McClatchy asks, “Where is the Republican Attack Machine this campaign?”

Posted on June 29, 2008 by murrayw

Of course, there is this sentence buried in this really exceptional story (the best that has appeared on this subject anywhere):

Of course, they still could jump in at any time, thanks to their ability to raise cash fast with a few huge checks.

Also interesting is the fact that this election cycle’s would be Swift Boaters are sitting it out because they are afraid of losing their corporate clients. Who would have thought that the political operatives who distort and twist and lie would put profit ahead of their political pursuits?

Here is a long excerpt from the story:

WASHINGTON — Democrats and the media have used the term so much that it’s almost an article of faith. But the so-called “Republican attack machine” waiting with piles of unregulated cash to chew up Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is anything but.

Obama cited the threat of unregulated attack groups — called “527s” because they’re authorized to raise unlimited cash under that section of the Internal Revenue Service code — to justify dropping his pledge to take public financing — along with its spending limits — for the general election campaign.

Yet there’s no 2008 equivalent to the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which spent $22 million attacking Democrat John Kerry. Prominent groups and donors that played key roles in independent conservative 527 groups four years ago say they’re sitting out this election. And while they’ve raised more than they did at this point four years ago, the independent pro-Republican groups still lag more than $50 million behind pro-Democratic groups.

Why? Analysts and Republican insiders point to several reasons:

_ Contributors are nervous about increased federal regulation.

_ Those who operate such groups fear a backlash, including from their better-paying corporate clients, who may not want to be associated with such attacks.

_ Few are eager to take such risks to help John McCain, who’s bashed such efforts in the past and could again.

Of course, they still could jump in at any time, thanks to their ability to raise cash fast with a few huge checks.

“These groups can pop up overnight because they can take unlimited contributions from almost anybody,” said Massie Ritsch, the communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that analyzes money in politics.

“Just because they’re not doing anything now doesn’t mean they won’t jump out of the shadows.”

At this stage four years ago, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had been up and running for more than a month, ripping Kerry’s Vietnam record. It started airing its big ads that August.

Another pro-Republican group, Progress for America, aired its first ad criticizing Kerry’s national-security record and credentials four years ago this week, the first $1 million salvo of what would be a $35 million barrage in key states.

Today, there are no such groups on the Republican side.

DCI Group, a public affairs firm that ran Progress for America in 2004, said this week that it won’t do any political work this campaign and instead will focus entirely on clients including corporations, trade associations and nonprofits.

“We are not participating in 527 activities in the presidential election,” DCI spokesman Geoff Basye said.

Freedom’s Watch, another conservative group, so far has decided to skip the presidential campaign to focus on congressional contests. “We have no plans to get involved,” spokesman Ed Patru said.

Earlier: TPM Election Central: “John Kerry: Obama’s Public Financing Decision Will Enable Him to Avoid My Fate.”

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New Seymour Hersh article on covert operations against Iran

Posted on June 29, 2008 by murrayw

seymour_hersh22.jpgA new Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker on an escalation of covert Bush administration’s covert operations in Iran. Some excerpts:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees…

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and… Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements…

Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary…

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.

The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”

Additional analysis from Laura Rozen.

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Meet Robert Watson, chair of the McCain campaign in Rhode Island

Posted on June 29, 2008 by murrayw

Robert Watson is both the minority leader of the Rhode Island House, and the chief chair of John McCain’s presidential campaign in Rhode Island.

He is also, according to this week’s Boston Phoenix (see post below), one of those deserving by the alt weekly of one of their annual award winners for muzzling free speech in New England:

The First Amendment not only protects the right to express oneself freely; it protects the right to do so anonymously, as well.

“Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse,” the US Supreme Court ruled in 1995. “Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views,” and “protect[s] individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.”

Sadly, the trend in recent years has been to regulate political speech. One such measure is a Rhode Island law requiring that political pamphlets and negative newspaper ads identify the person or persons responsible for producing them. The law is an outrage.

