IAHF List: Its 6:30 pm, the lame duck session of congress could end
during the wee hours of saturday morning, and its IMPERATIVE that we
KEEP OPPOSING the Bad AER bill (HR HR 6168, the Dietary Supplement
and Nonprescription Drug Consumer Protection Act). At the end of this
alert please see my urgent plea to help IAHF get back to DC!!

HERE IS WHY ONGOING PRESSURE IS NECESSARY:

Senators Hatch and Harken, all the pharma dominated vitamin trade
association, as well as (so called Citizens for Health) are pushing
VERY HARD to get this bill through. An inside source has informed us
that Senator Hatch is recovering from rotator cuff surgery, and that
he's made numerous calls from his hospital bed to Congressman Boehner
in an effort to get the House Majority Leader to put the bill on the
calendar so it can be voted on.

Our sources on the Hill indicate that Boehner is standing firm like
the rock of Gibralter REFUSING to budge, but there is still a chance
that these oily bastards might attempt to attach the bill as a rider
to a much larger bill such as the NIH Appropriations bill- (which is
as thick as a Manhatten telephone book).

Stranger things have happened in this Con-gress of WHORES & TRAITORS
which has been selling out our country worse than any congress in
HISTORY. Read the article below to get fired up, then keep calling
the Hill! The Capital Switchboard is open 24/7 and even after hours
during the end of a lame duck there are staff in those congressional
offices til the end of business which could be at 5 am tomorrow
morning. So they WILL get your messages, they're constantly relaying
word to their boss as they keep their fingers on the pulse of the
people calling in, so your calls DO matter!

Previously we were targetting Boehner, Hastert, and Barton. Now our
inside sources are telling us to SHIFT our focus to the RANK AND FILE
in the House. So please focus on your OWN Congressman and use the
phone script below. You can also fax it in, see http://www.house.gov
to get your congressman's fax number.

"I want to kill HR 6168, the Dietary Supplement and Nonprescription
Drug Consumer Protection Act and understand that some are frustrated
that Congressman Boehner (pronounced Bayner) hasn't put it on the
calendar, so some are trying to attach it as a RIDER to the NIH
REAUTHORIZATION BILL. DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN!! This bill badly needs
a hearing. There is language in it that must be changed. Do not pass
it in the middle of the night attached to something as thick as the
Manhatten telephone directory unless you want me to work tirelessly
against you for the rest of your career til you are driven from
office." also use this:
HR 6168 MUST BE KILLED!!

"A large sector of the Dietary Supplement industry including Solgar,
Nutraceutical Corp, Nature's Plus, Life Extension Foundation,
Wellness Resources and many other companies oppose HR6168 Dietary
Supplement and Nonprescription Drug Consumer Protection Act. This
legislation has nothing in it to determine causality of an Adverse
event. Safe dietary supplements would be wrongly blamed for problems
actually caused by pharmaceutical drugs taken concurrently with one
or more dietary supplements- and there would be no medical or
scientific review required by FDA before they could release the
flawed "data" released by this witch hunt. This would be a trial
lawyers dream, but its not good government and it would do nothing to
protect the public health. There must be hearings on this
legislation, and there must be changes made to its language before it
would actually serve its intended purpose. Do not ram it through on
us during the lame d uck- if you do, you will enrage the millions of
dietary supplements who flooded congress with more mail during the
campaign to pass DSHEA than Congress ever received in its history on
ANY issue."

HERES the cool article I told you about:

The Worst Congress Ever

How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and
perverts -- in five easy steps .

By Matt Taibbi
10/31/06 "Rolling Stone" -- -- There is very little that sums up the
record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad
boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child
exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like
Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus
on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell
else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt
and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative
branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a
historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of
Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed
crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to
turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic
backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological
cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of
bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one
long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial
conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and
snore its way through even the direst political crises is something
we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal
class except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes
a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight
deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing
less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The
Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they
have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate
quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have
castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight
responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious
policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed
a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power
to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress
has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.

"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy
is a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional
scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George
Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol
Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they
created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no
principles -- and in that environment corruption has flourished. The
Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future
would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has
become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid
delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White
House."

The end result is a Congress that has hijacked the national treasury,
frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal
government in a private auction. It all happened before our very
eyes. In case you missed it, here's how they did it -- in five easy
steps:

STEP ONE
RULE BY CABAL

If you want to get a sense of how Congress has changed under GOP
control, just cruise the basement hallways of storied congressional
office buildings like Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Here, in the
minority offices for the various congressional committees, you will
inevitably find exactly the same character -- a Democratic staffer in
rumpled khakis staring blankly off into space, nothing but a single
lonely "Landscapes of Monticello" calendar on his wall, his eyes wide
and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape victim. His skin
is as white as the belly of a fish; he hasn't seen the sun in seven
years.

It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always
found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked
difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans
have given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a
systematic effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-
sharing role in creating or refining legislation but to humiliate
them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces. Washington was once
a chummy fraternity in which members of both parties golfed together,
played in the same pickup basketball games, probably even shared the
same mistresses. Now it is a one-party town -- and congressional
business is conducted accordingly, as though the half of the country
that the Democrats represent simply does not exist.

