You already know it's important for you and your guy to tell each other "I love you" — as often as possible. But you shouldn't depend on those three little words to let your one-and-only know what's in your heart.
In fact, nonverbal displays of affection are often a better way to get through to the man in your life. "Guys tend to be action-oriented, so they feel less comfortable using words to express emotions," says REDBOOK Love Network expert and psychiatrist Scott Haltzman, M.D., author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men. "They've seen enough Tom Hanks movies to know they're supposed to always say 'I love you,' but they're not sure that words alone convey how they feel."
Ready to let what you do speak louder than what you say? We asked REDBOOK readers and the men in their lives to share some sweet ideas.
Plus, we added in some expert tips on how to give your love a boost without uttering a word.
"Sometimes I 'write' a love message on my husband's breakfast toast. Using cookie cutters, especially my Valentine's Day set of hearts, I press one lightly into a slice of bread, just hard enough to imprint it, then I toast it. It never fails to bring a smile to his face." —Anita Crehan, Mason, NH
ROMANCE, REVISITED
"Every now and then I leave a card saying how much I love and appreciate him under his pillow for him to find before he goes to sleep." —Cim Collins, Springfield, IL
"My wife, Leigh Anne, sometimes has to travel for work, and when she gets home, I give her a small gift for every day she has been gone. I'll set them on the kitchen table and wait for her to notice them — things like her favorite perfume, fresh flowers, or a cool piece of hand-made jewelry. I love to spoil her!" —John Montgomery, Birmingham, AL
"I place special little love notes, cartoons, jokes, or small articles — sometimes racy ones — in her underwear drawer. She never knows what to expect next. She gets a big kick out of them and knows it is my way of saying I love her." —Joe Cirillo Jr., Englewood, FL
"When I take a shower at night, I write messages on the fogged-up mirrors so they appear when he takes a shower in the morning before he goes to work." —Jackie Peirce, Oley, PA
MAKE LIFE A LITTLE EASIER
"My husband puts toothpaste on my toothbrush and leaves it lying on the sink for me every night before bed. He is the sweetest husband ever!" —Lisa Wilkes-North, Heath, TX
"I scour the TV listings for his favorite movies or a sporting event that I know he'd love to watch. I TiVo it without telling him, then surprise him with it on Saturday morning. Bonus: While he's on the couch, I've just bought myself some me-time. Manicure, pedicure, here I come!" —Cindy Panowicz, Grand Island, NE
MAKE LIFE A LITTLE EASIER continued...
"Before my husband leaves for work, he sets the table for my breakfast. He lays out a bowl for cereal, a cup for orange juice, strawberries, a napkin, and a spoon. For a big, manly union guy, this is a really major step!" —Patricia Armstrong, Danvers, MA
"I love that my husband gets up every morning when I do. His job doesn't start till 9, so he could easily sleep later than me, but he doesn't. While I get ready, he gets our three kids dressed and loads them into the van with their backpacks. To me, this is one of the best ways he can say he loves us all." —Jeanette Dominguez, El Paso, TX
SHOW YOUR APPRECIATION
"We brag about each other when we're out with our friends — even if it's about something little, like 'Oh, Barry had the best idea the other day' or 'Barry fixed the whatsit that's been leaking!'" —Jennifer Starr, Columbus, OH
"For Christmas, I bought a dictionary and went through it, highlighting all the definitions that describe him or remind me of him." —Jaynee Germond, Roseburg, OR
"Every morning before I get up, he leaves two folded towels in the bathroom for me for when I take a shower — one big towel for my body and a smaller towel for my head." —Amy Rossi-Espagnet, Atlanta
EXPERT CHALLENGE: SHOW HIM YOUR GRATITUDE WITH A BEAR HUG
"The number one complaint I hear from guys is they feel like they don't get rewarded for the things they do, only told what they didn't do. Next time your man takes out the trash without being asked or starts the coffee pot for you in the morning, reward him with a 30-second full-body hug. Guys are so physical — it's easy and teasy." —Toni Coleman
"In the wintertime I start my husband's car in the morning so it will be toasty warm for him on his way to work." —Autumn Griffin, Canton, OH
HIGH-SPEED SIGNS OF DEVOTION
"I changed the banner on his cell phone to read 'I Love You' when he wasn't looking!" —Becky White, Newton, AL
"My husband and I send each other short e-mails to say what we are thinking about at that very moment. Once, he wrote me, 'The new Brad Paisley song makes me think of you.' Now every time I hear it on the radio, I'm reminded how much my husband loves me." —Michelle Magnetti, Colorado Springs, CO
"My husband gets up at 5:30 a.m., but he pulls his dresser drawers open the night before so the noise of them opening and closing won't disturb me. Now that's love!" —Connie Maynord, Bastrop, TX
SEND A SECRET MESSAGE
EXPERT CHALLENGE: POINT THE WAY
"Here's a suggestive sign he can't miss: Leave a trail of post-it notes in the hallway with arrows on them leading all the way to the bedroom." —Joyce Morley-Ball, Atlanta psychotherapist and author of Seeds for the Harvest of a Lifetime.
"Every time we kiss, we do it three times, which stands for 'I love you.' When my husband pulls out of the driveway in the morning, I stand at the door while he sets off the emergency light on his truck, also three times for 'I love you.'" —Peggy Clayton, Dubuque, IA
EXPERT CHALLENGE: DRAW HIM A MAP
"Use your eyeliner to give yourself a temporary tattoo — an arrow that starts at your navel and points down. Remember: Men are very visual!" —Scott Haltzman, M.D.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Just who does Jon Stewart think he is? SAD THE PEOPLE ARE NOT SMART ENOUGH TO VOTE & ACT IN THEIR SELF INTEREST!
These days, he can claim to be many things: political satirist, pseudo-anchorman, media critic, author, successful businessman, philanthropist, Emmy Award magnet. On Monday he arrives in Washington in a new, self-anointed role: as our national voice of reason, moderation and rationality -- a uniter, you might say, not a divider.
Jon Stewart's Saturday afternoon "Rally to Restore Sanity" (merged with partner-in-satire Stephen Colbert's concurrent "March to Keep Fear Alive") may become the largest "nonpartisan" event to hit the national Mall since . . . well, since a couple of months ago, when another basic-cable TV star, Glenn Beck, hosted his "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Beck claimed his event was nonpartisan, too.
With less than a week to go, it's still not exactly clear how Stewart will be using this new platform. No guests or musical acts have been announced, Stewart has done only a couple media interviews, and he's offered few details about the rally on his nightly program.
Nevertheless, the similarities to Beck's rally are just the sort of thing Stewart himself would satirize on his show if, of course, it weren't his rally and his TV show in the first place. In his few pre-rally comments, Stewart has reached for some of the broad values and high-minded themes that Beck's did -- civility, decency, making America better -- though admittedly with fewer religious allusions and more comic panache. And whereas Beck undercut his claim of non-political intent by inviting Sarah Palin to be his co-star, Stewart may have undercut his by allying with a couple of noted liberals, Arianna Huffington and Oprah Winfrey. He'll also get a nice plug this week, while here at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Sidney Harman Hall to tape "The Daily Show," from President Obama, scheduled to appear on the show on Wednesday.
Stewart has also insisted that the timing of the gathering is coincidental to the midterm election three days later, a statement that has faint echoes of Beck's disclaimer that his event was inadvertently scheduled on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Stewart, 47, has never claimed to be anything more than a guy trying to get laughs on "a fake news program on basic cable," as he puts it. While that surely understates his case, it comports with his background as a stand-up comic and entertainer.
Born in New York and raised in New Jersey, Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz) rattled around the stand-up comedy circuit after graduating from William & Mary in 1984 before landing a memorable role on HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show" in the early 1990s. This was followed by hosting gigs on several long-forgotten MTV and Comedy Central shows and a few better-forgotten movie roles ("Half Baked"). He landed at "The Daily Show's" desk in 1999 as Craig Kilborn's replacement.
Since then, Stewart's stature as a news source, kingmaker and sociocultural figure has grown apace, abetted in no small part by "The Daily Show's" skeptical "reporting" on the Bush administration, the news media and politics in general. The show has even spawned an academic cottage industry of scholars who probe the program's impact on society.
'A watershed moment'
It's true that the 11 p.m. broadcast of "The Daily Show" (which runs Monday through Thursday) plays to a relatively modest crowd -- an average of just 1.8 million viewers a night thus far in October. But that doesn't count four daily repeats on Comedy Central, which nearly double the program's daily audience to 3.5 million. This means Stewart has roughly the same number of viewers as "Nightline," David Letterman or Jay Leno, and a bigger audience than any show on the cable news networks except "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News Channel.
Add in the untold millions who see "DS" clips embedded on Facebook pages, blogs and Web sites, or read about him in the mainstream media (media types love yakking about "The Daily Show"), and you've got a cultural force that transcends mere "basic cable."
"He is mobilizing people like Glenn Beck does, but I suspect his cultural influence surpasses Beck's," says Geoffrey Baym, a media studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, who wrote one of the first scholarly studies of "The Daily Show" in 2005. "[Beck] has a narrow but very committed audience whereas Stewart resonates much wider with people who are fed up with the polemical aspects" of national affairs. "He's reaching a watershed moment."
Nor is Stewart's news entirely fake. Much has been written about "The Daily Show" as legitimate news, particularly among young viewers who've grown up watching Stewart. An often-cited study by the Pew Research Center in 2004 found that almost as many people under 30 (21 percent) relied on comedy shows such as Stewart's for information about the presidential campaign as relied on the networks' evening newscasts (23 percent).
In a follow-up study in 2006, Julia R. Fox of Indiana University found something even more startling: "The Daily Show" contained roughly the same amount of audio and visual "substance" in its political stories as the network newscasts (on the other hand, Fox noted, neither source was all that substantial).
Whether watching "The Daily Show" makes you smarter has been an emerging question among academics, who seem as much in love with "The Daily Show" as journalists. But Lauren Feldman, an assistant professor at American University, suggests in a forthcoming collection of academic research about Stewart and Colbert that Stewart's program has raised viewer awareness of science and environmental issues.
"In most cases, people are already bringing some knowledge to the show," Feldman says, echoing comments Stewart has made. "You need some background knowledge to [get the satire]. I would say that the people who are watching are broadly interested in politics but are not necessarily well-versed in its nuances."
Some research backs this up. Another survey, this one from 2007, classified 54 percent of the "Daily Show" audience as "high-knowledge" viewers, based on a current-events test. This equaled the percentage of those who were readers of major newspaper Web sites and slightly exceeded viewers of "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on PBS, "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox or NPR's regular listeners.
Stewart's political clout has been evident since at least 2003, when former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) announced his presidential candidacy on the show. Democratic candidate John Kerry was a guest in 2004, and candidate Barack Obama made the now obligatory pilgrimage to the program's studios in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood a few days before the 2008 election. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whom Stewart calls a friend, was a frequent guest. President Bush was never a guest.
Just as he giveth a platform for politicians and presidents, Stewart can taketh away, too. Stewart's breakthrough moment may have been his 2004 appearance on the CNN show "Crossfire," in which he denounced the "partisan hackery" of the program to its flummoxed hosts, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. The clip quickly went viral on the Internet; when CNN canceled "Crossfire" a few weeks later, the network's new president said, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise."
The media challenge
The notion that the media emphasize conflict rather than offering illumination or accountability is at the heart of "The Daily Show's" daily take. Baym says the program has offered "an important new model of journalism," that abandons traditional ideas about "objectivity" or "neutrality" and instead challenges the underlying veracity of official claims and statements. A staple of the show is a clip of a politician or official saying one thing, followed by the same official saying something contradictory a few weeks or months earlier, followed by Stewart with a look of mock-horror or surprise.
"He's really creating a discussion around those clips," Feldman says. "He's promoting discourse and activism. I think he's teaching people a form of media literacy and making them more discerning and skeptical. He's not replacing what journalists do -- gathering the facts -- but he is challenging the media to think more broadly about what they're doing and how they're doing it."
Nevertheless, there are many, including Feldman, who don't view Stewart and his program as above politics or partisanship. "The Daily Show's" popularity soared as a direct result of its relentless satirical broadsides against the Bush administration. While it certainly hasn't ignored Obama's foibles and missteps, the critique seems less frequent and more subdued. One telling statistic: During Bush's two terms, only one Cabinet member, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, appeared on the show. During President Obama's first two years, six Cabinet secretaries have been guests, plus the head of the EPA, and first lady Michelle Obama.
At the same time, much of Stewart's media criticism has focused on Fox News, the most overtly conservative of the three cable news networks.
"I won't deny his partisanship," Feldman says. "It's quite obvious to many viewers. He doesn't point out the absurdity of the left as much as the right, but he will do it. But I do think he is nonpartisan in his desire to create more civil dialogue."
