April 13, 2005
DeLay Makes Trip to Senate to Slow the Bleeding
By Byron LaMasters
After two Senators with tough re-elections next cycle, Rick Santorum and Lincoln Chafee made statements critical of Tom DeLay, DeLay spoke to the GOP Senate caucus the other day:
With a handful of fellow Republicans breaking ranks, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay crossed the Capitol on Tuesday to shore up Senate support. [...]
Mr. DeLay, admonished three times last year by the House ethics committee, has been fending off allegations about overseas trips apparently paid for by foreigners in violation of House rules, and for paying his wife and daughter $500,000 in the last five years for campaign work.
He has denied wrongdoing and said he'd like to go before the House ethics committee to clear his name. But the committee has been paralyzed for months. House leaders ousted the chairman and two others who voted against Mr. DeLay and changed rules to require bipartisan support to open any new investigations. Democrats refuse to operate under new GOP rules.
The panel meets today, though neither side is willing to budge.
Only the House can decide Mr. DeLay's fate, but recent comments by GOP senators have stepped up the pressure. Conservative Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a top Republican in the Senate, said Mr. DeLay should publicly explain his actions. And moderate Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., called him "a shadow over the party."
So, DeLay is having trouble in Washington, and back home in Pearland, his supporter, City Councilman Kevin Cole is getting a little bit hysterical. Andrew has more below.
Update: Earlier today, I read Councilman Cole's website. Now it seems to have been taken down. Interesting.
Posted by Byron LaMasters at April 13, 2005 02:18 PM
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Never mind that the GOP was simply enforcing the term-limit rule that was in place before the event, that forced Hefley to give up his chair of the committee.
Hell no! Facts be damned! Full speed ahead!
So Chris, can you explain to me why councilman Cole's website is down?
No... I can't. I'm not very buddy-buddy with any of the Pearland council-folks. But the timing is rather suspcious, eh? =)
The previous post hardly sounds like the letter of a coherent, city council member... but crazier things have happened.
Back to DeLay... The blood truly is in the water. Now Newt Gingrich is saying unflattering things about the bugman. The best part of today, from the White House Press Briefing.
Q And [Bush] considers Tom DeLay a friend?
MR. McCLELLAN: Sure. I mean, I think there are different levels of friendship with anybody, so -- (laughter.) Well, no, you referred to social friends and -- but, no, he certainly is a friend.
Byron, is it at all that surprising? The page probably had Cole's e-mail. Given that this is all over the blogs, he probably received about 500 nasty e-mails this afternoon, got pissed, gave a phone call to the Pearland Webmaster, and asked him to "do something about it."
Alternatively, if there were enough e-mails and Pearland's bandwidth was low enough (I mean, what, they probably get 500 hits a day?), inbound traffic re: Cole may have crashed their system.
Well you know what the logical thing to do is - remove the information from the public domain.
But that's what we have Google cache for...
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:1QiJL1vudnkJ:www.ci.pearland.tx.us/index.asp%3FType%3DB_BASIC%26SEC%3D%257BD8EADC8A-3689-4996-AC90-DB15DFFF26E4%257D+site:ci.pearland.tx.us+cole&hl=en