American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule
by consensus -- so this current batch of Republicans has found a way
to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the
spirit and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the
lawmaking process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in
the hands of a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the
legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is
just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft -- a fact the
Republicans don't even bother to conceal.

"I remember one incident very clearly -- I think it was 2001," says
Winslow Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican
staffer in the Senate. "I was working for [New Mexico Republican]
Pete Domenici at the time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and
the Democrats were debating what the final result would be. And my
boss gets up and he says, 'Why are you saying this? You're not even
going to be in the room when the decisions are made.' Just said it
right out in the open."

Wheeler's very career is a symbol of a bipartisan age long passed
into the history books; he is the last staffer to have served in the
offices of a Republican and a Democrat at the same time, having once
worked for both Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Arkansas
Democrat David Pryor simultaneously. Today, those Democratic staffers
trapped in the basement laugh at the idea that such a thing could
ever happen again. These days, they consider themselves lucky if they
manage to hold a single hearing on a bill before Rove's well-oiled
legislative machine delivers it up for Bush's signature.

The GOP's "take that, bitch" approach to governing has been taken to
the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee
is chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner
Jr., an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a
way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other
arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner
became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the
Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them
have one.

"Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday
when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show,"
recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a
pretty good turnout anyway."

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but
Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain
amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop
the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply
picked up his gavel and walked out.

"He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in
case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and
cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

For similarly petulant moves by a committee chair, one need look no
further than the Ways and Means Committee, where Rep. Bill Thomas --
a pugnacious Californian with an enviable ego who was caught having
an affair with a pharmaceutical lobbyist -- enjoys a reputation
rivaling that of the rotund Sensenbrenner. The lowlight of his reign
took place just before midnight on July 17th, 2003, when Thomas
dumped a "substitute" pension bill on Democrats -- one that they had
never read -- and informed them they would be voting on it the next
morning. Infuriated, Democrats stalled by demanding that the bill be
read out line by line while they recessed to a side room to confer.
But Thomas wanted to move forward -- so he called the Capitol police
to evict the Democrats.

Thomas is also notorious for excluding Democrats from the conference
hearings needed to iron out the differences between House and Senate
versions of a bill. According to the rules, conferences have to
include at least one public, open meeting. But in the Bush years,
Republicans have managed the conference issue with some of the most
mind-blowingly juvenile behavior seen in any parliament west of the
Russian Duma after happy hour. GOP chairmen routinely call a meeting,
bring the press in for a photo op and then promptly shut the
proceedings down. "Take a picture, wait five minutes, gavel it out --
all for show" is how one Democratic staffer described the process.
Then, amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real
conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go
searching the Capitol grounds for the meeting. "More often than not,
we're trying to figure out where the conference is," says one House
aide.

In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a
secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where
Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door,
but no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the
famous "Land Shark" skit from Saturday Night Live, with everyone
hiding behind the door afraid to make a sound. "Rangel was the land
shark, I guess," the aide jokes. But the real punch line came when
Thomas finally opened the door. "This meeting," he informed
Rangel, "is only open to the coalition of the willing."

Republican rudeness and bluster make for funny stories, but the
phenomenon has serious consequences. The collegial atmosphere that
once prevailed helped Congress form a sense of collective identity
that it needed to fulfill its constitutional role as a check on the
power of the other two branches of government. It also enabled
Congress to pass legislation with a wide mandate, legislation that
had been negotiated between the leaders of both parties. For this
reason Republican and Democratic leaders traditionally maintained
cordial relationships with each other -- the model being the
collegiality between House Speaker Nicholas Longworth and Minority
Leader John Nance Garner in the 1920s. The two used to hold daily
meetings over drinks and even rode to work together.

Although cooperation between the two parties has ebbed and flowed
over the years, historians note that Congress has taken strong
bipartisan action in virtually every administration. It was Sen.
Harry Truman who instigated investigations of wartime profiteering
under FDR, and Republicans Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker Jr. played
pivotal roles on the Senate Watergate Committee that nearly led to
Nixon's impeachment.

But those days are gone. "We haven't seen any congressional
investigations like this during the last six years," says David
Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale who has studied
Congress for four decades. "These days, Congress doesn't seem to be
capable of doing this sort of thing. Too much nasty partisanship."

One of the most depressing examples of one-party rule is the Patriot
Act. The measure was originally crafted in classic bipartisan fashion
in the Judiciary Committee, where it passed by a vote of thirty-six
to zero, with famed liberals like Barney Frank and Jerrold Nadler
saying aye. But when the bill was sent to the Rules Committee, the
Republicans simply chucked the approved bill and replaced it with a
new, far more repressive version, apparently written at the direction
of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"They just rewrote the whole bill," says Rep. James McGovern, a
minority member of the Rules Committee. "All that committee work was
just for show."

To ensure that Democrats can't alter any of the last-minute changes,
Republicans have overseen a monstrous increase in the number
of "closed" rules -- bills that go to the floor for a vote without
any possibility of amendment. This tactic undercuts the very essence
of democracy: In a bicameral system, allowing bills to be debated
openly is the only way that the minority can have a real impact, by
offering amendments to legislation drafted by the majority.