Baym agrees that the program and its host are "center-left" but "it's a mistake to try to put it on a straight left-right continuum. I don't think Stewart wants to be typecast as another liberal player. That undermines him. . . . He's a progressive but his bias is toward reasonableness."
And so, a mass gathering with the stated aim of being nice. Is that a role a satirist can really play?
Paul Farhi
Washington Post
Jon Stewart's Saturday afternoon "Rally to Restore Sanity" (merged with partner-in-satire Stephen Colbert's concurrent "March to Keep Fear Alive") may become the largest "nonpartisan" event to hit the national Mall since . . . well, since a couple of months ago, when another basic-cable TV star, Glenn Beck, hosted his "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Beck claimed his event was nonpartisan, too.
With less than a week to go, it's still not exactly clear how Stewart will be using this new platform. No guests or musical acts have been announced, Stewart has done only a couple media interviews, and he's offered few details about the rally on his nightly program.
Nevertheless, the similarities to Beck's rally are just the sort of thing Stewart himself would satirize on his show if, of course, it weren't his rally and his TV show in the first place. In his few pre-rally comments, Stewart has reached for some of the broad values and high-minded themes that Beck's did -- civility, decency, making America better -- though admittedly with fewer religious allusions and more comic panache. And whereas Beck undercut his claim of non-political intent by inviting Sarah Palin to be his co-star, Stewart may have undercut his by allying with a couple of noted liberals, Arianna Huffington and Oprah Winfrey. He'll also get a nice plug this week, while here at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Sidney Harman Hall to tape "The Daily Show," from President Obama, scheduled to appear on the show on Wednesday.
Stewart has also insisted that the timing of the gathering is coincidental to the midterm election three days later, a statement that has faint echoes of Beck's disclaimer that his event was inadvertently scheduled on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Stewart, 47, has never claimed to be anything more than a guy trying to get laughs on "a fake news program on basic cable," as he puts it. While that surely understates his case, it comports with his background as a stand-up comic and entertainer.
Born in New York and raised in New Jersey, Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz) rattled around the stand-up comedy circuit after graduating from William & Mary in 1984 before landing a memorable role on HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show" in the early 1990s. This was followed by hosting gigs on several long-forgotten MTV and Comedy Central shows and a few better-forgotten movie roles ("Half Baked"). He landed at "The Daily Show's" desk in 1999 as Craig Kilborn's replacement.
Since then, Stewart's stature as a news source, kingmaker and sociocultural figure has grown apace, abetted in no small part by "The Daily Show's" skeptical "reporting" on the Bush administration, the news media and politics in general. The show has even spawned an academic cottage industry of scholars who probe the program's impact on society.
'A watershed moment'
It's true that the 11 p.m. broadcast of "The Daily Show" (which runs Monday through Thursday) plays to a relatively modest crowd -- an average of just 1.8 million viewers a night thus far in October. But that doesn't count four daily repeats on Comedy Central, which nearly double the program's daily audience to 3.5 million. This means Stewart has roughly the same number of viewers as "Nightline," David Letterman or Jay Leno, and a bigger audience than any show on the cable news networks except "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News Channel.
Add in the untold millions who see "DS" clips embedded on Facebook pages, blogs and Web sites, or read about him in the mainstream media (media types love yakking about "The Daily Show"), and you've got a cultural force that transcends mere "basic cable."
"He is mobilizing people like Glenn Beck does, but I suspect his cultural influence surpasses Beck's," says Geoffrey Baym, a media studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, who wrote one of the first scholarly studies of "The Daily Show" in 2005. "[Beck] has a narrow but very committed audience whereas Stewart resonates much wider with people who are fed up with the polemical aspects" of national affairs. "He's reaching a watershed moment."
Nor is Stewart's news entirely fake. Much has been written about "The Daily Show" as legitimate news, particularly among young viewers who've grown up watching Stewart. An often-cited study by the Pew Research Center in 2004 found that almost as many people under 30 (21 percent) relied on comedy shows such as Stewart's for information about the presidential campaign as relied on the networks' evening newscasts (23 percent).
In a follow-up study in 2006, Julia R. Fox of Indiana University found something even more startling: "The Daily Show" contained roughly the same amount of audio and visual "substance" in its political stories as the network newscasts (on the other hand, Fox noted, neither source was all that substantial).
Whether watching "The Daily Show" makes you smarter has been an emerging question among academics, who seem as much in love with "The Daily Show" as journalists. But Lauren Feldman, an assistant professor at American University, suggests in a forthcoming collection of academic research about Stewart and Colbert that Stewart's program has raised viewer awareness of science and environmental issues.
"In most cases, people are already bringing some knowledge to the show," Feldman says, echoing comments Stewart has made. "You need some background knowledge to [get the satire]. I would say that the people who are watching are broadly interested in politics but are not necessarily well-versed in its nuances."
Some research backs this up. Another survey, this one from 2007, classified 54 percent of the "Daily Show" audience as "high-knowledge" viewers, based on a current-events test. This equaled the percentage of those who were readers of major newspaper Web sites and slightly exceeded viewers of "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on PBS, "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox or NPR's regular listeners.
Stewart's political clout has been evident since at least 2003, when former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) announced his presidential candidacy on the show. Democratic candidate John Kerry was a guest in 2004, and candidate Barack Obama made the now obligatory pilgrimage to the program's studios in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood a few days before the 2008 election. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whom Stewart calls a friend, was a frequent guest. President Bush was never a guest.
Just as he giveth a platform for politicians and presidents, Stewart can taketh away, too. Stewart's breakthrough moment may have been his 2004 appearance on the CNN show "Crossfire," in which he denounced the "partisan hackery" of the program to its flummoxed hosts, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. The clip quickly went viral on the Internet; when CNN canceled "Crossfire" a few weeks later, the network's new president said, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise."
The media challenge
The notion that the media emphasize conflict rather than offering illumination or accountability is at the heart of "The Daily Show's" daily take. Baym says the program has offered "an important new model of journalism," that abandons traditional ideas about "objectivity" or "neutrality" and instead challenges the underlying veracity of official claims and statements. A staple of the show is a clip of a politician or official saying one thing, followed by the same official saying something contradictory a few weeks or months earlier, followed by Stewart with a look of mock-horror or surprise.
"He's really creating a discussion around those clips," Feldman says. "He's promoting discourse and activism. I think he's teaching people a form of media literacy and making them more discerning and skeptical. He's not replacing what journalists do -- gathering the facts -- but he is challenging the media to think more broadly about what they're doing and how they're doing it."
Nevertheless, there are many, including Feldman, who don't view Stewart and his program as above politics or partisanship. "The Daily Show's" popularity soared as a direct result of its relentless satirical broadsides against the Bush administration. While it certainly hasn't ignored Obama's foibles and missteps, the critique seems less frequent and more subdued. One telling statistic: During Bush's two terms, only one Cabinet member, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, appeared on the show. During President Obama's first two years, six Cabinet secretaries have been guests, plus the head of the EPA, and first lady Michelle Obama.
At the same time, much of Stewart's media criticism has focused on Fox News, the most overtly conservative of the three cable news networks.
"I won't deny his partisanship," Feldman says. "It's quite obvious to many viewers. He doesn't point out the absurdity of the left as much as the right, but he will do it. But I do think he is nonpartisan in his desire to create more civil dialogue."
Baym agrees that the program and its host are "center-left" but "it's a mistake to try to put it on a straight left-right continuum. I don't think Stewart wants to be typecast as another liberal player. That undermines him. . . . He's a progressive but his bias is toward reasonableness."
And so, a mass gathering with the stated aim of being nice. Is that a role a satirist can really play?
Paul Farhi
Washington Post
"That's real hypocrisy!" GOP win top prize with your money!
Companies that received bailout money giving generously to candidates
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) was a fierce critic of the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler last year, saying he could not "ask the American taxpayer to subsidize failure."
But GM doesn't seem to hold a grudge.
The political action committee formed by the company, which is now largely owned by taxpayers, cut McConnell a $5,000 campaign check in September, a small piece of the $190,000 it donated to campaigns in the past month.
Although GM suspended its contributions while it solicited the government for financial help, it is now back in the game of political giving, increasing donations from its federal PAC steadily over the past few months.
It is not alone: Companies that received federal bailout money, including some that still owe money to the government, are giving to political candidates with vigor. Among companies with PACs, the 23 that received $1 billion or more in federal money through the Troubled Assets Relief Program gave a total of $1.4 million to candidates in September, up from $466,000 the month before.
Most of those donations are going to Republican candidates, although the TARP program was approved primarily with Democratic support. President Obama expanded it to cover GM and other automakers.
Greg Martin, a GM spokesman, said that the company's PAC donations come from voluntary contributions from its employees. "We contribute to candidates who thoughtfully approach issues that are important to the auto industry and manufacturing," he said. "If you look at our giving, we have given equally to both parties' leadership."
Some of the generosity to Republicans can be explained by the expectation that the party will make huge gains in Congress. But another factor is the Democratic Party's push for financial-regulation legislation this year. The new law, which passed the Senate with the votes of three Republicans and all but one Democrat, placed new curbs on banks and introduced a regulator to vet financial products for consumers. Most Republicans, and banks, say the law creates too many new restrictions.
Scott Talbott, a lobbyist with the Financial Services Roundtable, said another factor could be the tone some Democrats used against financial firms. At one point, Obama called Wall Street executives "fat cats."
"The entire industry was painted with a broad brush, and there was dissatisfaction with that," Talbott said.
Democrats have been abandoned by individual Wall Street donors as well as corporate PACs, leaving the party without an important source of funding as it fends off aggressive Republican challengers.
The bailouts have become campaign fodder for Republicans to use against their Democratic rivals. In a television commercial, former Republican senator Dan Coats pillories his opponent in the Indiana Senate race, Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D), for supporting "the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda," including "the disastrous bank bailout."
Coats has received more than $30,000 for his Senate campaign from companies, including J.P. Morgan Chase and GM, that took government money. No companies on the bailout list have donated to Ellsworth. Neither campaign responded to a request for comment.
One company that used TARP funds to invest in toxic assets from other banks is getting into the political giving mode for the first time. The investment fund BlackRock created a federal PAC in March, only a few months after the company used $2 billion in government money to invest in those assets. Its newly formed PAC has cut campaign checks to federal lawmakers including Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
The two top recipients of money from companies receiving TARP funds are the top two House Republicans, Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) with $200,000 and Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) with $187,000. They are followed by the ranking members of two key House committees, Spencer Bachus (Ala.) on Financial Services and Dave Camp (Mich.) on the tax-writing committee.
The Republican Party itself is getting some of the bank contributions. Seven financial firms have given the maximum $15,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in each of the past two years, including American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs - a total of $210,000.
A new ad by the NRSC running in Alaska shows a black-and-white photo of Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "They're out of control - government takeovers, Wall Street bailouts," the ad says as photos stamped with red ink pile up.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has taken $93,500 from companies that received TARP funds. The committee did not accept money from companies while they owed the government, except for one $15,000 donation from Capital One.
Citigroup, one of the few top recipients that has not paid back all that it owes the government, in September gave $30,000 to Republicans including Camp and Bachus. It also cut $12,000 in checks to Democrats, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.).
The DCCC also has found a way to use the issue leading up to the midterm elections. A DCCC ad attacks Republican Scott Rigell, a car dealer opposing Democratic Rep. Glenn Nye in Virginia, for campaigning against the bailout while accepting money from the government's "Cash for Clunkers" program.
"Hypocrisy. That's politics these days," the ad says. "Rigell rails against the bailout, but his business raked in the cash, almost a half million of our tax dollars filling Scott Rigell's pocket. Mr. Rigell, that's hypocrisy. It's wrong."
Rigell said that it was his customers that chose to participate in the "Cash for Clunkers" program, and that he felt an obligation to participate so that he would not need to lay off any of his employees.
"Glenn Nye and his Democratic allies are attacking me for a program that Glenn Nye voted for," Rigell said in a statement. "That's real hypocrisy!"
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) was a fierce critic of the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler last year, saying he could not "ask the American taxpayer to subsidize failure."
But GM doesn't seem to hold a grudge.
The political action committee formed by the company, which is now largely owned by taxpayers, cut McConnell a $5,000 campaign check in September, a small piece of the $190,000 it donated to campaigns in the past month.
Although GM suspended its contributions while it solicited the government for financial help, it is now back in the game of political giving, increasing donations from its federal PAC steadily over the past few months.
It is not alone: Companies that received federal bailout money, including some that still owe money to the government, are giving to political candidates with vigor. Among companies with PACs, the 23 that received $1 billion or more in federal money through the Troubled Assets Relief Program gave a total of $1.4 million to candidates in September, up from $466,000 the month before.