But not to Robert Watson, an East Greenwich Republican who is minority leader of the Rhode Island House. When a proposal was filed to scrap the mandatory-disclosure law, Watson flipped out, going so far as to smear anonymous critics as “terrorists.”

Referring to a difficult re-election battle he had won several years earlier, Watson said on the floor of the House, “At least you knew who was firing those missiles. At least you knew who was building those bombs and lobbing them into your lap. Mr. Speaker, we’re going to have a bunch of anonymous terrorists playing in our political sandbox, and I’m not sure I agree with that.”

Watson got his way, as the measure was sent to the graveyard of a legislative committee, with politicians saying the 1995 Supreme Court ruling somehow didn’t pertain to Rhode Island.

Watson, by the way, is the state chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign. McCain is the godfather of a campaign-finance-reform law, much praised by liberals and reformers, that, among other things, bans explicitly political ads by independent groups in the final weeks before an election.

Read the entire thing here.

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Free Speech at risk in lefty, McGovernite Mass.?

Posted on June 29, 2008 by murrayw

While many alt weeklies around the country have cutting back staff and sliding towards irrelevance even before, the Boston Phoenix, bucks the trend.  Their cover this week is their 11th annual “Muzzle awards”, exposing New England’s worst offenders when it comes to attacking the First Amendment.   If this type of stuff goes on in and around Mass., the only state in the union that voted against Nixon and for McGovern in 1972, and home of lefty, elitist universities, what is going on in the rest of the country?  Here’s Dan Kennedy’s cover story:

Freedom of expression may be guaranteed by the Constitution.  But it’s an idea we have to fight for every day.

The great civil libertarian Nat Hentoff once said that our sex drive pales in comparison with out urge to censor.  It’s an urge that is played out in places high and low, encompassing both the serious and the absurd.  Military veterans protesting the war are arrested in Boston and charged with disturbing the peace.  An anti-bortion activist in Maine borrows sex-education books from public libraries and refuses to return them.  A legislative leader in Rhode Island– the head of John McCain’s presidential campaign in that state– compares anonymous critics to `terrorists,’ and helps kill a proposal aimed at guaranteeing their First Amendment rights.

The whole story can be read here.

This blog sends a shout-out to Priscilla, Matt, and Pete from Somerville, Mass.  We will pander to try and get a few more readers.  When we blog from Scranton, we talk about shooting up the backyard and woking in the ol’ lace factory, and when we blog from San Francisco, we write about how people from Scranton cling to their guns and churches….

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LAT on White House’s faith based initiative and alleged abuses to implement it

Posted on June 27, 2008 by murrayw

 Johanna Newman at her Los Angeles Times White House blog, “Faith or Cronyism in the White House Faith-Based Initiative?” :

The White House faith-based initiative is in the news again. The program has been controversial from the start — derided by critics for requiring the needy to accept religion along with acts of charity, and avoided by some religious groups who feared they’d lose their church/state independence from government.

Now, amid new allegations that contracts were awarded to the politically connected, the program is getting the presidential spotlight.

At a national conference Thursday, Bush plans to say that the program has helped millions. “It does not matter if there is a crescent on your group’s wall, a rabbi on your group’s board or Chirst in your group’s name,” Bush will say, according to advance excerpts released today by the White House. “If your organization puts medicine in people’s hands, food in people’s mouths or a roof over people’s heads, then you are succeeding, and the government should support your work.”

ABC News reported Tuesday that the Justice Department gave a $1.2 million grant jointly to a California evangelical youth charity called Victory Outreach and a consulting firm run by a Lisa Trevino Cummins, who headed Hispanic outreach efforts for the White House faith-based office featured in the photo above. The allegation, first brought by career employees at the Justice Department, is being investigated by the DOJ’s Inspector General.

