Does Anyone Want To Decide Which Is Worse? (Ohio or Florida?) Then There Is Clinton Corrosion and ID/ID who wants to know everyone’s ID?
In 2008 He'll Have too Face the Democrats Insider-Approved Candidate Before He Can Run Again in Florida Against his Own Crooked Republican Arch-Nemesis, Rep. Tom Feeney.
And He's Taking None of it Lying Down...
>Special to by Jim Cirile
Clint Curtis doesn’t know when to quit.
The Florida computer programmer turned infamous whistleblower was allegedly asked by Jeb Bush crony (and future FL-24-R Congressman) Tom Feeney to write vote-flipping software for him in 2000 (here's the quick summary version of BRAD BLOG's coverage of the scandal) At the time, Curtis, then a loyal Republican, delivered the vote-rigging prototype to Feeney under the assumption that his software would be used to prevent e-voting manipulation by Democrats. When Curtis learned that true purpose was to game the election results in South Florida, he blew the whistle.
A stacked-deck investigation by the Florida Ethics Commission --- where 6 of the 8 members of the panel either Bush or Feeney appointees, or closely tied to one or both --- dismissed Curtis’ allegations without allowing him to testify, and without examining email and other evidence in the case, in violation of FL law. But Curtis would not go quietly.
He became a crusader, speaking at election integrity events around the country, eventually delivering stunning testimony (video here) to a stunned Congressional committee (who did nothing in response.) Curtis even passed a lie detector test administered by the retired chief polygrapher for of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Meanwhile, Feeney has been branded among the “Top 25 Most Corrupt in Congress”, for three years straight, by CREW, the non-partisan DC ethics watchdog group, most notably for his involvement --- and golf junket to Scotland --- with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
"They asked questions like, 'If you get elected, are you going to vote with Speaker Pelosi?' Of course my response is, 'No. I represent the people of District 24. If she has good plans, good policies, we’ll listen. But if my constituents don’t like it, then that’s not the way we go.' I don’t think that impressed them much."
In 2006, Curtis launched his first congressional bid --- now as a Democrat --- taking on Feeney himself for his FL-24 seat. A pre-election Zogby poll showed Curtis in a statistical dead heat with Feeney --- despite Feeney’s big-money smear campaign against Curtis (‘CrazyClintCurtis.com’ featured doctored photos of Curtis wearing a tin foil hat.) But on election night, Feeney was announced the winner 57%/43%. Problem is, those election results didn’t make much sense based on the Zogby poll or Curtis’ own internal polling. So Curtis did something remarkable. He filed a Congressional election challenge.
His team went door to door collecting signed affidavits from FL-24 voters testifying as to how they voted. They found the results to be wildly off, by double digits in some places. Despite this evidence, the Democratically controlled House committee summarily dismissed his election challenge, along with several others, without bothering to even review Curtis' evidence.
And yet, Curtis is once again going after the FL-24 Congressional seat. Only this time, he’s not just running against Feeney. First he must defeat an attempt to challenge him by the Democratic party's hand-picked candidate.
We caught up with Curtis on the campaign trail where he made clear, in our exclusive interview, he had no intentions of lying down or rolling over for naysayers, Democratic insiders, the woman chosen by the DCCC to challenge him, and certainly not the corrupt Tom Feeney...
BRAD BLOG: Clint, bring us up to speed on the fund raising deadline the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hit you with.
CLINT CURTIS: Well, we’ve been talking to the DCCC. And they said basically, “Your problem is you can’t raise any money.” They don’t care about policies. They don’t care if you’re doing anything interesting. All they care about is if you can raise money.
We’ve talked to them before, and they’ve always been just about the money. To them, it’s like a business deal. So I said, okay, well, how much will it take to get your support? And they said, “Well, if you could raise $250,000 in this next quarter, we would be interested.”
And of course, we weren’t close. Our base is grassroots, and grassroots doesn’t have money to throw around like that. They give what they can, but they don’t have that much to give. Our average contribution last time [Curtis’ ’06 congressional bid] was $11.
BB: So they’re looking for the big-money corporate donors.
CURTIS: They select who they’re going to support based on who has money in the bank. The problem with people who have money is, sometimes they’ve kind of sold themselves to get into politics.
BB: Was the DCCC willing to listen at all to how you built the whole grass roots network and found that you might well have done so, were it not for some dubious election results?
CURTIS: Well, the party in general had never really gotten on board before the election. They never really helped us with election issues or with the campaign.