Most of those donations are going to Republican candidates, although the TARP program was approved primarily with Democratic support. President Obama expanded it to cover GM and other automakers.
Greg Martin, a GM spokesman, said that the company's PAC donations come from voluntary contributions from its employees. "We contribute to candidates who thoughtfully approach issues that are important to the auto industry and manufacturing," he said. "If you look at our giving, we have given equally to both parties' leadership."
Some of the generosity to Republicans can be explained by the expectation that the party will make huge gains in Congress. But another factor is the Democratic Party's push for financial-regulation legislation this year. The new law, which passed the Senate with the votes of three Republicans and all but one Democrat, placed new curbs on banks and introduced a regulator to vet financial products for consumers. Most Republicans, and banks, say the law creates too many new restrictions.
Scott Talbott, a lobbyist with the Financial Services Roundtable, said another factor could be the tone some Democrats used against financial firms. At one point, Obama called Wall Street executives "fat cats."
"The entire industry was painted with a broad brush, and there was dissatisfaction with that," Talbott said.
Democrats have been abandoned by individual Wall Street donors as well as corporate PACs, leaving the party without an important source of funding as it fends off aggressive Republican challengers.
The bailouts have become campaign fodder for Republicans to use against their Democratic rivals. In a television commercial, former Republican senator Dan Coats pillories his opponent in the Indiana Senate race, Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D), for supporting "the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda," including "the disastrous bank bailout."
Coats has received more than $30,000 for his Senate campaign from companies, including J.P. Morgan Chase and GM, that took government money. No companies on the bailout list have donated to Ellsworth. Neither campaign responded to a request for comment.
One company that used TARP funds to invest in toxic assets from other banks is getting into the political giving mode for the first time. The investment fund BlackRock created a federal PAC in March, only a few months after the company used $2 billion in government money to invest in those assets. Its newly formed PAC has cut campaign checks to federal lawmakers including Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
The two top recipients of money from companies receiving TARP funds are the top two House Republicans, Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) with $200,000 and Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) with $187,000. They are followed by the ranking members of two key House committees, Spencer Bachus (Ala.) on Financial Services and Dave Camp (Mich.) on the tax-writing committee.
The Republican Party itself is getting some of the bank contributions. Seven financial firms have given the maximum $15,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in each of the past two years, including American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs - a total of $210,000.
A new ad by the NRSC running in Alaska shows a black-and-white photo of Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "They're out of control - government takeovers, Wall Street bailouts," the ad says as photos stamped with red ink pile up.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has taken $93,500 from companies that received TARP funds. The committee did not accept money from companies while they owed the government, except for one $15,000 donation from Capital One.
Citigroup, one of the few top recipients that has not paid back all that it owes the government, in September gave $30,000 to Republicans including Camp and Bachus. It also cut $12,000 in checks to Democrats, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.).
The DCCC also has found a way to use the issue leading up to the midterm elections. A DCCC ad attacks Republican Scott Rigell, a car dealer opposing Democratic Rep. Glenn Nye in Virginia, for campaigning against the bailout while accepting money from the government's "Cash for Clunkers" program.
"Hypocrisy. That's politics these days," the ad says. "Rigell rails against the bailout, but his business raked in the cash, almost a half million of our tax dollars filling Scott Rigell's pocket. Mr. Rigell, that's hypocrisy. It's wrong."
Rigell said that it was his customers that chose to participate in the "Cash for Clunkers" program, and that he felt an obligation to participate so that he would not need to lay off any of his employees.
"Glenn Nye and his Democratic allies are attacking me for a program that Glenn Nye voted for," Rigell said in a statement. "That's real hypocrisy!"
Sunday, October 24, 2010
"Three GOP candidates spend $243M" AND they want to run the finances of the country?
"Three GOP candidates spend $243M," by Alexander Burns:
"A group of three Republican candidates has spent nearly a quarter-billion dollars on statewide campaigns this cycle, overshadowing even the heavyweight independent groups commonly considered the biggest financial players of the 2010 election.
The trio of Meg Whitman in California, Rick Scott [running for governor against Alex Sink] in Florida and Linda McMahon in Connecticut together has burned through more money than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Crossroads and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have pledged to spend - combined.
... None ... is ahead in the polls. ... Whitman and McMahon [are] behind."
"A group of three Republican candidates has spent nearly a quarter-billion dollars on statewide campaigns this cycle, overshadowing even the heavyweight independent groups commonly considered the biggest financial players of the 2010 election.
The trio of Meg Whitman in California, Rick Scott [running for governor against Alex Sink] in Florida and Linda McMahon in Connecticut together has burned through more money than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Crossroads and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have pledged to spend - combined.
... None ... is ahead in the polls. ... Whitman and McMahon [are] behind."
IT'S NOT OVER!
Gulf Fishermen Find Miles of Missed Oil
You missed a spot—a big spot. Boating captains in the Gulf of Mexico have spotted massive oil slicks still remaining after this summer’s BP oil spill. Reports document that some of the spills are almost 400 feet wide and at least one mile long. The captains, who stated that they “have been reporting large areas of surface oil in the delta for more than a week,” said there was no response yet on the part of BP or the Coast Guard. This week the waters in the West Bay have calmed down enough so that the weathered orange-colored oil is very visible. Wildlife officials are nervous that the oil will not be removed quickly enough to beat the fall bird migration and prime fishing season. The oil-affected waters are also part of a major shipping throughway and highlight concerns from skeptics who said the clean up reports were vague and overreaching.
Read it at The Times-Picayune
You missed a spot—a big spot. Boating captains in the Gulf of Mexico have spotted massive oil slicks still remaining after this summer’s BP oil spill. Reports document that some of the spills are almost 400 feet wide and at least one mile long. The captains, who stated that they “have been reporting large areas of surface oil in the delta for more than a week,” said there was no response yet on the part of BP or the Coast Guard. This week the waters in the West Bay have calmed down enough so that the weathered orange-colored oil is very visible. Wildlife officials are nervous that the oil will not be removed quickly enough to beat the fall bird migration and prime fishing season. The oil-affected waters are also part of a major shipping throughway and highlight concerns from skeptics who said the clean up reports were vague and overreaching.
Read it at The Times-Picayune
Workers of the World, Watch Out T. M. SHINE
I USUALLY run errands in the afternoon, but one morning last week I was restless and had a craving for Apple Jacks. So I hopped on my bicycle and headed toward the convenience store. For the first few blocks I zigzagged along, enjoying the quiet roads of my sleepy neighborhood. But as I approached the first big intersection, I realized something strange was going on. Cars were jockeying for position, horns blaring; the nose of an Audi came dangerously close to striking my rear tire. The light went red, my feet touched down to stop and steady myself, and as I gazed at the traffic backing up in both directions, I asked myself, “Where on earth are all these people going?”
Then it dawned on me ...work.
Yes, it’s been that long since I was one of them — 432 days to be exact. I’d forgotten about commuter traffic. And that morning, a second epiphany followed the first: I hate people with jobs.
I’m writing to announce that I’ve officially gone beyond the usual job-loss spectrum of denial to acceptance. I’ve hit a more obscure step, No. 8 or 9, in which you to come to grips with the fact that you can’t stand anybody who is employed.
Employed people, with their benefits and direct deposits, seem so smug to me now — bills paid up, money for weekend getaways and nights at the movies. “You didn’t see ‘The Town’ yet?” employed people keep asking me. No, I have no money. I haven’t seen “The Town.” (I have, however, seen “The Great Buck Howard” nine times on Showtime, but no one wants to talk about what a treasure John Malkovich is anymore.)
The problem, I find, is no longer my unemployment. It’s the people with employment — rushing past me on the sidewalk, ties in the wind — who are killing my spirit. I want to start tripping them as they race by, maybe throw an iced coffee in a few of their “out-of-my-way-I’ve-got-to-get-to-my-next-appointment” faces.
I wasn’t always like this. In the beginning, it didn’t seem so bad being unemployed, at least not at this time in history, when so many others are in the same predicament. At first, maybe I was even a little relieved by the rising unemployment rates — 10 percent, 12 percent, even 20 percent in some devastated areas. You see, I’m the kind of guy who never feared the Apocalypse or a nuclear holocaust because I sort of liked the idea of us all going down together. I don’t so much mind being turned into a burning ember or a nuclear shadow on a concrete wall as long as it’s happening to everyone else.
It’s when I’m a shadow on a concrete wall and everyone else is going on a picnic with toasty Quiznos sandwiches that I get upset.
Other things have changed, too. There was a period when I really missed work. One night about six months ago, I went back to the office building where I used to work. I just wanted to be there. I couldn’t go inside (my security code no longer worked), so I climbed a utility ladder attached to the side of the building and strolled along the rooftop until I was standing somewhere above my old desk. I missed it all so much. I missed procrastinating and stealing office supplies. I missed the one co-worker who thought I was funny and, even more so, the one who thought I was attractive. I even missed the guy who used to describe everything as “awesome.”
But that’s all over now. At this point, just walking past the employed on a smoke break is enough to set me off. I try to cover my ears, but I can’t help hearing some guy talk about how he’s going to get the pretty girl in the office to go have Thai food with him, or another guy rehearse the joke he’s cooked up for the afternoon meeting, and then I can’t help wanting to go up to them to say that the pretty girl will go eat Thai with anyone, and that meeting laughs are the easiest laughs in the world.
And the thing of it is, I don’t think I’m part of some lunatic fringe. I am nothing if not representative of the average unemployed worker in America; there are millions of us, and surely others have reached this phase as well.
To be honest, dear reader, my main reason for writing this is to warn you. If you’re ever rushing to a business meeting down a crowded street and you suddenly fall flat on your face, as if somebody tripped you from behind, know this: Somebody did.
T. M. Shine is the author of the novel “Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You.”
Then it dawned on me ...work.
Yes, it’s been that long since I was one of them — 432 days to be exact. I’d forgotten about commuter traffic. And that morning, a second epiphany followed the first: I hate people with jobs.
I’m writing to announce that I’ve officially gone beyond the usual job-loss spectrum of denial to acceptance. I’ve hit a more obscure step, No. 8 or 9, in which you to come to grips with the fact that you can’t stand anybody who is employed.
Employed people, with their benefits and direct deposits, seem so smug to me now — bills paid up, money for weekend getaways and nights at the movies. “You didn’t see ‘The Town’ yet?” employed people keep asking me. No, I have no money. I haven’t seen “The Town.” (I have, however, seen “The Great Buck Howard” nine times on Showtime, but no one wants to talk about what a treasure John Malkovich is anymore.)
The problem, I find, is no longer my unemployment. It’s the people with employment — rushing past me on the sidewalk, ties in the wind — who are killing my spirit. I want to start tripping them as they race by, maybe throw an iced coffee in a few of their “out-of-my-way-I’ve-got-to-get-to-my-next-appointment” faces.
I wasn’t always like this. In the beginning, it didn’t seem so bad being unemployed, at least not at this time in history, when so many others are in the same predicament. At first, maybe I was even a little relieved by the rising unemployment rates — 10 percent, 12 percent, even 20 percent in some devastated areas. You see, I’m the kind of guy who never feared the Apocalypse or a nuclear holocaust because I sort of liked the idea of us all going down together. I don’t so much mind being turned into a burning ember or a nuclear shadow on a concrete wall as long as it’s happening to everyone else.
It’s when I’m a shadow on a concrete wall and everyone else is going on a picnic with toasty Quiznos sandwiches that I get upset.
Other things have changed, too. There was a period when I really missed work. One night about six months ago, I went back to the office building where I used to work. I just wanted to be there. I couldn’t go inside (my security code no longer worked), so I climbed a utility ladder attached to the side of the building and strolled along the rooftop until I was standing somewhere above my old desk. I missed it all so much. I missed procrastinating and stealing office supplies. I missed the one co-worker who thought I was funny and, even more so, the one who thought I was attractive. I even missed the guy who used to describe everything as “awesome.”
But that’s all over now. At this point, just walking past the employed on a smoke break is enough to set me off. I try to cover my ears, but I can’t help hearing some guy talk about how he’s going to get the pretty girl in the office to go have Thai food with him, or another guy rehearse the joke he’s cooked up for the afternoon meeting, and then I can’t help wanting to go up to them to say that the pretty girl will go eat Thai with anyone, and that meeting laughs are the easiest laughs in the world.
And the thing of it is, I don’t think I’m part of some lunatic fringe. I am nothing if not representative of the average unemployed worker in America; there are millions of us, and surely others have reached this phase as well.
To be honest, dear reader, my main reason for writing this is to warn you. If you’re ever rushing to a business meeting down a crowded street and you suddenly fall flat on your face, as if somebody tripped you from behind, know this: Somebody did.
