Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought him back, the saying goes. Details in a recent article at OpenSecrets.org, Shape-Shifting by Liberal Dark Money Groups Seems Meant to Confuse by Robert Maguire and Viveca Nova peeked my curiosity.

Maguire and Nova described an all-too-familiar scenario, one that my co-author Aaron Klein and I have covered in an endless string of articles and in our three books (a fourth is due out near the end of August) that also detail how progressive groups have a long history of inventing and re-inventing themselves and their groups’ activities.

At issue this time are “various groups seemed to have many of the same addresses and board members in common,” culminating with a constantly re-invented entity, Patriot Majority USA. In a string of name and function changes, the organization which launched prior to 2009 as Patriot Majority for a Stronger America (originally known as Midwest Alliance for a Better Government), and which terminated sometime in 2009, reemerged that year as American Alliance for Economic Development and changed its name in 2010 to Patriot Majority USA. Meanwhile, organizational leadership did not change, which I will address below. Several millions of dollars made their way in 2010 to America Votes and VoteVets, which in turn handed off (i.e. money-laundered) those millions to another entity launched in 2006 (its archived site says December 2005) and operated by Patriot Majority USA, which also terminated in 2011. The latter pretty much ceased its political activities after the 2012 campaign.

If you are really confused by this, it’s okay. You are meant to be. Maguire and Nova aptly focused their article on the “shape-shifting” by these progressive groups.

One of the issues OpenSecrets.org noted is that the reporting status held by these organizations exempts them from revealing all board members and donors. That said, we move on to another common thread, a key board member for all incarnations of the organization: Craig Varoga.

Ever heard of him? Me neither. However, you will quickly recognize the names of the politicians with whom he has been affiliated — for nearly twenty-five years.

His Varoga and Associates bio reads (all emphasis mine):

Craig Varoga is president of Patriot Majority and one of America’s most successful political strategists. In 2010, Varoga ran the successful independent-expenditure campaign by Patriot Majority to re-elect Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid; Varoga was also chief strategist that year in the successful re-election of Maryland Governor and DGA Chair Martin O’Malley. In 2011, Varoga was chief strategist for Kentucky Family Values, an independent PAC that advocated for the re-election of Governor Steve Beshear; Varoga was also lead strategist and media consultant in 2011 for Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. A native of Pittsburgh, graduate of Princeton University and long-time resident of Texas, Varoga has worked on the Presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Wesley Clark, John Kerry and Tom Vilsack. A top consultant in the victorious gubernatorial campaigns of USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, Varoga began his political career in Louisiana and writes a monthly column (“Ask the Campaign Doctor”) for Campaigns & Elections magazine.

The Wikipedia adds the following facts. Varoga

. is a founder of Patriotic Majority.
. is a partner at Independent Strategies.
. is associated with TheTeaPartyisOver.org.
. managed Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack’s presidential campaign and served as national field director for General Wesley Clark’s presidential campaign.
. managed the Democratic National Committee’s “Texas Truth Squad” campaign during the 2000 Bush/Gore Presidential campaign, attacking the record of Texas Governor, George W. Bush.
. was communications director to Senator Harry Reid (currently Senate Majority Leader) during the 1990s (more on this below).

The Wikipedia also reports:

Public records show at least seven political organizations at the same address, involving either Craig Varoga or partner George Rakis, including (as revealed by donations in years given):

. The American Public Policy Committee (APPC) (2008 and 2010)
. Patriot Majority (2008 and 2010)
. Citizens for Progress (now Patriot Majority West) (2008 and 2010)
. Oklahoma Freedom Fund (2008)
. Mid Atlantic Leadership Fund (2010)
. Public Security Now (formerly Midwest Alliance for Better Government) (2008)
. Pioneer Majority (2008)
. Bluegrass Freedom Fund (2008)

The American Public Policy Committee, which developed anti-tea party ads, received all of its money in 2010 from Patriot Majority and from Citizens for Progress, which is also called Patriot Majority West.

In October 2010, Peter H. Stone of the Center for Public Integrity profiled Craig Varoga:

Veteran Democratic Party operative Craig Varoga has quietly emerged as a significant player in the universe of outside political groups that during election years pump tens of millions of dollars into ads and get–out-the-vote drives to help members in tough races.

Patriot Majority, a 527 that Varoga set up in 2005, works closely with — and gets about half its funding — from several prominent unions such as the AFL-CIO and the SEIU. “We get money from all the major unions,” Varoga, 53, told the Center, adding that his group also has close political ties with America Votes, a broad coalition of some 400 liberal groups and unions.

Late last year, Varoga says that he decided to expand the group’s fundraising and political muscle by establishing an allied PAC, Patriot Majority PAC. Varoga timed the launch to capitalize on upcoming Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC and an advisory ruling that the Federal Election Commission was poised to release in late 2009. Together these decisions have given the green light to PACs to raise and spend unlimited funds and to engage in direct advocacy ads which urge voters to support or oppose specific candidates.

Screeeeech! Isn’t Citizens United just the most eevilll piece of legislation evah? Except when it benefits the progressive campaign money-laundering scheme, that is.

Also during the 2010 campaign season, Stone reports:

Patriot Majority this year has been spending very liberally in Nevada to protect Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. By Election Day, Varoga expects that his two groups will have run around $8 million of ads to help Reid triumph over GOP challenger and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle.

Notice the common thread for Varoga’s career and longevity as a political operative? Harry “Dirty Harry” Reid.

In March 1989, Varoga was serving as Reid’s spokesman regarding a hypocritical laughable campaign funding matter. Judge for yourself.

Three Democratic senators say an imported-car dealers’ group that spent almost $1 million against them in recent elections is really a foreign agent, and they want the Justice Department to investigate.

Leaders of the car group deny they are working for foreigners. And one yesterday called two of the senators “hypocrites” who asked for money from them and took $8,000 when it was offered.

“I think it’s nothing but sour grapes,” said Tom Nemet, chairman of the Auto Dealers and Drivers Free Trade PAC, a political action committee that last year spent nearly $2.6 million on House and Senate elections.

Of that total, about 83 percent was spent to help Republican candidates, according to figures compiled by the Federal Election Commission.

Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, both of Nevada, Bob Graham of Florida, and David Boren of Oklahoma signed a letter to the Justice Department alleging that the PAC is a foreign agent working for Japanese automobile manufacturers.

Ready for the punchline? Democrats also received funds from the same PAC, including Reid who received $3,000.

Enter Reid spokesman Craig Varoga, who said that Reid had no plans to “give back any of the money, despite his suspicions that the PAC is funded by foreign interests and the contributions would thus be against the law.”

