Republicans Anonymous

Looks like the light of public attention is making these cockroaches scurry back to the shadows:

Yesterday, the staff director of the Senate Republican Conference said that a K-Street-job-vacancies memo -- the heart of Congress's remaining involvement in the effort these days -- will no longer be distributed during high-level meetings hosted by the conference on Capitol Hill between lawmakers and lobbyists. Responsibility for the listings migrated from the House to the Senate several years ago, according to lobbyists.

While lobbyists and others could still obtain the information elsewhere, the change removes the formal involvement of lawmakers from the process and any implied encouragement by them to transform K Street into a Republican bastion.
(Source: Washington Post GOP Freezes Jobs List, a Vestige of the K Street Project, Jan 26, 2006.)

Note, please, that they're still doing it - just not quite so openly...

Yet more evidence that the Republicans knew there was massive corruption in the Bush League's Coalition Provisional Authority (misnamed "CPA") and decided to launch an over-hyped investigation into the UN "Oil for Food" plan to distract the voters from their own, far more serious scandals:

Cash meant for Iraqis 'misused'

Large bundles of cash meant for Iraq's reconstruction were stashed in filing cabinets, handed over without receipts and gambled away, a report has found.

The audit, by US-appointed inspectors, paints a picture of the chaotic misuse of millions of dollars of funds.

The lack of oversight had a tragic outcome in one case, when a hospital lift, supposed to have been fixed, crashed killing three people.

The report said US post-war planning was limited by a desire for secrecy.

There were no detailed, overt preparations for the reconstruction of Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 invasion "to avoid the impression that the US government had already decided on [military] intervention", the report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) said.

Nevertheless, the US has allocated billions of dollars to rebuilding Iraq, and large amounts have been raised through the sale of Iraqi oil.
(Source: BBC News, Jan 25, 2006 [emphasis in original])

Wasn't Hillary Clinton visiting Iraq during some of this? Maybe she should be investigated...