So much corruption in so little time

I can't keep up. I have a life to live, food to eat, work to do, sleep to obtain. To keep up with this administration's wheelings and dealings, you need a task force of accountants and law-based attorneys on unlimited espresso shots hidden on an uncharted island surrounded by Navy Seals and hooked up to Internet IVs.
I can't figure out if this administration is brilliant because they have 1,001 ways to skirt near and through every conceivable tax code and campaign law on record. Or if they're complete derelicts because they keep getting caught.
Nonetheless, no one will make a stink except the online truth brigades stirring up enough dust to leave Katie Couric gnawing on grit.

Here's the facts, in only the way someone else but me can tell them.

Via National Review Online:

Did Sen. Tom Carper Just Admit PhRMA and the White House Had a Laws-for-Ads Deal?

While discussing an amendment to have drug companies pay more to the government as part of the health care reform bill, Senator Tom Carper, D-Del., said:

I'll tell you — if someone negotiated a deal with me and I agreed to put up say, 80 dollars or 80 million dollars or 80 billion dollars and then you came back and said to me a couple of weeks later — no no, I know you agreed to do 80 billion and I know you were willing to help support through an advertising campaign this particular — not even this particular bill, just the idea of generic health care reform? No, we're going to double — we're going to double what you agreed in those negotiations to do. That's not the way — that's not what I consider treating people the way I'd want to be treated.

How's that hope and change working out for ya? This isn't even the usual slime of deceit and favors and corruption in Washington. It's slime-plus. New improved slime. Slime you can believe in.

This is a new ethics issue, on top of the current NEA issue yet to be resolved. If you haven't heard about that one, here's a brief recap from Andrew Klavan:

Through the work of artist and blogger Patrick Courrielche, Andrew Breitbart’s new website Big Government—reporting the news so the mainstream media won’t have to—has just released a sickening transcript of an August 10 conference call jointly hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House’s Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve, an initiative overseen by the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency. The purpose of the call was to urge a group of pro-Obama artists to get out there and start creating art that would support the president’s agenda on health care, the environment, education, and community services. Speaking at the request of “folks in the White House and folks in the NEA,” Michael Skolnick, political director for Obama-mad hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, told the assembled artists, “All of us who are on this phone call were selected for a reason, and you are the ones that lead by example in your communities. You are the thought leaders. You are the ones that, if you create a piece of art, or promote a piece of art or create a campaign for a company, and tell our country and our young people sort of what do and what to be into, and what’s cool and what’s not cool.”

Churches can't campaign because of their tax-exempt status. Not because they get money from the government but because they don't give money to the government. Let a pastor give his congregants an opinion on a candidate and watch the vitriol fly. Yet NEA, a tax supported creative gestapo, can play politics?

The White House tried to ignore the NEA scandal, said Ed Morrissey in Hot Air, but Andrew Breitbart made that impossible. Breitbart's Big Hollywood website posted audio of a conference call in which Obama administration officials asked "grant recipients to plug Barack Obama’s domestic agenda." That finally got media outlets interested, and the White House had "to do the obligatory issuance of 'new guidelines' to avoid a repeat."

A repeat of what, angry readers might ask, said Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. Conservatives are "going ape" over the intrigue at the National Endowment for the Arts, but all that happened was that "a White House flack and an NEA flack arranged a conference call with a bunch of artists and encouraged them to create artwork in support of the president's National Day of Service." The Right will regret making a big deal of this "nothingburger" unless another shoe drops.

Nice try, said Ben Shapiro in Big Hollywood. But at least six federal laws and regulations were violated when then NEA communications director Yosi Sergant and White House Office of Public Engagement deputy director Buffy Wicks tried twisting the arms of artists and arts groups interested in getting federal arts grants. If Congress doesn't launch a full investigation, it is endorsing "the misuse of taxpayer funds."

Yosi's gone, or at least reassigned. Wonder if there's space in his new office under the bus for Buffy.