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to tend to her mother, who has suffered a stroke.

Jack Abramoff may have been indicted on criminal charges, but big-time lobbyists don’t seem to be losing any influence. A survey released yesterday by the Hill found that lobbyists are on pace to set new records for revenue this year:

Though conventional wisdom holds that election years typically see a decline in lobbying expenditures as party strategists and supporters move beyond the Beltway to the hinterland, lobbying spending actually grew last year. Spending grew to $2.14 billion in 2004, a 7 percent increase over 2003, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.

The growth trend seems like[ly] to continue.

That survey, taken alongside a study by the Center for Public Integrity, paints a startling picture of how powerful lobbyists have become. The CPI found that, at the state level, lobbyists (all 38,000 of them) spent almost 1 billion dollars in 2004. For a sense of comparison, that’s five lobbyists and $130,000 for every state legislator in the country.

It’s a lot of lobbying, in other words. And those numbers don’t even speak to the intense lobbying that takes place every week on Capitol Hill.

No, the ridiculously pork-laden energy bill and highways bill speak to that.

noted a report that the Bush administration was “planning to quietly eliminate most State Department arms control offices” during the August recess. Good news: the restructuring is now (temporarily) on hold.

From the 8/18/98 Dallas Morning News:

The public can smell a phony, [Rove] said. For public officials caught lying, the apology must be honest and sincere. “It’s a question of authenticity and whether they seem to have a plausible reason” for lying, said Mr. Rove, who is Gov. George W. Bush’s chief political strategist. He said he was speaking only for himself on this matter.

Long term, lies by public officials erode public confidence in government and make it hard for all elected officials at all levels to govern, analysts noted.

“To the extent that there is already a high level of cynicism among the people, it does not make it any easier to lead,” Mr. Rove said.

Of course, that was before Rove repeatedly denied he had any involvement in the Valerie Plame leak. We are waiting for our “honest and sincere” apology.

It was another disappointing week for those who want a complete picture of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. On Monday, the Reagan Presidential Library released 5,300 pages relating to Roberts’s service as a lawyer in the Reagan administration, but withheld 478. Just today, the Reagan Library (along with the National Archives) released an additional 38,000 pages of documents, but withheld nearly 2,000 more.

It’s a bit difficult to understand why. In both cases, the claim was that the documents fall under exemptions to the federal Freedom of Information Act. But it’s rarely explained which exemptions are used: of the original 478 pages withheld, 459 were said to fall under privacy exemptions (specifically, sections 6 and 7C). And while it’s hard to find a breakdown of the FOIA exemptions cited for the documents withheld today, we do know that privacy exemptions played a part.

But the administration has stated over and over and over again that John Roberts is a man who keeps his private life separate from his public roles: because he’s such a lawyer’s lawyer, they say, we shouldn’t think that his public actions give us insight into his private life. Scott McLellan summed it up best, when asked about the Roberts memos: “I think there’s a distinction between advocating on behalf of a client and someone’s personal views.”

But if Roberts is so good at separating public and private, why are we expected to believe that releasing these documents would violate his personal privacy? (Senator Leahy has expressed similar skepticism on this point.) Given what they’ve said, administration officials owe us an explanation of why, specifically, these documents deserve the privacy exemption.