The Pope has spoken. Blogging is over.

Two stories via Martin Kimel:

The Washington Post has an editorial about Michael Oxley (R-Ohio):

We understand that lobbying is a business of relationships; party affiliation helps determine whom you know, and whom you know helps determine which doors open for you. But there is a difference between choosing to beef up your contingent of Republicans and being told -- explicitly or implicitly -- that you'll be sorry if you don't. If a prosecutor offered to stop investigating someone in exchange for a job or two for friends, everyone would know what to call that. This case has a similar odor, and at a minimum the House ethics committee should investigate. The GOP should start behaving more like the party of Abraham Lincoln and less like the party of Tony Soprano.

And a loathesome story about CBS News:

CBS aired an excerpt Wednesday night of videotapes that convicted rapist Andrew Luster made of his sexual encounters with drugged victims, provoking anger from victims' families and fueling the latest debate over the ethics and legality of increasingly coarse prime-time TV programs...

The show included a tape of Luster sitting on a bed with a woman lying behind him, facing away from the camera. As the tape continues, Luster stands up and leans over the bed, touching the back of the girl's upper leg and pulling up her skirt. The clip ends in mid-motion.

"I dream about this. A strawberry blond, beautiful girl passed out on my bed and basically there to do whatever I choose," Luster says on the tape.

Increasingly, I suspect that television is incapable of covering news. Just as there's no such thing a scary poem, there may be no such thing as a good television news network.

Oliver Willis has the first two chapters of his novel up. I'm going to go look for sex scenes and then embarass him in front of his mother.

Glenn Reynolds links to a story by Houston-based courtesan Evelyn charging that anti-war feminists are betraying women. She points to the horrifying oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, and then wonders why feminists aren't supporting war*.

Liberal bloggers have repeatedly shown (here, for example, or here) that the frequent right-wing charge that "feminists don't care about women in Muslim countries" is completely untrue. But still, this is a thought-provoking piece.


* There's an obvious mistake in my copy- it seems to refer to a war on Iraq, not Saudi Arabia. But that has to be a server problem or something, right? Otherwise, Evelyn's argument makes no goddamn sense at all.

Bush shafts the firefighters (via Atrios).

The firefighters whose courage was celebrated in eulogies and in documentaries, whose likenesses were etched onto commemorative coins and molded into toys for the holiday season, now roam the Capitol, helmets in hand.

They don't have the protective breathing gear needed for them to survive a chemical or biological attack, they say. Their radios still can't connect with those of police and other rescuers. They don't have a day's worth of training in how to handle a terrorist assault of any kind, let alone the "dirty bombs" - homemade radioactve devices - the men at the top say could be sent our way.

The politicians, from the president on down, were happy to have firefighters as props when the moment called for pictures to be taken with those who had stood tallest. Now the firefighters stand in line with Washington's other lobbyists. Their place is somewhere behind those pushing this or that tax break, for this or that favored group.

Bush shafts the children of military families (via CalPundit).

As thousands of sailors and Marines are sent abroad for a possible war with Iraq, the Bush administration is proposing to cut education funding for many children of military families.

The president's plan would eliminate funding for military students who live in apartments or homes off base, a proposal that has incensed educators who say the timing couldn't be worse.

I guess he just needs to kick a nun down the stairs to hit the trifecta.

(Kind of childish, I know, but Jesus. If Bush can't stand up for military brats when he's sending their parents to war, who can pretend that "compassionate conservatism" means anything?)

Peter Beinart has a depressing, thought-provoking essay in the latest New Republic, asking "Have liberal hawks been duped?"

The national security argument for this war may be based on pessimism about the inevitable spread of weapons of mass destruction, but the political argument is based on post-1989 optimism about America's ability to bring liberal government to every corner of the globe.

It is just this kind of liberal optimism that historically precedes liberal betrayal. Liberals support this war because they hope it will bring certain political results, but they have limited influence over whether it will be prosecuted with those results in mind. The Bush administration at times frames the war in liberal terms, but, then, it frames its education and budgetary policies in liberal terms too. And its record on democratic postwar reconstruction is not encouraging.

