Cunningham accepted money and gifts including a Rolls-Royce and $40,000 Persian rugs from defense contractors and others in exchange for steering government contracts their way and other favors.

Federal prosecutors sought the maximum and his attorneys asked for mercy, but Cunningham, choking up as he addressed the judge, focused on accepting blame. "Your honor I have ripped my life to shreds due to my actions, my actions that I did to myself," he said.

"I made a very wrong turn. I rationalized decisions I knew were wrong. I did that, sir," Cunningham said.

Much thinner than when he pleaded guilty in November - he said he has gone from 265 pounds to 175 pounds since June - Cunningham had asked to see his 91-year-old mother one last time before going to prison, but was denied.

The judge, while crediting Cunningham for his military service and for taking responsibility, questioned why he felt compelled to betray his constituents and his colleagues for luxuries.

"You weren't wet. You weren't cold. You weren't hungry and yet you did these things," Burns said. "I think what you've done is you've undermined the opportunity that honest politicians have to do a good job."

The scale of his wrongdoing surpasses anything in the history of Congress, according to official Senate and House historians. "In the sheer dollar amount, it's unprecedented," Deputy House Historian Fred W. Beuttler said Friday.

The longest term meted out to congressmen in the past four decades had been eight years, handed to former Rep. James Traficant, D-Ohio, in 2002 for taking payoffs, and to former Rep. Mario Biaggi, D-N.Y., in 1988 for extorting nearly $2 million from a defense contractor.

Prosecutor Phil Halpern told the judge that while Cunningham was living the good life "he was squandering precious tax dollars for, among other things, systems the military didn't ask for, didn't need and frequently didn't use."

Cunningham's attorney Lee Blalack asked for six years for the former Navy "Top Gun" flight instructor and Vietnam War flying ace.

Cunningham, 64 and a congressman for 15 years, rubbed away tears while Blalack addressed the court. He appeared to be crying quietly when Blalack referred to his wartime service.

Blalack said that given Cunningham's age and history of prostate cancer, "there is a significant likelihood" he would not survive a 10-year sentence, and that he already has suffered greatly.

"This man has been humiliated beyond belief by his own hand. He is estranged from those he loves most and cares most about," Blalack said. "All his worldly possessions are gone. He will carry a crushing tax debt until the day he dies. He will go to jail until he's 70 years old."

Prosecutor Jason A. Forge said Cunningham should not get a break for committing crimes late in life, and doubted his apparent remorse, pointing out that after the allegations emerged he spent months falsely denying them.

"The fact of the matter is Mr. Cunningham went down kicking and screaming," Forge said.

The sentence reverberated in Washington, D.C.

"It is my hope that Congressman Cunningham will spend his incarceration thinking long and hard about how he broke the trust of the voters that elected him and those on Capitol Hill who served with him," House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said in a statement.

Cunningham pleaded guilty Nov. 28 to tax evasion and a conspiracy involving four others. It is among a series of GOP scandals: Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff's guilty pleas in a corruption investigation; a campaign-finance indictment that forced Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas to step down as majority leader; a stock sale by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist that is under investigation; and the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff in the CIA leak case.

The case against Cunningham began when authorities started investigating his sale of his Del Mar house to defense contractor Mitchell Wade for $1,675,000, a price inflated by $700,000.

Wade admitted giving Cunningham more than $1 million in gifts, including a yacht, cash, cars, antiques and meals. He pleaded guilty last month to conspiring with Cunningham, among four corruption charges that carry a maximum prison term of 20 years.

Wade's company, MZM Inc., which does classified intelligence work for the military, donated to Cunningham's campaigns and received more than $150 million in Defense Department contracts beginning in 2002.

Three other co-conspirators were included in Cunningham's plea agreement but no charges have been announced.

The judge recommended that Cunningham serve his sentence at a federal prison in Taft, Calif. Time off for good behavior could cut his sentence to about seven years.

A special election to fill Cunningham's seat is set for April 11. The district is heavily Republican but Democrats hope to capture it; their candidate Francine Busby is to deliver the party's weekly radio address on Saturday.

He also admitted making illegal campaign contributions in the names of MZM employees and their spouses to Harris and Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va. Prosecutors said Harris got $32,000 from employees who were reimbursed by Wade. Harris said she recently donated the money to charity, and didn't know the donations would be reimbursed.

In the plea agreement, Wade acknowledged dining with Harris at a Washington restaurant in 2005 to discuss a possible fundraiser for her and obtaining funding for a Navy counterintelligence program involving his company. She requested the funding, but Wade didn't get it.

"I requested a $10 million appropriation for the U.S Naval Criminal Investigative Services project because I thought it would bring new jobs to Sarasota," said Harris, R-Fla. "I never requested funding for this project in exchange for any contributions, but rather to bring more high-skill, high-wage jobs to the region."

