Great article on Rove media manipulation

[Melissa G]

The Man Who Would Destroy PBS
Does Republican crusade spell bedtime for Buster?
by DOUG IRELAND


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That’s hardly surprising given Lewis’ record of vindictiveness against his political opponents. “Lewis has a troubling, angry side, and an intimidating electoral style that can best be described as embodying pre-Watergate ethics,” says a prominent Democratic activist and businessman in Lewis’ district who, fearing reprisals from Lewis, requested anonymity. “The last time we put up a serious candidate against Lewis, he really went after the guy, put muckraking ‘political consultants’ on him paid out of campaign funds, went after our candidate’s clients and tried to ruin him, pressured one of our guy’s clients into suing him — Lewis is a take-no-prisoners kind of fellow.”

Lewis is a longtime congressional water carrier for the military-industrial complex, and for years has raked in big campaign bucks from its corporate behemoths like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, United Technologies, General Dynamics and General Atomics. Lewis’ congressional district is chock-full of military bases — including the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Training Command, Edwards Air Force Base and the China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center.

Another huge facility in Lewis’ district is the million-acre Army National Training Center for desert warfare. A middle school, built to serve the center’s off-base military families, bears Lewis’ name, and is a charter school funded with what are called “special-impact funds,” which Lewis procured. The school was the centerpiece in another unsavory political scandal involving Lewis. A few years ago, a school-board member in the Silver Valley United School District, which has jurisdiction over the middle school, discovered some $15 million in cost overruns at the Lewis school, as the Desert Dispatch and the San Bernardino Sun reported at the time. A General Accounting Office investigation found dozens of irregularities, and a draft report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s Office sharply criticized the Lewis school’s management. Lewis’ reaction to all this? He had his cronies initiate a successful recall election against the obstreperous school-board member who’d spotlighted the fraud, twisted arms to destroy the man’s business, and, as the then-chairman of the appropriations subcommittee overseeing Defense appropriations, put pressure on the Pentagon to scrub its scandal-revealing draft report, which no longer officially exists (although a copy is in the possession of local Democrats). Lewis is not a politician many have the guts to cross swords with.



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And that’s not all. On the same day as the House vote on its budget, the board of directors of CPB — under the thumb of its hard-line Republican chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson — voted to name as CPB’s new president and CEO a partisan political operative: Patricia deStacy Harrison, a co-chair of the Republican National Committee for four years (1997–2001) and a major fund-raiser for George Bush, who rewarded her with a job in the State Department. She co-chaired Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole’s finance committee in 1996, when it accepted $80,000 in contributions from employees of Empire Sanitary Landfill, a waste-management company later indicted for illegally funneling contributions to numerous federal campaigns and ordered to pay an $8 million fine, the largest Federal Election Commission fine in history. Harrison is a former lobbyist and PR woman with no public-broadcasting experience, and was selected by passing over four more-qualified finalists for the top CPB job. “Patricia Harrison’s selection as president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is an outrage — her complete lack of experience and close ties to the leadership of the Republican Party represent a new low in public-broadcasting history,” says Josh Silver, executive director of the media-reform group Free Press, which has been central in fighting the GOP’s effort to bring public broadcasting to heel.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/32/news-ireland.php

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Excellent article!!! Thanks for posting.

Consider posting it in the "Editorials and other articles" Forum as well.