Trent Lott, wandering hero

A new report names the Senate majority leader the worst of the corporate sluts. But our slut may be the greatest living American.

By Chris Colin

Topics:Campaign Finance, Air Travel, U.S. Senate, Travel, Satire

More than any other senator up for reelection, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., allows corporate lobbyists to bend his ear in exchange for flights on their companies’ jets, a study by the Campaign Study Group reports.

We are kissing our spouses good morning and they interrupt to deliver this information.

Rather than fly with the hoi polloi and abide by the “schedules” of uptight airlines, the opponent of campaign-finance reform leads the Senate in the common practice of reimbursing companies after using their specially chartered airplanes. Since Jan. 1, 1995, he has spent $101,029 on corporate flights, money that comes out of his campaign account.

We are spooning our poor cats breakfast and they intercede to give us the news.

Companies leap at the opportunity to taxi a powerful politician from one place to another, staffing the flights with talkative lobbyists who take advantage of their captive audience. Over the last year, Lott has flown with U.S. Tobacco Co., R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, among others, writing them checks that total more than $23,000. He has also opposed efforts to regulate tobacco as a drug and to raise federal cigarette taxes.

We are tying our poor children’s shoes and they stop us to explain.

In an Associated Press report Monday, Jonathan D. Salant quoted Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity: “Private corporate jet travel is still one of the biggest scams in Washington,” he said. “The average American cannot afford to travel on a private jet and the face time it affords lobbyists with lawmakers is absolutely invaluable.”

As usual, everyone has missed the point. The Campaign Study Group’s report isn’t about corruption, sleaze or dishonor. It’s not about abusing the public trust or whoring one’s self out for convenient transportation. It’s about a man who loves to travel.

Trent Lott, bless his heart, suffers from the profoundly human disease of wanderlust. Rather than criticize, we must applaud this hero for his unassailably human instincts. The guy wants to see the world. He loves the world.

During his tenure in the U.S. Senate, Lott developed a reputation for the global perspective he brought to a variety of issues. From insufficient defense spending to the homosexual scourge, the great flier speaks with the panoramic wisdom of someone who has roamed the Earth.

“He’s a truth-seeker,” President Clinton has remarked. “Travel is the secret to his immense human breadth.”

Clinton repeated the phrase “human breadth” after that.

It couldn’t make more sense. As all travelers know — and when I say traveler, I mean it in the deepest sense, which is to say there’s an element of metaphor there — standing still has never led to greatness. Lott is fond of quoting poet and fellow wanderer Walt Whitman on the subject:

“Going places is really aces/I like to visit a lot of places.”

Many politicians don’t value travel. They read fashion magazines and eat candy out of special candy holders. Do they care about our world? And the beautiful people in it? They do not.

“The Canadian people — they are a beautiful people,” Lott says. “And the Australians? Also beautiful, as a people.”

Sometimes Lott is overcome. Who in this country can’t relate?

“I would like to help pass this bill which holds the tobacco industry more accountable for its product,” Lott is quoted as saying recently, “but I need to go to Zimbabwe, where they are having a cultural event.”

Like many globetrotters, Lott is deeply misunderstood. Dismissed for his racism, homophobia and lack of political integrity, the senator often finds himself pigeonholed. Does this, perhaps, explain the ineffable joy he feels on foreign soil, away from the faultfinding and hostility?

“I believe that man is happiest in the bush, among his bushpeople friends,” colleague Newt Gingrich once said.

Sometimes Lott can’t talk about travel, because he cries. “Just a minute,” he told me on the phone this morning, audibly choked up. “I’m thinking about a trinket that a beautiful Djiboutian man once gave me.”

Whiny liberals would have us put a leash on this American leader, would have us coop him up like an animal. Don’t compromise the future of our country just because you want to fly on corporate jets, which often serve fresh juice, the whiners chant. To this I reply, open your mind! Broaden your horizons! Grow your world!

“Sometimes I fly in my underpants,” Lott says.

We suffer from a collective case of amnesia. Have we already forgotten such great American travel heroes as Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo and Droopy Dog? Fear not, compatriots, amnesia has a cure. It’s called tobacco. Buy some refreshing cigarettes today!