That pretty much sums it all up, don’t ya’ think?

Please explain to me why anyone — let alone a conservative — is surprised to learn that a community like Klamath Falls, Oregon, has fallen into the clutches of illegal immigrant drug runners.

We begin with Breitbart.com’s Brandon Darby, who appears shocked to learn that, according to his source, an investigation begun last October involving the Oregon Department of Justice, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Department of Homeland Security, the Klamath County Sheriff’s Office, the Klamath Falls Police Department, and Oregon State Police, resulted in 38 arrests, seizure of four pounds of methamphetamine, more than fifty firearms, and an “undetermined amount of cash.” Darby reports that, on May 16, the activities of “a Mexican cartel-linked narcotics operation” were “thwarted” by several early morning raids of “at least 23 homes and businesses.”

Progressive Oregon is a hotbed of sanctuary cities and Klamath Falls, although it is not located directly on any of the state’s interstate highways, does generally lie between such major sanctuary cities as Sacramento, California (a four-hour, forty-six-minute drive), and Portland, Oregon (a five-hour drive via Eugene), which are connected via Interstate 5. The illegal immigrant criminal enterprise thereby runs northward into Canada via that highway, and then meanders easterly on Interstate 80 out of Sacramento and on Interstate 84 out of Portland.

If you need to know how the drugs find their way to I-5, just check out an interstate map. You’ll be amazed how easy it is for illegal immigrant drug runners to make their way out of Mexico and traffic them via our taxpayer-funded interstate highway system from sanctuary city to sanctuary city. (Thank you, Ike.) And let us not forget that triad of trade agreements uniting the United States with our nextdoor neighbors in Canada and Mexico.

Doubt that Oregon is a sanctuary state? Perhaps you’d be interested to know that, in 2007, the state revised its statutes to include the following:

181.850 Enforcement of federal immigration laws.

(1) No law enforcement agency of the State of Oregon or of any political subdivision of the state shall use agency moneys, equipment or personnel for the purpose of detecting or apprehending persons whose only violation of law is that they are persons of foreign citizenship present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws.

Sounds like a free pass for just about any criminal activity, does it not? Don’t ask, don’t tell.

A 2006 Congressional Research Service report provides some background:

Sanctuary States and Cities

Current day “sanctuary cities” or “non-cooperation policies” have their roots in the 1980s religious sanctuary movement by American churches. These churches provided sanctuary to thousands of unauthorized Central American migrants fleeing civil war in their homelands. Most cities that are considered sanctuary cities have adopted a “don’t ask-don’t tell” policy where they don’t require their employees, including law enforcement officers, to report to federal officials aliens who may be illegally present in the country.

Localities, and in some cases individual police departments, in such areas that are considered “sanctuary cities,” have utilized various mechanisms to ensure that unauthorized aliens who may be present in their jurisdiction illegally are not turned in to federal authorities. Some municipalities address the issue through resolutions, executive orders or city ordinances, while many police departments address the issues through special orders, departmental policy and general orders. To date, there are two statewide policies regarding providing sanctuary for unauthorized aliens. In May 2003, Alaska’s state legislature passed a joint resolution prohibiting state agencies from using resources or institutions for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration laws. In 1987, Oregon passed a law that prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from using agency moneys, equipment or personnel for the purpose of detecting or apprehending foreign citizens based on violation of federal immigration law. Oregon law, however, does permit their law enforcement officers to exchange information with federal authorities to verify the immigration status of an individual arrested for criminal offenses.

At the time, official sanctuary cities in Oregon were reported to be Ashland, Gaston, and the whole of Marion County. The usually-accurate NumbersUSA lists sanctuary cities for thirty states. Oregon is a sanctuary state.

Darby continues:

The Oregonian’s Les Zaitz, who first covered the arrests, has theorized that this long-term investigation started following the discovery of two corpses buried in in Klamath County, OR. The corpses were discovered during the same month this investigation began. Oregon DOJ’s [Communications Director, Jeff Manning] said, “That reporter came up with that on his own. We did not confirm any connection.” However, Manning also said, “We do not deny any connection between the two matters.”

If the Oregonian’s theory is correct, authorities are finding Mexican cartel victims buried beneath US soil, deep into the continental U.S.

Given the information I cited above about Oregon’s geography and interstate network, is it any wonder?

Darby also leaves us with the impression that this was a one-off event. It is not.

As recently as January 2013, during what is described as a routine traffic stop on Highway 97, south of Klamath Falls, Oregon State Police arrested two “Mexicans” after more than one pound of methamphetamine was found concealed in their vehicle.” The car had California license plates and the driver was from Pasco, Washington. The passenger’s address was not provided in the news account.

In September 2011, Oregon State Police “stopped a vehicle on Hwy 66 which led to the seizure of 672.2 grams of methamphetamine, 6 firearms, and two arrests. On September 13th, 2011, the follow-up investigation by HIT, OSP Drug Enforcement Section, OSP Major Crimes Section, OSP Patrol Division and DEA-Medford led to the seizure of 3 additional pounds of methamphetamine delivered to Klamath Falls and the arrest of three subjects.”

Also in September 2011, Oregon State Police stopped a vehicle near Ashland, Oregon, for speeding on I-5. The juvenile driver and female passenger were from San Diego, California, destined for Grants Pass, Oregon. State Police seized two pounds of methamphetamine. Also, a “subsequent search warrant” and follow-up investigation lead to the discovery of “1.94 pounds of methamphetamine, 48 ecstasy tablets, scales, packaging, US Currency, a firearm, and other items of evidentiary value.” Plus, in what was the fourth major bust of Mexican drug runners near Central Point, Oregon, in as many days, two traffic stops on I-5 yielded 7 kilos of cocaine destined for delivery in Portland.

It should be clear from these few examples that Oregon has not only designated itself as a sanctuary state but has also set itself up as an illegal immigrant drug runner destination. Law enforcement appears to be hamstrung to the point that it must rely on discovery of illegal drug activitiy through the providence of traffic stops.

And We the People are willing to entrust our immigration policy to Congress Critters from at least thirty states that endorse sanctuary cities? You’ve got to be kidding! Right?

Anything look familiar?

Life’s little ironies come home to roost for Obama. While he’s busy building a Watergate-like case against himself, he was busy building a Watergate fairy tale years ago in his autobiography. Below you can read my December 2012 update of the Obama Watergate hearings’ false memory (otherwise known as a lie).

First, however, we have Chicago blogger John Ruberry to thank for reminding us that the Watergate hearings began 40 years ago today, on May 17, 1973.

