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Reuters is reporting that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald “appears to be laying the groundwork for indictments” this week, possibly including charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation over the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. If that’s not surprising, neither is the Republican’s typically hypocritical spin:

In a preview of how Republicans would counter charges against top administration officials by Fitzgerald, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas brushed aside an indictment for perjury — rather than for the underlying crime of outing a covert operative — as a “technicality.”

A technicality, huh? Oh… you mean like lying about a blowjob?

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Hutchinson accused Fitzgerald of trumping up perjury charges in an effort to show that “two years’ of investigation was not a waste of time and dollars.”

Hmm. So how does the Fitzgerald investigation compare to the four-year witch hunt that Ken Starr conducted against President Bill Clinton? Well, Armando reports on Daily Kos that Fitzgerald has spent $723,000 to date, whereas Starr spent $40,835,000 to catch a president lying about sex. Remember… Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, and everything else he investigated… and all he came up with was Monica’s stained blue dress. And a Republican Congress impeached a president for that.

So now that their ox is being gored, and Republicans start explaining away perjury as a “technicality”… I have to laugh.

David Irons Jr.’s mother has mixed emotions about her son. On the upside, she says he’s “very good with his hands.” On the downside, she claims he’s used them to beat her.

I’m almost embarrassed to start with such a flippant lede… for my hour-long conversation with Janet Irons was both sad and disturbing, and the genuine pain she expressed surely deserves more respect. But this is a story that apparently demands the most shocking prose possible in order to be heard, for it is also one of those stories that everybody in the media seems to know, yet nobody wants to talk about.

In an era when pundits and reporters can soberly chronicle the impeachment of a president for lying about a blowjob, it seems inconceivable that our local media could ignore the character testimony of a candidate’s own parents. But that is exactly what the MSM has done for years, most recently with Joni Balter’s timid, almost-apologia of a column in the September 29 edition of the Seattle Times. [”Irons’ Burden? It’s all relative“]

Balter starts by asking the obvious and pertinent question — “Who is David Irons Jr. and why is much of his family unwilling to vote for him…?” — yet she amazingly leads readers to believe that the family feud is merely rooted in politics.

That is not the story the Irons family told me, nor the one they claim they told Balter. Irons’ mother, father and younger sister won’t vote for him because they believe him to be “dishonest”, “devious”, prone to violent outbursts, and “totally unqualified” to serve as King County Executive. The family cites a number of incidents, many dating from long before Irons’ 1999 run for county council, that call into question his fitness for office and paints the picture of a troubled, unstable man with a vastly inflated resume, a penchant for dirty tricks, and dubious ethics.

“Wouldn’t I like to be the proud mother and say yes,” Janet told me when I opened the interview by asking whether she supports her son’s candidacy, “but that just isn’t the case.” She then went on to recount the sad tale of David Jr.’s gradual estrangement from the family, whichculminated in his council run, rather than started from it as Balter implies.

Of course, the fact that Irons’ family refuses to vote for him is old news. During his 1999 campaign against Councilman Brian Derdowski, he not only smeared the reputation of his family’s longtime friend, but his victory also put his sister Di Irons, a Derdowski staffer, out of a job. Di’s write-in campaign against her older brother during the general election became amusing fodder for political writers nationwide, but the MSM has remained curiously uncurious about the private circumstances that led to this very public family split. Take for example Balter’s description of Janet’s refusal to endorse her own son, an oddly expurgated bit of reporting:

Irons’ mother is an independent who votes for — or in this case against — individual candidates. Angry about a different family matter years ago, she won’t support her son.

A “family matter”. How concise.

As tearfully recounted to me by Janet, the “family matter” involved an incident that occurred back during the early 1990’s at her office in the family cable company, when David Jr., during one of his frequent fits of rage, hit his mother, knocking her to the floor… and then ripped the phone off the wall when she attempted to dial 911. Frightened, shocked and in pain, Janet fled in her car, hiding several blocks away, “afraid he was coming again.”

Janet has never again allowed herself to be alone with David Jr. since the day the “family matter” occurred. More than a decade later she remains frightened of her own son, even fretting to me that “something might happen” should he read her account in the papers.

As for David Jr., he never denied to his family that something happened that day… he never straightened the office to hide signs of the struggle, nor picked up the typewriter, papers and other objects he angrily swept off his mother’s desk. However, he did deny to his father and sister that he actually hit his mother, incredibly claiming that she ran into his arm… an account that reads like those laughable accident reports where stunned drivers insist that the tree hit their car.

If this were but a single, isolated incident it still would be inexcusable, and in my opinion disqualify him from higher office. But the Irons’ family has many tales of David Jr.’s “violent temper” and his abusive, cuss-filled rages in which he would push his father and poke him in the chest, and occasionally fling objects in blind anger. In one such fit he threw a wrench at his nephew, Di’s son Chris, who afterwards went to his grandfather and refused to ever work with his uncle again. Even the hard-nosed crews who laid cable for the family business complained of working with David Jr., finding it unsettling to have the boss’s son indiscriminately toss obscenities and tools in their direction.

“David billows up easily,” his mother told me in her understated fashion, “and people ought to know.”

Well… many who have worked with him apparently do know. At Brigadoon.com, a former officer tells me that Irons had a reputation as a “bully” who many colleagues avoided entirely. According to council scuttlebutt, Irons has a similar reputation for bullying staffers — particularly women — several of whom reportedly played for colleagues recordings of abusive voicemail messages left for them by the choleric councilman. Derdowski says an unnamed council staffer complained to him that Irons was “abusive and rude”, while another former staffer recalled to me a copy machine mishap that ended in a door-slamming screaming fit.

None of this shocks David Jr.’s mother, who describes her son as “very difficult to get along with.” If anything, she seemed most surprised that he hasn’t shown more of his temper in public. “He sometimes goes bonkers,” she said.

But if Janet is at times understated in describing her son’s explosive temper, it is nothing compared to Balter’s muffled reporting of the family’s assessment of David Jr.’s character:

The candidate’s dad is a Republican likely to vote for Sims because of the vague term, veracity, or in his view, his son’s lack of it.