: Chris Colin is the author most recently of "Blindsight," published by the Atavist. More Chris Colin

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More than 85 percent of the donors to Romney and Obama super PACs were men in 2011

By Justin Elliott

Mitt Romney (Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder)

Topics:2012 Elections, War Room, Campaign Finance, Gender

Going through the donor listings in the super PAC disclosures filed Tuesday, female names are very difficult to find.

Unlike fundraising by the candidates’ official campaigns, which tend to rely at least in part on small donations from grass-roots supporters, the super PACs raise massive sums from a very small number of wealthy people. Who those donors are is important because they presumably will have influence with (or on) their favored candidate and potentially the next president.

: Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott

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Texas billionaire Harold Simmons has given $7 million to a Rove-affiliated outside group

VIDEO

By Justin Elliott

Karl Rove (Credit: AP)

Topics:2012 Elections, Campaign Finance, Karl Rove

We’ve written a lot about Sheldon and Miriam Adelson and their $10 million in donations to a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC. Part of the reason the Adelson donations got so much attention is that their existence was leaked to the media before the disclosure filing deadline. Since all super PACs were required to disclose their 2011 donors yesterday, we now have a much better picture of the other mega-donors who are in effect setting the agenda of the GOP primary.

One of the big headlines out of the filings Tuesday is that Harold Simmons, a Texas billionaire, gave the Karl Rove-affiliated American Crossroads an impressive $7 million over the course of just a couple months in the fourth quarter of 2011. That’s nearly 40 percent of the $18 million the group raised last year; an affiliated group, Crossroads GPS, whose donors are secret, raised more than $30 million.

Simmons gave $5 million of the money personally, and another $2 million via a corporation he owns called Contran. Even though the $7 million he gave to Crossroads (along with another $1 million to the Rick Perry super PAC) puts Simmons among the top donors of the cycle, his bank account can handle the hit. Simmons was the 33rd richest American in 2011, according to Forbes, which put his net worth at $9.3 billion. Amazingly, his net worth increased in 2011 $4.3 billion from the previous year, Forbes says.

Simmons owns companies that manufacture a range of products including metal goods and chemicals. And he has generously funded a range of right-wing causes going back to the 1980s; perhaps his most notorious effort in recent years was the money he gave to the Swift Boats group that went after John Kerry’s Vietnam service.

His campaign donations have been known to help his bottom line. Simmons has, for example, been a longtime patron of Rick Perry and he recently got a potentially lucrative favor from the governor, the Los Angeles Times reported last year:

Simmons, the second largest individual contributor to Perry, is poised to gain perhaps the most as his firm constructs the first new low-level radioactive waste disposal site in the country in three decades. The venture could not have happened without the backing of Perry, who early in his administration signed a controversial law allowing a private company to build such a facility in Texas.

Simmons’ company, Waste Control Specialists, or WCS, lobbied fiercely for the measure and eventually got its license approved by Perry-appointed state regulators despite objections from some state environmental agency staff.

Simmons’ donations to Crossroads have been funding ads like this:

: Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott

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Why are defense lobbyists funding the pet crusade of the wife of Buck McKeon, House Armed Services Committee chair?

By Lee Fang

Howard "Buck" McKeon: Help my wife. Please! (Credit: AP/Susan Walsh)

Topics:Campaign Finance, Pentagon

Patricia McKeon, wife of a powerful committee chairman in Congress, announced her bid for California Legislature last fall by telling local Republicans that she decided to run for office because she’s fed up with the plastic bag tax in Los Angeles County. “Just think how much food we could buy if we weren’t forced to pay 10 cents for grocery bags,” she said in announcing her campaign. Within days of her official announcement, one industry stepped up to finance her campaign — but it wasn’t the plastic bag industry. It was military defense contractors and their Beltway lobbyists.

