That didn’t take long. Katherine Harris won’t spend all the her money after all. Only her liquid assets.
Open for reasonable speculation.
Just what is prosecutor Brian Cavanagh telling us here?
Context: Brian Cavanagh is prosecuting the three men charged in the killing of erstwhile Abramoff business partner Gus Boulis. The article is about whether lawyers for the defendants will subpoena Abramoff and Adam Kidan to testify.
The chief prosecutor in the case, Brian Cavanagh, said his office had not intended to call Abramoff as a witness in part because he would be given immunity from prosecution for anything he says under those conditions. Cavanagh also said Kidan has not been cleared as a suspect in the Boulis slaying.
Thoughts?
Black helicopters (from the New York Post) …
A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday.
Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen “KT” McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:
“Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures,” according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event.
“She wasn’t joking, she was very, very serious, and she also claimed that Clinton’s people were taking pictures across the street from her house in Manhattan, taking pictures from an apartment across the street from her bedroom,” added the eyewitness, who is not involved in the Senate race.
Uh boy …
A TPM Reader graces us with his recollection of his quality time with Neil Bush and his junk educational software company Ignite! …
The funniest thing is not that Neil Bush is trying to sell his educational software company to statesmen and business leaders– it’s that he’s wandering around schools, begging anyone who comes his way. I met him last year, when he came to the junior high where I teach. I talked to him for about an hour, in which he showed me some of the animations his company produces (think “DNA…Chromosomes” over a fake alt-rock beat), and tried to talk us into taking a (appparently free) version of the company’s “Purple Cow” product– basically a LCD projector and laptop (with a few hundred animations on its hard-drive), packaged together into a “fuck-with-proof” box (his words, not mine.) “You gotta eliminate the FWF, the fuck-with-factor, know what I mean.” I was worried that if I took the product (Retail $13000, apparently), there’d be Barbara Bush and USA Today appearing in my classroom to watch the magic effects of “DNA… Chromosomes… DNA… Chromosomes.” I think he took the hint, and one of the more indelible images since I became a teacher was that of Neil Bush, 6’3″ in an incredibly expensive suit, wading through a swarm of yelling, jostling, jumping, bothering 13-year-olds, just released from 6th period, blissfully unaware of his proximity to power, as he struggled towards the wrong exit, as confused about the geography of the Lower East Side as he apparently was about the content of the science software he was trying to sell, failing the “sample quizzes” that came with the animations, unable to remember his password to log into the online site, repeating over and over again “Leave that to the eggheads. I failed all this stuff when I was in school.”
Like his brother, though of much less internationally cataclysmic importance, Mr. Bush came across for that hour as an incredibly genial and easy-going guy, but with something missing, like when you meet former junkies or coke-heads. Anyways, whether or not the Purple Cow took flight, I found a DVD version of the animations online last month for $10 and showed some of them to my class. They liked them. Shows me.
In case you missed it, on Friday TPMmuckraker.com’s Paul Kiel put together this partial list of the cast of characters who’ve seen fit to invest in Neil’s operation.
On the front page of tomorrow’s Washington Post, Jeffrey Smith has a lengthy and detailed article about how Tom Delay’s one-time Chief of Staff and later lobbyist/advisor, Ed Buckham, used the US Family Network as a front group for the purpose of laundering money from Jack Abramoff’s clients into Buckham’s own hands.
The broad outlines of the story aren’t different from what we already knew — largely from Smith’s December 2005 piece on the same subject. But he provides copious new detail about the audacity of Buckham’s own methods of personal enrichment and fairly brazen violation of at least the US tax code.
For my money, the most shocking relevations are still those uncovered in Peter Stone’s recent (print only) piece in National Journal (summarized here by Paul Kiel). Using the US Family Network front, DeLay and Buckham arranged officials favors for shadowy Russia ‘energy and security’ executives in exchange for large cash payments laundered through US Family Network.
One nugget to consider. Like Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) and Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY), Buckham siphoned off funds off of political contributions and converted them into personal income by having his wife take ‘commissions’ for a nominal role as fundraiser. Her cut was 10%.
In 1997, for instance, on $524,975 contributed by a handful of Abramoff clients, Wendy Buckham pocketed $43,000 in ‘commissions.’
Tales from the meltdown (from the Orlando Sentinel’s Jim Stratton) …
U.S. Senate candidate Katherine Harris slogged through another political morass Saturday when she suggested that one of her most senior advisers had fed embarrassing information to the press.
Appearing at a gun show in Orlando, Harris said that Adam Goodman, her longtime media consultant, had told the St. Petersburg Times that he and chief strategist Ed Rollins were leaving the campaign.
The story, Harris said, was wrong.
“Ed is not leaving my campaign,” the Longboat Key Republican said. “Ed Rollins is very committed to my campaign.”
The two-term congresswoman, who is challenging Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, then accused Goodman of spreading the story.
“That article basically came from Adam,” Harris said, “and it was not accurate.”
Asked whether Goodman was still with the campaign, she said: “He is, is, uh . . . heh . . . no comment.”
Harris’ remarks were surprising, because Goodman has worked with Harris for years and is considered one of her closest advisers. The candidate’s words became puzzling when Harris phoned the Orlando Sentinel an hour later with a different story.
She said Goodman was still with the campaign and said “it was wrong” of her to say he leaked information.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said.
Harris could not explain the change or make clear why she had first refused to say whether Goodman was still working with her.
“I don’t even know,” she said. “That is so not like me.”
And from yesterday’s St. Petersburg Times …
As Katherine Harris’ rocky Senate campaign takes an increasingly evangelical Christian bent, her remaining top campaign staffers are preparing to jump ship.
Colleagues say Harris’ closest confidante lately appears to be spiritual adviser Dale Burroughs, founder of the Biblical Heritage Institute in Bradenton.
“Dr. Dale,” as she is known among campaign staffers, describes herself as a licensed clinical pastoral counselor who counsels in behavior temperament, career, crisis and disaster, among other things.
Burroughs has been advising Harris for years, but lately has had a more prominent role as Harris stopped listening to other campaign advisers. Burroughs said she has little role in the campaign beyond helping reach out to religious voters and is merely a Bible study partner and close friend.
Friends and advisers say Harris has been deeply religious all her life, but religion recently has become a central part of her campaign. Campaign staffers warily describe Harris as leading a “Christian crusade.”
“It was always part of the background, but it was never an integral part of the campaign. It never engulfed her,” said former campaign manager Jim Dornan, who quit the campaign in November but keeps in touch with staffers. “She’s grasping for a pillar she thinks this campaign can be raised on.”
Her top campaign advisers, having failed to persuade Harris to drop her struggling campaign against Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson, are preparing to leave. Those include Ed Rollins, a highly regarded GOP strategist and her top campaign adviser; Adam Goodman, her longtime Tampa-based media consultant; and campaign manager Jamie Miller. Harris has been aggressively campaigning for support among religious conservatives, hitting large churches and headlining a “Reclaiming America for Christ” conference in Broward County last weekend. She told hundreds of attendees she was “doing God’s work” with her campaign.
Sounds like it’s about time for an intervention, doesn’t it?
“The Founders Never Imagined a Bush Administration” by Joyce Appleby and Gary Hart.
Yep, institutionalizing a ‘guest worker’ type program in the US would give us the worst of all worlds as immigration policy goes. Citizenship matters; and it should be the basis of any good immigration policy.
Texas yanks Tom DeLay’s Concealed Carry permit. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.