There is nothing vague about the term “veracity”, and what the family has bluntly told both Balter and me — and anybody else who will listen — is that David Jr. is a liar.

“David lies about all of us,” his mother lamented. According to family members, acquaintances and co-workers, David Jr. has lied to reporters, he’s lied to voters, he’s lied to his family, and he’s lied to the police. Derdowski, who has plenty to be bitter about, is particularly disturbed by what he sees as easily refuted “outlandish lies” from which Irons’ had little or nothing to gain.

“I don’t have the professional experience to diagnose him as a ‘pathological liar’,” Derdowski told me, “but there is a pattern of making false statements where David apparently doesn’t seem to know the difference. I find it chilling.”

Of course, the easiest lies to document are those on Irons’ resume, and at the very start of our conversation Janet immediately made a point of refuting some of her son’s educational claims. In a 1999 candidate survey, Irons — who has no undergraduate degree — described his college education as “Economics/Math, Bellevue Community College, 1971-1973; Economics/Math, Oakland University, 1973-1975.” Unprompted, Janet pulled out her son’s Oakland University transcript, which shows “Intro to Math for Social Studies” I and II, plus a math lab. “Those were the only math courses he ever took,” his mother told me. “David was never very good at math.”

But exaggerating his math education is nothing compared to some of the other doozies on his resume. While Irons’ campaign website biography now describes his involvement in the family business as simply “VP & co-owner All Points Cable TV — 1982 to 1995″, a 1997 resume was considerably more creative.

Both Janet and Di actually laughed at the suggestion that David Jr. was involved in the day-to-day operations and management of the company. “David…?” Di chuckled, “He maintained the trucks.” She says her brother also occasionally liked to operate the equipment out on cable laying jobs, “but mostly he worked alone in the garage.”

Janet echoed her daughter’s account, describing her son’s resume as an exaggeration: “99 percent of what he wrote, there’s not one bit of truth to it.” According to Janet, her son had no office, had absolutely no role in the management of the family business, and while he once accompanied his father on a business trip, he had no involvement in any negotiations. Still, both Di and Janet agree that David Jr. was good at what he did. “He’s an excellent mechanic…” his mother kvelled, “… good with machinery… very good with his hands.”

While his years at the family business may have prepared Irons for a job in the maintenance facility at the county motor pool, it most certainly did not provide the vaunted business experience he touts in his quest to be county executive. Even the one-line reference on his current bio, “VP & co-owner”, is intentionally misleading.

“At a small company like ours, everybody gets a big title,” explained his mother. And if Irons was a co-owner of All Points Cable TV, then I am a co-owner of Apple Computer… and any other corporation in which I might own stock. According to his family, Irons never invested money in the family business, never had a say in its operations, and only came to work for his parents years after the company’s founding. Because David Sr. wanted his children to have a financial stake in the company, he gave David Jr. a raise a couple years into his tenure, but paid the difference in stock instead of cash. When the family sold out in 1995, David Jr.’s take was a couple hundred thousand dollars… not a bad windfall for the company mechanic, but only a small fraction of the multimillion dollar deal.

But lying on your resume is nothing compared to lying to the police. In what his family considers to be but one of his many dirty campaign tricks, they claim David Jr. filed a false police report about a week before the 1999 election, accusing his nephew Chris, the son of his opponent/sister, of vandalizing his car. The family adamantly swears that Chris was at home at the time of the alleged incident… a fact of which they insist David Jr. was well aware. Chris even used his own money to pay for a polygraph test, but when he tried to clear his name by presenting the results to the Sammamish police a few weeks after the election, he was told that his uncle had quietly dropped the charges, claiming Chris had admitted to the crime and agreed to pay restitution… both of which were out and out lies.

To file a false police report about your own nephew was a fitting conclusion to a campaign that had been built on lies and dirty tricks. This was a campaign engineered by the Master Builder’s Association, but one in which Irons ironically campaigned against the eminently green Derdowski for not doing more to control sprawl. It was a campaign where Derdowski signs mysteriously disappeared, and when a local resident, Sara Ulrich, saw Irons himself removing a Derdowski sign she had planted, and asked him what he had done with her sign, he unapologetically replied he had “lost over 14,000 signs.”

This is the David Irons Jr… the tool throwing, obscenity spewing, resume faking, police report falsifying, mother beating, lying, cheating campaign trickster for whom his father, mother and sister refuse to vote.

By all accounts the Irons family had once been very close… bizarrely close… dysfunctionallyclose… all living together on the same Sammamish cul de sac… her parents to one side of Di’s house, her brother to the other. The family used to live together, work together, rent houses by the ocean together, but over time their relationship with David Jr. slowly deteriorated. The brooding David Jr. moved away from the family enclave, and eventually stopped attending family dinners and other events, feigning illness or using some other excuse.

To claim as Balter does, that “a private family squabble spilled into the public realm’’ only after Di ran against her brother as a write-in candidate, is a bizarre misreading of the sequence of events, for it was David Jr., after years of gradually distancing himself from the family, who chose to bring the “squabble” to a head and take it public by running against a close family friend, and putting his little sister out of work. It was David Jr. who estranged himself from his parents and sister, and who has repeatedly gone public with attacks against the family.

A former council staffer describes Irons as nearly appearing sympathetic, almost teary-eyed around the holiday season as he lamented the fact that his children could not enjoy Christmas with their grandparents and cousins. But according to his family, David Jr.’s exile is self-imposed. In 1999 he told his parents that if they did not support him politically, they would never see their grandchildren again… and much to their surprise he actually followed through on the threat. He even forbade his parents to send his children birthday and holiday cards, leaving a voicemail message saying that his girls had shredded their gift checks. (A year later, two of the checks cleared.)

Irons of course, blames his estrangement on his family, once complaining to the Issaquah Press that they never let him know that his 97-year-old grandfather was sick and dying. But according to Di, he hadn’t called or visited the man for over five years, and so they assumed he had as little interest in seeing his grandfather as he did in seeing his own parents.

