Abramoff used [Seatttle] area foundation as conduit for money

[spindrifter]

By David Postman and Hal Bernton

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff funneled money through a Mercer Island religious foundation as he tried to influence a top aide to Republican congressional leader Tom DeLay, according to his guilty plea last week to corruption charges.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin confirmed Sunday it was his foundation, Toward Tradition, that took $50,000 from two Abramoff clients and, at Abramoff's suggestion, used it to hire the aide's wife to organize a conference for the group.

Lapin said he and his board had no idea the money was part of Abramoff's vast scheme to influence Congress and, in this case, stop bills to raise postal rates and ban online lotteries.

<snip>

Lapin confirmed he urged supporters of President George W. Bush's re-election to give campaign donations through Abramoff, which helped the lobbyist gain Bush "Pioneer" status among top presidential fundraisers.

<snip>

During Senate hearings last year on the Abramoff scandal, e-mails between Daniel Lapin and Abramoff were read detailing the lobbyist's request that the rabbi help phony-up some awards for him.

<snip>

"Obviously his formal admission to some of these things is a sort of stark indicator that he was engaged in a lot of things that a lot of his friends didn't know anything about," Lapin said.

<snip>

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002728644_lapin09m.html

[barbaraann]

1. Hmmm.... I wonder if Lapin knows Michael Medved.

n/t

[Missy Vixen]

2. I think Lapin may be his rabbi

I'll check with the man who knows everything about local politics, David at www.horsesass.org.

Julie

[barbaraann]

3. I can't decide which one I dislike more.

Medved is such a sophist and Lapin is so shamless about exploiting religion.

[Muddy Waters Guitar]

4. Hear how they squeal

Ha, the prospect of Abramoff turning state's witness must be driving up antacid sales through the roof among the Rethug Congressional Congresscritter community. It's going to be incomparable entertainment to see the evasions that they summon up to distance themselves from this guy. "No, really, I didn't know it was a bribe-- we all just thought he was the real Santa Claus." Get out the popcorn, folks. :woohoo:

[newswolf56]

5. More proof of the fact Abrahamic religion (no pun) and liberty are...

as incompatible now as ever in this religion's uniquely genocidal histories, whether Old Testament (extermination of whole peoples), New Testament (Inquisition, Reformation, extermination of whole peoples, theocracy, witch-hunts, the Ku Klux Klan) or Koran (the sack of Mecca in 629AD, extermination of whole peoples, theocracy, female circumcision, torture executions of "adulteresses" and homosexuals etc.) -- not to mention the macrocosm of thermonuclear doomsday and the microcosm of suicide bombing.

Wake up, people: the conspiracy to impose theocracy on America is one and the same with the conspiracy to impose fascism: all of it financed by the corporations in the name of restoring capitalism to its tyrannosauric worst, granting the oligarchy imperial omnipotence and reducing all the rest of us to abject slavery. This is neither some story from history nor a paranoid tinfoil-hat fantasy: it is reality, here and now and today, and despite Abramoff's turning state's evidence it may already be too late.