AlterNet.org: Tea Party and the Right

Obama Shows He's Serious About Fixing Our Screwed-Up Election System

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:07:00 -0700

The President's election reform panel is filled with good people; let's hope Congress listens to them.

President Obama’s newly appointed election reform commission is filled with election officials who have a record of supporting progressive election reforms—even though some of them are known for working in red states under conservative Republicans.

Whether Congress listens to this panel’s suggestions is another matter. Half of the 10-member panel are election state and local officials who have participated in numerous retreats sponsored by the Pew Center on the States where they have endorsed voter registration modernization that would be a vast improvement over what’s widely in practice in election administration today. Regardless of political party, they generally agreed that voter registration—which is the gateway to the process—could be made more accurate, cost-effective and efficient. As important, they all don’t think very highly of politicizing the voting process. Their fundamental commitment is making sure eligible voters can cast ballots.

The backbone of their recommendations at Pew in 2010 was creating a system where states use a mix of government databases to draw up lists of eligible voters. Then states are left to decide how they will contact those voters and what people must do to activate their registrations before casting a ballot. This centrist compromise doesn’t entirely please progressives, who want states to universally register everyone. And it doesn’t please conservatives either, who want to make voter registration and the process of voting more difficult, in order to maintain GOP political power in states with increasingly diverse populations.

But, if Obama’s blue ribbon committee draws on the thinking that’s been done by these same people, what’s likely to emerge is a system where the government draws up eligible voter lists, attempts to contact new voters and people who move, and has better voter information databases and tracking ability on Election Day to ensure that anyone who wants to vote has an easier time crossing the finish line and casting a ballot. One impact of this more modernized approach—which would appeal to Republicans—is that a larger state role in enrolling voters would lessen the need for registration drives that have been attacked as unprofessional, such as by ACORN in 2008. However, the fact that states might rely on government data to identify people as eligible voters also would put GOP "voter integrity groups" out of business, because the government would be using data gathered under penalty of perjury.

Obama’s panel is headed by two of the country’s top election lawyers—Democrat Bob Bauer and Republican Benjamin Ginsberg—who are known for using any tactic to win and then saying there’s nothing wrong with the process because their side won. The panel also has people whose professional lives are in corporate America and not in running elections. Both these lawyers and executives are likely to defer to the real experts—people who have run elections for years.

In that latter category is former Tennessee Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson; Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas), Registrar Larry Lomax; former Texas Director of Elections Ann McGeehan; Maricopa County, Arizona, (Phoenix) longtime election official Tammy Patrick, and Michigan Director of Elections Christopher Thomas. These officials know exactly what does and doesn't work in elections. They may get mixed reveiws from some progressive groups, but many of them have improved voting in their state, though that hasn't gotten press attention.

For example, in Michigan, under a Republican Secretary of State, Christopher Thomas instituted an Election Day affidavit that a person who said she had registered—but wasn’t on the polling place list—could sign, under penalty of perjury, to get a ballot and vote. A handful of states have this option, which gives the benefit of the doubt to voters.

Whatever this panel may suggest could easily be disregarded by Congress, especially because they are likely to take a less confrontational tone than many Republicans who have talked up so-called voter fraud might prefer. However, it seems inexorable that advances in data management will be applied to the voting process, as they are everywhere else in society. And with that comes the promise of making voting more accurate, cost-effective and efficient—and easier and more inclusive. That is, if Congress wants to make voting that way.

(Full disclosure: In 2009-2010 the author worked with Pew and many of these state and local election directors to write a report on voter registration modernization in which half these officials took part.)

Here's What a Real Political Cover-up Looks Like -- Orchestrated by the Right-Wingers Who Know It Best

Robert Parry, Consortium News — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:35:00 -0700

Many lessons can be drawn from the failed October Surprise investigation of two decades ago.

Exclusive:Republicans won’t let go of their conspiracy theory about some nefarious “cover-up” in “talking points” for Ambassador Susan Rice’s TV interviews on the Benghazi attack. But they should at least have better skills for detecting a real cover-up, since they’ve had direct experience, as Robert Parry documents.

There have been nine public hearings and countless hours of commentary about the so-called Benghazi “cover-up” – really some bureaucratic back-and-forth about “talking points” for a second-tier official’s appearance on TV. But none of the outraged members of Congress or the news media seems to have any idea what a real cover-up looks like.

In 2011, I gained access to files at the George H.W. Bush library in College Station, Texas, showing how Bush’s White House reacted to allegations in 1991 that he had joined in an operation in 1980 to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

What those files revealed was how to run a cover-up! Its framework was set on Nov. 6, 1991, by White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, who explained to an inter-agency strategy session how to contain and frustrate a congressional investigation into the so-called October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to insure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.

Gray’s strategy session followed by two days the White House receiving evidence from the State Department that a key fact in the October Surprise allegations had been verified. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign director, William Casey, indeed had traveled on a mysterious trip to Madrid, just as one of the central witnesses had claimed.

The confirmation was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson, who said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” Associate White House counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. Beach noted Williamson’s information in a “memorandum for record” dated Nov. 4, 1991.

Two days later, on Nov. 6, Gray summoned his subordinates to a meeting that laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. Up to that point, Iran-Contra had focused on illicit arms-for-hostage sales to Iran that President Reagan authorized in 1985-86.

As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it, the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.” To achieve that result, the Republicans coordinated the counter-offensive through Gray’s office under the supervision of associate counsel Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

The Stakes

Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns – and be of special interest to the President,” Gray declared, according to minutes. [Emphasis in original.]

Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings.

“Alleged facts have to do with 1979-80 – no apparent reason for jurisdiction/subpoena power to extend beyond,”the document said. “There is no sunset provision – this could drag on like Walsh!” – a reference to Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

However, the key to understanding the October Surprise case was that it appeared to be a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal, part of the same narrative. The story started with the 1980 crisis over 52 American hostages held in Iran, continuing through their release immediately after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, then followed by mysterious U.S. government approval of secret arms shipments to Iran via Israel in 1981, and ultimately morphing into the Iran-Contra Affair of more arms-for-hostage deals with Iran until that scandal exploded in 1986.

The documents, which I obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that Reagan-Bush loyalists were determined to thwart any sustained investigation that might link the two scandals. The GOP counterattack included:

–Delaying the production of documents;

–Having a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena;

–Neutralizing an aggressive Democratic investigator;

–Pressuring a Republican senator to become more obstructive;

–Tightly restricting access to classified information;

–Narrowing the inquiry as it applied to alleged Reagan-Bush wrongdoing while simultaneously widening the probe to include Carter’s efforts to free the hostages;

–Mounting a public relations campaign attacking the investigation’s costs; and

–Encouraging friendly journalists to denounce the story.

Highly Effective

Ultimately, the GOP cover-up strategy proved highly effective, as Democrats grew timid and neoconservative journalists – then emerging as a powerful force in the Washington media – took the lead in decrying the October Surprise allegations as a “myth.”

The Republicans benefited, too, from a Washington press corps, which had grown weary of the complex Iran-Contra scandal. Careerist reporters in the mainstream press had learned that the route to advancement lay more in “debunking” such complicated national security scandals than in pursuing them.

It would take nearly two decades for the October Surprise cover-up to crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed, that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored, and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

In the near term, however, Republicans succeeded in their well-organized cover-up. They were aided immensely by Newsweek and The New Republic, which published matching stories on their covers in mid-November 1991 claiming to have debunked the October Surprise allegations by proving that Casey could not have made the trip to Madrid in 1980.

Though Bush’s White House already had the State Department’s information contradicting the smug self-certainty of the two magazines, the administration made no effort to correct the record. Yet, even without Beach’s memorandum, there was solid evidence at the time disproving the Newsweek/New Republic debunking articles.

Both magazines had sloppily misread attendance records at a London historical conference that Casey had attended on July 28, 1980, the time frame when Iranian businessman (and CIA agent) Jamshid Hashemi had placed Casey in Madrid for a secret meeting with Iranian emissary Mehdi Karrubi.

The two magazines insisted that the attendance records showed Casey in London for a morning session of the conference, thus negating the possibility that he could have made a side trip to Madrid. However, the magazines had failed to do the necessary follow-up interviews, which would have revealed that Casey was not at the morning session on July 28. He didn’t arrive until that afternoon, leaving the “window” open for Hashemi’s account.

At PBS “Frontline,” where I was involved in the October Surprise investigation, we talked to Americans and others who had participated in the London conference. Most significantly, we interviewed historian Robert Dallek who gave that morning’s presentation to a small gathering of attendees sitting in a conference room at the British Imperial War Museum.

Dallek said he had been excited to learn that Casey, who was running Reagan’s presidential campaign, would be there. So, Dallek looked for Casey, only to be disappointed that Casey was a no-show. Other Americans also recalled Casey arriving later and the records actually indicate Casey showing up for the afternoon session.

In other words, the high-profile Newsweek-New Republic debunking of the October Surprise story had itself been debunked. However, typical of the arrogance of those publications – and our inability to draw attention to their major screw-up – the magazines never acknowledged their gross error.

Worse Than Sloppiness

I later learned that the journalistic malfeasance at Newsweek was even worse than sloppiness. Journalist Craig Unger, who had been hired by Newsweek to work on the October Surprise story, told me that he had spotted the misreading of the attendance records before Newsweek published its article and alerted the investigative team, which was personally headed by executive editor Maynard Parker.

“They told me, essentially, to fuck off,” Unger said.

During my years at Newsweek, from 1987-90, Parker had been my chief nemesis. He was considered close to prominent neocons, including Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams, and to Establishment Republicans, such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Parker also was a member of banker David Rockefeller’s Council on Foreign Relations — and viewed the Iran-Contra scandal as something best shut down quickly.

Jumping to a false conclusion that would protect his influential friends would fit perfectly with what I knew of Parker. [To this day, neither Newsweek nor The New Republic has published a correction for their errors, despite the historical damage done.]

The false articles in Newsweek and The New Republic gave the White House cover-up a key advantage: Washington’s conventional wisdom crowd now assumed that the October Surprise allegations were bogus. All that was necessary was to make sure no conclusive evidence to the contrary reached the congressional investigation.

Coordination was crucial. For instance, on May 14, 1992, a CIA official ran proposed language past associate White House counsel Janet Rehnquist from then-CIA Director Robert Gates regarding the agency’s level of cooperation with Congress. By that point, the CIA, under Gates, was already months into a pattern of foot-dragging on congressional document requests.

Bush had put Gates, who was also implicated in the October Surprise case, at the CIA’s helm in fall 1991, meaning that Gates was well-positioned to stymie congressional requests for sensitive information about secret initiatives involving Bush, Gates and Donald Gregg, another CIA veteran who was linked to the scandal.

The records at the Bush library revealed that Gates and Gregg, indeed, were targets of the congressional October Surprise probe. On May 26, 1992, Rep. Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Task Force, wrote to the CIA asking for records regarding the whereabouts of Gregg and Gates from Jan. 1, 1980, through Jan. 31, 1981, including travel plans and leaves of absence.

Withholding Documents

The persistent document-production delays finally drew a complaint from Lawrence Barcella, chief counsel to the House Task Force who wrote to the CIA on June 9, 1992, that the agency had not been responsive to three requests on Sept. 20, 1991; April 20, 1992; and May 26, 1992.

Gregg and Gates also were implicated in the broader the Iran-Contra scandal. Both were suspected of lying about their knowledge of secret sales of military hardware to Iran and clandestine delivery of weapons to Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

A ex-CIA director himself, Bush also had been caught lying in the Iran-Contra scandal when he insisted that a plane shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 while dropping weapons to the Contras had no connection to the U.S. government (when the weapons delivery had been organized by operatives close to Bush’s vice presidential office where Gregg served as national security adviser).

And, Bush falsely claimed that he was out of the “loop” on Iran-Contra decisions when later evidence showed that he was a major participant in the policy discussions. From the Bush library documents, it was apparent that the October Surprise cover-up was essentially an extension of the broader effort to contain the Iran-Contra scandal, with Bush personally involved in orchestrating both efforts.

For instance, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh discovered in December 1992 that Bush’s White House counsel’s office, under Boyden Gray, also had delayed production of Bush’s personal notes about the arms shipments to Iran in the 1985-86 time frame.

Though Gray’s office insisted that the delay was unintentional, Walsh didn’t buy it. After all, one of Bush’s s Iran-Contra diary entries, dated July 20, 1987, described then-Secretary of State George Shultz’s detailed notes on meetings with Reagan. In the Iran-Contra report, Walsh wrote that Bush’s phrasing about Shultz’s notes suggested that the withholding of Bush’s own documents was willful.

“I found this almost inconceivable,” Bush wrote about Shultz. “Not only that he kept the notes, but that he’d turned them all over to Congress. … I would never do it. I would never surrender such documents.” Following those sentiments, Bush’s White House sought to frustrate not just Iran-Contra investigators but those assigned to examine the October Surprise issue.

Cat-and-Mouse Game

Rather than any commitment to openness regarding the October Surprise case, the documents reveal a cat-and-mouse game designed to block pursuit of the truth. Beyond dragging its heels on producing documents, the Bush administration maneuvered to keep key witnesses out of timely reach of the investigators. For instance, Gregg used his stationing as U.S. Ambassador to South Korea in 1992 to evade a congressional subpoena.

Like Gates and Bush, Gregg had been linked to secret meetings with Iranians during the 1980 campaign. When asked about those allegations by FBI polygraph operators working for Iran-Contra prosecutor Walsh, Gregg was judged to be deceptive in his denials. [See Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, Vol. I, p. 501]

And, when it came to answering questions from Congress about the October Surprise matter, Gregg found excuses not to accept service of a subpoena.

In a June 18, 1992, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul to the State Department in Washington, Gregg wrote that he had learned that Senate investigators had “attempted to subpoena me to appear on 24 June in connection with their so-called ‘October Surprise’ investigation. The subpoena was sent to my lawyer, Judah Best, who returned it to the committee since he had no authority to accept service of a subpoena. …

“If the October Surprise investigation contacts the [State] Department, I request that you tell them of my intention to cooperate fully when I return to the States, probably in September. Any other inquiries should be referred to my lawyer, Judah Best. Mr. Best asks that I specifically request you not to accept service of a subpoena if the committee attempts to deliver one to you.”

That way Gregg ensured that he was not legally compelled to testify while running out the clock on the Senate inquiry and leaving little time for the House Task Force. His strategy of delay was endorsed by Janet Rehnquist after a meeting with Best and a State Department lawyer.

In a June 24, 1992, letter to Gray, Rehnquist wrote that “at your direction, I have looked into whether Don Gregg should return to Washington to testify before the Senate Subcommittee hearings next week. … I believe we shouldNOT request that Gregg testify next week.”