In telling this story — a story Irons’ mother, father and sister want to be told — I know full well that I am going to piss people off. There are those of you who will say that I have sunk too low… that I have inappropriately brought a man’s private life into the public realm. But to you I ask… since when has a man’s character not been the subject of political campaigns? Just last year John Manning was virtually dismissed as a serious candidate for Seattle City Council because of a prior domestic violence conviction… a conviction Irons might share if he had not had the foresight to tear the phone off the wall before his mother could dial 911.

And to my friends in the media, who have thus far failed to cover this story, I ask you this: how is it possibly responsible journalism to tell the amusing tale of a candidate whose own mother won’t vote for him… yet refuse to attempt to explain to voters the reasons why?

If you reject this story as just another case of he said/she said, then why not reject the entire story, instead of just the part that requires a little elbow grease? How hard is it to research a candidate’s resume to determine if his claims are based in fact? How hard is it to interview former co-workers, employees and neighbors to see if they corroborate the family’s charges? How hard is it to look up a damn police report? Isn’t that your job?

Irons’ own family — the people who know him best — have made devastating charges against his character and qualifications… doesn’t the public have a right to know?

And finally, to those cynical amongst you who question the timing of this post, appearing just as the absentee ballots are dropped in the mail, and thus positioned to have maximum impact… I want to personally assure you that this is absolutely intentional. This is not merely a strategic move on my part, but one which appeals to my unique sense of irony.

You see, back in 1999, when Irons first entered the council race, Derdowski went to the Irons family, who were longtime friends and backers, and said he would not want or expect them to support him in opposition to their son. And so Irons’ mother and father stayed quietly on the sidelines, despite their misgivings about David Jr.’s qualifications.

The night before the absentee ballots dropped for the primary election, Derdowski and Irons’ attended a candidate forum sponsored by the Issaquah Chamber of Commerce, at which the Irons’ family was in attendance. Much to his surprise, the first written question posed to Derdowski was “Are you under investigation by the FBI?”

As it turned out, Derdowski had been under investigation by the FBI during much of the campaign (he’s not sure for what), but the investigation had recently come to a close without indictment or comment. And so Derdowski truthfully answered “No.”

It was a setup. At this point, as Irons’ mother Janet describes it, notorious Eastside developer Skip Rowley exclaimed “We got him! We got him!” while gleefully wringing his hands. Irons immediately stood up and charged that Derdowski was indeed under investigation. An unusually heavy media presence in the audience (apparently tipped off that something would happen) hit the story strong the next day, and by the time the truth played its way through the press a week or so later, the damage had already been done. Derdowski lost the early absentee ballots big, and went on to lose the election.

For months, David Jr. had been bragging to his family that he had a “secret weapon” in his race against Derdowski, and that night they realized what it was. Shocked and offended by what they perceived to be a dirty trick, it was only then, a few weeks before the primary, that Irons’ parents finally came out in public support of Derdowski and in opposition to their own son.

“I’m not proud of my son,” Janet sadly lamented about his political success, “because he didn’t do it the right way. I’m disappointed that he approaches the level he does, and that I didn’t do a better job raising him.”

What started years before with Irons’ violent outbursts, and continued through his brooding, gradual disengagement from his parents and sister, culminated that night in the family split that continues to this day. It was not their son’s politics that prompted his parents to go public, but rather his tactics — specifically, the unfair, public maligning of an old family friend — a dirty trick that to those who knew David Jr. best, must have seemed tragically, unfortunately, and entirely in character.

And so tonight, as I prepare to air Irons’ dirty laundry on the eve of the absentee ballots being mailed, I do so without remorse, and without regret. What goes around comes around.

UPDATE:
N in Seattle of Peace Tree Farm, has a diary up on Daily Kos, and Darryl, usually of Hominid Views, has a very funny letter to David Irons posted over on Jesus’ General.

Oh… and I’ll be talking to Kirby Wilbur tomorrow morning at 7AM, 570-KVI.

King County Executive Ron Sims delivered his 2006 Budget Address before the Council this afternoon, and one little tidbit that immediately jumps off the page is the news that Standard & Poor’s has upgraded the county’s general obligation bond rating to AAA. For the first time in its history, the county now enjoys the highest rating of financial stability awarded by all three major ratings agencies… and one of the highest municipal ratings in the nation.

In announcing the upgrade last week, S&P lauded the county’s “exceptional financial management through the spectrum of economic climates.”

“From 2000 to 2005, King County experienced economic fluctuation; it was also during this time period that a significant statewide property tax limitation initiative was introduced,” said Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Gabriel Petek. “In the midst of these challenges, the county has effectively achieved ongoing structural budget balance while continuing to incrementally increase its reserve levels in recognition of the need for financial cushion in an environment of limited revenue flexibility,” he added. “Moreover, the county has taken steps to address potential challenges to its very strong fiscal position. For instance, the county is facilitating the incorporation or annexation of unincorporated-but-urban areas within its limits–areas that are effectively subsidized by county services under the current regime.”
…
A structural challenge the county has grappled with is the pressure that Initiative-747 (I-747) places on county finances. In 2001, Washington voters approved I-747, which limits the growth of tax revenues to 101% of the previous year’s revenues, plus newly constructed development. Early in the current decade, this and other limits on revenue growth combined with regular growth in expenditures to produce a structural budget gap between recurring revenues and expenses. In response to the loss of tax revenues from I-747, the county budgets conservatively by assuming low growth in sales tax revenues and by reducing expenditures. In addition, management and staff have been creative in developing ways to make operations self-supporting and by contributing to projects that will provide increases in revenues other than property taxes.

According to an article in The Bond Buyer Online, King County joins Seattle as the only other municipality or school district in the state to achieve an underlying AAA rating from S&P… an impressive accomplishment by any measure.

Challenger David Irons says he wants to run the county more like a business, touting his exaggerated resume as preparation for running a government larger than that of thirteen states. But when voters go to the polls to choose who’s best qualified to manage the county’s $3.4 billion budget, I’m guessing they’ll stick with Sims, the executive who has led King County to the highest bond ratings in its history, at a time when many other municipalities around the state are bordering on bankruptcy. While Irons and his GOP allies are reduced to rehashing the 2004 election contest in a trumped up effort to cast doubt on Sims’ managerial skills, the financial experts — S&P, Moody’s and Fitch — all give Sims the highest grade possible on the executive’s most important management responsibility of all… drafting and executing the county budget.

