Category: News & Comment

As you may have read below, we learned today that Tom Noe, the Republican moneyman at the center of the missing-millions scandal in Ohio, has put his luxurious Key West home on the market for $4.6 million.

Now comes word that a top advisor to two Ohio Republican governors has admitted he participated in the money laundering scheme Noe orchestrated in order to funnel illegal contributions to President Bush and other Republican candidates last year.

H. Douglas Talbott, a former top aide to two Ohio governors, told federal authorities that Republican coin dealer Tom Noe persuaded him to contribute $2,000 to President Bush’s re- election campaign – then reim bursed him for the donation, The Plain Dealer has learned.

Talbott appeared Wednesday before a federal grand jury in Toledo that is investigating whether Noe illegally reimbursed as many as two dozen contributors to a Bush fund- raiser in October 2003. The grand jury is looking into whether Noe made the reimbursements to circumvent campaign finance laws, which limit individual contributions to $2,000.

His appearance before the grand jury marked the first time a former top aide to Gov. Bob Taft and former Gov. George Voinovich has been linked to the federal investigation of possible laundering of Bush campaign money.

Repeated attempts to reach Talbott were unsuccessful.

(Thanks Julie!)

Late today after the East Coast media had gone home for the evening, the Pentagon released a report in which it admitted multiple incidents of U.S. interrogators abusing the Koran in order to incite Moslem detainees:

The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Koran and was later fired for “a pattern of unacceptable behavior.”

In other confirmed incidents, water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Korans to get wet; a guard’s urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Koran; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Koran.

The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening, are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba, that was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report — later retracted — that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee’s Koran down a toilet.

It’s going to be interesting to learn how “a guard’s urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Koran.”

Tom Noe, the Ohio Republican fundraiser who is under investigation for, er, misplacing over $10 million in state funds, is also making news in the Florida Keys. A friend who is knowledgable about goings-on down in Margaritaville writes:

Tom Noe’s name keeps popping up in the news in Florida for two reasons — he rented his house in the Keys to prominent Ohio politicians for less than market rate, and now he’s trying (secretly at first, but now he’s busted and it’s public) to sell the place quickly for $4.6 mill.

Speculation is, Noe will need the money for legal fees.

This just in: The bigger story right now is the rush of GOPers to return Noe’s contributions. Sounds like they’re tripping over each other to do it.

Scandal: An Ohio county commissioner, a state official and a company president answered questions in front of a federal grand jury on Wednesday in the political funding case against Tom Noe.

The grand jury is investigating whether Noe, a long-time GOP fund-raiser, funneled contributions to the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign by reimbursing donations from these three notables, among many others. It appears he may have laundered over $100,000.

Bush’s re-election team listed Noe as a “pioneer” for raising more than $100,000 in last year’s presidential campaign.

Federal prosecutors began the grand jury inquiry as state officials continue to investigate Noe’s handling of a $55.4 million coin investment scheme using money from the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation.

Last week, investigators said $10 million to $13 million in state money was missing.

The investigation focuses on Noe’s work at the fund-raiser that raised more than $1 million for Bush.

Turmoil: Meanwhile, in the State Senate,the Democrats are getting “testy” and the floor “erupted into a shouting match” with Republicans, who control both houses in the state government. The issue at hand was the state’s $51 billion spending plan.

The Dems were demanding that the Republicans justify the bill’s “tax cuts for the wealthy, defend local government cuts that disproportionately harm cities and answer a series of technical questions.”

The bill included significant changes to Ohio’s tax system. “Pushed by Gov. Bob Taft and crafted mainly by the Ohio Business Roundtable, it calls for replacing the state’s corporate franchise tax and tangible personal property taxes with a new tax on businesses’ gross receipts.”

(Thanks Julie!)

It was supposed to be a soft launch. Those of us who masterminded this site at the end of 2004 had planned to announce Pensito Review to the world around the first of June – meaning, now – after a phased-in deployment, during which we slowly but steadily built our readership.

What we hadn’t factored in, however, was the target-rich environment we would find ourselves in. It turns out that in the present historic moment – the dawning nadir of the Bush Era – there is an eager readership for a site that covers liberal politics and media. Because the perspective of the Left is so under-represented, we have experienced popularity far greater – and far sooner – than we could have imagined six months ago.

Not that it all came by accident. Our three-person editorial staff has a combined 60-plus years’ experience in marketing, editorial, public relations and web dev – and about 120-plus years as political junkies, to one degree or another.

When we posted the test version of the site to Blogger in January, I predicted the PR would be doing well to have to have around 200 daily readers within six months. Three months later, after we had moved to our permanent location at pensitoreview.com, we had already reached the hoped-for 200 daily readers (or “unique visitors” in Geekspeak). In May, our readership spiked and by month’s end, we’d had 34,903 unique visits, an average of 1,125 readers a day.

For this modest success, we are grateful. We decided to publish Pensito Review because, like you, we were hungry for real news unfiltered. Turns out, we are Legion. Who knew?

So I guess we can call this a launch.

PS. We appreciate all the comments. But what I really love is that our first flame came from the Left.

In another sign of the end of civilization as we know it, Country Music Television has hired an ex office temp to be vice president of the “Dukes of Hazard” Institute. The salary — $100,000 for a one-year contract. The job — watch nightly reruns of the 1979-85 silly sitcom on CMT and write a blog about it.

