Here is more evidence that The Republican Party and their Conservative Christian claims just seem to equal scadal and corruption wherever you look.  That is sad and is giving Christianity a bad name.

F.B.I. Studies Senator’s Role in Contract

Excerpted from an article by PHILIP SHENON

Published: August 17, 2007 in the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 — The F.B.I. is investigating whether Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska had a role in arranging a 1999 government contract worth as much as $70 million for a company that oversaw renovations of his house months later, officials said Thursday.

The contract was awarded by the National Science Foundation to VECO, an Alaska oil-services company founded by a businessman who has confessed to bribing officials.

It is one of several government contracts and grants that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is scrutinizing in a corruption investigation centering on Alaska lawmakers, including Mr. Stevens and the state’s sole House member, Don Young.

Mr. Stevens and Mr. Young, both Republicans, have denied wrongdoing in their dealings with the founder of VECO, Bill Allen. The senator’s home in Girdwood, a resort city, was renovated in 2000 with Mr. Allen’s help. F.B.I. agents raided it last month.

A spokesman for National Science Foundation, an agency that promotes scientific research, confirmed that the bureau had requested information about the 1999 contract and a later contract valued at up to $100 million to VECO to provide logistics for Arctic researchers.

The spokesman, Dana Cruikshank, said he was barred from commenting on other details of the contacts with bureau and how the contracts might involve the investigation of Mr. Stevens.

The initial contract was given to VECO several months before Mr. Allen took charge of the 2000 renovation project on the senator’s house, arranging for contractors to send their bills to VECO rather than the senator.

Mr. Stevens has not disputed that there was such an arrangement with Mr. Allen, a one-time business partner. But the senator has denied wrongdoing and insisted that he paid every bill that Mr. Allen forwarded to him.

The bureau’s interest in the Arctic logistics contract, one of the largest government contracts ever obtained by VECO, was reported by The Anchorage Daily News. A spokesman for Mr. Stevens did not respond to requests for an interview on Thursday.

The Daily News quoted a spokesman, Aaron Saunders, as suggesting that it was no surprise that a senator from Alaska would want to promote scientific research in the Arctic.

“As an appropriator and a senior member of the Commerce Committee,” Mr. Saunders was quoted as saying, “it is Senator Stevens’s role to ensure government entities receive the necessary funding to carry out this important work.”

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Like Father, Like Son, Even When They Are Under Suspicion

Published: August 10, 2007Senator Ted Stevens at the Alaska Legislature last year with his son Ben behind him and to the left.

By PHILIP SHENON

Published: August 10, 2007

WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 — Ben Stevens is often said by Alaskans to be the spitting image of his father, Senator Ted Stevens. They have the same broad forehead, wide-set eyes and compact physique. They share the same rough-hewn personality, seemingly always spoiling for a fight.

Al Grillo/Associated Press

The authorities at the Stevens home in Girdwood, Alaska.

Now, father and son share a new, unwelcome distinction. Both are under investigation by the Justice Department over their ties to an Alaska businessman who has confessed to bribing public officials.

The Alaska home of Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, was raided last week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His son’s offices in the Alaska Legislature — he was a state senator until this year — were raided last summer.

Neither Ted Stevens, who is 83, nor Ben Stevens, 48, a fisherman turned politician and lobbyist who is the youngest of the senator’s three sons, has been charged with a crime.

But in court papers in May in which he admitted to bribery, the Alaska businessman, Bill J. Allen, acknowledged making $243,000 in possibly illegal payments to a state lawmaker identified only as “Senator B.” Although he denies wrongdoing, Ben Stevens, who has acknowledged receiving about $243,000 in consulting fees from Mr. Allen’s oil-services firm, has not disputed that he is “Senator B.”

It is undeniable that Ben Stevens has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from companies and industry groups that have been the recipients of huge federal grants steered to Alaska by his father in recent years.

Prosecutors are now investigating whether Senator Stevens directed money to projects that benefited his son’s lobbying clients. Until Democrats took control of the Senate this year, Senator Stevens had been chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which determines how the federal budget is actually spent.

