Some politicians in Washington have a lot of important and difficult decisions to make for our country. Then there are the politicians who have a lot of important and difficult decisions to make for themselves. In the 2006 election cycle Pete Hoekstra got nearly half of his half million dollars in donations from corporate PAC's and special interest groups.

As Chairman of the Permanent House Select Committee on Intelligence, Hoekstra crafted legislation that benefited the very same Defense Contractors and Corporations that were funding his campaign; Isn't there something intrinsicly wrong with that? Maybe not if you use the standard of House Ethics that were in place during the Republican rule but how about from a moral standard? Should Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman be giving money to Hoekstra while Hoekstra is deciding on legislation to award multi-million dollar defense contracts to these companies?

Do you remember when Pete Hoekstra and Rick Santorum were running around the country, proclaiming that the WMD that Bush had used as a prtext to invade Iraq had been found? Hoekstra/Santorum seemed to be the only ones who thought so. Bush's own Pentagon said "these are not the WMD's..." What they had found in Iraq were some dilapidated, degraded abandoned and forgotten chemical munitions that were left over from before the first Gulf War.

Pete Hoekstra has been doing a lot of war mongering about both Iraq and Iran, in fact he issued a report from his committee a couple of months ago that was written by an aide to John Bolten, not by the committee. Mohammed ElBardei, the chief weapons inspector for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Commission) called that report "outrageous and dishonest".

Is Pete Hoekstra looking out for our best interests or is he just trumping up this perpetual war on terrorism in order to distribute our money to his buddies in the defense industry? I can't answer that question, but wouldn't it be better if we didn't even have to ask the question because politicians who make such decisions did not take money from corporations who have business before their committees or the House or the Senate?