Is there a perp walk in Roger Ailes's future?

On Friday I voice the opinion that people like Roger Ailes just aren't held to account for crimes like the one he now seems clearly to have committed in pressing Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators about her affair with (ugh) Bernie Kerik. I'd love to be proved wrong, but I really don't expect it. I recycled this photo, by the way, from an October 2009 Politico puff piece with the caption: "Friends are encouraging Fox News founder Roger Ailes to run for president in 2012."

by Ken

Howie passed along the report earlier today that Fox Noisemaster Roger Ailes is about to be indicted, presumably for his now-disclosed role as the previously unnamed Newscorp exec who was revealed long ago to have leaned on Judith Regan, then embattled but still in the company's employ as a book publisher, to lie to federal investigators who were vetting Rudy Giuliani crony Bernie Kerik to be the new homeland security secretary. Back in 2004 Rupert Murdoch and his people were still looking at Rudy as their guy for the future, and they didn't want his luster tarnished by squalid revelations that his man Bernie had had an extramarital affair with their gal Judith.

As it turned out, the squalid affair was almost the least of the embarrassments Battling Bernie caused his low-life patron Rudy. But at the time it was possible to imagine that the revelation could dim the luster of Master Rupert's rising star Rudy.

It didn't make a lot of sense to me, this rumor. After all, everybody has known for years about Miss Judith's claim about the pressure from above to lie to the federal investigators, and everybody also knew that there were, er, rules -- not just against lying to the investigators but against encouraging someone else to do so. It's not as if anyone in government has shown any interest in holding the previously unnamed Newscorp to account. The general belief way back when was that she had a tape of a phone conversation to back up her story, and that the existence of that tape had enabled her to wangle a $10.75M settlement to leave the company quietly. Strangely, nothing more was heard from her about this heinous crime of the unnamed Newscorp honcho.

The only thing that's changed is that, as I mentioned Friday, the New York Times's Russ Buettner pieced together information buried in the court papers for an embarrassingly related cause of action involving Miss Judith's settlement with her old Newscorp pals, which identified Ailes as the Newscorp heavy and also confirmed the existence of that embarrassing phone-conversation tape. (Buettner also laid out a compelling case for the ties between Ailes and Rudy which could have led our Roger to apply muscle on his pal's behalf.) What's so embarrassing about the related case is that it's based on allegations from the lawyers who represented Miss Judith in her old action against Newscorp that she stiffed them by firing them with a settlement in hand, thereby cheating them of their share.

The new documents emerged as part of a lawsuit filed in 2008 in which Ms. Regan’s former lawyers in the News Corporation case accused her of firing them on the eve of the settlement to avoid paying them a 25 percent contingency fee. The parties in that case signed an agreement to keep the records confidential, but it does not appear that an order sealing them was ever sent to the clerk at State Supreme Court in Manhattan, and the records were placed in the public case file.

Discussion of the recorded conversation with Mr. Ailes emerges in affidavits from Ms. Regan’s former lawyers who are seeking to document the work they did on her case and for which they argue they deserve the contingency fee. They describe consulting with a forensic audio expert about the tape.

Does it really seem likely that after all these years suddenly an indictment has materialized against Ailes over that?

Well, Salon's Justin Elliott pieced together the way today's story became a story. He doesn't claim to know whether there's any truth to it, but then, it turns out that neither does the guy who, as Elliott put it, dropped the bombshell on his blog this day, economics analyst and TV commentator Barry Ritholtz.

he story, which was based on what an unnamed source told Ritholtz, quickly boomeranged around the Web and Twitter. Several well-read web sites, including Business Insider and Political Wire, picked up the report.

As it turns out, Ritholtz's source for the post was a man he happened to meet and strike up a conversation with at a Barbados airport over the weekend, he told me in an interview this afternoon.

Here's what happened, according to Ritholtz, who just got back from a vacation on the tropical island: He was sitting in the Barbados airport waiting for a plane to arrive and he struck up a conversation with an older man sitting next to him.

"We started chatting and next thing I know, we're waiting to leave the gate, his phone rings and he tells his wife, 'yeah Ailes just canceled the event,' Ritholtz says, describing the man as "obviously annoyed and frustrated."

The man runs an annual event in March at which Ailes was scheduled to speak, according to Ritholtz, who declined to specify the event. When he asked the man why Ailes canceled, the man said Ailes was about to be indicted. He describes the man, who he would not name, as an "Upper East Side Democrat."

Ritholtz says that everyone assumed any indictment would be related to a matter reported on by the New York Times last week: that Ailes allegedly told News Corp. executive Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators who were vetting Bernie Kerik, the New York police commissioner who was nominated to be the first Secretary of Homeland Security. Regan had had an affair with Kerik at a lovenest near Ground Zero; Ailes allegedly wanted to protect the political ambitions of Kerik's boss, Rudy Giuliani. The allegations emerged in a civil lawsuit filed by Regan -- who claimed that she had a phone recording of Ailes talking about the matter -- against News Corp. Much about the episode is still unclear because Regan was paid $10 million to settle the suit, and she signed a confidentiality agreement.