People with knowledge of the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, say the F.B.I. is reviewing Senator Stevens’s involvement in millions of dollars in earmarks to fishing and seafood companies that his son represented, as well as a $1.6 million appropriation to an Alaska marine sciences center to buy land owned by one of his son’s business partners.

The story of the Stevens family is central to the rough-and-tumble history of Alaska politics — the elder Stevens entered the Senate in 1968, a decade after Alaska was granted statehood — and the latest chapter has its elements of tortured family drama.

Many Alaskans have been left wondering whether it was a doting, fiercely ambitious father who brought the son under the suspicion of criminal investigators, or an intemperate, boastful son who entangled his aging father in the Justice Department’s fast-growing investigation.

“Tragedy is a pretty powerful word, but, yes, it applies,” said Jack Roderick, a former law partner of Ted Stevens who was mayor of Anchorage in the 1970s.

Mr. Roderick said he suspected that Ben Stevens’s tough-as-nails political style might help explain why his father had found himself under federal scrutiny. Mr. Roderick described Ted Stevens as “a father with a son who may have overstepped the bounds.”

Ben Stevens’s criminal defense lawyer, John Wolfe, said it might be precisely the opposite — that his client had come under unfair scrutiny by prosecutors because he is the son of a powerful senator with many adversaries. In Alaska, Mr. Wolfe said, “many people view life through a prism that is decidedly anti-Stevens.”

Mr. Allen, the businessman at the center of the investigation, and Senator Stevens have been business partners in recent years; they were co-owners of a racehorse. But according to local news media reports, witnesses before a federal grand jury say that what appears to have attracted the attention of prosecutors is Mr. Allen’s unusual role in renovating the Stevens family home in Girdwood, the house that was raided last week.

Contractors were instructed to forward their bills for the renovation, which more than doubled the size of the house, to Mr. Allen’s oil-services business, VECO, not to the senator. Mr. Stevens has insisted that he paid every bill that was forwarded to him; he said those bills totaled about $130,000. The question before prosecutors is whether Mr. Allen paid some of the renovation costs in exchange for legislative favors.

Since the F.B.I. raid on his office last year, Ben Stevens has mostly stopped talking to reporters. But in the past, he had denied in interviews that he owed his success as a state politician and business consultant — under state law, he was allowed to do both simultaneously — to his father’s influence in Washington.

“I’ve been living with it my whole life,” he was quoted as telling The Anchorage Daily News in 2002. “There’s nothing I can do to get rid of him as my dad.”

Those comments came in response to financial disclosure forms filed by Mr. Stevens in the State Senate and other documents made public that year that revealed he had been paid more than $715,000 in salary and bonuses for three years’ work on the 2001 Special Olympics World Winter Games in Anchorage.

The effort to bring the Special Olympics to Alaska had been a pet project of his father in Washington, and from his post on the Appropriations Committee, Senator Stevens helped steer millions of dollars in federal money to support the competition for mentally disabled athletes; the 2001 games were mostly underwritten by federal taxpayers.

After the games, Ben Stevens received two consulting and fund-raising contracts from Special Olympics, the Washington organization that oversees the games. The contracts were worth a total of $36,000. The larger contract was for $4,000 a month over a six-month period in 2001.

There is no evidence that his work for the Special Olympics has drawn any sort of scrutiny by investigators.

But the generosity of his pay package for a nonprofit event, and Mr. Stevens’s subsequent consulting contracts with Special Olympics, drew strong criticism in Alaska and seemed to demonstrate how the younger Mr. Stevens had capitalized on his father’s influence on Capitol Hill.

Jerry McBeath, a professor of political science at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, said Ben Stevens was seen in the state as someone whose success was due largely to his bloodline: “What he has done in life has had less to do with native ability than with the fact that he’s the son of a very powerful United States senator.”

Ted Stevens, whose spokesmen in Washington did not return phone calls for comment this week, have said in the past that he had nothing to do with his son’s appointment to the Special Olympics organizing committee or his pay for the 2001 games.

Leslie Aun, a Special Olympics spokeswoman, said the Anchorage games were considered “an extraordinary and wonderful event.” Mr. Stevens was hired and paid by the local organizing committee, Ms. Aun said, adding, “We didn’t have any role in that.” Ms. Aun said Mr. Stevens had been a valuable paid consultant to her group after the games and helped organize a major fund-raising drive.