T. M. Shine is the author of the novel “Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You.”
Supremely Bad Judgment MAUREEN DOWD
In the wacky coda to one of the most searing chapters in American history, everyone remained true to form.
Anita Hill reacted with starchy disgust.
Ginni Thomas came across like a spiritually addled nut.
Clarence Thomas was mute, no doubt privately raging about the trouble women have caused him.
And now into the circus comes Lillian McEwen, an old girlfriend of Thomas’s.
Looking to shop a memoir, the 65-year-old McEwen used the occasion of Ginni’s weird phone message to Anita — asking her to “consider an apology” and “pray about this” and “O.K., have a good day!” — to open up to reporters.
If “the real Clarence” had been revealed at the time, he probably wouldn’t have ascended to the court, McEwen told The Times’s Ashley Parker. Especially since the real Clarence denied ever using the “grotesque” argot of the porn movies he regularly rented at a D.C. video store.
In her interviews, McEwen confirmed Thomas’s obsession with women with “huge, huge breasts,” with scouting the women he worked with as possible partners, and with talking about porn at work — while he was head of the federal agency that polices sexual harassment.
Years later, some of the Democrats on that all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee told me they assumed there must have been a consensual romance between the boss and his subordinate. McEwen assumed so, too, because Clarence took Anita with him when he changed agencies. Hill has made it clear she felt no reciprocal attraction.
Joe Biden, the senator who ran those hearings, was leery of the liberal groups eager to use Hill as a pawn to checkmate Thomas. He circumscribed the testimony of women who could have corroborated Hill’s unappetizing portrait of a power-abusing predator.
For the written record, Biden allowed negative accounts only from women who had worked with Thomas. He also ruled out testimony from women who simply had personal relationships with Thomas, and did not respond to a note from McEwen — a former assistant U.S. attorney who had once worked as a counsel for Biden’s committee — reminding him of her long relationship with Thomas.
It’s too late to relitigate the shameful Thomas-Hill hearings. We’re stuck with a justice-for-life who lied his way onto the bench with the help of bullying Republicans and cowed Democrats.
We don’t know why Ginni Thomas, who was once in the thrall of a cultish self-help group called Lifespring, made that odd call to Hill at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. But we do know that the Thomases show supremely bad judgment. Mrs. Thomas, a queen of the Tea Party, is the founder of a new nonprofit group, Liberty Central, which she boasts will be bigger than the Tea Party. She sports and sells those foam Statue of Liberty-style crowns as she makes her case against the “tyranny” of President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who, she charges, are hurting the “core founding principles” of America.
As The Times’s Jackie Calmes wrote, Mrs. Thomas started her nonprofit in late 2009 with two gifts of $500,000 and $50,000, and additional sums this year that we don’t know about yet. She does not have to disclose the donors, whose money makes possible the compensation she brings into the Thomas household.
There is no way to tell if her donors have cases before the Supreme Court or whether her husband knows their identities. And she never would have to disclose them if her husband had his way.
The 5-to-4 Citizens United decision last January gave corporations, foreign contributors, unions, Big Energy, Big Oil and superrich conservatives a green light to surreptitiously funnel in as much money as they want, whenever they want to elect or unelect candidates. As if that weren’t enough to breed corruption, Thomas was the only justice — in a rare case of detaching his hip from Antonin Scalia’s — to write a separate opinion calling for an end to donor disclosures.
In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court chose the Republican president. In Citizens United, the court may return Republicans to control of Congress. So much for conservatives’ professed disdain of judicial activism. And so much for the public’s long-held trust in the impartiality of the nation’s highest court.
Justice Stephen Breyer recently rejected the image of the high court as “nine junior varsity politicians.” But it’s even worse than that. The court has gone beyond mere politicization. Its liberals are moderate and reasonable, while the conservatives are dug in, guzzling Tea.
Thomas and Scalia have flouted ethics rules by attending seminars sponsored by Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate run by billionaire brothers that has donated more than $100 million to far-right causes.
Christine O’Donnell may not believe in the separation of church and state, but the Supreme Court does not believe in the separation of powers.
O.K., have a good day!
Anita Hill reacted with starchy disgust.
Ginni Thomas came across like a spiritually addled nut.
Clarence Thomas was mute, no doubt privately raging about the trouble women have caused him.
And now into the circus comes Lillian McEwen, an old girlfriend of Thomas’s.
Looking to shop a memoir, the 65-year-old McEwen used the occasion of Ginni’s weird phone message to Anita — asking her to “consider an apology” and “pray about this” and “O.K., have a good day!” — to open up to reporters.
If “the real Clarence” had been revealed at the time, he probably wouldn’t have ascended to the court, McEwen told The Times’s Ashley Parker. Especially since the real Clarence denied ever using the “grotesque” argot of the porn movies he regularly rented at a D.C. video store.
In her interviews, McEwen confirmed Thomas’s obsession with women with “huge, huge breasts,” with scouting the women he worked with as possible partners, and with talking about porn at work — while he was head of the federal agency that polices sexual harassment.
Years later, some of the Democrats on that all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee told me they assumed there must have been a consensual romance between the boss and his subordinate. McEwen assumed so, too, because Clarence took Anita with him when he changed agencies. Hill has made it clear she felt no reciprocal attraction.
Joe Biden, the senator who ran those hearings, was leery of the liberal groups eager to use Hill as a pawn to checkmate Thomas. He circumscribed the testimony of women who could have corroborated Hill’s unappetizing portrait of a power-abusing predator.
For the written record, Biden allowed negative accounts only from women who had worked with Thomas. He also ruled out testimony from women who simply had personal relationships with Thomas, and did not respond to a note from McEwen — a former assistant U.S. attorney who had once worked as a counsel for Biden’s committee — reminding him of her long relationship with Thomas.
It’s too late to relitigate the shameful Thomas-Hill hearings. We’re stuck with a justice-for-life who lied his way onto the bench with the help of bullying Republicans and cowed Democrats.
We don’t know why Ginni Thomas, who was once in the thrall of a cultish self-help group called Lifespring, made that odd call to Hill at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. But we do know that the Thomases show supremely bad judgment. Mrs. Thomas, a queen of the Tea Party, is the founder of a new nonprofit group, Liberty Central, which she boasts will be bigger than the Tea Party. She sports and sells those foam Statue of Liberty-style crowns as she makes her case against the “tyranny” of President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who, she charges, are hurting the “core founding principles” of America.
As The Times’s Jackie Calmes wrote, Mrs. Thomas started her nonprofit in late 2009 with two gifts of $500,000 and $50,000, and additional sums this year that we don’t know about yet. She does not have to disclose the donors, whose money makes possible the compensation she brings into the Thomas household.
There is no way to tell if her donors have cases before the Supreme Court or whether her husband knows their identities. And she never would have to disclose them if her husband had his way.
The 5-to-4 Citizens United decision last January gave corporations, foreign contributors, unions, Big Energy, Big Oil and superrich conservatives a green light to surreptitiously funnel in as much money as they want, whenever they want to elect or unelect candidates. As if that weren’t enough to breed corruption, Thomas was the only justice — in a rare case of detaching his hip from Antonin Scalia’s — to write a separate opinion calling for an end to donor disclosures.
In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court chose the Republican president. In Citizens United, the court may return Republicans to control of Congress. So much for conservatives’ professed disdain of judicial activism. And so much for the public’s long-held trust in the impartiality of the nation’s highest court.
Justice Stephen Breyer recently rejected the image of the high court as “nine junior varsity politicians.” But it’s even worse than that. The court has gone beyond mere politicization. Its liberals are moderate and reasonable, while the conservatives are dug in, guzzling Tea.
Thomas and Scalia have flouted ethics rules by attending seminars sponsored by Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate run by billionaire brothers that has donated more than $100 million to far-right causes.
Christine O’Donnell may not believe in the separation of church and state, but the Supreme Court does not believe in the separation of powers.
O.K., have a good day!
Health Care Overhaul Depends on States’ Insurance Exchanges
WASHINGTON — In Massachusetts, which has had a government-run health insurance marketplace for four years, people typically file paper applications for subsidized coverage offered by one of five state-approved insurers.
In Utah, employees of small businesses can go to a state Web site and sign up for insurance over the Internet, almost as easily as they download music from iTunes.
The success of President Obama’s health care overhaul, with its promise of affordable coverage for all, depends on the creation of such retail shopping malls, known as health insurance exchanges.
Massachusetts and Utah provide a glimpse of the future, and they offer radically different models for other states. The battle over health care is shifting to the states, and the design of insurance exchanges will be one of the most pressing issues for state legislators when they convene early next year.
“Utah and Massachusetts may well serve as bookends for other states,” said Norman K. Thurston, the policy coordinator at the Utah Health Department.
The Congressional Budget Office predicts that by 2019, about 24 million people will have insurance through exchanges, with four-fifths of them getting federal subsidies that average $6,000 a year per person. People with incomes up to four times the poverty level (about $88,000 a year for a family of four) will be eligible for subsidies.
The Utah Health Exchange organizes the market, allowing consumers to compare a wide variety of health plans sold by any insurers that want to participate.
In the Massachusetts exchange, known as the Connector, the state serves as an active purchaser, soliciting bids from insurance companies and negotiating prices and benefits in an effort to secure the best value for state residents. Health plans cannot be sold through the Connector unless they receive its seal of approval.
“Massachusetts has been more selective and aggressive in contracting,” said Jon M. Kingsdale, who was executive director of the Massachusetts exchange from its creation in 2006 until June of this year.
Matthew A. Spencer, manager of the Utah exchange, said: “We are on the other end of the spectrum from Massachusetts. Our exchange is wide open for any carrier that wants to participate. We define the minimum benefits that plans need to offer. But we step back and allow carriers to compete within the exchange, setting their own prices.”
The idea of an insurance exchange has bipartisan appeal.
Liberals and conservatives alike see it as a way to concentrate the purchasing power of individuals and small businesses.
The federal law was shaped, to a large degree, by the experience of Massachusetts. But Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said: “Utah is not Massachusetts. Nor does it want to be.”
Other states will probably fall somewhere along the continuum from Boston to Salt Lake City as they try to figure out the right mix of regulation and competition.
State legislators are asking: Can we get a better deal by limiting competition in the exchange or by accepting all qualified health plans? Should states negotiate premiums or rely on market forces to set rates?
David Clark, a Republican who is speaker of the Utah House of Representatives, said: “In our exchange, the government is a market facilitator, not a contracting agent. We believe in the invisible hand of the marketplace rather than the heavy hand of government.”
Utah has no interest in putting its exchange plans out for bid, Mr. Thurston said. “Any attempt to standardize benefit designs tends to discourage competition and entry into the market, and limits choice,” he said.
In Massachusetts, State Senator Richard T. Moore, a Democrat who is president of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said: “We took a much more governmental approach. But both models make sense. Small states might find Utah is a good model. Bigger industrialized states might go the route we went.”
Massachusetts officials point to the state’s near-universal coverage as evidence that their approach is working. The Census Bureau says 95.6 percent of Massachusetts residents were covered by health insurance last year, compared with 83.3 percent for the nation as a whole and 85.2 percent for Utah.
“We have the lowest uninsured rate in the nation, and we are immensely proud of that,” said Glen Shor, executive director of the Massachusetts Connector.
The White House has provided $49 million to states to help them set up exchanges, which are envisioned as a kind of bazaar where insurers will offer their products side by side, so consumers and employers can make intelligent comparisons.
Congress assumed that insurance would also be sold outside the exchange. But federal subsidies, to help pay for insurance, will be available only to people who enroll in health plans through an exchange.
Exchanges will also play a crucial role as gateways to Medicaid and other public health programs. If people are found eligible, the exchange will help them enroll. In Massachusetts, the same application form is used for Medicaid and for subsidized private insurance purchased through the Connector.
California is another pioneer. On Sept. 30, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, signed two bills establishing the California Health Benefit Exchange, with broad powers to “negotiate on behalf of the public” and select qualified health plans.
The legislation generated intense lobbying, and the governor’s intentions were unclear until the last minute. Mr. Obama had urged him to sign the bills and was thrilled when he did, aides said.
The fight in Sacramento offers a preview of what other states can expect. In a letter to California lawmakers in August, Natalie Cárdenas, regional director of government relations for Anthem Blue Cross, a unit of WellPoint, complained that the exchange would have the power to pick winners and losers in the insurance market.
“Federal law will already limit the types of products that carriers can offer,” Ms. Cárdenas said. “Beyond that, the marketplace should determine what products consumers and small employers can purchase, not a government bureaucracy.”
The California Chamber of Commerce urged a veto of the bills, saying they “could lead to unnecessary cost increases and limited choice for employers.”