It's not entirely clear what Ailes would be charged with in connection with the episode. I've reached out to a Fox spokesperson for a response to all this, and I will update this post if I hear back.

Ritholtz, for his part, describes his attitude in writing the post as "passing along what an informed person had said."

"If it's true we'll find out. If it's not, no big deal," he says. "We'll see where this goes."

Well, yes, I guess we'll see. My guess is that it takes a whole lot more than this to bring down a lifelong thug like Ailes. In fact, this all has the ring of really bad -- and unfunny -- comedy, like maybe a really bad Woody Allen movie.

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Time For Roland Burris To Step Down-- And For Bernie Kerik To Start Serving Time

Isn't American Justice now just about all movin' on?

Roland Burris has voted really well since being appointed to the Senate by Rod Blagojevich. In terms of progressive issues, he's up there with Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Jeff Merkely (D-OR), the Senate's champions of working families. But Burris is more a champion of Roland Burris than of any families and every minute he's in the Senate is a blot on that already suspect institution of systemic corruption. A new secretly recorded transcript of a phone conversation between Burris-- looking to be appointed to the Senate-- and Blagojevich's brother-- looking to help his bro sell a Senate seat-- was released yesterday. In it Burriss offers Blagojevich money for the seat and frets about how bad it will look if the media finds out.

He was right. It looks bad. He should be removed immediately. Illinois has an exceptionally honest reform governor, Pat Quinn. I wish I could say the same thing about the state legislature but, unfortunately, it isn't that much different from other notoriously corrupt state legislatures like Texas', Florida's, Pennsylvania's and California's. This sounds like a job for Patrick Fitzgerald, far more from the hidebound, incumbent protection racket known as the Senate Ethics Committee.



And speaking of crooked politicians, Bernie Kerik was finally indicted. According to this morning's NY Times the Rudy Guiliani crony and bagman was "indicted on charges of making false statements to White House officials vetting him for the secretary's seat at the Department of Homeland Security in 2004."

Kerik, who served as commissioner from 1998 to 2002, allegedly gave false and misleading answers to Bush administration officials about his relationship with contractors who renovated his Riverdale apartment, according to the indictment handed up by a Washington grand jury.

Prosecutors allege Kerik received and concealed benefits of about $255,000 in renovations to his home from contractors seeking to do business with the city of New York.

Kerik's camp-- i.e., the never ending Giuliani campaign-- claims the Justice Department is out to get him and that this is just "the latest example of the Department of Justice's overzealous pursuit of high-profile public figures."

From our You Can't Make This Stuff Up Dept.: If Tom Ridge becomes the next senator from Delmarpenn, who's gonna lobby for Albania?

Click on it to enlarge, and then scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, almost all the way, and . . . there, stop! This is former Pennsylvania governor and "founding" Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's "registration statement" under the "Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended." And who is he representing? Albania, fercripessakes? (I swear I'm not making this up. Heck, you're looking right at it!)

by Ken

So I was reading this DailyKos diary by Jed Lewison about how Tom Ridge "will announce whether or not he's running for Senate within the next two weeks." Now I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Tom Ridge. In fact, the one question about him that interests me is that of his actual existence, as opposed to being, say, some sort of mass hallucination escaped from a particularly wicked Tom Tomorrow cartoon. Doesn't most everyone in a Tom Tomorrow cartoon look (and for that matter talk) like Tom Ridge?

[As always, click to enlarge.]

TWO POSSIBLE PROOFS FOR THE ACTUAL
EXISTENCE OF THE ALLEGED TOM RIDGE

1. The Empirical Proof

Get together a pile of stuff, like gumdrops and twigs and pennies and rotten eggs and tomatoes, and systematically hurl the stuff at the alleged Tom Ridge (note the creepy, dead-on resemblance between the "real" Tom and every character in the Tom Tomorrow cartoon strip above). If the stuff goes right on through, we've proved once and for all that there really is no such thing. However, if the stuff is interrupted in its trajectory by the alleged Tom Ridge, that just proves that there's something there, not that the something is an actual living, breathing person.

2. The Scientific Proof

With a chisel or a hacksaw or something, chop off a chunk of the alleged Tom Ridge and shoot it over to the lab for scientific analysis. (Just to be safe, you might want to break off a chunklet and send it to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. I don't mean to cast aspersions. I'm just saying, better safe than sorry. Am I right?) In theory, the lab should be able to tell us not just whether there is such a thing as Tom Ridge, but what sort of thing it might be. Would plastic sheeting and duct tape be sufficient to protect us against it?

Now, since our Tom has been dragged into the Arlen Specter story, I'll play along -- up to a point, anyways. Here's Jed Lewison's take:

[I]f Ridge does decide to run, he's going to need to figure out in which state, because it turns out he has a claim on running in at least three of them.