In Afghanistan, the Pentagon's dogged resistance to a nationwide peacekeeping force has condemned large swaths of the country to warlordism. In Iraq, the Bush team says it is committed to turning post-Saddam Iraq into a model for the Arab world. But its new budget allocates not one cent for the effort. The justification, as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith recently testified, is that the cost of post-Saddam nation-building is "unknowable." (Someone forgot to tell the United Nations and the Congressional Budget Office, which have both recently published estimates.) The truth is that making Iraq a template for Arab liberalism will be expensive and protracted. And the Bush administration won't say so for fear of undermining public support for the war.

Indeed, the best-case scenario is that the Bush team is misleading the American people about the intensive political effort they have in mind once Saddam is gone. The worst-case scenario is that no such effort is even planned and that, in the name of stability, Riyadh and Foggy Bottom will settle on an Iraqi Pervez Musharaf. It is not a good sign, as Janine Zacharia recently reported in these pages (see "Exiled," February 17), that the closer we get to war, the more despondent the genuine Iraqi democrats sound.

The unhappy truth is that, if the Bush administration wins the war but betrays the peace, the political consequences for the president will be small. Once the fighting is over, the American press will turn its attention elsewhere, just as it has in post-Taliban Afghanistan. But the consequences for hawkish liberalism will be great. Having been played for fools, most liberal hawks will retreat to a deep skepticism of American power. They will end up on the decent, feckless left--in the company of those who sincerely condemn men such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam but have no strategy for toppling them except empty exhortations to people power. And that soft isolationism will likely retake the Democratic Party. On the right, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney won't lose sleep if Chevron and Crown Prince Abdullah run things in post-Saddam Baghdad rather than Kanan Makiya. Paul Wolfowitz will either shut up or resign.

This rather crystallized a line of thought that has been haunting me recently, and it sounds all too plausible.

I mentioned the other day (via Martin Kimel) that Rep. Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio) is using his powers of Congressional investigation in order to put pressure on the mutual fund industry. Several mutual fund companies have formed a consortium, and their top lobbyist is a Democrat. Republicans would like the mutual funds to fire her and hire a Republican. Rep. Oxley’s office is letting the industry know that “the congressional probe might ease up if the mutual fund trade group complies with their wishes.”

It seems to me that one of two things is going on here. They’re either staging a bogus, punitive probe for political reasons, or they’re willing to ease up on a legitimate probe for political reasons. Either way, it’s hardly something you’d want on your tombstone.

Like many Americans, I have a personal stake in this. I have a 401(k) account full of mutual funds. If Michael Oxley is squeezing mutual funds for no good reason, he’s squeezing my personal retirement account.

I’m bringing this up again because I think that it’s relevant to one of my least-favorite conservative projects: Social Security privatization. The Republicans are playing politics with the mutual fund industry, the biggest vehicle for private retirement accounts. And the maddening thing is, they’re doing it for such a trivial reason. They want one person who happens to be a Democrat replaced by one person who happens to be a Republican.

This is how they play when the stakes are low. But we’re supposed to trust these bastards to invest trillions in Social Security dollars in a rational and apolitical manner? Not bloody likely. Judging from my comments, the primary conservative defense of Michael Oxley is that the Democrats are even worse. If you believe that, it makes the case for Social Security privatization unthinkable, doesn’t it? After all, these moral and responsible Republicans will probably be replaced by unscrupulous Democrats at some point. Conservatives who argue for SS privatization seem to be abandoning their fear of government, just when it could do them some good.

Every couple of months, I repost this old letter about the folly of Social Security privatization. I copied it out of Slate's "The Fray" from March 2001, and was written by someone named John Nowicki (not me). I think it's really important. Back when he wrote it, we were still in surplus, but the points are still valid.

********

While I agree with 90% of what you've said here, I do have to call you on the stock market point. As a stereotype social Liberal/fiscal Conservative (I support affirmative action and NAFTA), the continued acceptance by the "New Democrat" wing of the horridly bad idea of govt. controlled stock investments bugs me.

To wit, you just have waaaay too much moral hazard involved here. First, a few basic, though probably incorrect assumptions. We'll assume the "surplus" runs as projected, and that the $3.5T holds. We'll also assume that the "Parliament of Whores (PoW)" (Thank you P.J. O'Rorke) doesn't buy votes with it, by shipping the cash back home in "Highway Improvements", etc... Pretty heroic assumptions in my book, especially the latter, but hey. One last assumption, just to weaken my position...the govt. only dumps a $1T into the market.