But Betsy M. Imholz, a lobbyist for Consumers Union, said the California laws struck the right balance.
“At first,” Ms. Imholz said, “the exchange may want to have a large number of health plans participating. But then the state needs to winnow down the number so consumers can see where they will get the best value.”
The California law says the exchange should choose health plans that “offer the optimal combination of choice, value, quality and service.”
Massachusetts requires people to have insurance. Utah does not.
Massachusetts provides more generous subsidies. But, Mr. Kingsdale said, the biggest difference is the magnitude of the two state programs.
In Massachusetts, more than 154,000 people receive subsidized coverage through the exchange, and 40,000 receive unsubsidized coverage, which can be bought on the Web. The Utah exchange, created under a 2008 state law, began enrollment this year. About 1,200 people have coverage through the Utah exchange, and the number is expected to grow to 10,000 by July 2011.
“We anticipate exponential growth,” Mr. Spencer said.
Under the new federal law, the exchanges must be in operation by January 2014. Federal officials will assess states’ progress as of Jan. 1, 2013, and will run the exchange in any state that is unable or unwilling to do so.
The exchanges will have a huge number of duties. They must evaluate health insurance plans and publish “standardized comparative information.” They must set up telephone call centers to answer consumers’ questions. They must determine who is eligible for subsidies and who will be exempt from the penalties imposed on people who go without insurance. They must build new computer systems to exchange data with state Medicaid agencies, insurance companies, employers and federal agencies.
While the exchange cannot explicitly control prices, it can exclude health plans that show a pattern of “excessive or unjustified premium increases.”
State officials worry that sick people will gravitate to the exchange, while healthier people who do not need subsidies will buy insurance outside it. However, insurers must agree to charge the same prices inside or outside the exchange.
Moreover, the law stipulates that members of Congress must get their health insurance through an exchange. So lawmakers will presumably be alert to problems.
NY TIMES By ROBERT PEAR
In Utah, employees of small businesses can go to a state Web site and sign up for insurance over the Internet, almost as easily as they download music from iTunes.
The success of President Obama’s health care overhaul, with its promise of affordable coverage for all, depends on the creation of such retail shopping malls, known as health insurance exchanges.
Massachusetts and Utah provide a glimpse of the future, and they offer radically different models for other states. The battle over health care is shifting to the states, and the design of insurance exchanges will be one of the most pressing issues for state legislators when they convene early next year.
“Utah and Massachusetts may well serve as bookends for other states,” said Norman K. Thurston, the policy coordinator at the Utah Health Department.
The Congressional Budget Office predicts that by 2019, about 24 million people will have insurance through exchanges, with four-fifths of them getting federal subsidies that average $6,000 a year per person. People with incomes up to four times the poverty level (about $88,000 a year for a family of four) will be eligible for subsidies.
The Utah Health Exchange organizes the market, allowing consumers to compare a wide variety of health plans sold by any insurers that want to participate.
In the Massachusetts exchange, known as the Connector, the state serves as an active purchaser, soliciting bids from insurance companies and negotiating prices and benefits in an effort to secure the best value for state residents. Health plans cannot be sold through the Connector unless they receive its seal of approval.
“Massachusetts has been more selective and aggressive in contracting,” said Jon M. Kingsdale, who was executive director of the Massachusetts exchange from its creation in 2006 until June of this year.
Matthew A. Spencer, manager of the Utah exchange, said: “We are on the other end of the spectrum from Massachusetts. Our exchange is wide open for any carrier that wants to participate. We define the minimum benefits that plans need to offer. But we step back and allow carriers to compete within the exchange, setting their own prices.”
The idea of an insurance exchange has bipartisan appeal.
Liberals and conservatives alike see it as a way to concentrate the purchasing power of individuals and small businesses.
The federal law was shaped, to a large degree, by the experience of Massachusetts. But Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said: “Utah is not Massachusetts. Nor does it want to be.”
Other states will probably fall somewhere along the continuum from Boston to Salt Lake City as they try to figure out the right mix of regulation and competition.
State legislators are asking: Can we get a better deal by limiting competition in the exchange or by accepting all qualified health plans? Should states negotiate premiums or rely on market forces to set rates?
David Clark, a Republican who is speaker of the Utah House of Representatives, said: “In our exchange, the government is a market facilitator, not a contracting agent. We believe in the invisible hand of the marketplace rather than the heavy hand of government.”
Utah has no interest in putting its exchange plans out for bid, Mr. Thurston said. “Any attempt to standardize benefit designs tends to discourage competition and entry into the market, and limits choice,” he said.
In Massachusetts, State Senator Richard T. Moore, a Democrat who is president of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said: “We took a much more governmental approach. But both models make sense. Small states might find Utah is a good model. Bigger industrialized states might go the route we went.”
Massachusetts officials point to the state’s near-universal coverage as evidence that their approach is working. The Census Bureau says 95.6 percent of Massachusetts residents were covered by health insurance last year, compared with 83.3 percent for the nation as a whole and 85.2 percent for Utah.
“We have the lowest uninsured rate in the nation, and we are immensely proud of that,” said Glen Shor, executive director of the Massachusetts Connector.
The White House has provided $49 million to states to help them set up exchanges, which are envisioned as a kind of bazaar where insurers will offer their products side by side, so consumers and employers can make intelligent comparisons.
Congress assumed that insurance would also be sold outside the exchange. But federal subsidies, to help pay for insurance, will be available only to people who enroll in health plans through an exchange.
Exchanges will also play a crucial role as gateways to Medicaid and other public health programs. If people are found eligible, the exchange will help them enroll. In Massachusetts, the same application form is used for Medicaid and for subsidized private insurance purchased through the Connector.
California is another pioneer. On Sept. 30, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, signed two bills establishing the California Health Benefit Exchange, with broad powers to “negotiate on behalf of the public” and select qualified health plans.
The legislation generated intense lobbying, and the governor’s intentions were unclear until the last minute. Mr. Obama had urged him to sign the bills and was thrilled when he did, aides said.
The fight in Sacramento offers a preview of what other states can expect. In a letter to California lawmakers in August, Natalie Cárdenas, regional director of government relations for Anthem Blue Cross, a unit of WellPoint, complained that the exchange would have the power to pick winners and losers in the insurance market.
“Federal law will already limit the types of products that carriers can offer,” Ms. Cárdenas said. “Beyond that, the marketplace should determine what products consumers and small employers can purchase, not a government bureaucracy.”
The California Chamber of Commerce urged a veto of the bills, saying they “could lead to unnecessary cost increases and limited choice for employers.”
But Betsy M. Imholz, a lobbyist for Consumers Union, said the California laws struck the right balance.
“At first,” Ms. Imholz said, “the exchange may want to have a large number of health plans participating. But then the state needs to winnow down the number so consumers can see where they will get the best value.”
The California law says the exchange should choose health plans that “offer the optimal combination of choice, value, quality and service.”
Massachusetts requires people to have insurance. Utah does not.
Massachusetts provides more generous subsidies. But, Mr. Kingsdale said, the biggest difference is the magnitude of the two state programs.
In Massachusetts, more than 154,000 people receive subsidized coverage through the exchange, and 40,000 receive unsubsidized coverage, which can be bought on the Web. The Utah exchange, created under a 2008 state law, began enrollment this year. About 1,200 people have coverage through the Utah exchange, and the number is expected to grow to 10,000 by July 2011.
“We anticipate exponential growth,” Mr. Spencer said.
Under the new federal law, the exchanges must be in operation by January 2014. Federal officials will assess states’ progress as of Jan. 1, 2013, and will run the exchange in any state that is unable or unwilling to do so.
The exchanges will have a huge number of duties. They must evaluate health insurance plans and publish “standardized comparative information.” They must set up telephone call centers to answer consumers’ questions. They must determine who is eligible for subsidies and who will be exempt from the penalties imposed on people who go without insurance. They must build new computer systems to exchange data with state Medicaid agencies, insurance companies, employers and federal agencies.
While the exchange cannot explicitly control prices, it can exclude health plans that show a pattern of “excessive or unjustified premium increases.”
State officials worry that sick people will gravitate to the exchange, while healthier people who do not need subsidies will buy insurance outside it. However, insurers must agree to charge the same prices inside or outside the exchange.
Moreover, the law stipulates that members of Congress must get their health insurance through an exchange. So lawmakers will presumably be alert to problems.
NY TIMES By ROBERT PEAR
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Realco guns tied to 2,500 crimes
Realco guns tied to 2,500 crimes in D.C. and Maryland
Outside a baby shower in Landover three years ago, Erik Kenneth Dixon snapped. As he argued with his sister and her boyfriend in a parking lot, the 25-year-old man whipped out a .45-caliber Glock and shot her in the leg. Then he chased down her boyfriend, firing between cars and at the running man's feet until he slipped on wet grass. As the prone man held his hands up in futile defense, Dixon executed him, firing seven times.
By law, Dixon was prohibited from owning a gun. He had spent almost three years in prison for shooting at a man. But three months before the baby-shower killing, he gave his girlfriend $335 and took her to an old brick house on a commercial strip just beyond the District line in Forestville, home to a gun shop called Realco.
"He knew which one he wanted and picked it out," the woman would later tell police.
Dixon's Glock was one of 86 guns sold by Realco that have been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop, including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies.
Realco has been known as a leading seller of "crime guns" seized by local police, but a year-long Post investigation reveals the magnitude of Realco's pattern and links the guns sold by the store to specific crimes. The Post compiled its own databases of more than 35,000 gun traces by mining unpublicized state databases and local police evidence logs.
The Post investigation found that a small percentage of gun stores sells most of the weapons recovered by police in crimes - re-confirming the major finding of studies that came out before federal gun-tracing data were removed from public view by an act of Congress in 2003. For the most part, these sales are legal, but an unknown number involve persons who buy for those who cannot, including convicted felons such as Dixon, in a process known as a "straw purchase." Such sales are illegal for the buyer and the store, if it knowingly allows a straw purchase. But cases are hard to prove. Law enforcement officials rarely prosecute gun stores, deterred by high bureaucratic hurdles, political pressure and laws that make convictions difficult.
The investigation also found that:
-- Nearly two out of three guns sold in Virginia since 1998 and recovered by local authorities came from about 1 percent of the state's dealers - 40 stores out of 3,400 selling guns. Most of those 40 had received government warnings that their licenses were in jeopardy because of regulatory violations. But only four had their licenses revoked, and all are still legally selling guns after transferring their licenses, reapplying or re-licensing under new owners.
-- A gun store in Portsmouth, Va., transformed over the past seven years from a modest family-owned business into one of the state's top sellers of "crime guns," leading Virginia in the category of how quickly its guns moved from the sales counter to crime scenes.
-- The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which investigates gun trafficking and regulates the firearms industry, is hamstrung by the law, politics and bureaucracy. The agency still has the same number of agents it had three decades ago. It can take as long as eight years between inspections of gun stores. And even when inspectors turn up evidence of missing guns, they cannot compel a dealer to take inventory.
In Maryland, Realco towers over the other 350 handgun dealers in the state as a source of guns confiscated in the District and Prince George's County, the most violent jurisdictions in the area. Nearly one out of three guns The Post traced to Maryland dealers came from Realco. The rest were spread among other shops across the state.
The store is a paradox for law enforcement and politicians. Its owners say they scrupulously follow handgun laws. State and federal regulators have documented only minor problems in numerous inspections.
"The owners of Realco Guns are cooperative with our detectives and have been compliant with all reporting requirements," said Maj. Andy Ellis, commander of the public affairs division for Prince George's police. "It shows a weakness in our system when a company like Realco can adhere to the law yet still be the source of so many crime guns. I can only imagine how much lower our violent-crime rate would be if Realco sold shoes instead of guns."
Dealers on the front lines
Tracing brings into sharp relief the fact that virtually all crime guns are first sold as new weapons by a licensed dealer to someone who cleared a background check. The criminal demand for weapons - especially new ones that cannot be tied to previous crimes - puts dealers at the front line of crime prevention.
One ATF study found that about half the guns in trafficking cases started as "straw purchases" from licensed dealers. As in the Dixon case, a person with a clean record buys a gun for a person who cannot or does not want to do so. The ATF looks to merchants to proactively weed out suspicious customers, such as a girlfriend buying for a boyfriend.
Most experts and ATF officials agree that the number of conscientious dealers far outweighs the minority that break the law. Straw schemes can be hard to detect. A gun traced to a merchant does not necessarily signal that the merchant did anything wrong, the experts say. The number of traces a store generates is shaped by many factors, including the type and number of guns sold, geography, clientele and how clerks vet customers.
The District has no walk-in gun shops but is ringed by more than 100 in Maryland and Virginia. Of the 996 guns successfully traced last year in the city, about one-fourth were tracked back to Maryland dealers, one-fourth to Virginia dealers and the rest to shops nationwide, according to the ATF.