Ruberry writes:

As the Obama White House continues to get pummeled over its involvement in the Benghazi, IRS, and AP phone records scandals, an ominous anniversary arrived today. On this day in 1973, the Senate Watergate hearings opened.

This question, uttered by Sen. Howard Baker (R-TN) during those hearings, is as timely as ever: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

Against this background, the Obama Watergate fairy tale holds even greater significance. The answer, of course, is he didn’t know nuthin’. He never does. Facts escape him. Obama lives in an upside-is-down in-is-out fiction-is-truth Alice-in-Wonderland world.

Here’s that oldie-but-goodie from December 23, 2012:

This is totally amazing! Finally! Finally! Finally! Someone has finally had enough of Obama’s mind-numbing narcissism!

Emily Yoffe spelled it out in the left-leaning Slate.com: “Today We Are Gathered … To Hear More About Me. President Obama was supposed to eulogize the memory of Sen. Daniel Inouye. Instead he told us about his favorite summer vacation.”

This is one of those topics I thought I had nearly flogged to death — Obama’s telling and retelling of his fairy tale about his childhood visit to Chicago.

First, though, here’s what Yoffe had to say:

Obama likes to see events through the lens of his own life’s chronology. Thus we learn that Inouye was elected to the Senate when Obama was 2 years old. Now you could make this relevant by describing how Inouye worked to send federal dollars (you don’t have to call it “pork” at a funeral) to transform Hawaii’s roads and schools, for example, so that the Hawaii Obama grew up in had the kind of facilities people on the mainland had long taken for granted. But no, we simply learn that Inouye was Obama’s senator until he left the state to go to college—something apparently more momentous than anything Inouye did during his decades in office.

Obama acknowledges that as a young person he was unaware of politics, and thus Inouye. But then something important happened that made young Obama pay attention to the first man to be elected to Congress from Hawaii after it joined the union. When Obama was 11 years old he went on vacation with his family, and those paying their respects to Inouye got to hear a long description of this amazing trip, from Seattle to Kansas, from Disneyland to Yellowstone. They heard of the young Obama’s happiness whenever the motel had a pool or an ice machine. And finally, as the people must have been twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going, we get back to the late senator.

It turns out the Watergate hearings were taking place at that time, too, and Obama’s mother watched them in their various hotel rooms.

Surprisingly, Yoffe also noted: “That Obama in some way may have been inspired to a political career by a man who overcame prejudice and later became Obama’s colleague is a fine point to make. But it is an incidental one to the life being celebrated. … Obama never really gives us a sense of the life being celebrated.”

That would have been the man he was there to eulogize — Senator Daniel Inouye.

As Daniel Greenfield noted at FrontPageMag.com, “The Senator, like the rest of humanity, only exists for the enlightenment and entertainment of Barack Hussein Obama. His life story is a footnote in Obama’s own.”

But that’s Obama. It’s ALWAYS ALL ABOUT HIM.

Caught up in the Obama spin machine, Yoffe failed to dissect Obama’s claims about his childhood visit.

In all fairness, Yoffe gets a bit of a pass. She was not the first to get caught up in Obama’s retelling of the story without questioning the details — although we do have a new embellishment. Obama added info about his “happiness whenever the motel had a pool or an ice machine.”

But here’s the truth, which I have been reporting for several years now. The last update came from July 2012:

One day after announcing that the “biggest mistake” he had made during his first term in office was “putting policy over storytelling”, Obama delivered yet another version of his childhood vacation to the mainland.

Keith Lang at The Hill reported:

President Obama took another opportunity to subtly ding Republican opponent Mitt Romney for his wealth Friday by remarking in a campaign speech that childhood family vacations were taken on Greyhound.

Speaking in Virginia Beach, Obama said that his family did not often fly when it took vacations during his childhood.

“I was up in Ohio talking about, you know, my favorite vacation,” Obama said Friday. “When I was 11 years old, my grandmother and my mother, my sister and me, we traveled the country.

“But we didn’t do it on jets,” Obama continued as his audience laughed. “No, we took Greyhound and the train. And I think twice we rented a car.”

A few months earlier, in May 2102, I related Obama’s own words from Dreams From My Father (page 144). All added emphasis is mine.

I have been to Chicago once before. It was during the summer after my father’s visit to Hawaii, before my eleventh birthday, when [my grandmother] Toot had decided it was time I saw the mainland of the United States. …

We traveled for over a month, Toot and my mother and [my sister] Maya and I — Gramps had lost his taste for traveling by this time and chose to stay behind. We flew to Seattle, then went down the coast to California and Disneyland, east to the Grand Canyon, across the Great Plains to Kansas City, then up to the Great Lakes before heading back west through Yellowstone Park. We took Greyhound buses, mostly, and stayed at Howard Johnson’s, and watched the Watergate hearings every night before going to bed.

He also mentions they stayed in Chicago for three days, he thinks in July, even though he remembers the weather being “cold and gray.”

As I have repeatedly said, this is target rich territory for Google.

We start with dates. Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961. Barack Obama Sr. returned to Hawaii briefly in December 1971.

Barack Obama Jr. would have turned eleven in August 1972.

We now have a window. The three days spent in Chicago would have been between December 1971, when Obama’s father visited Hawaii, and August 4, 1972, the date of his eleventh birthday.

Except that, in May 2012, Obama changed his story. He did this again in the Inouye eulogy. He says he was eleven when they made the trip.

Now for the Watergate hearings on tv.

This one is way too easy. Pay close attention to the dates and the answer is self-evident.

You see, it was on the night of June 17, 1972, when “five burglars were arrested in the Democratic National Committee offices” in the Watergate Building in Washington, DC.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications informs:

The U.S. Senate, by a 77-to-0 vote, approved a resolution on 7 February 1973, to impanel the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to investigate Watergate. Known as the Ervin Committee for its Chairperson, Senator Sam Ervin, the Committee began public hearings on 17 May 1973, that shortly came to be known as the “Watergate Hearings.”

Except that Obama now says he was eleven when he made the month-long trip.

The Watergate hearings ended August 7, 1973. Obama’s family could have watched the hearings during the summer of 1973 except for the inconvenient fact that his father had visited Hawaii in December 1971 and the following summer was in 1972. Obama can’t have it both ways.

Why does Obama keep changing and embellishing this story?

Because he can and no one in the partisan media is going to call him on it. So, he spins and he twists and he turns the same tale over and over again. It gets the applause and that’s all that really matters to him — ever.

In December 2012, long-time Obama dissecter Jack Cashill also noted Obama’s Chicago trip lie:

The story of the trip set up the punch line. He told Inouye’s mourners that “my mother that summer would turn on the TV every night during this vacation and watch the Watergate hearings,” and he was forced to watch, too. Of course, the senator who “fascinated” him most was “this man of Japanese descent with one arm, speaking in this courtly baritone, full of dignity and grace.”

