This is the heart of the republican party. While spewing “change you can believe in,” Tom Delay is still a rock star to them. Never mind the corruption. I don’t need your change. H/T to Scottie for this one!!

Tom DeLay, the former House GOP majority leader whose connections to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff brought scandal and disgrace to the Republican party, returned to the spotlight in Minneapolis last night, helping to host a private party that drew hundreds of delegates and Republican officials.

Disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom Delay returns to the GOP limelight.

“He’s the man, he’s the man,” said one guest leaving the party.

“I’ve always liked him, he’s a good solid conservative,” said one delegate standing in line for entrance to the party, Corey Stewart, chairman of the Board of Supervisors in Prince William County, Virginia.

DeLay arrived at the Minneapolis night club for his party last night in a gold mini-van, no longer traveling with the Capitol police detail that used to protect him from reporters and other perceived security threats.

He declined to answer questions from ABC News as he entered the back door of the club through a loading dock.

Once known as “the hammer” for his hardball tactics on Capitol Hill, the featured entertainment at DeLay’s party was the band Smash Mouth.

Asked his reaction to DeLay’s appearance in Minneapolis, Cong. John Mica (R-FL) declined to answer and then head-butted the ABC camera. (VIDEO HERE)

More at ABC

Will this crook ever go away?

Way too funny that he picked the WRONG audience to preach his republican “small government” crap to!

OXFORD, England (AP) - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will capture the presidency in 2008 unless the Republican Party can rise to meet the challenge, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Thursday.
[...]

“Don’t kid yourself. She will be the next nominee, and if Republicans don’t get their act together - and it is pitiful - she will be the next president,” he told a crowd of Britons and Americans at the Oxford Union, a 184-year-old debating society.
[...]

DeLay warned that a Clinton victory would result in higher taxes and bloated government. He also said she would seek to create a British’style publicly funded health care system, a prediction that was met with thunderous applause. (emphasis mine)

“By the way, there’s no one denied health care in America. There are 47 million people who don’t have health insurance, but no American is denied health care in America,” he said to derisive laughter.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay told The New Yorker about his future plans, and what’s motivating him to keep up his conservative crusade. (via Ron Chusid)

Earlier this year, [DeLay] published a memoir called “No Retreat, No Surrender” … in which he claimed that as a young congressman he would on occasion drink ten to twelve Martinis at a time. In this period, he earned the nickname Hot Tub Tom. Then he found Jesus and, he said, stopped sinning. In the book, he freely confesses to committing adultery. “I had put my needs first,” he told me. “I was on the throne, not God. I had pushed God from His throne.” […]

DeLay says that when, in the coming years, he is not fighting the indictment in Texas (he insists that he is not guilty) he will be building a conservative grass-roots equivalent of MoveOn.org. “God has spoken to me,” he said. “I listen to God, and what I-ve heard is that I-m supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party, and I think we shouldn-t be underestimated.”

Well, he’s quite the modern-day Noah, isn-t he? An omnipotent God is not only concerned about the future of the Republican Party, He’s specifically worried about the right-wing base of the Republican Party. And this same God is not only interested in the base, but He specifically wants a corrupt exterminator to lead the way in building a rejuvenated far-right movement.

And we know all of this to be true because Tom DeLay received a message directly from God, who told him to take on these challenges.

Remember, when you talk to God, it’s prayer. When God talks to you, it’s schizophrenia.

I should note that, tempting though it may be to dismiss DeLay, he still matters.

More at the Carpetbagger Report

What ever happened in the charges against Delay in Texas? Ronnie Earl….. what’s going on?

WASHINGTON - The federal probe into corruption related to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff could be inching closer to former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay of Sugar Land as investigators focus on a former DeLay chief of staff who later employed the Republican leader’s wife.

DeLay has not been charged with any crime in the Abramoff case. And his lawyer, Richard Cullen, said federal investigators have given DeLay no indication that he is a target of the ongoing grand jury probe, such as subpoenaing documents.

But prosecutors could decide within weeks whether to bring charges against former DeLay staff chief Edwin Buckham, according to sources close to the investigation who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. The decision should give a clear signal on whether DeLay remains in legal jeopardy, the sources said.

In recent days federal prosecutors have served notice that their sprawling Abramoff case has remained very much alive.

On Tuesday a former aide to Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, pleaded guilty to accepting tens of thousands of dollars in gifts from Abramoff - including a golf junket to Scotland - in exchange for giving the lobbyist illegal help. Mark Zachares accepted more than $30,000 in sports tickets from Abramoff, including $10,000 through a nonprofit foundation Abramoff controlled.

Zachares is the 11th person convicted in the scandal.

More at Chron.com

Well, look who’s spewing venom about the Democratic House and Senate! Why it’s Mr. Money Launderer himself, Tom Delay! Everybody sit down and let the story begin.

In an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial board yesterday, former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) accused Senate Majoirty Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of “getting very, very close to treason” by opposing the war in Iraq. When a member of the editorial board noted that treason is a “pretty serious charge,” DeLay shot back, “And I-m serious about it.” He added that he had looked up the definition on his way to the interview (probably a good idea), and it meant “the betrayal of trust.”

DeLay specifically attacks Reid, saying that “in the time of war, with soldiers dying on the ground, announcing that we had lost the war, is very close to treasonous.” Here’s DeLay in 1999, stating that the U.S. campaign in Kosovo will fail:

“[Milosevic is] stronger in Kosovo now than he was before the bombing. … The Serbian people are rallying around him like never before. He’s much stronger with his allies, Russians and others.” Clinton “has no plan for the end” and “recognizes that Milosevic will still be in power,” added DeLay. “The bombing was a mistake. … And this president ought to show some leadership and admit it, and come to some sort of negotiated end.”