The failure to effect service of the subpoena gave the Bush team an advantage, Rehnquist noted, because the Senate investigators then relented and merely “submitted written questions to Gregg, through counsel, in lieu of an appearance. …. This development provides us an opportunity to manage Gregg’s participation in October Surprise long distance.”

Rehnquist added hopefully that by the end of September 1992 “the issue may, by that time, even be dead for all practical purposes.”

Delaying Tactics

Beyond pushing the investigation later into 1992, the Republican delaying tactics also ensured that an interim House report, scheduled for the end of June, would not break any new ground that might torpedo Bush’s reelection hopes. The GOP made it a top goal to have the interim report clear Bush of allegations that he had joined a secret trip to Paris in mid-October 1980 to meet with Iranian representatives, the released documents show.

On June 24, 1992, Rehnquist prepared “talking points” for a Boyden Gray phone call with Republican Sens. Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Richard Lugar of Indiana stressing that “it must be said clearly for the record” that Bush was not in Paris. “We cannot let something this important left hanging,” Rehnquist wrote.

The key to that success was to prevent the congressional investigators from thoroughly examining Bush’s supposed alibis for the date of Oct. 19, 1980, when his account had him returning to his Washington home for a day off but when some October Surprise witnesses alleged he snuck off for a quick overnight flight to Paris to meet with Iranians.

The released records reveal that the White House had a hand in limiting what the Secret Service showed to the investigators regarding Bush’s supposed activities during the day of Oct. 19. The partially redacted Secret Service records, which were given to Congress, showed a morning trip to the Chevy Chase Country Club and an afternoon visit to a private residence.

But the redactions impeded efforts by congressional investigators to corroborate that those supposed movements by Bush actually took place. Under questioning, only one of the Secret Service agents, supervisor Leonard Tanis, had any memory of Bush’s supposed trip to the Chevy Chase Country Club. Tanis claimed that George and Barbara Bush attended a brunch with Supreme Court Justice and Mrs. Potter Stewart.

However, Barbara Bush’s records showed her going somewhere else that morning and, when questioned, Mrs. Stewart said she and her late husband did not have brunch with the Bushes. No one at the Chevy Chase club recalled the supposed brunch either. Tanis, a Bush favorite among the Secret Service detail, soon backed off his account.

With the Chevy Chase trip having verification problems, attention turned to the afternoon visit to a private residence. However, the Secret Service refused to release the name and address of the person visited, claiming that to do so would somehow endanger the agency’s protective strategies. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Withholding a Name

What the records from the Bush library revealed, however, was that the White House was involved in keeping the name of the person secret — and that a Republican senator involved in the October Surprise inquiry was under intense pressure from the GOP to act more aggressively in Bush’s defense.

On June 24, 1992, Rehnquist wrote a memo for the file describing a meeting that she and Gray had with Sen. Terry Sanford, D-North Carolina, chairman of the subcommittee in charge of the Senate’s October Surprise inquiry, and Jeffords, the ranking Republican who was viewed as not on the GOP’s cover-up team.

The senators complained about the “GOP thrashing Jeffords,” Rehnquist wrote. “The Senators urged that we seek to stop the GOP from criticizing Sen. Jeffords’ handling of the minority interests in the investigation. They said that they were irritated by the continued GOP bashing and that it wasn’t doing any good.”

But the pummeling appears to have softened Jeffords’s readiness to ask tough questions of his fellow Republicans. Rehnquist wrote, with apparent relief, that there was “discussion concerning whether the investigators needed to see the names and addresses of private individuals whom the VP visited on a particular occasion” and the two senators “were not interested in the names and addresses of private individuals whom the VP may have visited on a particular day.”

So, the White House was spared publicly having to identify Bush’s alibi witness for the afternoon of Oct. 19, 1980.

In summer 1992, Republicans were suggesting that they wanted to protect the host’s name because Bush may have been visiting a woman friend and that the Democrats might have been hoping to stir up a sex scandal to counter some of the salacious rumors about their own nominee, Bill Clinton.

However, when Secret Service records for Barbara Bush were released they showed her going to the same unidentified residence, deflating suggestions of a sexual liaison involving her husband. The question that remained was whether George H.W. Bush actually was part of the afternoon visit or whether his wife’s day trip was used as a cover for his absence from Washington.

Without questioning the afternoon host, it was impossible to verify Bush’s alibi. Yet, in a strange alibi deal, the House Task Force agreed to clear Bush of taking a secret trip to Paris in exchange for the White House privately giving the name of Bush’s host to a small number of the congressional investigators. But they were barred from interviewing the alibi witness or releasing the name.

The peculiar arrangement – being told the name of an alibi witness but never questioning the witness – was typical of Bush’s White House imposing bizarre rules on the inquiry and the badgered investigators acquiescing. [It was not until September 2011 that I was able to pry loose the name of the “alibi witness,” Richard A. Moore, a former legal adviser to President Richard Nixon. However, by then, Moore had died.]

Contrary Evidence

The House Task Force stuck with its decision to clear Bush regarding the alleged Paris trip despite subsequent evidence suggesting that Bush, indeed, had flown to Paris and had created a false record to conceal the trip.

For instance, I informed the Task Force about contemporaneous knowledge of the Bush-to-Paris trip provided by Chicago Tribune reporter John Maclean, son of author Norman Maclean who wrote A River Runs Through It. John Maclean said a well-placed Republican source told him in mid-October 1980 about Bush taking a secret trip to Paris to meet with Iranians on the U.S. hostage issue.

After hearing this news in 1980, Maclean passed on the information to David Henderson, a State Department Foreign Service officer. Henderson recalled the date as Oct. 18, 1980, when the two met at Henderson’s Washington home to discuss another matter. (Maclean never used the information for a story, but he confirmed his knowledge after Henderson remembered the conversation when the October Surprise allegations surfaced a decade later.)

And, there was other support for the allegations of a Republican-Iranian meeting in Paris. David Andelman, the biographer for Count Alexandre deMarenches, head of France’s Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE), testified to the House Task Force that deMarenches told him that he had helped the Reagan-Bush campaign arrange meetings with Iranians on the hostage issue in summer and fall of 1980, with one meeting in Paris in October.

Andelman said deMarenches insisted that the secret meetings be kept out of his memoir because the story could otherwise damage the reputations of his friends, William Casey and George H.W. Bush.

The allegations of a Paris meeting also received support from several other sources, including pilot Heinrich Rupp, who said he flew Casey from Washington’s National Airport to Paris on a flight that left very late on a rainy night in mid-October 1980. Rupp said that after arriving at LeBourget airport outside Paris, he saw a man resembling Bush on the tarmac.

The night of Oct. 18 indeed was rainy in the Washington area. And, sign-in sheets at the Reagan-Bush headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, placed Casey within a five-minute drive of National Airport late that evening.

A well-connected French investigative reporter Claude Angeli said his sources inside the French secret service confirmed that the service provided “cover” for a meeting between Republicans and Iranians in France on the weekend of October 18-19. German journalist Martin Kilian had received a similar account from a top aide to intelligence chief deMarenches.

As early as 1987, Iran’s ex-President Bani-Sadr had made claims about such a Paris meeting, and Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe claimed to have been present outside the meeting and saw Bush, Casey, Gates and Gregg in attendance.

Russian Report

Finally, the Russian government sent a report to the House Task Force, saying that Soviet-era intelligence files contained information about Republicans holding a series of meetings with Iranians in Europe, including one in Paris in October 1980. “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” the Russian Report said. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”

At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part,” the report said. “The representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”

The Russian Report was kept hidden by the House Task Force until I discovered it by gaining access to the Task Force’s raw files. Though the report was addressed to Hamilton, he told me in 2010 that he had never seen the report until I sent him a copy shortly before our interview. Barcella then acknowledged to me that he might not have shown Hamilton the report and may have simply filed it away in boxes of Task Force records.

The documents from the Bush library also shed light on how far the Republicans were prepared to go to protect Bush on the issue of his whereabouts on Oct. 19, 1980. The GOP members of the Task Force insisted that the one Democratic investigator who had the strongest doubts about Bush’s alibi be barred from the inquiry altogether.

The suspicions of the investigator, House Foreign Affairs Committee chief counsel Spencer Oliver, had been piqued by the false account from Secret Service supervisor Tanis. In a six-page memo, Oliver urged a closer look at Bush’s whereabouts and questioned why the Secret Service was concealing the alibi witness’ name.

“Why did the Secret Service refuse to cooperate on a matter which could have conclusively cleared George Bush of these serious allegations?” Oliver asked. “Was the White House involved in this refusal? Did they order it?”

Oliver also noted Bush’s odd behavior in raising the October Surprise issue on his own at two news conferences. “It can be fairly said that President Bush’s recent outbursts about the October Surprise inquiries and [about] his whereabouts in mid-October of 1980 are disingenuous at best,” wrote Oliver, “since the administration has refused to make available the documents and the witnesses that could finally and conclusively clear Mr. Bush.”

Well-Founded Suspicions

From Janet Rehnquist’s memo on the meeting with Jeffords and Sanford, it appears that Oliver’s suspicion was well-founded about the involvement of Bush’s White House in the decision to conceal the name of the supposed afternoon host.

Another released documents reflected how angry the Republicans were about Oliver, who also had been a dogged investigator during the congressional Iran-Contra probe in 1987. Thomas Smeeton, a former CIA officer who served as Republican staff director for the House Intelligence Committee and had been Rep. Dick Cheney’s appointee to the congressional Iran-Contra committee, sent Rehnquist a memorandum prepared for Republican members regarding Oliver.

Entitled “October Surprise – The Ubiquitous Spencer Oliver,” the memo said Republicans had “been told repeatedly that Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman [Dante] Fascell does not want his Chief Counsel, Spencer Oliver, to participate in the ‘October Surprise’ probe. Yet, we continue to get reports that he’s as active as ever. For example, the GAO [General Accounting Office], in congressional testimony last year [1991] indicated that he attended an October Surprise meeting with Senator Terry Sanford.”

Keeping Oliver off the October Surprise investigation became a high priority for the Republicans. At a midway point in the inquiry when some Democratic Task Force members asked the knowledgeable Oliver to represent them as a staff investigator, Republicans threatened a boycott unless Oliver was barred.

In a gesture of bipartisanship, Rep. Hamilton gave the Republicans the power to veto Oliver’s participation. Denied one of the few Democratic investigators with both the savvy and courage to pursue a serious investigation, the Democratic members of the Task Force retreated further into passivity.

Meanwhile, Bush’s White House kept up the pressure, restricting congressional access to key documents pertinent to the investigation. In a “top secret” memo dated June 26, 1992, to the State Department about cooperation with the October Surprise probe, National Security Council executive secretary William F. Sittmann demanded “special treatment” for NSC documents related to presidential deliberations.

Regarding the House Task Force, Sittmann recommended that only Republican counsel Richard Leon and Democratic counsel Barcella be “permitted to read relevant portions of the documents and to take notes, but that the State Department retain custody of the documents and the notes at all times.”

Though Republicans kept insisting that the October Surprise allegations were a myth, the Bush administration was going to extraordinary lengths to control the evidence.

Questioning the Cost

As early as November 1991 at White House counsel Gray’s inter-agency meeting, Gray instructed administration officials to keep track of the costs for document searches so the inquiry could be challenged as a waste of money. Again and again, the documents reveal a near obsession with the estimated costs of the probe as well as the close collaboration between Rehnquist’s office and Republican congressional staff, especially John Mackey, the minority staff director on the October Surprise Task Force.

When another Bush legal adviser, Lee Liberman, helped coordinate a P.R. attack on the cost of the October Surprise investigation, Mackey sent his business card with the note, “Lee: FYI How to hit back! Best, John”

Bush’s White House also kept close track of press stories, especially those attacking the credibility of anyone who made October Surprise allegations. That was especially true about Carter’s former NSC aide Gary Sick, whose New York Times op-ed in April 1991 had given important impetus to the long-held suspicions regarding a GOP-Iranian deal in 1980.

On May 21, 1991, President Bush dashed off a personal note to conservative columnist William Rusher, thanking him for “rallying ‘round in that article challenging Gary Sick to apologize.”

However, at least one White House official privately held a different view of Sick’s book, October Surprise. On June 23, 1992, after reading it, Ash Jain wrote a memo to Janet Rehnquist, noting that “Sick presents a seemingly compelling account of [William] Casey’s participation in secret meetings with the Iranian Government.”

In the end, the Republican “delay/filibuster strategy” proved successful. The impact of the October Surprise scandal on Campaign 1992 was minimized, although Bush still failed to win reelection. It wasn’t until December 1992 – a month after Bush lost to Bill Clinton – that the floodgates on October Surprise evidence finally began to open.

Years later, Task Force chief counsel Barcella told me that so much new evidence poured in that final month implicating the Republicans that he asked Hamilton to extend the investigation three more months. But Hamilton, recognizing how nasty the Republican reaction would be, turned down the extension request, Barcella said.

For his part, Hamilton told me that he had no recollection of Barcella’s request. Hamilton also said he had no memory of Barcella ever showing him the Russian Report which arrived in January 1993 and corroborated allegations of meetings between Iranians and Republicans in Europe, including Bush, Gates and Casey in Paris.

Despite all the evidence of Republican guilt, Hamilton and his Task Force simply signed off on a finding of Republican innocence.

Though many lessons can be drawn from the failed October Surprise investigation of two decades ago, one point that is relevant today is to understand what a real government cover-up looks like.

What is Paper Terrorism? Anti-Gov't Nuts File Tens of Thousands of False Docs as "Sovereign Citizens"

Jillian Rayfield, Salon — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:40:00 -0700

Zealots use fraudulent tax returns, liens and foreclosures to evade laws they find illegitimate.

How do you stop one anti-government extremist from coordinating a trillion dollar “paper terrorism” scheme involving a raft of false financial documents, or deal with another who sues prosecutors for allegedly conspiring against him by using poor grammar?

This is the question that state governments and federal agencies are faced with, ever since a surge of people who consider themselves “sovereign citizens” began acting on their belief that all aspects of law and government are illegitimate. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that in 2011 there were approximately 100,000 “hard-core” believers in sovereign citizen ideology, though it’s a tough number to nail down because the movement is so disparate. For the same reason — and because, by their nature, members of the movement don’t believe in laws — it’s also tough to draft legislation to specifically target those crimes favored by sovereign citizens.

Some of those crimes involve filing fraudulent tax returns, liens and foreclosures, frequently known as “paper terrorism.” In fact, insofar as the sovereign citizen movement has leaders, it’s in the form of so-called “gurus” who peddle materials on how to conduct these schemes. One prominent sovereign leader, Tim Turner — who refers to himself as “president” of the “Republic for the united States of America” [sic] — was recently convicted for “attempting to pay taxes with fictitious financial instruments,” among other things. In addition to his own alleged tax crimes, Turner also purveyed a “series of seminars claiming he could help his clients get out of paying mortgages, credit cards and income tax bills using a series of sovereign tricks,” the SPLC reports.