This story would work only if Obama had toured the United States during the summer of the Watergate hearings, 1973, when he was eleven years old going on twelve, but in his memoir Dreams from My Father, he tells another story — a much more specific one. Yes, he made the same trip, but he did so “during the summer after my father’s visit to Hawaii, before my eleventh birthday.” This would have been 1972, when Watergate was still a third-rate burglary that had gotten little media traction.

Cashill added one more detail that further shatters Obama’s story:

In Dreams, Obama mentioned a Kansas City stop along the way, and Madelyn [Dunham]‘s youngest brother in suburban KC would later provide photographic evidence of the same. He confirmed the year as 1972. This disparity did not stop Obama from relating in Dreams how in that elusive summer he “watched the Watergate hearings every night before going to bed.”

Again, in Obamaland facts do not matter. His parallel universe version of reality always does.

Wonder if we’ll be treated to yet another version of Obama’s Watergate fairy tale sometime today? It’ll be a good distraction for the lapdog media to spread, will it not?

Joe Battenfeld, Obama knee-deep in Nixon-esque scandal, Boston Herald, May 14, 2013:

President Obama’s second-term campaign slogan was “Forward,” but instead we’ve got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters.

That sounds like “backward” to me. All the way to, say, 1972.

Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. … [Read on.]

In his excellent article on the finally-emerging details on the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. Benghazi compounds during which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and two ex-Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, lost their lives, Doug Ross sums up how the Obama administration and the media handled the situation, consistently using tactics that they began in 2007 during the presidential campaign continuing through today:

So twisted and despicable is the Obama administration that it was willing to lie to the American people to retain its white-knuckled death grip on power.

So invested in the progressive agenda is the fascist media that it was willing to go to the mat to suppress the truth . . .

Unrepentant Communist revolutionary terrorist Bill Ayers, the keynote speaker at the annual May 4 “commemoration of the National Guard shootings at Kent State in 1970 that left four students dead”, could not help himself from, once again, revising the facts of historical events.

Ayers said that “people can’t equate the bombings that he and others in the Weather Underground did 40 or so years ago with the April 15 twin bombings in Boston that killed three people.” Delusionally he claimed: “No one died in the Weather Underground bombings.”

Jim Mackinnon, reporting on the event in Akron, Ohio’s Beacon Journal, writes: “In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.”

Minor details.

Ayers also said that his equally-unrepentant Communist revolutionary terrorist wife, Bernardine Dorhn, “spoke several years ago at a Kent State May 4 commemoration.”

The aging Ayers appears to have a convenient case of progressive senility, as wife Dohrn spoke at Kent State numerous times more than forty years ago.

Here’s what I reported in October 2008:

We begin with a November 1996 book review by John Mage of Victor Rabinowitz’s Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer’s Memoir. Rabinowitz provided some interesting information about Dohrn and the path she led before becoming a full-fledged domestic terrorist.

Rabinowitz and Leonard Boudin were partners in the law firm Rabinowitz Boudin which defended an assortment of leftist clients.

Following Rabinowitz’s death November 16, 2007, at age 96, Marjorie Cohn wrote in Monthly Review that, in addition to defending “known Communists” in the McCarthy hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee and having defended the “Cuban government’s nationalization of U.S.-owned property” in the U.S. Supreme Court, Rabinowitz Boudin “counted as clients Daniel Ellsberg, Paul Robeson, Julian Bond, Dashiell Hammett, Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Rev. Philip Berrigan, Alger Hiss, the Black Panthers, the Salvador Allende government in Chile,…. During the Vietnam War, the Rabinowitz Boudin firm represented hundreds of men facing the draft or criminal charges for refusing induction due to their opposition to the war.”

In 1967, Rabinowitz was president of the National Lawyers Guild, described by some as a Communist front group, he had helped co-found. John Mage wrote in 1996:

Almost all the organizations in which members of the Communist party took a leading role in the 1930s and 1940s were purged and/or destroyed. By the late 1960s, there were left some (not large) labor unions and the National Lawyers Guild. Victor Rabinowitz, reflecting on the achievements of a distinguished career, places first his role in preserving the National Lawyers Guild. It is today an effective nationwide organization, many thousand strong, committed to the goal of radical social change. It is an important exception to the prevailing rule, and Victor’s pride is justified.

Victor’s credible account is that the community of 1930s lawyers in and close to the CPUSA preserved this organizational treasure, more or less intact, through the great storm in order to hand it over to their 1968er successors.

Jesse Rigsby wrote April 25, 2003, in a Front Page Magazine article about the National Lawyers Guild (the “Guild”):

As the 1960s began, the Guild began to focus much of its efforts on fighting for civil rights for black Americans. Part of the reason for the Guild’s newfound emphasis was pure opportunism: a means of acquiring new membership, both black and white (interestingly, one of the Guild’s black members was elected to Congress in 1964: John Conyers (left), one of the more liberal Representatives currently serving in the House. The Guild defended rioters and others involved in civil unrest as the 1960s progressed, and “helped” the U.S. war effort in Vietnam by encouraging young men to become draft evaders and then defending them. Guild lawyers were active in defending such “movement” participants as “demonstrators” arrested during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots and members of the militant Black Panther Party in their many run-ins with law enforcement.

John Mage now literally drops the Bernardine Dohrn bomb on us:

Victor places the transition as beginning in 1967, when he was President of the Guild, and culminating in the memorable electrically tense Boulder, Colorado convention of the National Lawyers Guild of the summer of 1971. In August of 1971 many of the best of the youth movement against the Vietnam War had just gone underground (the “Weathermen”). Bernardine Dohrn, leader of Weatherman, in 1967 had been hired by the national office of the Guild as a student organizer.

Student organizer! Hold that thought!

In a May 1998 interview with ZMag, Dohrn was asked

In terms of Columbia SDS, you have Dave Gilbert still locked up. In other countries they give amnesty to political prisoners. In the U.S., that doesn’t happen. Why do you think the establishment’s so reluctant to release some of the activists from the 1960s? And, in terms of the Columbia Revolt and student activism, what was Dave Gilbert’s role?

Still-unrepentant Dohrn answered (emphasis added):

I met David in 1967 when I spoke at Columbia Law School to organize a Guild chapter there. Then saw him during the November 1967 anti-war Rusk demonstration. I met Teddy Gold both of those times, too. Teddy, who died in March 1970 in an explosion at a New York townhouse, was an activist and a leader of the SDS chapter at Columbia.