First, where do they dump that $1T, which is now the single largest investment fund in the market? Since this is the govt., the investments will implicitly have to follow political rules. Denny's gets nailed for racial discrimination...can you picture the headlines if the Fed. is holding huge amounts of that firm? Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson running protests? Uh huh...so out goes the money, fast, not for economic reasons, but political/social ones. What about non-union shops? What about firms that do/don't offer gay employees partner benefits? What about the reverse under a conservative Republican admin?

What you have, no matter how much blather is made about "independence" of the fund managers (which is practically impossible, even the Fed. is only quasi free of politics), is an implicit industrial policy. The govt. running the private markets. With a $1T 800 pound gorilla bouncing around the markets, acting economically "irrational" (i.e. reacting to political pressures) no private investments are safe. Would you want to be the fool holding Apple stocks, when a heavily conservative admin takes over, and quietly places pressure on the administration agency to divest, as the have a gay friendly partnership benefits program? Or holding an anti-union firm when a new liberal admin does the same? With no investments safe from short to medium term slams when the gorilla divests, no one will invest.

Moreover, what about changes in political behavior based on the markets? Would a DoJ go after a Microsoft if the govt. held a chunk of the stock? Would we be more, or less likely to act militarily if the country in question could tank the govts. portfolio (for example, a Middle Eastern Conflict and oil stocks). Would the Fed. restrict rates while the Nasdaq is plunging? And would not every such action, as just mentioned, immediately create the impression of investment based bias, even if not. Again, using the MS example...smart money on a breakup would be in Sun, Aol/Netscape. But as an investor, would that not make the govt. an "inside trader" to its own DoJ policy?

In addition, what about PoW payola? Given the impossibility to completely exclude political considerations from investment issues, would it not behoove companies to pony up at the PoW trough? It's already necessary to buy off your Representatives and Presidents through soft money...imagine if you give those same folks implicit power over market valuations. How often would "Senator Blowhard" put pressure on the investment admin to place money into a large campaign contributor? If we think we have corruption now...just wait for this. You also create an incentive to industry to spend $ on buying politicians, rather than compete effectively...options cash based on short term market value, not long term profitability.

This is getting too long, so here's a few others in shorthand...

1. Domestic vs. International investment. Will the admin be free to invest abroad, or only domestically? I can't picture the political air to allow diverse international investments, so the fund is totally at risk to one market's downturns. Also, that $1T restricted to domestic investments impacts #2, below.

2. Maximum investments. Can the govt. hold controlling interest in a company? I don't even need to explain the implications of that, but $1T invested domestically implies that happening, especially in small caps. If you accordingly lock out small caps, you now make it likely in mid caps, and so on.

3. Related to #3, above. What about foreign owned firms listed domestically? Daimler/Chrysler for example? Especially if said firm directly competes against a purely domestically held firm?

4. Sectoral Shifts. We have seen a huge sectoral shift in the economy from old line industries with low skill/high wage employment, to services and technology, with high skill/high pay employment. The result has been an erosion of unskilled labor income and an explosion in high skill income. As a computer programmer I benefit from this. But as a govt. investor, will you really take tax money from factory workers to invest in firms that will destroy their employment? You will if you want to get return from the winning sector in the shift. Conversely then, will you tax me to prop up the failing sector, and lower the returns accordingly?

5. Boomer Bye-bye. When the boomers hit majority retirement, this $1T will leave, and leave quickly. I hope you have plans set for dealing with the deep recession.

6. Too many more to even go into. I will reiterate that this is just 1/3 the total "surplus"...it gets far worse if the entire thing is used in this manner.

In summary, you blithely ignore huge amounts of political, moral, and corruption risks inherent in this model. The only way to minimize these risks would conflict with each other, and with the goal of maximizing investment returns. You create an implicit govt. industrial policy, and a potential for actual govt. ownership of firms. There is no way around these issues. You then will pull the rug out in 20 years, triggering a huge recession. Thus, the idea of surplus investment in private markets is a horrid one, and should be abandoned.