Another sovereign citizen, David Russell Myrland, he of the particularly bizarre grammar-based conspiracy lawsuit, spent around 20 years illegally practicing law and teaching others to cheat on federal income taxes. In 2012, though, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 months in prison for threatening to kidnap a mayor in Washington state.

These cases sometimes take years to build, and they don’t address the problems that arise with the more common sovereign practice of filing false tax liens (charges imposed on property to ensure tax payments) against public officials, sometimes worth millions of dollars. Usually, these liens are left undiscovered until the official in question goes to take out a mortgage or a loan and finds their credit effectively ruined. Most of the time, sovereign citizens can exploit loopholes in laws that require clerks to process the filings without asking questions.

One way states are addressing the issue is by passing legislation to close that loophole. Indiana is the latest of at least 15 other states to pass a law to allow clerks and state officials to reject fraudulent filings before they can do any damage.

Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, a Republican, told Salon that Indiana’s new law aims to stop two typical types of filings: harassment and “straw man” filings. Harassment filings are those used “usually for a retaliatory purpose,” Lawson said, against an elected official who has confronted the sovereign citizen in some way. In Indiana, there have been two recent harassment filings made against federal judges and one against a local mayor, amounting to millions of dollars in fraudulent liens. “Straw man filings” simply express a sovereign citizen’s contention that the government is illegitimate, and are easy to identify because they are often in all caps and interspersed with colons, make multiple references to the Bible or the Constitution, and generally contain noticeably odd language and punctuation.

In the past, Lawson explained, her office would be able to identify these fraudulent filings, but they “couldn’t question the content” and were still required to process them. At best, the filings clog up the system. At worst, they can seriously damage an official’s finances. “The most effective way to stop these filings is to do it preventively,” Lawson said.

Some states are hoping to prevent these filings in a different way — by enacting tougher penalties that could serve as a deterrent. In New York, a bill would “ensure that appropriate punishments and deterrent exist in relation to the malicious filing of false or fictitious liens against … police officers and elected officials,” by making filing them a felony. The punishment would be a fine of $10,000 per filing and up to a year in prison.

The bill, which was introduced and deferred to the state judiciary committee back in January, was pushed by Orleans County District Attorney Joe Cardone. Cardone told Salon that he had heard about a federal statute that helped crack down on false liens filed against federal officials, “but there was really nothing at the state level.” Though he says the practice hasn’t occurred much in his area, the bill closes a loophole in the system in which “you might have a forgery statute that might cover the situation, but it won’t have as high an offense as this.”

Bill Fulton, a former confidential informant for the FBI on the Schaeffer Cox militia case, who has continued to work with law enforcement on sovereign citizen issues, argued to Salon that the idea behind the New York bill is not to stop them from filing the liens but to prosecute before they can file multiple liens. Under the current law, Fulton said, by the time officials catch on to the lien scam, there could already be 20 to 30 fraudulent filings in the system — which could amount to multiple fraud felonies.

“They’re not going to follow the law, but what it will do is allow law enforcement to deal with them before they clog up the court system and before they cause additional problems,” he said, noting that “sovereign citizens have convinced themselves that this is all legal and this is all OK.” The law would be like “early intervention,” Fulton said. ”If we can get them early enough to discourage them, then hopefully they won’t continue down that path.”

Georgia implemented a similar law in 2012, which went into effect last July. The law, pushed by state Rep. B. J. Pak, a Republican, made it a separate crime to file false liens, punishable by 1 to 10 years in prison, a fine up to $10,000, or both. Pak told Salon that though the law is pretty recent, he hasn’t heard of any filings since it’s gone into effect. “I’m hoping no news is good news, that it’s becoming a deterrent.” He added that the next step might be targeting sovereign citizens that have been filing false foreclosures on homes, which Pak says is in the “same kind of wheelhouse.”

For instance, in Georgia itself, 12 sovereign citizens were indicted in 2011 on several charges related to an alleged scheme to break into unoccupied homes, file the deeds for themselves, and then file additional fraudulent liens and lawsuits against any law enforcement or public official who tried to kick them out.

In these schemes, the “rightful owner has a hard time getting possession of their house; they have to go through this protracted process to determine which deed is real and which is fake,” Pak said.

Though state governments may be able to effectively utilize deterrence to prevent “paper terrorism,” there are still those more disturbing cases in which sovereign citizens have resorted to violence when confronted with law enforcement. In 2010, for example, two sovereign citizens in Arkansas were killed in a shootout with police officers after the two men opened fire with AK-47s during a traffic stop.

That’s why the FBI has labeled sovereign citizens a “domestic terrorist movement,” and it’s why the White House established a new “Interagency Working Group to Counter Online Radicalization to Violence” in February of this year. The group organizes efforts to crack down on potentially violent individuals and movements, like sovereign citizens, ”who use the Internet to recruit others to plan or carry out acts of violence.”

That’s also why local police departments have been taking additional measures to instruct officers on how to deal with sovereign citizens, including hiring specialized trainers like Detectives Rob Finch and Kory Flowers. Finch and Flowers have been making the rounds across the country, training approximately 15,000 police officers and 5,000 public officials in how to recognize and deal with a sovereign citizen who might, when pushed, resort to violence. ”To them, a police officer is just a man in a Halloween costume,” Finch recently told the Los Angeles Times.

Being a Democracy Hating, Corporate Power-Defending Newspaper Owner Runs Deep in the Koch Family

Yasha Levine, Not Safe for Work Corporation — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:16:00 -0700

The Koch bros are rumored to be possible bidders for the Tribune company and its large regional papers including the LA Times ... their grandfather Harry Koch would be proud.

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.

There’s a rumor going around that the Koch brothers are interested in buying up the Tribune Company, which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun… And there’s a lot of speculation about what would happen if they did.

Some worry, and rightly so, that the Kochs—whose combined wealth makes them the biggest billionaires on the planet—would integrate the Tribune Co. with the rest of their free-market thinktank-industrial complex, and turn its newly acquired news media property into a gigantic business propaganda machine. Half the reporters at the Los Angeles Times even took a vote saying they’d quit if the Kochs bought the paper.

Others are positively enthusiastic about the possible takeover. Slate’s Matthew Yglesias, for one, argued that "America would be better off for it" because the Kochs would spent lots of money building a better "conservative media product."

But while the country’s media commentators busy themselves trying to predict what Koch ownership would mean for newspapers, many of them are overlooking one important fact: We already know. Because the Koch family has a long history of newspaper ownership.

The Kochs and newspapers go waaay back, right back to their grandfather Harry Koch (yep, that’s a real name), who emigrated to America from the Netherlands in 1888 and bought a newspaper in a podunk railroad town in North Texas called Quanah. With the power of the press behind him, ol' Harry Koch went on to make a fortune for himself and his brood by aggressively rah-rahing on behalf of railroad and banking interests, fighting organized labor and savaging New Deal programs.

Not much is known is known about Harry Koch. Charles and David Koch don’t like to talk about him much. And when they do talk about Grandpa Harry, they don’t tell the truth. Like a lot of billionaires, they want the public to think they're self-made, that they came from humble beginnings, and so they portray their grandpa as if he was a po' immigrant who lived on the edge of poverty, barely scratching out an existence from his tiny newspaper business.

"The whole area was very poor and people didn’t have the money to pay for their subscriptions. So they would pay in produce or chickens or eggs," Charles Koch recalled.

When I travelled to Quanah for the Texas Observer in 2011 to investigate the life of Harry Koch, and to understand the environment that spawned the most powerful brother-oligarchs of our time, I discovered that the truth is much more interesting than Charles' tale. Quanah, Texas, is the world as Harry Koch made it, through his newspapers and railroad. His sons have been remarkably true to the Darwinian-capitalist views Harry ceaselessly proclaimed in his newspaper. So, if you want to know what the Koch brothers have in mind for our country, start by taking a look at the newspaper that their Grandpa Harry Koch ran.

***

Harry Koch was born in Holland in 1867 into a wealthy family that owned farmland, ran a linseed oil mill and operated a shipping business that ran sailboats between his seaside hometown of Workum, and Amsterdam. Harry Koch's mother died when he was a child, and his father remarried a much younger woman—the daughter of a local banker—and had seven new kids with her.

Life at home didn’t satisfy young Harry. As soon as he turned 21, he emigrated to the United States, hoping to get in on the railroad boom of the late 19th C.

Real estate speculation was a major part of the railroad racket. Railroad companies had acquired huge tracts of public land for free by government grant, and needed to sell it off as quickly and as profitably as possible. That meant railroads were on the constant lookout for sympathetic newspaper publishers to help promote and sell the countless boom towns that had been planned around railroad platforms all across the nation. The railroad town newspaper publishers' job was to hype up local real estate booms and land grabs, providing an opportunity for railroads to dump their properties on gullible settlers at inflated prices

Enter: Harry Koch.

After bouncing around and learning the ropes of the newspaper business, Harry settled in the tiny frontier town of Quanah up near the panhandle, bought two of the town’s newspapers, merged them into the Quanah Tribune-Chief, and quickly established himself as the region’s most ambitious railroad booster.

When Harry moved to Quanah, the town barely existed. There was a cluster of wooden shacks, a crude railroad platform and a whole lot of sunbaked dirt — all of it owned by the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company. The company had created Quanah just a few years earlier, and wanted to sell as much land in the area as quickly as possible.

Harry’s job was simple: sell Quanah land to as many suckers as he could con. So he dutifully filled his newspaper with wild stories of prosperity, boasting about Quanah’s fertile soil, and the fine qualities of its inhabitants, and the curative properties of the climate.

It wasn’t an easy sell. In the 1890s, North Texas was hit by a massive crop failure, a severe economic depression and low commodity prices, a triple hit that devastated the region and sent many farmers looking for greener pastures. But that didn’t faze Grandpa Harry Koch, who acted like nothing bad had happened, and went about his business hard-selling the superb productivity of the parched, dead land: "Crop failures have been unknown in this valley for twenty years," Grandpa Koch declared in his paper.

He’d print anything, so long as it lured settlers with some loose change in their pockets.

Harry Koch ran his newspaper, the Tribune-Chief like an unofficial sales and advertising division of the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company, working on commission and kickbacks. Records show that the Ft. Worth-Denver Railway paid Harry directly for his "advertising services." Sometimes the railroad remunerated him in land instead of cash, allowing him to cash in on a real estate bubble that he was helping to inflate. The more he hard-sold the riches of Quanah, the more cash he pocketed.

Grandpa Koch worked hard, and he was credited with helping turn the town into a major regional transportation hub with three different railroad lines going through it. It didn't hurt that he got rich in the process.

Over time, Harry took an increasingly active role in regional development, investing in local businesses and branching out into oil exploration. In 1910, he finally hit the big time: Harry Koch became the founding director, and one of the biggest shareholders, of a local railroad company, the Quanah, Acme & Pacific, which covered a short spur through a handful of towns in North Texas.

After two decades of promoting other people’s railroads, Harry got in on the railroad action himself — and all the perks that went along with it, including the easy money railroads made by bribing and extorting towns desperate to be connected to the railway line. And of course, Harry Koch's Tribune-Chief went all out in the promotional department, printing full-page advertisements for company shares and land in towns created and owned by Koch’s railroad.

Harry Koch went from being a booster to a small time railroad baron, an Ayn Rand hero of the Texas scrub. It was a huge step up in prestige and wealth, and he owed his rise to the way he used his newspaper business.

But Harry Koch wasn’t just about making money for himself. Harry saw himself as a civic-minded publisher who worked for the greater good of his community. He used his paper to educate his readers about complex political, economic, religious and cultural matters. And given that railroad workers were constantly striking for better pay, and farmers in the Populist movement agitated for nationalizing the railroads, regulating Wall Street and breaking up monopolies, the people of Texas were in dire need of the sort of proper education about the free-market facts, that Grandpa Harry Koch heroically provided.

Here are some of Grandpa Harry Koch's editorial highlights:

On unions & strikes:

Harry Koch was no friend of unionized labor. In 1897, not long after he moved to Quanah, Harry penned an impassioned editorial expressing his outrage over the way he was treated by the street railway workers of Galveston, Texas, who decided to strike on the day the National Editorial Association came to town for its annual convention, thereby rudely interrupting a procession of lavish dinners, boozing and partying. Harry was there, and described how the respectable guests were put in the awful predicament of having to walk, with their feet, from one bar to the next. But the newsmen didn’t have to endure the humiliation for long. "Santa Fe officials took pity on the suffering newspaper men and made up a train to Woolman’s lake where the oyster roast was to be held," Grandpa Harry wrote.

On government regulations:

Harry disapproved of financial regulations—or, for that matter, regulations or laws of any kind. He was an anarcho-libertarian before the term was invented! "If we depended upon laws to make us perfect the United States should be a near Utopia and Texas would be the most heavenly spot on earth," wrote Harry, sounding like one of the gazillions of libertarians paid to imitate Grandpa Harry in the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. This insight didn't stop Grandpa Harry from laughing at the thousandsof people who had been defrauded by Charles Ponzi, calling them "suckers" and "idiots."

"In dear old Boston, 11,126 suckers are to hold a conference to discuss ways and means to recover some of the money they entrusted to Ponzi, a former convict. We sincerely hope most of these creditors will bring a guardian along, otherwise it may endanger the peace of the community to have so many idiots come together."

On Rockefeller and oligarch philanthropy:

Harry Koch defended fellow industrialist John D. Rockefeller from critics who accused the robber baron of setting up Chicago University to whitewash his crimes:

"True, Rockefeller’s money is tainted, but how much money is there in circulation that has not at one time or another been possessed by dishonorable men or women? … No person is altogether good or bad, and it seems to us that as long as a bad man is willing to put his money to a good cause, build universities, churches or hospitals, he should not be refused and encouraged to use his money to baser ends."

On ethnic diversity:

Harry Koch frequently weighed in on matters of race. Among other things, Charles Koch's grandpa wrote that he believes "Jews are poor politicians" and that black folks can’t be expected to live up to the moral standards of the white race.

"Marrying comes as easy to some negroes as changing their places of residence. One old negro who died here not long ago, had at least three wives living in Quanah, and several more in neighboring towns. Nobody ever thinks about prosecuting a negro for bigamy, and we suppose it is right not to hold Africans but partly civilized too strictly amenable to laws made by and for white people."

On monopoly power:

Koch published a passionate defense of monopolies and trusts, which he said got a bum rap for no reason at all.