“The incident of cronyism removes all doubts that the real mission of the faith-based initiative is to aid the religious right,” said Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, the president of Interfaith Alliance, an advocacy group with 185,00 members of 75 different faiths. “Congress needs to exercise greater oversight on this program so that we can avoid scandals like this in the future.” Gaddy is not the first to charge foul. Former White House staffer David Kuo charged that after he left the administration federal funds were funneled to evangelical Christian charities without congressional approval.

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David Addington’s testimony on the Unitary Theory of the Presidency: It’s good to clear all of this up!

Posted on June 27, 2008 by murrayw

From a Washington Post account of Addington’s testimony:

When John Conyers (D-Mich.) inquired about Addington’s pet legal concept, a “unitary executive theory” that confers extreme powers on the president, Addington dished out disdain.

“I frankly don’t know what you mean by unitary theory,” Addington replied.

“Have you ever heard of that theory before?”

“I see it in the newspapers all the time,” Addington replied.

“Do you support it?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

The usually mild Conyers was angry. “You’re telling me you don’t know what the unitary theory means?”

“I don’t know what you mean by it,” Addington answered.

“Do you know what you mean by it?”

“I know exactly what I mean by it.”

More from Marty Lederman at Balkinization on John Yoo’s testimony.

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DOJ Official Who Took the Fifth Fired

Posted on June 25, 2008 by murrayw

Last week, when the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform held a hearing into the politicization of the Department of Justice’s quarter of a billion dollar grant program, one DOJ official, Michelle DeKonty, refused to testify, citing her Fifth amendment rights. Today, she was fired:

A Department of Justice official was fired yesterday after refusing to testify at a Congressional hearing regarding whether or not her office awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in grants based on political favoritism and personal connections.

Michele DeKonty, Chief of Staff for the DOJ’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Administrator, cited the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and declined to appear at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing last week.

DeKonty’s departure also comes on the heels of a Justice Department probe into alleged irregular contracting practices within its own ranks according to a federal law enforcement official close to the investigation.

Questions about the agency’s awarding of grants were raised earlier this month by ABC News on Nightline. (click here to watch the report)

OJJDP staff members were notified of DeKonty’s departure this morning in an email from the office’s administrator, J. Robert Flores, who is also under investigation by the DOJ’s Inspector General. That investigation probes Flores’ hiring of a Honduran Colonel as a contractor on faith-based issues and his alleged golfing during conferences on taxpayer-funded business trips, according to a staff member who was contacted by the OIG.

In the email Flores said, “Over the past 2 years I have had the benefit of working with a talented and professional Chief of Staff in Michele DeKonty. Yesterday, ended her tenure with our Office.”

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Former White House faith-base official received grant with help from former colleagues

Posted on June 24, 2008 by murrayw

A new story posted today on ABCNews.com– that I wrote and reported with Anna Schecter– about a grant awarded to a former White House official in part thanks to the role some of her former colleagues in the Bush administration played in pressing her case.

A former top official in the White House’s faith-based office was awarded a lucrative Department of Justice grant under pressure from two senior Bush administration appointees, according to current and former DOJ staff members and a review of internal DOJ documents and emails.

The $1.2 million grant was jointly awarded to a consulting firm run by Lisa Trevino Cummins who previously headed Hispanic outreach efforts for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and a California evangelical group, Victory Outreach.

The grant was awarded over the strong objections of career DOJ staff who did not believe that Victory Outreach was qualified for the grant and that too great an amount of the funds was going to Cummins’ consulting company instead of being spent on services for children.

Cummins’ company, Urban Strategies LLC, was slated to get one third of the money for helping the self-described “evangelizing” Victory Outreach use the rest of the funds.

On its website, Victory Outreach describes itself as a “church-oriented Christian ministry called to the task of evangelizing and disciplining the hurting people of the world, with the message of hope and plan of Jesus Christ.”

The grant is now central to a Justice Department probe into alleged irregular contracting practices within its own ranks, according to a federal law enforcement official close to the investigation.

