October 2006: Week Three: This Far and No Further

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October 15: E-mails betwen convicted criminal and former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and his friends and contacts at the State Department, hint at the level of influence Abramoff enjoyed with the Bush administration. Case in point: former State Department official Allen Stayman. Stayman lost his post as a negotiator with several Pacific Island nations, even though his bosses wanted him to stay, after then-White House official Ken Mehlman intervened with the State Department on behalf of Abramoff. Abramoff, whose client list included the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, had long opposed Stayman's work advocating labor reforms in that US protectorate and considered what his lobbying team called the "Stayman project" a high priority. "Mehlman said he would get him fired," an Abramoff associate wrote after meeting with Mehlman, who was then White House political director. The exchange illustrates how, more than two years after the corruption scandal surrounding the now-disgraced Abramoff first came to light, people are still learning the extent of the lobbyist's ability to pull the levers of power in Washington. The latest revelations provide more detail than the administration has acknowledged about how Abramoff and his team reached into high levels of the White House, not just Capitol Hill, which has so far been the main focus of the influence-peddling investigation. The e-mails, disclosed by the House Government Reform Committee, show how Abramoff managed to manipulate the system through officials like Mehlman, now the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Doing so, Abramoff directed government appointments, influenced policy decisions and won White House endorsements for political candidates, all in the service of his clients. The report found more than 400 lobbying contacts between Abramoff's team and the White House.
Besides the Stayman matter, the e-mails reveal Mehlman's role in helping an Abramoff client, the Mississippi Band of the Choctaw Indians, secure $16.3 million for a new jail that government analysts concluded was not necessary. Mehlman also helped Abramoff obtain a White House endorsement in 2002 of the Republican gubernatorial ticket in the US territory of Guam. Abramoff pleaded guilty in January to federal charges as part of a congressional bribery investigation that continues to loom over Capitol Hill and the GOP. A Senate subcommittee concluded that Abramoff fleeced Indian tribes out of millions of dollars in fees that he split with one of his associates. So far only one White House official, Karl Rove aide Susan Ralston, has resigned because of her contacts with Abramoff. Mehlman says he does not recall the details of his contacts with the Abramoff team, including discussions about Stayman, the former State Department official, but such interactions were part of his job as White House political director. "I was a gateway," Mehlman says. "It was my job to talk to political supporters, to hear their requests and hand them on to policymakers." Mehlman, now the head of the Republican National Committee, says he had known Abramoff since the mid-1990s and would listen to his requests along with those from other influential Republicans. "I know Jack," Mehlman says. "I certainly recall that if he and others wanted to meet, I would have met with them, as I would have met with lots of people."
Democrats charge that Mehlman might have acted unethically during his time at the White House, lobbying for government actions at Abramoff's behest, even when policy experts disagreed with the decision. The senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, Henry Waxman, points to e-mails suggesting in the midst of negotiations over whether to fire Stayman, Mehlman requested two tickets in Abramoff's suite at the MCI Center to a sold-out U2 concert in June 2001. Ethics rules prohibit officials from accepting gifts worth more than $20 from a person doing business with the government, although there are exceptions. Ethics officials typically consider such suite tickets to be worth the same as the most expensive tickets to an event, which in this case was $133 apiece, according to Waxman's office. "Please tell me we can fit 2 more in for Friday," lobbyist and Abramoff partner Kevin Ring wrote to Abramoff. "Ken Mehlman of the White House apparently wants to go." On the day before the concert, Ring wrote to Abramoff that a resume for a Stayman replacement has been "sent to our conduit." A former Abramoff associate remembers Mehlman attending the concert. Mehlman said he did not recall it. "I've been to several U2 concerts, but I don't know whether I went to that one," he said. "But I can tell you that as political director, I was always very careful to make sure everything I did was above board and consistent with the rules." Waxman said the e-mails suggest that Mehlman may have "violated fundamental ethics regulations and the law." "There are serious questions that Mr. Mehlman needs to address with candor and that Congress should investigate thoroughly," Waxman says.
The e-mails disclosed in the House report showed that Mehlman was involved in a variety of matters of interest to Abramoff, one of which bore fruit for the lobbyist after he discussed delivering campaign contributions to GOP causes. Tony Rudy, then an aide to then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, referred to Mehlman on November 9, 2001, as a "rock star" after Mehlman agreed to "take care of" the jail for the Choctaws, despite a Department of Justice finding that the tribe's existing jail was adequate. Several days after that meeting, on November 13, Rudy recommended a $15,000 contribution to the Republican National Committee. "Let's give the check to Ken Mehlman at the White House," wrote Rudy, who later pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges as part of the broader investigation. On November 15, the tribe gave $10,000 to the RNC. Two week after the RNC received its check, Susan Butler, chief of staff to House member Chip Pickering, the Mississippi Republican whose district includes the Choctaws, e-mailed Rudy to say that she had discussed the issue with Mehlman and others. When Justice Department officials relented and released the money for the jail, Abramoff associates planned to host agency officials in a suite for a Dave Matthews concert. "I have the suite filling up with DOJ staffers who just got our client $16 million," one wrote. Another replied that the agency officials deserve any reward they want, "opening day tickets, Skins vs. Giants, oriental massages, hookers, whatever."
Mehlman also helped Abramoff with another client, Guam. On October 9, 2002, Abramoff asked Mehlman to secure a White House endorsement for the island's GOP gubernatorial ticket. Three weeks later, Abramoff received a note from Ralston, then Rove's assistant, saying that Mehlman had gotten a quote from the White House for "your candidate." She also asked Abramoff to send his requests in the future to "Ken only."
For Stayman, learning more about how Abramoff used White House connections helped him understand why, five years ago, he found himself looking at a career change. His job was up for renewal in 2001, but his State Department supervisors wanted to keep him on to finish a project that was expected to take more time. "With only about a year left on my appointment, I didn't think it would trigger any interest from the White House," Stayman says. "I assumed that Abramoff was behind it, but I didn't know the details, who called whom, and how much effort it took." Unbeknownst to Stayman, though, within weeks of Bush's taking office, the "Stayman project" was in full swing. State Department officials resisted the dismissal, and negotiations dragged on for months. That May, one of Mehlman's deputies assured Abramoff's team, "Obviously, this guy cannot stay." On July 9, Ralston e-mailed Abramoff with news of a deal on Stayman: "He'll be out in 4 months." Stayman was gone before then. (Baltimore Sun)
October 15: Former president Bill Clinton says, during a Democratic fundraiser in Iowa, that the actions of "an extreme sliver" of the Republican Party have backfired and "profoundly divided" the country. "We've got a big responsibility," he says. "Forget about 2008. Forget about the politics. Just go out and find somebody and look them dead in the eye and say 'You know, this is not right'.... This is America. We can do better and this year, it's a job that Democrats have to do alone." Clinton says that the Republicans leading the country "paint themselves as pure and the rest of us who don't agree with them as stained" in order to divide the country and stay in power. "People know things are out of whack, that fundamentally the order of, the rhythm of public life and our common life as Americans has been severely disturbed." Clinton adds, "You cannot blame the entire Republican party for this reason. The entire government of the United States, the Congress, the White House and increasingly the courts for the last six years has been in the total control not of the Republican party but of the most ideological, the most right wing, the most extreme sliver of the Republican Party." (Reuters)
October 15: Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace ignores over 20,000 e-mails sent to him demanding that he ask his interview subject, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the following question: "Prior to 9/11, you had eight months to respond to the al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole. Why didn't the Bush administration take action and put al-Qaeda out of business?" The e-mail barrage was sparked after Wallace's interview with former President Bill Clinton on September 24, where he asked an almost identical question even though neither the CIA nor the FBI could verify that al-Qaeda was responsible for the bombing until Clinton had left office in early 2001. At the time, Wallace claimed he asked the question of Clinton because "I got a lot of e-mail from viewers." This interview with Rice marks the 24th time Rice has been on Wallace's show, Fox News Sunday, since the 9/11 attacks. Neither Wallace nor anyone else on Fox has ever asked Rice about the USS Cole bombings, even though during the Clinton interview, Wallace claimed he routinely asks Rice and other Republicans the same kind of tough questions he asked Clinton. (See the entry for the interview in the September 2006 page of this site.) (Think Progress)

October 16: FBI agents investigating Pennsylvania Republican congressman Curt Weldon conduct six raids, including at the homes of his daughter and a longtime family friend. Four of the raids are in Philadelphia and two in Jacksonville, Florida. FBI agents search the law firm of Weldon's friend John Gallagher, who with Weldon has conducted extensive business in Russia and throughout the former Soviet bloc; the offices of the public relations firm Solutions North America, founded by Weldon's daughter Karen and family friend Charles Sexton; the Florida offices of a Russian energy firm, Itera; and a $7.5 million Florida beachfront home owned by a company related to Itera, the Russian oil firm, and possibly owned by Itera CEO Igor Makarov. When FBI agents leave Karen Weldon's three-story home in Philadelphia, they take armfuls of boxes with them. "I can confirm that we conducted a number of searches regarding an ongoing investigation," says FBI agent Jerri Williams. "Details regarding those investigations cannot be provided because the accompanying affidavit is sealed." Sexton's home is also raided; Sexton is a longtime GOP power broker in Delaware County. The raids come three days after news broke that the FBI was investigating whether Weldon used his influence to help his daughter, a registered lobbyist with no experience in the field, win over $1 million in consulting contracts from Russian and Serbian firms, including Itera. Weldon says the investigation is politically motivated, singling out watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington -- CREW -- for his complaints. CREW filed a request with the House Ethics Committee and with the Justice Department in 2004 to investigate Weldon, requests that were ignored. Weldon insists he is innocent of any wrongdoing. Among the group of protesters outside Weldon's campaign offices is a Republican, Chuck Ries, who holds a sign linking Weldon to current and former Republican colleagues Tom DeLay, Mark Foley and Bob Ney, all of whom have been embroiled in career-ending scandals. "I don't know what to believe anymore," says Ries. "They lie so much."