"It is fashion this day and time for democratic newspapers to jump on to trusts and denounce them, whether good or bad. As for the Tribune-Chief, we are enough of a heretic to look upon them with a passive eye and believe that capital has the right to combine. Trusts mark a natural and important and interesting phase of our development. There is nothing in them to be afraid of: they cannot hurt the people, although we, if we pleased, could crush them. We are the people, they are our servants, our creation, altogether ours. We should therefore hold ourselves towards the trusts as masters, proud of what is good in them, anxious to remedy what is evil. And when Europe pales at the tramp of our industrial march, let us remember that we owe to the trusts much of this new-borne prestige… "Let this thing be borne in mind as significant, that all real trusts, all that are destined to succeed and endure, are established on a basis of permanent lower prices for their products. Everybody knows that sugar and oil have been considerably cheaper since these industries have been under trust control. And the same is true, barring periods of fluctuation, of all industries under effective monopoly, from steel rails to cigarettes…"

On democracy:

Harry loved monopolies — but not so much democracies, which he called "Mob-ocracy."

In a 1934 editorial headlined "Democracy’s Problem," Charles Koch's grandpa expressed to readers his concern that democracy might not be all that it’s made out to be: "Mobocracy has long since been discarded as undesirable, even if attainable, and representative democracy has in operation disclosed many defects. . ." (According to the Cato Institute, founded by Harry’s grandson Charles, our wise Founding Fathers agree with Mr. Koch: "Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.")

On public pensions:

Harry Koch raised the "welfare queen" alarm even before the country passed its first welfare laws.

In 1935, Harry Koch described how a dangerous mob of black people descended on his newspaper after a rumor spread "among Quanah’s colored population that the Tribune-Chief contained a request from the government that every man past sixty should report as an applicant for an old age pension." Harry says that was enough to get "every elderly negro in town" cramming into Tribune-Chief‘s offices. It was proof positive that African-Americans (whom you might recall Harry considered "partly civilized" and unable to observe "laws made by and for white people") were already scheming to exploit government programs made for honest white folk.

The funnies:

The Quanah Tribune-Chief kept readers entertained with funny tales about the local black community's zany hijinx in racist, segregated Texas. Here’s one:

An old Negro, passing a graveyard, saw the grave of a man he had known and paused to read the words on the tombstone. Finally he had it: "I still live," read the inscription. "Jes’ look at dat," exclaimed Old Ned. "Who he think he fooling’? If I’m ever dead, I sho’ll be man enough to own up to it."

On eugenics:

Blame Heredity, Not Nature Both the Texas Senate and House are reported to be favoring bills providing for the sterilization of some of the inmates of insane asylums and prisons. Such measure is expected to greatly cut down the number of habitual criminals and mental freaks.

On the assassination of elected officials:

In the 1930s, Harry Koch’s Tribune-Chief joined the smear campaign against Huey Long, the popular Democratic Senator from Louisiana who was keen on challenging FDR from the left. To Harry, Huey was a covert Bolshevik for proposing to cap individual' net worth, and to set up a genuine welfare system that would redistribute the wealth. After the Louisiana Senator was by a killed by a lone gunman in 1935, Harry all but approved of the murder:

"Huey Long was shot by a doctor Sunday evening after he had left the Louisiana legislature. Fighting people like he did and depriving them of a livelihood, the shooting did not come unexpectedly. Bill Maddox, who went to school with him said Huey was very bright but greatly disliked by the other boys, while Huey’s younger brother says he had to do his fighting for him."

On Pinkos:

Of course, Huey Long wasn’t the only covert commie plotting to undermine the United States. As he fought against the New Deal, Harry Koch became a chronic Red-baiter. In a 1938 editorial, he warned his readers (particularly the ones who were "Americans who believe in America") that "Communists were working particularly within the schools" and that "it is the duty of every parent to inspect closely material of a radical nature which is infiltrated ever as skillfully into the public school system."

What Harry didn’t tell his readers was that his own son, Fred Koch, had just come back from the Soviet Union, where he was under contract with Comrade Stalin to build 15 refineries, train commie engineers and beef up Soviet energy independence. Fred made a killing working for the Soviet Union, taking home a $5 million nut for himself, but that didn’t stop Fred Koch from carrying on his father’s red-baiting tradition. Fred Koch took the obsession to new paranoid heights when he helped found the John Birch Society in 1958, after which he toured Elk Lodges and YMCAs across America, arguing for the reimposition of segregation, denouncing President Kennedy as communist agent and traitor, and warning people of a diabolical commie plot to subvert America using labor unions, gays, Jews, blacks and that most evil and cunning of all Soviet-trained commie traitors, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

***

When I stepped out of Quanah’s little courthouse, my eyes squinting from hours of staring at dim microfilm, it was as if I was still in Harry Koch’s horrible little dreamworld, because Quanah today is the perfect expression of the Koch family’s ideal world — as ignorant, poor and powerless as Harry would have wanted it to be. Every local I met acted like a pliant peasant: they were too poor, too sick and too tired to care.

In 2011, the Koch family still owned most of downtown Quanah, as well as the gypsum factory on the outskirts of town. Another billionaire owned a massive cattle ranch outside the city limits, where hired hands earn $150 a day—flat rate. "I gotta make sure there enough water, I gotta move them from one patch of land to another, I gotta round em up and drive them into a pen for transportation... you name it, I gotta do it. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get it done. Five hours, two hours or 18 hours. It pays $150," one of the ranch hand told me. "That’s just the way it is."

If Harry Koch were still alive, he wouldn’t even have to keep putting out his paper, because Quanah, and all the hundreds of other towns like it all over Texas, have so internalized the Kochs' Darwinian ideology, now under the banner of "libertarianism," that heavy-handed persuasion is no longer as necessary as it was in the days when labor unions and socialism were powerful forces.

Perhaps that’s the real reason why the Kochs are so interested in applying Grandpa Harry's formula to the few remaining newspaper holdouts, especially targeting a major coastal city like L.A. — one of the last regions in America that hasn't yet been Quanah-fied.

Republican Congressman: 'Abortion on Demand' Causes School Shootings

Ian Millhiser, Think Progress — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:06:00 -0700

The freshman rep explained, "we’ve normalized perversion and perverted God’s natural law."

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is overturning Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, that’s what freshman Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) seemed to suggest in a speech earlier this month:

Just in the last several days, a Bismarck news anchor mistakenly uttered vulgarity on live television. He’s been heralded by celebrities from New York to California as some sort of pop icon. His bosses have been called goons because they fired him. We learned this week that the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to rape, and advocated that military personnel and colluding chaplains who proselytize should be court-marshalled.
Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand. And we wonder why our culture sees school shootings so often.

Cramer’s link between recent school shootings and a 40 year-old Supreme Court decision is certainly an unusual take on what causes events to transpire, but his attempt to present abortion as more dangerous to society than weakly regulated access to firearms is far from unique. Indeed, in five states, it is significantly harder to obtain an abortion than it is to purchase a gun.

The congressman’s statement appears to be part of a broader theory about how bad things are happening in the United States because people have turned away from Cramer’s version of Christianity. At another point in the speech, he claims that “[i]nnocent people in New York have airplanes flown into their places of work, and marathoners in Boston are victims of bombs, yet Christianity is singled out as bigotry in our public institutions because politicians and academics lack the courage to speak truth. We’ve normalized perversion and perverted God’s natural law to the point where the only thing not tolerated anymore is a stand for truth.”

6 Key Takeaways From the Stupidity and Reality of IRS 'Scandal'

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:20:00 -0700

The maddening episode reveals how Washington works.

There’s so much that’s upside-down and ill-informed about the "IRS scandal" unfolding in Washington, starting with the fact that no one has pointed a finger at the people who created these abuses in the first place: senior political consultants and lawyers. And doesn’t anyone see the hypocrisy of the GOP for calling out the IRS for targeting groups (that lied about being charities) when that party has been targeting black and brown voters for years via every imaginable "voter-fraud" law?

It would be stunning if the current "scandal" led to an informed discussion about the lies and loopholes and campaign law-evading tactics used by both parties in the post-Citizens United era, where lawyers exploited legal ambiguities to run campaigns with little or no accountability. However, that’s not going to happen when too many of the politicians screaming scandal were elected using these dark money deceits.

Let’s go through some of the most maddening aspects of this evolving episode, with an eye to identifying the real scandal and the real culprits.

1. The IRS made mistakes with both parties. The scandal mongers have said that the IRS went too far in pressing Tea Party groups for information when applying for federal non-profit tax status. Lost in this fine print is a critical fact. As Bloomberg.com reported, IRS staffers sent the same questionaire to Democratic groups suspected of not being charities but political as well. So it’s not just an "attack" on Republicans.

2. The real issue is the IRS isn’t doing its job. On Wednesday, Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse gave a speech in the Senate where he laid out the fictions used by political groups to masquarade as charities. He pointed out that industry groups—like PhRMA, the drug company lobby—file reports to IRS and Federal Election Commission filled with contradictory information about their political activities. “Making a material false statement to a federal agency is not just bad behavior, it’s a crime,” he said. But “the Department of Justice won’t prosecute false statements… unless the case has been referred by the IRS… [and] the IRS never makes a referral.”

“So it is very wrong that the IRS required additional information from a number of organizations based on a screen incorporating their Tea Party orientation,” Whitehouse said. “Picking on the little guy is a pretty lousy thing to do; rolling over for the powerful and letting them file false statements is pretty lousy too.”

3. Team Obama’s hysterical overreactions. The adminstration’s reactions, from the president to Attorney General Eric Holder, have fed the hysteria and given the GOP a green light to turn the Tea Party into victims. Not only did the firing of the IRS acting director come prematurely, but Obama’s overreaction cements the notion that many local Tea Party groups—frequently funded by the Koch brothers—were entitled to be treated the same under tax law as the March of Dimes. Moreover, Holder’s statement that he was recusing himself while announcing the FBI investigation just picks another fight between the administration and congressional Republicans. What Obama could have done was take the risk of explaining how the system really works—what’s broken—and the solutions, even though he has been a beneficiary of it.

4. Charities are not political front groups.The question of who turned charities into political front groups has barely been discussed. The answer, of course, is the same as it always has been: election lawyers and campaign consultants who look for loopholes in the law so clients can run for office using any tactic with little or no accountability.

Media coverage of this scandal has had the wrong starting line. It wasn’t the IRS that deluged its staff with thousands of applications from political groups pretending to be charities. It was groups following the advice or example of campaign consultants such as Karl Rove. He was the first to use this ruse on a large scale in order to run a shadow presidential campaign where he could hide his donors’ identities.

The way this works is simple. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling deregulated campaign finances, political operators looked for ambiguities to exploit and turned to non-profit tax law—knowing the agency's primary focus has nothing to do with electioneering. One of the legal ambiguities is the fiction that "public education" and "lobbying" activities by non-profits groups are not political (and thus subject to election law) if they comprise more than 50 percent of that group’s activities.

So that’s what Karl Rove ginned up with his non-profit Crossroads GPS, which spent $123 million for the 2012 federal elections, according to the Sunlight Foundation, with 70 percent raised from secret donors. The IRS still has not issued a ruling on whether Rove’s group violated non-profit tax law.

5. The IRS’s top GOP critics were elected this way. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey might be the GOP frontman on federal gun controls, but on this issue he has compared the IRS scrutiny to President Richard Nixon’s infamous enemies list. Of course, two political non-profits, Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the Republican Jewish Coalition spent $17.6 million on his behalf by the time Election Day rolled around last fall. He’s hardly the only member of Congress whose rise to power was helped by political front groups masquerading as tax-exempt charities.

One of the unwritten but enduring Washington rules is that both political parties will not tinker with the tactics that helped them gain power—because they mastered the system to get elected. But that is not even the biggest GOP hypocrisy surrounding this "scandal."

6. Lies are so big they hide in plain sight. The party known for voter suppression and intimidation now feels targeted? The spectacle of Republicans protesting that its groups were targeted by the IRS, when the only business of some of these groups was to lead the GOP’s 2012 voter suppression efforts, is just unbelievable. The GOP has spent years trying to discourage and suppress voting blocks that it perceives will back Democrats, such as black and brown voters, and students. Its entire "voter fraud" canard is based on policing the polls in myriad ways targeting millions of voters.

But now the GOP is upset—with Speaker of the House John Boehner saying he wants the guilty put in jail—because groups like True The Vote were not given the same tax status as the Girl Scouts? They have spent years in state after state imposing tougher ID laws, criminalizing voter registration drives, curtailing early voting, and on and on.

There are so many reasons why this "scandal" reflects what’s really wrong in our political culture. But watching it unfold literally is like watching the blind leading the blind—and the rest of us have to live with the results of these political subterfuges. This scandal is about the perpetuation of lies and deceits in modern campaigns and politics. Meanwhile, the solution, more transparency and disclosure, is going nowhere.

Pat Robertson's Latest Ridiculousness: Forgive Your Cheating Husband Because "Well, He's a Man"

Brian Tashman, Right Wing Watch — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:47:00 -0700

The 700 Club nut job also reminds women that they live in America "and good things are happening."

Pat Robertson has advice for women who are struggling to forgive their cheating husbands: “Well, he’s a man.”

On today’s 700 Club, Robertson told a woman whose husband was cheating on her that she should stop focusing on the adultery and instead ponder, “Does he provide a home for you to live in, does he provide food for you to eat, does he provide clothes for you to wear, is he nice to the children…is he handsome?”

After encouraging the woman to focus on the positives rather than her husband’s adultery, which Robertson imagined to be a one night stand with a stripper in a hotel room, he said she should “give him honor instead of trying to worry about it.”

He also suggested the woman could have done more to prevent her husband from cheating: “But recognize also, like it or not, males have a tendency to wander a little bit and what you want to do is make a home so wonderful that he doesn’t want to wander.”

“What you have to do is say, ‘My husband was captured and I want to get him free,’” Robertson said, concluding that the woman should still be grateful that she lives in America: “Begin to thank God that you have a marriage that is together and that you live in America and good things are happening.”

Watch:

The Real Scandal: Official Washington Goes Nuts Over IRS Doing Its Job

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:42:00 -0700

Voter intimidation groups say they were intimidated by the IRS.

There is a deepening IRS scandal about the government’s review of Tea Party groups that sought legal status as tax-exempt charities, but it’s not what House Republicans and some Democrats including the President are spewing into the microphones and TV cameras.

Let us consider what may be an more accurate assessment of what happened. The IRS was doing its job. Its staff was overwhelmed by the thousands of obvious political groups that sought the cover of being designated as charities in the 2010 and 2012 elections; so they could raise money and hide their donors names. Some IRS employees spent far too much time or were assigned to spend time on lowest-hanging fruit—political amateur groups from the Tea Party movement—and not enough on the bigtime players, such as Karl Rove, who was lawyered up. And the IRS still has not ruled on the tactics and likes of the Roves (Crossroads GPS), Koch brothers (Americans for Prosperity) and the pro-Obama groups (Organizing for America and Priorities USA) that put millions into thepresidential election via groups pretending to be charities.