To track crime guns in the District and Prince George's, The Post used public information requests to obtain local police logs listing 76,000 guns recovered by police in the two jurisdictions, then matched the serial numbers against a Maryland database of gun sales.
About 9,400 had no serial numbers and could not be matched. Another 13,300 were rifles or shotguns, which the state does not track. About 44,000 guns were not listed in state sales records, meaning the weapons were probably sold by dealers scattered across the country or had their serial numbers entered into police logs incorrectly.
About 8,700 guns were tracked to the Maryland merchants that last sold them.
Police in the District and Prince George's on average seized more than 160 Realco guns annually from 1997 through 2008. Realco's firearms end up at local crime scenes at a rate nearly twice that of any other active Maryland dealer that had 10 or more guns seized.
On a single day, police have logged two, three or even four guns sold by Realco, records show.
A Taurus .40-caliber pistol sold by the store in March 2004 was put to work in a murder three weeks later at a Popeyes in Oxon Hill, where 20-year-old Robert Garner Jr. killed 22-year-old Kelvin Braxton. Police learned that Garner's girlfriend had bought the gun.
A Glock .45-caliber the shop sold to Alfred L. Evans in June 2004 was used in October 2005 in Clinton at a busy traffic light to kill 28-year-old Keith Ingaharra. After one driver cut the other off in evening rush-hour traffic, Ingaharra stepped from his car waving his hands. Evans shot Ingaharra in the hip, leg and chest and then drove home.
"He had the gun right there at his fingertips," said Ingaharra's mother, Bonnie Rogers. "He just took it out and blew him away."
A Kel-Tec 9mm sold by Realco in January 2007 was used by Terris T. Luckett seven months later to shoot his wife 20 times, killing her at their Clinton home. He then killed a barber, John Scales III, in his shop. Luckett, who bought the gun, incorrectly thought the two were having an affair, police say.
Realco's president, Carlos del Real, declined repeated requests to be interviewed, dismissing the news value of gun tracing.
"It's such a ridiculous topic," said del Real, who took over the shop after his brother died in 2008. "Maybe we should just move our shop a few hundred miles away."
Glenn Ivey said that after he became Prince George's state's attorney in 2002, he asked law enforcement colleagues if he could do anything about the flow of guns from Realco, which he said he knew of from his time in the 1990s as a prosecutor in the District.
"I had an eye toward trying to take action," Ivey said. "The feedback we got was: They are doing it the way they are supposed to. They are following the letter of the law."
Asked about Realco, ATF spokeswoman Clare Weber said stores with greater numbers of traces are inspected more frequently.
"The number of traces that come back to a [gun dealer] is not a revocable offense if the dealer is found in compliance with record-keeping requirements," she said.
Joseph R. Vince Jr., who retired from the ATF's Crime Gun Analysis Branch in 1999 and has worked as an expert for lawyers who represent victims of gun violence, said the pattern prompts questions.
"If a gun store is bleeding crime guns, you have got to ask yourself what . . . is going on," Vince said. "I have no problem with somebody being in the firearms business. That is a legitimate business. But why can't the public be aware of where guns to criminals are coming from?"
Realco walks the line
Realco, one of dozens of dealers licensed over the years to sell handguns in Prince George's, opened more than 35 years ago when Carlos del Real's older brother Greg secured an ATF dealer's license.
The store - whose address is now in District Heights after an annexation three years ago - occupies a 1930 Craftsman-style house on a strip of Marlboro Pike, between the Loose Ends Hair Studio and the Black Ribeye drive-through. Across the street is a Dunkin' Donuts and a check-cashing service. Down the block is a liquor store and a police substation.
Stretched across one end of the front porch at Realco is a "Team Glock" banner, a marketing nod to the angular-shaped handgun. Bars line the windows. Customers enter in the back next to a sign announcing the "Realco Outdoor World & Gun Hospital."
Inside is a small paneled showroom lined with glass display cases and space for only a handful of customers. Rifle bags, gun safes, animal trophies and assorted gun gear fill the shop. Tacked behind the counter is a small yellow notice: "We will refuse the sale of ammo and guns to suspected straw purchasers."
Researchers in law enforcement, academia and the media first began to examine gun tracing data for clues to potential illegal sales in the late 1990s. (The efforts so angered gun supporters that they successfully lobbied Congress to impose a blackout on the once-public data in 2003.) In 1999, The Post identified Realco as the source of 493 guns used in crimes from 1996 to 1998, based on data from the ATF. That was twice the number of any other dealer in the region, and later researchers would rank Realco in the top 10 in the nation for crime-gun traces.
At the time, Greg and Carlos del Real disputed the numbers. They said they operated in a high-crime area but obeyed all laws.
"We step all over these people's constitutional rights to prevent these straw purchases," Greg del Real said.
Months later, Maryland State Police officials told The Post they were "taking an aggressive look" at Realco and potential straw purchases. Nothing came of the investigation, records show.
Greg del Real followed news of the state probe with a letter to The Post, disputing that "our store is in any way responsible for the flow of 'crime guns.'â??"
Guns, he wrote, are traced for many reasons that might not include "criminal use," including stolen guns and guns used in self-defense.
"We suspect that those reasons for traces, coupled with our high volume of sales, may account for the 'higher than average' number of gun traces attributed to our store," he wrote.
"The hundreds of sales that we have refused to make over the years," he also noted, "are not reflected in any statistical report."
Realco was back in the news in August 2007 when D.C. police issued a report that identified the leading sources of crime guns seized in D.C. in 2006 - Realco was No. 1 with 76, three times the number of the next-most-frequent dealer.
That month, prosecutor Ivey joined Jesse L. Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition and others outside Realco in a "protest against illegal guns." Inside the shop, Maryland State Police pored over Realco's paperwork. Investigators found little of concern.
"The brothers Del Real were cooperative during the inspection," they wrote.
Crime guns stack up
The gun industry often says that traces reflect little more than the number of guns a merchant has sold. But Maryland dealers that have sold almost as many or more guns than Realco have had their guns seized at much lower rates, records show.
Realco is listed in the Maryland database as selling 19,000 guns since 1984. Of every 1,000 sold, analysis shows, police later recovered 131.
About five miles away from Realco, near Andrews Air Force Base, is Maryland Small Arms Range Inc. The longtime dealer has sold about 15,000 guns over the past 25 years. For every 1,000 it sold, police later recovered 41.
Jack Donald, a longtime salesman at the shop, said police officers often use the range on site, potentially affecting who shops there.
"It may be some kind of a deterrent," Donald said.
Atlantic Guns, a long-established dealer in Silver Spring, has sold more than 18,000 guns in the past 25 years. For every 1,000 sold, police have recovered 28.
And in Rockville, a second Atlantic Guns location has sold more than 21,000 firearms since 1984 - the most listed in state records. Out of every 1,000 guns sold, police recovered eight.
One of the main ATF indicators of trafficking is how quickly guns are seized after they are sold, known as "time to crime." The faster guns are recovered, the ATF has found, the more likely they were bought by someone with criminal intent, sometimes through straw purchases. Anything less than three years is considered a potential red flag.
In general, Realco guns have been recovered more quickly than guns sold by other Maryland dealers. In Prince George's and the District, 55 percent of the recovered Realco guns were logged by police within three years, compared with 40 percent for the guns recovered from other Maryland dealers.
A Smith & Wesson .40-caliber handgun sold in March 2006 was recovered by Prince George's police 13 months later not far from a body, surrounded by shell casings, on a Landover street. A 26-year-old man was shot and killed after finding two men breaking into his car. The shooter told police that he asked a 21-year-old woman to purchase the handgun for him because he was 20 at the time and "not of legal age to purchase one himself," police said.
In a May 2006 straw purchase, a man bought a handgun at Realco for a felon friend who wanted to shoot abortion doctors. The plot was foiled after the felon's family called authorities weeks later.
In another straw scheme that ended later that year, a 22-year-old District man on probation for a handgun violation had his 47-year-old girlfriend, an office manager at a law firm who had a clean record, buy handguns for him on four shopping trips to Realco, prosecutors said. The scheme unraveled after police recovered one of the guns in the District.
The ATF trace revealed that the woman had bought it at Realco two months before. After talking with an ATF agent, she filed reports that one of the guns was stolen, but she eventually said she gave it to her boyfriend.
The man "went to Realco Guns with her on each occasion," she told the ATF, according to a document filed in court.
The straw purchase
When Erik Dixon first shot at a man, he had in his grip a relatively new Ruger .40-caliber handgun from Realco.
Dixon, then 21, had a string of arrests, was on federal probation, had abused drugs and complained of hearing voices in his head.
Standing outside his mother's home in Landover the night of May 3, 2003, he accused a man, an acquaintance, of attacking him. Dixon ordered the man to the ground, took $200 from him and pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the asphalt, and lead fragments ricocheted into the victim's face and shoulder.
As Dixon put the gun to the back of the man's head, a police car turned onto the street. Dixon fled.
When police arrested Dixon two days later, the gun fell from his waistband. Realco had sold the gun about eight months before, records show, to a man who had lived in the area.
Charged with attempted murder, Dixon claimed he was insane. The courts sent him to prison on a lesser charge of felony assault.
Once out, he met Cathy R. Anderson, 31, and soon asked that she buy a gun for him. In January 2007, the pair visited Realco, where she made a down payment on a Glock .45, signing a form saying she was buying the gun for herself. Dixon was in the store with her, she later told police.
She told investigators she didn't know of his criminal past. She said she never touched the gun after she picked it up on a return trip to Realco.
"I took it back to Erik's truck and gave it to him," she told police.
Two months later, Anderson called Maryland State Police, nervous about what she had done. That day, April 5, they opened a straw-purchase investigation to track down Dixon and the gun. Nine days later, he murdered his sister's boyfriend.
He was arrested nine days after that in Virginia. Anderson cooperated with prosecutors, who chose not to charge her. Dixon is serving a 60-year sentence.
In phone messages, Anderson declined to be interviewed, saying Dixon is no longer in her life.
"That was then; this is now," she said. ". . . I'm sorry for what happened."
story by David S. Fallis Washington Post Staff
Outside a baby shower in Landover three years ago, Erik Kenneth Dixon snapped. As he argued with his sister and her boyfriend in a parking lot, the 25-year-old man whipped out a .45-caliber Glock and shot her in the leg. Then he chased down her boyfriend, firing between cars and at the running man's feet until he slipped on wet grass. As the prone man held his hands up in futile defense, Dixon executed him, firing seven times.
By law, Dixon was prohibited from owning a gun. He had spent almost three years in prison for shooting at a man. But three months before the baby-shower killing, he gave his girlfriend $335 and took her to an old brick house on a commercial strip just beyond the District line in Forestville, home to a gun shop called Realco.
"He knew which one he wanted and picked it out," the woman would later tell police.
Dixon's Glock was one of 86 guns sold by Realco that have been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop, including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies.
Realco has been known as a leading seller of "crime guns" seized by local police, but a year-long Post investigation reveals the magnitude of Realco's pattern and links the guns sold by the store to specific crimes. The Post compiled its own databases of more than 35,000 gun traces by mining unpublicized state databases and local police evidence logs.
The Post investigation found that a small percentage of gun stores sells most of the weapons recovered by police in crimes - re-confirming the major finding of studies that came out before federal gun-tracing data were removed from public view by an act of Congress in 2003. For the most part, these sales are legal, but an unknown number involve persons who buy for those who cannot, including convicted felons such as Dixon, in a process known as a "straw purchase." Such sales are illegal for the buyer and the store, if it knowingly allows a straw purchase. But cases are hard to prove. Law enforcement officials rarely prosecute gun stores, deterred by high bureaucratic hurdles, political pressure and laws that make convictions difficult.
The investigation also found that:
-- Nearly two out of three guns sold in Virginia since 1998 and recovered by local authorities came from about 1 percent of the state's dealers - 40 stores out of 3,400 selling guns. Most of those 40 had received government warnings that their licenses were in jeopardy because of regulatory violations. But only four had their licenses revoked, and all are still legally selling guns after transferring their licenses, reapplying or re-licensing under new owners.
-- A gun store in Portsmouth, Va., transformed over the past seven years from a modest family-owned business into one of the state's top sellers of "crime guns," leading Virginia in the category of how quickly its guns moved from the sales counter to crime scenes.
-- The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which investigates gun trafficking and regulates the firearms industry, is hamstrung by the law, politics and bureaucracy. The agency still has the same number of agents it had three decades ago. It can take as long as eight years between inspections of gun stores. And even when inspectors turn up evidence of missing guns, they cannot compel a dealer to take inventory.