"Booman" of the liberal blog MyDD reminds readers of just what a "head-case" Weldon is. He posts photos of Weldon giving a commemorative plaque to Libyan tyrant Moammar Qaddafi, a photo of Weldon speaking at a faux "coronation" of eccentric Korean evangelist and Republican financier Sun Myung Moon -- where he called Moon "humanity's savior, messiah, returning lord and true parent" -- and notes that Weldon's 2005 book Countdown to Terror was largely sourced from Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, who is the subject of multiple CIA "burn notices," signifying that the agency considers Ghorbanifar thoroughly unreliable. (Philadelphia Inquirer, MyDD, Attytood)
October 16: Prosecutors in the Tom Noe case show that the Ohio Republican operative stole over $2.2 million from the $50 million rare coin fund he managed for the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation. Noe used part of the money he embezzled to shore up his floundering rare-coin business, prosecutors say. For Noe, "Money was power and power was money," says prosecutor John Weglian. Noe's power as an appointee of Ohio Governors Bob Taft and George Voinovich, coupled with his GOP connections came in handy for the coin dealer, Weglian says: "Tom Noe had very powerful and influential friends and knew that was a good thing to have." Noe's defense is that he had permission to do pretty much what he pleased with the fund. The defense blames Tim Lapointe, a former vice president of Noe's coin business who has been charged with numerous felonies and is cooperating with prosecutors, and asserts that the contract the bureau signed with Noe allowed Noe virtual carte blanche in managing its money. Even Noe's buying and selling of coins from himself, his purchases of personal and business items with bureau funds, and making loans for himself and others at his discretion, the defense calls merely "unsettling." It was Noe's idea to invest bureau funds into rare coins, an investment that gave him an unprecedented opportunity not only to manage the funds in an area of his own expertise, but to steal funds for himself and his business, and manipulate the funds for the benefit of himself and his GOP patrons. Bureau investigators who attempted to ascertain the details of Noe's investments, handled through Noe's shop, were not even allowed initially to enter the shop, and when they were, were not allowed to look at any coins. Tom Wersell, the director of investigations for the bureau, testifies that he didn't know the bureau had invested in collectibles. "We didn't have any preparation. We didn't know they had collectibles," he testifies. Noe could be sentenced to decades in prison if convicted on all 44 counts against him. He has already been sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for illegally funneling more than $45,000 into the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign in 2003. (Toledo Blade)
October 16: Mark Foley's stay at a posh alcohol rehabilitation clinic near Tucson is being paid for by tax dollars, even though Foley is no longer a government employee. Salley Collins, a spokeswoman for the House clerk's office, says that Foley is covered by a "temporary continuation of coverage" program that is available to federal employees who leave or resign their positions. "Most, if not all [lawmakers] have some coverage as far as rehabilitation for drug and alcohol," Collins says. Pete Sepp, vice president of communications for the National Taxpayers Union, says Foley's healthcare benefits will be available for 18 months under the plan. (Editor's note: I am trying, and failing, to think of a single instance of health care coverage being available for 18 months after an employee leaves a position. So far, I cannot.) (UPI)
October 16: Israeli police have recommended that multiple rape charges be filed against President Moshe Katsav. According to a police statement, the Israeli authorities are requesting Attorney General Menahem Mazuz charge Katsav with rape, indecent assault and sexual harassment of an undisclosed number of women. Investigators also have evidence that Katsav illegally pardoned people convicted of crimes and conducted illegal wiretaps, the statement says. The investigation of Katsav continues into other charges that he harassed a witness and obstructed justice. In Israel, the presidency is largely a symbolic post, mostly presiding over such ceremonies as the opening of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. Katsav skips today's opening ceremony. "There are apparently some members of Knesset who want to hover like vultures over carcasses and create provocations and to harm the image of the Knesset and symbols of power in Israel," says his brother Lior Katsav. "The president will not be part of this charade." The investigation of Katsav began this year after a former employee alleged he forced her to have sex under the threat of dismissal. Police repeatedly questioned Katsav at his official residence and seized personal documents. Katsav has denied wrongdoing, and his attorney has said that he is the victim of blackmail. Parliament appointed Katsav as president in 2000 after President Ezer Weizman resigned amid corruption allegations. (CNN)

Defense bill allows Bush to deploy US forces within the country at will

October 17: An item in the just-signed Defense Authorization Act, ignored by the mainstream media, is a provision entitled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies." On the surface, the provision is about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to Katrina-like disasters. But on closer inspection, the provision's language guts the 200-year old Insurrection Act, passed by Congress in 1807 to limit the president's power to deploy troops within the United States. Under the Insurrection Act, a president can only mobilize troops "to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy." However, the new law allows a president to take over local authority, and deploy military troops, in the event of "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident," and, most disturbingly, "if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order." According to the Military Commissions Act, the definition of a conspiracy against the US now includes anyone who has "has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States," -- a formulation that could mean anything from shipping arms to al-Qaeda terrorists to baking brownies for a peaceful, law-abiding impeachment rally. Yet few on Capital Hill even paid any attention to the new provision.
One who did is Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, who warns that the measure virtually invites the White House to declare federal martial law. It "subverts solid, longstanding Posse Comitatus statutes that limit the military's involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law," he warned on September 29. "The changes to the Insurrection Act will allow the President to use the military, including the National Guard, to carry out law enforcement activities without the consent of a governor." Moreover, he said, it breaks a long, fundamental tradition of federal restraint. "Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy." And Leahy criticized the way it was rammed through Congress. It "was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study," he observed. "Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals." But the provision sailed through as part of the $526 billion defense bill passed by Congress on September 30.
Governors, too, protested the provision, sending letters of protest to the White House to the Republican chairs and ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees, and received no response. So they petitioned the party heads on the Hill: Bill Frist and Harry Reid in the Senate, Dennis Hastert and Nancy Pelosi in the House. "This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors," said the August 6 letter signed by every member of the National Governors Association, "and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors...to the federal government. We urge you to drop provisions that would usurp governors' authority over the National Guard during emergencies from the conference agreement on the National Defense Authorization Act." Again, the letter received no response. On August 31, the governors sent another letter to the congressional party leaders, as well as to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had met quietly with an NGA delegation back in February. The bill "could encroach on our constitutional authority to protect the citizens of our states," they protested, complaining again about how the provision had been rammed through Congress with no oversight or discussion. "Any issue that affects the mission of the Guard in the states must be addressed in consultation and coordination with governors. ...The role of the Guard in the states and to the nation as a whole is too important to have major policy decisions made without full debate and input from governors throughout the policy process." Again, silence. A Republican Senate aide says the governors should have pushed harder, with phone calls and personal visits, and not just letters.
As is so often the case, the only real response to such a virulent piece of legislation came from the so-called blogosphere, the disparate collective of political, Internet-based blogs and Web sites. A close analysis of the bill by Frank Morales, an Episcopal priest in New York who occasionally writes for left-wing publications, spurred a score of liberal and conservative libertarian Web sites to take a look at it. However, the Washington Post and New York Times ignored it entirely. (Congressional Quarterly)
October 17: In yet another unconstitutional signing statement, Bush indicates that he has no intention of abiding by Congressional mandates included in the 2007 Defense Authorization Act, which he signs into law today. In the signing statement, he lists 24 provisions he says he will choose to ignore if he so desires. Among the provisions is Section 1008 of the Authorization Act, which requires the president to submit defense budgets for 2008 and beyond that include funding for the wars and contain "a detailed justification of the funds requested." In plain language, Bush is saying that he has no intention of including detailed budget requests for the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations in the 2008 budget, no matter what Congress says. Senator Carl Levin, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, says he "would not be surprised" if Bush ignores the budgeting requirements spelled out in Section 1008. "I'm very dubious he will abide by it. He has ignored it before," says Levin, who calls the measure "a strong bipartisan statement" that Congress wants responsible budgeting. He says the administration has made a practice of "irresponsible budgeting" for the war since it began in 2003. The wars have been paid for through emergency spending bills and "bridge funds" that amount to about $450 billion so far.
The statement says: "Several provisions of the act call for executive branch officials to submit to the Congress recommendations for legislation, or purport to regulate the manner in which the President formulates recommendations to the Congress for legislation. ...The executive branch shall construe these provisions in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to recommend for the consideration of the Congress such measures as the President deems necessary and expedient." Congressional aides said that appears to mean the president will decide whether or not he needs to comply with the provisions. "Basically, what the administration is saying to Congress is: 'You've told us what you want, now we're going to tell you what we're going to do,'" says Christopher Hellman, director of the Project on Military Spending Oversight. An amendment requiring war funding to be included in the regular defense budget, introduced by Republican senator John McCain, was approved 99 to 0 by the Senate in July. It was accepted by the House in September. A key congressional complaint about war funding through supplementals and bridge funds is that lawmakers see far fewer details about how the money will be spent, and supplementals must be approved by appropriations committees, but not by authorizing committees. Regular defense budgets must be approved by both.
In the signing statement, Bush also objected to: a requirement that he name a "coordinator of policy on North Korea" within 60 days, and submit within 90 days an updated intelligence assessment on Iran; a call for reports on subjects ranging from an early education program for military children to a study on assessing the safety of the nuclear stockpile; a response plan for remediation of unexploded ordnance, discarded military munitions, and munitions constituents; a report on a program for replacement of nuclear warheads on certain Trident sea-launched ballistic missiles with conventional warheads; energy efficiency in weapons platforms; a report on participation of multinational partners in the United Nations Command in the Republic of Korea; a report on the implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement; quarterly reports on Department of Defense response to threat posed by improvised explosive devices; and a National Academy of Sciences study of quantification of margins and uncertainty methodology for assessing and certifying the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. (Air Force Times)
October 17: In a remarkable display of either rampant ignorance or willful lying, Vice President Dick Cheney tells talk show host Rush Limbaugh that while there is "natural level of concern out there" over Iraq because fighting didn't end "instantaneously," that "[i]f you look at the general overall situation, [the Iraqi people are] doing remarkably well." (Think Progress)
October 17: Continuing the theme of Republican ignorance, New York Times reporter Jeff Stein asks GOP representative Terry Everett if he knows the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'ite. Everett says, "One's in one location, another's in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don't know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something." After Stein gives him a thumbnail sketch of the differences between the two -- based on the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shi'ite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni -- Everett says, "Now that you've explained it to me, what occurs to me is that it makes what we're doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area." Bad enough that any congressman dealing with Iraq is so woefully ignorant of the key religious differences between two of the three groups currently battling for control of that country, but Everett is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence." "This idiot isn't some backbencher," writes the Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. "This is why Republicans can't do anything right. This is why everything they touch turns to crap. Because they are idiots." (New York Times/Hullabaloo, Daily Kos)
October 17: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert continues to besmirch Democrats' patriotism in their final push towards the November elections, using the occasion of Bush signing the unconstitutional Military Commission Act to say, "The Democratic plan would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans' lives. While House Republicans work to deal with these dangers like establishing Terrorist Tribunals that will prosecute enemies of America, Democrat Leader Pelosi and 159 of her colleagues voted in favor of new rights for terrorists. The House Democrat Leader does not understand that our fight for freedom does not just happen on the battlefield but also on the floor of the House of Representatives. It should come as no surprise that the Democrats in the House put their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America." The RNC releases a simultaneous press release accusing Democrats of wanting to let terrorists roam freely without constraint. And House Majority Leader John Boehner piles on: "The Democrats' partisan opposition to this program, at the urging of the radical leftist element of their party, provides further proof that they continue to put politics ahead of addressing the security concerns of the American people. They voted against bringing the most dangerous terrorists to justice, and it underscores why the American people don't trust Democrats when it comes to national and homeland security." Pelosi retorts, "Democrats voted overwhelmingly to go to war in Afghanistan so that those responsible for the 9/11 attacks would be brought to justice. More than five years later, because of the failure of the Bush Administration to devise a legal process that could withstand the scrutiny of the Supreme Court, not a single person who planned the attacks has been tried and convicted. That record of failure is unlikely to be improved by the military commissions bill President Bush signed today. Legal challenges to the bill may result in convictions being overturned, punishments being set aside, and justice being further delayed." (Chicago Tribune)
October 17: The House overseers of the page program are discussing allegations of improper conduct by other House members besides Mark Foley, according to Page Board member Dale Kildee. Kildee refuses to give further details, including party affiliations, and says no proof of any further improper conduct has been provided. "It was about other allegations and I'd like to leave it at that," he says. "Let me just say, not about Mr. Foley. It's only been allegations." It is known that federal prosecutors in Arizona have opened a preliminary investigation into an unspecified allegation related to a rafting trip that Representative Jim Kolbe, a Republican, took with two former pages and others over the 4th of July in 1996. Kolbe, the only openly gay Republican in the House, has denied any wrongdoing. He is not running for re-election. Separate sources later confirm that the Page Board is indeed discussing Kolbe's camping trip. Kolbe denies being contacted by any authorities over the trip, but says if he is, he will cooperate. Kolbe's spokesman Korenna Cline said last week the rafting party included five current staffers, two former pages and Kolbe's sister. Nothing inappropriate happened on the trip, she said. She did not know who the pages were or what year they worked for Kolbe, but she said they paid their own way. Beth Kolbe, the congressman's younger sister, who was on the three-night trip, said that nothing inappropriate happened and that she had not heard of any concerns from anyone until the story of the camping trip appeared in the news media.
