I'm Losing Track Of How Many Republicans The DCCC Has Recruited To Run For Congress This Year

Tom O’Halleran, a 70 year old conservative Republican, served in the Arizona House from 2001 to 2006 and then served in the state Senate until 2009, when he lost his primary to fringe nut Steve Pierce. A former policeman, he makes his living as a bond trader and talk radio host.

In 2014, angry the Republican legislature wasn't dealing with a water issue, he quit the GOP and re-registered as an Independent and ran for the state Senate again when Republican Chester Crandell fell off a horse and died. O’Halleran was defeated by Republican Sylvia Allen. So last August the DCCC recruited him to switch his registration again and run for the House seat conservative New Dem Ann Kirkpatrick is giving up in her suicidal race against John McCain.

You'd be hard-pressed to find the word "Democrat" on his website, which gives you no idea how he's likely to vote in Congress, although there is a big endorsement from defeated right-wing Blue Dog, Ron Barber, who spent most of his short ugly time in Congress crossing the aisle to vote with the Republicans against working families.

His last batch of ratings from groups that watch state legislators included a 50% from Planned Parenthood, a "C" from the Sierra Club, a "D" from immigration rights activists Border Action Network, a 50% from Equality Arizona and, last year, 59% from Stonewall Democrats of Arizona. The state gun nut association gave him an A+.

An actual Democrat, state Senator Barbara McGuire has an exploratory committee for the seat but the DCCC is ignoring her and Kirkpatrick has endorsed O’Halleran. And the GOP will have a lively primary to pick their candidate. In October Studboi1 announced he was also running for the seat, but under the other name he uses, Paul Babeu. He'll be battling it out with Arizona's ex-Secretary of State Ken Bennett and Gary Kiehne, a rich rancher. Studboi1, who goes into graphic descriptions of his genitals on sex hook-up sites, has his own sordid sources of raising money for his campaigns. And the DCCC couldn't come up with anything better than some tired Republican retread to put up for the seat?!?!?!

Babeu And Grimm... Grotesque Republican Corruption

The video above has nothing to do with either Arizona congressional candidate Sheriff Paul Babeu or Staten Island Republican Congressman/Mafioso Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm. Instead it's another real world tableau documenting the pervasive political corruption that reaches right up the Republican Party leadership chain. The doofus being interviewed by investigative journalist Lee Fang is third-ranking Republican in the House, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). He lies right to Fang's face, claiming not to know about the Buck McKeon and Vern Buchanan scandals roiling their California and Florida districts.

So what does this have to do with Grimm and Babeu? Fang points out that the #2 House Republican, Eric Cantor, said he would have "zero tolerance" for corruption in the House GOP Caucus. Boehner was equally adamant when the Republicans won their majority in 2010. But neither is addressing the outrageous public scandals that both McKeon and Grimm are embroiled in-- with McKeon already under investigation by the House Ethics Committee (which informed McCarthy) and Grimm's case so serious that the NY Times demanded that the Justice Department start looking into it. As for Babeu... he's the favored Republican candidate in a deep red western Arizona district where he's up against incumbent (from another district) Paul Gosar. Or at least he was the favorite until it came out that... well, he came out-- or, more to the point, was outed... by his ex-lover, a Mexican immigrant he was trying to strong-arm and threatening to have deported.

When we first started covering Babeu we suggested that his time as headmaster of the DeSisto School was going to lead to very ugly places. And yesterday the media finally started confirming just that.

Pinal County Sheriff and U.S. Congressional candidate Paul Babeu was the school's Headmaster and Executive Director from 1999 to 2001.

He touts his experience there on his campaign website.

While Babeu ran the school, the Massachusetts Office of Child Care Services launched an investigation into repeated allegations of abuse.

The ABC15 Investigators traveled across Massachusetts and tracked down reports that have never been released.

The documents show that during Babeu’s tenure the school was not licensed. Other allegations include detailed instances of physical and sexual abuse.

