Discussion for article #236343
I guess the “scarves, rugs and other gifts” just weren’t explicit enough as hints.
3 Rs and 1 D: must have been a representative delegation from the House maroon caucus. I do hope they brought back enough gifts to share with everyone else.
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Baku looks like a smelly armpit of a city.
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I’m sure they did (trip/expenses/gifts) at about 200K per Rep. So I’m thinking about half of that in gifts. But I’m not feeling positive about the “share with everyone else” part.
Screw the “Scarves, rugs and other gifts”.
How much in SuperPAC Campaign Donations did this Foreign Government give? (we will never know.)
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What was the necessity of the trip?
They didn’t ask cause they didn’t want to know! The Ethics Committee is the biggest joke in Washington, next to Congress itself!
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Mmmmmm, let me guess. All those lawmakers were Republican but they had no idea. . . . .
And it’s a total coincidence that these guys are from major oil states?
Clearly, this is just the liberal media’s attempt to distract from all the foreign governments that are buying Hillary Clinton through the Clinton Foundation something something Benghazi.
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So are the tax-exempt corporations no longer tax-exempt? That would be the first appropriate course of action.
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I’m sure they thought it was just Macao gambling money; that would have made it all OK.
The fact that these folks accepted a clearly free trip to Baku and by their own accounts NEVER asked who was paying for it, pretty much sums up the state of Congress and the tentacles of money and power. But as Anthony Kennedy assures us, none of this could possibly rise to the appearance of corruption.
And what does THAT say about the intellectual capacities of some members of our Supreme Court?
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Like Houston in the 1960s-70s.
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An awful lot of details are missing from the story. Is this it? This is all anyone is going to report? Ouch.
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Really! I mean, my God, look at all the oil derricks in this photo!
I would think that three-quarters of a million dollars would go a long way in Azerbaijian. Not that I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting Baku, but I know how far $750,000 goes in NYC and I doubt Baku is as expensive. How long did these four Representatives stay? If it’s anything less than six months, or if they brought with them any less than their first, second and third cousins, then someone was definitely padding the room-service bills.
“Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” - Justice Anthony Kennedy
I’m surprised many of you don’t know that .
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Ethics Committee??? This Congress actually has an ethics committee. Who would have thunk?
This is such a DREADFUL AP boil down of a Washington Post story that TPM ought to remove it. Because it suggests a lot that’s contrary to the facts.
First, 10 members of Congress, plus 32 aides, plus 3 people from the White House who went on the trip, not merely the four Congreessmen named in this article.
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Oil state Reps, Houston going to an oil rich country looking for help developing the oil fields… my my my nothing to look at here, let us move along now…