BOB NEY FINALLY MOVING INTO HIS NEW HOME-- A DORM ROOM IN THE FEDERAL PEN IN WEST VIRGINIA. SAVE A BUNK FOR JERRY LEWIS AND JOHN DOOLITTLE

Call me bloodthirsty but in 5 days I'd be poppin' a champagne bottle if I was a drinking man. That's because far right Republican and ex-congressman Bob Ney gets deposited in his prison cell on Thursday. Although I think a 30 month sentence for his bribery conviction is a tiny fraction of what he should get, I'm glad to see that he will get at least some prison time before Bush pardons him and the rest of the gang of congressional corruption on his way out the door.

Ney will be surrendering himself to the federal penitentiary in Morgantown, West Virginia on March 1, where he'll be sharing dorm style accommodations with bunk beds for 12 fellow inmates. He gets a personal locker for his possessions and I guess he can keep his wig in it. I haven't been able to find out if the wig is considered "drag" and that makes him eligible for the gay wing of the prison. In any case, his accommodations at the pen will be considerably different from what Jack Abramoff and other bribers and lobbyists have helped him become accustomed to. This will be nothing like that nice St Andrews Golf Resort he became so fond of.

And those nice Inside-the-Beltway restaurants lobbyists were always taking Ney too... Fellow inmates will serve meals, which Ney gets to eat while seated at a four-person table in the prison cafeteria. He'll be required to work 7-1/2 hours each day, something he's never done in his entire miserable life. His assignments won't include breaking rocks but he'll be doing food service, custodial work, landscaping, and "education services." Because he blames drugs and booze for his criminality Ney gets to spend half of his designated work hours in the prison's substance-abuse program.


UPDATE: TRAITORS ONLY GET 30 MONTHS IN PRISON IF THEY'RE REPUBLICANS?

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker just went thru the documents relating to the charges against ex-Ney and Hastert staffer Will Heaton. He's sharing the details of life with the crooked Republican heavyweight. Heaton admits accepting bribes from Abramoff and others seeking to enrich themselves at the public trough via the corrupt GOP congressional leadership. There's plenty worth reading but my favorite part goes to what I was saying about Ney getting off too easy. He should have been tried as a traitor, for one starters.

Ney and Heaton both pled guilty to accepting thousands of dollars in gambling chips from a man only identified as the "Foreign Businessman" in the documents. That's the Syrian-born businessman Fouad al-Zayat (known as "The Fat Man" in the London casinos), who flew Ney and two of his staffers over to London for a high-flying night at a casino. Why? al-Zayat had a company that was seeking to sell U.S.-made airplanes and airplane parts to Iran, and he wanted Ney to get an exemption to U.S. laws that ban the sale of such parts to Iran.