David, you know, is one of those brilliant figures who was a real intellectual. A classic Columbia student. A political economist, who loved to talk theory. Who, if it hadn’t been 1968, would surely have become a professor and an academic and written books. Who was and is a gentle person.

But David and Teddy, like all of us, were thrown into this, were lucky enough, really, to be offered the opportunity to step into this cauldron. We felt the world didn’t have to be like this.

Oh, yes. It has been assumed by those of us who don’t know better that it was Bill Ayers (right), who came out of the 1969 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) National Convention as one of three Weatherman leaders along with Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones. But on numerous listservs and in several articles, as well as in Rabinowitz’s memoir, we find Dohrn called the Weatherman leader — whether because she was the first to physically walk out at the convention, or because she was actually viewed in that leadership role — is not for us to determine. But she is, in fact, often referred to as the Weather leader.

Brian Hect wrote February 16, 2005, at FrontPageMag.com:

But Dohrn’s initial foray into the legal field was short-lived—she quickly became even more extreme than her NLG comrades (no small feat) and branched out as a leader of some of the most ultra-radical elements within the anti-Vietnam war movement.

Sadly, when we find the words Communist, ultra-radical, and student organizer within a few short phrases, our ears perk up.

But John Mage has even more to satisfy our interest (emphasis added):

Many of us at Boulder had been brought into the Guild by Bernardine and none would dispute Victor’s characterization of her as “brilliant” and with “inexhaustible energy.” As he says, “in her travels around the country she spent half her time organizing antiwar demonstrations and the other half organizing Guild chapters to defend the demonstrators.”

BAM!!!

Did you get that? This is just so, so …. Alinskyesque? Identify a problem, then agitate for the “solution”. It’s no wonder Obama fits so well into the Hyde Park radical niche.

Columbia University 1968

Confirmation comes from that May 1998 Dohrn interview (emphasis added):

Thirty years ago Columbia University was the scene of “The Battle Of Morningside Heights”—when Columbia President (and Institute for Defense Analyses Director) Grayson Kirk called in 1,000 NYC police to clear the campus of protesting students on two occasions—711 students were arrested, 148 injured, and 120 charges of police brutality were filed.

In July 1968, following the revolt, a National Lawyers Guild activist who coordinated some of the legal defense work on behalf of the arrested Barnard and Columbia students, Bernardine Dohrn, became a national officer of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Mark Rudd (left), later to become a co-leader of Weather, became nationally prominent for his role in the Columbia revolt.

Democratic National Convention 1968

Additionally, in the interview, Dohrn says that she helped plan the Guild’s legal support for the August 26-29, 1968, Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago.

In a 1996 retrospective, PBS Online NewsHour writes

But the 1968 Democratic convention was less notable for its politics than for its televised display of social unrest and national disunity. The country had reached the boiling point. Two American icons, Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, had just been assassinated. Everyday, young American boys were being slaughtered in a war that, for many, had already lost its meaning. War protesters decided to gather in Chicago and send a message to candidate Hubert Humphrey and the Democratic party. But Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was unsympathetic. He posted 12,000 police officers on the streets, and called in the Illinois National Guard. Television cameras recorded a bloody riot as police arrested over 500 people in clashes that injured more than 100 police and 100 demonstrators.

Finally, we get to the Dohrn-Kent State connection.

In a June 1974 American Opinion article, Alan Stang provided some contemporary graphic information about how well Dohrn’s SDS agitation worked:

So it was in Chicago at the 1968 Democrat National Convention, where students got their skulls fractured when their leaders attacked the police. And on May 4, 1970, on the campus at Kent State University, in Ohio, the revolution finally killed four students. The anti-American Conspiracy had the martyrs it needed. The killings at Kent State have been used to radicalize students across America—and around the world. And recently, after four years, a federal grand jury indicted eight members of the Ohio National Guard, which was also victimized at Kent State. Their conviction would mean another disaster for America. …

But the fact is that the killings on the campus were the predictable result of almost two years of Communist agitation by such terrorist gangs as Students for a Democratic Society.

For instance, in the fall of 1968, Kent State was treated to two appearances by Mark Rudd, the S.D.S. Ieader who had led the seizure of campus buildings earlier that year at Columbia University in New York. Another frequent visitor was Bernardine Dohrn, an S.D.S. official who calls herself a “revolutionary Communist,” and who according to James Michener, in Kent State, told the students: “They’ve shot blacks in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and they’re certainly going to shoot whites here.”

Members of the staff at the regional S.D.S. office in Cleveland constantly made the short trip to Kent, where they propagandized and recruited. A student revolutionary told Michener: “We established our communes in three Ohio cities, one in Columbus, two in Akron, two in Cleveland. The idea was to teach severe discipline. Every single decision—was a girl member entitled to buy an ice cream cone?—was decided by group discussion. The object was to produce revolutionaries programmed to obey orders, even if they involved severe personal sacrifice or death. You surrendered all personal money, idiosyncrasies and will power, assured that you would come out of the experience with total dedication.” …

So the purpose of all this agitation at Kent State was to recruit as much cannon fodder as possible, and then to provoke a “major confrontation.” When it came, it would be neither accidental nor spontaneous. It would be exactly what the revolutionaries wanted. …

At a meeting in Williams Hall on April 28, 1969, revolutionary Communist Bernardine Dohrn said that people fighting “oppression” would have to carry weapons for “self defense.” …

Bear in mind that we have room here to cite only a few examples of the inflammatory agitation and propaganda on the campus at Kent State for almost two years. The evidence establishes—in the words of the revolutionaries—that the goal of S.D.S. was to provoke a violent confrontation in which somebody would be hurt, or even worse.

Yes. It is indeed sad that the day has arrived when a once proud Communist revolutionary terrorist exhibits loss of memory to the ravages of old age — if only that were true.

It’s no longer just a rumor. Billionaire Penny Pritzker will be Obama’s nominee as the next head of the Commerce Department. CNN’s Political Ticker describes Pritzker thusly:

Pritzker is chief executive of the Pritzker Realty Group and is one of the wealthiest women in America. Forbes estimates her fortune at $1.85 billion, making her the 271th wealthiest person in the country.

She is also a philanthropist and major Democratic donor who acted as the national finance chair of the president’s 2008 campaign and a campaign co-chair in 2012.

While all true, it’s only a wee bit of the story. Pritzker turned the nomination down in November 2008. Here is what I wrote then:

The Politico’s Mike Allen reported:

Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker, national campaign finance chairwoman for the Obama campaign, has taken herself out of the running to be secretary of Commerce, a Democratic official said.