The Page Board consists of three lawmakers, the House clerk and the sergeant at arms. The board does not run the program day-to-day, but watches over it. Teenagers from around the country, sponsored by lawmakers, attend a congressional school and perform messenger jobs. Kildee says if he had known of the allegations against Foley earlier, he would have called him before the board. He said minutes of the meeting would serve as a record. "The Page Board is the responsible body and a bipartisan body with a law enforcement officer on it," he says, referring to Sergeant at Arms Wilson Livingood, who has testified before the House Ethics Committee. (AP/CBS News, ABC News)
October 17: Ohio Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, trailing badly in his race for the state's governorship behind Democrat Ted Strickland, has a novel idea for winning the race: using the power of his office to declare Strickland ineligible. The idea comes from a complaint filed by a Blackwell support with Blackwell's office, alleging that Strickland, currently a US representative, does not live in the apartment where he is registered to vote. Strickland owns a condominium in another area of Ohio, and the complaint alleges that he actually lives there. If Strickland is not a registered voter, he is ineligible to run for governor. The New York Times, breaking this story in an outraged op-ed, writes, "The complaint itself is without merit. No one disputes that Mr. Strickland lives in Ohio, or that he is registered. The only issue is which of his two homes he chose to register from, and the law gives voters with multiple homes broad discretion in choosing among them. What is more interesting, and troubling, is the way the complaint is proceeding. The county board that heard it broke down 2 to 2, on party lines, about whether to hold a hearing. In the case of a tie vote at the county level, complaints like these get forwarded to the secretary of state's office to be resolved. Mr. Blackwell says he has designated his assistant secretary to handle duties that could conflict with his candidacy. But passing these matters on to a subordinate who is a political ally and owes his job to the candidate hardly removes the conflict." The Times notes that for Blackwell, or any other candidate, to have such jurisdiction over his opponent during an election is unAmerican. "In 2004, Mr. Blackwell chose to become co-chairman of President Bush's Ohio campaign, and then issued rulings that helped the campaign," the Times writes. "Now we have the even more bizarre prospect of Mr. Blackwell, or his deputy, potentially participating in the baseless disqualification of his opponent. We are confident it will not come to that. But however this particular case is resolved, it underscores the need for Ohio, and other states, to find a way to administer elections that is insulated from partisan politics." After the Times breaks the story, Blackwell apparently abandons any plans he may have had to rule Strickland ineligible, and steal the governorship for himself. (New York Times)
October 17: Republican representative Jerry Lewis of California, facing multiple federal corruption probes, has used campaign contributions to pay over $500,000 in legal fees in just the past three months, according to quarterly reports filed last Friday with the Federal Election Commission. The reports show Lewis paid the Los Angeles-based firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher a total of $569,096 in legal fees. "This is an extremely unusual, large expenditure in a short period of time," says Kent Cooper of Political Money Line, a Web site that tracks money and politics. "This will shock many people on the Hill to the reality of the seriousness of his legal problems and also provide a clue to the depth of the investigation." Lewis's campaign says that Lewis merely wants to retain the best possible legal representation so that he can be quickly exonerated and return to "honorably" serving his constituents. Campaign finance experts said the half million dollar expense is not illegal as long as the money is spent on legal issues related to the congressman's official duties in office. (ABC News)
October 17: The GOP is returning to its infamous "Willie Horton" strategy in the Massachusetts gubernatorial race, says Newsweek reporter Mark Starr, who covered the 1988 presidential race that featured George H.W. Bush using the racist Horton ad to sink Michael Dukakis's presidential hopes. (The Horton ad featured convicted murder William Horton, who, while on weekend furlough, killed a man and raped his fiancee. Bush's campaign successfully tarred Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, with Horton, even though the furlough program was the creation of Dukakis's Republican predecessor. Starr writes, "The GOP ad campaigns featuring Horton's black 'thug'-shot became a symbol of soft-on-crime Democrats -- and an effective exercise in campaign fear mongering." More on the campaign can be found on the 1988 page on this site.) The same tactics are now being used in the race between Democrat Deval Patrick and Republican Kerry Healey. Patrick, an African-American, is the former chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division under Clinton. Healey is the sitting lieutenant governor. After the September primary, Patrick enjoyed a 30+ point poll lead over Healey, who represents the incumbency of four straight Republican governors, including current governor Mitt Romney, who is not seeking re-election to instead nurse his presidential aspirations. So the state and national GOP are busily seeking to "Willie Hortonize" Patrick. The ad campaign, featuring three convicted criminals, seems to be having an effect, as Patrick's lead has shrunk to 13 points and he finds himself forced to play defense against Healey, who is using her husband's millions to finance a seemingly endless barrage of attack ads. Of course, Healey's campaign merely says, "There are legitimate differences on crime [between the two candidates] and we're going to talk about them."
Healey is trying to hang a murderer and two rapists around Patrick's neck. The first subject of a Healey ad campaign, Carl Ray Songer was convicted of murdering a Florida state trooper in 1973. In Songer's 1985 appeal, Patrick, then a lawyer with the NAACP, managed to secure a life sentence instead of the death penalty for Songer, arguing that the Songer jury did not hear crucial arguments before handing down the death sentence. Starr writes, "This seems to be a clear-cut case of Patrick doing his job -- and doing it well," but a TV ad for Healey twists the issue, saying, "While lawyers have a right to defend admitted cop killers, do we really want one as governor?" Starr notes the semantic confusion of the line -- is Healey saying that Patrick is a cop killer? Starr also notes that "by using Songer, who is white, for its first attack, the GOP should dodge the racist accusations that dogged the Horton ad campaign."
The second is Benjamin LaGuer, a black man of Hispanic origin convicted in 1984 of raping an elderly white woman for over eight hours. LaGuer has contended from the outset that he is a victim of mistaken identity. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel rallied to the cause, as did John Silber, then president of Boston University. Patrick himself wrote letters on LaGuer's behalf to the Massachusetts Parole Board, and he wrote a check to help secure a DNA test for LaGuer, which actually confirmed his guilt. Patrick hurt himself on the LaGuer case by failing to recall doing anything for LaGuer besides write a letter. Healey's ad, asking, "What kind of person defends a brutal rapist?" has forced Patrick to apologize "to anyone who feels we didn't come forward with all the facts" about his efforts on LaGeur's behalf.
The third, Bernard Sigh, is actually Patrick's brother-in-law. Sigh was convicted in 1993 of raping his wife, Patrick's sister, and is now an unregistered sex offender living in Massachusetts. Sigh served a short prison sentence, reconciled with his wife and moved to Massachusetts. Patrick has told reporters the couple are now deacons in their church and counsel other couples. Most distressingly for the family, Patrick has said, their two young children were unaware of their parents' history until the story was leaked to the Boston Herald. The Healey campaign denies having any hand in the story, though few believe the denials.
Michael Dukakis said recently that the smears were worse than anything done to him; Senator Edward Kennedy, appearing with Patrick last week, decried the ad campaigns as "gutter politics." And at a fundraiser for Patrick in Boston last Monday, Clinton deplored the tactics in a speech. He said, "They don't do that unless they think they're going to get a big whuppin' laid on." Starr concludes, "Still, Patrick finds himself on the defensive. It's a sign of how effective Healey's latest attacks have been when a man who grew up in the Chicago projects has to compare crime creds with a suburbanite from the state's affluent Prides Crossing neighborhood of Beverly, Massachusetts." (MSNBC)
October 17: In a truly egregrious example of blatant racism, a Republican television ad tries to connect with black voters' hostility towards abortion by calling black women "ho's," street slang for "whores." The ad portrays two black men saying, "If you make a little mistake with one of your 'hos,' you'll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked." The second says, "That's too cold. I don't snuff my own seed." The first responds, "Maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican." The ad is running in ten battleground states. This ad is financed by J. Patrick Rooney, a white billionaire notorious for funding several misleading anti-Kerry ads that ran on urban radio stations in 2004. The money for Rooney's newest ad flowed through a little-known group called America's PAC, which was founded by Richard Nadler, a veteran Republican consultant who pushed "intelligent design" in Kansas public schools, declaring, "Darwin is bunk." According to reporter Max Blumenthal, "Nadler has an apparently dim view of the minorities he hopes to court. In 2000, he produced an ad in 2000 for school vouchers in which a white parent declared that his child's public school 'was a bit more diversity than he could handle.' The Republican National Committee flatly denounced that ad as 'racist.' But about Rooney and Nadler's latest creation, which portrays black men as promiscuous misogynists and black women as submissive 'ho's,' the RNC is silent." Another ad in the series features the commentary, "Black babies are terminated at triple the rate of white babies. The Democratic Party supports these abortion laws that are decimating our people, but the individual's right to life is protected in the Republican platform. Democrats say they want our vote. Why don't they want our lives?" (New York Sun, Huffington Post)
October 17: Embattled GOP senator Rick Santorum uses a "Lord of the Rings" metaphor to explain why the US hasn't been attacked by terrorists in five years. "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else," Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth. "It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the US. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States." Democrats, naturally, have greeted Santorum's clumsy metaphor with hoots of derision. His opponent, Bob Casey, says through spokesman Larry Smar, "You have to really question the judgment of a US senator who compares the war in Iraq to a fantasy book. This is just like when he said Kim Jong Il isn't a threat because he just wants to 'watch NBA basketball.'" (Bucks County Courier Times)

October 18: Inside sources within the Ohio GOP say that, contrary to common belief that Ohio will be swept in a Democratic tide of votes, Ohio will remain solidly Republican after the elections, because of a simple expedient -- a purge of likely Democratic voters carried out by Republican secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell. The information comes from an unnamed source high within the Ohio GOP with close ties to the national Republican Party, who says that Ohio and three other states, which he refuses to name, have just carried out voter roll purges. He says a new Diebold voter registry system, just installed in the last year, has held what he calls a "test run" of the system's ability to purge what the system identifies as "ineligible voters." The purge generated names and test letters sent out to 1.2 million Ohio addresses with a focus on universities and apartment addresses with high turnover. The insider brags about Blackwell's "brilliance" in carrying out the purges without media attemtion. He adds, since the purge was done ostensibly as a test, only a few letters informing voters that their status is in question were sent. "I suspect Blackwell chose criteria very very favorable for us," he says. He believes the purge has caught "hundreds of thousands of students, activists and wanderers with no real job" would show up at the polls and have to vote provisionally -- and provisional ballots are usually not counted. He predicts that tens of thousands of voters will show up on election day, and once the provisionals are used up will simply not be able to vote at all. The operation also turned up what he calls fascinating information about several Democratic lawmakers, some of which will be used in late-season campaigning.
Amateur investigations of early voting in Lorain and Wayne Counties bear out this story. During the hour or so one person spent in the Lorain elections offices, over 15 Democrats were turned down in their attempt to cast early votes through one mechanism or another -- addresses not matching, home ownership not verified, and in one case a college student who changed dormitories. One blue-collar worker had been purged because his voter registration had only his building address, but his drivers liscense included an apartment number. Each resolution took a maddeningly long time to address; several voters had given up in frustration and gone home. A similar occurrence happened in Wayne: a student's college ID was not considered adequate, another who owns two houses had to verify and update information for both homes. In Wayne, the observer noted that poll workers being trained to operate the new Diebold TSX machines were told repeatedly by their trainer, "I don't know how it works, I just know how we are supposed to use it."
The writer, blogger "KStreetProjector" of the Daily Kos, believes that Blackwell got the information he intended to use to attempt to throw his opponent Ted Strickland out of the gubernatorial race -- Strickland owns two homes, and doesn't always reside at the one for which he is registered -- from the data compiled for the voter purge. The blogger writes, "[Blackwell] has taken away your right to vote based on any piece of mismatched information in your state records. I would expect that would be nearly everyone if the test was applied across the board. But I suspect it was not done that way by Mr. Blackwell. It might be worth other states starting to look at this issue as well."