In 1977, when Democrats held a majority in the House, eighty-five
percent of all bills were open to amendment. But by 1994, the last
year Democrats ran the House, that number had dropped to thirty
percent -- and Republicans were seriously pissed. "You know what the
closed rule means," Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida thundered on
the House floor. "It means no discussion, no amendments. That is
profoundly undemocratic." When Republicans took control of the House,
they vowed to throw off the gag rules imposed by Democrats. On
opening day of the 104th Congress, then-Rules Committee chairman
Gerald Solomon announced his intention to institute free debate on
the floor. "Instead of having seventy percent closed rules," he
declared, "we are going to have seventy percent open and unrestricted
rules."

How has Solomon fared? Of the 111 rules introduced in the first
session of this Congress, only twelve were open. Of those, eleven
were appropriations bills, which are traditionally open. That left
just one open vote -- H. Res. 255, the Federal Deposit Insurance
Reform Act of 2005.

In the second session of this Congress? Not a single open rule,
outside of appropriation votes. Under the Republicans, amendable
bills have been a genuine Washington rarity, the upside-down eight-
leafed clover of legislative politics.

When bills do make it to the floor for a vote, the debate generally
resembles what one House aide calls "preordained Kabuki." Republican
leaders in the Bush era have mastered a new congressional innovation:
the one-vote victory. Rather than seeking broad consensus, the
leadership cooks up some hideously expensive, favor-laden boondoggle
and then scales it back bit by bit. Once they're in striking range,
they send the fucker to the floor and beat in the brains of the fence-
sitters with threats and favors until enough members cave in and pass
the damn thing. It is, in essence, a legislative microcosm of the
electoral strategy that Karl Rove has employed to such devastating
effect.

A classic example was the vote for the Central American Free Trade
Agreement, the union-smashing, free-trade monstrosity passed in 2005.
As has often been the case in the past six years, the vote was held
late at night, away from the prying eyes of the public, who might be
horrified by what they see. Thanks to such tactics, the 109th is
known as the "Dracula" Congress: Twenty bills have been brought to a
vote between midnight and 7 a.m.

CAFTA actually went to vote early -- at 11:02 p.m. When the usual
fifteen-minute voting period expired, the nays were up, 180 to 175.
Republicans then held the vote open for another forty-seven minutes
while GOP leaders cruised the aisles like the family elders from The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, frantically chopping at the legs and arms of
Republicans who opposed the measure. They even roused the president
out of bed to help kick ass for the vote, passing a cell phone with
Bush on the line around the House cloakroom like a bong. Rep. Robin
Hayes of North Carolina was approached by House Speaker Dennis
Hastert, who told him, "Negotiations are open. Put on the table the
things that your district and people need and we'll get them." After
receiving assurances that the administration would help textile
manufacturers in his home state by restricting the flow of cheap
Chinese imports, Hayes switched his vote to yea. CAFTA ultimately
passed by two votes at 12:03 a.m.
Closed rules, shipwrecked bills, secret negotiations, one-vote
victories. The result of all this is a Congress where there is little
or no open debate and virtually no votes are left to chance; all the
important decisions are made in backroom deals, and what you see on C-
Span is just empty theater, the world's most expensive trained-
dolphin act. The constant here is a political strategy of conducting
congressional business with as little outside input as possible,
rejecting the essentially conservative tradition of rule-by-consensus
in favor of a more revolutionary strategy of rule by cabal.

"This Congress has thrown caution to the wind," says Turley, the
constitutional scholar. "They have developed rules that are an abuse
of majority power. Keeping votes open by freezing the clock, barring
minority senators from negotiations on important conference issues --
it is a record that the Republicans should now dread. One of the
concerns that Republicans have about losing Congress is that they
will have to live under the practices and rules they have created.
The abuses that served them in the majority could come back to haunt
them in the minority."

STEP TWO
WORK AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE -- AND SCREW UP WHAT LITTLE YOU DO

It's Thursday evening, September 28th, and the Senate is putting the
finishing touches on the Military Commissions Act of 2006,
colloquially known as the "torture bill." It's a law even Stalin
would admire, one that throws habeas corpus in the trash, legalizes a
vast array of savage interrogation techniques and generally turns the
president of the United States into a kind of turbocharged Yoruba
witch doctor, with nearly unlimited snatching powers. The bill is a
fall-from-Eden moment in American history, a potentially disastrous
step toward authoritarianism -- but what is most disturbing about it,
beyond the fact that it's happening, is that the senators are
hurrying to get it done.

In addition to ending generations of bipartisanship and instituting
one-party rule, our national legislators in the Bush years are guilty
of something even more fundamental: They suck at their jobs.

They don't work many days, don't pass many laws, and the few laws
they're forced to pass, they pass late. In fact, in every year that
Bush has been president, Congress has failed to pass more than three
of the eleven annual appropriations bills on time.