Wade has been cooperating with federal prosecutors in Washington and San Diego since last summer and is required to continue to do so as part of his plea agreement with the government. He faces up to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors said they are continuing to investigate and won't say if Harris is a subject.

Harris said her office has not been contacted about the investigation.

"I think these revelations should matter to voters because I think ethics should count for something in a public servant," said Dan McLaughlin, spokesman for Nelson.

In the OpEdNews.com /Zogby People's poll of 850 Pennsylvania voters, we found that Republicans were far more likely to expect corruption. We asked, "Who is more corrupt, if at all, Republicans or Democrats?" 48% of respondents said Republicans and 9% said Democrats. 41% said both equally. Women said 60% Republicans and 4% Democrats. But it gets most interesting when you compare Republicans and democrats, looking at the crosstabs.

83% of Democrats said Republicans were corrupt, compared to 6% of Republicans saying that Republicans are corrupt Only 21% of Republicans said Democrats are corrupt and only one percent of Democrats said Democrats are corrupt. Most interesting, 71% of Republicans said that both parties are equally corrupt, whereas only 14% of Democrats say both parties are equally corrupt.

If you add up the percentage of Republicans who say that Republicans are corrupt and both parties are corrupt you get a total of 77% of Republicans saying that Republicans are corrupt, compared to 15% of Democrats saying Democrats are corrupt. What does this mean? Republicans assume their representatives are corrupt because they think everyone is corrupt. That's the mindset of a culture of corruption. They see they world as corrupt and they accept it. Let's take a closer look.

There's the Republican base. Our OpEdNews.com / Zogby People's poll asked, Do you agree or disagree that Churches, Synagogues and Mosques, or other places of worship would l ose their tax exempt status if they openly and actively support politicians or political parties?" Seventy percent of voters support this. The one demographic group that disapproved was the "very conservatives" Less than 1% of Democrats identify themselves as very conservative. 22% of Born agains identify themselves as very conservative. After "very conservatives, the next demographic group that opposed revoking tax exempt status was the Born agains. I think they oppose this because they've been doing it-- violating the law against churches getting actively into politics. The majority of Americans-- 70% oppose this. These people are extremists who believe they have the right to break the law. It's trickle down corruption, trickle down law breaking, trickle down absence of integrity. These self-righteous, sanctimonious extremists are breaking the law. Their churches should be taxed. Their leaders should be charged with violating the law, and laws should be made tougher to prevent these abuses. Meanwhile, people on the left should organize "church-watches" which monitor, especially right before elections, activities and services in right wing churches.

Then there's the corruption that surrounds the voting and election process. Democrats in the house and senate have entered bills that would make the voting process safer and more reliable. Republicans have failed to respond. At local levels, Republicans seem to have done all they can to keep the voting, vote counting, voter registration and voter access as untrustworthy, unfair and inaccessible for Democrats as possible. This is treacherous-- an attack on Democracy that should be punishable, in its worse forms, as a capital offense. Sorry, for most reasons, I oppose the death penalty, but when the most basic, core element of democracy-- the vote-- is "murdered" there is only one punishment that fits the crime-- the same one applied to traitors.

Then there's the Republican position on cleaning up the money in politics-- in elections and in congress. The right wingers want to keep the money in. In our OpEdNews.com/Zogby People's Poll, we found that 66% of voters, want to take the money factor out of elections by providing a fixed amount of money to qualified candidates, and 65% of voters support a law that would require network and local TV stations to provide free ad time to qualified candidates. But just over 50% of Republicans oppose taking the money out, and while more Republicans support a law requiring free advertising for qualified candidates, that percentage doesn't reach 50%. The Republicans want to keep the influence buying, the ability of corporations and wealthy people to influence elections, at the price of a purer democratic process.

I've been saying that part of the process of taking back America is waking people up.

I've been saying that the only people left supporting Bush are either corrupt, greedy rich parasites who are tax avoiders and fools.

But I need to modify that. These people are all tolerating an unbelievable level of corruption. These people MUST have impaired integrity and impaired character.

There is hope for those right wingers who are finally waking up and seeing how bad the Republicans have been. Those Republicans who HAVE awakened MUST go to their legislators and tell them it is time to impeach both Bush and Cheney. One factor that may make a major difference in this year's elections is the response from moderates. Forty eight percent of them say republicans are corrupt, compared to one percent saying Democrats are. Frankly, there are enough DLC Republicrats so I think they are estimating too low. But the writing is on the wall. Unless Republicans take major steps to change the situation, they will be in deep doo doo this fall.

It is time for the people on the right to either wake up and face the corruption they've allowed or accept that they are co-conspirators guilty of helping the crimes and corruption to continue.

Rob Kall is editor of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology.

Perlett said no decision had been made to halt the trial, which is to enter a fourth day today after classes were canceled Thursday due to the snowstorm.

