Media, Blogging, Internet – Page 17

Mitt’s Most Secret Offshore Investment

July 4, 2012/2 Comments/in Media, Blogging, Internet /by Philip Turner

First in Vanity Fair by Nicholas Shaxson and now today via AP staff reporters, journos are digging into Mitt’s most secret offshore investment, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., registered in Bermuda. From the AP, we now know at a minimum that he failed to report Sankaty in required filings when he held office in Massaschusetts, and that he may still be making money from it. Romney’s finances are held in many opaque vehicles.

Sankaty was transferred to a trust owned by Romney’s wife, Ann, one day before he was sworn in as Massachusetts governor in 2003, according to Bermuda records obtained by The Associated Press. The Romneys’ ownership of the offshore firm did not appear on any state or federal financial reports during Romney’s two presidential campaigns. Only the Romneys’ 2010 tax records, released under political pressure earlier this year, confirmed their continuing control of the company. . . .

Romney’s 2010 tax returns show him and his wife as sole owners of Sankaty. . . .

The candidate’s 2010 tax returns listed at least 20 investment holdings besides Sankaty that had not been previously disclosed on federal reports. At least seven were foreign investments. Bain Capital Inc., the holding that posted the $1.9 million earning, was listed on Romney’s state ethics reports in 2001 and 2002, when he ran for governor, but was missing from any annual ethics report until Romney’s trust included it last month on his 2012 financial statement. Sankaty is the only offshore holding in the Romneys’ portfolio under their full control. On his 2010 taxes, Romney’s blind trust filed an IRS form identifying Sankaty as a “controlled foreign corporation.” That filing is required for any U.S. taxpayer who owns more than 50% of a foreign company. Romney’s 2010 tax returns indicate that he and his wife control all 12,000 shares. Several U.S. Securities and Exchange documents from the late 1990s and 2000s depicted Romney as Sankaty’s owner at the time, but when he ran for Massachusetts governor in 2001 and 2002, Romney did not list the company on annual disclosure forms required by the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission. The ethics commission would not comment on the omissions. Boston College law professor R. Michael Cassidy, who was a member of the commission at the time, said that if Romney “owned this business before he signed his ethics disclosure, then he was obliged to report it.”

Dan Froomkin on Patrick Fitzgerald’s Legacy as a Federal Prosecutor

July 4, 2012/7 Comments/in Media, Blogging, Internet, Personal History, Family, Friends, Education, Travels, Philip Turner's Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

Dan Froomkin, Senior Washington DC Correspondent for Huffington Post, has long been one of my favorite news aggregators and commentators. I first got to know his work in the early 2000s, when he wrote and edited the must-read, “White House Watch” at washingtonpost.com. WHW was a daily news digest entirely made up of news about the Bush White House, with Dan’s pithy commentaries about the stories he selected for his readers. I used to wait avidly each day until mid-morning when each new column would appear online. If I had a lunch date I had run to, I would print out the pages and take them with me on the subway.

This is Dan’s awesome archive of all the WHW columns he did–plus all the live chats he did–before his employment at the Post was ended in January 2009, one of the worst decisions, among many bad calls, that that newspaper made in the 2000s.

I got to know Dan personally shortly after I began working with Ambassador Joseph Wilson on the manuscript that would become his 2004 book The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity.* Dan and I haven’t been in touch the past few years, but I continue to enjoy reading him.

Yesterday Dan published a provocative column in which he laments the fact that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald only charged VP Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice in the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity, ultimately choosing to not put Karl Rove and/or Dick Cheney on trial. Froomkin reminds readers that

“Fitzgerald was appointed as a special prosecutor in late 2003 to investigate the July 2003 leak of Plame’s identity, which came during a White House effort to discredit her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson [who] was trying to expose how the administration had twisted intelligence to make its case for the war in Iraq, launched a few months earlier, and the White House was desperate to prevent that narrative from establishing itself before the 2004 elections. The evidence that came out at trial clearly established that Cheney was the first person to tell Libby about Plame’s identity and that Cheney wrote talking points that likely prompted Libby and others to raise Plame’s role with reporters.”