“It is breathtaking that the IRS seems to be harassing mom and pop Tea Party organizations while ignoring what appears to be the blatant abuses of the 501(c)(4) tax status right under its noe by groups pumping tens of millions of dollars into partisan political advertising,” said Gerald Hebert, director of the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington campaign finance reform organization that urged the IRS to reject the ruse. “It must enforce the law rather than turning a blind eye to widespread abuses.”

Sadly, there’s no shortage of blind eyes in this made-for-DC scandal. The Republican-controlled House had been hearing complaints in 2011 from Tea Party groups that they were harassed by the IRS—because these tiny (and sometimes not so tiny) political clubs weren’t getting rubber-stamped as social welfare organizations. The New Yorker’s legal correspondent, Jeffrey Toobin, blogs about that apparent irony, saying, “It might be useful to ask: Did the IRS actually do anything wrong?”

It’s amazing to see who the Washington Post quotes today as answering a loud ‘Yes’ to that question, as it reports that the agency’s DC office apparently was involved in the vetting of the non-profit applications. The Post turns to NRA board member and attorney Cleta Mitchell, who tried to secure non-profit tax status for the GOP’s voter intimidation group, True the Vote. This is truly political theatre of the absurd: a group whose purpose is intimidating black and brown voters is claiming it was unduly scrutinized by the IRS—because the agency somehow suspects, correctly, that they might not be a charity?

The Obama White House are hardly angels in the murky campaign finance world. They were the first presidential campaign to reject public funds in 2008. For years, Obama’s team has embraced any tactic that would allow it to raise huge sums of campaign money, including these same 501(c)(4) groups to win re-election. Their attitude is typical Washington: there’s no problem if it helps their side win.

That’s the real scandal here: how business hums along in the Washington political money circles and the biggest abusers don’t even get slaps on their wrists.

“Congressional hearings must serve as a reminder to the IRS that maintaining a ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ stance on illegal political activity by tax-exempt groups is completely unacceptable,” the Campaign Finance Center’s Hebert said.

No doubt there will be more congressional hearings. But as the GOP’s scandal machinery revs up, you can be sure they will not be looking at the real bottom line—whether anyone who wants to create a political group can masquerade as a charity, and not pay taxes on the group’s income and hide donor’s names. Instead, they will be playing to Fox News, claiming the Obama administration is trampling on the First Amendment right to lie in political campaigns and receive government tax breaks for doing it.

Ayn Rand USA: In 20 Years Corporate Profits Are Up 4X and Their Taxes Have Fallen by 50% -- Meanwhile the Workers' Payroll Tax Has Doubled

Paul Buchheit, AlterNet — Sun, 12 May 2013 22:48:00 -0700

Corporations have decided to let middle-class workers pay for national investments that have largely benefited businesses over the years.

Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged" fantasizes a world in which anti-government citizens reject taxes and regulations, and "stop the motor" by withdrawing themselves from the system of production. In a perverse twist on the writer's theme the prediction is coming true. But instead of productive people rejecting taxes, rejected taxes are shutting down productive people.

Perhaps Ayn Rand never anticipated the impact of unregulated greed on a productive middle class. Perhaps she never understood the fairness of tax money for public research and infrastructure and security, all of which have contributed to the success of big business. She must have known about the inequality of the pre-Depression years. But she couldn't have foreseen the concurrent rise in technology and globalization that allowed inequality to surge again, more quickly, in a manner that threatens to put the greediest offenders out of our reach.

Ayn Rand's philosophy suggests that average working people are 'takers.' In reality, those in the best position to make money take all they can get, with no scruples about their working class victims, because taking, in the minds of the rich, serves as a model for success. The strategy involves tax avoidance, in numerous forms.

Corporations Stopped Paying

In the past twenty years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax percent has dropped by half. The payroll tax, paid by workers, has doubled.

In effect, corporations have decided to let middle-class workers pay for national investments that have largely benefited businesses over the years. The greater part of basic research, especially for technology and health care, has been conducted with government money. Even today 60% of university research is government-supported. Corporations use highways and shipping lanes and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, and communications towers and satellites to conduct online business.

Yet as corporate profits surge and taxes plummet, our infrastructure is deteriorating. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $3.63 trillion is needed over the next seven years to make the necessary repairs.

Turning Taxes Into Thin Air

Corporations have used numerous and creative means to avoid their tax responsibilities. They have about a year's worth of profits stashed untaxed overseas. According to the Wall Street Journal, about 60% of their cash is offshore. Yet these corporate 'persons' enjoy a foreign earned income exclusion that real U.S. persons don't get.

Corporate tax haven ploys are legendary, with almost 19,000 companies claiming home office space in one building in the low-tax Cayman Islands. But they don't want to give up their U.S. benefits. Tech companies in 19 tax haven jurisdictions received $18.7 billion in 2011 federal contracts. A lot of smaller companies are legally exempt from taxes. As of 2008, according to IRS data, fully 69% of U.S. corporations were organized as nontaxablebusinesses.

There's much more. Companies call their CEO bonuses "performance pay" to get a lower rate. Private equity firms call fees "capital gains" to get a lower rate. Fast food companies call their lunch menus "intellectual property" to get a lower rate.

Prisons and casinos have stooped to the level of calling themselves "real estate investment trusts" (REITs) to gain tax exemptions. Stooping lower yet, Disney and others have added cows and sheep to their greenspace to get a farmland exemption.

The Richest Individuals Stopped Paying

The IRS estimated that 17 percent of taxes owed were not paid in 2006, leaving an underpayment of $450 billion. The revenue loss from tax havens approaches $450 billion. Subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes are estimated at over $1 trillion. Expenditures overwhelmingly benefit the richest taxpayers.

In keeping with Ayn Rand's assurance that "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue," the super-rich are relentless in their quest to make more money by eliminating taxes. Instead of calling their income 'income,' they call it "carried interest" or "performance-based earnings" or "deferred pay." And when they cash in their stock options, they might look up last year's lowest price, write that in as a purchase date, cash in the concocted profits, and take advantage of the lower capital gains tax rate.

So Who Has To Pay?

Middle-class families. The $2 trillion in tax losses from underpayments, expenditures, and tax havens costs every middle-class family about $20,000 in community benefits, including health care and education and food and housing.

Schoolkids, too. A study of 265 large companies by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) determined that about $14 billion per year in state income taxes was unpaid over three years. That's approximately equal to the loss of 2012-13 education funding due to budget cuts.

And the lowest-income taxpayers make up the difference, based on new data that shows that the Earned Income Tax Credit is the single biggest compliance problem cited by the IRS. The average sentence for cheating with secret offshore financial accounts, according to the Wall Street Journal, is about half as long as in some other types of tax cases.

Atlas Can't Be Found Among the Rich

Only 3 percent of the CEOs, upper management, and financial professionals were entrepreneurs in 2005, even though they made up about 60 percent of the richest .1% of Americans. A recent study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. Job creators come from the middle class.

So if the super-rich are not holding the world on their shoulders, what do they do with their money? According to both Marketwatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate.

Ayn Rand's hero John Galt said, "We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another." In his world, Atlas has it easy, with only himself to think about.

Is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Turning Out to Be a Another Billionaire Conservative?

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Sun, 12 May 2013 15:51:00 -0700

The causes he’s backing and political style signal a shift to the right.

The GOP billionaire’s club may have a new member: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg is registered to vote without picking a political party affilation and has been a participant at events with Obama where he put on a jacket and tie instead of a hoodie. But there seem to be a series of signs that he is drifting toward the GOP side of the aisle—and not just because he held a fundraiser for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie earlier this year.

Nor is it that Facebook’s PAC gave more money to Republicans than Democrats in 2012. The newest sign comes from the new lobbying group that he co-founded with other technology executives called Fwd.us. Their first moves resurrect old-school libertarian values: lifting immigration quotas for workers who could fill high-skill positions in technology manufacturing and information services, trashing health care reform and backing the Keystone XL pipeline.

Previous reports have speculated that Zuckerberg is a secret Republican, and Fwd.us—whose founding was announced with an op-ed by Zuckerberg in The Washington Post—is not behaving like the warm and fuzzy bipartisan entity that it website proclaims.

It doesn’t matter that Fwd.us has hired former Obama and Clinton White House staffers to appear to balance their Republican staff. Or that some of the executives on their page of supporters have been allied with Democrats in the recent past. Their political style is what you would expect Rand Paul followers; not Obama’s centrist Democratic Party.

Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and co-founder, told The New York Times that Fwd.us “needs to be ‘disruptive’ in politics, as in commerce.”

“In order to push Washington to do something different and pass major legislation like comprehensive immigration reform, groups like Fwd.us can’t just do the same thing over and over again and expect different results,” he said. “As part of our work, we’re using a wide variety of tactics, some of which may ruffle some feathers, but we believe passage of the bill will be worth it.”

“Worth it” is the key phrase here. Immigration reform for Silicon Valley means hiring a bottomless pool of foreign computer programmers and technologists without having to share the wealth created for better wages and benefits for the thousands of Americans working in the Valley who rent $2,000 a month one-bedroom apartments—and don’t have fat equity packages waiting to vest.

But back to Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder has not just shown that his instincts are leaning to the right by hosting fundraisers for Gov. Christie, or by letting his new group,Fwd.us, bankroll GOP groups that back the Keystone pipeline and attacked Obamacare.

Fwd.us executives were told that these stances would create blowback and they have. CredoAction, based in San Francisco, tried to buy Facebook ads criticizing the group’s politics and was denied. The Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn all said they’d stop buying Facebook ads, which has symbolic not economic value.

Meanwhile, the group has been unapologetic, even as other technology executives have pointed out that it’s far too secretive for their liking—such as backing GOP groups whose agendas have nothing to do with Fwd.us’s stated aims. On Friday May 10, Pay Pal co-Founder and Tesla Motors' big captain Elon Musk suddenly quit the Fwd.us group, explaining: "I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes."

In recent weeks, there have been a little-covered war in the upper echelons of the GOP—between Karl Rove’s camp and the Koch brothers—over who will build the party’s giant voter database to help it target voters and fine-tune its messaging in future elections. So far, it seems that Rove other San Francisco-based entrepreneurs are winning.

That raises another question about Zuckerberg. It’s not his ability to spend endlessly for whatever political causes he likes that’s scary—like Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson did during the 2012 presidential campaign for various Republicans. It’s the idea that Zckerberg could put Facebook’s data to use to for the party’s goals.

Sheldon Adelson is approaching his 80th birthday. But Zuckerberg is not yet 30. He’s going to be involved in politics for a very long time. And if he’s already drifting to the political right, well, that’s not something to like.

Tea Partyers Boycott Fox News for Being Too “Left”

Jillian Rayfield, Salon.com — Sun, 12 May 2013 15:24:00 -0700

A three-day boycott of the network protested a lack of coverage of the attacks on Benghazi, among other things.

A group of Tea Partyers organized a three-day boycott of Fox News in protest of its coverage of Benghazi, tepid opposition immigration reform, and in general “turning to the left” since the election.

David Freedlander of the Daily Beast reports:

The three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and is the second time this group of activists have gone Fox-free in an effort to steer the coverage. Organizers say a two-day boycott earlier this month knocked 20 percent off of the network’s regular viewership. (A Daily Beast analysis of the same data showed that the boycott had little effect.)
A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.
A leader of the boycott, Kathy Amidon, of Nashville, declined an interview, instead directing The Daily Beast to a website, Benghazi-Truth. The website, a single-page, 23,000-word manifesto complete with multicolored fonts, supposedly incriminating videos of Fox News’s complicity in a coverup, and communist propaganda photographs, is kept by someone who identifies himself online as “Proe Graphique,” and who other members of boycott described as someone who works “in New York media.”

“Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” Stan Hjerlied, one of the boycotters, told the Beast. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.”

“The more I research into Fox—I saw that they donate more to Democratic candidates than conservative or Republican candidates—I was like holy cow! Maybe they are just trying to snatch our pockets. Maybe they are just talking the talk, because it sure doesn’t look like they are walking the walk,” said another boycotter, Donnie Farner.

Cleveland Horror Caps Week of Violence Against Women

Leslie Savan, The Nation — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:06:00 -0700

These tales of misogyny should jolt us shine a stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there beneath the surface.

In just the last few days, we’ve seen a series of news stories involving violence against women. The violence comes in different forms -- physical, psychological, financial -- and from different quarters: a former school-bus driver in Cleveland, the NRA convention in Houston, the military, congress. And so it’s not surprising that the media, as usual, is delivering these stories as unrelated incidents. But arriving almost simultaneously, these tales of misogyny should jolt us all to connect the dots and to shine a stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there, just below the surface.

The story of the three Cleveland women who were found alive after being held captive (and, by all accounts, raped, beaten and bound) in a neighbor’s house for 10 years is the most shocking. The suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, reportedly let them outside only twice in all that time. Michelle Knight was 20 when she disappeared in 2002, Amanda Berry had been reported missing in 2003 when she was 16, and Gina DeJesus vanished at age 14 in 2004 on her way home from school. Berry’s mother died in 2006 of what friends say was “a broken heart” less than two years after a psychic on "The Montel Williams Show" told her Amanda was dead. DeJesus’ mother believed her daughter had been sold into the sex trade. On Monday, Berry and her 6-year-old daughter (possibly fathered by Castro) escaped with the help of neighbors Charles Ramsey and Angel Cordero. The other women came out shortly after. Berry and DeJesus are now home, while Knight remains in the hospital.

As this story unfolds, it will serve as fascinating cable TV filler: We’ll learn more of the horrific details and get to know the victims, their friends and families, and the suspect; we’ll urge neighbors to keep a closer eye on each other; and hopefully we’ll learn why the police didn’t follow earlier leads. But this shouldn’t be treated as just the latest incredibly sad and sensational crime story, as if it were devoid of social and political context -- or unrelated to the other news of anti-women violence that accompanied it this week.

When I first saw the photo of a freed Amanda Berry with her sister and daughter, and tried to imagine the women’s unimaginable captivity, I couldn’t get another set of images out of my mind -- that of the "Ex,” a target mannequin that squirts blood when you shoot her.

The Ex (variously called the "Ex-Girlfriend" and “Alexa”) is a large-breasted white woman, her clothes partly ripped off, and blood dripping from her mouth down her cleavage. The mannequinwas sold with other “bleeding zombie targets” at the NRA convention in Houston last weekend. A target mannequin that looks like Obama painted green (one happy customer calls him “Barry” in a video that has been removed) also made the news. Buzzfeed reported that the NRA asked the vendor, Zombie Industries, to remove it from display, but it continued to be sold, a reminder of the racism that fuels the pro-gun paranoia. But the NRA didn’t object to displaying the Ex, and she still appears on the company’s website, where one commenter writes, “This Zombie Bitch is awesome, reminds me of a girl I knew in High School.”