“She fears problems with her confirmation based on past business dealings,” the official said. [...]

Officials said she was not vetted.

My response was: Well there’s a surprise! Not!

Earlier in the day, on November 20, 2008, Uppity Woman posted that Obama was considering the Mother of failed sub-prime lenders for Secretary of Commerce position. (Also see her earlier post, Obama’s Finance Chair Failed Bank Owner Penny Pritzker, reposted from April 3, 2008.)

. Also see Dennis Bernstein’s February 28, 2008, Obama’s Sub-Prime Conflict (h/t Room101) and Dan Riehl’s July 22, 2008, post Penny Pritzker: It Gets Worse? (h/t Bessie)

. Also see Steve Bartin’s May 2, 2013, post Obama Nominates Sub-Prime Penny Pritzker for Commerce Secretary at Newsalert.com.

On a list of ten questions he’d like then-Senator Obama to answer, author and political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson listed the following as number 6:

The head of your campaign finance chair is Penny Pritzker. Before taking over Obama´s campaign finances, she headed up the borderline shady and failed Superior Bank. It collapsed in 2002. The bank engaged in deceptive and faulty lending, questionable accounting practices, and charged hidden fees. It made thousands of dubious loans to mostly poor, strapped homeowners. A disproportionate number of them were minority. Why does she still have a principal financial role in your campaign?

John Courtney, commenting in March 2007 at Bob McCarty’s BMW blog, asked

… when is someone going to talk about Obama financial campaign chairman – Penny Pritzker, that cost the Federal Government – taxpayers one billion dollars when Superior Bank failed, and 450 million dollars still owed to the FDIC – and they gave her 15 years to pay back – no interest, if Obama get elected is he going to waive this money owed, all the people the work so hard for there money Obama talks about, hundreds of them, lost there money at Superior Bank, Ms. Pritzker is the only one that made out on that deal.

For those who do not know, “billionaire business mogul” Penny Pritzker was named in January 2007 as Obama’s national finance chairman. She was also on the finance committee for Obama’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. In August 2001, Penny, Thomas, and Nicholas Pritzker were described as “struggling with a complicated legacy”—”a vast real estate and Hyatt hotel empire”—left to them by its founder, Jay Pritzker, the New York Times reported. In 2005, Forbes counted Penny Pritzer among The 100 Most Powerful Women, as well as a member of the Forbes 400.

About the Superior Bank failure

The Chicago Sun-Times reported August 3, 2001:

Superior Bank, half-owned by the wealthy Pritzker family, was shut down by the FDIC Friday after a bailout plan by the Pritzkers, who own the Hyatt Hotel chain, and their partner, New York real estate developer Alvin Dworman, fell through. The bank failed because it had lost nearly all of its more than $2 billion of assets on bad loans to high-risk borrowers, federal regulators said.

The FDIC reopened the bank Monday as Superior Federal and is seeking a buyer and a new CEO.

Superior’s failure could cost the FDIC $500 million or more–some observers now are pegging the loss at closer to $1 billion, one of the largest bank failures ever.

On September 11, 2001, Ellen Seidman, Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, told the Senate Banking Committee:

Superior, which had assets of $1.8 billion as of June 30, 2001, became critically undercapitalized largely due to incorrect accounting treatment and aggressive assumptions for valuing complicated financial instruments known as residuals. “The risk from a concentration in residuals at Superior was exacerbated by a faulty accounting opinion by the institution’s external auditors that caused capital to be significantly overstated, and by management and board recalcitrance in acting on regulatory recommendations, directives and orders.”

The New York Times reported December 11, 2001, that the Pritzkers had agreed to pay a “record $460 million” spread out over 15 years to the federal government to avoid being punished” for Superior Bank’s failure. It was “the largest settlement ever in the failure of a banking institution. The failure itself is one of the largest in the last decade, one that some estimate could cost the government up to $1 billion.”

“Regulators said Superior had collapsed because of poor lending practices and sloppy bookkeeping,” the Times wrote. “The bank specialized in loans to people with poor credit histories, a practice called subprime lending.”

The Times also reported that the Pritzkers, who “have a long and troubled history in the S.& L. business” and “once battled the Internal Revenue Service over estate taxes, … also agreed to cede 90 percent of any money they might recover in separate litigation with the government.”

The Obama Subprime plan

Max Fraser wrote January 28, 2008, in lefty The Nation:

Barack Obama’s proposal is tepid by comparison, short on aggressive government involvement and infused with conservative rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. As he has done on domestic issues like healthcare, job creation and energy policy, Obama is staking out a position to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.

Edwards’s plan includes a mandatory moratorium on foreclosures, a freeze on rising interest rates for at least seven years, federal subsidies to help homeowners keep up with payments and restructure loans, and explicit measures to rein in predatory lenders and regulate the financial sector. Clinton’s plan is weaker–a voluntary moratorium, a shorter freeze, less commitment to new regulations–but she has promised $30 billion in federal aid to help reeling homeowners and communities.

Only Obama has not called for a moratorium and interest-rate freeze. Though he has been a proponent of mortgage fraud legislation in the Senate, he has remained silent on further financial regulations. And much like his broader economic stimulus package, Obama’s foreclosure plan mostly avoids direct government spending in favor of a tax credit for homeowners, which amounts to about $500 on average, beyond which only certain borrowers would be eligible for help from an additional fund.

… When asked if Obama would hold these financial institutions accountable for losses incurred by homeowners and investors, his campaign refused to comment.

See next page

Today, for the first time, the public and members of the California High-Speed Rail Authority board will get to “weigh in on the bids and bidding process” since contractors’ bids for the first section of a high-speed rail between Madera and Fresno were announced. The winning bidder, Tutor Perini, is connected with Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

This is not new news. In March 2012, the High-Speed Train Talk blog pointed out that “Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, husband Richard Blum [is/are] involved in organizations owning land through which the rail corridor passes.” I’ll leave that hot potato issue to others better informed about it than I.

However, regarding today’s hearing, the Fresno Bee reports:

At their meeting Thursday in Sacramento, board members will receive an update on the bids submitted by five contractor teams this year. The prices of each bid were announced last month, following a three-month analysis of the bids’ technical merits during which the prices remained sealed, according to the rail authority.

A consortium of Sylmar-based Tutor Perini, Zachry Construction of Texas and Pasadena’s Parsons Corp. was deemed to be the “apparent best value” with a low bid of about $985 million — the only one of the five bids to come in at less than $1 billion.

But the bidding process has come under scrutiny because, months before the contractors submitted their bids in January, the agency’s executive leadership altered the threshold for evaluating the proposals without approval from the authority board.

