Things that make ya go “Hmm…”
Report: Texas Overpaid Miers in Land Sale
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Texas officials paid Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’ family more than $100,000 for a small piece of land in 2000 – 10 times the land’s worth – despite the state’s objections to the way the price was determined, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported Saturday.
The three-member committee that determined the price included Peggy Lundy, a friend of Miers, and property-rights activist Cathie Adams, Knight Ridder reported. They were appointed to the panel by state District Judge David Evans, who had received at least $5,000 in campaign contributions from Miers’ law firm. </i>
And did she have a hand in cleaning up Bush’s National Guard records?
The politics of the Harriet Miers nomination are getting stranger as attention turns toward Ms. Miers’s tenure as head of the Texas Lottery Commission. Two key players in last year’s presidential campaign–Jerome Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat Veterans book “Unfit for Command,” and Ben Barnes, a former Texas lieutenant governor who claimed President Bush got special treatment when he joined the Texas Air National Guard–are involved in the debate.
…Mr. Littwin has alleged that aides to then-Gov. Bush were worried that should GTECH lose its lottery contract, its top lobbyist, Mr. Barnes, would discuss efforts he claimed to have made to push a young George W. Bush to the top of the coveted waiting list for a pilot’s slot in the Texas Air National Guard. (Mr. Barnes went public with those claims last year in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes.”) Lottery Commission officials, including Ms. Miers, never detailed the reasons for the Littwin firing. Last week, when the Houston Chronicle asked about it, the White House replied, “Harriet Miers has never commented and will not now on what was a personnel matter.”</i>
Getting a bit clearer why Bush might want this unqualified person on the SCOTUS, don’t it?