Disclosures posted last evening at the California secretary of state’s website confirm that a flood of military contractor money has flowed to Patricia McKeon, who is running for an open Assembly seat in a district that overlaps that of her husband, Republican Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

As Salon first reported this week, defense lobbyists are scrambling to mitigate looming defense budget cuts and appear to be donating to Patricia McKeon because of her husband’s powerful position overseeing the Pentagon budget.

In her first few months of fundraising, Patricia McKeon collected at least $19,200 from defense contractors or their registered lobbyists. Her husband of 49 years is already the top recipient of military industry cash in Congress, so some of the contributions to his wife appear to be an attempt to get around federal campaign contribution limits.

Lockheed Martin, a company locked in a pitched battle to stave off cuts to the lucrative F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet, cut Patricia McKeon’s campaign a $3,000 check.

Rep. Buck McKeon has rigorously defended the jets, despite growing concerns that the planes will run almost $90 million over budget each.

The lobbying firm Beau Butler LLC gave to Patricia McKeon as well. Beau Butler lobbies for Proxy Aviations, a drone company. Although it’s not clear why a drone maker would rally to Patricia McKeon’s call to end plastic bag taxes, the industry is an important cause for Buck McKeon. He’s co-chairman of a caucus dedicated to promoting drones for both military and civilian purposes.

Other Buck McKeon-related lobbies also donated to Patricia McKeon’s campaign coffer. Bruce Leftwich, a government affairs executive with a group associated with for-profit colleges, gave $500. In his previous committee chairmanship, at the helm of a subcommittee dealing with post-secondary education during the Bush years, McKeon helped for-profit colleges with a rule that extended billions in taxpayer money.

: Lee Fang is an investigative journalist in the Bay Area. More Lee Fang

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The spouse of the House Armed Services Committee chairman got Washington money for California Assembly bid

By Lee Fang

House Armed Services Commitee chairman, Howard "Buck" McKeon (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Topics:Campaign Finance, House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon

Could an effort to lift his wife’s political aspirations land the powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in hot water?

Recent disclosures reveal that a federal lobbyist with ties to Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., the senior member of the committee overseeing the Pentagon, provided financial support to McKeon’s wife, who is seeking a seat in the California Assembly this year. As defense industry lobbyists scramble to head off looming cuts in the Pentagon budget, they are looking for new ways to ingratiate themselves with McKeon.

Patricia McKeon, Buck’s wife, surprised many when she announced her intention last September to run for an open seat that largely overlaps her husband’s district. One of the first reported contributions to her campaign came from a political committee called the Fund for American Opportunity, registered to a post office box in Washington, D.C., that donated $1,000. The fund, which is financed by a number of corporations including the drug industry trade association PhRMA, is owned and operated by Mark Valente, a Beltway lobbyist.

The contribution, reported here for the first time, appears to be an effort to circumvent federal campaign limits. Federal campaign disclosures show that Valente has already maxed out in donations to Rep. McKeon this cycle, having given $2,500 to his campaign for Congress. And the contribution came within a day of Valente’s donation to Patricia’s campaign for the California Assembly.

Valente’s lobbying firm, Valente and Associates, reported over $1.4 million in fees last year. The firm represented at least one company, 3Leaf Group, a government contractor specializing in human resources, that sought help from Valente on issues relating to the Defense Authorization bill. McKeon, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was the principal author of that legislation.

Valente did not respond to a request for comment. But his so-called 527 campaign entity, the Fund for American Opportunity, gave only one contribution to a California state politician in all of 2011: Patricia McKeon.

Craig Holman, a lobbying expert with Public Citizen, says that the donation to McKeon is part of a larger pattern of influence peddling in Washington: “The objective is to throw as much money as possible at the feet of the lawmaker; that includes at the feet of his family as well.”

It’s not the first time McKeon has raised eyebrows by using his elected office to boost his wife. For the last 10 years, Buck McKeon made Patricia McKeon his highest-paid campaign staffer, an arrangement that ethics experts have criticized as an invitation for corruption. In 2007, a report exposed the fact that Patricia McKeon was by far the highest-compensated family member of the few members of Congress employing relatives for their campaigns.

A review of campaign documents by Salon found that, counting reimbursements for food and travel, the McKeon campaign committee has paid Patricia over $547,584 since 2001.