The money was awarded by J. Robert Flores, the Administrator of the DOJ’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) who is under investigation by the DOJ’s Inspector General after current and former employees said he awarded grants to programs with the right political and ideological connections. OJJDP grants are intended to address juvenile delinquency prevention and/or the juvenile justice system.

Questions about Flores’ awarding of grants were raised earlier this month by ABC News on Nightline.

Cummins’ application for the grant should have immediately “raised red flags,” according to a senior Justice Department official. The official said that most of the grant money should be going to services, but that “in this case, you have a third of the money up front going to a consulting company,” the official said.

Furthermore, Cummins’ said in the application that she planned to have one of her senior employees oversee Victory Outreach’s use of the federal funds, even though that employee, Kelly Cowles, had mismanaged funds according to Ohio state investigators.

You can read the story in its entirety here.

Update: Just as our story was being posted, the Justice Department’s Inspector General released a report saying that former senior Justice Department officials illegally used “political and ideological” criteria in deciding which young lawyers would be accepted into DOJ’s elite intern program.

The report asserts that “many qualified candidates” were rejected solely because of their political beliefs. Such practices, the report concluded,“constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”

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Memo to Bob Woodward: Disclose your speaking fees.

Posted on June 22, 2008 by murrayw

Deborah Howell, the ombudsman at the Washington Post, weighed in this morning about Bob Woodward’s and David Brooder’s extracurricular activities as buckakers– speaking to corporate and political groups with an interest in their work, without disclosing details of the fees they received for those those speaking engagements not only to their readers, but even to their own editors.

During her tenure as ombudsman– many in the Post’s own newsroom– say that she has transformed the ombudsman’s position at the paper into one where she acts more like a reader representative, spokesperson, or even public relations spokesperson for the Post. Her predecessor, Michael Getler, radically transformed the role of ombudsman– criticizing, questioning, even playing investigative reporter at times. The contrast between what the two of them have written, and the role they perceive an ombudsman to play, is striking.

But here is some of what Howell had to write this morning:

The propriety of David Broder and Bob Woodward taking fees or having expenses paid for speeches to special-interest groups was raised recently by Ken Silverstein, Washington editor of Harper’s magazine, in his Washington Babylon blog. Silverstein found the fees unseemly and asked whether editors had approved them.

The Post Stylebook’s ethics and standards section says only: “We freelance for no one and accept no speaking engagements without permission from department heads.” Broder and Woodward did not check with editors on the appearances Silverstein mentioned.

Free speeches are no problem unless they create the appearance of an endorsement, said Executive Editor Len Downie. The Post has its own community speakers bureau, which pays staffers $100 a speech. As a rule, journalists are not to take fees or awards from government agencies, partisan groups or special-interest groups that focus mainly on lobbying. Speaking to educational or nonprofit groups for fees may be approved; whether to allow expenses to be paid is decided case by case. Downie unearthed a 1995 memo outlining the rules on speeches, but it is not widely known about in the newsroom.

Silverstein said an Internet search showed that Broder made a number of speeches to business groups, including the Western Conference of Prepaid Medical Service Plans, a group of nonprofit health plans; the National Association of Manufacturers, which met at a Florida resort; a Northern Virginia Association of Realtors fundraiser; and the American Council for Capital Formation, a nonprofit group promoting smaller government and lower taxes. Broder said he attended an ACCF dinner but did not give a speech and that he spoke free to the NAM and the health-care group. Silverstein said Broder also spoke to the Gartner Healthcare Summit in 2007. He was advertised as a speaker on an Internet site, but Broder said he canceled the engagement.

Broder said the groups paid his expenses. He received two speech fees — about $7,000 from the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, and, in 2006, he accepted $12,000 from the Minnesota League of Cities. Mary Beth Coya, the Realtors’ senior vice president for public and governmental affairs, said the event was not a fundraiser but was attended by elected officials “to promote our government affairs programs.”

Broder and his wife, Ann, also took free passage on the 2007 Seabourn Cruise Line‘s 13-night “Rio and the Amazon” cruise in exchange for three speeches about presidents he has covered.