Did you ever read an opinion piece that made you want to stand up and applaud? That's the way I felt after reading Michael Kinsley on Bush's fiscal irresponsibility. It's hard to pull a quote; the whole thing is marvelous and should be read by anyone who isn't planning on dropping dead or emigrating before the baby boomers start retiring.

But the lead metaphor is just perfect:

Suppose you had a friend who was grossly overweight for years but lately had been looking very trim. Suddenly, though, he puts on 30 or 40 pounds and is waddling around like his old porcine self. He explains that he's found a marvelous new diet: "You eat like a pig and stop exercising until you get so fat that you just have to lose weight." Would you say that your friend is kidding himself?

And if your friend went on to complain that he was getting fat because other people were eating too much, and this diet was the only way to stop these other people from putting those unsightly pounds on him, would you think his self-delusion was becoming clinical? Or would you start to suspect that the joke is on you?

UPDATE: OK, this too. Just read the whole thing.

Perhaps the idea is that government spending is an addiction, and the patient has to hit rock bottom before an intervention can start him on the path to a cure.

But who is the patient? Who is this government that is so out of control? Republicans now control the White House and both houses of Congress. Even the Supreme Court has made vividly clear that it stands ready to help if necessary. And self-labeled conservatives are pretty much in control in the party itself. There is nothing to stop President Bush and his congressional cohorts from proposing, enacting, and imposing any vision they may have about the proper size of government and method of financing it. They don't need wacky behavioral schemes and incentives.

The administration's 2004 budget documents include long-run projections, based on its own policy wish list and its own economic assumptions, that show growing deficits from now until … forever. If Bush really believes that increasing deficits in general, and its own policies in particular, will produce smaller government and more fiscal responsibility, why don't his own numbers reflect this? In the fine print, it seems, the Bush folks don't really believe any such thing. And why should they? It's ridiculous.

I'm going to be Ken Layne's "Perspective Buddy" for a second.

On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. It was part of a larger march on Washington in support of the civil rights bill that was pending in Congress. 200- 250,000 people marched in support.

According to the 1960 census, the population of the US at the time was about 178 million. The marchers constituted just over 1/10 of 1% of the population. More people went to see The Great Escape that week than participated in the march.

What a bunch of useless losers! Right, Ken?

UPDATE: Ken Layne responds in my comments, in his own, and in Greg Beato's.

This made me laugh. Hard.

CalPundit asks:

And on a related note, is it just my imagination or is the Standard really a more interesting, more unpredictable, and basically more honest conservative magazine than National Review? It seems that way to me.

Boy howdy, yes it is. I bring this up only because it gives me an opportunity to pimp something that I wrote back when no one was reading this page. In summary, the National Review published an article from the Heritage Foundation saying that Russia was taking in a lot more money because it switched to a flat tax. I didn't believe that the article made any sense, and I did some looking. Not only did the author make a dishonest argument (in my opinion), he was lying about the tax.

Blog historians, note: As of March 22, 2002, I was refering to "one of those point-by-point deconstructions", rather than a Fisking. Ah, I was young then, and beautiful.

Conservatives in media-bias arguments often dismiss the notion that widespread corporate or conservative ownership of media outlets biases coverage to the right. They argue that journalists and editors don't take their marching orders from their owners. Rather, they follow their own instincts, which (of course) lean left.

If conservatives are right, this is a hell of a coincidence. Rupert Murdoch owns 175 newspapers on three continents. And every single one of them supports a war on Iraq.

(via Cursor)

A timely reminder that abusive idiots come from every color in in the jackass rainbow. Here are some (printable) quotes from Laura Billing's email:

"Put the roach clip down, kick off your Birkenstocks, take off the backpack, and try to comprehend for a minute… . It will be amusing to see the change of heart you have once the terrorists come to a town near you.''

"There is one positive about this whole story: when that mad man sprays his poison it will kill you creeps along with the rest of us.''

"If you hate this country so much, go back to Iraq!"

"I saw Bill Clinton in the real-life remake of 'Wag the Dog.' Now I'm watching president George W. Bush starring as the lone hero for the free world, Winston Churchill, in the remake of 'The Battle of Britain.'''

"If you hate this country so much, go back to Cuba!''

"Come to New York City so I can bounce your head full of stupidity off a sidewalk.''

"I've never heard of you before but I can tell you were the product of a long line of hippy pacifist commie losers … and you don't deserve any claim to the First Amendment.''

