While the White House downplays its connections to indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, it is becoming more and more evident that Abramoff actually had more friends at the Bush White House than originally thought.

The Associated Press is reporting that a number of ex-colleagues of Abramoff remember that he always talked about his close connections with Karl Rove. This article says:

Three former business associates of Abramoff, who worked with the lobbyist in various roles between 2001 and 2004, told The Associated Press that Abramoff routinely mentioned Rove when talking about his influence inside the White House.

One said he was present when Abramoff took a call from Rove’s office to confirm a White House meeting had been approved between Malaysia’s prime minister and Bush in May 2002. Abramoff was being paid by Malaysia for helping it in Washington, according to evidence the Senate has made public.

It’ll be interesting to see how this unfolds as photos of Abramoff and Bush together become public. It’s becoming obvious that George W. Bush and Abramoff had a relationship and it appears now that some of Bush’s closest political staff did too.

Sometimes, just when you think the levels of incompetency, corruption, and near-criminality in the BushCo administration can’t get any worse, they up the ante and pull another one out of their bag of crap. Krugman, via Atrios (who reposted the entire thing “for educational purposes”):

The new prescription drug benefit is off to a catastrophic start. Tens of thousands of older Americans have arrived at pharmacies to discover that their old drug benefits have been canceled, but that they aren’t on the list for the new program. More than two dozen states have taken emergency action.

At first, federal officials were oblivious. “This is going very well,” a Medicare spokesman declared a few days into the disaster. Then officials started making excuses. Some conservatives even insist that the debacle vindicates their ideology: see, government can’t do anything right.

But government works when it’s run by people who take public policy seriously. As Jonathan Cohn points out in The New Republic, when Medicare began 40 years ago, things went remarkably smoothly from the start. But this time the people putting together a new federal program had one foot out the revolving door: this was a drug bill written by and for lobbyists.

…

Mr. Scully had good reasons not to let anything stand in the way of the drug bill. He had received a special ethics waiver from his superiors allowing him to negotiate for future jobs with lobbying and investment firms - firms that had a strong financial stake in the form of the bill - while still in public office. He left public service, if that’s what it was, almost as soon as the bill was passed, and is once again a lobbyist, now for drug companies.

Meanwhile, Representative Billy Tauzin, the bill’s point man on Capitol Hill, quickly left Congress once the bill was passed to become president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the powerful drug industry lobby.

Go read the entire thing over at Eschaton. Krugman wonderfully ties together the threads of this debacle and the political machine that is at the center of the Abramoff and Delay scandals. He concludes with an important question.

So I have a question for my colleagues in the news media: Why isn’t the decision by the White House to stonewall on the largest corruption scandal since Warren Harding considered major news?