A lawsuit to force Blackwell to reinstate the potentially hundreds of thousands of Ohio Democratic voters purged from the rolls will be filed on either October 20 or 23, according to Ohio voting rights activist and attorney Bob Fitrakis. Fitrakis says, "Essentially, by purging these rolls, the Republicans, by shrinking the electorate, have already won in Ohio. If they can't win, which is what the polls show among registered voters, the way to win is to use their nuclear option -- to target black voters, young voters and the working poor -- by purging them so they can't vote. ...They aren't challenging voter eligibility in Republican areas. This is coming from the Republican party. They're not targeting their own base. If it follows the pattern from 2004, they will have purged heavily Democratic areas. They will challenge high performance Democratic precincts. ...A federal judge can issue an order to reinstate all the purged voters. ...When we go, we'll ask for an injunction, amending this to our existing, arguing that this irreparable harm to the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Ohio voters, that they're being targetted because of their race and age." According to Fitrakis, the letters were sent out and purges timed, so voters could not get their voting eligibility status reinstated, because the voting registration period just ended. Worse, there was no reason to purge the voters, which is usually reserved for people who have died or moved out of state. They should have been moved to inactive status. "They were probably purged because they moved," says Fitrakis. "If they were registered to vote, they were eligible to vote simply by going to the board of elections. They should have been moved to inactive status. There was no reason to purge these people." (Daily Kos, OpEd News)
October 18: Representative Rodney Alexander, the Republican congressman who warned House leaders about Foley's e-mails to a teenage boy from his district, testifies before the House Ethics Committee. Alexander spends three hours testifying about Foley's contacts with teenage pages and how the chamber's Republican leadership handled concerns about Foley. "We told them what we know, when we knew it, and what we did about it, and we are looking forward and hoping that the committee will talk to others," Alexander says after the testimony, which is held behind closed doors. "It's quite apparent from some of the reports out there that there are many people that know what we know and have known it for a lot longer period of time than we've known." Alexander has said his office warned House leaders in 2005 about non-explicit but "overly friendly" e-mails Foley sent to a boy Alexander sponsored as a page. That has led to investigations by the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department. "The pages from the past that have come forward now with testimony, you know, I'd like to know who their member of Congress was," Alexander says. "Who sponsored them? What did they know? Why didn't they reveal if they knew anything? So, there are some very important questions that the committee has yet to get answers to." He concludes, "We just look forward to the committee continuing their investigation, and hopefully this will come to a conclusion and we can move on with other things." (CNN)
October 18: A Florida court has banned the use of signs at polling places on November 7 reminding voters that votes for Mark Foley, who has now resigned his position as a US representative and removed himself from the race, will actually go to Foley's replacement, Joe Negron. Florida law prohibits removing Foley's name from the ballot so close to the elections, so Negron asked election supervisors to post signs at the polls telling voters that ballots cast for Foley would elect him instead. Such signs are illegal under Florida law. The Florida Democratic Party has opposed such signs, saying the signs would not only violate the law, but would amount to campaign material within the polling places themselves. (ABC News)
October 18: Republican representative John Sweeney is attempting to fend off allegations surrounding his January 2001 trip to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in the company of a lobbyist hired by convicted Washington influence peddler Jack Abramoff. Sweeney made the 8,000 mile trek to the CNMI, a US territory infamous for its garment sweatshops and prostitution trade, to give a speech. He traveled with Tony Rudy, who had just left the staff of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to work for Abramoff. The Saipan Chamber of Commerce says it paid for Sweeney's visit, but Sweeney never reported any privately funded travel as House rules require. Those rules prohibit lobbyist-paid travel. Sweeney's office says that he believed the CNMI paid for the trip but that government says it did not. Abramoff lobbied on and off for the Mariana Islands government from 1994 to early 2002, eventually earning more than $11 million, and helped to fend off the emplacement of regulations that would regulate its workplaces and ensure fair treatment for its employees. Rudy, who met with Sweeney after the trip to lobby him on behalf of the territory, pleaded guilty in March 2006 to conspiracy charges connected to the cash laundering and political influence enterprise run by Abramoff. Abramoff pleaded guilty in January to mail fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion charges. Both he and Rudy are cooperating with law enforcement officials in an ongoing investigation. Sweeney insists Abramoff did not personally organize or pay for this trip, as he did for other members of Congress and congressional aides -- including DeLay -- in violation of House ethics rules. Sweeney said he never met Abramoff, adding that his only connection to the disgraced lobbyist was Rudy.
Sweeney is the latest of a string of Republican lawmakers to be exposed for his possibly illegal connections to Abramoff, joining DeLay, Bob Ney, and John Doolittle. Sweeney has not yet been accused of any wrongdoing. At the time of his trip, Sweeney had just been named to the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which could potentially direct federal funds sought by the commonwealth, but he did not sit on any committees with direct jurisdiction over the islands. Sweeney visited the island commonwealth at a time when Abramoff was attempting to persuade a reluctant CNMI government to renew its lobbying contract with him; the governor, Pedro Tenorio, was not happy with Abramoff's $100,000/month fees. Sweeney returned to the US and declared that the CNMI needed to continue its efforts to combat its poor image back in the States. "The reputation of the commonwealth is not really what ought to be," Sweeney said. "I come here and found that the truth projected to me in Washington was not the truth at all." Over the years, at Abramoff's urging and with the support of the islands' garment industry, GOP House leaders blocked legislation to federalize the CNMI's immigration and wage laws and stop the islands from producing clothes stamped "Made in USA." Abramoff also worked to secure federal money for the islands. Sweeney gave Abramoff and the CNMI garment industry a key boost when he told reporters on January 15, 2001, that concerns about poor working conditions there were overblown, and that he had seen worse sweatshops back home in New York. Sweeney's office says he was "absolutely not" aware of any severe mistreatment of workers or forced prostitution before he made these comments. But Democrat George Miller, a longtime champion of legislation to change CNMI wage and immigration laws, traveled to the islands in 1998 on a fact-finding mission to document abuses there and later said that the problems were obvious "unless you choose not to look at the facts on the ground. A blind pig could run into the human rights violations and the exploitation of workers on the islands." Miller said he met women "forced into the sex trade," workers living in barracks behind barbed wire and others who "wanted us to find someone to buy their kidney so they could go home, because they were trapped."
Several months after his trip, on April 6, 2001, Sweeney accepted a $1,000 campaign contribution from Abramoff's law firm, Greenberg Traurig. The firm made no more contributions to Sweeney until August 2004 -- about five months after Abramoff departed. Partners and lobbyists at the firm where Rudy worked after leaving Greenberg Traurig in 2002, the Alexander Strategy Group, and others associated with them gave Sweeney at least $8,850 in campaign aid in 2005. The Alexander Strategy Group closed in January. Within months of returning from the CNMI, Sweeney met separately with the governor of the Marianas, Benigno Fitial, and Abramoff's lobbyist Tony Rudy in Washington. Rudy also met with members of Sweeney's staff. Fitial met with Sweeney and his fellow Appropriations Committee member, Doolittle, in Washington on April 8, 2001, to discuss the islands' infrastructure and development needs. "I am very glad that the CNMI has friends in such powerful positions," Fitial said after the meeting. "Whether the issue is construction funding or Compact impact assistance, the Appropriations Committee will make the important decisions, and I am confident we will receive a fair hearing because of our friends that serve on that committee." But Sweeney says he could not recall any appropriations being discussed. (Albany Times-Union)
October 18: The watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [CREW] has asked for an IRS investigation into the activities surrounding the reelection efforts of Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline. During the week of September 12, 2006 several Kansas-based news organizations published an internal campaign memorandum authored by Kline that detailed his efforts to recruit churches to aid his reelection efforts. The memorandum includes several activities that may constitute illegal support of the Kline campaign by Kansas churches. Kline identified Light of the World and Wanamaker Woods Nazarene, both in Topeka, and an unspecified Basehor-Linwood church as churches that had agreed to help disseminate his campaign literature. Redistributing partisan campaign literature is a violation of tax laws that forbid churches and other public charities from intervening in elections. Kline also identified Topeka Bible Church and Overland Park's First Family Church along with several unnamed churches serving the black and Hispanic communities in Kansas City, as possible locations for political forums. He also referred to a special campaign video to be distributed to churches, and incorrectly claimed that churches could legally show the video without inviting his opponent to show his own video. IRS law dictates that churches must offer an equal opportunity to the opposing candidate. In distributing this misinformation, the Kline campaign may have caused Kansas churches to violate IRS rules. In another likely violation of IRS law, on September 16, 2006, Kline appeared before the TBC IronMen Ministries of the Topeka Bible Church. Following his speech, a campaign supporter invited the crowd to attend a political reception at an off-site location. IRS rules regarding candidate appearances strictly prohibit political fundraising and the use of church resources to indicate support or opposition to a candidate. According to CREW's executive director Melanie Sloan, "It is appalling that the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Kansas is blatantly disregarding the laws governing churches' participation in political campaigns. The IRS should investigate his egregious conduct as well as that of the churches that may have violated the rules governing their non-profit status." (CREW)
October 18: Former president Bill Clinton urges Democrats to challenge their GOP opponents' characterizations of them as traitors and anti-religious zealots. At Georgetown University, Clinton slams Republicans who describe their Democratic opponents as "running for office on his or her way to hell" and tells Democrats not to shy away from fighting back. "Most of us long for politics where we have genuine arguments, vigorous disagreements but we don't claim to have the whole truth and we don't demonize our opponents and we work for what's best for the American people," he says. "This is a contact sport, politics," he says. "You can't complain about being attacked. It's like Yao Ming complaining about being fouled playing basketball." Clinton says that Democrats are no longer ducking away from counterattacking Republicans' attacks. "It's not that we want a bland, mushy, meaningless politics," he says. "We like our debate. ...We understand that campaigns will be heated and only one side can win. But we want it to be connected somehow to real lives and real people, to aspirations of ordinary Americans to the future of our children and our grandchildren." Clinton says of the GOP, "The ideological, right-wing element of the Republican Party has been building strength, partly in reaction to things that happened 40 years ago -- Barry Goldwater's defeat, the excess of the '60s, Ronald Reagan's election. But this is the first time on a consistent basis, the most conservative, the most ideological wing of the Republican Party has had both the executive and legislative branches with a very distinct governing philosophy and very distinct political philosophy. ...They favor unilateralism whenever possible and cooperation when it is inevitable. The problem with ideology is, if you've got an ideology, you've already got your mind made up. You know all the answers and that makes evidence irrelevant and arguments a waste of time. You tend to govern by assertion and attacks." Unsurprisingly, the Republican National Committee counters by attacking Clinton's character, with spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt saying, "It's not surprising to hear these attacks from a man widely recognized for repeatedly playing the blame game to cover his own mistakes." (AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
October 18: A potentially fascinating land buy is coming together in Paraguay. George W. Bush has recently purchased 98,840 acres in that landlocked South American country. Of all people, presidential daughter Jenna Bush recently paid a secret "diplomatic visit" to Paraguayan president Nicanor Duarte and US ambassador James Cason. Jenna Bush did not take part in any press conferences, nor were there any public sightings or even an official confirmation of her 10-day trip, which ended this week; she was officially reported to be representing UNICEF, with which she is interning. (Jenna is completing her internship in Panama.)
Several items of information give the Bush land buy added interest. Paraguay voted last summer to "grant US troops immunity from national and International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction" within its borders. Immediately afterwards, 500 heavily armed US troops arrived with various planes, helicopters and land vehicles at Mariscal Estigarribia air base, which happens to be at the northern tip of Paraguay near the Bolivian/Brazilian border. More have reportedly arrived since then. Cason is an interesting figure. Before he was Bush's ambassador to Paraguay, he was ambassador to Cuba, and a former "political advisor" to the US Atlantic Command and NATO's Supreme Commander Atlantic. Cason has been posted in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Panama, all of which have "hosted" secret and quasi-secret wars during the last thirty years. The base itself was the subject of a secret visit by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in late 2005, and US Special Forces troops began arriving in the summer of 2006. The base is a sprawling complex built in 1982 during the reign of dictator Alfredo Stroessner. The airfield can handle B-52 bombers and C-5 "Galaxy" cargo planes, and has an enormously powerful radar system, a vast array of hangers, and can house up to 16,000 troops. As of July 1, 500 US Special Forces soldiers arrived at the airbase for what is termed a three-month counterterrorism exercise, dubbed Operation Commando Force 6. Mariscal Estigarribia is, in essence, now a US military base, though Paraguay denies it. Foreign Policy in Focus writes, "There is a disturbing resemblance between US denials about Mariscal Estigarribia, and similar disclaimers made by the Pentagon about Eloy Alfaro airbase in Manta, Ecuador. The United States claimed the Manta base was a 'dirt strip' used for weather surveillance. When local journalists revealed its size, however, the United States admitted the base harbored thousands of mercenaries and hundreds of US troops, and Washington had signed a 10-year basing agreement with Ecuador." Blogger "Wonkette" writes, "Here's a fun question for Tony Snow: Why might the president and his family need a 98,840-acre ranch in Paraguay protected by a semi-secret US military base manned by American troops who have been exempted from war-crimes prosecution by the Paraguyan government?"