Let's hope that there's nothing to this story, via CalPundit:

The US is abandoning plans to introduce democracy in Iraq after a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, according to Kurdish leaders who recently met American officials. The Kurds say the decision resulted from pressure from US allies in the Middle East who fear a war will lead to radical political change in the region.

....Mr Abdul-Rahman said the US had reneged on earlier promises to promote democratic change in Iraq. "It is very disappointing," he said. "In every Iraqi ministry they are just going to remove one or two officials and replace them with American military officers."

And that there's nothing to this, via Uggabugga:

America is to punish Germany for leading international opposition to a war against Iraq. The US will withdraw all its troops and bases from there and end military and industrial co-operation between the two countries - moves that could cost the Germans billions of euros.

The plan - discussed by Pentagon officials and military chiefs last week on the orders of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - is designed 'to harm' the German economy to make an example of the country ...

'We are doing this for one reason only: to harm the German economy,' one source told The Observer last week. ... Another Pentagon source said: 'The aim is to hit German trade and commerce. It is not just about taking out the troops and equipment; it is also about cancelling commercial contracts and defence-related arrangements.'

The Pentagon plan - and the language expressed by officials close to Rumsfeld - has horrified State Department officials, who believe that bullying other countries to follow the US line will further exacerbate anti-Americanism ...

Via Julian Sanchez:

When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.

Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.

But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert.

"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story.

I knew about the fake "Iraqis threw Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators" story, but I didn't know that.

Holy crap, this is funny. And the worm game is a trip. Yet another reason never to leave my house.

Also, if you want the go-to guy on public health, biological warfare and how we have and have not prepared, Ross from Bloviator is the guy. If you only have time for one post, you could do worse than this one.

Here's a question. Is it more acceptable to make fun of John Kerry for the possible effects of prostate cancer than it is to make fun of Charlton Heston for the effects of Altzheimer's?

If so, why?

Peter Beinart:

It would be nice, then, if prominent Bush officials acknowledged their past moral culpability and vowed not to betray the Iraqi people again. Rumsfeld should have trouble sleeping at night given his role in abetting Saddam's crimes. Instead, last fall on CNN, he insisted that in 1983 he "cautioned" Saddam about chemical weapons. But State Department notes from the meeting show no such thing. (Rumsfeld did mention chemical weapons to then-Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, but only in passing--as one of various issues that concerned the United States.) In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last September, Rumsfeld said, "It would be a shame to leave this committee and the people listening with the impression that the United States assisted Iraq with chemical or biological weapons in the 1980s. I just do not believe that's the case." But, according to recently declassified State Department documents reviewed by Newsweek, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, it is the case.

It is a testament to Rumsfeld's immense arrogance and lack of moral reflection that neither on CNN nor before the Armed Services Committee did he betray the slightest hint that he or the administration he served did anything wrong in the '80s regarding Saddam Hussein. That's not a reason to oppose this war. But it sure makes me wish a better man were running it.

Via Atrios, I see that Dave Neiwart and a new blogger named Angry Bear are all over the trial balloon for a consumption tax. Dave Neiwart, who is an actual journalist, has a good summary. He includes both the reason why liberals would want to oppose it:

Of course, under a regressive system like this, the major tax burden will shift almost wholly off the backs of the wealthy, whose disposable income likely would at least double, to the backs of the middle class and poor, whose own disposable incomes would certainly shrink accordingly.

And why people with a bit of common sense should oppose it:

Nearly every economist with whom I’ve spoken confirms that, in order to replace the revenues provided by the current tax structure, a national sales tax would have to be in the vicinity of 50 percent. And that means other problems too -- the rise of a huge black market for all kinds of goods; increasingly lax controls over the public-health aspects of these goods; and ultimately, the near-impossibility of actually administering such a tax. Not to mention, of course, what effect the extreme pressure to reduce these taxes will have on the ability of government to provide services and, ultimately, the concomitant effect on the nation's infrastructure.