The DCCC promised to support us if we won the [’06] nomination. Well, we won the nomination, and they never did. And they’re still not on board with election reform issues, which is why the challenges [by him and 4 other candidates in 2006] haven’t gotten anywhere in Congress.
They are basically a status quo operation. They want to raise money. I don’t think they really care that much about beating the Republicans, because if they stay equal, it’s all status quo. They’re calling each other names so they can raise money. It’s kind of sad, but I think that’s where they are.
They asked questions like, “If you get elected, are you going to vote with Speaker [of the House Nancy] Pelosi?” Of course my response is, “No.
I represent the people of District 24. If she has good plans, good policies, we’ll listen. But if my constituents don’t like it, then that’s not the way we go.” I don’t think that impressed them much. They don’t understand that the only reason Feeney is vulnerable is because we’ve exposed him as basically being a crook.
He’s basically selling his vote out. If they understood that, they wouldn’t have [recruited former Florida legislator Suzanne] Kosmas, because she has the same issues.
According to The Orlando Sentinel, in 1998, Kosmas was part of a 2-member board that recommended Volusia County purchase a $25,300 sculpture for a library for more than twice the county’s allocated budget. The artist was in fact a friend of Kosmas and contributed $1,000 to her campaign.
BB: Do you know Suzanne Kosmas? Why do you think they picked her?
"They select who they’re going to support based on who has money in the bank. The problem with people who have money is, sometimes they’ve kind of sold themselves to get into politics."
CURTIS: She was in the [Florida] legislature for eight years, and she has, I think, $3 million in the bank, and I think that was as far as it went. In the legislature, all she really did --- I think she sponsored one bill that got through the entire time she was there, something about kids couldn’t ride in the back of a pickup truck.
If you’ve ever driven in Florida, you know that bill’s not been too effective. There may be a law on the books; I don’t know if there is or not, and apparently, no one else knows either. You see kids hanging out of the back of a pickup truck going down the road all the time.
Dick Morris declares Hillary Finished
http://video.newsmax.com/?assetId=V1930194
Initially an ad will come up, but after the ad the group that recorded the telephone conversation with Former Clinton political strategist,: Dick Morris. The conversation can be listened to and it is worth the wait - for the ad to finish - to hear what a large number of political and self anointed political operatives (i.e. Dick Morris) argue where the current Democratic Primary is and what candidate is winning.
Morris comments that Hillary is now so desperate to beat Barack Obama she will "try anything" to win — including hiring private detectives to dig up dirt on Super delegates. Hillary and Bill have in the past week begun the scorched earth approach to everyone that is not in their camp. What is your opinion of this campaign strategy and Dick Morris' riveting video analysis? —Go There Now For A Full Pennsylvania report as well.
Is Hillary Dumb or Devious, My God! …. Maybe Both???
April 7, 2008
Hillary Clinton and Watergate: Corroboration of ‘Stupid, Politically Tone-Deaf’ Behavior
In 1974, 27-year-old Hillary Rodham found herself at the center of a congressional firestorm over the question of whether Richard Nixon had a right to counsel as he faced impeachment proceedings.
In my column of Monday, March 31, 2008, I reported the account of Jerry Zeifman, who served at the time as general counsel and chief of staff to the House Judiciary Committee. Zeifman minced no words about Hillary’s behavior when she worked on the House Judiciary staff during the impeachment investigation.
After signing her termination papers, Zeifman refused Hillary a letter of recommendation. He told me in an interview that this was because she had shown herself to be a liar and an unethical lawyer.
During the past week, I have done further reporting and interviewed two others who were close to the proceedings at the time. The picture that emerges from all this is that of a very ambitious young lawyer who was eager to please her political patrons, and was willing to mislead and undermine established committee staff and senior committee members in order to do so.
To recap, Hillary was hired to work on the impeachment investigation by the Democratic Judiciary Committee staff. During the investigation, two camps formed on the question of whether Nixon should be afforded the right to counsel. Chief counsel John Doar was one of the leaders of the no-counsel camp, which also included Hillary, future Clinton White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum and Yale Law Professor Burke Marshall, who served as an outside consultant to the committee. Marshall had been one of Hillary’s law professors at Yale, and was also close to the Kennedys, having served as Ted Kennedy’s lawyer in the aftermath of Chappaquiddick.