Holli Nielsen was a student of DeSisto while Babeu was Headmaster.

“It's not unreasonable to say we were cult-like,” said Nielsen.

The school's policy was "tough love" and it led to at least one death-- a boy forced out in a blizzard with no clothes, who froze to death-- and several rapes. And, Babeu, being Babeu, is going to have a lot more seedy crap associated with himself, of course. This is when we get to the part of the danger of these hypocritical Republican closet cases not being treated for their severe mental illness.

Several students we spoke with say they also knew a secret about Babeu.

It was a secret that Babeau’s older sister said she discovered one day after visiting his home.

Lucy Babeu told the ABC15 Investigators she confronted her brother after finding a student from DeSisto school living with Babeu.

“I said what is this student from Desisto doing here? He says, ‘Lucy, he's my boyfriend. I love him’.”

Lucy Babeu told us her brother was having a relationship with the male student.  

“I said Paul get a hold of yourself here,” said Lucy. “You were his teacher! You were his Executive Director! You can't do this.”

ABC15 is not identifying the former student. He has not responded to our interview requests.

At the time, he was 17 which is the legal age of consent in Massachusetts.

“He was of age. He would be what we considered a high school senior,” said Nielsen.

Holli says she knew the student personally.

“It was widely known but not discussed. People were aware of it,” said Nielsen. “It was kind of swept under the rug.”

Babeu left the school in 2001. Three years later, the state investigation forced DeSisto to shut down.

And Grimm? He wasn't having sex with young boys too, was he? Not that we know of... but we do know of a meeting he had at the Crow Bar with the owner, major New York crime figure-- now imprisoned for 30 years... our old friend "Gus" Kontogiannis. Yep... yesterday's New York Daily News published a story about the relationship between Grimm-- basically an astonishingly corrupt cop-gone-bad-- and Kontogiannis, one of the crime figures behind, among other things, the Duke Cunningham scandal. We've been talking about Kontogiannis (and "Mikey Suits" since 2005). Kontogiannis, among his many other crimes, gave Cunningham $400,000 to give George W. Bush in return for a pardon. Kontogiannis became too hot for a pardon but no one has ever accounted for the $400,000. I doubt the Daily News investigation will lead to it. What they came up with, though, was Grimm trying to get Kontogiannis off the hook another way.

Staten Island  Rep. Michael Grimm urged a federal judge to spare a New York-based developer with three bribery-related convictions from serving a day in prison, the Daily News has learned.

Grimm sought leniency for Thomas Kontogiannis in 2008, before Grimm entered Congress as a Republican and after he had left a career as an FBI agent. Kontogiannis then faced sentencing on his third conviction-- for helping funnel $1 million in bribe money to former Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham (R-Calif).

In a three-page letter, Grimm asked California Federal Judge Lawrence Burns to “be as lenient as the law will allow and your conscience accepts, granting him a noncustodial sentence.” Burns sentenced Kontogiannis to eight years [a sentence that has grown over the years].

A lot of people focus on the Republican Party for its ideological extremism and its aggressive international policies. But you never need to scratch too deeply on the surface of conservatism without finding the stench of corruption. They go hand-in-hand because of the adoration with which sociopathic, self-serving behavior is treated. Oh-- and Boehner isn't on Grimm's case either. Last we heard of an interaction between them was when Grimm suggested to the Speaker that Members of Congress be allowed to pack heat and Boehner promised to look into that great idea.

Right-Wing Paradise

Over the weekend I was disgruntled that the media-- particularly Fox, where Paul Babeu is a regular contributor ("border expert")-- chose to ignore my favorite news story, the outing of Republican hypocrite, Sheriff Paul Babeu. Babeu, an anti-immigrant fanatic who went from being the headmaster of a troubled-- now shuttered-- boarding school in Massachusetts to a right-wing political icon in Pinal County, Arizona, is running for Congress. Or was. The story was made for sensationalistic TV and, had Babeu not been a Republican, it is all Fox would have broadcast all day Saturday and all day Sunday. (As Andy Borowitz pointed at on Twitter, not even a nuclear attack by North Korea could have pulled that network away from its Whitney Houston funeral coverage.)