As McIntyre told me: “It becomes pretty hard to run when you get up to a rate big enough to replace the income tax, because you're going to have to have a 40 or 50 percent rate. That's what scared Bill Archer [the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, a fierce advocate of a consumption-tax approach] from ever putting a bill in. He was for it, but he didn't want anybody to know how high the rate would be. He asked his staff to analyze it, and they came back and they said, 'Well, if you taxed everything, you could do it at 42 percent.' He says, '42? Come on, I was hoping for 10.' And they said, 'Well, you've gotta tax everything, you understand.' And he said, 'Like what?' And they started going through this, you know, rents and everything. 'Oh shit!'

Angry Bear has (far more than) two additional good reasons:

- A consumption tax depresses economic mobility:

Nowhere do the authors deny that in a static snapshot, the consumption tax is in fact regressive. Instead they rely on the Panglossian notion that it's fine because you'll move up, devote a smaller portion of your income to consumption, and then benefit by paying less in taxes. Whether the movements in brackets are truly "substantial" is subjective, but let's assume it is. The authors fail to note that implementing a regressive tax will reduce the very mobility they use to defend the proposed consumption tax. An old truism is that it takes money to make money. If we take more money from poor people now (via consumption taxes), it will be more difficult for them to become not poor later.

- And, a consumption tax is less countercyclical than a progressive income tax It would make recessions deeper and periods of irrational exuberance more exuberant:

The economy goes up and down; it's a fact of economic life. But the size of the swings in the post-war era pale in comparison to those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Why have the swings become smaller? A variety of counter-cyclical mechanisms implemented since World War II, such as unemployment insurance. And the progressive income tax is innately counter-cyclical: when a recession moves families into a lower tax bracket, their after-tax income falls by less than does their pre-tax income (because they move into a lower bracket). Consumption taxes are intrinsically less counter-cyclical. A family's spending can be divided into subsistence (food, clothing, shelter) and discretionary (new car instead of used, vacations, …). By definition, subsistence spending can't be varied in concert with the business cycle, though discretionary can. The point: families whose income is devoted mostly to subsistence will not have an off-setting tax benefit in recessions. Here's the shocker: which families devote the most to subsistence and the least to discretionary spending? Poor families.

I'm sorry, Ms. Jane Galt
(oooh)
I am for real
Never wanted you to quit your blog
I apologize for all the slobs

Speaking personally, there is no more effective tool to drive me away from the right than hate mail from conservatives. I strongly suspect that this is a leading cause of creeping polarization in the blogosphere, a subject that's been on my mind recently. It's hard enough to change people's minds using reason and evidence. Attempting to change people's minds with hateful emails is not only abusive and uncivilized, it's utterly counterproductive.

Read Jane's comments. Was a single person convinced by raining abuse on Jane? No, of course not. It just provided more evidence to right-wingers that lefties are evil and hateful.

Don't do that.

Martin Kimel sends on this story about a particularly Mafiaesque Republican shakedown:

Rep. Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio) and members of his staff are pressuring mutual fund companies to hire a prominent Republican to represent them in Washington, according to congressional and industry sources.

The push is part of a broader campaign by Republicans to place party loyalists in top jobs at corporate lobbying offices and trade associations, Republican lobbyists involved in the effort said.

Oxley, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, wants the Investment Company Institute (ICI), a consortium of mutual fund companies, to push aside Democrat Julie Domenick as its top lobbyist, officials at fund companies said after participating in the trade group's internal discussions on the matter...

The pressure comes as Oxley and Rep. Richard H. Baker (R-La.), who also serves on the committee, are ramping up an investigation of mutual fund companies. They are examining whether funds overcharge customers and provide enough information to investors, among other issues.

Six sources, both Republicans and Democrats who all declined to be identified, said certain members of Oxley's staff have suggested the congressional probe might ease up if the mutual fund trade group complies with their wishes...

Oxley's dispute with the institute has been the talk of financial lobbyists for weeks. Although none agreed to be identified for fear of angering the committee chairman, several lobbyists of both political parties said Oxley and his associates have sent them an unmistakable message that Domenick must go and that if she does, the mutual fund group will have greater congressional access and the industry might receive less scrutiny.

A prominent Republican is using a congressional investigation as a tool to punish association with Democrats. They will back off of their investigation if the mutual fund companies fire a Democrat and hire a Republican. The federal government is officially a protection racket.

Shouldn't congressional probes be directed by the validity of the charges, rather than wielded as clubs to punish political opponents?

Republican voters- did you vote for this?