Today, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke at Pat Robertson’s Regent University. In the opening of his speech, he congratulated Robertson for the “influence” Regent has:

Thank you very, very much, Pat. Thank you for the very kind words and the introduction. And thank you for having me here.

I am very, very impressed with Regent University, when I consider that it was founded just a short while ago. The number of graduates that you have and the amount of influence that you have is really, really terrific.

And of all the many things that you’ve done — and there have been many, and many contributions…

Regent is ranked a “tier four” school by US News & World Report, “the lowest score and essentially a tie for 136th place.” Yet approximately one in six Regent graduates are employed in government work, and 150 serve in the Bush administration.

Monica Goodling, the former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who graduated from Regent’s law school, perhaps best exemplifies the “terrific” influence Regent is exerting on the nation. Last month, Goodling admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had “taken inappropriate political considerations into account” while hiring career employees at the Justice Department. At one point she even pressured Michael Battle, head of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, to replace two long-standing Justice officials with “a fellow Regent law school graduate.”

The “amount of influence” that Regent has had is a testimony to the willingness of some of its graduates to place partisan loyalties over principle.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) also recently spoke at Regent and commended Robertson for his “dedication to strengthening and then nurturing the pillars of this community and our country.”

Digg It!

CNN reports that J. Steven Griles, the former No. 2 official in the Interior Department, was sentenced to 10 months in prison today for “lying to the Senate about his relationship with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff,” who got Griles to intervene at the agency for his Indian tribal clients. Griles had proposed “community service” (with a lobbyist group) in lieu of a prison sentence.

UPDATE: More from the AP.

blocking legislation that would enact the 9/11 Commission recommendations and ethics and lobbying reform.

Former senator Fred Thompson today defended his work as a Washington lobbyist, telling the AP, “Nobody yet has pointed out any of my clients that didn’t deserve representation.” But the AP reports:

Thompson, who likes to cast himself as a political outsider, earned more than $1 million lobbying the federal government for more than 20 years. He lobbied for a savings-and-loan deregulation bill that helped hasten the industry’s collapse and a failed nuclear energy project that cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars.

He also was a lobbyist for deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was widely criticized for endorsing “necklacing,” the gruesome practice of execution where gasoline-soaked tires are thrown over a person’s neck and set ablaze. In September 1991, Aristide said: “The buring tire, what a beautiful tool! … It smells good. And wherever you go, you want to smell it.”

Major news outlets devoted just 1 percent of their coverage last week to the Iraq policy debate, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Those findings are indicative of a trend in recent weeks in which coverage of the political debate over the war has diminished substantially.”

The always-provocative Jonathan Rauch has a slightly curious column in The Atlanic praising the new front-loaded primary schedule. Yes, he acknowledges some flaws, but he thinks a longer general election campaign would be a pretty good thing. Finally, he writes this:

For me, though, what tips the scales in favor of early primaries, with the resulting long general-election campaign, is that they give U.S. politics an opportunity to mimic one of the best features of British-style parliamentary politics: the shadow government. American commentators often observe, with envy, that political campaigns in parliamentary systems are much shorter. In Britain, the formal campaign and election span weeks, not months or years. But such commentators tend to overlook the fact that by the time a British election rolls around, voters have had months or years to get to know the candidates, parties, agendas, and even cabinets. The party and prime minister in office are known quantities. Typically, opposition leaders are familiar too, because the parties choose their leaders well in advance of most elections. And these leaders choose shadow cabinets, the men and women who would ascend to ministerial portfolios if the party won. In other words, the voters decide not just between two candidates or even two parties but, in effect, between two governments.

For me, I’m all for the shadow cabinet concept. It’s also even arguably true that “Until the modern era of front-loaded primaries, any similar arrangement in the United States would have been all but impossible.” Still, just because it’s now possible doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. Indeed, the odds of it happening strike me as overwhelmingly small. The reason is that it serves candidates interests just fine to leave as large a pool as possible of semi-important people looking for jobs. Absent a shadow cabinet, you’ll probably have Richard Holbrooke telling everyone who might possibly care what Richard Holbrooke thinks that whichever person happens to have won the Democratic nomination is a brilliant individual with sound instincts guided by the greatest team ever assembled. But if you do have a shadow cabinet and it doesn’t include Holbrooke well, then, here come the off-the-record quotes about how so-and-so’s a bit of a softie, not really up the job, a bit of a left-wing nut, etc., etc., etc.

And that’s not to cast any particular aspersions on Holbrooke, I just don’t know off the top of my head the names of any likely candidates to be a Democratic Secretary of the Treasury. The point is that candidates try to avoid sending clear signals about this kind of thing for a reason.