In a June, 2008 foreign agent registration filing, Ridge listed Maryland as his residence and said that his firm, Ridge Global LLC, was a Delaware corporation. Ridge was also governor of Pennsylvania, leaving him with at least three 2010 races he could consider:

1. Maryland, where he would challenge Barbara Mikulski

2. Delaware, where he would try to fill Joe Biden's old seat

3. Pennsylvania, where he would challenge Pat Toomey for the GOP nomination, and if he won, whoever wins the Democratic primary

In addition to showing that Ridge lives in Pennsylvania Maryland and incorporated his firm in Delaware, the document also shows that in 2007 Ridge earned nearly a half-million dollars representing the foreign government of Albania.

Perhaps more notably, even though Ridge was paid that money in January and November of 2007, he didn't report it until June 2008.

All the polls say that Ridge could mount a viable campaign in Pennsylvania. But as this document shows, if Ridge does run, his opponents will start out with serious questions to raise with him.

Now the question of which state our Tom is fit to represent doesn't much engage me. Is there any state, short of "torpor" or perhaps "disengagement," he could be imagined to be "fit to represent"? Have we really forgotten the frightening lesson of watching the man take his place as his pal George W. Bush's homeland security czar, coming to Washington with the reputation of being "really smart" and performing as a total buffoon? (Can someone who was set to be replaced by Bernie Kerik be said to have ever really existed?)

Nevertheless, we'll kick our Tom's Senate prospects around a bit, right after this dramatic pause to register astonishment . . .

Hey, what the fuck was that? Ridge earned nearly half a million smackeroos representing the government of Albania?

Albania??? Holy Enver Hoxha, Batman!

No, we have not slipped into some cheesy Mad Magazine parody. As a matter of fact, though, if we were attempting some such cheesy parody, and were trying to make up the most preposterous and most pathetic imaginable foreign "entanglement" for our Tom, I have no doubt that Albania would be near or at the very top of our list of possibilities.

So now we know that for 11 months in 2006-07 our Tom was, um, Tirana's man in D.C. For the benefit of anyone who isn't already convulsed with laughter, here is Besar Likmeta's account (on World Politics Review, Sept. 11, 2006) of what our Tom was hired to do:

The primary function of the former secretary's new job is to make the case for the accession of Albania into NATO in Washington. A government spokesman clarified that Ridge will engage a team of consultants and offer his connections to make known Albania's reforms in the United States, while forging homeland security and good governance strategies. In addition to his security expertise and Washington connections, [Albanian Prime Minister Sali] Berisha is hoping to exploit Ridge's experience as Governor of Pennsylvania. In a country in profound need of structural reforms, Ridge is expected to consult with the government on strategies to reform education, the judiciary, agriculture and information technology.

Let me stress: I am still not making any of this stuff up.

So somebody persuaded Prime Minister Berisha that the man he needed to grease his country's way into NATO was . . . Tom Ridge??? (Do I really need to point out how well that worked out?) And for the asking price of $40K a month, our miracle man was, in addition, going to strategize the reform of Albania's educational system, judiciary, agriculture, and information technology?

Oh, good grief, is there anyone who thinks our Tom even knows how to spell all these words?

I can't help wondering how this contact was made. Are we really supposed to imagine that the prime minister's brain trust, while picking its collective brain, scoured the ranks of "the connected" in D.C. looking for just the right "enabler" -- and came up with Tom Ridge??? Did some genius dash off a fax to Jack Abramoff's talent shop asking for a recommendation?

Or, heaven help us, did our Tom perhaps solicit the gig?

Hello, my name is Thomas ("Tom") Ridge, and I am a 60-year-old boy who by way of "experience" served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania and two years as the very first U.S. secretary of Homeland Security. I would like to offer my services -- at any job you can think of, like mowing your lawn in summer, and maybe running a lemonade stand, and shoveling your driveway in winter. I am a hard worker, a "self-starter," and I am determined someday to make something of myself.

So if that's the pitch, and we're Young Tom, where do we send it? Here's a thought: If we look at the alphabetical list of United Nations members, we find under "A":

Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Andorra
Angola
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan

Given the, er, situation in Afghanistan in the earlier years of this century, wouldn't it be understandable -- as we imagine our enterprising Tom planning to send out his first cold mailing -- if he gave that country a discreet pass? (Perhaps we can find out whether he made contact with folks in Algeria and Andorra?)

Now, however the contact was made, it appears that our Tom and his new Albanian clients reached a meeting of the minds in early September of 2006. And in case you were wondering, it appears that you can sign a contract to represent a foreign government without asking anybody's permission, as our Tom did. However, the rules -- okay, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938, as amended, if you want to be technical -- say that you've got to file the appropriate registration form with the Dept. of Justice "within 10 days of signing the contract and before performing any duties for the client" (as reported by Roll Call).