Even more interestingly, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon has bought an enormous chunk of real estate -- almost a million and a half acres -- near Chaco, Paraguay, virtually adjacent to the Bush estate. And at least one Paraguayan news source claims that the owner of the Bush estate is not George W. Bush, but his father, former president George H.W. Bush. The elder Bush's ties with Moon are long, deep, and well-documented, particularly in South America. Paul Waldman's Gadflyer wrote last year, "In the early stages of the Reagan Revolution that embraced the Washington Times and Moon's anti-Communist movement, it was embarrassing to be caught at a Moon event, until George H.W. Bush appeared with Moon in 1996, thanking him for a newspaper that 'brings sanity to Washington.'" That was while on an extended trip to South America in Moon's company. A Reuters' story of November 25, 2005, describes the elder Bush as "full of praise" for Moon at a banquet in Buenos Aires, toasting him as "the man with the vision." Moon was generous in return, paying Bush $100,000 for his appearance. The two then traveled to Uruguay, where Bush helped Moon "to help him inaugurate a seminary in the capital, Montevideo, to train 4,200 young Japanese women to spread the word of his Church of Unification across Latin America."
A final note: both Moon's and Bush's lands are located at what one Paraguayan drug czar once called an "enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades." And it sits atop the one of the world's largest fresh-water aquifers. (Wonkette, IANS/Telugu Portal)
October 18: Nevada Republican Jim Gibbons, running for the state's governorship, is dogged by accusations that he assaulted an unnamed woman the night of October 13. So far, information on the assault is sketchy. According to police, Gibbons and campaign adviser Sig Rogich dined with supporters at McCormick & Schmick's restaurant that evening. Rogich is a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist with strong ties to Nevada's casino industry. He has an office near the restaurant. After dinner, Rogich and Gibbons retreated to the bar to wait out a rainstorm. In the bar, says Rogich, he and Gibbons met two female attorneys who worked in Rogich's building and two other women, one of whom knew the two attorneys.
The incident with Gibbons occurred after the candidate left the bar. Two separate 911 calls came out of the incident, one from the restaurant and one from a hotel lobby several hundred yards away. Eyewitness Kim Hartnett, a desk clerk at the nearby La Quinta Inn, says she saw Gibbons, or someone of similar appearance, grab a woman by the arm outside the hotel around 10:20 pm. Hartnett says the woman yelled and pointed a finger at the man, who attempted to calm her down. The two then moved from Hartnett's view. Minutes later, a second woman calls 911 to report an altercation outside. Metro Deputy Chief Greg McCurdy says the call came from a female who alleged that she had been assaulted and had run over to La Quinta to dial 911. She sounded drunk on the phone and was laughing, McCurdy says. She did not mention Gibbons. Robert Uithoven, Gibbons' campaign manager, says Gibbons was never at La Quinta. He was at his hotel, the nearby Marriott, by 10 pm, preparing for Tuesday's debate with his Democratic rival, state Sen. Dina Titus, according to Uithoven. As for Gibbons, he says that the woman who accuses him of assaulting her merely lost her balance just after they walked out of the restaurant. Gibbons says he grabbed the woman to keep her from falling. The next day, he told police the incident was a misunderstanding. Nearly an hour after the incident, police say they received a second 911 call from a woman complaining that they had not responded to the first call. This time, Gibbons was named. According to police accounts, the woman who alleged that she was assaulted had been drinking for several hours and appeared intoxicated. When contacted the following day, she recanted her assault allegation, police say.
Like the witness statements, the restaurant employees have differing stories, made more so by the restaurant's threat to fire any employee who talks to the media. Two employees who ask for anonymity say that Gibbons drank more than the single glass of wine he admits to having at the restaurant's bar; Rogich describes Gibbons as "usually" a teetotaler. Rogich admits that Gibbons's party ran up a bar tab of over $300, though he says that 16 or 18 people were drinking on the tab. The woman who claims to have been assaulted was "quite vague" in her allegations, aside from claiming to have been grabbed by the arm, according to one of the police officers who responded to the 911 call. He says that while the woman had been drinking, "[s]he wasn't stumbling drunk, wasn't to the point where she couldn't be understood." The officer, Lieutenant Chris Jones, says the incident had been blown out of proportion. From the information police had gathered, he says, the events occurred "just in fact the way Mr. Gibbons explained them to have happened." The deputy police chief agrees: "From a police point of view, this was a he said, she said. We didn't see any evidence that a crime had occurred." (Las Vegas Sun, Las Vegas Sun)
October 18: The Republican candidate for Oklahoma's superintendent of education, Bill Crozier, says he thinks old textbooks could be used to stop bullets shot from weapons wielded by school intruders. If elected, he says he will put thick used textbooks under every desk for students to use in self-defense. To prove his novel idea, he provides the press with a videotape showing him and others firing weapons, including an AK-47 and a 9mm pistol, at textbooks in a field. They conducted the experiment to see how far bullets would penetrate the books. "We are doing this as an experiment because at Fort Gibson, many young people were shot in the back," Crozier said in the videotape, referencing a December 1999 middle school shooting in eastern Oklahoma, in which a student wounded four students with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun. The tape shows that textbooks stop the 9m bullets, but the AK-47 bullets penetrate two calculus textbooks at once. "This would be to protect the children in an immediate situation," he says. "This is something that any student, any classroom in the country could do immediately." He adds, "Not everybody would be saved in that situation, of course. But many of them would, and instead of running away or being lined up ... this is a way for the children to fight back." His opponent, incumbent Democrat Sandy Garrett, has no comment on Crozier's idea. (KOCO-TV)
October 18: Radio talk show host Sean Hannity gives some interesting advice to Democratic voters for November 7: "I want you to stay home on Election Day because you must accept the fact that your party has abandoned you. You've gotta accept the fact that your vote doesn't matter anyway. So all you Democrats, stay home." He adds to his extraordinary call that Democrats should not turn out to vote "for the sake of the nation" because "[y]our candidates have absolutely no ideas how to win the war on terrorism. The only ideas that they espouse are ways to undermine the troops in harm's way and undermine their commander in chief while they're at war. Your candidates have no idea how to keep this economy strong. ...But you Republicans out there, the ones -- there's enough people in this audience to make a real, significant difference in really key important states." He goes on to say that the media will mischaracterize his remarks: "This is how the press is going to report this: 'Hannity says Democrats should stay home on Election Day.'" How this is a misrepresentation of his statements is not explained. He goes on to explain his take on the Democratic Party platform: "I don't think abandoning our troops on the battlefield or closing your eyes to enemy communications or listening to enemy communications in our country, or killing the economy, or supporting illegal immigration, I don't think that's something to run on."
Two days later, Hannity, on his Fox News talk show Hannity & Colmes, complains that "the media seems somewhat complicit" in creating "an institutionalized bias to sort of suppress voting and take away initiative from people" because of a purported lack of coverage of gaffes by Democrats. He says, during an interview with former Republican House member Newt Gingrich, that "news coverage" disproportionately discourages Republican voters by devoting more coverage to unflattering remarks by Republican candidates. It seems that consistency is not Hannity's strong suit. (MediaMatters, MediaMatters)

October 19: The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter Pace, says he supports Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and says his leadership is inspired by God. "He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country," Pace says. Rumsfeld is "a man whose patriotism focus, energy, drive, is exceeded by no one else I know...quite simply, he works harder than anybody else in our building." Pace makes his remarks during a ceremony at the Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami. Pace is joined in lauding Rumsfeld by Navy Admiral James Stavridis, who is taking over command of SOUTHCOM from General Bantz Craddock. "He comes to work everyday with a single-minded focus to make this country safe," says Stavridis, who was a senior aide to Rumsfeld before taking the new position. "We're lucky as a nation that he continues to serve with such passion and such integrity and such determination and such brilliance," he says. Stavridis will be responsible for military cooperation with Latin American countries, and will be in charge of the Guantanamo US military base in Cuba where more than 400 detainees are being held. (AFP/Yahoo! News)
October 19: The FBI is investigating the "possible theft" of Diebold electronic touch-screen voting system source code in Maryland. The disks were anonymously delivered to the office of Democratic delegate Cheryl Kagan, a longtime critic of Diebold and electronic voting. A letter in the package containing the disks says that the disks were stolen with ease from the State Board of Elections offices. The board admits that the disks contains "the software...used in Maryland in the 2004 elections," but Diebold denies that the disks are of any value, saying that the software is for older versions no longer used in Maryland. Diebold spokesmen have had to admit that, contrary to their own statements, some of the software is still in use. The disks feature logos from Ciber Inc. and Wyle Labratories, Inc., two labs that test voting machines and software for Diebold. Both firms deny the disks are theirs. The software on the stolen disks could easily be used to hack Diebold's machines and fix the election results. (Diebold has also said that the disks would be of no use, because the software on the disks was encrypted. Analysis shows that there was no encryption.) Maryland has also had to admit that the state's new voter registration database does not have proper security controls in place for access to the data, making it all the easier for voting results to be hacked and manipulated. (Washington Post/BradBlog)
October 19: The Republicans' latest Internet ad is nothing more than pure fearmongering, attempting to frighten voters into voting for GOP candidates by threatening them with a second 9/11 attack. The new ad from the Republican National Committee called "The Stakes" features images of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other Islamic jihadists. The only sounds are the ticking of what presumably is a bomb, and a heartbeat. Superimposed over the photos and video are quotes from al-Qaeda terrorists like "What is yet to come will be even greater," which bin Laden said in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. The ad ends with a line spoken in voiceover: "These are the stakes. Vote November 7th." The tag line is a deliberate echo of the 1964 ad used by Democrats to rattle Republican supporters of Barry Goldwater, in which Democrats warned voters that a vote for Goldwater might well be a vote for nuclear destruction. MSNBC, NBC's Today Show, CNN, and Fox News have all given lengthy amounts of free air time to broadcasting and discussing the ad. While some broadcasts, particularly CNN's, aired some criticism of the ad, others, particularly Fox's coverage, were uniformly laudatory; on MSNBC, Republican representative Tom Price defended the ad, but anchor Norah O'Donnell ended the segment before her other guest, Democratic representative Chris Van Hollen, could respond. Liberal blogger Duncan Black observes, "The point of terrorism is, as the name suggests, to terrorize. Not simply to kill and destroy, but to frighten the broader population. It puzzles me why the RNC has found common cause with terrorists in their new ad campaign, and it puzzles me more why they want to highlight the fact that over 5 years after 9/11 George Bush has failed to catch the guy responsible." (Chicago Tribune [link to video], MediaMatters, Eschaton)
October 19: Former House Clerk Jeff Trandahl testifies to the House Ethics Committee. Although his testimony is secret, according to sources close to Trandahl, he planned to tell the committee that he informed House leaders about Mark Foley's inappropriate conduct with pages years ago. Trandahl had been monitoring Foley's interaction with pages after being told of troubling behavior by the congressman in the House cloakroom and elsewhere. Trandahl took his concerns to Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff, many times. Fordham testified last week that he warned House Speaker Dennis Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, at least three years ago about Foley's conduct. Palmer has denied Fordham's account. Trandahl, who was House clerk from 1998 to 2005, oversaw the page program and had day-to-day authority over the teens. Former colleagues describe him as a by-the-book manager who took his job seriously. A friend, Craig Shniderman, says that if Trandahl was aware of something improper, he would have reported it. "Jeff is a guy who always does the right thing," says Shniderman. "He lives by the truth. He lives by one truth. He's not a man that tells different stories to different people."
