Florida Republicans are a very special breed of morons. They will pay you $20 to give you a blowjob in the bathroom, they will keep you up at all hours on the Instant Message Blonker if they think you are a hot pimply teen, and they will hang up on you if you are the President-elect. Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen got a call from Barack Obama and hung up on him, twice, because if she learned one thing from Sarah Palin it’s that world leaders will never call Republicans in earnest. MORE »

Representative Bill Thomas (R-CA) is, we assume, a cultured man-of-the-world type, so there’s no reason to be too surprised that he’s taken a few lobbyist-funded trips hither and thither. As we see on PoliticalMoneyLine, he gets around. Keep in mind, of course, that the gentleman is the head of the Ways and Means committee — and, due to Republican committee term limits, he has decided to retire from office so that he won’t have to suffer the indignity of a seat in the House with slightly less power and influence. From his trip disclosure info, a couple things stand out.

The first is the cost of his all-expenses paid trip to Colorado for an AEI forum:

(Note: Screenshot edited for size and clarity)

Uh, Bill… you’re gonna have to do a better job of hiding that kind of stuff. Spread it out or something! But hey, that’s just par-for-the-course corruption. Mostly harmless. You know, you see one big lobbyist cash gift, you seen ‘em all. It was in Bill’s trip to Scotland where we got a little more interested. The results of our investigation, after the jump.

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