Monday, October 03, 2005

Bush Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers

Bush is expected to nominate former Texas Lottery Commission head and current White House counsel Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. She has no experience as a judge, and was head of the Texas Lottery Commission during Bush's term as governor of Texas, when Ben Barnes, the guy who got Bush into the Texas Air National Guard, received a gigantic severance payment from Gtech, the company with the contract to run the Texas Lottery, followed by Gtech getting it's contract extended without having to bid for it. Miers was in charge of the commission when it chose to extend Gtech's contract despite the fact that the company was involved in a bribery scandal. I'm sure there will be some interesting questions at the confirmation hearings if Miers is really the nominee.

BTW, Gtech has quite a history... in 1993, Virgin billionaire Richard Branson accused its founder, Guy Snowden, of trying to bribe him in relation to the UK national lottery.

Gtech also runs the state lottery in Jeb "Chang" Bush's state, Florida, as well.

(Note added 8:29 a.m.: Bush has announced the nomination.)

2 comments:

Einzige said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Einzige said...

Sorry, I removed the previous post because it wasn't clear that I was being tongue-in-cheek.

Harriet Miers' blog:

http://harrietmiers.blogspot.com/

(ha ha)