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. DeLay, who is currently under criminal indictment for money laundering and criminal conspiracy, has a long history of attacking the patriotism of progressives.

Read more and see the tasty video at Think Progress!

pretty funny article……..

Surely confession plays some role in Tom DeLay’s brand of hyper-religiosity. If so, there’s faint testimony to the principle as regards politics in the former House majority leader’s self’serving new book, No Retreat, No Surrender.

DeLay has a lot to be sorry for. As he says not quite half-way through the book, “In short, I had become a self-centered jerk.” Fighting against almost all the external evidence, DeLay would have us believe there came a point when that wasn’t the case. On that basis the book belongs in the “new fiction” display.

Overall, DeLay offers himself up for canonization in the Church of St. Ronald the Reagan as a result of suffering the slings and arrows of persecution from the devilish Democratic troika of Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel and Patrick Kennedy. Of the three, only Emanuel is anywhere near DeLay’s league.

Co’starring roles as Beelzebub and Lucifer are assigned to District Attorney Ronnie Earl of Austin, who had the temerity to indict DeLay on state charges related to campaign fund raising, and to former Rep. Chris Bell, D-Houston, who broke (thankfully) what our author describes as “the seven-year gentlemen’s agreement” not to use ethics charges as “political weapons.” Truth and justice, you’ll note, are not allowed to rear their ugly heads in DeLay’s rendering of his role in the world.

Full article at Chron.com

Let me get this straight. If Giuliani were to right now do a one-eighty, start publicly lying about his core beliefs and urged more shoot’em-up-gun-deaths in the streets (with a preference towards abortion clinic doctors) and promised more gays strung to barbed wire, beaten and bloodied,… that more conservatives would get behind him, increasing his shot at becoming president in 2008?

Sounds par for the course. Is there any doubt that, if Cheney were to run for president, he’d sell his lesbian daughter down the river for a viable shot at the seat?

DeLay rails on Giuliani and McCain, says Clinton likely to become president

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay told CNN Wednesday he does not support the front-runners in the race for the GOP presidential nomination and warned fellow Republicans that Sen. Hillary Clinton will likely be the next president if his party abandons its core beliefs.

Though DeLay called Rudy Giuliani an obvious “leader” who may be able to win over some social conservatives, the Texas Republican said he would not vote for the former New York City mayor, even if he were to win the GOP nomination.

“I can’t vote for somebody that’s for abortion,” DeLay told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on the Situation Room. “I never have, and I never will.”

DeLay also cited Giuliani’s support of gun control and gay rights as reasons social conservatives might turn away from the New York Republican.

DeLay had dire predictions to make about Sen. John McCain’s second bid for the White House as well, citing vigorous opposition to the Arizona Republican’s championing of campaign finance reform.

“I don’t think he’ll get very far because he is not — does not reflect the vast majority of the party,” DeLay said. “There’s a lot of conservatives that fault him for our situation right now because of McCain-Feingold…the lack of understanding about what the constitution guarantees and rights it guarantees.”
[...]

“They need to go back and show their base that they haven’t lost their principle, they haven’t lost their way — that they will fight for what they believe in,” DeLay said.

Source: CNN.com

I want to see this guy go down. Bad.

AUSTIN, Texas - The prosecution of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay could be stalled for weeks or even months while Texas’ highest criminal court decides whether a dismissed campaign finance conspiracy charge against him should be reinstated.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is set to hear arguments Wednesday on the conspiracy charge - part of the criminal case that helped drive DeLay from office.

Prosecutors want the charge reinstated, but attorneys for DeLay and two co-defendants contend a lower appellate court correctly ruled that the law was not in effect when the alleged conspiracy occurred in 2002.

DeLay’s trial on remaining felony conspiracy and money laundering charges must wait until the state’s highest criminal court rules, which could be weeks or months after Wednesday’s hearing.

DeLay, who resigned his seat in Congress last summer, wants to get the criminal case behind him, said his attorney, Dick DeGuerin. DeLay is not expected to attend the hearing.

DeGuerin said the prosecution’s appeal of the dismissed conspiracy charge allowed them to put off DeLay’s trial and hurt him as he tried to regain his leadership post and fight off election challengers.

Read more at YahooNews

Funny stuff…… Arianna Huffington smacks down Tom Delay

Dear Tom,

First let me say, welcome to the blogosphere — always nice to have a new voice in the mix. So good to know you have access to a computer in jail (oh, sorry, you dodged that bullet). And thanks for the link.

But since you’re a newbie blogger, I want to give you a hand by pointing out some rookie mistakes your site made in its diatribe about me and the Huffington Post today.

For starters, you seem to have missed the class on the difference between linking to a news story and offering an opinion on said news story. You claim that I was “in quite a tizzy” and that I’d “acquired sound intel” that there are Christians in the Defense Dept.

Acquired sound intel? That sounds so cloak and dagger, like a secret fact-finding golf mission to Scotland. You make it seem like I’m skulking around in a trench coat and fedora — oh wait, that’s your pal Jack Abramoff. Far from skulking or acquiring intel, what we actually did was “link” (a key term you should know as a blogger) to a story written by a reporter for “Reuters,” which is a news wire service (a handy place to get “facts.” Here’s a link.)

Read more at the Huffington Post