressman Ed Towns, the…

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Just three weeks ago, President Bush signed into law a new bill into law that he said marked progress towards strengthening “ethical standards that govern lobbying activities.” Congress had passed…

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Below is a press release I just received that manages to combine Britney Spears and genocide in a tidy self-help PR package. Hanala Stadner, the daughter of holocaust survivors and…

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Earlier this year I wrote a story about the Joint IED Neutralizer (JIN), a device intended to destroy roadside bombs. The JIN is built by an Arizona-based company called Ionatron—a…

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President Bush recently called for an end to the “reign of fear” in Burma and announced new sanctions against the military dictatorship in that country, telling the United Nations it…

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It’s not as dramatic as the Downing Street Memo but El Pais, the Madrid daily, has obtained a revealing transcript of a pre-Iraq War meeting between President Bush and Spain’s…

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A new FBI report shows a sharp rise in crime in the United States, with robberies up more than 7 percent and homicides up 2 percent. According to a story…

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A few days ago I wrote about a visit to Washington, D.C., by what I described as a bogus human rights group from Azerbaijan. The group, called the Association for…

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Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), has been working at the Defense Department for more than three decades and has never met a threat to…

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“President Reaches Out to a Friendly Circle in New Media,” ran a Washington Post headline above a Sunday story about a White House meeting between Bush and a group of…

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Andrew Meyer, a student at the University of Florida, wanted to ask Senator John Kerry a question during a forum held on Monday: was he, like President Bush, a member…

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When I wrote in the July magazine about Washington lobbyists offering to whitewash the regime in Turkmenistan, I noted that the firms with whom I spoke told me they could…

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Kim Long is the author of the new book The Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals & Dirty Politics, which chronicles several centuries of American political bribery, mudslinging, influence peddling, and…

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On September 11, staffers for Barack Obama had a campaign ad taken down that had appeared as a “sponsored link” on Amazon.com’s web page for The Israel Lobby and U.S.…

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