Maryland, home to GorT and the adolescent home for two other Gormogons, is a very blue state. Since the inception of a governorship of the state in 1777 with Thomas Johnson, the state has had 29 democrat governors and only 6 republican governors. In fact, historically, there have been more federalist and democratic-republican governors (9 each) than the modern republican variety. Prior to Gov. Bob Ehrlich, the last republican governor was Spiro Agnew who resigned his office to become the VPOTUS in 1969. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, Maryland is the third most democrat-favoring state with a 22% advantage for the democrat party in registered voter party affiliations, trailing the District of Columbia and Vermont.

So when you hear cries of crony capitalism and favoring businesses for particular contracts, one might think that it is a charge led by the majority here. But you’d be wrong. Governor O’Malley is supporting a bill (HB576) which would bestow a special legal status on public-private partnerships with a retroactive clause. If this bill passes the Senate, processes intended to ensure competitive and fair bidding on state projects could be bypassed. One doesn’t have to look far to see why this is being pushed now – from Martha Mossburg’s piece in the Baltimore Sun:

As a refresher, the $1.5 billion taxpayer-financed project in Baltimore City is stalled due to a lawsuit by a group of downtown business owners who claim the state circumvented the competitive bidding process to choose developers. The state tried to dismiss the case and failed — and then, outrageously, countersued plaintiffs for $100 million and failed again. So far, the state has refused to provide documentation on the project as required by court order.

and

Del. Luiz Simmons, Democrat of Montgomery County, said of the bill, “What we are about to do is to become legislators in a banana republic where they routinely interfere with the judicial process on behalf of special interests.”

And they are not just any special interests but close allies of Governor O’Malley. A long list of political supporters would benefit from the State Center development, including lobbyist Sean Malone, Mr. O’Malley’s labor commissioner during his time as mayor of Baltimore. He represents State Center LLC, as well as other organizations that stand to gain from this legislation, including East Baltimore Development Inc., the secretive, taxpayer-funded organization overseeing the haltingly slow redevelopment of land around Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The lobbyist’s influence on the legislation was so strong that Mr. Simmons said he was told to “work it [his objections] out with Sean Malone.”

As Martha Mossburg points out in her lead paragraph, Maryland just received a D- grade for corruption risk in a national report.  Maybe someone should point this “culture of corruption” out to Nancy Pelosi.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.