FW: Agony in Aceh

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

>From Microsoft's [soon to be WashPo's] survey of major US newspapers: >The papers all mention the White House's announcement that Secretary of State Powell and the president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, will visit some of the disaster areas this weekend. <

Is Jeb being groomed as the heir apparent? Could this effort succeed?

Meanwhile, in the corruption news [from the same source]:>The Los Angeles Times digs through federal disclosure forms and finds that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted a lot more gifts over the past six years than have his colleagues, a total of $42,000 worth. Ethics codes only bar justices from accepting goodies from people who have business in front of the court. For what it's worth, the Times notices that some the most expensive swag came from a Texan conservative who had been a board member of a group that often filed amicus briefs in the Court. 

>The [Washington] Post fronts House Republican leaders pushing to loosen another ethics committee rule in order to make it harder to discipline wayward lawmakers. 

>Dept of Irony in Naming... A finger-wagging "analysis" accompanying the above WP piece notes: "The Office of Government Ethics has proposed, and Bush supports, legislation to ease financial disclosure requirements for government officials, reducing the amount of conflict-of-interest information that candidates and their families must report. The House recently passed a version of the legislation."<

JD