Broder said he adheres to “the newspaper’s strict rules on outside activities” and “additional constraints of my own. I have never spoken to partisan gatherings in any role other than a journalist nor to an advocacy group that lobbies Congress or the federal government. Virtually all of the speeches I have made have been to college or civic audiences.”

The NAM, the ACCF and the national parents of the Minnesota group and Northern Virginia Realtors do lobby Congress. Broder later said he broke the rules on those speeches. He also said he had cleared his speeches with Milton Coleman, deputy managing editor, or Tom Wilkinson, an assistant managing editor, but neither remembered him mentioning them. Wilkinson said Broder had cleared speeches in the past. Editors should have been consulted on all of the speeches as well as the cruise.

Broder for what it is worth was at least apologetic and remorseful. He told Howell: “I am embarrassed by these mistakes and the embarrassment it has caused the paper,” Broder said.

And Woodward? Was he remorseful that he put his colleagues and his newspaper in an embarrassing position?

Continue reading →

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House hearing on DOJ contracting: One witness testifies; another takes the Fifth.

Posted on June 19, 2008 by murrayw

floresdummy.jpg

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform this morning held a hearing on alleged favoritism in the awarding of grants by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). While Robert Flores testified at length, his chief of staff, Michelle Dekonty, informed the committee through counsel that she was invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination.

An account of the hearing by ABC News.com can be found here. Flores’ prepared statement in defense of himself can be found here, as well as a number of documents relevant to the congressional inquiry. The most important document posted on the committee’s website however, is a long investigative staff memo. For those not as interested in this issue as me, I promise my blog will move on to other subjects soon– but this is important too!

Update: The Winona Daily News weighs in. By way of explanation about their interest, Winona State lost out on a grant despite having the foruth higher rating of 104 gant applicants. The Congressman from the district which represents Winona Sate, Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) had some things he wanted to get off his chest at the hearing today:

Winona State University and one of its most recognized programs was at the forefront of a Congressional hearing Thursday:

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing was the culmination of a U.S. House of Representatives investigation focused on J. Robert Flores, a U.S. Department of Justice administrator, accused of passing over highly ranked grant applicants — including WSU-affiliated National Child Protection Training Center — for less-qualified applicants in a competitive grant program managed by his department.

The investigation was sparked by WSU officials, who… expressed their concern to Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn. Walz then contacted Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the committee’s chairman, who initiated the investigation into the actions by Flores’ office.

Lawmakers have accused Flores of awarding money to groups who share his political philosophies or whose officials have personal ties to him.

“We were devastated when we found out we didn’t get the funding,” said James Schmidt, WSU’s vice president for university advancement. “The department spelled out the criteria, they did the analysis, we came up with our proposal, and then to be bypassed, it was just devastating.”

The NCPTC, founded in 2003 and headed by WSU graduate Victor Vieth, provides training to law enforcement and child protection professionals who handle child abuse cases. Often on financial life-support since its inception, the NCPTC had relied on earmarks from Congress as it developed a child-advocacy studies curriculum in universities throughout the country.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Earlier articles by Murray Waas on abuses in the Justice Department’s juvenile justice grant programs:

Anna Schecter and Murray Waas, “DOJ Official Breached Ethics Rules Playing Golf,” ABC News.com,  May 1, 2009.

Anna Schecter and Murray Waas, “DOJ Official Fired in Wake of ABC News Investigation,” ABC News.com, June 25, 2008.

Murray Waas and Anna Schecter, “Exclusive: White House Pushed Grant for Former Staffer,” ABC News.com, June 24, 2008.

Anna Schecter and Brian Ross and Murray Waas, “$500,000 Round of Golf? Congress Probes Official,” ABC News.com, June 19, 2008.

Murray Waas, “Questions Surround Government Funded Abstinence Program,” ABC News.com, June 12, 2008.

Murray S. Waas, “Judge’s Group Director Pays DOJ Settlement,” ABC News.com, April 29, 2008.

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