Zeifman’s allegations against Hillary center on a memorandum she wrote arguing that there was no precedent for a person facing impeachment to be allowed counsel. Zeifman says he told Hillary that the 1970 impeachment attempt against Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas established an impeachment target’s right to counsel, and as Hillary prepared the memorandum on the issue, Zeifman briefed her thoroughly on the Douglas case and directed her to the Douglas case files in the Judiciary Committee archives.
According to Zeifman, Hillary then removed the Douglas case files from the Judiciary Committee archives without his permission, and proceeded to write a memorandum arguing that no right to counsel existed in impeachment cases – as if the Douglas case had never happened and the Douglas files did not exist.
Franklin Polk, who served at the time as chief Republican counsel on the committee, confirmed many of these details in two interviews he granted me this past Friday, although his analysis of events is not always identical to Zeifman’s. Polk specifically confirmed that Hillary wrote the memo in question, and confirmed that Hillary ignored the Douglas case. (He said he couldn’t confirm or dispel the part about Hillary taking the Douglas files.)
To Polk, Hillary’s memo was dishonest in the sense that she tried to pretend the Douglas precedent didn’t exist. But unlike Zeifman, Polk considered the memo dishonest in a way that was more stupid than sinister.
“Hillary should have mentioned that (the Douglas case), and then tried to argue whether that was a change of policy or not instead of just ignoring it and taking the precedent out of the opinion,” Polk said.
Polk recalled that the attempt to deny counsel to Nixon upset a great many members of the committee, including just about all the Republicans, but many Democrats as well.
“The argument sort of broke like a firestorm on the committee, and I remember Congressman Don Edwards was very upset,” Polk said. “He was the chairman of the subcommittee on constitutional rights. But in truth, the impeachment precedents are not clear. Let’s put it this way. In the old days, from the beginning of the country through the 1800s and early 1900s, there were precedents that the target or accused did not have the right to counsel.”
That’s why Polk believes Hillary’s approach in writing the memorandum was foolish. He says she could have argued that the Douglas case was an isolated example, and that other historical precedents could apply.
But Zeifman says the memo and removal of the Douglas files was only part the effort by Hillary, Doar, Nussbaum and Marshall to pursue their own agenda during the investigation.
After my first column, some readers wrote in claiming Zeifman was motivated by jealousy because he was not appointed as the chief counsel in the investigation, with that title going to Doar instead.
Zeifman’s account is that he supported the appointment of Doar because he, Zeifman, a) did not want the public notoriety that would come with such a high-profile role; and b) didn’t have much prosecutorial experience. When he started to have a problem with Doar and his allies was when Zeifman and others, including House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill and Democratic committee member Jack Brooks of Texas, began to perceive Doar’s group as acting outside the directives and knowledge of the committee and its chairman, Peter Rodino.
(O’Neill died in 1994. Brooks is still living and I tried unsuccessfully to reach him. I’d still like to.)
This culminated in a project to research past presidential abuses of power, which committee members felt was crucial in aiding the decisions they would make in deciding how to handle Nixon’s alleged offenses.
According to Zeifman and other documents, Doar directed Hillary to work with a group of Yale law professors on this project. But the report they generated was never given to the committee. Zeifman believes the reason was that the report was little more than a whitewash of the Kennedy years – a part of the Burke Marshall-led agenda of avoiding revelations during the Watergate investigation that would have embarrassed the Kennedys.
The fact that the report was kept under wraps upset Republican committee member Charles Wiggins of California, who wrote a memo to his colleagues on the committee that read in part:
Within the past few days, some disturbing information has come to my attention. It is requested that the facts concerning the matter be investigated and a report be made to the full committee as it concerns us all.
Early last spring when it became obvious that the committee was considering presidential "abuse of power" as a possible ground of impeachment, I raised the question before the full committee that research should be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon.
As I recall, several other members joined with me in this request. I recall as well repeating this request from time to time during the course of our investigation. The staff, as I recall, was noncommittal, but it is certain that no such staff study was made available to the members at any time for their use.
Wiggins believed the report was purposely hidden from committee members. Chairman Rodino denied this, and said the reason Hillary’s report was not given to committee members was that it contained no value. It’s worth noting, of course, that the staff member who made this judgment was John Doar.
In a four-page reply to Wiggins, Rodino wrote in part:
Hillary Rodham of the impeachment inquiry staff coordinated the work. . . . After the staff received the report it was reviewed by Ms. Rodham, briefly by Mr. Labovitz and Mr. Sack, and by Doar. The staff did not think the manuscript was useful in its present form. . . .