Christopher Nelson was one of 2,000 people to apply for the job. The contract mentions no time off for vacation.

“For $100,000 he’d better watch that show every night,” said James Hitchcock, CMT’s vice president for marketing.

No sooner did the American Family Association call off its nine-year boycott of Walt Disney World (universally deemed a miserable failure) than it tuned its homophobic attention to that bastion of testosterone-tanked truck drivers, Ford Motor Co. According to a Detriot Free Press article, the Ford boycott is primarily in response to Ford’s advertisements in gay publications that offer to donate $1,000 to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for every Jaguar or Land Rover sold. (Supposedly, those vehicles are considered gayer than, say, the F150 pickup or Ford Expedition.)

But, while AFA Special Projects Director Randy Sharp said with its marketing ploy, “Ford is willing to do something they have refused to do for any other group,” AFA Chairman Donald Wildmon painted Ford with a broader brush:

“From redefining family to include homosexual marriage, to giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to support homosexual groups and their agenda, to forcing managers to attend diversity training on how to promote the acceptance of homosexuality… Ford leads the way.”

Sounds terrible, don’t it, but Ford is actually a leader is such diversity and philanthropic activities.

In 2004, Ford donated $77.9 million to a wide variety of groups last year. The majority — $39.6 million — went to education. A much smaller percentage went to community organizations for gays, Hispanics, blacks, Asians and other groups.

AFA e-mailed an announcement about the Ford boycott to 2.2 million supporters. So far, less than 55,000 people have signed a pledge supporting the boycott. That’s less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the total who received the announcement.

Looks like AFA is off to another great boycott start. If they do for Ford what they did for Disney, the automaker can expect sales to increase during the boycott.

City Business Journals are reporting today that the mega-bank is looking at its past and neither minimizing or denying it profited from slavery.

Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia recently commissioned Chantilly, Va.-based historical research firm The History Factory to investigate its predecessor institutions…The investigation revealed two institutions that later became part of Wachovia through acquisitions — the Georgia Railroad and Banking Co. and the Bank of Charleston — owned slaves.

Through specific transactional records, historians determined the Georgia Railroad and Banking Co. owned at least 162 slaves and the Bank of Charleston accepted at least 529 slaves as collateral on mortgaged properties or loans, and subsequently acquired an undetermined number of slaves when customers defaulted on their loans.

Extensive Northeast banking interests eventually absorbed into Wachovia were also fat with slave profits, it was revealed.

According to the investigation, these banks outside the traditional South had founders, directors, or account holders who owned slaves and/or profited directly from slavery; invested in or transacted business with companies or individuals that owned slaves; invested in the bonds of slave states and municipalities; or invested in U.S. government bonds during years when the United States permitted and profited from slave labor directly through taxation…

Bank of North America (Philadelphia), The Philadelphia Bank (later Philadelphia National Bank), Girard National Bank (Philadelphia), Farmers’ & Mechanics’ Bank of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Company for Insurances on Lives and the Granting of Annuities (Philadelphia), Bank of Baltimore, Savings Bank of Baltimore, State Bank of Elizabeth (New Jersey), and State Bank of Newark (New Jersey).

Wachovia, whether it set out to or not, is following the Truth and Reconciliation process pioneered by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa. After apartheid, whites feared blacks would rise up and kill them in revenge. That Israel/Palestine style conflict resolution didn’t happen, and Tutu won a Nobel prize as a result.

The crucial part of the process is acknowledging the crime or wrong-doing and its hurtful effects, then sincerely apologizing. Too often in this country, we deal with slavery by saying, “Oh that was a long time ago, and I didn’t personally own slaves.” That attitude is as helpful as denying slavery took place.

We also like to pretend that racism is confined to one geographic area, that the problem is in the South. We do this by refusing to see racism when it confronts us elsewhere. When a cross is burned in Durham, as three were recently, we call it a hate crime. When a cross is burned in Chicago, as it was last week, we call it a prank. When black people are killed by police in L.A., we say it’s a police brutality issue. When the same thing happens in Houston, we say it’s southern racism.

This allows us to perpetuate the myth that racism is a problem for other people, not for ourselves, and that it happens in some places, but not here. This blind eye does a disservice not only to those struggling to rise above prejudice everywhere, but particularly to the objects of racism. It’s more denial that they have a right to feel aggrieved.

Tutu says that until we, as a country, acknowledge our slave-holding past and the benefits it gave some of us while taking a huge price from others, we will continue to be mired in our race problems, endlessly trudging through the same old ground. Wachovia seems to get it:

“On behalf of Wachovia Corp., I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent,” said Ken Thompson, Wachovia chairman and CEO. “We are deeply saddened by these findings.”

Wachovia said it plans to partner with community organizations that are experts in furthering awareness and education of African-American history. Yesterday, Wachovia was named the principal sponsor of the National Center for Black Philanthropy (NCFBP) and national co-chair for its Fifth National Conference on Black Philanthropy.

“We know that we cannot change the past, and we can’t make up for the wrongs of slavery,” Thompson said. “But we can learn from our past, and begin a stronger dialogue about slavery and the experience of African-Americans in our country…”

Well said, Wachovia, and well done.