Story ties Abramoff to Norquist scandal expanding toward WH
http://projectusa.org/ezine/2005/05-24- ... quist.html
New York Times barking up right tree, a Greece Palm
Story ties Abramoff to Norquist -- scandal expanding toward White House?
By CRAIG NELSEN
ProjectUSA director
In a very positive step in the right direction, the New York Times ran a front page story yesterday ("Link to Lobbyist Brings Scrutiny to G.O.P. Figure," May 23, 2005) tying indicted lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, to waiting-to-be-indicted lobbyist, Grover Norquist.
They are quite the pair of influence peddlers. Norquist is the man people are thinking about when they say they feel like they need to shower after a visit to Washington. A long-time enemy of immigration moderates, he and his stable of lesser stars have lobbied for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, American Businesses for Legal Immigration, and for the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands.
On May 02, 2004, Norquist wrote a dishonest article for FoxNews.com attacking Matt Hayes of Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement after FoxNews.com ran a piece by Matt detailing the negative impact on working Americans of the immigration policies pushed by Rep. Chris Cannon of Utah.
By the sheerest of coincidences, in the last election cycle, Chris Cannon's campaign paid Janus Merritt Strategies, the firm Grover Norquist started with David Safavian, Cannon's chief of staff in 2001, $5,960 for "Campaign Consulting & Fundraising Exp." Also during the 2004 cycle, Cannon's campaign paid $5,614 for fundraising expenses to Williams Mullen, the influence-peddling company that was in the process of buying Norquist's influence-peddling company.
Matt had a crushing response to Norquist ready to submit (crushing responses to immigration extremists, forced as they are to rely on dishonesty in order to be convincing, beiing very easy to write), when he got word that word had come from higher up not to print any more articles by Matt having to do with Chris Cannon.
As it turns out, News Corp, the foreign company that owns Fox News, has a political action committee, too. Just like Viacom! News Corp's vehicle for pooling its employees' political views is called News America Holdings.
In the 2004 cycle, News America Holdings gave $5,000 to Cannon for Congress. Undoubtedly, the money this foreign multinational gave to this American legislator was given out of love for democracy, and a desire to see higher quality political advertising, and there was no relation between that and between the corporation using its power to allow Norquist to publish lies (which Cannon, of course, distributed throughout the district, maybe using the money News America Holdings had given him), and then disallow a rebuttal. It was all a matter of pure coincidence, and not the sickening perversion of our democracy that it seems.