If Sims had achieved these AAA ratings during an economic boom, today’s news would be a footnote rather than a headline. But by setting the county on such a sound financial footing at a time when revenues were shrinking and costs were skyrocketing, Sims deserves just as much credit as he’s earned for the county.

Oh man… if this is the sharpest arrow in David Irons’ quiver, it’s gonna be an awfully boring election season.

Now that he and King County Executive Ron Sims have both come out on the same side of the two most contentious issues of the day, the Southwest proposal and I-912 (both candidates oppose them), Irons is reduced to following the lead of his paranoid delusional webmaster, Stefan Sharkansky, and his OCD-like focus on last year’s contested election for governor. Yesterday, both appeared as part of a press conference staged by Republicans on the KC Council, in which they held true to their party’s McCarthyite tradition, by waving before reporters lists of alleged illegal voters, without actually handing over any evidence to reporters or authorities.

The Republicans claim that they have discovered duplicate registrations for over 2000 voters, the bulk of them being women who are registered under both their maiden and married names.

“It’s a sad day,” Irons said. “We’ve lost the trust of the people.”

Yes Dave, it certainly is, and you certainly have. But then, that’s the whole point isn’t it? You’re totally willing to undermine the public’s faith in government if you think that might get you into office.

Of course there are duplicate registrations. There are always going to be duplicate registrations, in every county and in every election, as Secretary of State Sam Reed pointed out in an interview on KIRO radio today:

This problem of dual registrations is one that all 39 counties have. I had when I was county auditor.

The elections office gets no automatic notice when somebody changes their name or address, and for the most part it’s up to voters to change their registration correctly. Elections departments periodically run database queries looking for such errors (KCRE corrected over 9,000 duplicate registrations earlier this year) but there will always be some duplicate registrations on the rolls. The GOP’s attempt to imply that duplicate registrations are the result of negligence on the part of Dean Logan or his staff, is dishonest, mean-spirited and manipulative. This is a well known issue, and as Reed points out, one which will be partially addressed by the statewide voter registration database that has long been scheduled to go online in January of 2006.

I think that it’s very important that we have a clean voter registration rolls and obviously if they do have information that there are dual registrations I do think that it’s important that they challenge them. That’s part of Washington State law. Now I’m not up in King County so I’m not part of the politics going on with the election right now and everything but certainly it’s a legitimate issue and one we’re working on. We’re going to have a statewide voter registration system in the Secretary of State’s Office beginning next year and we hope to be able to help the counties a lot to clean up their records and to try to void as many duplicate registrations as I say occur everywhere.

Everything about yesterday’s press conference reeked of a candidate so bereft of issues, ideas and qualifications, that his only desperate hope is to tear down the other side, at any cost. How else can you explain an effort to criminalize several thousand women who married and took their husband’s last name, or to level an accusation so paper thin that the Republican Secretary of State dismisses it with an audio shrug?

But perhaps the most embarrassing detail for Irons and his GOP comrades is that they seemed unembarrassed to stand there side by side with WA state’s most famous conspiracy theorist, our friend Stefan of (un)Sound Politics, whose tireless efforts to find patterns of fraud in KC’s voter databases borders on numerology, and whose aluminum-hat-analyses have earned him every last drop of incredulity he enjoys. Stefan actually had the temerity to stand before the assembled media throng and claim he was one of them, ignoring the fact that real journalists cover press conferences… they don’t conduct them.

This is what Irons and his fellow Republicans are reduced to… a bogus press conference on an over-blown none issue, with expert, objective analysis from the state’s best known partisan blogger… a man whose idea of reasoned debate is to compare Ron Sims to the brutal African dictator Robert Mugabe. At least I’ve always admitted I’m a propagandist, but Stefan doesn’t even have the honor to do that. And Irons clearly doesn’t have the sense to disassociate himself from a man who could be the inspiration for one of Aesop’s best known fables.

Are there thousands of duplicate registrations in KC and the state’s other 38 counties? No doubt. But after months of investigation and litigation election officials and GOP attorneys could only document a handful of double voters out of 3 million ballots cast.

“It’s a sad day that we’re here again talking about election flaws from this election and past elections,” Irons said.

It certainly is, Dave. But then again, apparently you have nothing else to talk to voters about.

Over 20,000 are reported dead, and 45,000 injured in yesterday’s 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Pakistan… and the toll will likely go much higher.

Meanwhile, Avian Flu is spreading to Europe with outbreaks reported in flocks in Turkey and Romania. The jump to human-to-human transmission is considered imminent, and the World Health Organization estimates a pandemic could kill over 150 million people.

And oh yeah… there is virtually unanimous consensus in the scientific community (outside the Bush administration) that global warming is real, that it is caused by human activity, and that the consequences could be absolutely devastating… flooding coastlines, disrupting weather patterns, and causing widespread famine and mass extinctions.

So… um… I guess I’ll just spend the day watching football.

Yesterday I mentioned an Arizona Republic article that documents former FEMA chief Mike Brown’s rocky, litigation strewn tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association, and the “sham” legal defense fund that eventually led to his resignation. In an open letter to Brownie’s attorney, Andy Lester, Darryl at Hominid Views focuses on a part of the story I’ve pretty much ignored thus far: what exactly happened to the money in the fund? Darryl writes:

You and I know that Brownie was more than happy to add the following clause to section III paragraph I of the separation agreement between Brown and the IAHA, “[b]y October 1, 2000, Mr. Brown will cause to be contributed from the Michael D. Brown Legal Defense Fund Trust to the IAHA Legal Defense Fund the sum of $25,000.”

The only thing that puzzles me, Mr. Lester, is that it appears you took the money instead. It is probably just malicious misreporting by the liberal media when The Arizona Republic reports that:

Brown’s resignation agreement called for him to turn over the balance of the defense fund, which then totaled $25,000. Although a public accounting has not been given, Lester said the balance went to him in payment for legal services.