This is problematic, as Jed Lewison suggests. It appears that Tom of Albania was on Tirana's payroll, at that $40K a month, from Oct. 2006 through Aug. 2007, and duly filed his registration form with the DoJ on, um, let's see, well, again according to Roll Call: "The time stamp on Ridge's registration stamp with the Justice Department is dated June 12, 2008."

Let's take a second to do the math. I don't have the exact date of the contract-signing, but Besar Likmeta wrote in his above-cited Sept. 11, 2006, World Politics Review report:

In a statement made during a joint press conference at the prime minister's office Sept. 4, Berisha announced that Ridge had agreed to join his government's efforts to become part of [NATO], while providing much needed advice in the fight against organized crime and corruption.

So if we figure the contract was signed by Sept. 4, ten days takes us to Sept. 14, 2006. Sure enough the DoJ received our Tom's FARA form right on time on . . . um, June 12, 2008. Okay, that's stretching the 10-day reporting deadline just a tad. By roughly 637 days according to my quick count. (Remember, 2008 was a leap year.)

What's more, the eventual FARA registration form did not appear spontaneously. It seems that to get it, the DoJ -- "after press accounts surfaced noting Ridge's connection to the country," according to Roll Call -- had to rattle our Tom's cage to get the, er, slightly late paperwork produced. (By the way, those "foreign agents" are also subject to periodic subsequent reporting requirements. Of course in this case the association had already been terminated by the time it was reported.)

That's right, the Bush DoJ! Long since converted, under the watchful eye of VP "Big Dick" Cheney, into Your One-Stop Shop for Legalized Republicrookery. How dumb or crooked would a Republican have to have been to fall afoul of the Bush DoJ's enforcers?

Fortunately, our Tom had a simple, logical, understandable explanation when the feds put the screws to him about his Albanian lobbying activities. He didn't know he was supposed to register. Why, that could happen to anybody! Never mind that this is the man who had been, in those angst-ridden years of the first term of the Bush regime, first as President Bush's homeland security adviser and then as our very first secretary of Homeland Security, the point man in the protection of, you know, the security of the homeland.

Okay, so the need for paid agents of foreign governments to register somehow escaped our Tom's notice. At least he understood the color codes for those national-security alerts we got every time the Bush regimistas felt the need to promote panic in the American body politic. Or anyway he knew somebody who understood the color-coding.


"OKAY, OKAY," YOU SAY, "ENOUGH SNARK -- WILL
OUR TOM BE THE GOP'S PA SENATE CANDIDATE?"

There are, it appears, folks who take our Tom more seriously than I do. Just yesterday WashingtonExaminer.com Political Editor Chris Stirewalt wrote of the possibility of Tom's entering the Pennsylvania GOP Sentate jamboree against anti-tax loon Pat Toomey:

Last week, the conservative former congressman was looking at a likely primary win over Specter followed by a possible victory over a lesser-known Democrat in the fall.

Now, Toomey is the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination but is facing a double-digit loss to Specter next November.

Many Republicans are now hoping that Ridge — former mayor of Erie, former congressman from the western part of the state and former popular two-term governor — will jump in the race.

Prominent GOP operatives who know Ridge and Pennsylvania politics tell me that there are two controlling issues for the 63-year-old former Homeland Security boss: his loss of income from giving up his private security consulting firm and his ability to beat Toomey.

Only Ridge and his accountant know the answer to the first question. Would ending a political career on a high note be worth the aggravation of candidacy and giving up his chance to make some big dough?

On the second question, though, there’s some hard data.

Recent polling has shown that Toomey enjoys a 40 percent favorable rating among Pennsylvania Republicans and a 3 percent unfavorable rating. Compare that with a 78 percent favorable and a 5 percent unfavorable rating for Ridge. In other words, if Toomey means to have any chance at winning a primary, he would have to attack Ridge.

“Ridge is still in rock star territory with numbers like those,” one prominent GOP pollster said. “The only way [Toomey] can beat him is to light him up — and that will cap his own favorables.”

National conservatives see Ridge as vulnerable because he is a pro-choice, social moderate. And while that may have disqualified him from being John McCain’s running mate, the Pennsylvania GOP hasn’t changed so much that it would limit his prospects there.

As we are frequently reminded, in eerily identical terms, our Tom was a popular two-term governor of his home state. We may yet find out just how popular he is. I can't help thinking this is one of those deals where maybe he was, and perhaps still is, famous for being popular and popular for being famous, and Pennsylvanians may have been happy enough to pull the lever beside his name because they recognized the name, on account of his being so famously popular and popularly famous -- thereby freeing them from having to think about the whole business too hard. Quite possibly they had more important things on their minds.

On one question there is no serious question. People are making an issue of our Tom's Maryland residency, suggesting that it's somehow inappropriate for him to run for office back home. Never mind that Senate residency requirements are flexible to the point of nonexistence, and people have been known to run in states to which they have infinitely flimsier connections. Our Tom was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and apart from his military (and, later, congressional) service spent roughly the first 56 years of his life as a resident -- up to the point when he was called to full-time federal government service by his pal from their time as fellow governors, George W. Bush. (Now this business of being a pal of George W. Bush, I see no problem with that weighing heavily in his disfavor.)