Up until yesterday Amazon was also selling the $89.99 product. (“Great for a bachelor party!” read the only five-star review. “This was a very original, cool way to kick off a bachelor party for a firearm enthusiast, such as myself.”)

Noting that "The Ex shooting target turns violence against women into a joke and promotes the idea that men should want to kill their ex-wives or ex-girlfriends,” the activist group Ultra Violet petitioned Amazon to stop selling it. In less than 24 hours, 63,000 people signed and the Ex was gone.

A similar, if real-life, ex target was Grimilda Figueroa, the former wife of kidnap suspect Ariel Castro. Castro was accused of beating Figueroa, breaking her nose twice, knocking out a tooth, dislocating her shoulders and threatening to kill her and their children, according to a filing in Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court. The filing also said that Castro “frequently abducts [his] daughters and keeps them from mother/petitioner/legal custodian.”

Figueroa’s brother, Jose Figueroa, told RadarOnline that in 1996, Grimilda and her children fled to a battered women’s shelter. “If she stayed with Ariel, he would have killed her,” Jose said. “She had gone to the hospital and called the police many times but they never did anything.” (Grimilda remarried and moved out long before Castro allegedly kidnapped the three women; she died of cancer last year.)

If Jose Figueroa’s account is accurate, his sister may have saved her life and her children’s, as so many abused women do, by finding refuge in a women’s shelter. But, as learned this week, men who abuse women will be able to corner them even more easily: The sequester is cutting some $20 million of funding for women’s shelters and protection programs over the next year.

Like all sequester cuts that don’t involve airplane delays, the cuts to shelters are not making the national news, but they are locally. From KSL.com in Utah:

Julee Smith, the director of Your Community Connection in Ogden, said she works with people every day who are running from violent situations. She said many abuse victims need a place to stay, and due to the lack of funding, she has had to start turning them away,
“We literally had a lady call, she had four children and begged to get in our shelter,” Smith said. “She said, ‘I have 45 minutes to get out.’ And we said ‘We’re sorry, we don’t have any room.’ And then the police call and say that she has been abused again.”

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones cites other shelters and domestic violence programs that are being reduced or completely eliminated in Louisiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Oregon and other states. “The projections are bleak,” he writes.

Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) office estimates that 70,120 fewer domestic violence victims will have access to recovery programs and shelters; 35,900 fewer people will get help obtaining non-shelter services such as restraining orders and sexual assault treatment. Cuts to programs related to the Victims Against Crime Act will hurt another 310,574 people.

This increased danger to women has been made possible by the same pols, mostly Republicans, who are too scared of the NRA to pass an expansion of background checks, checks that would block sales of guns to anyone convicted of domestic violence, among other crimes.

And you know that big-shock Pentagon report released Tuesday that estimates 26,000 sexual assaults took place in the armed forces in 2012, a 37 percent increase over 2010? The report that also said that fewer than 10 percent of the sex-assault cases end with a conviction at court-martial, while 62 percent of victims who dare to report an assault are rewarded with retaliation?

Well, expect those stats to get worse. The sequester is putting on hold Department of Defense plans to hire 829 “sexual assault response coordinators.” Army Secretary John McHugh and Chief of Staff Ray Odierno told the Senate Armed Forces Committee last month that sequestration will hurt efforts to reduce sexual harassment and assault in the Army in many ways, from “slowing hiring actions to delaying lab results, which hinders our ability to provide resolution for victims.”

Of course, as we also learned this week, the value of some of those sexual assault response coordinators is questionable to begin with. On Sunday, Lt. Col Jeffrey Krusinski, the chief of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program, was arrested in a northern Virginia parking lot for sexual assault. A police report says that Krusinski, 41, was drunk and had grabbed a woman’s breast and buttocks. She fought him off, and his mug shot has the cuts to prove it.

While millions of men worldwide and the institutionalized male establishment at large still believe it’s their right to subjugate women, let’s not leave the impression that only women are victims. In the Pentagon report above, an estimated 13,900 of the 1.2 million active duty men said they had experienced some form of sexual assault in the past year (a far smaller portion than the active duty women). About a quarter of the victims of non-family child abductions are boys. And from 1994 to 2010, about four in five victims of intimate partner violence were female, according to the Bureau of Justice stats. But that leaves one in five victims to be men.

As if to prove the exception to the female-victim rule, there’s Jodi Arias. She was found guilty this week of first-degree murder of her ex, Travis Alexander. It was a particularly gruesome murder, with a heavy sexual backstory. A media circus, led by CNN’s sister channel HLN, has been making ecstatic noises over the trial’s every salacious detail.

When the Cleveland story broke Monday, it was hard to tell if HLN resented it for overshadowing the climax of its Jodi Arias witch-burning or welcomed it as a replacement now that the Arias case is winding down.

But instead of another media circus over the story in Cleveland, let’s see if the media and its audience -- that is, all of us -- can more seriously address the violence against women that is woven into our culture and that politicians in Washington threaten to make worse.

Now They Want to Take Away the 8-Hour Day and 40-Hour Week

Dave Johnson, Truthout — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:47:00 -0700

House Republicans are pushing a bill that takes away extra pay for overtime, substituting "comp" time instead.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission. View the original article at TruthOut.org.

Republicans are trying to pass an "alternative" to overtime pay. This is really about taking away the eight-hour workday and 40-hour workweek. Will weekends be next? What about an "alternative" to paying workers at all?

House Republicans are pushing a bill that takes away extra pay for overtime, substituting "comp" time instead. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 is the law that brought us the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek. This law does not prohibit employers from requiring workers to work over 40 hours. Instead, it gives employers an incentive to instead pay extra or hire more people, and gives employees a premium if they do have to work longer. (Note that this is also the law that brought us a minimum wage and outlawed child labor.)

There is proof that overtime pay works: workers like domestic workers and agricultural workers - jobs not covered by the FLSA - are twice as likely to have to work more than 40 hours in a week. And even with this law, Americans already work more hours than in almost any other industrialized country.

The Bill - No Guarantees

The House will be voting on H.R. 1406, The Working Families Flexibility Act, which lets employers offer "comp time" instead of overtime pay. The problem is that employers will pressure workers to take comp time instead of overtime, which reduces paychecks and gets rid of the incentive to hire more people. Later, the employees will be pressured to not take that comp time, or will have to be "on call," etcetera.

It is important to note that the law does not guarantee workers the right to actually use the comp time they get instead of extra pay. Employers can put it off forever. You can't use this time when you want to, only when the employer decides it is okay.

This really is a flat-out pay take-away, can't use it another day.

Eileen Appelbaum of the Center for Economic and Policy Research drives this point home in her article "Working Families Flexibility Act: Not Good for Working Parents and Bad for the Economy," on The Huffington Post:

Employees cannot just take comp time when they need it. Rather, the bill lets an employer who receives a request for comp time decide when the employee gets to take it. The employer can even refuse the request and defer it to a later time if, in the employer's view, letting the employee take comp time will "unduly disrupt the operations of the employer."

Overtime Helps the Economy

We have a jobs emergency and Republicans are trying to get rid of one of the laws that causes employers to hire more people. Go figure. When employers require workers to work more than eight hours in a day or 40 hours in a week, they have to pay more than the regular wage for that extra time. This is a strong incentive to hire more people instead.

And when they don't hire more people, they pay a premium, which means regular people have more money to spend. Either way, it helps the economy. And of course, it really, really helps those workers.

Last year, USA Today took a look at overtime pay and found that productivity was rising, but as a result of squeezing workers for more hours. But employers were calling these workers "managers" to get out of paying overtime - and to get out of hiring more people.

The National Partnership for Women and Families has a fact sheet titled, "An Empty Promise: The Working Families Flexibility Act Would Give Workers Less Flexibility and Less Pay." It begins:

Despite its name, the Cantor/Roby Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013 sets up a dangerous false choice between time and money, when working families really need both. The bill does not promote family friendly or flexible workplaces. Instead, it would erode hourly workers' ability to make ends meet, plan for family time and have predictability, stability and true flexibility at work.

People Died to Get Overtime Pay

Leo Gerard points out that people died to get a 40-hour week, writing at Campaign for America's Future in "GOP Forcibly Making Working Families Flexible": "Trade unionists and labor rights activists died to achieve the goal of eight-hour days and 40-hour weeks. They were shot and beaten in the streets during demonstrations organized by the eight-hour movement. Their slogan was: "Eight hours for work; eight hours for rest; eight hours for what we will."

Veto Threat

President Obama issued a statement saying he will veto this bill if it is sent to him. The statement explains that this bill "undermines the existing right to hard-earned overtime pay, on which many working families rely to make ends meet, while misrepresenting itself as a workplace flexibility measure that gives power to employees over their own schedules."

If Congress wants to help working people and their families, they should instead raise the minimum wage, fund enforcement of laws against wage theft and other employer pay-stealing scams, and make it easier to join unions. That would show that they mean it. Taking away the 40-hour work week and giving it a nice-sounding name like Working Family Flexibility just does not cut it.

Failure to Pass Gun Legislation Casts Doubt on Immigration Bill's Success

Rory O'Connor, Al Jazeera — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:46:00 -0700

Despite broad support for immigration overhaul, warning flags are flying, and success is anything but guaranteed.

Meet the new bill... Same as the old bill?

In 2007, comprehensive reform of America's troubled immigration system seemed about to happen at long last. After all, the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act, crafted by a bipartisan team of legislators known as the "Gang of 12" and sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, was backed by then-President George Bush as well as the leaders of both major political parties in both houses of Congress. What could possibly go wrong?

Six years later, the answer is obvious. Far right-wing elements of the Republican party, coupled with conservative radio talk show hosts led by Rush Limbaugh, cynically re-framed the complicated legislation as simply providing amnesty - or "shamnesty" for "illegal immigrants", as they cleverly re-branded it the proposed bill.

But opponents to reform did not stop there. Ratcheting up the rhetoric, Limbaugh warned on his nationally syndicated radio programme that Mexican immigrants who illegally entered the US were not only "poor and unwilling to work", but also "a renegade, potential criminal element". Fellow shock jock Michael Savage went further, vowing to "derail this train of treason" and urging his listeners to "stop Bush from dropping the 'I Bomb' on America". Bill O'Reilly, another top-rated talker, said supporters of immigration reform "hate America, and they hate it because it's run primarily by white Christian men". O'Reilly added, "There is a movement in this country to wipe out 'white privilege' and to have the browning of America."

The hate speech, exaggeration and demagoguery did not end there, however. Even as some Republican lawmakers tried their best to placate the shock jocks, even to the point of accepting their ideas for amendments to the proposed legislation, others who stood up to them received only threats in return. Senator Mel Martinez, a conservative Republican from Florida, for example, received a threatening letter at his home. Senator Richard Burr, a conservative Republican from North Carolina, said his office received a telephone call that "made a threat about knowing where I lived". Several other senators, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, also received threats in letters and telephone calls. At least one email sent to senators was forwarded to law enforcement authorities, since it concluded by saying supporters of the bill "need to be taken out by any means".

"I'm sure a lot of people who have taken a high-profile position on this have been threatened," noted Senator Graham. "But what are you going to do?" What indeed? Ultimately, of course, the threats and raw political muscle used against the "shamnesty" bill proved successful, and any hope of comprehensive immigration reform was scuttled - until now.

Today, as conventional wisdom has it, comprehensive immigration reform in the US is once again about to become a reality - or is it? A bipartisan team of legislators - this time a "Gang of Eight" - has come together again to craft a careful compromise, one backed by the president and leaders of both parties. Despite this broad support for immigration overhaul, however, the warning flags are flying, and success is anything but guaranteed. This is particularly true in the wake of the recent inability of Congress to pass even modest gun legislation - not to mention the recent terrorist bombing in Boston by two recent immigrants to the US. As the New York Times recently reported: "The warning does not mean failure, especially since most Republicans believe that immigration changes, unlike gun legislation, would help them politically. But it does indicate that the road to consensus on immigration will be far bumpier than the narrative on Capitol Hill suggests."

The immigration bill, like the failed gun control legislation, has to first pass muster with the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the same partisanship that defeated the gun bill despite the fact that 90 percent of the American people favoured it, are now threatening to scuttle immigration reform as well. Several senators, including the lead Republican on the committee, Iowa's Charles Grassley, have already suggested that the bombings in Boston should become part of the immigration debate - a volatile notion in a country still scarred and preoccupied by the deaths and severe injuries caused by the attack.

Despite the apparent support for reform both in Congress and among the populace, there is still a very real chance that the new immigration deal will fall apart once again, just as in the past. Even if the Senate's "Gang of 8" is successful in keeping their end of the bargain together, there is still the politically-riven House of Representatives to factor in. Frank Sharry, the executive director of the immigrant advocacy group America's Voice, told the Times: "I think the opposition is counting on mistrust of government, hatred of Obama and the idea that Congress can’t get anything right to combine as the pathway to no."

Supporters of the reform point to its broad support from such disparate groups as the US Chamber of Commerce and labor unions. Nonetheless, as Sharry notes, "We have a real roller coaster ride ahead." The same was true in 2007, and the end result was that the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act was voted down and left for dead. Will it happen again?

Inside the Collapsing Media Empire of Deceased GOP Sleaze-Peddler Andrew Breitbart

Mark Ames, Max Blumenthal, Not Safe for Work Corporation — Sun, 05 May 2013 10:40:00 -0700

In the year after Breitbart's death, his heirs have produced a string of grotesque episodes that have embarrassed even their own impossible-to-shame allies on the right.

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.

This March was a cruel month for the American press. The 10th anniversary of the Iraq War briefly punctured the country's cultural amnesia, forcing hacks to sweat out another round of cringing mea culpas.

March was also the anniversary of another less epic media failure, but this one came and went without a whimper: The death of Andrew Breitbart, on March 1, 2012.

In the immediate aftermath of Breitbart's death last year, at age 43, the Beltway media reflexively whitewashed and glorified his work and legacy, canonizing a reactionary circus barker as some kind of American Icon, a gonzo iconoclast, a conservative punk rocker, or a "Zany, Magnetic Media Hacker," as Wired's Noah Shachtman put it. Publications ranging from Time, the Washington Post and Slate sang Breitbart's praises; scores of ambitious up-and-coming media figures burned both ends of the candle to compose the seminal Andrew Breitbart funeral tribute.

