Year: 2005

Don’t know if this story is getting much play outside the advertising community, but it should, for comic relief if nothing else. The huge firm Ogilvy & Mather is defending itself against charges it overbilled the Clinton Administration’s White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).

According to Ad Age online, an O&M exec sought in late 1999 to hide problems with the company’s financials by shifting billing time from other accounts to the government.

Testifying in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the FBI’s John Sardone presented a set of timesheets for Rosalinde Rago, Ogilvy’s former director of research and planning who died last year. He told the jury that the handwriting on written orders on the timesheets telling Ms. Rago to “Put Huggies and Wings time on ONDCP” matched handwriting samples provided to prosecutors by Ms. Seifert.

For all the clients who ever suspected they were being overcharged, this case provides plenty to worry about. As for O&M, it’s going to take a lot of Huggies and Wings to soak up all the hot water they’re in.

Interesting story in the in the St. Petersburg Times. Evidently the dying act of the chair of Amway, Jay Van Andel, was to give the largest contribution by an individual to a state party in Florida. And guess which party it was?

” Records show that starting July 27, he made 10 $100,000 donations to the Florida Republican Party. The money began flowing in at a time when many observers saw Florida as a tossup state that could decide whether President Bush or John Kerry won the election.

The money helped pay for a massive get-out-the-vote effort in a state Bush needed to win.

Van Andel had Parkinson’s disease and nearly missed seeing his generosity to the Florida GOP pay off. He died just over a month after President Bush won Florida and re-election – and a week after the Florida GOP deposited his 10th $100,000 check. He was 80.”

Oh well, what’s a million these days? That’s no doubt why Van Andel and the family of his business partner, Richard DeVos, “also each gave $2-million to Progress for America, an independent group that paid for TV ads aimed at re-electing Bush.”

So let’s see, that’s $1 million, then another $2 million each, so that’s $5 million, plus another $515,000 from the DeVos family to the state GOP…Yep, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

Amazing there are still people (like my mother) out there who fall for the staged performances of the Bush crowd.

A story in the St. Petersburg Times exposes the process for how “ordinary folks” are recruited for presidential appearances. Bush speaks in Tampa, across the bay from St. Pete, Friday.

Let’s see, who would definitely support putting Social Security money in the stock market? How about securities traders?

” Susan Hartman, a Raymond James financial planning consultant, who belongs to the Securities Industry Association, sent out the e-mail searching for volunteers Monday.”

There was no question about what the President wanted to hear.

“Recipients of the e-mail sent out to employees at Raymond James were asked to explain how they wanted Social Security changed – not if they wanted it changed.”

Yes, just folks, like you and me and Grandma.

“Are they ordinary American citizens? Yes and no,” said Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. The White House “will look through the pool for people who say the magic words they want to hear.”

The White House does not deny this.

“When the president travels outside Washington to participate in a conversation on a particular subject, we would look at individuals who have a vested interest in a particular subject or have an important story to tell,” said Taylor Gross, a White House spokesman.

Why should they deny it? It’s working for them great.

Guardian UK:

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 66 percent of people who watched his State of the Union speech said his Social Security proposals will move the country in the right direction. That’s up from 51 percent of Americans surveyed before the speech. Three in four said Bush made a “convincing case” that the government needs to take action in the next couple of years to change the system.

The telephone survey of 485 speech watchers, conducted Wednesday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Hurry, time’s running out! Go here now to be ready to enjoy the State of the Union address the only way you can stand to – heavily inebriated and distracted.

Glad to see this highlighted over at AmericaBlog. If you really hate Bill O’Reilly there is actually something you can do: Watch “The Countdown” with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, which comes on at the same time as “The Factor.” I won’t besmirch Keith’s journalistic integrity by calling him a “liberal” but as a regular viewer of his show I can tell you that he comes closest to Jon Stewart in calling the Bushies on the bushit.

From Keith’s blog, Bloggermann:

…The Three-Card Monte Players at Dr. James Dobson’s “Focus On The Family” have reopened the can of worms that is SpongeBobGate, and have focused not on the family but on me, and in so doing embarrassed themselves and undermined the validity of their own concerns.

Dobson, you will recall, joined the singularly inoffensive animated character “SpongeBob SquarePants” to his conspiracy theories of a “pro-homosexual” agenda, in order to get headlines. When he got those headlines, he promptly complained about getting them. Dobson, like many other exploiters of Amoral Values, ran immediately to the easiest way out of a stupid fix of his own creation: he blamed the big old ugly media.

His website asked readers to send emails of protest to me and four other reporters who had covered this foofery – it even provided them with an email-generator with which to do so. But because I responded to nearly all of those missives with something other than “I’m sorry, please don’t send me to hell,” Dobson has determined I need more exposure.

So Keith gets what he deems a rather underwhelming amount of emails from the wingnuts – a very small amount of mail compared to the response after he dared to report on questions about the validity of the vote count in Ohio in November.

[…]

Thank God for Ted Turner, the Mouth of the South. Maybe he should be chairman of the DNC! From North County News/AP:

Cable news pioneer Ted Turner used an appearance before a group of television executives to criticize the Fox network as a “propaganda voice” of the Bush administration and to compare Fox News Channel’s popularity to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany before World War II.

Turner, 66, in a speech Tuesday before about 1,000 people at the National Association of Television Programming Executives targeted “gigantic companies whose agenda goes beyond broadcasting” for timidity in challenging the Bush White House.

“There’s one network, Fox, that’s a propaganda voice for them,” Turner said. “It’s certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy when the news is ‘dumbed-down.”‘

Fox News in New York issued a statement Tuesday saying, “Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network and now his mind — we wish him well.”

Turner stepped down as vice chairman of AOL Time Warner in May 2003.

During a wide-ranging hour-long question-and-answer session moderated by former CNN anchorman Bernard Shaw, Turner called it “not necessarily a bad thing” that Fox ratings top CNN and other cable news networks.

“Adolf Hitler was more popular in Germany in the early 30s than … people that were running against him,” Turner said in remarks videotaped by conference administrators. “So, just because you’re bigger doesn’t mean you’re right.”

Convention spokeswoman Michelle Mikoljak said the association had no comment about Turner’s comments and that Turner was no longer in Las Vegas at the conference that continued Wednesday at the Mandalay Bay Event Center.

Turner heads an Atlanta-based philanthropic and business empire that includes restaurants serving buffalo steaks and other American dishes.

He wrote an article published last summer in the Washington Monthly magazine titled “My Beef With Big Media” in which he focused on what he called a loss of quality, localism and democratic debate.