Don’t worry, Andy, even if you did take the money and run, I don’t think anyone will really notice. I mean, who would really connect the dots that the person who wrote an impassioned and indignant defense of Brownie, citing that he is “good, honest, compassionate, [and a] competent leader” could possibly be the same person who screwed the IAHA out of $25,000?

I’m not exactly sure what “the balance” refers to, but despite the fact that he was indemnified by the IAHA, Brown raised much more than $25,000 for his private legal defense, including a single $50,000 donation from one of the wealthy breeders who had a stake in his actions as commissioner. I have received emails from several IAHA members who have questioned whether Brown actually pocketed much of this money, though nobody has evidence one way or the other, as there has been no public accounting.

But as Darryl points out, the only person we know for sure to have profited from this “sham” fund was Brown’s attorney, Andy Lester. Which I guess made him the perfect, objective observer to defend Brown (and impugn my reporting) on the pages of Accuracy in Media. Uh-huh.

That’s me! At least, as described by Danny Westneat in his column today in the Seattle Times: “This story starts at the rear.” Danny writes about my “power-of-the-Internet moment”, in which “the horse’s ass guy could influence national politics” by breaking the story former FEMA director Mike Brown blames for his downfall (as well as incalculable suffering in the Gulf.)

Yes… I’m “an aggressively liberal, smart, foul-mouthed irritant”… but what I’m not, is a liar. And that’s essentially what Brown’s attorney Andy Lester called me in a guest column on Accuracy in Media (AIM), echoing his client’s congressional testimony that I made false and defamatory statements.

I suppose both Brown and Lester thought they were being clever — in a lawyerly sort of way — by dismissively referencing my irreverently named blog and simply saying the story was false, without further explanation. In fact, the heart of the story the MSM picked up from my original post on HorsesAss.org (and in my diary on Daily Kos), is undisputed… that Brown’s emergency management experience prior to joining FEMA consisted almost entirely of a decade serving as the Commissioner of Judges and Stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association.

I further alleged that Brown resigned from the IAHA under pressure, in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray, an assertion that was not only corroborated by contemporaneous accounts in horse breeding trade journals and newsletters, but which has been repeatedly substantiated through investigations and interviews conducted by the MSM, most recently in a very thorough background piece in the Arizona Republic:

Brown’s actions led to a flurry of lawsuits, a five-year suspension from the group for Boggs and Brown’s resignation in 2000 from the Colorado-based association.

In a four-year span, Brown, a lawyer, amassed association legal fees exceeding $1.5 million and initiated a controversial legal defense fund for himself, which ultimately led to his resignation. The 45,000-member horse group, now called the Arabian Horse Association, was involved in at least seven lawsuits during Brown’s tenure.

But of course, the circumstances surrounding Brown’s resignation from the IAHA are immaterial to the fact that his was a patronage appointment that put an unqualified crony in charge of coordinating the federal government’s disaster relief operations… and with disastrous results. Mike Brown simply was not qualified to run FEMA — an opinion not simply drawn from his razor thin resume or his incompetent job performance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but from his stunningly inept effort to shift the blame during his congressional testimony.

Brown claimed that it was “ironic” that the story started with a blog named “HorsesAss.org”, and it certainly was. For who’d have thought that the “horse’s ass guy” would have more credibility than the director of a top federal agency?

[Cross-posted to Daily Kos]

The League of Conservation Voters has renewed its demand that members of Congress return tainted campaign funds to recently indicted, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, until legal issues regarding his campaign finance schemes are resolved.

The LCV has also reissued a report, “Tom’s Tainted Team“, that exposes the ten as financially beholden to DeLay and the powerful special interests that back him. For example, each of the ten have voted for a provision in the House energy bill that would protect makers of the fuel additive MTBE, even though they each represent districts with drinking water contaminated by the dangerous chemical, and where lawsuits are pending against MTBE polluters. All ten also voted for a change to House Ethics Rules intended to protect DeLay from further investigations.

“While this latest ethical cloud hangs over Congressman Tom DeLay, the decent thing for these members to do would be to return the money they took from him until this issue is resolved,” said LCV President Deb Callahan. “If they cannot be shamed into that, perhaps they could put the money in a trust and donate the interest to hurricane relief until Rep. DeLay’s case has worked its way through the courts.”

The 10 Members of “Tom’s Tainted Team” and their campaign contributions from Rep. DeLay are as follows:

Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-CO) – $30,000
Rep. Chris Chocola (R-IN) – $40,000
Rep. Phil Gingrey (GA-11) – $25,000
Rep. Katherine Harris (FL-13) – $20,000
Rep. Mark Kennedy (MN-06) – $29,500
Rep. Rick Renzi (AZ-1) – $30,000
Rep. Mike Rogers (AL-3) – $30,000
Rep. Pete Sessions (TX-32) – $26,644
Rep. Clay Shaw (Fl-22) – $30,020
Rep. Heather Wilson (NM-1) – $46,959

“It’s worse enough that these members are siding with MTBE and big oil polluters over their constituents, but the fact that they continue to support one of the most ethically challenged members of Congress in history and take his ‘tainted’ money is unconscionable,” said Ms. Callahan.

There is a tendency with stories like DeLay’s indictment to focus on inside politics, but the scandal is not merely about how he illegally skirted campaign finance laws to help elect Republicans, it is also about how these politicians exercised the power of their offices in return. It is not enough to hold DeLay responsible for his actions, we most also hold responsible all those who benefited from his illegal activities.

CNN is reporting that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been indicted by a Texas grand jury on one count of criminal conspiracy.

UPDATE:
From the AP:

A Texas grand jury today charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, an indictment that could force him to step down as House majority leader.

DeLay attorney Steve Brittain said DeLay was accused of a criminal conspiracy along with two associates, John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads DeLay’s national political committee.

The indictment against the second-ranking, and most assertive Republican leader came on the final day of the grand jury’s term. It followed earlier indictments of a state political action committee founded by DeLay and three of his political associates.