Of course there is that Maryland residence, so if our Tom wants to have at Senator Mikulski, that's okay by me. For that matter, I'm even okay with the Delaware connection. Better still, why doesn't he run in all three states? On the understanding, of course, that if he winds up representing two or even all three states, he does so at only one salary, and with only one staff, at least in Washington (I suppose there would need to be separate staffs in each of the states), meaning that we would in effect get two or even three empty suits for close to the price of one!

In these economically still-parlous times, how can we resist a deal like that?

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UPDATE: It Looks Like Ken's Albania Exposé Has Driven Tom R From The Race!

Tirana's man in DC has has bowed out leaving the Republicans stuck with either the hard right unelectable Pat Toomey or the squishy rubber stamp Jim Gerlach, who needs to find a new job since he'd be unlikely to hold his House seat next year (having won with 51% in 2006 and 52% in 2008). Or, if they ask nice, maybe Specter would come back. At this point, maybe the Democrats would even give them a nice dowry to take him off their hands! (Don't forget to vote in the straw poll today!)

From the 2008 leftover pile: If Rudy and Jeb are the cream of the GOP leadership-in-waiting, hoo boy!

Bernie Kerik came this close to being secretary of homeland
security. (Does Chimpy the Prez know talent, or what?)

by Ken

The idea was supposed to be to attack this pile of stuff I never got around to writing about in 2008, knocking each item off in a single paragraph, with a link to where somebody has written about it. But as you know, "a single paragraph" isn't something I do a lot of. So let's start with quick (quickish?) glances at the two leading statesmen among the Republican leaders-in-waiting.


* RUDY! RUDY!

This is actually an item Howie shot back from Africa (under the above subject line): news of a revised and amplified set of indictments against Bernie Kerik, who as NYC corrections commissioner and then police commissioner was Mayor Rudy Giuliani's good right hand on security matters. Later, of course, after they had left office and were in the private sector together, those unfortunate indictments against Bernie got Rudy to chop off that old hand right quick.

Back in the good old days it was Rudy and Bernie, standing side by side, who kept the city safe -- from, you know, stuff like the terrorist attacks on which Rudy presents himself as such an authority. Oh wait!

Well, they like to make believe that they're the bee's knees in security consciousness. (Certainly Rudy is an acknowledged master at sustaining 9/11 consciousness, not to mention Rudy consciousness.) Just look how much time Rudy and Bernie devoted to securing -- oops, I almost said "procuring" -- gov't-provided love nests for their extramarital shtupping. Okay, that's maybe unkind. For guys this repulsive, both personally and physically, they must have had to become pretty darned powerful just to get opportunities for fornicating, especially on the public's time and dime.

Rudy of course came this close to 9/11-ing his way into the White House, and now presumably he's preparing for his next run. Don't forget, it took him two tries to race-bait his way into City Hall. In 2010 he has his pick in of a run for governor or senator. I'm sure he's hoping that by then his old comrade-in-arms Bernie will have plea-bargained his way back into well-deserved obscurity.

Then came this NYT blog report:

WHITE PLAINS -- Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who at one point was President Bush's top choice to lead the federal Department of Homeland Security, pleaded not guilty on Monday morning to new tax-fraud charges that were added to his public-corruption case.

As part of a superseding indictment, Mr. Kerik, 53, was arraigned on two new charges of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false tax returns for the tax years 2002 and 2005, and one new charge of making false statements regarding a loan application for a home loan. Mr. Kerik was originally indicted in November 2007 on corruption, conspiracy and tax fraud charges.

If convicted on all the current charges against him he could face 142 years in prison -- according to the United States attorney's office in the original indictment -- along with $4.75 million in fines and forfeiture of $255,000 that authorities say were the proceeds of a criminal conspiracy.

* JEB! JEB!

Speaking of the "depth" of that Republican leadership bench, we were talking recently about the sudden, miraculous revival of Jeb Bush's political hopes, which the poor guy undoubtedly thought had been ended by the permanent "political pariah" status his big brother earned for the Bush name -- as witness those extra hundred or two pounds he's put on. But Jeb discovered that, as far as the American electorate is concerned, as long as it's nothing more serious than gross incompetence and trampling the constitution, "permanent" memories can vanish in a heartbeat -- and then he too took a look at the strength of that current GOP lineup: Willard "The Rat" Romney, Minister Mike the Huckster Bee, Princess Sarah Palin. Jeb can be forgiven for thinking that he's back. Heck, maybe he can go on Minister Mike's weight-loss program.