That figures into tonight's problems. At this very moment, as the
torture bill goes to a vote, there are only a few days left until the
beginning of the fiscal year -- and not one appropriations bill has
been passed so far. That's why these assholes are hurrying to bag
this torture bill: They want to finish in time to squeeze in a measly
two hours of debate tonight on the half-trillion-dollar defense-
appropriations bill they've blown off until now. The plan is to then
wrap things up tomorrow before splitting Washington for a month of
real work, i.e., campaigning.

Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont comments on this rush to torture during the
final, frenzied debate. "Over 200 years of jurisprudence in this
country," Leahy pleads, "and following an hour of debate, we get rid
of it?"

Yawns, chatter, a few sets of rolling eyes -- yeah, whatever, Pat. An
hour later, the torture bill is law. Two hours after that, the
diminutive chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Sen. Ted
Stevens, reads off the summary of the military-spending bill to a
mostly empty hall; since the members all need their sleep and most
have left early, the "debate" on the biggest spending bill of the
year is conducted before a largely phantom audience.

"Mr. President," Stevens begins, eyeing the few members
present. "There are only four days left in the fiscal year. The 2007
defense appropriations conference report must be signed into law by
the president before Saturday at midnight. . . ."

Watching Ted Stevens spend half a trillion dollars is like watching a
junkie pull a belt around his biceps with his teeth. You get the
sense he could do it just as fast in the dark. When he finishes his
summary -- $436 billion in defense spending, including $70 billion
for the Iraq "emergency" -- he fucks off and leaves the hall. A few
minutes later, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma -- one of the so-called
honest Republicans who has clashed with his own party's leadership on
spending issues -- appears in the hall and whines to the empty room
about all the lavish pork projects and sheer unadulterated waste
jammed into the bill. But aside from a bored-looking John Cornyn of
Texas, who is acting as president pro tempore, and a couple of
giggling, suit-clad pages, there is no one in the hall to listen to
him.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Congress met an average of 162 days a
year. In the Eighties and Nineties, the average went down to 139
days. This year, the second session of the 109th Congress will set
the all-time record for fewest days worked by a U.S. Congress: ninety-
three. That means that House members will collect their $165,000
paychecks for only three months of actual work.

What this means is that the current Congress will not only beat but
shatter the record for laziness set by the notorious "Do-Nothing"
Congress of 1948, which met for a combined 252 days between the House
and the Senate. This Congress -- the Do-Even-Less Congress -- met for
218 days, just over half a year, between the House and the Senate
combined.

And even those numbers don't come close to telling the full story.
Those who actually work on the Hill will tell you that a great many
of those "workdays" were shameless mail-ins, half-days at best.
Congress has arranged things now so that the typical workweek on the
Hill begins late on Tuesday and ends just after noon on Thursday, to
give members time to go home for the four-day weekend. This is borne
out in the numbers: On nine of its "workdays" this year, the House
held not a single vote -- meeting for less than eleven minutes. The
Senate managed to top the House's feat, pulling off three workdays
this year that lasted less than one minute. All told, a full fifteen
percent of the Senate's workdays lasted less than four hours.
Figuring for half-days, in fact, the 109th Congress probably worked
almost two months less than that "Do-Nothing" Congress.

Congressional laziness comes at a high price. By leaving so many
appropriations bills unpassed by the beginning of the new fiscal
year, Congress forces big chunks of the government to rely
on "continuing resolutions" for their funding. Why is this a problem?
Because under congressional rules, CRs are funded at the lowest of
three levels: the level approved by the House, the level approved by
the Senate or the level approved from the previous year. Thanks to
wide discrepancies between House and Senate appropriations for social
programming, CRs effectively operate as a backdoor way to slash
social programs. It's also a nice way for congressmen to get around
having to pay for expensive-ass programs they voted for, like No
Child Left Behind and some of the other terminally underfunded
boondoggles of the Bush years.

"The whole point of passing appropriations bills is that Congress is
supposed to make small increases in programs to account for things
like the increase in population," says Adam Hughes, director of
federal fiscal policy for OMB Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog
group. "It's their main job." Instead, he says, the reliance on
CRs "leaves programs underfunded."

Instead of dealing with its chief constitutional duty -- approving
all government spending -- Congress devotes its time to dumb
bullshit. "This Congress spent a week and a half debating Terri
Schiavo -- it never made appropriations a priority," says Hughes. In
fact, Congress leaves itself so little time to pass the real
appropriations bills that it winds up rolling them all into one giant
monstrosity known as an Omnibus bill and passing it with little or no
debate. Rolling eight-elevenths of all federal spending into a single
bill that hits the floor a day or two before the fiscal year ends
does not leave much room to check the fine print. "It allows a lot
more leeway for fiscal irresponsibility," says Hughes.

A few years ago, when Democratic staffers in the Senate were
frantically poring over a massive Omnibus bill they had been handed
the night before the scheduled vote, they discovered a tiny provision
that had not been in any of the previous versions. The item would
have given senators on the Appropriations Committee access to the
private records of any taxpayer -- essentially endowing a few
selected hacks in the Senate with the license to snoop into the
private financial information of all Americans.

"We were like, 'What the hell is this?' ?says one Democratic aide
familiar with the incident. "It was the most egregious thing
imaginable. It was just lucky we caught them."