The Austin American-Statesman gives some great background on the case, in a story published before the indictment, but I think Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo best sums up what this means for the Republicans:

So let’s see.

House Majority Leader Indicted for Criminal Conspiracy.

Senate Majority Leader the target of an increasingly serious probe of potential insider trading.

Rumors of October Rove indictment in the Plame case.

Is this a problem yet?

Um… yeah.

From the home page of David Irons’ other official campaign website:

“For the last five years, you have been teaching me how King County government can work better. I have been listening, and now I want to take that knowledge and my 25 years of practical business experience to make it more efficient and more accountable.”

Hmm. So, if elected, Irons wants to apply his “practical business experience” to running King County, huh? Then I guess, judging from the four years he spent as Chief Operations Officer of Brigadoon.com, Irons should have the county in bankruptcy before the end of his first term.

Even when their employees were living on tuna and rice, their creditors were cutting them off for ignoring millions in debt and their investors were fuming that they’d been swindled, the leaders of Brigadoon.com said they’d be a great success.
…
But the company discovered it could not deliver. It posted a more than $10 million operating loss while attracting millions from nearly 200 accredited investors from around the world. It hired more than 110 employees at one point and ordered expensive equipment.

See… the problem with the oft repeated admonition that government should be run more like a business… is that most businesses fail.

Anyway, I’d love to hear from any former “Brink-O-Doom” employees about the company’s “ingenious business plan” and Iron’s role in failing to execute it. Drop me an email.

I got scooped!

John Pennington, the official in charge of federal disaster response in the Northwest, was a four-term Republican state representative who ran a mom-and-pop coffee company in Cowlitz County when then-Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn helped him get his federal post.

Before he was appointed regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Pennington got a degree from a correspondence school that government investigators later described as a “diploma mill.”

I’d been working on a piece on Pennington, but awoke this morning to find the Seattle Times had beat me to the punch. Nobody like’s being scooped, but the Times did a much more thorough reporting job than I ever could have done (they are, after all, real journalists), and it is comforting to know that the MSM is finally looking into these things.

What’s not so comforting is that the man overseeing the federal government’s disaster response in Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Idaho — about one-third of the nation’s land mass — had no emergency management experience prior to assuming his $138,000 a year post at the head of FEMA’s Region X office.

Sure, Pennington had been a four-term state representative, and a rising star in the Republican party, before resigning due to health reasons. But his prior disaster experience consisted of successfully pushing legislation to suspend sales taxes on rebuilding damaged buildings after floods struck his southwest Washington district. And as the Times reports, his academic resume is even shakier than that of his boss at FEMA, Michael Brown.

Just before his appointment, Pennington received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California Coast University in Santa Ana, Calif., which at the time was an unaccredited correspondence school.

The school is now accredited.

In testimony before Congress last year, investigators for the General Accounting Office identified California Coast as a diploma mill. […] GAO special agent Paul DeSaulniers told The Seattle Times this week that his investigation showed that California Coast University sold degrees for a flat fee.

So how exactly did Pennington get this plum appointment to head a regional FEMA office? None other than the state’s most prominent political fixer, former US Rep. Eleanor Prentice Shaw Jennifer Dunn.

Former GOP Rep. Dunn, who was Bush’s 2000 campaign chairwoman in Washington, recalled that she called Pennington and asked him to fill out an application for the FEMA job. She was responsible for screening and making recommendations on all regional political appointments.

Dunn, who said she was unaware that Pennington’s degree was obtained through correspondence courses, said she was “relieved” when he finally agreed to take the job. Pennington was selected from three finalists recommended by Dunn’s office.

That’s right, the only qualification needed was Shaw’s Dunn’s recommendation, and only those recommended by Shaw Dunn were considered for the job. And so a man with no emergency management experience, and a college degree from a mail order diploma mill, was deemed the person best qualified to manage emergencies in the Northwest region. As Shaw Dunn put it: “He was a natural.”

Makes you wonder about some of Shaw’s Dunn’s other, more recent appointments. (Her son Raymond Reagan comes to mind.)

[Cross-posted to Daily Kos]

From a horse fancier forum, on the subject of former International Arabian Horse Association Judges & Stewards Commissioner — and current FEMA director — Mike Brown:

He’s not even a horseman. He was hired by IAHA because, as a non-horseperson, he had no dog in the fight, so to speak

So Brown went from a horse show commissioner who knew nothing about horses to a Federal Emergency Management Agency director who knew nothing about managing emergencies. At least he’s consistent.

So, what the hell am I doing reading horse fancier forums? Well, after breaking the story on our stunningly unqualified FEMA chief, I suddenly found myself in the middle of row between angry horse breeders, emailing me comments, links and press releases, from both sides of the Brown debate. For example I just received a copy of a press release from the IAHA’s successor, the Arabian Horse Association, attempting to rehabilitate Brown’s reputation:

Barbara Burck, executive vice president and chief administrator of the association added that “Mr. Brown had a long and successful career with IAHA and was regarded as upholding the highest standards of integrity and demanding excellence in all areas under his jurisdiction. His legal background and management skills enabled him to accomplish the rigors of the job with professionalism.”

“He dealt with issues related to enforcement of rules and regulations that often generated passionate dispute by advocates on both sides of his decisions,” she added. “Several of those enforcement issues resulted in litigation. Due to the nature of Mr. Brown’s duties as commissioner, he set up his own Legal Defense Fund Trust to supplement the IAHA Legal Defense Fund. Following his departure from the IAHA, the entire sum in the Michael D. Brown Legal Defense Fund Trust was transferred to the IAHA Legal Defense Fund.”

President Myron Krause stated, “Brown’s contract was not terminated by IAHA, he resigned. Furthermore, there was no due cause to terminate his contract.

Yeah… well… sure… that’s somewhat how some of my sources remember it, but certainly not the majority, and it’s contrary to how it was reported at the time. In a November 2000 newsletter, the president of the New Hampshire Arabian Horse Association specifically reported back from the national convention that Brown was “requested to resign.” And several IAHA board members, including its former president, have confirmed this account in the MSM. (Here and here.)