Some examples:

The Los Angeles Times: "His genius was rooted in the realization that in the new media universe, being outrageous often gets far more attention than being authoritative...In many ways, Breitbart was a throwback to the subversive media manipulators of the 1960s, especially counterculture provocateurs like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. They courted the media with bizarre antics. Breitbart often did the same."
Jack Shafer in Reuters: "I admired the way he ignored journalistic convention and the usual ethical standards to pursue the stories that were important to him. I admired his entrepreneurial approach to journalism and his disdain for the credentialed, self-important press corps."
Time: "Breitbart gave hard and must have expected to get it back hard. He came out of the American political tradition that if you cared about things, then you fought about them...Part of Breitbart's legacy is a rise in the power of openly partisan journalism outlets and contested news. But if another part of his legacy–as exemplified by the first reaction to his death–is a rise in skepticism, alertness and critical reading of the media, that's not entirely a bad thing.
The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza: "Andrew Breitbart was complicated. He clearly saw around the corner of where journalism was headed but the ways in which he used that insight rightfully raise questions about his ultimate motives... If you loved him, you really loved him. And if you hated him, well you really hated him. Having met Breitbart on a few occasions and corresponded with him infrequently over the years, I can't imagine he would want it any other way."

This is how the mainstream press describes great iconoclasts, not paid hatchet-men and extraction industry tools like Breitbart. It's uncanny how these major media obits synced with the rebel-washed image of himself that Breitbart pushed on the public, as for example this quote from his book "Righteous Indignation":

"My mission isn't to quash debate — it's to show that the mainstream media aren't mainstream, that their feigned objectivity isn't objective, and that open, rigorous debate is a positive good in our society. Man, how I long for the days of Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Abbie Hoffman, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce."

Slate's Dave Weigel quoted that very excerpt in his Breitbart obituary; what's interesting is Weigel's smart decision to edit the next sentence in that quote:

"Today, the only people upholding their free-speech legacies are conservatives like Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh."

Weigel's decision to edit out that sentence from his Breitbart quote changes everything — put that sentence in, and Weigel's Breitbart is suddenly a lot less interesting and unique and trailblazing. That edit was emblematic of the mainstream media's love affair with an otherwise garden variety GOP sleaze-peddler.

Breitbart, of course, had nothing in common with the comedians whose anti-establishment spirit he claimed to embody. Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce came up from poverty and overcame anti-Semitism and entrenched, violently enforced racism to wield their wit against powerful forces. Bruce was hounded throughout his career by the FBI, local cops and eventually blacklisted from nearly every comedy club in the United States. Whereas Breitbart collaborated with the FBI and New York police to spy on Occupy Wall Street protesters. Perhaps the only thing Bruce had in common with Breitbart, who spent his career in a mostly uncritical national limelight, was his untimely death at age 40 while in the throes of paranoia and emotional collapse.

Breitbart, the adopted son of a wealthy West Los Angeles restauranteur, used his privilege to immiserate the most marginalized, impoverished, widely demonized groups of Americans. He was a faithful errand boy for rich, Scrooge McDuck tycoons like Peter Thiel, Foster Friess, and the Koch Brothers, wielding smear journalism against anyone or any interest that threatened their power — usually African-Americans or groups like ACORN, serving impoverished, neglected inner city communities.

There was nothing innovative or new about Breitbart's smear operation. Indeed, he walked a trail blazed by the now-forgotten snitches and smear artists of the McCarthy era – quasi-eccentric figures like Matt Cvetic and Henry Matusow. Cvetic drank himself to death a few years after McCarthy's fall; while Matusow recanted, was jailed for perjury, and spent the last decades of his life begging for money and working as a clown for children's parties. Breitbart, for his part, collapsed on a sidewalk outside his home in Brentwood at the tender age of 43.

It will never be known if Breitbart's death was brought on by decades of Amy Winehouse-style partying around the glass coffee tables of West Hollywood – exactly the sort of practice that can transform a healthy heart into a dried apricot — or whether he succumbed to a "natural cause" like the hysterical, unchecked hatred that seemed to have consumed his entire, physically precarious being. Though he was the father of four young children, Breitbart seemed to have spent much of his time on Twitter, baiting his perceived enemies with scatological and graphically sexualized taunts. After 25,901 Twitter entries, Breitbart reached his tweet limit, leaving behind a vast right-wing online media empire that still remains largely unexamined.

While pundits gushed over Breitbart's provocations, ignoring race-baiting blunders like the Shirley Sherrod affair and whitewashing his increasingly unhinged behavior – "Stop raping people!" he bellowed at Occupy Wall Street protesters shortly before dropping dead — as a form of "political performance art," no one bothered asking what would come next. Who would take the reigns of Breitbart's websites and how would they preserve whatever undeserved credibility Breitbart managed to maintain in the eyes of the media, which proved to be easy prey to his bullying tactics?

Breitbart's Doomsday Machine

By now, it has become clear that in the months before his death, Breitbart had constructed a journalistic Doomsday Machine and programmed it for an apocalyptic episode of self-destruction. Perhaps it was convenient that Breitbart's heart exploded when it did; as a martyr, he did not have to witness the implosion of his media empire or bear the responsibility he deserved for its rapid demise.

In the year after Breitbart's death, his heirs and associates produced a string of grotesque episodes that have embarrassed even their own impossible-to-shame allies on the right, including:

Spreading the lie that Chuck Hagel took money from a non-existent group called "Friends of Hamas." What began as a New York Daily News reporter's burlesque joke-hypothetical question to a Senate staffer was recycled by Breitbart.com editor-at-large Ben Shapiro [see below] and reported as fact from "Senate sources." From Breitbart, the reporter's joke traveled onto the Senate floor and nearly sank Hagel's confirmation as Obama's new Defense Secretary. Even after the story was completely debunked and disavowed even by fellow right-wingers, Breitbart.com remains the only media outlet in the world that continues to stick by its debunked story;
In mid-March, Breitbart published a straight news story claiming that Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy. The story was sourced from an online news parody site, The Daily Currant;
Also in March, Breitbart's most famous protege, video smear-artist and convicted criminal James O'Keefe, wasforced to pay a six-figure settlement to one of the victims of his heavily-edited ACORN videos, which was deceptively re-edited to give the impression that ACORN employees were willing to participate in sex trafficking. ACORN was once a powerful community activist organization working in mostly poor minority communities. O'Keefe's video, which was heavily promoted by Breitbart, helped destroy ACORN and ruin the careers of many of its employees. Other lawsuits against Breitbart associates continue, including one filed by Shirley Sherrod, an African-American employee of the Department of Agriculture who was fired after Breitbart pushed a heavily-edited video manipulated to make Sherrod appear as if she was anti-white. O'Keefe's work has been underwritten by everyone from billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel to the billionaire Koch brothers and the billionaireFoster Friess;
At the most recent CPAC conference in 2013, Breitbart.com's sponsored panel bashing Muslims was considered too hateful and extremist by CPAC's organizers and banned from the official CPAC agenda — despite the fact that Breitbart News Network is a major sponsor of CPAC.

Pull the camera back a bit further, looking back on the year since Breitbart died, and the same pattern of appalling failure, journalistic fraud, and malevolence repeats itself on a broader scale. The actual record of Breitbart's legacy — not the manufactured, iconoclastic legacy cooked up by Breitbart's fanboys in mainstream media, but his real legacy — turns out to be much less than advertised.

What Breitbart really left behind is not so much a media business as an asylum for fringe-right degenerates, a motley collection of depraved losers, beer hall rage-a-holics and downright freaks offering themselves up as mercenaries for the rich and powerful, taking dirty jobs no one with a shred of self-respect would consider. As hired-assassins who couldn't hit the side of a barn if their lives depended on it, the unlikely heirs Breitbart once hired as sycophantic underlings come off as a comedy troupe of slapstick fascists — and it would be funny, if not for the powerful corporate forces sponsoring their attempts at sectarian smears and top-down class warfare.

"A Major Letdown"

The string of Breitbart.com's epic failures began with Andrew Breitbart's final act — what he promised would be his biggest bombshell of all, bigger than the Anthony Weiner boner-tweet, bigger than the destruction of ACORN or Shirley Sherrod. In a speech to the 2012 CPAC conference, Breitbart titillated his conservative groupies with what he said was video evidence that Barack Obama was a Manchurian candidate programmed and set upon America by Marxist Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. "Barack Obama was launched from Bill and Bernadine's salon. I was there," Breitbart snarled.

Looking haggard and swollen as he stood before the CPAC audience, slurring his words, Breitbart described the nefarious plot that his bombshell video would soon expose, bringing down the Obama presidency:

"the rest of us slept as they plotted, and they plotted, and they plotted and they oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in the Annenberg Challenge and they had real money, from real capitalists. Then they became communists. We got to work on that. That is a parenthesis. Barack Obama is a radical, we should not be afraid to say that!"

The speech was just inane and incoherent enough to be taken seriously by Glenn Beck. It should have been a warning sign; it should have been greeted with derision by everyone in the media purporting to do their job — but they were too enamored of Andrew Breitbart, too easily seduced by his marketing power, his "brand," his celebrity, his vulgar attempt at gonzo-McCarthyism... too intellectually insecure to dismiss Breitbart's fake populism for what it was: race-baiting corporate propaganda, handsomely rewarded.

Less than a week after Breitbart's heart popped like a water balloon, the heirs to his legacy were revealed on Fox News' Sean Hannity Show. Seated together in a remote studio were Breitbart's new editor-in-chief Joel B. Pollak, and his mini-me, a weasel-faced anti-masturbation crusader named Ben Shapiro. Before an utterly underwhelmed and clearly disappointed Hannity, the duo unveiled the dramatic Obama video.

What Breitbart's young heirs delivered — what Andrew Breitbart's corpse delivered, posthumously — turned out to be a monumental dud. The video showed President Obama as a Harvard law student, affecting the same relaxed, monotone-dull, soporific way of speaking that soothed voters in the 2008 election. The video needed explaining — the African-American Harvard Law professor, Derrick Bell, was a race- and class-war radical, Breitbart's heirs tried to argue. And Obama hugged him — and embraced him.

To the average viewer, it was hard to get worked up over an arcane doctrine called "critical race theory," which needed explaining. Jeremiah Wright's rants needed no explaining. But Derrick Bell's did.

The anti-Obama right was visibly angry. Hannity tried his best to contain his anger at Pollak and Shapiro, but fellow Fox commentator Juan Williams, the network's token liberal, called it a clunker right on the program:

"I must say, I thought this was going to be so much more," said Williams. "I thought this was going to be a smoking gun... But it really didn't come to much."

Even Glenn Beck was sorely disappointed — and his bar is notoriously low — telling his radio listeners:

"The Obama college tape — wasn't that a major letdown? I mean I feel bad for Andrew that that was the thing that came out right after [he died] because it was a little disappointing. I think that's because, you know, if you die you say to your wife, ‘Oh honey, I have something really important to tell you, don't let me forget.' And then you go and die. And then she finds the note. And it's like, ‘Please remind me, I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow.' That's really kind of disappointing, you know. Because you're like, ‘I thought he had something really important to tell me.' ... This thing came out and it was like, ‘The. Last. Story. Andrew. Breitbart. Did: Very. Important. Video.' And you're like...[shakes head ‘sadly, no'] ‘Not so much.'"

And from there, it's been all downhill for Breitbart.com.

Indentured Servitude Limbo

Part of the problem was the "talent" charged with pitching and selling the video to the public. Leaving aside whatever demons Breitbart battled with and lost, his legacy is a company racked with infighting, lawsuits, scandals, embarrassments, and is staffed at key levels with sexual predators, police informants, and genocidal sociopaths.

Right-wing radio host Dana Loesch, editor-in-chief of Breitbart's "Big Journalism" site, would have been the closest thing to a number-two presentable face after Breitbart himself. But weeks before Breitbart died, Loesch had been put out to pasture from her brief stint as a CNN contributor after she came out in support of defiling enemy corpses. Early in 2012, US Marines in Afghanistan photographed themselves defiling and urinating on Taliban corpses, in violation of American military and international law; Loesch went on the air supporting the soldiers, adding that she too would gladly pull her pants down and defile their corpses if given the chance:

"I'd drop trou and do it too."

Andrew Breitbart stood by Loesch, but he was alone; even Rush Limbaugh denounced the corpse defiling.

Problems with Loesch only got worse after Breitbart's demise, culminating in a lawsuit she filed in late 2012, accusing Breitbart's heirs of "forcing her into ‘indentured servitude limbo.'" Loesch's lawsuit asked for a relatively modest $75,000 in compensation (given Breitbart's billionaire sponsors), and demanded that Breitbart.com LLC release her from her contractual duties.

Loesch's lawsuit, filed at the end of 2012, offers a rare insight into the chaotic and poisonous corporate culture that Andrew Breitbart left behind.

The lawsuit describes Breitbart.com LLC as "poorly managed" and describes Breitbart's heirs as a "vindictive party" determined "to sabotage the reputation and career" of Dana Loesch.

Claiming that she'd been identified as "the face of the Breitbart empire" in the fall of 2012, Loesch's lawsuit alleges "internal difficulties the new company had with managing the media ‘empire'" and claimed "the working environment for Loesch became increasingly hostile."

Loesch claimed her contract allowed her to terminate their agreement with a 30-day written notice; Breitbart.com LLC responded that she was bound by the contract to continue with Breitbart.com, yet at the same time, denied her access to the website, effectively muzzling the media company's only media semi-celebrity.

With Loesch out of the picture, the "face of Breitbart.com" title has mostly gone to the same two clowns — Joel Pollak and Ben Shapiro — who botched the Obama student video on the Sean Hannity Show, and started Breitbart down the long slide into the fringe-right margins.

And that is just how Pollak and his little sidekick Shapiro, a pair of ambitious celebrity-seekers, like it. Pollak and Shapiro both harbor deluded fantasies of becoming the telegenic faces and voices of the conservative movement. The only thing holding them back: their faces and voices.

The Dorm Troll

Joel Pollak was born in South Africa, and moved to suburban Chicago at a young age, becoming a US citizen by age 10. Pollak enrolled in Harvard in the mid-90s, telling a local paper that his dream was to become the Ted Koppel of his generation, with his own TV program like Nightline. It explains a lot — as the idealistic part of that dream soured, all that has remained is the childhood ambition to be a TV talking head; the content is fungible.

In every way Joel Pollak of the 1990s was a different creature, conforming to the politics and mood of the Clinton era: Photographs of Pollak as an undergrad show him proudly sporting an expansive "Jewfro" — he looks much happier and almost likeable, if not human, in his Jewfro. Pollak was a Democrat student activist in his undergrad years. Another photograph shows young Joel Pollak, with his Jewfro cropped, smiling as he screams in unison with other pro-Clinton activists protesting against the Clinton impeachment hearings.