Also scheduled to testify is House Majority Leader John Boehner, who said earlier this month that Hastert had told him the concerns about Foley had been "taken care of." (CNN)
October 19: Orange County, California Republicans are calling for the withdrawal of their district's Republican candidate for the US House of Representatives after evidence surfaces that the candidate, Tan Nguyen, had a campaign staffer send out a letter threatening Hispanic immigrant voters with jail if they voted. County Republican Chairman Scott Baugh says that after speaking with state investigators and the company that distributed the mailer, he believes Nguyen had direct knowledge of the "obnoxious and reprehensible" letter. He says that the party's executive committee voted unanimously to urge Nguyen to drop out of the race against Democratic opponent, incumbent Loretta Sanchez. "I learned information that allows me to draw the conclusion that not only was Mr. Nguyen's campaign involved in this, but that Mr. Nguyen was personally involved in expediting the mailer," he says. Nguyen denies any knowledge of the letter, but has fired a campaign staffer who was involved in the mailing. State and federal officials are investigating the letter, written in Spanish and mailed to an estimated 14,000 Democratic voters in central Orange County. It warns, "You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that could result in jail time." Of course, immigrants who are adult naturalized citizens are eligible to vote. The letter also says the government has developed a computer system to track down the names of immigrant voters, an allegation that is not true but is guaranteed to frighten many Hispanic voters. Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant whose opposition to illegal immigration has figured heavily in his underdog campaign, says he has no intention of dropping out of the race. His attorney, David Wiechert, says, "He would do the public a disservice if he dropped out." US Justice Department spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson says the department's civil rights division was investigating in coordination with the state attorney general's office. Numerous political leaders denounced the letter, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. "If it is proven that a candidate was responsible for this action, that candidate is clearly not fit to serve the people of California and should withdraw immediately from his or her race," says California GOP chairman Duf Sundheim. "If it is in fact this guy [who sent the letter], the most disgusting and saddest thing about it is that it comes from another immigrant," says Sanchez, who was born in the US to Mexican parents and whose 1996 election signaled Orange County's increasing diversification. "These communities have spent years trying to get naturalized immigrants to vote." Nguyen's family immigrated from Vietnam in 1973.
The letterhead of the mailing resembles that of an anti-illegal immigration group, the Huntington Beach-based California Coalition for Immigration Reform, but the group's leader, Barbara Coe, says she told investigators that her group didn't authorize the letter and that she didn't know who sent it. "The letterhead was altered, and I've never head of any Sergio Ramirez," the name signed to the letter, Coe says. This is not the county's first dispute over alleged intimidation of Hispanic voters. In 1988, Republican Assembly candidate Curt Pringle posted uniformed "security guards" at 20 predominantly Hispanic voting places in Orange County, a violation of the law. Republicans said the guards were stationed to prevent noncitizens from casting ballots. Pringle and the county GOP later paid $400,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit alleging intimidation of Hispanic voters. (Washington Post)
October 19: Facing federal investigation of improprieties in how he oversaw Congress's spending of $900 billion annually, Republican House Appropriations Committee chairman Jerry Lewis takes an unusually direct step to derail the investigation -- he fires 60 investigators who had worked for his committee rooting out fraud, waste and abuse, effective immediately. The investigators were contract workers, brought on to handle the extraordinary level of fraud investigations facing the panel. Sixteen permanent investigative staff are staying on. Lewis's decision "has in fact stalled all of the investigations on the staff," says one of the contractors, a former FBI agent, who asks not to be identified. "This eviscerates the investigatory function. There is little if any ability to do any oversight now. ...In effect, no investigative function is going to be done." The contractor calls the decision "misguided. This staff has saved billions and billions of dollars, we've turned up malfeasance and misfeasance. Its results justify the expense of the staff. I have no idea why the chairman would do this." Lewis's spokesman John Scofield calls the complaints "sour grapes," and asserts, "There is nothing sinister going on."
A day later, Lewis through Scofield, tries to say that the firings were bipartisan, saying that the contracts were not renewed because the panel is conducting a "bipartisan review" of the unit's staff. "Frankly, the work we've been getting as of late has not been that good," he says. He adds that the review has the backing of ranking Democratic House appropriator David Obey. But according to an inside source, while committee Democrats agree that there were problems with the investigative staff that needed to be addressed, they were not consulted prior to the suspension of the investigators. The source also says that problems with the investigations unit were only part of an overall issue involving the alarming deterioration of the committee's oversight activities. The Appropriations Committee makes decisions on nearly a trillion dollars a year in federal spending, yet the diligence with which the committee monitors the use of those funds has declined steadily over the past decade, with the administrative problems of the Surveys and Investigations unit being only part of a much larger problem. In 2003, Lewis personally intervened to block a committee review of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans that was responsible for a great deal of the misinformation used by the administration to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Joseph Stehr, a retired FBI agent who had been a member of the team off and on since 1985, says he remains stunned by Lewis' action. "It reeks, it really does," he says. "It just amazes me that after 60 some years, that just with the swipe of a pencil the thing could all go away." Stehr says the team gave the committee a unique window into Defense programs. "Who is going to look into all of this? GAO? I don't think so. They're slow-pitch Wiffle ball, where we throw 90 miles an hour." Stehr and other staffers say Lewis and his fellow Republicans have no desire to exert any oversight on the Bush administration nor over the intelligence community; the staff has not been allowed to begin any investigations since 2003. More than 20 proposals for intelligence studies were circulated to the committee leadership by investigators, to no avail, says former FBI agent Peter Wyman. "There wasn't anybody down there who gave a hoot about intelligence spending," he says. Lewis also moved to impede the committee's investigation of the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. (Congressional Quarterly/TPM Muckraker, Congressional Quarterly/Think Progress, Congressional Quarterly)
October 19: Republican representative Peter Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, suspends a Democratic staff member pending an investigation into whether he leaked a high-level intelligence assessment to the news media. The suspension was requested by GOP representative Ray LaHood, who a day later admits that he has no proof whatsoever of any such leak, and that he asked for the suspension not for any real reasons, but merely for political revenge. "I'll tell you why I did it," LaHood tells a Fox News interviewer. "The reason I did it was because Jane Harman released the Duke Cunningham -- who sat on our Intelligence committee -- report." That report, which detailed the misconduct of Cunningham, who is now serving a jail term, was not classified. The interviewer asks, "So, it's payback?" LaHood responds, "There are some of us on the other side who can equally play politics, and I'm not afraid to do it." No evidence exists that the staffer leaked the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate to anyone from the press, and Harman says she is "appalled" by the suspension, which she says, correctly enough, is "without basis." LaHood says in his letter to Hoekstra, "I have no credible information to say any classified information was leaked from the committee's minority staff, but the implications of such would be dramatic. This may, in fact, be only coincidence, and simply 'look bad.' But coincidence, in this town, is rare." Hoekstra's spokesman, Jamal Ware, says, "Chairman Hoekstra considers security highly important, and the coincidence certainly merits a review." Harman demands that Hoekstra "immediately reinstate the staffer's access to classified information." Two congressional officials say that the NIE was marked "secret," not "top secret," so thousands of people had access to the document, and that the staffer, who requested access to the document three days before its existence was leaked to the New York Times, acted appropriately in requesting the document on behalf of a committee member.
After learning of LaHood's admission that the suspension was nothing more than political retaliation, and having it confirmed by Hoekstra, Harman fires off a letter to Hoesktra demanding the staffer's immediate reinstatement. In a statement about the letter, she says, "The Chairman's unilateral action is without basis and an abuse of his power to provide security accesses. There is no evidence to suggest that the professional staff member in question did anything wrong. In May, the NIE was provided to multiple congressional committees and made available to thousands of individuals throughout the intelligence and policymaking community. The document was posted on the internal Committee website and available to every Committee staff member days before the story was published. In securing the document and providing it to a Member of the Committee in the secure Committee offices, this staffer acted appropriately. The Chairman has acknowledged in a letter to me that his action was a direct response to my decision to release the 5-page unclassified Summary of the Cunningham Report by the Special Counsel. The Majority staff has also informed Minority staff that they do not believe the staffer in question actually leaked any classified information, but they felt 'compelled' to take this action because a Majority member of the Committee requested an investigation."
House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, knowing that the accusations against the staffer are false, still attempts to use the incident to whip up outrage against the Democrats and calls for further investigation: "I hope Democrats would never knowingly and illegally leak sensitive information just to score political points, and that's what an investigation would determine. It is absolutely necessary that the House Intel Committee conduct a thorough review of the illegal leak of intelligence to the New York Times in wartime. I support Chairman Hoekstra's decision to suspend a staffer who may have orchestrated the leak until all the facts are known." (Washington Post, Think Progress [link to video], Jane Harman/Think Progress, The Hill)
October 19: The Republican Party is refusing to cancel ads that say Ohio Democratic senate candidate Sherrod Brown has failed to pay his taxes for years, even though the state of Ohio says the ad's claim is a lie. Brown is running against Republican incumbent Mike DeWine, and leads DeWine by double digits in polls. According to Ohio tax records, Brown paid the tax bill in question years ago, soon after receiving a tax lien. However, the Republican National Committee continues to run a television ad claiming that Brown "didn't pay his unemployment taxes for 13 years." DeWine has piggybacked with his own ad claiming that Brown didn't pay "an outstanding tax bill for 12 years." The DeWine campaign says it will alter its ad, but will continue to claim that Brown "failed to pay a delinquent tax bill." The RNC says it will not change its own ad. The tax bill in question, for $1,776, was for unemployment taxes on the Brown campaign organization for the 1992 tax year. After the taxes weren't paid on time, the state filed a lien in Lorain County, where the campaign was based, on December 2, 1993. The Brown campaign then paid the bill within four months, according to the state. The lien should have been released then, and the state in fact issued a lien release on April 20, 1994. But because of a mixup, no one actually filed the necessary papers with the Lorain County recorder until 2005. Republicans looking for avenues of attack seized on the dates of the lien and the 2005 release. The RNC bought $700,000 worth of television time in Ohio, starting on Tuesday, for its ad. The DeWine campaign on Wednesday spent an undisclosed sum for its own ad on the theme. Brown's campaign has repeatedly demanded that the RNC and DeWine cancel their commercials. "The ads are false," says Marc Elias, a Washington-based attorney for Brown's Senate campaign. "They are not close to being true." RNC spokesman Aaron McLear says, in contradiction to Ohio's own records, that "Sherrod Brown failed to pay his unemployment taxes in 1992, and the Ohio Bureau of Employment Services filed a lien against him, which remained unpaid until June of 2005." Jon Allen, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services, the successor agency to the employment bureau, says the claims suggesting Brown didn't pay the tax bill for 12 or 13 years are false. His department researched the matter last year, when the Brown campaign asked about the lien. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
October 19: Nevada gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons, currently a US House member, says that the accusations of him assaulting a casino cocktail waitress on the night of October 13 are untrue. He says that while he was walking with her in a restaurant parking lot, she stumbled, and he merely grabbed her arm to help her stay upright. "She tripped," he told detectives the night of the incident. "I grabbed her to straighten her up. I said, 'Are you OK?' She walked away. I walked away. And I went into the, into the hotel, came up here and went to bed. And that's the end of the story." Waitress Chrissy Mazzeo told investigators she did not want to press charges against the Reno congressman "mainly because of who he is. 'Cause of who he is, and I just don't want to go up against something like that." Though Gibbons' Democratic opponent, Dina Titus, has declined to comment on the allegations, a political analyst says the incident could change the dynamics of the governor's race in the last stages of the campaign. "It's a distraction even if it's not true," creating damaging headlines and overshadowing other news about the race, says David Damore, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "If there's any truth to it, it brings his judgment into question in a very big way. It could be really bad for him." Damore says that for any candidate to have a drink with an unknown member of the opposite sex three weeks before an election was an error in judgment. "Maybe she was setting him up or whatever, but he made himself vulnerable," he said.