STEP THREE
LET THE PRESIDENT DO WHATEVER HE WANTS

The constitution is very clear on the responsibility of Congress to
serve as a check on the excesses of the executive branch. The House
and Senate, after all, are supposed to pass all laws -- the president
is simply supposed to execute them. Over the years, despite some ups
and downs, Congress has been fairly consistent in upholding this
fundamental responsibility, regardless of which party controlled the
legislative branch. Elected representatives saw themselves as
beholden not to their own party or the president but to the
institution of Congress itself. The model of congressional
independence was Sen. William Fulbright, who took on McCarthy,
Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon with equal vigor during the course of his
long career.

"Fulbright behaved the same way with Nixon as he did with Johnson,"
says Wheeler, the former Senate aide who worked on both sides of the
aisle. "You wouldn't see that today."

In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new
standard for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be
that when a Democratic president is in power, there are no matters
too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully -- but when George
Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is
shocking enough to warrant congressional attention. One gets the
sense that Bush would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to
inspire hearings in Congress -- and only then if he did it during a
nationally televised State of the Union address and the babies were
from Pennsylvania, where Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was
running ten points behind in an election year.

The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through
the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee
chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a
committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-
standing arrangement and issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to
investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct,
reviewing more than 2 million pages of government documents.

Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since
George Bush took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the
number of open rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of
appropriations bills passed on time.

And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35
million investigating the administration. The total amount of
taxpayer funds spent, when independent counsels are taken into
account, was more than $150 million. Included in that number was $2.2
million to investigate former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying
about improper payments he made to a mistress. In contrast, today's
Congress spent barely half a million dollars investigating the
outright fraud and government bungling that followed Hurricane
Katrina, the largest natural disaster in American history.

"Oversight is one of the most important functions of Congress --
perhaps more important than legislating," says Rep. Henry
Waxman. "And the Republicans have completely failed at it. I think
they decided that they were going to be good Republicans first and
good legislators second."

As the ranking minority member of the Government Reform Committee,
Waxman has earned a reputation as the chief Democratic muckraker,
obsessively cranking out reports on official misconduct and
incompetence. Among them is a lengthy document detailing all of the
wrongdoing by the Bush administration that should have been
investigated -- and would have been, in any other era. The litany of
fishy behavior left uninvestigated in the Bush years includes the
manipulation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction, the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, the leak of Valerie
Plame's CIA status, the award of Halliburton contracts, the White
House response to Katrina, secret NSA wiretaps, Dick Cheney's energy
task force, the withholding of Medicare cost estimates, the
administration's politicization of science, contract abuses at
Homeland Security and lobbyist influence at the EPA.

Waxman notes that the failure to investigate these issues has
actually hurt the president, leaving potentially fatal flaws in his
policies unexamined even by those in his own party. Without proper
congressional oversight, small disasters like the misuse of Iraq
intelligence have turned into huge, festering, unsolvable fiascoes
like the Iraq occupation. Republicans in Congress who stonewalled
investigations of the administration "thought they were doing Bush a
favor," says Waxman. "But they did him the biggest disservice of
all."

Congress has repeatedly refused to look at any aspect of the war. In
2003, Republicans refused to allow a vote on a bill introduced by
Waxman that would have established an independent commission to
review the false claims Bush made in asking Congress to declare war
on Iraq. That same year, the chair of the House Intelligence
Committee, Porter Goss, refused to hold hearings on whether the
administration had forged evidence of the nuclear threat allegedly
posed by Iraq. A year later the chair of the Government Reform
Committee, Tom Davis, refused to hold hearings on new evidence
casting doubt on the "nuclear tubes" cited by the Bush administration
before the war. Sen. Pat Roberts, who pledged to issue a Senate
Intelligence Committee report after the 2004 election on whether the
Bush administration had misled the public before the invasion,
changed his mind after the president won re-election. "I think it
would be a monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any
further," Roberts said.

Sensenbrenner has done his bit to squelch any debate over Iraq. He
refused a request by John Conyers and more than fifty other Democrats
for hearings on the famed "Downing Street Memo," the internal British
document that stated that Bush had "fixed" the intelligence about the
war, and he was one of three committee chairs who rejected requests
for hearings on the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Despite an
international uproar over Abu Ghraib, Congress spent only twelve
hours on hearings on the issue. During the Clinton administration, by
contrast, the Republican Congress spent 140 hours investigating the
president's alleged misuse of his Christmas-card greeting list.

"You talk to many Republicans in Congress privately, and they will
tell you how appalled they are by the administration's diminishment
of civil liberties and the constant effort to keep fear alive," says
Turley, who testified as a constitutional scholar in favor of the
Clinton impeachment. "Yet those same members slavishly vote with the
White House. What's most alarming about the 109th has been the
massive erosion of authority in Congress. There has always been
partisanship, but this is different. Members have become robotic in
the way they vote."