—-
Correction: The original version of this article stated inaccurately Patricia McKeon was “the only state candidate” to receive contributions from the 527 committee run by lobbyist Mark Valente for the period covered by the disclosure. She was the only California state politician to receive a contribution in that period. We regret this error.

: Lee Fang is an investigative journalist in the Bay Area. More Lee Fang

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We talk to a former Vermont legislator whose PAC promotes progressive causes and has a plan to restore transparency

By Heather Michon

Bob Stannard (Credit: bob-stannard.blogspot.com)

Topics:2012 Elections, Campaign Finance, Occupy Wall Street

This originally appeared on Heather Michon's Open Salon blog.

With the presidential race looking like a dull Obama-Romney plod to November, the most memorable thing about this election cycle may end up having nothing to do with the candidates.

Instead, 2012 seems poised to go down in the history books as the Year of the Super PAC.

Look at the figures: As of Monday, independent expenditure committees had spent over $38 million on the Republican primary candidates. That’s already over three times more than candidates themselves spent on broadcast advertising during the entire 2008 Republican primary season.

The avalanche of outside money is worrying political parties, making candidates anxious and just plain depressing the socks off the rest of us.

But at least one of the hundreds of registered independent expenditure committees out there is trying to use the system in a different way, and maybe – just maybe – building a model for the future.

Meet Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Today, a Vermont-based super PAC launched in December.

The name is a play on comedian Stephen Colbert’s Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow. “We didn’t think people wanted to wait the extra day,” says Bob Stannard, the former Vermont legislator, activist, author and blues harmonica player who founded the PAC in coordination with KSE Partners, a lobbying firm based in Montpelier.

While the name may be tongue-in-cheek, the goal is serious. The group wants to highlight the issues and values brought into focus by the Occupy movement, including progressive tax policies, clean energy development, the protection of collective bargaining rights and a system that doesn’t routinely graduate college students with $100,000 of student loan debt.

Super PACs generally align themselves with specific candidates, explained Todd Bailey, the group’s treasurer and main spokesman, in a phone interview last week. “We want this to be the People’s Action Committee.”

It’s a tall order in a world where casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife can give a pro-Gingrich super PAC a $10 million cash infusion and help him win the South Carolina primary by 12 percentage points. (Depending how you calculate it, it may be the largest single donation in American campaign history.)

Stannard told VtDigger.org that the sheer amount of money flooding the system was daunting, but that ceding the field struck him as unacceptable. In planning this organization, he said that he and Bailey went through the process of acknowledging, “OK, we may not like this, but shouldn’t we be participating? Either you use it to advance your agenda, or you just sit there and wish you had.”

Bailey noted that this PAC doesn’t have the Adelsons or the Koch brothers on speed-dial – but that’s fine with him. “We’d rather that 10 million people give us a dollar each.” While they certainly wouldn’t turn down a six-figure donation, there’s a lot of value to those $10 and $20 contributions.

Their first ad, “Puppets of the One Percent,” aired during “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” in key South Carolina markets the day before that primary and got “a great response.” They hope to do the same with a fresh commercial during the upcoming primaries. Meanwhile, they’re looking for progressive candidates they might want to support.

They also want to tackle what Bailey describes as “the fundamental flaw” with super PACs: their utter lack of transparency. His firm is currently working on software that would publicly disclose donor names within 24 hours of their donation.

There are some positive signs, even over the last few days, that the sentiment behind “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Today” may be catching on.

Many politicians seem to be realizing that bloated, overzealous super PACs hijack campaign messaging and anger the public, and some are looking for ways to take back the reins.

Consider the recent joint pledge between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren to limit outside influence in their battle for the Senate. Or the fact that congressional Democrats are poised to introduce a new version of the DISCLOSE Act, which failed by a single vote in 2010. Among its other provisions, DISCLOSE 2.0 would require more timely disclosure of donor names, and would require ads produced by these groups to list the names of their top five donors on each ad.

Impossible as it seems at the moment, this may be the only Year of the Super PAC.