"There is no curtailment of what is going on at the school, at present,"Perlett said.

Perlett said that the high school's principal, Anthony Sciaino, would attend the meeting. Sciaino, who did not return a phone call Thursday, said on Wednesday evening that he approved the senior advanced placement government class project in advance.

Interim Superintendent James Dwyer, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Kathleen Sleezer and board Vice President Alan Gordon will also attend, Perlett said.

Teacher not invited

Joseph Kyle, whose class is trying Bush for alleged "crimes against civilian populations"and "inhumane treatment of prisoners," was not invited, Perlett said.

"It's going to be very interesting. We might as well wait and see if a shoe drops or not," said teachers union President John Capsouras.

Capsouras spoke to Kyle by telephone on Thursday evening about the controversy stemming from the trial, in which students are playing the roles of prosecutors, defense lawyers and witnesses and a five-teacher "international court of justice"is sitting in judgment.

"Joe is fine. He's a good man, and he's fine," Capsouras said of Kyle, who is the union's vice president and chief negotiator.

Capsouras said Kyle, an eight-year teacher at the high school, was in good spirits despite some crank calls. He said that Kyle, in terms of his job, should be in the clear unless "somebody decides they didn't give him permission" for the project.

Student outlook

Catherine Galdun, one of four student prosecutors, said she would be upset if the trial -- which Kyle, on Wednesday, likened to a hearing -- is halted.

"I would say that we're doing this in a fair and balanced way," said Galdun, 18.

"We're looking at both sides of it. If they don't believe that's right to do in a classroom -- to debate both sides of an issue -- I don't agree with that," Galdun said.

A chorus of criticism ensued after a Daily Record story about the project was linked to the Drudge Report on the Internet and discussed on various news programs on Thursday, with e-mails from across the nation calling Kyle a disgrace, a traitor and worse.

"If my child came home from school and told me this was going on, I would have someone's head. This is akin to treason," wrote Karen LaBauve of Roswell, N.M., in an e-mail to the Daily Record.

A smaller number praised Kyle.

"So-called conservatives don't have a clue as to what they've bred or are breeding. We need more teachers like Joseph Kyle," wrote Belita R. T. Franklin of Jacksonville, Fla.

Jamie Barberio, defeated in the Republican primary for mayor last year, joined former county Sheriff John Fox of Parsippany and Freeholder Jack Schrier of Mendham Township in slamming the project.

"We're presuming that President Bush is an indictable war criminal, when he's not," Barberio said. "How about teaching that he's not a war criminal."

A phone call to the White House press office was not returned Thursday.

Dwyer, Sciaino and Kyle did not return phone calls.

Learning process

Another student prosecutor, Stephanie Foltzer, said that after Kyle proposed holding the trial in January, the class was fully in agreement about proceeding.

Foltzer said that extensive research went into the project. At trial, she questioned two of nine prosecution "witnesses"-- students standing in for Sen. John McCain and Hachemi Abdullah, an Iraqi man who allegedly lost several family members in a U.S. bombing raid.

"I can understand the controversy, but I think people are taking this a little bit too far," Foltzer said.

Township Council Vice President James Vigilante, a U.S. Air Force reservist, saw a little bit of both sides.

"I'm a Bush fan. I don't necessarily, myself, agree with the lesson plan, but on the flip side, I wouldn't condemn the teacher," said Vigilante, a Republican.

"I would hope he's not censored by the school board. For me, it's the right of free speech," Vigilante said.

One of the few certainties in modern U.S. politics is that no Democrat can win the presidency without carrying California. Thanks to the Electoral College system set up by the Founding Oligarchs to keep the low-born rabble from voting directly for president, the big haul of California's electoral votes is crucial for Democrats to offset the multitude of small, sparsely populated states that reliably vote Republican. Bagging California doesn't guarantee Democratic victory, but without it, the cliffhanger electoral counts in the goosed elections of 2000 and 2004 wouldn't even have been close.

Thus, the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the politically partisan firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for 2008. It doesn't matter who the Democrats run -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, George Clooney or Jesus H. Christ in an Uncle Sam suit. It won't make a bit of difference. California is lost, the presidency is lost and the Bushists are in -- already. It's over.

After Diebold's machines failed miserably in a battery of tests last year, McPherson vowed to put their certification on hold until his own hand-picked panel of experts had fine-combed the system to a fare-thee-well, blogger Brad Friedman reports. The panel delivered their conclusions last month -- and the results were staggering, far beyond the worst fears of the most hard-core "conspiracy theorist." The panel found that Diebold's machines were riddled with curious built-in glitches that effectively "ceded complete control of the system" to hackers who could "change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates and change the races being voted on."

What's more, "hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system to do their dirty work," the Los Angeles Times notes. "Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked." A more perfect vehicle for fixing an election can hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more than a handful of high-tech zealots, not a vast conspiracy.