What was initially adopted in March 2012 as a rigorous and competitive way to ensure that only the three most technically sound bids would be considered for the contract morphed into a “pass/fail” analysis requiring contractors to only meet “the minimum elements required” to advance in the competition.

The Tutor Perini consortium had the lowest technical score among the five bidding teams. The second-lowest-cost bid — less than $1.1 billion from a joint venture of Dragados SA of Spain; Samsung C&T America, a subsidiary of South Korean multinational Samsung Group; and Pulice Construction Inc. of Arizona — received the second-highest technical score.

As I wrote yesterday, there has been a call for the winning bid to be invalidated:

Elizabeth [Goldstein] Alexis, a co-founder of the watchdog group Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design, argued that the bid review process ultimately used was not properly authorized and that the Tutor Perini team’s selection should be invalidated.

On April 18, the Los Angeles Times reported:

The technical score is based on safety measures, engineering, scheduling, quality of design, project approach and solutions to possible construction problems.

In March 2012, the rail authority’s board set up a two-step process for weighing the bids. In the first step, the bidders were supposed to be narrowed to three based only on a technical evaluation. Only the bids submitted by the remaining contenders would be opened. The winner was to be selected on a combination of price and technical scores.

Under that process, the Tutor Perini consortium and another team led by Skanska, a Swedish company, would have been eliminated after the first round, leaving groups led by Colorado-based Kiewit and two teams led by Spanish firms, Dragados and Ferrovial.

The board adopted the two-step process, which the agency’s staff said would create competition and obtain quality technical proposals for the first 200-mph rail system to be constructed in the United States

“We think we’re going to get strong technical proposals, and we’re going to get some very well thought-out plans from these proposal teams,” Thomas Fellenz, the authority’s attorney, told the board last March. “And we’re making it very competitive, because, you know, if you are not in the top three, you’ll be dropped.”

Fellenz said at the time that “non-substantive” changes could be made in consultation with board Chairman Dan Richard.

The agency changed the evaluation process in July, according to an agency spokesman. The official did not provide details of the internal process used to alter the criteria. But he said the state potentially would save hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of the decision to change the evaluation criteria.

Ms. Alexis of Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design protested, arguing that the “change in evaluation criteria has invalidated the bidding process.” “This is not a non-substantive change,” she said. “I don’t see any indication that the board approved this.”

Future problems hiding in plain sight?

“In the end,” LAT’s reporters wrote, “the state placed far more weight on price than the technical evaluation, which is contrary to the best practices suggested by some construction industry groups.” The article continues to explain possible future speedbumps:

The Design Build Institute of America advises public agencies to put greater emphasis on technical merit to avoid later problems on a project.

“Smart public owners across the country are moving in that direction,” said Rex Huffington, an official at the institute. “This best practice is even more critical on complex projects.”

The state completed only about 15% of the design of the first segment when it sought bids from the five teams.

The technical proposals could be critical. Building the first section will require a massive engineering feat on a tight schedule that includes cutting a 1.7-mile trench through Fresno, erecting a 1.2-mile viaduct and using giant hydraulic jacks to create a tunnel beneath California 180 in the Fresno area.

Tutor Perini is one of the largest contractors in the country. Critics have complained that the firm tends to bid low to win contracts and then seeks change orders and contract amendments that increase costs.

The firm has handled many major construction projects successfully. But it also has been embroiled in controversies involving accusations of overbilling, fraud and shoddy workmanship related to the Los Angeles subway, San Francisco International Airport and public works projects in New York. Those matters have cost the builder tens of millions of dollars in legal judgments, settlements and penalties.

U-T San Diego reported that Tutor Perini’s “Change Artist” Ron Tutor “returned fire” at critics who claimed he has a history of cost overruns and expensive lawsuits.

His joint venture of Tutor Perini/Zachry/Parsons has submitted the “best apparent value” bid of $985 million for the first segment of the rail line, below the $1.09 billion proposal by the next-lowest bidder. Rail officials had estimated the cost of the first segment at $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion.

A U-T Watchdog report … focused on persistent criticisms of Tutor and his firms over the years. Tutor was unavailable for comment, but the Watchdog reached him by phone on Tuesday.

“You’re picking up on the 20-year-old (baloney) that we get jobs and we get a lot of change orders, right?” he asked. “And you still believe that (baloney)? I am getting tired of refuting it. It’s just such drivel.”

Eleven major projects in the San Francisco Bay Area completed by Tutor in the last 12 years cost local governments $765 million more than they expected, or 40 percent above the initial bids, according to an August report by the Center for Investigative Reporting, a media partner of U-T San Diego.

The U-T quoted Kevin Williams, a former San Francisco contracting officer who has testified in court against Tutor. Williams predicted the construction tycoon “is going to make up the difference somehow by lowballing. That is as old as history itself in the construction industry.”

Tutor’s companies have a long history of courtroom battles in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, where officials in 2002 accused him of deliberately bidding low and then charging more for an airport expansion.

Unsurprisingly, Tutor also said “he expects to get the contract for the first segment — a 28-mile stretch from Madera to Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley — and then compete for the other segments of the $68 billion project.” When asked whether he could guarantee to hold down costs, Tutor responded, “What do you think a contract is? I am not on a cost-plus. Our contract is a guarantee. I swear to God.”

Tutor continued:

Tutor said any increased costs could be caused by the rail authority, not his company. For instance, the plans call for rail officials to make land available so the builders can meet the quoted schedule.

“Say they don’t turn them over. There’s delays, there’s costs,” Tutor said. “These aren’t huge. They are not major. They are nothing extensive. And my assumption is that high-speed rail, like all owners, budget a certain amount for those issues that are beyond anyone’s control.

“It’s nothing major and it never spirals out of control,” he added. “That’s media (baloney).”

Time will tell — if Tutor Perini gets to keep the contract.

Robert Cruickshank of the California High-Speed Rail blog cautioned:

I don’t have a dog in this fight, at least not yet. None of us knows enough about any of these five bids to make an informed comment on which one was the best. We don’t know whether the Tutor Perini bid has serious technical flaws or whether it is just fine and the other bids are simply overengineered. Until we are able to see details we can’t make informed assessments.

I will say that I personally believe that we should be prioritizing technical quality over cost in assessing bids. But again, until we see details of the scoring process and the bids, we’re not in any position to do more than wildly speculate. It’s no surprise that [high-speed rail] opponents have chosen to do exactly that.