We spoke to several former Harvard classmates of Pollak. Each offered a uniform description of an extremely aggressive, often blundering, always self-promoting character who knew no shame. One former classmate who knew him during his undergraduate years and then during his time at Harvard Law School told us the young Pollak idolized Cornel West, the former Harvard African-American studies professor, socialist activist and critical race theory proponent.

"He absolutely loved Cornell West. He would try to present himself to us as West's darling. Some Harvard students like to collect relationships with famous professors so it was also part of that."

In 1999, Pollak graduated Harvard, and moved back to his native South Africa, where he remained until at least 2006, working as a speech writer for a controversial white, Jewish South African politician, Tony Leon, who was accused by top ANC politicians,including former President Thabo Mbeki, of racism. Leon inherited a party that had been known for its comparatively progressive politics during the apartheid-era, merged it with the pro-apartheid National Party, and made race-baiting and fear a cornerstone of his politics.

It was while working for Leon that Pollak met his future wife, Julia Bertlesmann.

Bertelsmann was the daughter of Tony Leon's close friend, Rhoda Kadalie Bertelsmann, herself a well-known columnist and political activist with neoliberal leanings. After apartheid collapsed, Rhoda Kadalie turned against the ANC and "majoritarian" politics, favoring instead the neoliberal politics of Tony Leon's party, and its alignment with Ariel Sharon and George Bush. As the ANC veered the country away from the special alliance it enjoyed with Israel during the apartheid era, Kadalie Bertelsmann emerged as one of South Africa's most fervent apologists for the Israeli government, authoring a series of op-eds condemning critical comparisons of Israeli policies towards Palestinians to those of apartheid-era South Africa.

Before falling under the sway of Tony Leon's race-baiting neocon politics, Pollak was a Clinton Democrat. When he left South Africa in 2006, Pollak says, he had become an opponent of the concept of majority rule — which in the context of South Africa means opposing black rule.

No surprise then that Pollak explicitly equated his opposition to majority rule (i.e. black rule) to his opposition to America's first black president, which he describes in "Proud To Be Right":

"I saw in Barack Obama's presidency the roots of a cult of personality. I recognized in the Democrats' eager rush to consolidate political power, and to expand rapidly the role of the federal government in the American economy — adangerous majoritarian impulse that our Constitution, and my experience in South Africa, warned against."

Pollack's return to the US coincided with Bertlesmann – then 18 or 19, and Pollack a decade older – enrolling in Harvard. Pollack didn't just follow his future wife to Harvard, but according to former classmates, he also moved in to her dormroom, along with her teenage friends.

As one former Harvard student described the situation to us:

"When she was an undergrad, they were living together in her dorm room. From what I heard, it was something that people in the house there thought was kind of strange. An older law student always being there all the time with these younger students—and being his usual obnoxious self who was not even low key.
"I know a few people who know Julia [Bertelsmann]…and the consistent theme is there was this really smart, promising, beautiful high school student and somehow she ended up with this guy. Dot, dot, dot, question mark – what's up with that? It might be part of [Pollak's] personality. He sees something he wants and goes for it."

It was at Harvard, where he had enrolled at law school, that Pollak authored a new book denouncing Obama's election victory, "Don't Tell Me Words Don't Matter: How Rhetoric Won The 2008 Presidential Election."

"He goes up against someone big and tries to puff himself up," the former classmate told us. "That's kind of his formula."

Ignored even by fellow right-wingers, Pollak's book on Obama was published by an obscure, Illinois based company specializing in medical textbooks, HC Press — which happens to be owned by Joel's parents, Raymond and Naomi Pollak. The future heir to the Breitbart empire was over 30 years old, living in his girlfriend's college dorm, and tapping his parents' money to attack welfare and Big Government handouts.

On campus, Pollak took on the role of ultra-Zionist enforcer, working closely with the pro-Israel super-lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to stamp out any iterations of Palestine solidarity activity. Pollak's pro-Israel histrionics were on most vivid display in a class taught by Harvard law professor Duncan Kennedy, one of the most influential and renowned legal theorists of the past few decades.

Pollak and Dershowitz both loathed Duncan Kennedy's politics, a loathing made clear by Pollak's own personal blog rants at the time. Despite that hostility (and the waiting list) Prof. Kennedy made sure that Pollak was enrolled in his class, and he hired Pollak his research assistant. On his personal blog "Guide To The Perplexed," which still stands as a record of his strange college years, Pollak blogged critically, almost obsessively about Kennedy.

Fellow law students recalled how a class debate on whether armed resistance by a theoretical occupied population was permissible set off Pollak into one of his notorious fits of histrionics.

According to one classmate, "He came back to class a week later and slammed a hunk of metal on the table and started shouting, ‘This is what you people are justifying! You are supporters of terrorism! This is piece of a Qassam rocket that's fallen near [the Israeli city of] Sderot!' Basically his behavior was embarrassing even to the other Zionists in the course."

The classmate added, "[Pollak] is just someone who, in everything he did, speaking as someone who's known him over the years, the persistent characteristic is a very, very deep lack of inhibition or shame." He added, "I don't know if it's because he received too much positive reinforcement as a child or what. And in a way, it's kind of admirable – he's always willing to say something no matter how ridiculous or inappropriate it might be in the circumstances."

In 2010, after graduating from law school, Pollak declared his candidacy for Congress as a Tea Party challenger against Democratic, Chicago-area stalwart Jan Schiakowsky. Despite an endorsement from his former taskmaster Dershowitz, a desperate deployment of his mixed-race wife to brand himself as an enlightened moderate, and an embarrassing but highly entertaining song routine (imagine a Teabagger's version of that folk singer from Animal House), Pollak was trounced. He failed in an election where nearly every half-baked Tea Party challenger destroyed Democratic opponents. That should have been an ignominious end to his career, but then Breitbart came along with a liferaft.

From Harvard Law graduate to abject political failure, Pollak was recruited by Breitbart to help edit his growing portfolio of right-wing smear sites. And it is there that Pollak's story of shamelessness, bizarre twists and ethically dubious behavior reached wild new lows.

Genocide Ben

Since Breitbart's death, Breitbart.com has been defined almost as much by Pollak as it has by his tightly wound little sidekick, Ben Shapiro, now the site's editor-at-large.

"I know this sounds pathetic, but I've never been to a rock concert" --Ben Shapiro, June 17, 2011

Ben Shapiro — known variously as "Virgin Ben," "Tali-Ben," or simply "Genocide Ben" — has constructed for himself a biography that makes him look like some sort of prodigy wunderkind. One thing Ben wants to stress is that he was 16 years old when he started college at UCLA.

"I'm twenty-one years old, a heterosexual red-blooded American male, a graduate of University of California at Los Angeles, a student at Harvard Law School, a nationally syndicated columnist, a bestselling author...and a virgin. And I'm proud of it." —Ben Shapiro, "Porn Generation"

Ben Shapiro's most useful talent is that he makes Joel Pollak look sane, cool and relaxed. Shapiro's job is to fidget nervously while holding his tongue, like his bladder's about to explode through his nose — providing needed contrast to Pollak.

As boy-wonder prodigies go, Ben Shapiro sure picked a shitty career path. A real prodigy would've pursued a mad artistic or science dream, or cashed in by taking a job in finance or management consulting; but Ben chose to be a lowly Republican errand boy instead, taking an almost masochistic pleasure in making as much of an ass of himself as is humanly possible.

"There are at least 100,000 child pornography websites available on the Internet. Also available: incestuous porn, bestial porn, and with extreme commonness, ‘virgin' porn — for those guys who like to pretend that their fetish girls really haven't done anything before taping a hard core sex video. ‘Schoolgirl' porn is especially typical — from ‘first-time lesbian' schoolgirls to ‘organ' schoolgirl porn. The ‘college roommates' idea is also big; lesbian porn between co-eds is insanely popular. The idea that the porn industry doesn't push men to look at fifteen- to eighteen-year-old girls as sex objects is ridiculous." —Ben Shapiro, "Porn Generation"

Some of what Ben Shapiro publishes is fascinating for the sheer Freudian freakshow entertainment value. Some are downright bizarre and raise all sorts of obvious questions, as in "How did Harvard let a deranged lughead like the author of this piece into its esteemed law school?" For example, this Ben Shapiro-authored attack on the Supreme Court. It's a piece of pure meatheadery, beginning with the headline, "When Justices Become Dictators." It begins:

"This week, the Supreme Court of the United States once again proved that it is a feckless, dictatorial and altogether ridiculous body. Its latest spate of decisions reveals legislative usurpation, disingenuous deference and silly inconsistency. But, of course, what else should we expect from the court that tells us our Constitution protects pornography but not political advertising, sodomy but not the Ten Commandments, and mentally disabled murderers but not private property?"

Prose that deranged and clunky wouldn't grade a "C" in your average Californian community college expository writing course. But apparently Harvard Law School's admission committee read that and thought, "We have our new Oliver Wendell Holmes!" Either that, or Harvard Law has a quota for fringe-right nutcases like Shapiro.

That's the black comedy side of Ben Shapiro's punditry. But there's a darker side to Shapiro's writing that reveals him as much worse than a mere silly nutcase. Ben Shapiro is on record advocating genocide against Palestinian Arabs in Greater Israel. Advocating genocide is considered a war crime — Nazi journalists were hung in Nuremberg for advocating genocide, and Hutu media personalities who advocated genocide in Rwanda have also been charged with genocide.

Yet that didn't stop Harvard Law School's Ben Shapiro from penning a column, "Transfer Is Not A Dirty Word," calling for ethnic cleansing — which is legally classified as genocide and a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Here is Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large at Breitbart, advocating genocide:

"Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It's an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. Any time the Jews get wise and threaten mass expulsion of Arabs, the Arabs pull out their big stick, equating Nazism with Zionism... Their spokespeople cry 'Genocide!' And the Jews cower in fear that they could be equated with their parents' murderers. The Jews don't realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements. It's time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn't a solution."

Actually it is genocide. And it's the reason why Ben Shapiro came to be known as "Genocide Ben."

Here, then, is Andrew Breitbart's true legacy: His two leading heirs, Joel Pollak and Genocide Ben Shapiro, stepping in as the new faces of Breitbart.com to unveil the Obama student video that Andrew himself promised would bring down Obama's presidency, just as he helped bring down ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, Andrew Weiner, and a handful of tweedy NPR executives.

But without Breitbart's privileged Brentwood demeanor to make the smearing appear vaguely respectable, the Breitbart.com operation is being pushed further into the margins of its own conservative movement, as evidenced when CPAC banished this year's Breitbart hate seminar to the unofficial margins of the CPAC convention, which already had enough hate and racism on its agenda.

Last Refuge Of A Daily Caller Scoundrel

What's most fascinating about Breitbart's legacy is that these two central characters — Joel B. Pollak and Ben Shapiro — are the best they have to offer. Look at the layer below them in the Breitbart media group, and it's like pulling up the rotted, vermin-infested floorboards in a rotted old swamp shack —where degenerates and quasi-fascist maniacs permeate the entire Breitbart culture. Here you get a look at the late Andrew Breitbart's true personal sensibility, through the pathological tendencies of his chosen heirs. The minions who comprise the Breitbart community include:

John Nolte, Breitbart.com editor and blogger. Has repeatedly called for murdering teachers and mothers. During Occupy protests in November 2011, Nolte tweeted, "Teachers who take kids to protests without parents' permission should be murdered." In April 2012, he responded to an HBO comedy show gag involving a young girl bywriting, "whoever this little girl's stage mom is… she should be murdered." When police violently cracked down on Occupy protests, Nolte was sexually aroused: "Dirty, filthy #OWS hippies getting what they deserve from cops = MY PORN"; "Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes. Dirty, filthy hippies arrested with bruises and gashes…"; "sniff sniffThere's just something about a police baton swung towards the skull of #OWS that sniff chokes a man up.#ItsSoBeautiful".
Jeff Dunetz: Breitbart.com blogger nicknamed "Yid With Lid," Dunetz, has accused practically everything alive or dead of "anti-Semitism", from Media Matters and George Soros, toPresident Obama, and even corporations like Delta Airlines.
Kurt Schlichter, Breitbart.com columnist. Advocated mass-murdering peaceful American protesters on board a flotilla sent to Gaza to protest Israel's blockade; urged conservatives to arm themselves and prepare for war against the left because "Leftists want us dead. D-E-A-D."
Ali Akbar, Breitbart columnist and head of Breitbart.com-associated outfit the National Bloggers Club, is a convicted felon who was jailed and put on probation for four years for credit card fraud, vehicle burglary, and intent to commit theft.
Brandon Darby, FBI informant who infiltrated young anarchist protest groups and ratted them out, leading to arrests and jail time for his former friends. Darby also spied on an Arab-American school teacher and peace activist, Riad Hamad, whom Darby claimed had asked him to launder money for Middle East terrorists. Not long afterwards, Hamad's corpse was fished out of a lake, his arms bound and his mouth duct-taped; police ruled it a suicide. After Darby outed himself as an informant, Andrew Breitbart brought him into his close circle of friends, and had Darby accompany him in public demonstrations in support of the Koch brothers.
James O'Keefe, convicted of attempting to illegally spy on a US Senator and forced to pay large settlements to victims of his manipulated videos which destroyed the livelihoods of several people.
Lee Stranahan: Breitbart.com blogger who spent years peddling photographs specializing in many of Genocide Ben's favorite fetishes, including bondage and S&M, and Ben's fave,schoolgirl lesbian fetishes. Stranahan covered the Steubenville rape trial for Breitbart.com, tweeting out his belief that the rape of the 16-year-old schoolgirl was not "brutal" and that many women tell him that their rapes are not "brutal" but merely "non consensual." During the Trayvon Martin murder trial hearings last summer, Stranahan outed the name of a witness who claimed she'd been sexually abused by Martin's killer.

If there's one thing Breitbart's heirs can be thankful for, it's that there'll always be an endless stream of degenerate right-wing failures looking for an asylum they can call home. And Breitbart.com will be there to welcome them in, weaponize them for the wealthy right-wing, and turn them on the rest of us.

Recently, the Breitbart.com Asylum welcomed another inmate:Matthew Boyle, the discredited author of the Daily Caller's fraudulent smear articles against Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey. Boyle's article for the Daily Caller alleged that Sen. Menendez paid Dominican prostitutes for sex. That story was subsequently completely debunked by The Washington Post, after the prostitutes confessed that they were paid to lie about Menendez.

A Dominican prosecutor accused the Daily Caller of paying the prostitutes $5,000 to lie about Sen. Menendez and the site has since distanced itself from that fiasco.

The author of that smear, Matthew Doyle, today proudly describes his current job as "investigative journalist for Breitbart News Network."

AlterNet.org: Tea Party and the Right

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