Mazzeo says that Gibbons and his colleague, Sig Rogich, invited her and her friend Pennie Puhek to join them for dinner at the McCormick & Schmick's restaurant, and that Gibbons flirted with her throughout the evening, put his hand on her thigh and played footsie with her, according to a police report. "He just, just started talking about how his, his marriage wasn't successful and how he had two children," Mazzeo told police. "He was married for 20 years and that, uh, marriage wasn't everything that it was cracked up to be, and then that's when he gave me his card." Gibbons told her she could campaign for him, she said. Mazzeo said she tried to change the subject and move away from Gibbons when he touched her. "He put his hand on my leg," she said. "And then I just scooted closer to Pennie." Mazzeo told police that when she moved away, Gibbons said, "I wish I could have that kind of affection from her." After Rogich suggested that he and Gibbons leave, Gibbons then said he was staying at the nearby Residence Inn by Marriott, and "we could basically crawl back to his hotel room," Mazzeo said, explaining to police that she was not sure whether Gibbons was asking her to go to his room. She said she remained at the table with Puhek for 15 or 20 minutes before walking outside, where she ran into Gibbons. "Are you looking for me?" she said he told her. She told him no, and he offered to help her find her truck, which was parked in the parking garage behind the restaurant. A witness told police he saw Gibbons walking toward the garage with Mazzeo following several feet behind him. Mazzeo told police they walked in silence to the garage, but when they got to the garage elevator, Gibbons grabbed her arms and pushed her against a wall. "I thought he was joking at first," she told police. "That's when he said, um, he, he said, 'You have two choices.'" Gibbons told her she could try to leave or do what he said, she told police. "Are you really, you know, rape me at this time?" Mazzeo said she told Gibbons. "That was the time, and I said, 'Are you serious?' I said, 'I, I just survived cancer for 11 years, and you're really going to do this right now?'" she told police. "And he said, 'Lucky you. You survived cancer.'"
Mazzeo said she broke away from Gibbons and ran, then made the first of three 911 calls over the incident at 10:23 pm. Police describe her as sounding and appearing frazzled, nervous, and somewhat intoxicated. She told the operation, mistakenly, that she was on a date with "Jim Gibson," a Democrat who lost the gubernatorial primary to Titus, though she later clarified her statement to identify Gibbons. During the call, Mazzeo mistakenly gives her location as outside a Starbucks, but then changes it to indicate that she is outside a La Quinta Inn next to the restaurant. She tells the operator that Gibbons "just assaulted me in the...(expletive) g*ddamn police...in the g*ddamn (expletive) parking lot." She called again a half hour later, first telling the operator that she was at the La Quinta, then quickly changed her location to a Starbucks bathroom. "Well, I never even went into the La Quinta, I was just running down the street," she said. She called 911 for a third time 22 minutes later, recounting the story she continues to tell investigators in a calmer and more coherent fashion. "He kept telling me I just (expletive) up, and then I started running," she said. "But I'm hoping that there are elevator cameras that show the assault." Cameras in the parking garage were not recording at the time. When asked if Gibbons had been under the influence of anything other than alcohol -- both Gibbons and Mazzeo had been drinking, she said -- she replied, "Oh, probably power. But I don't know." Police officers responding to the call noted scratches on her shoulder and back, but she did not explain how she got there.
On October 14, she told police that she did not want to press charges, saying that no one pressured her to change her mind, but she was a single mother with a 3-year-old daughter and worried the incident would become a "three-ring circus." Since then, she has generally refrained from speaking about the incident, and has directed press inquiries to her attorney. Las Vegas police Deputy Chief Greg McCurdy says police would not have filed criminal charges even if Mazzeo had pursued them because they found no evidence to support her story. Investigators would have referred the case to the district attorney's office for review. "We have her word. We have his," McCurdy says. "Somewhere is the truth."
Gibbons has a very different story from Mazzeo's. He denies flirting with her, calling their conversation "pleasant" and saying Mazzeo is "a wonderful young lady. ...I'm surprised that, uh, she would think that I would do something wrong. Uh, and I certainly if, if, you know, if there's an opportunity for me to apologize to her I'd be happy to do that. If she thought that would help. Uh, but, you know, I just thought we were all having a good time with casual conversation." He says he might have inadvertently bumped her with his leg under the table, but denies touching her in any other way. He says she put her hand on his arm several times. He says he offered to help her find her truck -- in a parking lot, not a parking garage -- because she was "tipsy. Uh, she didn't walk in a straight line. That's for sure. Cause she, you know, bump into ya when you're walking along and, you know, I didn't think anything of that. And just helping this lady, and that was all. Gosh I learned an important lesson, never to offer a helping hand to anybody ever again." At a press conference, Gibbons says, "As a nearly 30-year member of our military, I conducted myself as an officer and a gentleman, and my actions that night were consistent with that practice." Rogich supports Gibbons's story. But waitress Julie Vick says that everyone at the table had been drinking heavily and that the atmosphere was "flirty -- dirty jokes, etc." (Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Sun)
October 19: The Reverend Anthony Mercieca, a former priest in Lake Worth, Florida, says that newspaper accounts of him having sexual contact with the then-13-year old Mark Foley are "exaggerated," but acknowledges being naked with Foley in saunas. "We were friends and trusted each other as brothers and loved each other as brothers," he says by phone from his home on the Maltese island of Gozo. Asked if their relationship was sexual in nature, he says, "It wasn't." The Sarasota Herald-Tribune stands by its story, which quotes Mercieca as acknowledging that he had a two-year relationship with Foley in the 1960s that included massaging the boy in the nude. Herald-Tribune editor Mike Connelly says that the story is based on four separate conversations with Mercieca, and "accurately reports what the priest said." Mercieca had worked at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lake Worth in 1967, according to church records. Foley would have been 13 at the time. Merceica says that going into saunas naked with young boys is nothing unusual: "everybody does that." In the newspaper article, Mercieca described several encounters that he said Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate, including massaging Foley while the boy was naked, skinny-dipping together at a secluded lake in Lake Worth and being nude in the same room on overnight trips. He said there was one night when he was in a drug-induced stupor because of a nervous breakdown and he couldn't clearly remember what happened: "[M]aybe I did something that he didn't like." Foley "seems to have interpreted certain things as inappropriate. ...I don't know what I did to him. I wonder why 40 years later he brought this up?" But, referring to the page e-mail scandal, the priest says, "I don't think there was a connection with our friendship and this thing now." Because the statute of limitations covering sex crimes has long since expired, Mercieca cannot be charged with any crimes relating to his possible abuse of Foley. (ABC News)

October 20: Republican representative Jerry Weller says that he has informed the House Ethics Committee and the House Page Board that a former male page or intern may have been the subject of "inappropriate attention from another lawmaker," according to Weller's campaign attorney. Weller is not prepared to reveal either the name or the youth or of the lawmaker. Manager Steven Shearer says only that Weller is sure a former page or intern was "inappropriately invited to a social function by another congressman." The unconfirmed mention of Weller in the page inquiry has inspired intense speculation on Democratic-leaning Internet Web blogs about what role he might have played. Shearer accuses the congressman's opponents of leaking his name in connection with the page inquiry, and said it came from "national Democrats what want to put another seat in play for free." Weller's seat in Congress is not considered threatened.
Weller has his own issues. He has failed to report his purchase of three parcels of land in Nicaragua -- at tremendously discounted prices, no less -- to Congress on his financial disclosure forms. He did report the purchase of three other parcels. The combined worth of the unreported parcels is at least $500,000. He has since them sold the plots, and failed to report that income, estimated at $85,000 or above. And it seems Weller is seriously under-reporting the values of the three plots in Nicaragua he does admit to owning. He has reported the parcels' worth at between $200,000 and $450,000, when their actual value is closer to a million. Weller's plots are either beachfront or near the beach, making them prime for resort development. Local real estate agents and a government expert say that such property has sold for anywhere from $50 to $80 per square meter. Weller bought his properties for anywhere from 24 cents per square meter to $8.75 per square meter. Weller is married to a Guatemalan legislator, who also happens to be the daughter of Guatemala's former dictator, General Efrain Rios Montt. (My Web Times, Chicago Reader/TPM Muckraker)
October 20: The watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asks the Justice Department to investigate whether GOP congressman Curt Weldon violated the law by intimidating government personnel "in the national security field" who support his opponent, Joe Sestak. The request is sparked by a number of e-mails obtained by CREW. The first e-mail describes a "hit list" compiled of Weldon opponent's supporters. In addition, that e-mail notes the Weldon said something to the effect of "If they don't think there will be retribution before or after the election, they're kidding themselves." The second e-mail states that Weldon had his staff contact Navy personnel to get information on Sestak. CREW says, "The e-mails, which are provided below, detail a disturbing, and potentially unlawful, abuse of power." Executive director Melanie Sloan states, "Not only has Rep. Weldon abused his position to financially benefit his daughter, he has threatened to misuse his position to punish those who support his political opponent. Rep. Weldon needs to learn that no one, not even a powerful member of Congress is above the law." (CREW [includes reprints of e-mails])
October 20: The former bookkeeper for Ohio Republican operative Tom Noe says he was told to label $2.75 million in transfers from state funds to Noe's personal business as coin purchases, yet never saw any documentation to verify any coins were bought. In the first specific evidence yet of financial mismanagement with the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation rare-coin funds managed by Noe, bookkeeper Tom Peters says the transfers were never supported with evidence that Noe's personal business sold inventory to the state's two coin funds. The balance sheet for Vintage Coins and Collectibles, Noe's business, recorded the transfers as notes payable, meaning they were loans from the coin fund. But the balance sheet of the state-funded Capital Coin Fund recorded them as coin inventory. Peters says they should have been identified as notes receivable. "As a bookkeeper, you know that doesn't wash?" asks prosecutor Larry Kiroff. "Correct," Peters replies. Peters also acknowledges that Noe kept two sets of books, one showing no money in one of its coin inventory accounts, and the second showing over $2 million listed as coin inventory, an amount equal to the amount that had been transferred from the state coin fund to Noe's business. Noe's ledgers show that Vintage had transferred enough coin inventory back to the state coin funds to cover the $2 million, but Peters says no documents or receipts prove that any such transfer were actually made. Noe has pleaded not guilty to 44 felonies and is free on $500,000 bond. Prosecutors allege that he embezzled more than $2 million from the $50 million in coin funds he managed for the state. (Toledo Blade)
October 20: Beleagured Republican incumbent Curt Weldon, facing a tough challenge from Democratic opponent Joe Sestak, attacks Sestak's military service during a debate. Sestak retired from the Navy after 31 years of service with the rank of vice admiral, and served six tours of duty on naval vessels. Weldon chose not to join the military, and avoided service in Vietnam by seeking a teaching deferment. Weldon cites his service as a volunteer fireman, and after mentioning a situation where he had found himself stuck between an oil tanker and a refinery fire, asks, "Have you ever faced a similar situation, Joe, or are you always in the admiral's quarters, drinking out of your wine goblets and being waited on by your sailor servants?" Though no questions about the FBI investigation of Weldon's alleged influence-peddling are asked, Weldon complains about the media coverage, saying, "When the media has a liberal bias and attacks three of your five children, and you have no recourse except to accept their lies, there's something wrong with the system." He goes on to criticize Democratic mailings on the issue as "outrageous" and "un-American." Weldon is under investigation for setting up his daughter in a lobbying firm whose only contacts were with Russian and Serbian business partners of Weldon's. (Philadelphia Daily News, AP/New York Daily News)

October 21: Investigative journalist Greg Palast writes of the 2004 election debacle in New Mexico, and how citizen activists in that state are working to ensure that all cast ballots are fairly counted in 2006. In 2004, Palast writes, over 3 million ballots were considered "spoiled" and never counted. In Ohio, during the 2004 Presidential election, 153,237 ballots were simply thrown away -- more than the Bush "victory" margin, Palast reminds us. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush's triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. "The official number is bad enough -- 1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, according to the federal government's Elections Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for that under-reporting, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380." Palast asks, "Why doesn't your government tell you this?" Actually, it does, if you can find the numbers buried in a US Census Bureau announcement released in mid-2005 and buried in a footnote. "Spoilage, not the voters, picked our President for us," he writes. "Unfortunately, that's not all. In addition to the three million ballots uncounted due to technical 'glitches,' millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries. Palast calls the scare over electronic voting machines "the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The principal means of the election heist -- voiding ballots -- went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale next time."