And in 2010 Jeb too has a plum job opening up to get him back into public service (and the public eye). Sen. Mel Martinez, of all people, has turned out to be too principled to sustain a career in Republican politics. (Off his record as party chairman and then his time to date in the Senate, who'd a-thunk it?) So he's not running for reelection, clearing the seat for Jeb to waddle into if he's interested, since the strongest statewide candidate Florida Dems seem able to field is "none of the above." (Unless you count begging former governor and senator Bob Graham to once again unretire.)

Jeb has been out of the public eye so long now that all Floridians seem to remember is how much they used to love him, even though from everything I've heard, his successor as governor, fellow Republican Charlie Crist, has been a way better governor. As governor, Jeb seemed to seize every opportunity to be as committed a far-right ideologue as his brother George on social issues, and an even bigger corporate and special-interest whore on all issues where money was involved.

Florida has been one of the states hardest hit by the mortgage meltdown, and it's turning out, not surprisingly, that Governor Jeb played a powerful role in putting the state at the mercy of a horde of thieves, including actual criminals. Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake called attention last week to a series that the Miami Herald has been running since July (in other words, since before the shit really hit the fan) called "Borrowers Betrayed," and also to a report on the series on Columbia Journalism Review's blog The Audit which includes an interview with Herald reporter Jack Dolan, who's been one of the principal reporters on the series.

Here are the Herald website's thumbnail summaries of the early installments in the series:

Part 1: State regulators allow thousands with a criminal past to peddle home loans -- costing consumers millions.

Part 2: Despite pleas from consumers, Florida does not require loan originators to pass criminal background checks.

Part 3: Even when brokers break the law, they are frequently allowed to keep their licenses -- only to break the law again.

In the interview, CJR's Ryan Chittum asks reporter Dolan why the state regulators failed so abysmally to regulate.

A big part of the problem on Wall Street and across the country has been this laissez-faire attitude toward regulation. Was it philosophy? What caused them to just not do their job?

JD: Nobody ever came right out and said on the record “Jeb Bush appointed us and he’s not a big fan of government, so we didn’t do it.” One of the more telling things that one of the higher-ups at the agency told me; he said “Look, my whole career has been spent regulating guys in silk suits. These mortgage brokers, they’re not bankers. They have little storefronts. Those are guys in polyester suits.”

He said that, and that kind of summed it up for me. These were kind of white-shoe regulators, and the mortgage brokers were, you know…

Which leaves open the question of how effectively Jeb's blue-blood-loving regulators in fact watched over those guys in the silk suits.

If enough investigators do enough investigating of the other Bush regime, assuming Jeb chooses to make the Senate race, even whatever sad sack candidate the Dems come up with should be able to send him back to private life.

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After Scotty: The Tom Brokaws of the world ask, How could we have known?, while the Bush kooks crawl out of the woodwork to denounce the traitor

"Regardless of whether McClellan is right about [the media] not pushing back hard enough or even, as my friend thereisnospoon says, what they reported after he stonewalled them (although it is an excellent point) . . . there are still so many abuses and lies and stories that they should be reporting on and are not."

-- clammyc, in his Daily Kos diary yesterday,
"While 'defending its honor,' MSM still dropping the ball"

"There's the loyalty trade-off for you: On the one hand, [Bernie] Kerik did a terrible job in a critical assignment in Iraq, allowed himself to be nominated to a hugely important post for which he was ill qualified and showed a stupendous lack of interest in ethical considerations when he served in New York City.

"On the plus side, he will never, ever write a tell-all memoir about any of the great men he has served."

"While the bracing effects of being pushed out of his job have helped [Scott] McClellan face reality, clarity might have come earlier if he'd just been more canny about personal relationships. His White House career could have been so different if, when Bush started babbling about W.M.D.'s in Iraq, McClellan reminded himself that this was coming from a guy who couldn't remember what drugs he had ingested."

-- Gail Collins, in her NYT column today, "What George Forgot"

It occurs to me that I may have been underestimating what poor Scotty McClellan's revelations have to tell us.

Oh, not poor Scotty's revelations themselves. I'm thinking of the reaction to them, in particular among the two groups who feel most challenged by poor Scotty's shocking revelation of, well, stuff we've known for some time now.


(1)
FIRST, THERE ARE THE MEDIA HORDES WHO SCREWED
UP BACK THEN -- JUST LIKE THEY'RE SCREWING UP NOW

Even some of the media mensches who actually got the story right are up in arms about poor Scotty pointing a pudgy finger at them. How dare he? they seem to be asking. Why, why (note how they're reduced to spluttering), by his own admission, he just stood up there and lied to us!

Is it really necessary to explain how fatuous this is? Of course the Bush regime's relentless propagandizing and lying made the media pigeons' job harder. But wasn't it still their job to get at the truth? There were lots of media people who weren't fooled, and who tried to do honest reporting -- and a bunch of them did a splendid job. Of course nobody paid any attention to them, in large part because the fat and lazy big-time media, with their suspicious big-corporate ties, tanked on the job.