Perhaps the most classic example of failed oversight in the Bush era
came in a little-publicized hearing of the Senate Armed Services
Committee held on February 13th, 2003 -- just weeks before the
invasion of Iraq. The hearing offered senators a rare opportunity to
grill Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and top Pentagon officials
on a wide variety of matters, including the fairly important question
of whether they even had a fucking plan for the open-ended occupation
of a gigantic hostile foreign population halfway around the planet.
This was the biggest bite that Congress would have at the Iraq apple
before the war, and given the gravity of the issue, it should have
been a beast of a hearing.

But it wasn't to be. In a meeting that lasted two hours and fifty-
three minutes, only one question was asked about the military's
readiness on the eve of the invasion. Sen. John Warner, the
committee's venerable and powerful chairman, asked Gen. Richard Myers
if the U.S. was ready to fight simultaneously in both Iraq and North
Korea, if necessary.

Myers answered, "Absolutely."

And that was it. The entire exchange lasted fifteen seconds. The rest
of the session followed a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched
a hearing on C-Span: The members, when they weren't reading or
chatting with one another, used their time with witnesses almost
exclusively to address parochial concerns revolving around pork
projects in their own districts. Warner set the tone in his opening
remarks; after announcing that U.S. troops preparing to invade Iraq
could count on his committee's "strongest support," the senator from
Virginia quickly turned to the question of how the war would affect
the budget for Navy shipbuilding, which, he said, was not
increasing "as much as we wish." Not that there's a huge Navy
shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, or anything.

Other senators followed suit. Daniel Akaka was relatively
uninterested in Iraq but asked about reports that Korea might have a
missile that could reach his home state of Hawaii. David Pryor of
Arkansas used his time to tout the wonders of military bases in
Little Rock and Pine Bluff. When the senators weren't eating up their
allotted time in this fashion, they were usually currying favor with
the generals. Warner himself nicely encapsulated the obsequious tone
of the session when he complimented Rumsfeld for having his shit so
together on the war.

"I think your response reflects that we have given a good deal of
consideration," Warner said. "That we have clear plans in place and
are ready to proceed." We all know how that turned out.

STEP FOUR
SPEND, SPEND, SPEND

There is a simple reason that members of Congress don't waste their
time providing any oversight of the executive branch: There's nothing
in it for them. "What they've all figured out is that there's no
political payoff in oversight," says Wheeler, the former
congressional staffer. "But there's a big payoff in pork."

When one considers that Congress has forsaken hearings and debate,
conspired to work only three months a year, completely ditched its
constitutional mandate to provide oversight and passed very little in
the way of meaningful legislation, the question arises: What do they
do?

The answer is easy: They spend. When Bill Clinton left office, the
nation had a budget surplus of $236 billion. Today, thanks to
Congress, the budget is $296 billion in the hole. This year, more
than sixty-five percent of all the money borrowed in the entire world
will be borrowed by America, a statistic fueled by the speed-junkie
spending habits of our supposedly "fiscally conservative" Congress.
It took forty-two presidents before George W. Bush to borrow $1
trillion; under Bush, Congress has more than doubled that number in
six years. And more often than not, we are borrowing from countries
the sane among us would prefer not to be indebted to: The U.S. shells
out $77 billion a year in interest to foreign creditors, including
payment on the $300 billion we currently owe China.

What do they spend that money on? In the age of Jack Abramoff, that
is an ugly question to even contemplate. But let's take just one
bill, the so-called energy bill, a big, hairy, favor-laden bitch of a
law that started out as the wet dream of Dick Cheney's energy task
force and spent four long years leaving grease-tracks on every set of
palms in the Capitol before finally becoming law in 2005.

Like a lot of laws in the Bush era, it was crafted with virtually no
input from the Democrats, who were excluded from the conference
process. And during the course of the bill's gestation period we were
made aware that many of its provisions were more or less openly for
sale, as in the case of a small electric utility from Kansas called
Westar Energy.

Westar wanted a provision favorable to its business inserted in the
bill -- and in an internal company memo, it acknowledged that members
of Congress had requested Westar donate money to their campaigns in
exchange for the provision. The members included former Louisiana
congressman Billy Tauzin and current Energy and Commerce chairman Joe
Barton of Texas. "They have made this request in lieu of
contributions made to their own campaigns," the memo noted. The total
amount of Westar's contributions was $58,200.

Keep in mind, that number -- fifty-eight grand -- was for a single
favor. The energy bill was loaded with them. Between 2001 and the
passage of the bill, energy companies donated $115 million to federal
politicians, with seventy-five percent of the money going to
Republicans. When the bill finally passed, it contained $6 billion in
subsidies for the oil industry, much of which was funneled through a
company with ties to Majority Leader Tom DeLay. It included an
exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act for companies that use a
methane-drilling technique called "hydraulic fracturing" -- one of
the widest practitioners of which is Halliburton. And it included
billions in subsidies for the construction of new coal plants and
billions more in loan guarantees to enable the coal and nuclear
industries to borrow money at bargain-basement interest rates.