In Maryland, Realco towers over the other 350 handgun dealers in the state as a source of guns confiscated in the District and Prince George's County, the most violent jurisdictions in the area. Nearly one out of three guns The Post traced to Maryland dealers came from Realco. The rest were spread among other shops across the state.
The store is a paradox for law enforcement and politicians. Its owners say they scrupulously follow handgun laws. State and federal regulators have documented only minor problems in numerous inspections.
"The owners of Realco Guns are cooperative with our detectives and have been compliant with all reporting requirements," said Maj. Andy Ellis, commander of the public affairs division for Prince George's police. "It shows a weakness in our system when a company like Realco can adhere to the law yet still be the source of so many crime guns. I can only imagine how much lower our violent-crime rate would be if Realco sold shoes instead of guns."
Dealers on the front lines
Tracing brings into sharp relief the fact that virtually all crime guns are first sold as new weapons by a licensed dealer to someone who cleared a background check. The criminal demand for weapons - especially new ones that cannot be tied to previous crimes - puts dealers at the front line of crime prevention.
One ATF study found that about half the guns in trafficking cases started as "straw purchases" from licensed dealers. As in the Dixon case, a person with a clean record buys a gun for a person who cannot or does not want to do so. The ATF looks to merchants to proactively weed out suspicious customers, such as a girlfriend buying for a boyfriend.
Most experts and ATF officials agree that the number of conscientious dealers far outweighs the minority that break the law. Straw schemes can be hard to detect. A gun traced to a merchant does not necessarily signal that the merchant did anything wrong, the experts say. The number of traces a store generates is shaped by many factors, including the type and number of guns sold, geography, clientele and how clerks vet customers.
The District has no walk-in gun shops but is ringed by more than 100 in Maryland and Virginia. Of the 996 guns successfully traced last year in the city, about one-fourth were tracked back to Maryland dealers, one-fourth to Virginia dealers and the rest to shops nationwide, according to the ATF.
To track crime guns in the District and Prince George's, The Post used public information requests to obtain local police logs listing 76,000 guns recovered by police in the two jurisdictions, then matched the serial numbers against a Maryland database of gun sales.
About 9,400 had no serial numbers and could not be matched. Another 13,300 were rifles or shotguns, which the state does not track. About 44,000 guns were not listed in state sales records, meaning the weapons were probably sold by dealers scattered across the country or had their serial numbers entered into police logs incorrectly.
About 8,700 guns were tracked to the Maryland merchants that last sold them.
Police in the District and Prince George's on average seized more than 160 Realco guns annually from 1997 through 2008. Realco's firearms end up at local crime scenes at a rate nearly twice that of any other active Maryland dealer that had 10 or more guns seized.
On a single day, police have logged two, three or even four guns sold by Realco, records show.
A Taurus .40-caliber pistol sold by the store in March 2004 was put to work in a murder three weeks later at a Popeyes in Oxon Hill, where 20-year-old Robert Garner Jr. killed 22-year-old Kelvin Braxton. Police learned that Garner's girlfriend had bought the gun.
A Glock .45-caliber the shop sold to Alfred L. Evans in June 2004 was used in October 2005 in Clinton at a busy traffic light to kill 28-year-old Keith Ingaharra. After one driver cut the other off in evening rush-hour traffic, Ingaharra stepped from his car waving his hands. Evans shot Ingaharra in the hip, leg and chest and then drove home.
"He had the gun right there at his fingertips," said Ingaharra's mother, Bonnie Rogers. "He just took it out and blew him away."
A Kel-Tec 9mm sold by Realco in January 2007 was used by Terris T. Luckett seven months later to shoot his wife 20 times, killing her at their Clinton home. He then killed a barber, John Scales III, in his shop. Luckett, who bought the gun, incorrectly thought the two were having an affair, police say.
Realco's president, Carlos del Real, declined repeated requests to be interviewed, dismissing the news value of gun tracing.
"It's such a ridiculous topic," said del Real, who took over the shop after his brother died in 2008. "Maybe we should just move our shop a few hundred miles away."
Glenn Ivey said that after he became Prince George's state's attorney in 2002, he asked law enforcement colleagues if he could do anything about the flow of guns from Realco, which he said he knew of from his time in the 1990s as a prosecutor in the District.
"I had an eye toward trying to take action," Ivey said. "The feedback we got was: They are doing it the way they are supposed to. They are following the letter of the law."
Asked about Realco, ATF spokeswoman Clare Weber said stores with greater numbers of traces are inspected more frequently.
"The number of traces that come back to a [gun dealer] is not a revocable offense if the dealer is found in compliance with record-keeping requirements," she said.
Joseph R. Vince Jr., who retired from the ATF's Crime Gun Analysis Branch in 1999 and has worked as an expert for lawyers who represent victims of gun violence, said the pattern prompts questions.
"If a gun store is bleeding crime guns, you have got to ask yourself what . . . is going on," Vince said. "I have no problem with somebody being in the firearms business. That is a legitimate business. But why can't the public be aware of where guns to criminals are coming from?"
Realco walks the line
Realco, one of dozens of dealers licensed over the years to sell handguns in Prince George's, opened more than 35 years ago when Carlos del Real's older brother Greg secured an ATF dealer's license.
The store - whose address is now in District Heights after an annexation three years ago - occupies a 1930 Craftsman-style house on a strip of Marlboro Pike, between the Loose Ends Hair Studio and the Black Ribeye drive-through. Across the street is a Dunkin' Donuts and a check-cashing service. Down the block is a liquor store and a police substation.
Stretched across one end of the front porch at Realco is a "Team Glock" banner, a marketing nod to the angular-shaped handgun. Bars line the windows. Customers enter in the back next to a sign announcing the "Realco Outdoor World & Gun Hospital."
Inside is a small paneled showroom lined with glass display cases and space for only a handful of customers. Rifle bags, gun safes, animal trophies and assorted gun gear fill the shop. Tacked behind the counter is a small yellow notice: "We will refuse the sale of ammo and guns to suspected straw purchasers."
Researchers in law enforcement, academia and the media first began to examine gun tracing data for clues to potential illegal sales in the late 1990s. (The efforts so angered gun supporters that they successfully lobbied Congress to impose a blackout on the once-public data in 2003.) In 1999, The Post identified Realco as the source of 493 guns used in crimes from 1996 to 1998, based on data from the ATF. That was twice the number of any other dealer in the region, and later researchers would rank Realco in the top 10 in the nation for crime-gun traces.
At the time, Greg and Carlos del Real disputed the numbers. They said they operated in a high-crime area but obeyed all laws.
"We step all over these people's constitutional rights to prevent these straw purchases," Greg del Real said.
Months later, Maryland State Police officials told The Post they were "taking an aggressive look" at Realco and potential straw purchases. Nothing came of the investigation, records show.
Greg del Real followed news of the state probe with a letter to The Post, disputing that "our store is in any way responsible for the flow of 'crime guns.'â??"
Guns, he wrote, are traced for many reasons that might not include "criminal use," including stolen guns and guns used in self-defense.
"We suspect that those reasons for traces, coupled with our high volume of sales, may account for the 'higher than average' number of gun traces attributed to our store," he wrote.
"The hundreds of sales that we have refused to make over the years," he also noted, "are not reflected in any statistical report."
Realco was back in the news in August 2007 when D.C. police issued a report that identified the leading sources of crime guns seized in D.C. in 2006 - Realco was No. 1 with 76, three times the number of the next-most-frequent dealer.
That month, prosecutor Ivey joined Jesse L. Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition and others outside Realco in a "protest against illegal guns." Inside the shop, Maryland State Police pored over Realco's paperwork. Investigators found little of concern.
"The brothers Del Real were cooperative during the inspection," they wrote.
Crime guns stack up
The gun industry often says that traces reflect little more than the number of guns a merchant has sold. But Maryland dealers that have sold almost as many or more guns than Realco have had their guns seized at much lower rates, records show.
Realco is listed in the Maryland database as selling 19,000 guns since 1984. Of every 1,000 sold, analysis shows, police later recovered 131.
About five miles away from Realco, near Andrews Air Force Base, is Maryland Small Arms Range Inc. The longtime dealer has sold about 15,000 guns over the past 25 years. For every 1,000 it sold, police later recovered 41.
Jack Donald, a longtime salesman at the shop, said police officers often use the range on site, potentially affecting who shops there.
"It may be some kind of a deterrent," Donald said.
Atlantic Guns, a long-established dealer in Silver Spring, has sold more than 18,000 guns in the past 25 years. For every 1,000 sold, police have recovered 28.
And in Rockville, a second Atlantic Guns location has sold more than 21,000 firearms since 1984 - the most listed in state records. Out of every 1,000 guns sold, police recovered eight.
One of the main ATF indicators of trafficking is how quickly guns are seized after they are sold, known as "time to crime." The faster guns are recovered, the ATF has found, the more likely they were bought by someone with criminal intent, sometimes through straw purchases. Anything less than three years is considered a potential red flag.
In general, Realco guns have been recovered more quickly than guns sold by other Maryland dealers. In Prince George's and the District, 55 percent of the recovered Realco guns were logged by police within three years, compared with 40 percent for the guns recovered from other Maryland dealers.
A Smith & Wesson .40-caliber handgun sold in March 2006 was recovered by Prince George's police 13 months later not far from a body, surrounded by shell casings, on a Landover street. A 26-year-old man was shot and killed after finding two men breaking into his car. The shooter told police that he asked a 21-year-old woman to purchase the handgun for him because he was 20 at the time and "not of legal age to purchase one himself," police said.
In a May 2006 straw purchase, a man bought a handgun at Realco for a felon friend who wanted to shoot abortion doctors. The plot was foiled after the felon's family called authorities weeks later.
In another straw scheme that ended later that year, a 22-year-old District man on probation for a handgun violation had his 47-year-old girlfriend, an office manager at a law firm who had a clean record, buy handguns for him on four shopping trips to Realco, prosecutors said. The scheme unraveled after police recovered one of the guns in the District.
The ATF trace revealed that the woman had bought it at Realco two months before. After talking with an ATF agent, she filed reports that one of the guns was stolen, but she eventually said she gave it to her boyfriend.
The man "went to Realco Guns with her on each occasion," she told the ATF, according to a document filed in court.
The straw purchase
When Erik Dixon first shot at a man, he had in his grip a relatively new Ruger .40-caliber handgun from Realco.
Dixon, then 21, had a string of arrests, was on federal probation, had abused drugs and complained of hearing voices in his head.
Standing outside his mother's home in Landover the night of May 3, 2003, he accused a man, an acquaintance, of attacking him. Dixon ordered the man to the ground, took $200 from him and pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the asphalt, and lead fragments ricocheted into the victim's face and shoulder.
As Dixon put the gun to the back of the man's head, a police car turned onto the street. Dixon fled.
When police arrested Dixon two days later, the gun fell from his waistband. Realco had sold the gun about eight months before, records show, to a man who had lived in the area.
Charged with attempted murder, Dixon claimed he was insane. The courts sent him to prison on a lesser charge of felony assault.
Once out, he met Cathy R. Anderson, 31, and soon asked that she buy a gun for him. In January 2007, the pair visited Realco, where she made a down payment on a Glock .45, signing a form saying she was buying the gun for herself. Dixon was in the store with her, she later told police.
She told investigators she didn't know of his criminal past. She said she never touched the gun after she picked it up on a return trip to Realco.
"I took it back to Erik's truck and gave it to him," she told police.
Two months later, Anderson called Maryland State Police, nervous about what she had done. That day, April 5, they opened a straw-purchase investigation to track down Dixon and the gun. Nine days later, he murdered his sister's boyfriend.
He was arrested nine days after that in Virginia. Anderson cooperated with prosecutors, who chose not to charge her. Dixon is serving a 60-year sentence.
In phone messages, Anderson declined to be interviewed, saying Dixon is no longer in her life.
"That was then; this is now," she said. ". . . I'm sorry for what happened."
story by David S. Fallis Washington Post Staff
THOMAS should 'man up' and RESIGN!
Thomas's credibility at issue again
The phone call Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife placed to Anita Hill earlier this month seeking an apology for Hill’s allegation 19 years ago that Thomas sexually harassed her may go down as a textbook lesson in unintended consequences.
With a single voice mail message, Virginia Thomas managed to rekindle interest in a story many Americans no longer remember or never heard about — and set in motion a series of events that could seriously undermine her husband’s credibility and damage his long effort to distance himself from his controversial confirmation to the court.
After years of refusing interviews, Lillian McEwen, a former girlfriend of Thomas’s, agreed to talk to The Washington Post and appeared to corroborate Hill’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Thomas's nomination that he had a keen interest in pornography and sometimes made sexually-suggestive comments to women in the workplace — allegations that Thomas has always denied.