Of course, thinking about it more closely, it isn't inconsequential to realize that the corporate media gets its walking orders from interests that not only don't want to see Babeu destroyed the way they made sure Anthony Weiner was destroyed but that don't want anything of real importance that might spark critical thought, covered on their networks.

Late last week Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America-- yes, he's someone you can think of as a literary Green Day-- published an essay, Livin' In A Bankster's Paradise, in Esquire, that should have attracted massive media coverage. But it's precisely what our corporate media avoids like the plague. Holding banksters accountable is not something corporate media is pushing... or mentioning. Pierce absolutely loathes "the notion that the best way to deal with things is to 'look forward, not back'."

This is especially true as regards the undeniable fact that, over the course of a decade, a bunch of cheats, thieves, and suited mountebanks stole most of the national economy and then wrecked whatever was left of it. But what's most extraordinary about the whole thing is that, after they swindled their swindles and heisted their heists, and got paid off by the rest of us for having looted our naional economy, they all kept doing the same things they were doing before. These included extravagant bonuses and, of course, continued crimes of capital that ought to be capital crimes.

This is extraordinary. All this Citigroup fraud and thuggery took place after the events of the great meltdown had taken place. This whisteblower's co-workers, instead of checking for fraud or making reports about underwriting defects to the FHA as required, argued with her over the soundness of the loans, she said. Employees who acted as "gatekeepers" applied "what they describe as 'brute force' to pressure Citi's quality control managers" into downplaying defects, according to the government's complaint.

Some colleagues had pay incentives tied to reducing the number of reported problems, and they spent hours trying to get her to relax her warnings, including those about the most basic deficiencies, Hunt said. "They started beating us up over the quality-control reports," she said. Last year, she said, she became convinced she was being asked to look the other way on serious flaws. That's when she decided to become a whistle-blower.

Last year. The more I think about it, the more I believe that we, as a society, gave up on the pillory too soon. And $158.3 million is tip money for CitiGroup.

This is what happens when real punishment for real crimes is considered to be too inconvenient, or too difficult, or too traumatic for the nation, which is made up completely of candyglass children incapable of existing with the knowledge that their financial lords of the universe are really no different from stick-up kids in a bodega. This is what happens when nobody goes to jail. This is what happens today.

And it's what happens when real journalism-- an actual 4th estate-- is tossed away and replaced with the corporate media, feeding us a steady diet of... Whitney Houston funerals and whatever else it deals appropriate to take our minds off the crime spree the corporations that own them are engaged in or complicit with. Joshua Holland addressed this phenomenon in the introduction to his enlightening book, The 15 Biggest Lies About The Economy as a way of explaining why Americans seem so complacent "in the face of the tectonic shift in their economic fortunes." He dissects the highly influential message machine built by all the tremendous plutocratic money behind the so-called “New Conservative Movement” which works so tirelessly to "obscure not only the economic history of the last four decades, but the very notion of class itself."

The Lies That Corporate America Tells Us

Let’s return to the early 1970s, when a rattled economic elite became determined to regain control of the U.S. economy. How do you go about achieving that in a democracy?

One way, of course, is to depose the government and replace it with one that’s more to your liking. In the 1930s, a group of businessmen contemplated just that-- a military takeover of Washington, D.C., to stop Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dreaded New Deal from being enacted. The plot fell apart when the decorated general the group had tapped to lead the coup turned in the conspirators.

A more subtle approach is to convince a majority of voters that your interests are, in fact, their own. Yet there’s a big problem with this: if you belong to a rarified group, then the notion of aligned interests doesn’t reflect objective reality. And in the early 1970s, the media and academia provided a neutral arbiter of that reality (of sorts).

We’ve all grown accustomed to conservatives’ conspiracy theories about the corporate media having a far-left bias and college professors indoctrinating American youths into Maoism. In the early 1970s, a group of very wealthy conservatives started to invest in what you might call “intellectual infrastructure” ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.

