Great Vanity Fair article on Congressional fraud - Duke Cunningham, the housing swindle, and a bit role by Katherine Harris

You just gotta wonder how much of this is going on - not just the clear-cut bribery, but the travel, the dinners, the boxing matches, it's just sickening.

Why voters don't demand the same policies that business uses when it comes to this type of stuff I don't know. In purchasing departments, there's generally a zero tolerance policy - no gifts, dinners, etc from vendors. Same should be true for Congress, who are out spending our money, but are on the take from our "vendors".

This Congressman, now in jail, had the brilliant scheme of having a contractor buy his house for $700,000 more than it was worth. Then the contractor sells the house 9 months later for the real, much lower, market price. But that's just one of many ways he pocketed. I wish some MSM would review every housing sale record for the past five years for every member of Congress and the Administration.

I do love the Katherine Harris appearance. Read the whole article for that laugh.

That year the congressman bought a new, $2.6 million house in Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic area of estates in the northwestern part of his district, in San Diego County. To do so he sold his old house, in Del Mar, to Wade for $1.675 million. This was $700,000 more than it was worth. In fact, Wade, who never moved into the house, sold it for that much less nine months later.

After the news story about the sale of his Del Mar house broke, Cunningham tried to get others to cover his tracks. He called Elizabeth Todd, a local real-estate agent, and pressured her to fax him a letter claiming that 2004 was a buyers' market, a request with which Todd only reluctantly complied, since she knew it to be inaccurate. Next, he wrote a letter to Wade in which, after professing amazement at the low resale price of his former home, he offered to pay the $700,000 difference—but never did.