Naturally, after such a blistering condemnation, McPherson did what any official charged with guaranteeing the integrity and credibility of his state's elections would do: He approved the slipshod system by the dark of the moon, on a Friday before a holiday weekend, without any public hearings -- indeed, without waiting for the results of a pending federal review of Diebold's mole-infested code. Now, the Diebold contraptions, whose chronic "breakdowns" have featured in numerous contested elections and last-second "miracle" victories by Republican candidates across the country in recent years, will control California's pot of electoral gold.

A good example of how this control works can be found in Alaska. There, the state Democratic Party has long been seeking an audit of some of the 2004 Diebold-counted returns, which produced a series of strange anomalies -- including awarding President George W. Bush an extra 100,000 votes that turned out to be phantoms. First, state officials blocked the request because that information, the vote count of a public election, was a "company secret" that belonged exclusively to Diebold, Friedman reports. Then they decided that the returns could be examined -- but only on the condition that Diebold and the Republican officials be allowed to "manipulate the data" before it was released. In the end, even this tainted transparency was too much for the Bushist ballot crunchers; late last month, Alaska officials suddenly declared that examining the returns would pose a dire but unspecified "security risk" to the state.

America's votes are increasingly controlled by a small number of interrelated corporations: Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, all of which have close political and financial ties to the Bush faction -- and to other dark forces as well. Diebold and ES&S were both bankrolled by tycoon Howard Ahmanson, who was also a major funder of the Christian "Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a totalitarian theocracy in America, including the death penalty for homosexuals, slavery for debtors, stoning for sinners and stripping nonbelievers of citizenship. As journalist Max Blumenthal reports, these extremists have been welcomed as a key part of the Bushist base of politicized evangelicals, whose cadres have been quietly filling government posts for the past five years. Meanwhile, Sequoia -- whose machines racked up 100,000 "mistakes" in just one Florida county in 2004, according to a recent audit -- is owned by a business partner of the Carlyle Group, the investment firm whose insider deals and war profiteering have earned millions for the Bush family.

Thus, the 2008 election will be conducted largely on wide-open machines programmed by avowed partisans and paymasters of a ruthless gang that has already committed demonstrable vote fraud on a massive scale in engineering narrow "victories" in 2000 and 2004. So it doesn't matter who runs, who votes or how unpopular the Bush faction becomes through the murderous ruin of its radical agenda. The "consent of the governed" will be drowned in the blood money that has bought the nation's electoral process. Annotations

Integrity of E-Balloting System Still in Doubt
Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 2006

Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Florida Vote
Associated Press, Feb. 23, 2006

Vanishing Act: Disappearing the Republic at the Push of a Button
Empire Burlesque, Sept. 19, 2003

Bush Poll Ratings at All-Time Low
CBS News, Feb. 28, 2006

Audit Shows Electronic Voting in Disarray
Bradblog.com, Feb. 23, 2006

Alaska Now Refuses Release of 2004 Election Data Citing Security Concerns
Bradblog.com, Feb. 24, 2006

Loot the Vote
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 19, 2006

Is the GOP "Shock-the-Vote" Brigade Planning to Heist California?
Huffington Post, Feb. 21, 2006

A State Senator Says Diebold Re-Certification in Violation of State Law
Bradblog.com, Feb. 23, 2006

Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too
Mark Crispin Miller, Basic Books, October 2005

The Brutal Christ of the Armageddonites
Antiwar.com, Feb. 24, 2006

Pin Heads: The New Bush Push for Theocracy
Empire Burlesque, March 12, 2004

The "Pro-Family" Movement and Killing Gays
Max Blumenthal, Feb. 14, 2006

Body Blow: Bush's Worldwide War Against Women
Empire Burlesque, Oct. 3, 2003

Millions Are Dying Because of American Policies
Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2005

Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Empire Burlesque, Aug. 27, 2004

US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004

Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004

Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism
Empire Burlesque, Nov. 1, 2002

Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 25, 2005

Slavery Under God's Laws
The Institute for Christian Economics,

Stoning: Integral to Commandment Against Murder
The Institute for Christian Economics,

World Conquest: The Obligation of Christian Politics
The Changing of the Guard, Dominion Press,

An Anthology of Reconstructist Thought
Christian Reconstructionism, November 2002

Judicial Warfare: Christian Reconstructionism and its Blueprint for Dominion
Crown Rights Press, 2003

E-Voting: How it Can Put the Wrong Candidate in Office
Common Dreams, Sept. 3, 2003

The Theft of Your Vote is Just a Chip Away
Thom Hartmann, July 31, 2003

Now Your Vote is the Property of a Private Corporation
Thom Hartmann, March 11, 2003

From Superpower to Tin-Horn Dictatorship
Lew Rockwell.com, Feb. 28, 2006

Copyright © 2006 The Moscow Times.