Vatican City, Las Vegas

F. Rex’s ribald, allusive, and downright blasphemous graphic novel parodies the excesses of modern capitalist culture as it finds bathos and transcendence in a debased, Vatican-themed Las Vegas casino. With a colorful cast of characters that includes Thomas Carlyle as a down-on-his-luck drunkard, Karl Marx as an overweight vagrant donning a beer helmet, T.S. Eliot as an uptight casino-floor manager, and Jesus as an oppressed janitor, plus a dozen other characters too profane to mention, Vatican City, Las Vegas reads like a version of The Waste Land re-imagined by R. Crumb. Let’s hope that Philly’s slots parlors don’t turn out like this . . . though if they do, they might wind up being a lot more fun.

John McCain Breaks McCain-Feingold Law

Hotline On Call today reports that John McCain will be raising money for Adjudant General Stan Spears in South Carolina. However the fundraiser violates the law he helped write. The invitation says that the “minimum donation requested is $100″ and says nothing about the maximum.

The law that McCain wrote specifically prohibits Senators from raising more than $2100 for a state candidate. However, the Spears invitation encourages donors to give amounts up to and beyond that limit. This means that John McCain is raising soft money.

McCain has said repeatedly that the purpose of McCain Feingold was to stop federal officeholders from raising soft money.

Today, the Spears campaign has said that it distributed an RSVP card with the invitation with a disclaimer that should satisfy the law. This would make the appearance merely hypocritical rather than outright illegal . . .

Trouble is, it’s not at all clear that this disclaimer passes legal muster. McCain Feingold isn’t a law that mandates disclaimers; it’s a law that (as McCain has reminded us many times) bans federal officeholders from asking for unlimited soft money contributions. When McCain put his name on an invitation that asked for unlimited contributions where the “minimum donation requested was $100,” McCain violated that law. Even with the RSVP card, it appears that the invitation is asking for funds up to $3,500 – well above the amount McCain may raise under the McCain-Feingold law.

The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.

[. . .]

In another case cited in the report, a power station project in Musayyib, the direct construction cost cited by the development agency was $6.6 million, while the overhead cost was $27.6 million.

The result is that the project’s overhead, a figure that normally runs to a maximum of 30 percent, was a stunning 418 percent.

The figures were even adjusted in the opposite direction when that helped the agency balance its books, the inspector general found. On an electricity project at the Baghdad South power station, direct construction costs were reported by the agency as $164.3 million and indirect or overhead costs as $1.4 million.

Sadly, it is increasingly clear that this collapse was not brought about by the isolated acts of rogue employees. A disaster of this magnitude requires the complicity of far more than a few bad apples. From senior managers to corporate directors, to outside counsel and accountants, almost no one who had the power to sound the alarm, correct the situation or prevent this debacle did so.

[. . .]

One final note: Like many Americans, I have tried to keep some perspective on this whole tawdry affair and to provide some perspective as well, but the truth is that this story of financial collapse and betrayal is of epic proportions. It is almost biblical in scope, so perhaps we need to look beyond all the greedy details of avarice and appetite to a larger lesson that all of us can share. In the 11th Chapter of the Book of Proverbs, the authors offer these prophetic words: “He that troubleth his own house will inherit the wind. And the fool will be a servant to the wise in heart.'’ Perhaps that is the true lesson of Enron’s failure.