Favors for campaign contributors, exemptions for polluters, shifting
the costs of private projects on to the public -- these are the
specialties of this Congress. They seldom miss an opportunity to
impoverish the states we live in and up the bottom line of their
campaign contributors. All this time -- while Congress did nothing
about Iraq, Katrina, wiretapping, Mark Foley's boy-madness or
anything else of import -- it has been all about pork, all about
political favors, all about budget "earmarks" set aside for expensive
and often useless projects in their own districts. In 2000, Congress
passed 6,073 earmarks; by 2005, that number had risen to 15,877. They
got better at it every year. It's the one thing they're good at.

Even worse, this may well be the first Congress ever to lose control
of the government's finances. For the past six years, it has
essentially been writing checks without keeping an eye on its
balance. When you do that, unpleasant notices eventually start
appearing in the mail. In 2003, the inspector general of the Defense
Department reported to Congress that the military's financial-
management systems did not comply with "generally accepted accounting
principles" and that the department "cannot currently provide
adequate evidence supporting various material amounts on the
financial statements."

Translation: The Defense Department can no longer account for its
money. "It essentially can't be audited," says Wheeler, the former
congressional staffer. "And nobody did anything about it. That's the
job of Congress, but they don't care anymore."

So not only does Congress not care what intelligence was used to get
into the war, what the plan was supposed to be once we got there,
what goes on in military prisons in Iraq and elsewhere, how military
contracts are being given away and to whom -- it doesn't even give a
shit what happens to the half-trillion bucks it throws at the
military every year.

Not to say, of course, that this Congress hasn't made an effort to
reform itself. In the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal, and
following a public uproar over the widespread abuse of earmarks, both
the House and the Senate passed their own versions of an earmark
reform bill this year. But when the two chambers couldn't agree on a
final version, the House was left to pass its own watered-down
measure in the waning days of the most recent session. This
pathetically, almost historically half-assed attempt at reforming
corruption should tell you all you need to know about the current
Congress.

The House rule will force legislators to attach their names to all
earmarks. Well, not all earmarks. Actually, the new rule applies only
to nonfederal funding -- money for local governments, nonprofits and
universities. And the rule will remain in effect only for the
remainder of this congressional year -- in other words, for the few
remaining days of business after lawmakers return to Washington
following the election season. After that, it's back to business as
usual next year.

That is what passes for "corruption reform" in this Congress --
forcing lawmakers to put their names on a tiny fraction of all
earmarks. For a couple of days.

STEP FIVE
LINE YOUR OWN POCKETS

Anyone who wants to get a feel for the kinds of beasts that have been
roaming the grounds of the congressional zoo in the past six years
need only look at the deranged, handwritten letter that convicted
bribe-taker and GOP ex-congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham recently
sent from prison to Marcus Stern, the reporter who helped bust him.
In it, Cunningham -- who was convicted last year of taking $2.4
million in cash, rugs, furniture and jewelry from a defense
contractor called MZM -- bitches out Stern in the broken, half-
literate penmanship of a six-year-old put in time-out.

"Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them
Along with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life,"
Cunningham wrote. "I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I
made some decissions [sic] Ill be sorry for the rest of my life."

The amazing thing about Cunningham's letter is not his utter lack of
remorse, or his insistence on blaming defense contractor Mitchell
Wade for ratting him out ("90% of what has happed [sic] is Wade," he
writes), but his frantic, almost epic battle with the English
language. It is clear that the same Congress that put a drooling
child-chaser like Mark Foley in charge of a House caucus on child
exploitation also named Cunningham, a man who can barely write his
own name in the ground with a stick, to a similarly appropriate
position. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the former chairman of
the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and
Counterintelligence:

"As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you
have & will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of
the Year...hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border
security, Megans law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill...and every
time you wanted an expert on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you
write About how I died."

How liablest you have & will be? What the fuck does that even mean?
This guy sat on the Appropriations Committee for years -- no wonder
Congress couldn't pass any spending bills!

This is Congress in the Bush years, in a nutshell -- a guy who takes
$2 million in bribes from a contractor, whooping it up in turtlenecks
and pajama bottoms with young women on a contractor-provided yacht
named after himself (the "Duke-Stir"), and not only is he shocked
when he's caught, he's too dumb to even understand that he's been
guilty of anything.

This kind of appalling moral blindness, a sort of high-functioning,
sociopathic stupidity, has been a consistent characteristic of the
numerous Republicans indicted during the Bush era. Like all
revolutionaries, they seem to feel entitled to break rules in the
name of whatever the hell it is they think they're doing. And when
caught breaking said rules with wads of cash spilling out of their
pockets, they appear genuinely indignant at accusations of
wrongdoing. Former House Majority Leader and brazen fuckhead Tom
DeLay, after finally being indicted for money laundering, seemed
amazed that anyone would bring him into court.

"I have done nothing wrong," he declared. "I have violated no law, no
regulation, no rule of the House." Unless, of course, you count the
charges against him for conspiring to inject illegal contributions
into state elections in Texas "with the intent that a felony be
committed."

It was the same when Ohio's officious jackass of a (soon-to-be-ex)
Congressman Bob Ney finally went down for accepting $170,000 in trips
from Abramoff in exchange for various favors. Even as the evidence
piled high, Ney denied any wrongdoing. When he finally did plead
guilty, he blamed the sauce. "A dependence on alcohol has been a
problem for me," he said.

