[The Blitherer]

Thompson, who likes to cast himself as a political outsider, earned more than $1 million lobbying the federal government for more than 20 years. He lobbied for a savings-and-loan deregulation bill that helped hasten the industry's collapse and a failed nuclear energy project that cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars.

I love drive-by's like this. Anyone got the REAL scoop on this?

[rogue yam]

Anyone got the REAL scoop on this?

The REAL scoop on this is that Yahoo News is a leftist outfit that tells whatever lies it thinks will help the Democrats.

[Dems_R_Losers]

$1 million over 20 years is an average of $50,000 a year. He either wasn't doing a lot of lobbying or he wasn't very good at it if he only made $50k a year at it. It is very typical for a single client to pay a Lobbyist $50,000 a year. Many lobbying firms charge corporations upwards of $50,000 a MONTH. Top lobbyists generally make well over $1 million a YEAR.

Much ado about nothing.

[griswold3]

$1,000,000 divided by 20 years equals
$50,000 per year.
Chicken feed by Washington D.C. standards.

[traderrob6]

From Powerline:

The AP highlights three issues on which Thompson lobbied over the course of his career. The first is savings and loan deregulation:

One of his clients at the time was the Tennessee Savings and Loan League, on whose behalf Thompson lobbied for a bill to deregulate the industry. Experts say the final version of that bill played a large role in the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s, opening the door to widespread fraud and mismanagement.
The fiasco ultimately led to about a $150 billion taxpayer bailout of the industry, said Robert Litan, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and co-author of a 1993 report on the causes of the disaster that describes the influence of lobbyists as “pervasive, pernicious—and effective.”

This is a good example of how controversial (and often false) liberal claims become “fact” over time. The heavily regulated savings and loan industry couldn’t deal with either the spiraling interest rates or the innovative competition it faced beginning in the late 1970s. The industry had to be deregulated, or it was doomed. As it turned out, much of the industry was doomed anyway, and the government made things worse by encouraging risky lending practices, by enacting the Tax Reform of 1986, which rendered many S&Ls insolvent, and through regulatory mismanagement. No matter: the AP, like the Democrats, suggests that having anything to do with the “savings and loan crisis” was disreputable.

The second target is Thompson’s work on behalf of the Clinch River nuclear power plant:

Thompson’s first and longest-running lobbying client was Westinghouse Electric Co., for whom he lobbied in favor of nuclear energy. In 1981, he received a little less than $54,000 from the company. At the time Westinghouse was receiving federal funds for Tennessee’s Clinch River nuclear project.
A spokesman for Thompson, Mark Corallo, said the experimental reactor “was a local project focused on new kinds of energy at a time when the U.S. was going through an energy crisis.”

The reactor was never built and the project was canceled in 1983 after the government had spent $1.7 billion on it.

Clinch River was to be a breeder reactor, a technology which was widely used in Europe at the time, but not in the U.S. I have no idea whether the project had merit or not; it was far from the only nuclear power project that was never completed. Thompson could plausibly claim to have been ahead of his time on nuclear power, but that isn’t how his representation of Westinghouse will be spun.