Families with names such as Olin, Coors, Scaife, Bradley, and Koch may not be familiar to most Americans, but their efforts have had a profound impact on our economic discourse. Having amassed huge fortunes in business, these families used their foundations to fund the movement that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and eventually bring about the coronation of George W. Bush in 2000.

That's why media consumers will never forget who Anthony Weiner is and will never even hear of Paul Babeu. And it's why the banksters will continue living-- along with the rest of us-- in a Bankster's Paradise.




UPDATE: More-On Media

Afer I finished writing the post above, a friend spent me, coincidentally, a pst by John Cory from RSN called The Ugly Circus, which I'd like to recommend. He starts my mentioning a question from Barbra Sreisand asking where the hell the fourth estate is when we need them most. "Well Ms Streisand," he replies, "they ran away from home and joined the ugly circus of pundit shows and cable news, with big floppy shoes and red rubber-ball noses and lots of money in the trunks of their clown cars.

The fact that news has become a product for sale is not new, nor is the fact that media has embraced celebrity over content and corporate sponsors over substance, and mindless entertainment over education and illumination. Edward R. Murrow warned of these things in his RTNDA Convention speech in 1958. And now, 54 years later, it echoes with immediacy as though written yesterday.

Television news is an ugly circus of innuendo, gossip and tabloid sensationalism. Whether ABC or CBS or NBC, the news is read by celebrity personalities between self-promotional appearances on late-night talk shows.

The nightly news is anything but news. Seven minutes of shallowness, two car chases, the latest celebrity divorce/trial/book/or murder-mystery followed by a feel good human-interest story. Information, elucidation and perspective are sacrificed for pharmaceutical elixirs of youth and sex, insurance lizards, and the latest in-dash tracking system that monitors and synchs up with your Blackberry/iPhone with a voice that guides your every waking movement and thought. Everything you don't need and can't possibly afford but must have.

Cable news is nothing more than nightly WWE cage matches between hot-air blowhards and giggling snark. Yes, I'm talking liberal and conservative programming.

I don't want to be entertained. I read books or go to the movies for that. And, I might add, they do a much better job than anything on cable news. Why sometimes, movies and books even make me think.

FOX News Channel is pure unadulterated propaganda for the far right. I don't care whether it's morning, noon or night, that's what I see and hear. And that is certainly their right, as it is my right to dislike their product and not watch.

...Where is the liberal host that offers an in-depth examination as to why Americans pay $7800 per person for healthcare with the same or worse results of other OECD countries that pay $2800-$4800 per person per year? Are Americans being ripped off? Where does all that money go? Why do Americans pay double or three times the amount other countries pay for the same pills and procedures?

Surely there are real experts for a panel to discuss these issues, and I don't mean talking-head partisans or corporate shills. How about a panel consisting of Maggie Mahaar, author of Money-Driven Medicine, Jonathon Cohn, author of Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis, and others who would deal with why America is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not offer its citizens universal healthcare. And how much could we save through preventative care?

Does being born in the wealthiest country in the world simply mean: Welcome to the world. You're on your own now so goodbye and good luck! Sickness is a profit center with potentially high profit margins. Do your part and shop well!

Of course this would require a network and sponsors willing to give us, the viewing public, credit for being interested in learning and understanding the issues. That would empower us and make us-- informed.

That's bad for corporate-owned pundits, bad for corporate-owned networks and their corporate sponsors, and even worse for corporate-owned politicians. An informed public is just plain bad all the way around for our would-be masters and their court jesters.

People say all the time that we are an Attention Deficit Disorder society. The media says that they only give the public what they want. None of that is true. The corporate media simply wants to think they have trained us to that end for their profit.

Murrow said: "One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of these is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles..."

Do yourself a favor... continue reading here.