But even within those organizations, I think it's safe to say there were people who knew better. I have no inside sources at the New York Times, but I know enough about the organization to venture with confidence that inside the Times building there were a lot of reporters and surely lower-level editors as well (we saw the way it worked in the last season of The Wire) screaming bloody murder about, for example, how Judy Miller had become a shill for the Bush regime.

The depressing thing is that the infotainment media don't seem to have learned a bloody thing. NBC's Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams put their heads together, combining their two generations and years beyond counting (albeit mostly wasted years) of Nightly News managing-editor experience to figure out whether "the right questions were asked, the right tone was employed and should it be viewed in the context to that time?" (That's Brian doing the asking.)

And here's the wisdom of Graybeard Tom:

Look, I think all of us would like to go back and ask questions with the benefit of hindsight of what we know now, but a lot of what was going on was unknowable.

Except, of course, that lots of people knew, and were jumping up and down trying to get the attention of the stonewalling infotainmenteers. "Well," as our pal John Amato notes on Crooks and Liars, "he should have watched Bill Moyers special on the media as a refresher course."

Meanwhile, as our friend clammyc pointed out yesterday in the terrific Daily Kos diary from which I've quoted at the top, those media slugs are providing essentially the same caliber of performance now that they did back then (I should warn that I haven't attempted to reproduce the scads of links embedded in the text -- you can check them out on Daily Kos):

While "defending its honor", MSM still dropping the ball
by clammyc

For starters, I only use "MSM" in the title because "corporate media" or "infotainment media" wouldn’t fit. That being said, the sad irony of the press corps which once again shows how out of touch the village idiots are with reality is that, despite all of the huffing and puffing about how Scott McClellan wouldn’t let them do their jobs, they still are falling flat on their faces at every turn.

I’d use the term jumped the shark (hyperlinked for those who don’t know what it means) to describe them and their role in the whole "reporting the news and professional journalism" thing that they clearly have long given up but I think the term "jump the shark" has kind of jumped the shark...

When news reporters say that their corporate bosses pushed them to take out their "America, Fuck YEAH!!!" pom poms, that is bad enough. But when the same reporter complains about how unfair McClellan was being to criticize them was not only the same one to share a stage with traitor Rove in one of the most eye-burning dances ever and is STILL, to this day the NBC News Chief White House Correspondent, and is not doing the job that McClellan accused him of not doing, well, sorry, I have no sympathies there.

And when someone like Tom Brokaw is shocked, SHOCKED, that his profession were either dumb or complicit or unfit to do the jobs they are supposed to do, it is time to not only call him on this, but to push back forcefully.

When Brokaw says that "all wars are based on propaganda", he misses the point. Propaganda means the spreading of ideas or rumor to further your cause or to damage an opposing cause. This was not propaganda. It was lies.

Period.

Hell, even Speaker Pelosi calls it a lie, although that apparently is still not grounds for impeachment.

What makes this worse, and what all of the whiny whiners are missing is that regardless of whether McClellan is right about them not pushing back hard enough or even, as my friend thereisnospoon says, what they reported after he stonewalled them (although it is an excellent point), is that there are still so many abuses and lies and stories that they should be reporting on and are not.

Where to even begin here? Even equating McCain’s total cluelessness about the troop levels and the violence in mosul with Obama’s minor "gaffe" (if it can even be called a gaffe) about a personal story that happened to be accurate in every meaningful way is a great disservice to what Americans should know when judging who should be their next President. Or the way that the Wright/Hagee/Parsley stories were reported -- if they should even have been covered at all in the first place.

And it doesn’t stop there, of course. There are real serious things -- things that should be covered and reported to the American people that we deserve to know about. Things that are imperative -- things that are both accurate but ignored and things that are inaccurate yet covered non-stop as if they were gospel.

Things like the number of troops that are committing suicide and have PTSD. Things like telecom immunity really being about protecting Bush and his illegal programs. Things like the GAO report that shows how unprepared we are to deal with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan. Things like the Pentagon propaganda campaign. Things like FISA. Things like fake "evidence" that overblows the threat that Iran is to the United States (or Israel for that matter). Things like the continued devastation in the Gulf Coast, almost three years later.

Things like Rove and Miers ignoring Congressional subpoenas for no good reason. Things like the hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters from voter ID anti-voter laws and other voter suppression tactics. Things like the same voting machines that were unreliable in 2002, 2004 and 2006 are still being used, despite many not being certified. Things like asking what exactly happened to the millions of dollars in cash that were "lost" in Iraq. Things like why the US was arming both sides of a civil war in Iraq, or exactly what the role of our troops is or the desired end game is in Iraq or the reason we should still be spending billions of dollars every month there.

So many more things. Even things like why Cindy McCain gets a pass when Teresa Heinz Kerry didn’t. Or why McCain still calls himself a "straight talker" when he is either lying, stupid or just losing it. And even bringing it back to McClellan’s bubble bursting smack in their faces, why they STILL aren’t saying that they were lied to.

