Decade of Reed (cont.)
For months now Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition and current candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia--the GOP primary is July 18 of next year--has been telling reporters that when he accepted checks from his old pal Jack Abramoff to help derail antigambling legislation from 1999 to 2002, he didn't know that the money had originally come from casinos--the ones paying Abramoff. And Reed's public affairs firm, Century Strategies, has said, in a statement, that it "had no direct knowledge" of who Abramoff was shilling for. That would be problematic, you see, since Reed is an avowed opponent of gambling, and taking money from gambling interests you supposedly oppose looks . . . well, sorta hypocritical.
The I-didn't-know-where-the-money-came-from defense was always shaky, but it fell apart completely on October 16, when the Washington Post's intrepid Susan Schmidt and James Grimaldi published a front-page story, "How a Lobbyist Stacked the Deck." Schmidt and Grimaldi's piece follows, in stomach-churning detail, how in the summer of 2000 Abramoff--now at the center of a wide-ranging federal investigation--was able to derail the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act. To that end, Abramoff's client, the Connecticut-based eLottery Inc., paid Preston Gates, Abramoff's firm, a retainer of $100,000 a month--$2 million in all. A lot of that money ended up going to Reed.
Not all at once, and not directly. To gin up "grass-roots" support among social conservatives against the gambling ban (basically by misrepresenting the nature of the legislation), eLottery sent $160,000 to Abramoff, who forwarded it to Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, which apparently kept $10,000 and forwarded $150,000 to the Faith and Family Alliance, a Virginia Beach group headed by Robin Vanderwall, an ally of Reed's currently in jail on child molestation charges. Vanderwall then sent $150,000 to Reed. "I was operating as a shell," Vanderwall told the Post. Writes Schmidt and Grimaldi: "A spokesman for Reed--now a candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia--said that he and his associates are unaware that any money they received came from gambling activities."
Sorry, no.
From Schmidt and Grimaldi's reporting, we learn that on August 18, 2000, Abramoff faxed an eLottery executive. "I have chatted with Ralph," he wrote, "and we need to get the funding moving on the effort in the 10 congressional districts" supporting the bill. "Please get me a check as soon as possible for $150,000 made payable to American Marketing Inc. This is the company Ralph is using." The check was issued August 24.
On August 29 Abramoff sent Reed an email with the subject line: "Internet Gambling: And so it continues."
"Where are we?" Abramoff asked his old friend. "You got the check, no? Are things moving?"
Reed replied: "1. Yes, they got it. 2. Yes, all systems go."
More Staged News Events
Last week on this page, we mocked the Associated Press for hyperventilating over a "staged" White House event--namely, the president's videoconference with U.S. soldiers in Iraq. After all, there is an element of theatricality in almost everything that passes for "news" on television--most of it perpetrated by the news professionals themselves.
As if to prove the point, Michelle Kosinski, a Today show correspondent, decided to dramatize the flooding in the northeast by filing her Oct. 14 report from a canoe in the flooded streets of Wayne, N.J. "This is essentially now a part of the Passaic river in this neighborhood--it rushed in yesterday through the streets," she said, paddling all the while. "And it's really tough to control a canoe or boat when you're out in it"--at which point two men in waders splashed between Kosinski and her cameraman, revealing that the "river" she was paddling in was at most ankle deep.
As Mark Finkelstein noted at NewsBusters.org, Kosinski's Today show colleagues Katie Couric and Matt Lauer engaged in some well-deserved impromptu media criticism:
Lauer: "Are these holy men, perhaps walking on top of the water?"
Couric: "Gee, is your oar hitting ground, Michelle?"
At which point the two of them "dissolved into laughter."
A penitent Kosinski later unburdened herself to the New York Observer:
"It's kind of painful," she said, "because you want to explain yourself. The most important point for me to get across is: Yeah, it looked really stupid, but there was never any attempt to make it look like it was worse of a storm than it really was."
No, no; certainly not.
Other than the personal humiliation, she had only one regret: "That it might have looked to some people like we were trying to put something over on viewers."
Gee, ya think?
Penn Kemble, RIP
We note with a pang the death last week of Penn Kemble. He was one of those people who had been around Washington so long, and whose energy and enthusiasm were so infectious, that it was especially distressing to realize he was only 64 when he died of brain cancer.
Like more than a few political activists in the nation's capital, he began life on the left: as a member of the Young People's Socialist League in college, and as founder, in 1967, of an organization advocating a negotiated end to the Vietnam war. Yet if any single event was formative in his life it was probably the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. That was the year the Democratic party deliberately severed its connection to its historic grass roots, and for which it has been paying the price ever since.
As a founder, along with Senators Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey, of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Penn Kemble spent the subsequent decades urging his fellow Democrats to reacquaint themselves with the values of their party's blue-collar past, and embrace the "muscular" foreign policy that had served FDR, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy so well. It was a lonely battle, fought at times in company with conservatives who shared his active support for freedom in the Soviet Union and Central America. And it was a battle that he steadfastly fought within his own party's ranks, with mixed success; but always gallantly, and with great good humor.
We'll Always Have NPR
Not even the nation's capital can help sustain Air America these days. According to the Washington Post, "the liberal talk network carried on WWRC-AM (1260), went from bad to nonexistent. After WWRC recorded a mere fraction of a rating point in the spring with syndicated shows from the likes of lefty talkers Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Stephanie Miller, Arbitron couldn't detect a measurable listenership for the station this time around."