And according to an interview with IAHA Secretary Gary Dearth in the Nov. 2000 issue of Arabian Horse World magazine, it was apparently Brown himself who originally complained that the Executive Committee was forcing him out.

Q: Why do you feel that prior to his resignation, Mr. Brown repeatedly stated that he does “not have the support of the Executive Committee”?

A: This talk of lack of support for Mike Brown has become rather tiresome. The Executive Committee, approximately a year and a half ago, gave Mike Brown a three-year contract rather than annual contract extensions which had been the tradition in the past. When you look at concrete support and not just talk, there is no stronger support than a three-year contract. However, information that came to light at the August Board meeting

After dismally failing to adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina, FEMA Director Mike Brown must now prepare to weather the full fury of the MSM. The Boston Herald struck first, corroborating my post that reported Brown was forced to resign from his job at the International Arabian Horse Association. And now Knight-Ridder further exposes the stunningly unqualified Brown with a scathing bio that is sure to hit sunday papers across the US.

From failed Republican congressional candidate to ousted “czar” of an Arabian horse association, there was little in Michael D. Brown’s background to prepare him for the fury of Hurricane Katrina.

“He’s done a hell of a job, because I’m not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm,” said Kate Hale, former Miami-Dade emergency management chief. “The world that this man operated in and the focus of this work does not in any way translate to this. He does not have the experience.”

As Josh Marshall explains in his coverage on Talking Points Memo, Brown’s main qualification for the post — perhaps his only — is the fact that he was a college roommate of former FEMA head and Bush political fixer Joe Allbaugh. And as Knight-Ridder points out, Brown’s prior experience with disaster was a disastrous run for Congress.

Brown ran for Congress in 1988 and won 27 percent of the vote against Democratic incumbent Glenn English. He spent the 1990s as judges and stewards commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. His job was to ensure that horse-show judges followed the rules and to investigate allegations against those suspected of cheating.

“I wouldn’t have regarded his position in the horse industry as a platform to where he is now,” said Tom Connelly, a former association president.
…
“He just wouldn’t follow instruction,” said Bill Pennington, another former association president. “Mike was bullheaded and he was gonna do it his way. Period.”

It was Pennington who confirmed to the Herald that Brown was indeed asked to resign, and even Connelly, who speaks positively about him, calls Brown “abrasive.” This is consistent with emails I’ve received from a number of horse breeders — even those who respect him — who call Brown a “tough bastard” with a quick temper.

No doubt Brown had many enemies at the IAHA, and while there are conflicting stories as to the direct circumstances surrounding his resignation, he clearly fell victim to inside politics. Some say Brown was forced out by breeders angry at strict rules and enforcement, others say it was the burden of costly litigation. But the most convincing explanation I received was this inside report:

To help pay our mounting legal bills, there were people raising money for the IAHA Legal Defense Fund. Mike was suppose to be helping to raise some of the money. Mike it seems was trying to raise money for his own legal defense fund as well as IAHA’s and some people were willing to donate to him. There were two major problems with this. First, ALL of Mike’s legal bills including any personal ones were to be paid by IAHA. So he had NO legal bills so there was no reason for him to need this money to pay legal bills. Second, Mike was in a position that he needed to be seen as never playing favorites or having any loyalty to any individual. Many felt that taking this money would look very bad.

I was not personally at the IAHA Board of Directors Meeting when this occurred however I have been told about it by several people that were there and they all give the exact same story. There are many other things that people did not like about Mike’s job performance at IAHA but this is why he resigned.

Essentially, Brown was raising money from the very breeders he was charged with regulating, and that was the straw that broke the horse’s back.

But I don’t think the reason behind his resignation really matters. The point is, nothing in his IAHA tenure prepared him for running FEMA. Indeed, the fact that he fell victim to the inside politics of a horse breeders association, calls into question his ability to function amidst the high stakes political gamesmanship of the nation’s capitol.

The other issue that has become abundantly clear is that the misleading reference to the Olympics that was in the White House press release announcing Brown’s nomination was no accident. The transcript of Brown’s confirmation hearing shows virtually the identical wording used in the opening statement from Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell.

Prior to his current job, from 1991 to 2000, Mr. Brown was the Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, an international subsidiary of the National Governing Organization of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Yet a number of IAHA/AHA members have made it abundantly clear that the organization is not in any way associated with the Olympics. Indeed, Arabians are not part of any Olympic competition. This was clearly an attempt by the White House to gussy up the resume of a man lacking the experience necessary to lead a major disaster relief effort… a lack of experience Brown has shown in his mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina.

More to come. The Denver Post is preparing a piece for Sunday, and the NY Times is working the story as well.

[Cross-posted to Daily Kos]

Update:
The NY Times article is online… third paragraph:

Mr. Brown has come under fire from critics of the federal government’s hurricane response, who describe him as a political appointee who had no disaster experience before joining FEMA.

Though he once worked as a municipal official in Edmond, Okla., Mr. Brown’s major previous job was as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, from which he resigned under pressure in 2001 after a controversial 10 years.

Not much, but it makes the point that Brown was a political appointee who had no disaster experience.

The LA Times has a nice lead:

The leader of the U.S. government’s much-criticized handling of hurricane relief efforts in the Gulf Coast came to Washington in 2001 with scant background in dealing with natural disasters. But he had an important connection: His new boss was an old friend who had managed George W. Bush’s successful campaign for the White House.

Michael D. Brown left his job in Colorado supervising horse-show judges to work for Bush’s longtime political aide, Joe Allbaugh, who was heading the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the new administration.

Brown had been a lawyer active in Republican politics whose most relevant emergency response experience was a stint supervising police and fire departments as assistant city manager in an Oklahoma City suburb.

But within two years, he rose from FEMA’s general counsel to deputy director and, when Allbaugh left, he moved to the agency’s top spot.

That’s the MSM’s take on this story: cronyism. And it’s a pretty good take.

The Denver Post weighs in, and with new information!

Former association board member Karl V. Hart of Florida alleges that in 2000 Brown improperly accepted a check for nearly $50,000 from a prominent breeder and put it toward his own legal defense for his work as commissioner. Board members thought this was improper because Brown already had protection, from the association’s legal team, Hart said.