She reiterated that point in an interview with Rebecca Cooper, reporter for Washington's ABC affiliate, WJLA-TV.
“He was obsessed with pornography,” McEwen told ABC7/WJLA-TV. “It was something he talked about quite frequently.”
McEwen also confirmed reports that Thomas asked a colleague about her bra size and that he was a regular at a Dupont Circle shop that offered pornographic films.
“The owner of the store stocked Clarence’s preferences behind the counter,” McEwen said.
McEwen said that Virginia Thomas may not have had all the facts about her husband when she approached Hill last week seeking an apology.
“Clarence should know that [Hill] doesn’t owe him an apology, but it’s not something he would have necessarily communicated to his wife,” McEwen said. “I would tell her to have a conversation with her husband and get the truth out of him, but the chances of that happening are not great.”
A Supreme Court spokeswoman said Justice Thomas had no comment on McEwen’s account.
McEwen, who has worked as a prosecutor, a defense attorney and an administrative law judge for the Securities and Exchange Commission, maintains she had a romantic relationship with Thomas from 1981 to 1986. She said she did not speak out in 1991 in part because she was still friendly with Thomas, but also because she suspected neither Hill nor Thomas was being entirely honest.
“I felt that neither was telling the truth because I had always assumed that Clarence had had a sexual relationship with her,” McEwen said. She conceded, however, that she had no proof of such a relationship.
McEwen said she was persuaded to break her silence this week in part because she has written a book about her life and is looking for a publisher. She insisted she harbored no ill-will towards Thomas, but simply sees no reason to keep quiet at this point.
“The reason I am talking now is because I have retired, I have reflected on my life since I have retired, I have written a book about my life which happens to include him in it. The book may never have been published,” she said. “Why would I let other people write about me?”
A spokesman for Brandeis University, where Hill currently serves as a professor, said she is declining all interviews.
But for many of those who believed Hill’s testimony that she was sexually harassed by Thomas when they worked together and that he often talked about pornography, McEwen’s description of Thomas was further vindication of the evidence they said at the time supported Hill and should have kept Thomas from the court.
“In my view, this closes the case in a way that’s very bad for him,” said David Brock, author of “The Real Anita Hill,” a book attacking Hill and supporting Thomas that he later renounced and said was part of a deliberate attempt by conservatives to smear Hill. “For years, I believed that Thomas perjured himself in his Senate testimony. As I read this today, I believe that even more strongly.”
“In the construction of the defense of Thomas, [McEwen] had a key role,” said Brock, who now heads the liberal press watchdog group Media Matters. “I was told she was romantically involved with Thomas during the time Anita Hill worked with him. She was continually held out to me as proof he could not have been pressuring Hill to date him.”
“While the hearings were going on, I was being placed under a great deal of pressure by not just the people that I knew but also reporters,” McEwen said Friday. “I had literally forgotten that Clarence had stacks of porn magazines everywhere and that he had this obsession…It was several years since I’d been a in relationship with him and I was bored with it. ... I was indifferent.”
Joel Paul, a University of California law professor who testified on Hill’s behalf at the 1991 Senate hearings, said he believes McEwen’s story and those of other women who knew Thomas could have killed Thomas’s nomination if they had been more widely known. The Senate ultimately confirmed him in a 52-48 vote.
“Thomas was confirmed by the smallest margin in history,” noted Paul. “It seems logical to conclude that if two or three more women came along to corroborate the story, it would have tended to shift opinion in favor of Anita Hill’s account.”
One of Hill’s lawyers at the time, Susan Deller Ross of Georgetown University, blamed Vice President Joe Biden — then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — for refusing to allow testimony by women like McEwen, who said they knew Thomas socially and had experiences that tended to support Hill’s story.
“If all the women who were kept from testifying were allowed to testify, it would have made a difference. If everyone had heard all the accounts, it would have begun to ring very differently,” Ross said. “But Biden made the decision to limit it to people who knew Thomas in the employment sphere.”
McEwen, who once worked for Biden on Capitol Hill, said the senator was well aware that she had been romantically involved with Thomas. She also said Biden was not as tough on Thomas as he could have been.
“I made sure that the senator knew about the relationship that I had with Clarence and that he also knew that Clarence was a frequent visitor to our office in the Russell Building,” McEwen told ABC7/WJLA-TV. “Clarence is a very charming person. I always thought that Sen. Biden was charmed by Clarence and, as a result of that, did not pursue matters that could have been pursued.”
A spokeswoman for Biden said he had no comment on McEwen’s story.
Radio host Armstrong Williams, a longtime defender of Thomas, said McEwen and Thomas were “very good friends.” Williams said he likes McEwen and would not attempt to dispute her story, even though he’d seen no indication that Thomas had a penchant for pornography or making odd sexual comments. “There was nothing in his behavior that would ever make me believe that,” the radio host said.
“It saddens me to see these things resurrected again, but it was resurrected by [Thomas’s] wife,” Williams noted. “Obviously, sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.”
Thomas’s televised confirmation hearings, at which he complained of being a victim of “a high-tech lynching” riveted the country in the fall of 1991. In response to Hill’s testimony, he told the committee:
“If I used that kind of grotesque language with one person, it would seem to me that there would be traces of it throughout the employees who worked closely with me, or the other individuals who heard bits and pieces of it on various levels.”
In the phone message that Virginia Thomas left Hill on Oct. 9th, she asked Hill “to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”
Ross said she was baffled by Virginia Thomas’s decision to reignite the long-dormant fight. “I can’t understand why she would do such a thing. It can only hurt her husband,” Ross said.
Williams also seemed surprised at what has happened in the past two weeks. “Nineteen years later, [McEwen] felt the need to tell this story just as his wife felt the need…to call Anita Hill,” said Williams. “These are some strange events.”
He said the renewed debate would be painful for Thomas, but that ultimately the recent disclosures won’t have much impact.
“Some people who have supported him in the past may have questions, but people will get to pick their sides and stake out their positions and nothing’s going to get him to leave. He’s staying on the Supreme Court and he’ll be there I think until they drag him off for old age,” Williams said.
by POLITICO
The phone call Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife placed to Anita Hill earlier this month seeking an apology for Hill’s allegation 19 years ago that Thomas sexually harassed her may go down as a textbook lesson in unintended consequences.
With a single voice mail message, Virginia Thomas managed to rekindle interest in a story many Americans no longer remember or never heard about — and set in motion a series of events that could seriously undermine her husband’s credibility and damage his long effort to distance himself from his controversial confirmation to the court.
After years of refusing interviews, Lillian McEwen, a former girlfriend of Thomas’s, agreed to talk to The Washington Post and appeared to corroborate Hill’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Thomas's nomination that he had a keen interest in pornography and sometimes made sexually-suggestive comments to women in the workplace — allegations that Thomas has always denied.
She reiterated that point in an interview with Rebecca Cooper, reporter for Washington's ABC affiliate, WJLA-TV.
“He was obsessed with pornography,” McEwen told ABC7/WJLA-TV. “It was something he talked about quite frequently.”
McEwen also confirmed reports that Thomas asked a colleague about her bra size and that he was a regular at a Dupont Circle shop that offered pornographic films.
“The owner of the store stocked Clarence’s preferences behind the counter,” McEwen said.
McEwen said that Virginia Thomas may not have had all the facts about her husband when she approached Hill last week seeking an apology.
“Clarence should know that [Hill] doesn’t owe him an apology, but it’s not something he would have necessarily communicated to his wife,” McEwen said. “I would tell her to have a conversation with her husband and get the truth out of him, but the chances of that happening are not great.”
A Supreme Court spokeswoman said Justice Thomas had no comment on McEwen’s account.
McEwen, who has worked as a prosecutor, a defense attorney and an administrative law judge for the Securities and Exchange Commission, maintains she had a romantic relationship with Thomas from 1981 to 1986. She said she did not speak out in 1991 in part because she was still friendly with Thomas, but also because she suspected neither Hill nor Thomas was being entirely honest.
“I felt that neither was telling the truth because I had always assumed that Clarence had had a sexual relationship with her,” McEwen said. She conceded, however, that she had no proof of such a relationship.
McEwen said she was persuaded to break her silence this week in part because she has written a book about her life and is looking for a publisher. She insisted she harbored no ill-will towards Thomas, but simply sees no reason to keep quiet at this point.
“The reason I am talking now is because I have retired, I have reflected on my life since I have retired, I have written a book about my life which happens to include him in it. The book may never have been published,” she said. “Why would I let other people write about me?”
A spokesman for Brandeis University, where Hill currently serves as a professor, said she is declining all interviews.
But for many of those who believed Hill’s testimony that she was sexually harassed by Thomas when they worked together and that he often talked about pornography, McEwen’s description of Thomas was further vindication of the evidence they said at the time supported Hill and should have kept Thomas from the court.
“In my view, this closes the case in a way that’s very bad for him,” said David Brock, author of “The Real Anita Hill,” a book attacking Hill and supporting Thomas that he later renounced and said was part of a deliberate attempt by conservatives to smear Hill. “For years, I believed that Thomas perjured himself in his Senate testimony. As I read this today, I believe that even more strongly.”
“In the construction of the defense of Thomas, [McEwen] had a key role,” said Brock, who now heads the liberal press watchdog group Media Matters. “I was told she was romantically involved with Thomas during the time Anita Hill worked with him. She was continually held out to me as proof he could not have been pressuring Hill to date him.”
“While the hearings were going on, I was being placed under a great deal of pressure by not just the people that I knew but also reporters,” McEwen said Friday. “I had literally forgotten that Clarence had stacks of porn magazines everywhere and that he had this obsession…It was several years since I’d been a in relationship with him and I was bored with it. ... I was indifferent.”
Joel Paul, a University of California law professor who testified on Hill’s behalf at the 1991 Senate hearings, said he believes McEwen’s story and those of other women who knew Thomas could have killed Thomas’s nomination if they had been more widely known. The Senate ultimately confirmed him in a 52-48 vote.
“Thomas was confirmed by the smallest margin in history,” noted Paul. “It seems logical to conclude that if two or three more women came along to corroborate the story, it would have tended to shift opinion in favor of Anita Hill’s account.”
One of Hill’s lawyers at the time, Susan Deller Ross of Georgetown University, blamed Vice President Joe Biden — then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — for refusing to allow testimony by women like McEwen, who said they knew Thomas socially and had experiences that tended to support Hill’s story.
“If all the women who were kept from testifying were allowed to testify, it would have made a difference. If everyone had heard all the accounts, it would have begun to ring very differently,” Ross said. “But Biden made the decision to limit it to people who knew Thomas in the employment sphere.”
McEwen, who once worked for Biden on Capitol Hill, said the senator was well aware that she had been romantically involved with Thomas. She also said Biden was not as tough on Thomas as he could have been.
“I made sure that the senator knew about the relationship that I had with Clarence and that he also knew that Clarence was a frequent visitor to our office in the Russell Building,” McEwen told ABC7/WJLA-TV. “Clarence is a very charming person. I always thought that Sen. Biden was charmed by Clarence and, as a result of that, did not pursue matters that could have been pursued.”
A spokeswoman for Biden said he had no comment on McEwen’s story.
Radio host Armstrong Williams, a longtime defender of Thomas, said McEwen and Thomas were “very good friends.” Williams said he likes McEwen and would not attempt to dispute her story, even though he’d seen no indication that Thomas had a penchant for pornography or making odd sexual comments. “There was nothing in his behavior that would ever make me believe that,” the radio host said.
“It saddens me to see these things resurrected again, but it was resurrected by [Thomas’s] wife,” Williams noted. “Obviously, sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.”
Thomas’s televised confirmation hearings, at which he complained of being a victim of “a high-tech lynching” riveted the country in the fall of 1991. In response to Hill’s testimony, he told the committee:
“If I used that kind of grotesque language with one person, it would seem to me that there would be traces of it throughout the employees who worked closely with me, or the other individuals who heard bits and pieces of it on various levels.”
In the phone message that Virginia Thomas left Hill on Oct. 9th, she asked Hill “to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”
Ross said she was baffled by Virginia Thomas’s decision to reignite the long-dormant fight. “I can’t understand why she would do such a thing. It can only hurt her husband,” Ross said.
Williams also seemed surprised at what has happened in the past two weeks. “Nineteen years later, [McEwen] felt the need to tell this story just as his wife felt the need…to call Anita Hill,” said Williams. “These are some strange events.”
He said the renewed debate would be painful for Thomas, but that ultimately the recent disclosures won’t have much impact.
“Some people who have supported him in the past may have questions, but people will get to pick their sides and stake out their positions and nothing’s going to get him to leave. He’s staying on the Supreme Court and he’ll be there I think until they drag him off for old age,” Williams said.
by POLITICO
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)