Much of the material Palast presents in this article has already been covered in his book Armed Madhouse, and included in abbreviated form in the pages of this site, but a brief review of the various thefts and "exclusions" of 2004 is apropos. Almost 1,100,000 provisional ballots were rejected in 2004. Many Democrats who had their votes challenged were "allowed" to vote on provisional ballots, and those votes were too often tossed in the garbage. "Spoiled" ballots come when, among other "glitches," a tally mark is too light for a machine to read or a punch card is not punched completely through (the infamous "hanging chad"). Almost 1.4 million such votes were not counted in 2004. Over a half million absentee ballots were not counted in 2004, particularly in swing states, where, Palast writes, "absentee ballot shredding was pandemic." Hundreds of thousands of voters -- there is no way to know an accurate number -- were barred from voting in a variety of "voter purges," having their polling stations changed or eliminated in their districts, police interference, and other methods for discouraging voting. Palast writes, "No one can pretend to calculate a hard number for all votes lost this way any more than you can find every bullet fragment in a mutilated body. But it's a safe bet that the numbers reach into the hundreds of thousands of voters locked out of the voting booth."
In theory, vote spoilage, the failure to count provisional ballots, and even voter purges are non-partisan. "The machines can't tell if a hanging chad is Democratic or Republican," Palast notes correctly enough. A look at New Mexico sheds light on this topic. In Precinct 13 in Taos, early voting gave John Kerry 73 votes and George W. Bush three. On Election Day, Kerry got 216 votes, Bush got 25 -- and 40 voters made no choice at all, according to the machines. Taos's Precinct 13 is an exclusively Navajo area. It is typical of election results throughout Navajo precincts in New Mexico -- thousands of Native American voters seemingly couldn't make up their minds who to vote for. During early voting, they voted overwhelmingly for Kerry with little indecision, but on Election Day, thousands of Navajos voted for no presidential candidate at all, if you believe the machines. In nine precincts in McKinley County, which is almost 75% Navajo, nine out of ten voters failed to make a choice. Nationally, one out of 12 Native Americans "drove to the voting station, walked into the booth, said, 'Who cares?' and walked out without voting for president." Actually, Native Americans are keenly interested in politics, both on a national level and over local issues. The same thing affected New Mexico's Hispanic population -- like the Native Americans, an overwhelmingly Democratic demographic. High-majority Hispanic precincts recorded over 7% of their votes as casting no choice for president.
According to Dr. Philip Klinkner, the expert who ran the statisticss for the US Civil Rights Commission, if you're Hispanic, the chance your vote will not record on the machine was 500% higher than if you are white. For Natives, it's off the charts. In New Mexico, the Native American population is 9.5%; the Hispanic, 43%. In the small town of Espanola in Rio Arriba County, where entire precincts of Mexican-Americans registered few or no votes for president, no one Palast and his team met with, including the leaders of the voter registration drives, believes the story that hundreds of their friends and relatives went in to vote and, well, just didn't bother. Palast writes, "What if those voters weren't indecisive; what if they punched in a choice and it didn't record? Let's do the arithmetic. As minority voters cast 89 percent of the state's 21,084 blank ballots, that's 18,765 missing minority votes. Given the preferences of other voters in those pueblos and barrios, those 18,765 voters of color should have swamped Bush's 5,988 vote 'majority' with Kerry votes. But that would have required those votes be counted." But just try proving it. Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron not only blocked any attempts at recounts after the 2004 elections, but ordered that the voting machines be wiped clean, destroying any evidence of possible machine fraud. In 2006, New Mexico's Supreme Court ruled her machine-cleaning job illegal -- too late to change the outcome of the election, of course.
There may be a different story told in New Mexico in 2006. Citizens' advocacy group Voter Action sued the state of New Mexico in 2005 over its fraudulent machines and failure to count the vote. A public campaign to inform the population about New Mexico's broken election system got results: in February 2006, Governor Bill Richardson signed a model law requiring that all voting in the state take place on new paper ballot machines, with verifiable tabulating systems. Voter Action, successful in New Mexico, is now pursuing lawsuits in seven states to stop the Secretaries of State from purchasing electronic voting systems which have records of inaccuracy, security risks, and have been proven unreliable. Palast concludes, "In New Mexico we learned, once again, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. To protect your right to vote, you must know what is happening in your state -- before, during, and after Election Day -- and be willing to hold your leaders accountable." (Yes!/CommonDreams)
October 21: California Department of Justice officials raid the campaign headquarters of GOP congressional candidate Tan Nguyen, looking for evidence that Nguyen or members of his campaign were responsible for a letter that was mailed to thousands of Hispanic voters in his district threatening them with jail time if they showed up to vote on November 7. The officials left two hours later with boxes and plastic bags full of evidence. They then searched the home of one of Nguyen's staffers, taking a computer hard drive and a box of evidence. Nguyen's home in Santa Ana was also searched. Nguyen has acknowledged that someone in his campaign sent the letter, which wrongly stated that immigrants who cast a vote could be jailed. He has refused to take responsibility for the letter. So far Nguyen has resisted calls from his own party asking him to drop out of the race. The letter is likely a violation of both state and federal laws. The letter, written in Spanish, was mailed to an estimated 14,000 Democratic voters in Orange County. It warns, "You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that could result in jail time." In fact, immigrants who are adult naturalized citizens are eligible to vote. Secretary of State Bruce McPherson says his office will send letters to homes that received the mailing to clarify voters' rights. Nguyen's lawyer, David Wiechert, says, "This is a political firestorm of high-ranking Republicans and Democrats speculating about an investigation they have no knowledge of." Orange County Republican Chairman Scott Baugh says he has reason to believe Nguyen personally expedited the "obnoxious and reprehensible" letter. The party's executive committee voted unanimously to urge Nguyen to drop out. State Democratic Chairman Art Torres says, "It's a hate crime as far as we are concerned." California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says he plans to visit the county and meet with Hispanic leaders. Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant and a naturalized American citizen, has run on a strongly anti-immigration platform against incumbent Democrat Loretta Sanchez. "This letter reminds us of what we were running away from in Vietnam, where people can't vote the way they want," says Xuyen Dong, who heads the Orange County chapter of the Vietnamese Professional Society. (AP/Washington Post)
October 21: GOP gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio accuses his opponent, Democrat Ted Strickland, of being homosexual, and of vacationing in Italy with what Blackwell calls Strickland's "boy toy." Strickland, who has been married for nearly 20 years, hotly denies the charge. Blackwell's attacks are being mounted with at least the tacit approval of the Ohio GOP, who has piled on with old accusations of Strickland's past employement of a man convicted of exposing himself to children, and his 1999 vote not to condemn a psychological study that suggested adult-child sexual relations aren't always bad. Strickland says Blackwell's attacks are the acts of a "desperate candidate" who is "very close to losing [his] own integrity." He says at a different venue, "I would just like to say something to Mr. Blackwell tonight. I've won elections and I've lost elections. It doesn't feel good to lose an election, but I'll tell you there is something worse than losing an election. It's losing your own integrity in an attempt to win an election." Blackwell defends his attacks by saying that he is merely piggybacking on questions already raised by others. Currently Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State who oversaw the 2004 voter fraud that won the presidential election for Bush, is trailing Strickland by double digits in the polls. "This is not going to appeal to the average bread-and-butter voter in Ohio who is worried whether there's going to be jobs in the next 15 years for them and their kids," says Chris Duncan, chairman of the University of Dayton's political science department. "This is beneath Blackwell."
Blackwell's attempt to torpedo Strickland with old accusations is not bolstered by the facts; Strickland has long since shown that the staffer who was convicted of exposing himself to children had left his employment before Strickland or anyone else knew about the charges. And he notes that he did not approve of the House resolution condemning the 1999 study because, as a trained psychologist, he did not agree with a line in the resolution that stated sexually abused children can never have healthy adult relationships. The "boy toy" accusation comes from a Fox News talk show broadcast, where host Sean Hannity floated an unsubstantiated accusation centering around a trip to Italy by Strickland and members of his staff. Blackwell quickly e-mailed transcripts of the show to members of the media. After Hannity and local talk show host Bill Cunningham headline an October 19 rally for Blackwell in Cincinnati, Strickland campaign Keith Dailey says it appears that the talk-show hosts are colluding with Blackwell in a nationally televised smear. "It's sad that these are the depths that Mr. Blackwell and his friends have stooped to in a desperate attempt to boost a failing campaign," Dailey says. In July, the Ohio GOP fired coordinator Gary Lankford for e-mailing accusations surrounding Strickland's sexual orientation to supporters; Lankford subsequently apologized for his actions. (Toledo Blade, Columbus Dispatch)
October 21: Republican Ray Meier, running for a House seat against Democrat Michael Arcuri in upstate New York, is running an ad accusing Arcuri of making a phone call to a sex line and billing taxpayers for the call. While the ad is technically accurate, the implication it makes is completely false, and Republicans worry that the ad will backfire badly on Meier, The national GOP began running the ad on October 20, which shows Arcuri apparently leering at the silhouette of a dancing woman who says, "Hi, sexy. You've reached the live, one-on-one fantasy line." He supposedly dialed the service two years ago from a New York City hotel room and billed taxpayers for the princely sum of $1.25 for a one-minute call. Arcuri is the district attorney in Oneida County. Meier and the RNC hoped that the ad would dash Arcuri's hopes for the seat; the race is currently very close.
Unfortunately for Meier, the facts tell a different story. In reality, according to phone records, Arcuri or a staff member did indeed call the 800 number sex line. Within a minute, the call was terminated and the state Department of Criminal Justice Services was called. The two phone numbers have the same last seven digits -- only the area code exchange is different. It is patently obvious that the phone call was a misdial, and that Arcuri, or the staff member, intended to call the DCJS. Arcuri calls the ad "clearly libelous" and is threatening a lawsuit. At least seven television stations in Syracuse, Utica and Binghamton have refused to run the ad. The National Republican Congressional Committee is so far refusing to pull the ad. Spokesman Ed Patru insists the ad is "totally true." Arcuri says he has "'never seen such an unfair commercial. I have a 12-year-old daughter. She's going to have to go to school and hear other kids talk about this." (Editor and Publisher)
October 21: The ACLU asks the Department of Justice to monitor the elections in Chesterfield County, saying that the actions of county officials could intimidate voters. ACLU director Kent Willis cites a number of incidents over the past two years, including a new allegation that the registrar, Lawrence Haake, refused to issue an absentee ballot to a registered voter because the prospective voter would not give his Social Security number. The State Board of Elections confirms that Social Security numbers are not required for voting purposes. Haake, however, says he believes he is following the law. Willis says, "Chesterfield seems to be Virginia's No. 1 trouble spot for irregular voting procedures." He cites Election Day practices two years ago that the ACLU said disproportionately affected minority voters, such as the registrar asking for armed guards at the polling places. Haake said then that because of heavy voting, he just wanted to maintain order. Willis also said that in the same presidential election, county election officials misinformed voters that they must show identification to vote. If voters don't have identification, they are allowed to cast a provisional ballot after signing an affidavit that they are who they say they are. Last year Haake refused to count provisional ballots submitted by people who had registered on time but whose applications were not processed in a timely manner. Haake says he disagrees with the State Board of Election's interpretation of the law on Social Security numbers. "The state board deals in abstract concepts, and we deal in realities," he says. (Richmond Times-Dispatch)
October 21: Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee confronts his GOP opponent, ex-Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker, during a Corker news conference, and demands an explanation of why Corker has attempted to smear Ford by making unfounded allegations that Ford's family is an example of Democratic "machine politics." Ford's father, Harold Ford Sr., is a former US representative, and other members of his family are active in state and local politics. Corker has said that he would not make Ford's family an issue in the race, but has since then made numerous allegations, including that the elder Ford, now a government lobbyist, had improperly influenced his son, also a US representative. Ford says that no one in his family has ever lobbied him on congressional issues and that he would refuse them if they did. Ford approaches Corker in the parking lot either before or after the conference, and says he wishes to debate Corker over the Iraq war. Corker retorts that he has questions about Ford's ethics, and calls Ford's visit to the news conference "a true sign of desperation." Ford replies that he could never find Corker to challenge him on Iraq, Corker's smears on Ford's family, or anything else. (CBS News)

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THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

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