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Mr. Stevens's Tirade

Sunday, October 23, 2005

ALASKA SEN. Ted Stevens threw the senatorial version of a hissy fit on the floor the other day. The issue was a proposal by his Republican colleague, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, to block $453 million earmarked for two Alaska bridges in the recent highway bill and instead use some of the money to rebuild the Interstate 10 bridge across Lake Ponchartrain wiped out by the recent hurricane. Mr. Stevens is one of the masters of the Senate at steering federal money in the direction of his state, but he was not going to stand for this reverse flow.

"I will put the Senate on notice -- and I don't kid people -- if the Senate decides to discriminate against our state and take money only from our state, I will resign from this body," Mr. Stevens vowed. Sounds awfully tempting to us -- but not, apparently, to Mr. Stevens's colleagues; the amendment failed 82 to 15.

What's most impressive about Mr. Stevens's tantrum is his ability to summon up this degree of righteous indignation -- self-righteous might be more apt -- over the alleged mistreatment of a state that benefits enormously, and disproportionately, from federal spending.

Leave aside for the moment the matter of whether these two earmarks represent a wise use of federal dollars. Okay, we can't let it go; they don't. One, a partial payment for the now infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," would link Ketchikan (population 8,900) with its airport on Gravina Island (population 50). The other, the magnificently named "Don Young's Way" -- hint: Mr. Young, Alaska's sole House member, conveniently happens to chair the transportation committee -- would be a down payment on a billion-dollar bridge across an inlet in Anchorage to a nearly deserted port.

Rather, think about this spending in the larger context: Poor, mistreated Alaska. It ranks number one in per capita federal spending, $12,279 in 2003, compared with Nevada, number 50 at $5,235 for every resident. Alaskans received $1.89 in federal help for every tax dollar they sent to Washington, making the state second only to New Mexico as a net beneficiary of federal largess.

This tale of woe is particularly heart-wrenching when it comes to transportation funding: Of the $24 billion in earmarked projects in the most recent transportation bill, nearly $1 billion went to Alaska, putting the nation's 47th most populous state just behind California and Illinois. The measure provided $1,597 in earmarked funding for every man, woman and child in the state.

Indeed, even if Mr. Coburn's amendment had been adopted, Alaska would have remained by far the leader of the pack in per capita funding. If that's being discriminated against, every state should be so lucky.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, center, flanked by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, left, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, gestures during a news conference in Anchorage, Alaska, in this Oct. 13, 2006 file photo.  The state's entire delegation is under an ethical cloud, something Congressional historians say is unprecedented.  And that may be ending a modern-day gold rush that sent billions of federal dollars to the state. (AP Photo/Al Grillo, File)   Photo Credit: AP Photo

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Examples of Alaska Earmarks

By The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 14, 2007; 1:56 PM

Below are some examples of special project appropriations going to Alaska, as compiled by the private group Taxpayers for Common Sense.  These show a visible unethical practice by Sen Ted Stevens:

• Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board. From its federal funds, the board gave Alaska Airlines a $500,000 grant. It was used, in part, to paint a Boeing 737 to look like a Chinook Salmon to promote the state's seafood.

• The Alyeska Roundhouse received $450,000. The building is at the Alyeska ski resort in Girdwood, where Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens has his home.

• Money for six "Alternative Salmon Products." The University of Alaska received several of these earmarks, which included $450,000 for development of baby food containing salmon in 2006.

• Alaska Christian College received $435,000 in 2005. The school had several dozen students at the time.

• The National Archives and Records Administration received at least $2.25 million toward the purchase of an empty lot in Anchorage from two former Stevens business partners. The purchase cost was $3.5 million, allowing the former Stevens partners to more than double their investment.

• The Alaska Botanical Garden received $300,000 over three years for expansion and renovation.

• SpringBoard, an organization that helps Alaska businesses meet the needs of the Department of Defense, received $14 million the past two years.   Guess which businesses are run by business partners.

• $250,000 was appropriated to plan for the Alaska Statehood celebration, set for 2009.

• $1 million in 2005 went for mobile computers for police cars in Wasilla, Alaska, population 6,700.