Linda Daschle, the stock option mess, his interview with Kudlow, this about Dodd, the hypocrisy of the Washington Post.... he's been right on target.
Thanks for the ping!
Did you see this?(Deborah Orin, New York Post)More...
Daschle refuses to release his own tax returns, which would "just let everybody see" what his wife makes as a big-business lobbyist.
Daschle spokeswoman Ranit Smelzer defended his refusal, saying: "Most Americans guard very closely this information [tax returns], and members of Congress should not be forced to release it."
Daschle's Senate financial-disclosure forms keep it secret, too - they just list Linda Daschle's lobbying income from some of America's biggest firms as "over $1,000." Make that a lot over $1,000.
Daschle and his wife insist she avoids conflicts of interest because she doesn't lobby the Senate - though she does lobby next door in the House, where lawmakers certainly know her hubby.
Among her clients: American Airlines, the American Trucking Assn., American Concrete and Pavement Association, Boeing, Loral Space and Communications, Northwest Airlines, L-3 Communications, Intelli-check, Schering-Plough, United Technologies Corp. and more than a dozen more.
Take Loral, which paid a $14 million fine last January to settle charges of illegally sending sensitive missile technology to China.
In 2001 alone - the latest data - Loral paid $460,000 to Linda Daschle's firm for lobbying by her and four colleagues.
The conflict-of-interest question gets even more delicate when it comes to L-3 because it involves potential risks to airline passenger safety. L-3 hired Linda Daschle and her firm when airlines balked at buying L-3 bomb-detecting devices to screen airline baggage because they were inferior to a competitor, The Washington Post reported last fall.
But after Linda Daschle got on the case, Congress inserted an "unusually explicit directive" ordering the FAA ( news - web sites) to buy one device from L-3 for every rival model from InVision.
"The connections apparently paid off . . . but [last October] the Transportation Department's inspector general agreed with industry critics that L-3's machines were not performing," the newspaper reported.