Looks like voting rights bamboozler and US Atty firing bigwig Bradley Schlozman may be looking at a wee bit of legal trouble.
As you know, Tim Russert, NBC Washington Bureau Chief and moderator of Meet the Press since 1991, died suddenly last Friday at the age of 58. We remember him in today’s Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
Scott Bloch, if you’ll recall, was among other things nominated for a Golden Duke for Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah for taking his computer hard drive to Geeks on Call for a scrubbing to stymie investigators. Bloch is the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an administration office charged with protecting federal whistleblowers. But he actually spent most of his time either ignoring whistleblowers or retaliating against them. But he ended up ignoring most whistleblowers and actually ginning up a bogus investigation of the Bush White House in order to shield himself from investigations.
It perhaps sums up Bloch’s tenure best to say that he was such a bamboozler that he managed the almost unimaginable feat of making the Bush White House the legitimate victim of a bogus corruption investigation.
Now it turns out that the very-thin-skinned Bloch was in the habit of ordering subordinates in his office to visit the websites of news outlets that ran critical articles about him and writing anonymous comments attacking the articles and praising Bloch’s work. We’re going to do some poking around to see if Bloch’s underlings were praising the boss on the TPMMuckraker articles as well.
Last week we reported on Samuel Israel III, the hedge fund scammer who fleeced his clients of almost half a billion dollars. He abandoned his car near Bear Mountain Bridge with the words “suicide is painless” scrawled across the hood. The feds have decided he’s not so dead after all, notwithstanding the good M.A.S.H allusion.
From the Times …
The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.
The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.
Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”
Condi Rice gives her blessing to power-sharing pact with Hezbollah.
I won’t bore our non-journalist readers by recounting in any great detail the shop talk from IPI Conference here in Belgrade. But a couple of points that might be interesting to the broader audience.
The hand-wringing about the future of newspapers is not limited to the States. The consensus seems to be that, while U.S. papers are in much worse shape than European papers, the newspaper business model is collapsing in Europe, too, largely but not exclusively because of pressures related to the explosion of the Internet.
One observation I’ve heard made more than once is that European papers were better positioned to meet the challenges of the Internet age because they had learned long ago how to survive in a fiercely competitive marketplace. American papers, on the other hand, enjoyed near monopolies in their respective local markets for decades.
There is so much turmoil in the industry on both sides of the Atlantic that it’s not clear yet how things will ultimately shake out. A BBC reporter asked me to put a number on it: how many more years will newspapers survive? I hesitate to get into the predictions business, but it seems obvious that in another 20-25 years two full generations will have grown up consuming news exclusively online. Whatever print editions still survive then, at least in America, with which I am familiar, will not look anything like newspapers today. An old American newspaperman in attendance here remarked to me, archly, “I can’t tell if the U.S. is a leading indicator or a lagging indicator.”
Interestingly, the disconnect between publishers and journalists in their responses to the industry’s shifting financial fortunes is just as pronounced here as in the States. In a provocatively titled panel — “Are Profits Killing the News?” — William Green, the editor of Time Europe, was nearly at his wit’s end, although diplomatically so, in trying to get two major European publishers to acknowledge and address the cutbacks in news and the effect of the industry’s financial struggles on journalism itself.
Britain’s David Montgomery, CEO of publicly traded Mecom Group PLC, and Switzerland’s Michael Ringier, chairman of privately owned Ringier AG, would have none of it. They rejected outright the premise that journalism has suffered from declining news budgets, and argued to the contrary that the quality of journalism is better than ever before. Ringier was particularly pointed, dismissing some of the criticisms as “bullshit” and declaring that despite the hand-wringing about Rupert Murdoch taking over the Wall Street Journal, the quality of the paper had actually improved since his arrival.
Green, ever earnest, implored them, “Aren’t you in denial?”
Hafez Mirazi, the former Washington bureau chief of Al-Jazeera, this afternoon in Belgrade, describing a T-shirt someone he knew was trying to promote just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq: Come to America — Before America Comes to You.