I also observed yesterday that this could get interesting when we find out who (possibly unilaterally) changed the rules that allowed Tutor Perini to win the bid in the first place. Now we know. The Fresno Bee explained:

Officials with the rail authority said Wednesday that the changes to the bid-evaluation process were made with the goal of ensuring the lowest possible price for technically sound bids, and done in consultation with board member Michael Rossi, who heads he authority’s finance committee. The consultation chores were delegated to Rossi by board chairman Dan Richard, who stepped away from all of the discussions involving bidders or changes to the request for bids because he had once worked as a consultant for Parsons Corp.

Who’s Michael Rossi?

In August 2011, California Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Michael Rossi to the California High-Speed Rail Authority board. Rossi replaced Republican David Crane, who had been appointed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This came a week after Brown appointed Rossi as his unpaid jobs czar. The position did not require the state’s Senate confirmation. The official announcement reads:

Michael E. Rossi, 67, of Pebble Beach, has been appointed Senior Advisor for Jobs and Business Development in the Office of the Governor. In this role, Rossi will be the point of contact between California’s business and workforce leaders and the Administration; he will streamline and invigorate the state’s economic development infrastructure; and he will advise Governor Brown on regulatory, legislative and executive actions needed to drive job growth.

From 2005 to 2008, Rossi served as an advisor and senior member of the operations team at Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. and as chairman and chief executive officer of Aozora Bank, taking it public in November 2006. From 2007 to 2008 he also served as chairman of GMAC Residential Capital, LLC. Rossi was retired from the private sector from 1997 to 2005. He was vice chairman and chief risk officer of BankAmerica Corporation and was the chairman of its Fiduciary and Investment Policy Committee from 1993 to 1997. Previously, he was BankAmerica’s chief credit officer and held various executive positions including running BankAmerica’s Commercial Banking, Global Private Bank, Asia, Latin America, Commercial Real Estate, Corporate Real Estate, Personal and Corporate Trust and Cash Management divisions. He also served as the senior credit officer of BankAmerica’s World Banking Group.

Rossi currently serves on the Advisory Board of Shorenstein Properties LLC, the Court Appointed Special Advocates of Monterey County, Special Olympics Committee of Northern California and Claremont Graduate University. He is also a senior advisor to the San Francisco 49ers.

Rossi is a former director of North Hawaii Community Hospital, BAWAG Bank (Austria), Pulte Homes, American Bankers Association, Monterey Institute of International Studies, American Graduate School of International Management, University of California at Berkeley Art Museum, Del Webb Corporation, BlueLinx Corporation, San Francisco Opera, National Urban League, Union Pacific Resources, Lifesavers, American Diabetes Association of California and United Way of Northern California. He was a member of the nominating committee of the Bankers Association for Foreign Trade and was the president of its Board. He also served on the President’s Campaign Cabinet for University of California at Berkeley.

Rossi received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

There’s your answer — Big Banking.

Here’s the “more”

The California High-Speed Rail Scam website has been on this case and is loaded with info.

The Washington Free Beacon reports on the ethically-challenged former Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency which oversees the Macs — Fannie and Freddie.

As always, there’s more to the story. In April 2009 I wrote about Comradess Barbara Lee and her merry band of ‘Red’ men and women:

“One wishes Ms. Lee were just a clueless liberal, but her history leads me to conclude that she is the kind of ‘San Francisco Democrat’ that former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick criticized in 1984: someone who ‘always blames America first’.”–John Fund, WSJ, 09/17/01.

Mark Hemingway’s April 17, 2009, NRO article Comrade Barbara, about Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)’s new book, Renegade for Peace & Justice, set off my ‘Red’ alarm.

In his observations from the book, Hemingway made mention of Lee’s numerous visits to Cuba and her “fondness for Castro”. He wrote:

Lee’s fondness for the brutal dictator probably stems from the fact that he helped her good friend, Black Panther leader Huey Newton. Accused of killing an underage prostitute, assault, and tax evasion, Newton went to Cuba for three years in the mid-1970s rather than stand trial.

Although that may be true, Lee’s “fondness” for Cuba was exhibited in more recent events. J. Michael Waller wrote April 7, 2009, at PoliticalWarfare.org:

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) is making headlines again as only she can – by being on the wrong side once again.

Her latest hobby horse is her recent trip to Cuba for a visit with Raul Castro (right) – Fidel’s little brother who for decades ran the army, secret police, intelligence services, hard currency laundering operations.

Lee led a congressional delegation to Havana for a 4-1/2 hour meeting with Raul Castro, telling reporters, “All of us are convinced that President Castro would like normal relations and would see normalization, ending the embargo, as beneficial to both countries.” Reuters reported that Lee’s delegation “avoided specifics” with Castro “but were struck by his humor, impressed by his involvement in Third World causes and firm in their belief that he wants to end U.S.-Cuba enmity.”

The meeting between Castro, Lee, and five other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, took place in secret without the customary presence of a US State Department official. No reporters attended, and according to the New York Times, Cuban television, which covered the visit, offered no details of what was said.

Xinhua, the Chinese propaganda agency, described the Castro-Lee meeting as a “closed-door discussion, whose details were undisclosed.” [...]

Congresswoman Lee has some explaining to do. Her secretive Cuba trip looks like a replay of what she did more than 25 years ago for Castro’s Grenada ally. Anything Lee says or does on Cuba is suspect. So is anything that other lawmakers do with her.

Major US and European news organizations covered the meeting but did not publish a list of the members of Congress (left) in the meeting. The Cuban Communist Party daily Granma stated that the lawmakers were: Reps. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), Marcia L. Fudge (D-OH), Laura Richardson (D-CA), Bobby Rush (D-IL), Melvin Luther Watt (D-CA), and Barbara Lee. “Also particpating were Patrice Willougby, executive assistant to the [Congressional] Black Caucus, and Eulada Watt, wife of Congressman Melvin Luther Watt,” according to Granma.

Granma added that also attending CBC’s meeting with Castro were high-ranking members of the Cuban government:

[...] Political Bureau members Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, president of the National Assembly of People’s Power, and Pedro Sáez Montejo, first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party in Havana; Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla; Dagoberto Rodríguez Barrera, deputy foreign minister; and Jorge Bolaños Suárez, head of the Cuban Interests Section in the United States.

Politico reported April 9, 2009, that, after the meeting, Lee and CBC members praised Castro as “warm and hospitable during their visit” and “call[ed] for an end to U.S. prohibition on travel to Cuba.” “The fifty-year embargo just hasn’t worked,” said Lee. “The bottom line is that we believe its time to open dialogue with Cuba.” Reflecting on her moments with Castro, Lee said, “It was quite a moment to behold.”

Note that Watt’s wife, Eulada, made the trip to Cuba as well.

What are the odds that POTUS Obama would name a Friend of Castro to such a prestigious office in his administration?