The Cave Man Speaks

Reid, meanwhile, has apologized for putting out a press release -- which likens Republicans vowing to stamp out corruption to John Gotti promisiong to clean up organized crime--saying the tone was too harsh, the Washington Post reports today.

Who was Abramoff meeting with at 1600 Penn? Slate's John Dickerson wants to know:

"Jack Abramoff was the Typhoid Mary of Potomac Fever: He sucked up to people in power and showered them with gifts and favors in hopes that they would forget who they worked for and think they worked for him. Did White House aides succumb? McClellan's argument for not telling us is that staff in the executive branch should be allowed to deliberate without fear of disclosure. Staffers can't give honest advice if they're constantly worried about how the public might react to every meeting they might hold. The courts upheld the idea when they rejected attempts by both the General Accounting Office and private watchdog groups to sue for the records detailing which representatives of which oil, gas, and coal companies helped Dick Cheney write the administration's energy policy.

"But like the government car, the 'executive deliberation' perk can be abused. In this case, the White House isn't protecting its sensitive decision-making process; it's merely shielding itself from embarrassment. Congress may not have a legal right to demand records of meetings, but under the circumstances, Bush should voluntarily relinquish them to the public. Taxpayers may not have a right to sit in on every meeting and read every memo, but they should know whether Abramoff succeeded in putting his interests ahead of theirs inside the White House as well as Congress. The Bush campaign returned Abramoff's donations to help remove the stink. But it won't be able to fully fumigate until officials let us know who they met with and why."

HuffPost blogger Eric Boehlert says the media lost sight of K Street (don't blame us, we work on L Street):

"In the wake of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's guilty plea on Jan. 3, some press outlets did their best, belatedly, to explain the crooked lobbying empire Abramoff had built with the help of Rep. Tom DeLay. And specifically, some news outlets addressed the K Street Project, the DeLay/Abramoff/Santorum/Norquist pay-to-play money machine that's playing a pivotal role in the GOP's deepening ethical morass. (Read a smart, concise description of the K Street Project here.) But even then, the media's descriptions have often been half-hearted at best. Appearing on the Don Imus radio show recently, Newsweek's Evan Thomas mentioned, 'this thing called the K Street Project,' as if he'd just heard about the day before over lunch at The Palm.

"In truth, there's not a serious reporter in Washington, D.C. who for the last three years did not know exactly what the K Street Project was. (The GOP openly boasted about it.) The K Street Project was, hands down, the most important behind-the-scenes development in terms of how power/legislation was bought and sold inside the Beltway and represented an epic story with endless angles and repercussions. And yet for the last three years those same serious MSM reporters participated in a virtual boycott of the story, refusing to detail corruption inside the GOP. (Curious, because during the Clinton years the press couldn't stop writing about alleged Democratic funny money scandals that never actually materialized into criminal wrongdoing by prominent Dems.) Only in recent weeks, after Abramoff pleaded guilty and DeLay's grip on power loosened, have reporters felt confident enough to cross the street -- to explain what the K Street Project is.

"And yes, boycott really is the word that described the MSM's previous don't-ask/don't-tell policy regarding the K Street Project. It's true that on June 10 2002, the Washington Post and the New York Times both published articles detailing the creation of the K Street Project. (Again, GOP leaders were practically advertising it.) But then the cones of silence went up."

At Power Line, John Hinderaker has a problem with yesterday's NYT scoop on the report of the last living independent counsel:

"The New York Times reports on David Barrett's investigation into alleged misdeeds by Clinton cabinet officer Henry Cisneros. . . . Someone leaked it to the Times. The Times' angle on the story is that Barrett's eleven-year investigation exemplifies what went wrong with the independent counsel statute, 'an important post-Watergate law.' (So important that it has been repealed, to pretty much everyone's relief.)

"What most struck me about the Times story was how they characterized the person who leaked Barrett's report to them, thereby enabling them to beat most of their competitors to the story:

" A copy of the report was obtained by The New York Times from someone sympathetic to the Barrett investigation who wanted his criticism of the Clinton administration to be known .