Rep. Henry Waxman isn’t the only person with questions about why the Justice Department reduced their demand on the tobacco industry by $120 billion. According to recent Reuters article, the judge presiding over the case, Gladys Kessler, expressed her skepticism:

Perhaps it suggests that there are some additional influences being brought to bear on the government’s position in this case.

The New York Times this morning revealed that the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), is closely tied to the lobbying firm which is now the focus of a federal corruption investigation. The firm, Preston Gates & Ellis, was home to shady lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who allegedly teamed up with Rep. Tom DeLay in the 1990s in a scheme to help the Marianas Islands avoid U.S. labor laws. (The Marianas Islands run brutal sweatshops where workers are “paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage,” are forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing,” and report having been forced into prostitution.)

Here’s a look at Hastings’s close ties Preston Gates & Ellis, Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay. Little wonder DeLay says he “welcomes” a House Ethics Committee investigation into the charges against him.

Over the past 10 years, Hastings received $14,000 from Preston Gates & Ellis, including $1,000 from Jack Abramoff himself.

After meeting with Preston Gates in 1996, Hastings stood on the House floor and praised the Marianas Island’s government for “moving in the right direction toward self-sufficiency” and warned requiring the island to abide by U.S. labor laws could “crush its fragile economy.”

Hastings has “received $5,930 in campaign contributions from DeLay’s leadership PAC, Americans for a Republican Majority.”

After taking control of the Ethics Committee, Hastings (R-WA) fired two senior staff lawyers who were involved in unanimous decisions to admonish DeLay three times for improper fundraising practices and bribes in the last two years.

Yep. Sure looks like an independent and fair investigation is in the works.

The Justice Department, without explanation, has reduced its settlement request with the tobacco industry from $130 billion to $10 billion. The LA Times provides some explanation:

A person familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the change was “forced on the tobacco team by higher-level, politically appointed officials of the Justice Department,” including Associate Atty. Gen. Robert McCallum, who oversees the civil division. McCallum, who issued a statement lauding the “tireless efforts” of the trial team, declined to discuss the matter.

The Washington Post also points to McCallum as the driving force behind the settlement. McCallum has a huge conflict of interest:

Before his appointment in the Justice Department in 2001, McCallum had been a partner at Alston & Bird, an Atlanta-based firm that has done trademark and patent work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco.

Reps. Henry A. Waxman and Martin T. Meehan have asked Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine to investigate McCallum’s role. An excerpt of their letter to Fine:

The Justice Department’s approach to tobacco litigation should be based on the facts of the case and not political favors to the tobacco industry. It is highly unusual for government prosecutors to abandon evidence-based testimony by their key witnesses [that established the $130B figure] at the last moment in a major trial. It is even more unusual for changes in strategy to be dictated by a political appointee with clear ties to the industry that is the defendant in the case.

Ohio has spent $455,000 in taxpayer money to teach abstinence-until-marriage-only sex ed to students in middle school and high school. Dr. Scott Frank, a leading public health researcher at Case Western Reserve University decided to check out exactly what the kids were learning. Here’s the sex-ed information a half-million dollars bought for Ohio teens:

HIV can be transmitted through “tears and open-mouth kissing.”

Contraceptives are to blame for mental health problems in teens.

Taking the pill will increase a girl’s future chances of infertility.

Students should just “follow God’s plan for purity.”

Keeping kids in the dark or filling their heads with misinformation about contraception doesn’t keep hormonally charged teens from having sex. It just makes it less likely they’ll have safe sex.

Robin Niblett says all the fuss about the Downing Street Memo is just all a big misunderstanding:

Robin Niblett of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, says it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being “fixed around” Iraq policy. ” ‘Fixed around’ in British English means ‘bolted on’ rather than altered to fit the policy,” he says.

So for Americans the Downing Street Memo should read:

There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being BOLTED ON the policy.

See, now it makes perfect sense. What was everyone worried about?