Tom Davis and Government, Inc.

By: Andrea Chamblee
Published On: 7/12/2007 7:42:37 AM

The Pay to Play politics of corrupt politicians like Tom Davis and Jeannemarie Devolites Davis has inspired a new blog from the reporter who last exposed the Davises a year ago.
From the Project on Government Oversight:
We wanted to send a warm welcome from the blogosphere to Robert O'Harrow, Jr. of the Washington Post who today launched his blog "Government Inc." In the past few years, O?Harrow and his partner Scott Higham have been reporting some of the biggest and most important stories about government contracting including the adventures of the General Services Administration?s Lurita Doan and the ballooning cost of contracts at the Department of Homeland Security. The first installment concerns Sun Microsystems overcharging the government millions of dollars. We are fans.

Even if you can believe contracting out core government functions is not a terrible idea in general, the prevalence of contracting out has even caused concern at ultraConservative Wall Street Journal. The paper wrote about the terrible consequences of government losing control over databases, libraries, and institutional memory in a front page article, "Is the Government Outsourcing its Brain?"

Then of course, there is the incompetence of the contractors who have paid Congress for their company's earmarks, for contracts they could not win honorably. Tom Davis, who had bought his position on the Oversight Committee by serving at Tom Delay's knee, ignored his duties and cried all the way to the bank.

Comments



Tom Davis and Government, Inc (makenomistake - 7/12/2007 8:37:39 AM)
Andrea Chamblee, could you use whatever resources and actions needed to report on the relationship between Connolly and the thousands and thousands of dollars that he has received from the development community?


Connolly links (Andrea Chamblee - 7/12/2007 11:58:29 AM)
I posted for the last requestor. Go to VPAP.org, click on candidates and type in Connolly.


One more thing on fundraising (Andrea Chamblee - 7/12/2007 11:14:08 PM)
Let's be fair to Connolly.  Davis has two PACs and a psuedo-political "beard" wife whose work is a conflict of interest. He has set up his money tree so it's very very difficult to follow it to the roots, to know who supports him and who doesn't.  For example, he claims to support stem cells, and he even tosses a few meaningless votes that way (that will never overcome the Party's position) yet when he has the power to dig into why the Surgeon General is muzzled on science including stem cells, he sits on his hands and lets the administration corrupt and sabotage the science and the scientists.  The authors of his expose say Davis  "works very hard at obscuring direct links between campaign contributions and official acts."  Connolly's donations are transparent. He has no secret PACs and no second wife he has propped up in a job calling people who report to him to ask them to speak at her own conferences.  He never subpoened Terri Schiavo and claimed it was because she "deserved an appeal" (she had 14 appeals!).  You know where Connolly money comes from and you know how he votes. He is much more of an open book and you can make decisions based on that.