Abramoff, incidentally, was another Republican with a curious
inability to admit wrongdoing even after conviction; even now he
confesses only to trying too hard to "save the world." But everything
we know about Abramoff suggests that Congress has embarked on a never-
ending party, a wild daisy-chain of golf junkets, skybox tickets and
casino trips. Money is everywhere and guys like Abramoff found ways
to get it to guys like Ney, who made the important discovery that
even a small entry in the Congressional Record can get you a tee time
at St. Andrews.

Although Ney is so far the only congressman to win an all-expenses
trip to prison as a result of his relationship with Abramoff, nearly
a dozen other House Republicans are known to have done favors for
him. Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana, who accepted some $36,000 from
Abramoff-connected donors, helped prevent the Jena Band of Choctaw
Indians from opening a casino that would have competed with
Abramoff's clients. Rep. Deborah Pryce, who sent a letter to Interior
Secretary Gale Norton opposing the Jena casino, received $8,000 from
the Abramoff money machine. Rep. John Doolittle, whose wife was hired
to work for Abramoff's sham charity, also intervened on behalf of the
lobbyist's clients.

Then there was DeLay and his fellow Texan, Rep. Pete Sessions, who
did Abramoff's bidding after accepting gifts and junkets. So much
energy devoted to smarmy little casino disputes at a time when the
country was careening toward disaster in Iraq: no time for oversight
but plenty of time for golf.

For those who didn't want to go the black-bag route, there was always
the legal jackpot. Billy Tauzin scarcely waited a week after leaving
office to start a $2 million-a-year job running PhRMA, the group that
helped him push through a bill prohibiting the government from
negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. Tauzin also became
the all-time poster boy for pork absurdity when a "greenbonds
initiative" crafted in his Energy and Commerce Committee turned out
to be a subsidy to build a Hooters in his home state of Louisiana.

The greed and laziness of the 109th Congress has reached such epic
proportions that it has finally started to piss off the public. In an
April poll by CBS News, fully two-thirds of those surveyed said that
Congress has achieved "less than it usually does during a typical two-
year period." A recent Pew poll found that the chief concerns that
occupy Congress -- gay marriage and the inheritance tax -- are near
the bottom of the public's list of worries. Those at the top --
education, health care, Iraq and Social Security -- were mostly blown
off by Congress. Even a Fox News poll found that fifty-three percent
of voters say Congress isn't "working on issues important to most
Americans."

One could go on and on about the scandals and failures of the past
six years; to document them all would take . . . well, it would take
more than ninety-three fucking days, that's for sure. But you can
boil the whole sordid mess down to a few basic concepts. Sloth.
Greed. Abuse of power. Hatred of democracy. Government as a cheap
backroom deal, finished in time for thirty-six holes of the world's
best golf. And brains too stupid to be ashamed of any of it. If we
have learned nothing else in the Bush years, it's that this Congress
cannot be reformed. The only way to change it is to get rid of it.

Fortunately, we still get that chance once in a while.

See our picks for the 10 Worst Congressmen and read what people are
saying in our politics blog.

IAHF needs your help to get back to DC in January:

If we can kill the AER bill in the House during this lame duck
session which ends Friday, the bill would have to be reintroduced in
the next Congress under new bill numbers- they'd have to try again-
and we will have to push very hard for a HEARING on the bill in order
to get the changes made to it that we need.

The other side is pulling out all the stops to get this bill through
because it would enable the big supplement companies that could
afford the red tape to knock off the small companies that can't and
the big ones would gain hugely increased marketshare. Thank God not
all big companies are against us! Please be sure to THANK Nature's
Plus, Nutraceutical, and Solgar for being in our corner against NPA
(formerly NNFA).

We must continue to build our base regardless of what happens on this
bill. We must ALSO push for a hearing on FDA's illegal Trilateral
Cooperation Charter with Canada/ Mexico wherein FDA is attempting to
harmonize the food and drug regs for all 3 countries as if the
N.American Union already existed. We're seeing a concerted push to
DESTROY our country, and it will be destroyed, but ONLY if we LET it!

See my petition and please sign it:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/373269232#body

For donations of $25 we'll send a copy of Byron Richard's book

FIGHT FOR YOUR HEALTH- EXPOSING THE FDA's BETRAYAL OF AMERICA

For $50. we'll send the book, plus Kevin Miller's documentary
film "We Become Silent" about the Codex vitamin issue.For $100. we'll
send the above + an IAHF Bumper Sticker.

For $200. or more we'll send the above + an autographed photo
suitable for framing of John Hammell swimming in a hole cut in the
ice of a frozen pond.

The photo helps anyone who sees it to increase their resolve to be
stronger than any hardship you may ever face.

Please help us get back to DC so we can do our work!

IAHF 556 Boundary Bay Rd., Point Roberts WA 98281 or via paypal:
http://www.iahf.com click to enter site, see paypal link on top of
scrollbar inside the site.


For Health Freedom, John C. Hammell, President International
Advocates for Health Freedom 556 Boundary Bay Road Point Roberts, WA
98281-8702 USA http://www.iahf.com jham@... 800-333-2553
N.America 360-945-0352 World