All the handwringing and finger pointing and blame gaming in the world won’t change the fact that McClellan passed along (either willfully or not) lies and they were not challenged or questioned at the time. And nothing will change the fact that the independence and integrity of those who are in the corporate media were sacrificed to become "buddy buddy" with the very people that lied and destroyed national security secrets and pissed all over the Constitution and made them out for the damn fools that they proved to be.

Regardless of whether it was their choice or the choice of their corporate puppetmasters bosses.

But instead of this "woe is me" nonsense, how about a bit of reflection and actually using it as a learning experience. There is so much that needs to be reported, so much that needs exposing, so much that a bit of research can lead to a huge story that the American public will be interested in.

The sad thing is that instead of doing the job that McClellan said you didn’t do a few years ago, you choose to keep crying that it just isn’t fair.

(2)
THEN THERE ARE THE REGIMISTS AND THEIR GROUPIES
WHO ARE SIMPLY SHOCKED BY SCOTTY'S DISLOYALTY

Here's where it gets hilarious. Presumably on the old theory that there's honor among thieves, the most astonishing people are crawling out of the woodwork. Mary Matalin? Bob Dole? And . . . and . . . Bernie Kerik???

When we venture into the land of the kooks, there's no better tour guide than the Times's Gail Collins:

Op-Ed Columnist
What George Forgot
By GAIL COLLINS

"DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE," wrote Bernard Kerik in an e-mail that he was circulating around this week. Kerik, you may remember, was the former New York City police commissioner who George W. Bush once tried to make chief of Homeland Security. This was during Kerik's happier, preindictment era.

Kerik's outrage was directed at Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary whose much-discussed memoir, "What Happened," reveals that the Bush White House put politics ahead of truth and openness with the American people.

I know it's a shock, but try to be brave.

The administration's defenders have not really attacked the book's thesis -- really, what could you say? But they've been frothing at the mouth over McClellan's lack of loyalty. "This will stand as the epitome, the ultimate breach of that code of honor," said Mary Matalin.

We've heard a lot about loyalty this year. Remember when Bill Richardson endorsed Barack Obama and James Carville compared Richardson to Judas Iscariot? And the whole Jeremiah Wright drama was mainly about Obama's coming to grips with the sad fact that presidents do not have the luxury of being loyal to anybody outside of their immediate gene pool.

"Having been through all I have been through in the past four years, disloyalty and betrayal seem more prevalent today than ever before in my lifetime, and that in itself, to me, is sickening," Kerik wrote in his e-mail, which also suggested that writing unflattering memoirs about working for the president "should be a crime."

Currently under indictment for multiple counts of fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion, Kerik is not, at this point, a person the administration calls upon when it wants to be defended. But he is a perfect example of what a worthless quality loyalty is in high government officials.

Kerik is stupendously loyal, which is what endeared him to Rudy Giuliani, his great patron. The Bush administration, which also prizes loyalty, shipped him off to Iraq with the critical job of supervising the rebuilding of the Iraqi police. Kerik stayed only three months, during which he devoted himself to giving interviews and being gregarious, the two things he does very well. Management, however, turned out not to be a strong point.

Back home, Bush was embarrassed when Kerik's Homeland Security nomination immediately ran aground on reports of his ethics issues. His downfall was a terrible blow to Giuliani's presidential candidacy -- although given Rudy's multitudinous deficiencies as presidential timber, it's hard to pick the one that made the difference.

Anyway, there's the loyalty trade-off for you: On the one hand, Kerik did a terrible job in a critical assignment in Iraq, allowed himself to be nominated to a hugely important post for which he was ill qualified and showed a stupendous lack of interest in ethical considerations when he served in New York City.

On the plus side, he will never, ever write a tell-all memoir about any of the great men he has served.

Whoever the next president is, I hope he-she picks incredibly well-qualified people who are strong enough to speak their minds and cynical enough not to assume the chief executive knows what he-she is doing. Loyalty does not tend to be a great virtue in these types, and the goal should be to wring as much accomplishment as possible out of them before the inevitable betrayal.

My favorite moment in "What Happened" was from 1999 when George W. Bush was deeply irritated about questions from the press on his past drug use. "The media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors," the future president said. "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not."

"I remember thinking to myself, How can that be? It didn't make a lot of sense," McClellan wrote.

While the bracing effects of being pushed out of his job have helped McClellan face reality, clarity might have come earlier if he'd just been more canny about personal relationships. His White House career could have been so different if, when Bush started babbling about W.M.D.'s in Iraq, McClellan reminded himself that this was coming from a guy who couldn't remember what drugs he had ingested.

Even now, McClellan still appears to have trouble with the critical concept that deeds matter more than words.

"Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake," he writes. "But in reflecting on all that happened during the Bush administration, I've come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made -- a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed."

Personally, I'm a huge fan of candor and honesty. But when it comes to fundamental mistakes, I'll start with the unnecessary war.

Man, you can't make this stuff up. Sometimes I wish you could, but when it comes to these people, trust me, you really can't.

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