In your letter you suggest that members of the staff may have intentionally suppressed the report during the course of its investigation. That was not the case.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Doar was more concerned that any highlight of the project might prejudice the case against President Nixon. The fact is that the staff did not think the material was usable by the committee in its existing form and had not had time to modify it so it would have practical utility for the members of the committee. I was informed and agreed with the judgment.
Mr. Labovitz, by the way, was John Labovitz, another member of the Democratic staff. I spoke with Labovitz this past Friday as well, and he is no fan of Jerry Zeifman.
“If it’s according to Zeifman, it’s inaccurate from my perspective,” Labovitz said. He bases that statement on a recollection that Zeifman did not actually work on the impeachment inquiry staff, although that is contradicted not only by Zeifman but Polk as well.
Labovitz said he has no knowledge of Hillary having taken any files, and defended her no-right-to-counsel memo on the grounds that, if she was assigned to write a memo arguing a point of view, she was merely following orders.
But as both Zeifman and Polk point out, that doesn’t mean ignoring background of which you are aware, or worse, as Zeifman alleges, confiscating documents that disprove your argument.
All told, Polk recalls the actions of Hillary, Doar and Nussbaum as more amateurish than anything else.
“Of course the Republicans went nuts,” Polk said. “But so did some of the Democrats – some of the most liberal Democrats. It was more like these guys – Doar and company – were trying to manage the members of Congress, and it was like, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ If you want to convict a president, you want to give him all the rights possible. If you’re going to give him a trial, for him to say, ‘My rights were denied,’ – it was a stupid effort by people who were just politically tone deaf. So this was a big deal to people in the proceedings on the committee, no question about it. And Jerry Zeifman went nuts, and rightfully so. But my reaction wasn’t so much that it was underhanded as it was just stupid.”
Polk recalls Zeifman sharing with him at the time that he believed Hillary’s primary role was to report back to Burke Marshall any time the investigation was taking a turn that was not to the liking of the Kennedys.
“Jerry used to give the chapter and verse as to how Hillary was the mole into the committee works as to how things were going,” Polk said. “And she’d be feeding information back to Burke Marshall, who, at least according to Jerry, was talking to the Kennedys. And when something was off track in the view of the Kennedys, Burke Marshall would call John Doar or something, and there would be a reconsideration of what they were talking about. Jerry used to tell me that this was Hillary’s primary function.”
Zeifman says he had another staff member get him Hillary’s phone records, which showed that she was calling Burke Marshall at least once a day, and often several times a day.
A final note about all this: I wrote my first column on this subject because, in the aftermath of Hillary being caught in her Bosnia fib, I came in contact with Jerry Zeifman and found his story compelling. Zeifman has been trying to tell his story for many years, and the mainstream media have ignored him. I thought it deserved an airing as a demonstration of how early in her career Hillary began engaging in self-serving, disingenuous conduct.
Disingenuously arguing a position? Vanishing documents? Selling out members of her own party to advance a personal agenda? Classic Hillary. Neither my first column on the subject nor this one were designed to show that Hillary is dishonest. I don’t really think that’s in dispute. Rather, they were designed to show that she has been this way for a very long time – a fact worth considering for anyone contemplating voting for her for president of the United States.
By the way, there’s something else that started a long time ago.
“She would go around saying, ‘I’m dating a person who will some day be president,’” Polk said. “It was like a Babe Ruth call. And because of that comment she made, I watched Bill Clinton’s political efforts as governor of Arkansas, and I never counted him out because she had made that forecast.”
Bill knew what he wanted a long time ago. Clearly, so did Hillary, and her tactics for trying to achieve it were established even in those early days.
Vote wisely.
More States Join In Battle to Stop National ID Card
American Free Press - Washington,DC,USA
West Virginia’s Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a bill to ban that state from participating in the federal act. Perhaps the only way Real ID could ...
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http://www.restoretherepublic.com/
http://www.realnightmare.org/news/105/
Defeat New York REAL ID Action Now - Correction, Use This One
in Defeat REAL ID in New York
by namelessjames (2008-04-06 22:02)
Maine's Governor Baldacci folding on Real ID
in Real ID Act of 2005
by Donnab (2008-04-04 01:36)
FYI
in Ron Paul for President 2008
by Donnab (2008-04-04 01:05)
Real ID Update and Urgent Request
in RTR Pennsylvania
by Comptonjr (2008-04-03 21:35)
WE WILL BE HAVING OUR MEETING ON APRIL 5TH
in RTR Colorado
by Betty (2008-04-03 14:07)
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