Free Republic

PHILADELPHIA -- Most of Mayor John Street's top campaign contributors have done business with the city since he took office, a practice that the mayor defends. "If I'm picking a law firm, a choice among equally qualified firms, and one of them is a friend and one of them isn't, who's getting that business?" Street told The Philadelphia Inquirer. The newspaper reported Sunday that 47 of Street's 50 most generous donors have won city contracts, subsidies or appointments or stood to gain from regulatory decisions.

Lautenberg To Replace TorricelliTRENTON, N.J. -- Democrats desperate to keep their single-seat majority in the Senate have chosen former Sen. Frank Lautenberg to replace scandal-tainted Sen. Robert Torricelli on the November ballot, NewsChannel 4 has confirmed...

(AP) Multimillion-dollar loans to Enron Corp. by big investment banks helped the now-collapsed company conceal its true financial condition, and the banks were aware in some cases that Enron was using questionable accounting, a Senate investigator testified Tuesday. After reviewing a million pages of documents and interviewing dozens of witnesses from Enron and its Wall Street investment banks, a Senate panel found that some banks actively aided Enron in its dodgy accounting in return for big fees and favors in other deals, Robert Roach told a hearing. "The evidence indicates that Enron would not have been able to engage in...

Why the DNC chairman can’t preach about business accountability. Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe has been a leading critic of President Bush's business dealings with the Harken Energy Corporation, as well as the president's corporate-reform efforts. "It's time this CEO, President Bush, took responsibility for his actions as a private businessman," McAuliffe said shortly after the Harken matter appeared in the press. On another occasion, McAuliffe strongly called on the president to release decade-old Securities and Exchange Commission files on the Harken stock sale, adding, "Every day, more questions arise." And McAuliffe's DNC website says flatly: "Despite his empty...