Because of the money dispute, Brown was asked to resign, Hart said.

One of my sources had hinted at this, but was not a board member and only had hearsay, so I couldn’t use it. Nice reporting by Jeremy Meyer to follow this up.

And finally, my favorite take on this story comes from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

So let me see if I understand this. Brown’s a Republican from the southwest. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress when he was thirty-three. Then he bounced from job to job, finally getting into the sports business in mid-life, before getting canned. And then he used connections to land himself a high-powered position in the federal government for which he had no apparent experience at all.

How could such a fellow possibly be in the Bush administration?

Hmmm.

David Irons wants to run King County, a government that serves two million citizens… a population greater than that of 13 states. But before we hand him the checkbook to KC’s $3.3 billion budget, perhaps it might be interesting to see how he budgets the finances of a considerably smaller concern, like… I dunno… say, his own campaign for county executive?

So I checked out his latest Public Disclosure Commission filing, and discovered that things aren’t looking so rosy for the Irons campaign. Of the $263,247.01 he’s raised thus far, he’s already spent $217,755.80, leaving him only $45,491.21 in cash on hand two months before the general election. Ron Sims, on the other hand, has raised $535,151.82, but spent only $156,926.23, leaving $378,225.59 in cash on hand… a better than eight to one advantage over his rival.

Of course Sims’ fundraising advantage is to be expected: he’s the incumbent. (Plus, he actually has a chance of winning.) It’s the expenditure disparity that caught my attention. While Sims has been marshaling his resources for the November campaign, Irons has been… well… perhaps one of his consultants can explain what Irons has been spending his money on. In case you’re curious, here’s a sampling of some of his major expense categories.

Consulting		$41,598.00
Payroll		$39,107.96
Printing		$31,845.45
Postage		$15,280.49
Food		$7955.64
Accounting		$6774.00
Balloons		$355.30

Hey Dave… here’s some consulting advice: next time, unless you have unlimited resources… don’t spend twenty percent of your budget on consultants. (My $4,200 invoice is in the mail.)

Break down the expenditures by percentage, and you get an idea of how an Irons administration might divvy up King County’s $3.3 billion budget: $640 million on consultants, $122 million on takeout, $9.6 million on his 20-year-old daughter Annette, and $5.5 million on balloons. Essential services might suffer, but the local consulting industry would boom, and the county offices would certainly take on a more festive atmosphere.

Of course we all know that at this point in the campaign, both candidates are still spending most of their time and money on fundraising… and Irons has seen a pretty crappy return on investment. With only 45K in the bank and two months to go, it’s really hard to consider Irons a serious challenger.

I suppose that explains why Irons has reportedly tried to shore up his support by quietly reassuring potential contributors and other party notables that he expects a $250,000 “independent” expenditure on his behalf prior to the general election. Which raises two important questions: 1) is Iron’s just blowing smoke out of his ass about this “independent” campaign, and 2) if he’s not blowing smoke, how “independent” could this campaign possibly be? If Irons is so privy to the details, it sounds to me like exactly the sort of coordinated activity our campaign finance laws expressly prohibit. This is not just a public disclosure technicality… it would be out and out fraud.

And that’s the type of headache that could lead Irons to spend another $1164.16 on wine from Hedges Cellars. (The equivalent of $17.9 million out of the county budget.)

UPDATE:
As a point of reference, Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn has raised about $239K in his race for the county council, with about $45K cash on hand. Combined with opponent Steve “The Hammer” Hammond, the KCGOP is spending more on a primary in a safe, Republican council district, than they are in the county executive race against a “vulnerable” Ron Sims. So tell me how the Irons’ campaign isn’t a joke.

So much to blog on, so little time. Worthy subjects are flooding in like the rising water in the streets of New Orleans. So I thought I’d just quickly touch on a couple stories by pointing you towards what’s happening on some other, worthy blogs.

Major levee break inundates New Orleans
Much of my up to the minute meteorological and related disaster information on Hurricane Katrina has been coming from Steve Gregory’s amazingly informative blog on Weather Underground. And the latest reports are truly horrendous: 40,000 to 50,000 people have now sought refuge in the Superdome, where conditions are deteriorating as water rises around them.

80% of New Orleans is totally submerged now, and will likely become 100% submerged tonight. The depth of the water in the BIZ district is around 6-10 inches at this time.

This is a result of 2 MAJOR BREACHES OF THE LEVEE. The first one ,is about 400 feet long, and appears to have given way around 9PM last night. The Corp of Engineers have now said there is also a second breach as well. Within the hour the Pentagon will be taking over the coordination and manpower / machinery to assist in closing the 2 breaches.

Gregory describes the situation as “a ‘slow motion version’ of the worst case scenario.” Fires are burning throughout the city, looting is rampant, and the governor has ordered a total evacuation. Again, if you want to help, the American Red Cross is seeking cash donations.

Rebooting Creationism
On a lighter note, The General has posted a rather amusing letter to Bill and Melinda Gates, asking for the same kind of support in financing his unscientific research as they’ve given to the Discovery Institute’s “intelligent” design media campaign.

One of the biggest problems people have with Noah’s Ark is that even at 300 x 40 x 30 cubits in size, it would be too small to hold that many animals. That’s especially true when dinosaurs are included. My theory is that only a small portion of the animals were actually on the ark at any given time. The others swam, or in the case of non-buoyant animals like tortoises, they windsurfed until it was time for them to be rotated onto the boat.

In order to prove this theory, I’ll need an ark, every living species of animal, mockups of dinosaurs, and Cheetos. That’s going to take a lot of money, but I think you should be able to swing it.

I love The General. (In a manly, heterosexual way, of course.)

Conservative coffee cups
Darryl at Hominid Views has written a letter of his own, this one to Maureen Richardson of Concerned Women for America, a group that has complained to Starbucks of liberal bias in printing quotations on their coffee cups. Darryl suggests adding balance with a few quotes from God-fearing Christians, including these uplifting sentiments from the Rev. Jerry Falwell:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say “you helped [9-11] happen.'”