Arizona Republican Sheriff And Congressional Candidate Paul Babeu Dragged Out Of The Closet

Pinal County Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu has a reputation as a hard man-- especially hard on immigrants. Some people have claimed he's a sadist who takes delight in splitting up families and gratuitously ruining people's lives. Last week the 43 year old Babeu, now a far right Republican candidate for Congress, was the toast of CPAC. They love hard men there.

Today Mitt Romney's campaign booted Babeu from his position as a Romney for President Arizona co-chairman, reminiscent of the move his 2008 campaign did when Romney for President Idaho co-chair Larry Craig was arrested in a public toilet trying to have sex with a young-looking police undercover agent. Closeted gay Republican flock to Romney for some reason I'll never understand.

Another Romney surrogate dumped as fast as Larry Craig & Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm

It turns out that Babeu wasn't just another garden variety, run of the mill Republican closet queen. The anti-immigrant fanatic had a long-time lover named Jose. And it gets much worse. The story was broken by a respected Arizona veteran journalist Monica Alonzo. Babeu threatened his Mexican ex-lover with deportation when the man refused to promise never to disclose their years-long relationship.

The latest of the alleged threats were made through Babeu's personal attorney, who's also running the sheriff's campaign for Congress in District 4, the ex-lover says.

He says lawyer Chris DeRose demanded he sign an agreement that he would never breathe a word about the affair. But Jose (New Times is withholding his last name because Babeu and his attorney have challenged his legal status) refused.

The 34-year-old from central Mexico charges that the sheriff's lawyer warned against mentioning the affair with Babeu. DeRose said gossip about Babeu would focus attention on Jose, attention that could result in his deportation, Jose says.

Melissa Weiss-Riner, Jose's attorney, confirms her client's account.

She says she spoke directly to the sheriff's lawyer, DeRose, about the Babeu camp's threats that Jose could be deported if he "revealed the relationship." She says DeRose falsely claimed that Jose's visa had expired.

"Jose came to our firm because he felt he was being intimidated, and he was in fear for his life," Weiss-Riner says. "He wanted his legal rights protected."

Babeu didn't respond to requests for comment by publication time for this article, but his attorney, DeRose, says the dispute between Jose and the sheriff concerned Jose's work on Babeu's websites. He says Jose was a former volunteer who hacked into a campaign website.

DeRose didn't immediately address the other claims against him and the sheriff, except to say, "I never threatened to deport anybody" and that "[Babeu's] not threatening anybody."

... Jose says he met Babeu in October 2006 on gay.com, a dating website. What started with an online invitation from Babeu for the two to get together, he says, turned into not only a personal relationship but a professional one.

Jose says he created and maintained Babeu's campaign websites, his Facebook page, and his Twitter account. Babeu didn't pay him for his online services, he claims.

Jose says Babeu told him that he loved him and was with him exclusively. But Jose suspected Babeu was lying. The relationship soured, and Jose believes that Babeu sent DeRose after him. He says DeRose demanded the passwords to Babeu's websites and social-media accounts. Jose says he complied but that Babeu and his attorney also wanted Jose to sign a document that would bind him legally to keep silent about the relationship.

Jose admits that he lashed out on news websites featuring stories about Babeu. He says he commented anonymously that the sheriff was not who people thought he was. He says he once wrote a comment on Chino Valley eNews that Babeu had an account on adam4adam.com, where gay men arrange sexual liaisons.

Jose shared text messages between him and Babeu with New Times. A September 4, 2011, text from the sheriff reads: "You can never have business after this and you will harm me and many others in the process . . . including yourself & your family."

A couple of minutes later, Babeu followed with: "And you say you have loved me? Papi... this is no good."

Meanwhile, Babeu, a former boarding school headmaster who claims he was repeatedly molested as a child by a Catholic priest, is still deluding himself that he can continue running for Congress against GOP incumbent Paul Gosar. That should be over by Monday. Babeu's press conference a couple hours ago is stunning. He admitted he's gay and tried painting himself as a victim, although he did acknowledge the relationship between himself and Jose.