Ronnie Earle looking at campaign finance records of Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt?
TPM Double-Alert!
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Yesterday I got an email from a reader from New Orleans who said, in so many words, Don’t forget about us.
In recent weeks I’ve gotten several notes like this from Louisiana readers telling me that for all the big talk back in September the Bush administration has all but forgotten about any commitment to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the affected area.
In truth, though, in our own little way, we have too — we being this website. Some of that is a simple shortage of hours in the day. We’re gearing up to hire two blogger-reporters, as we’ve told you. But not having more than one person doing the writing doesn’t entirely excuse it. It’s just too easy for everyone to let stories like ths fall to the background once the big headlines are gone. So we’ll try to do better.
Having criticized the president, let me note prominently that just today the White House has announced its support for a $3.1 billion plan to rebuild the city’s levee system. $1.5 billion is new and that is on top of $1.6 billion already committed.
US News’ Julian Barnes has been blogging from on the ground in Iraq recently. And today he has a report on voting in Mosul.
New Hampshire phone-jammer Tobin guilty on two counts, say our sources.
Late Update: We’ve got this triple sourced. So I think this one’s a done deal.
The Patriot Act renewal battle comes down to the wire. Sen. Feingold has an update.
Yes, TPM Muckraking Fund fundraiser goes down into its final hours.
Now, with James Tobin’s conviction in the New Hampshire phone-jamming case late this afternoon, DOJ lawyers plan to lean on him to flip on folks higher up the ladder in the GOP. So there’s even more muck coming down the pike.
President Bush says Congress saw the same intelligence he did in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. So Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked the non-partisan Congressional Research Service to look into the matter and report back whether or not what the president said is true.
They reported back today. The verdict: not true.
Ahhh, what a fun way to start the day, with the coming together of two of my favorite beats — OpEd payola and the Abramoff scandal.
In Business Week this morning, Eamon Javers reports that two noted conservative columnists — Doug Bandow of Cato and noted Social Security privatization advocate Peter Ferrara — both accepted cash payments from Jack Abramoff to write columns favorable to his clients.
The revelation has caused Bandow to resign from Cato. But Ferrara, who is now at the Institute for Policy Innovation, says “I do that all the time,” Ferrara says. “I’ve done that in the past, and I’ll do it in the future.”
Now, I used to follow the OpEd payola story pretty closely. (Here are a few examples of posts on the topic from previous years.) And I have to say that when Ferrara implies that this is a common practice, boy is he right, particularly on the right. There are even shops in DC that specialize in ginning up bogus ‘man on the street’ opeds which they then get placed on major oped pages. Another area where my reporting showed this to be very common was among foreign lobbyists, a number of whom had ex-foreign service officers and various other foreign policy bigwigs on retainer to write opeds advocating on behalf of their clients. Actually, ‘write’ overstates the matter. The lobbying firm writes the OpEd and the expert signs it.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Abramoff dabbled in this racket. But now that I think about it, I can’t imagine why it hadn’t. If he had these two on the payroll, there must be many, many more.
Now, before I end this post, let me make one important distinction. Everybody knows that most major politicians have speechwriters. And we don’t see anything untoward about that. When a major pol writes an OpEd most people understand that either a speechwriter or policy staffer either helped craft the words or got the ideas from the pol and wrote the piece which the pol then signed. Again, I don’t think that shocks anyone. When I said there are shops in DC which specialize in this sort of thing, this ‘speech writing’ sort of OpEding is not what I’m talking about.
What I’m talking about is when, say, the American Federation of Hot Dog Manufacturers wants to beat some new regulation. So they hire a shop in DC which then goes out and finds some sidewalk hot dog vendor and offers to pay him a couple grand if he’ll pretend to be the author of an OpEd saying how the new regs will drive his hot dog stand out of business. They then shop it to one of the conservative OpEd pages which are known to be an easy mark for this sort of scam.
Like I said, there are shops in DC who specialize in that sort of thing.