As is often the case with prosecutors, his decision may have come down to a calculation of what he could prove at trial, and what a jury would accept, beyond a reasonable doubt:

“In a subsequent court filing, Fitzgerald wrote that ‘there was reason to believe’ the leak had been coordinated by Cheney and that the vice president may have had a role in the cover-up. ‘When the investigation began, Mr. Libby kept the vice president apprised of his shifting accounts of how he claimed to have learned about Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment,’ Fitzgerald wrote. But Cheney was never charged. ‘I think the chances of it being a show trial and losing really weighed heavily on him, in terms of the political fallout,’ said Michael Genovese, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Institute for Leadership Studies.

Froomkin goes on to point out,

“For reasons he has never publicly explained, Fitzgerald ultimately chose not to indict Rove either for the leak or for obstruction of justice. While much could have been gleaned from key investigative documents requested by a congressional committee, the Bush White House wouldn’t let Fitzgerald release them.

Dan gives the last word in his column to one of the reporters who was most dogged about this case, Marcy Wheeler, whose commentary and reporting was then at firedoglake and can nowadays be found at Empty Wheel.

“Wheeler. . . one of the foremost chroniclers of the Libby trial, said Fitzgerald’s investigation didn’t go far enough. ‘The FBI agents believed that they had the case against Rove nailed down,’ Wheeler said. And Fitzgerald ‘actually had Dick Cheney in his teeth.’”

When Fitzgerald recently announced that he’s retiring from the corps of federal prosecutors, I expected to see postmortems of his career, though Froomkin’s is the first I’ve read. It seems that the last decade is already dim and distant in Americans’ memory, and in the minds of members of the media, even though so much of what happened in the terrible Bush years still hangs over us like a black cloud. What I’d really love to read, or even better edit, would be a manuscript by Fitzgerald, though I fear that’s unlikely from this career government lawyer, generally known for his circumspect nature. Still, he did let it all–or nearly all–hang out in one public statement about Cheney’s role in the Plame matter. Quoted here by Froomkin,

“In his closing arguments in the Libby case, Fitzgerald famously declared: ‘There is a cloud over what the vice president did that week. … That cloud remains because the defendant has obstructed justice and lied about what happened.’”

*Along with Wilson’s book, which became in part the basis for the movie, “Fair Game,” I also brought out the book The United States v. I. Lewis Libby, edited and with reporting by Murray Waas, the only published transcript of Scooter Libby’s trial. I recommend it along with Wilson’s book, and former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan’s What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

A Great Gray Bridge tumblr

June 30, 2012/0 Comments/in Media, Blogging, Internet, Philip Turner's Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

I’ve started a tumblr blog to share visual material and quick-hitting posts, different from what I post on this blog, though there will be some cross-posting too. Please follow me there, if you like. You can find it at this link, or http://philipst.tumblr.com/. Among my first new posts there was this one.

Major Media Failures by CNN & FOX on the ACA Ruling

June 28, 2012/0 Comments/in Media, Blogging, Internet /by Philip Turner

Mid-Afternoon Update: According to TPM’s Benjy Sarlin, it turns out that like me and millions of other Americans, the flawed reporting of CNN and FOX just after 10:00 AM this morning gave President Obama the false impression that the ACA had been struck down by the Supreme Court. It was incorrect, of course, but it shows how careless those two news orgs were in playing with the emotions of so many news consumers and citizens. I was following the unfolding drama on Twitter and on TV we had MSNBC. I saw a CNN tweet from reporting the mandate had been ruled unconstitutional, and my heart sank at first, but then–as has occasionally occurred in sports, when a final call or a buzzer beater is later over-ruled–I thought, Wait a minute, let’s see what the other networks are saying. Sure enough, within a few minutes Pete Williams, an NBC correspondent was telling the MSNBC anchor Chris Jannings that the mandate had in fact been upheld. So it goes, but when you have news orgs behaving as irresponsibly as two did today, the public is very poorly served.
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Early Afternoon Update: BuzzFeed.com‘s Michael Hastings has spoken with “about a half-dozen top on-air reporters and producers within” CNN who “are “furious” and embarrassed at their network’s blown coverage on “the most consequential story of the year.” ‘Fucking humiliating, said one CNN veteran. ‘We had a chance to cover it right. And some people in here don’t get what a big deal getting it wrong is. Morons.’ ‘Shameful,’ another long-time correspondent told BuzzFeed. ‘It’s outrageous and embarrassing,’ a third CNN staffer vented. ‘Maybe this will shake the company into understanding that CNN has not been the ‘most trusted name in news’ for a very long time.'”
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Shortly after 10:00 AM this morning, CNN and FOX jumped the gun and inaccurately reported on the upshot of the Supreme Court ACA’s ruling. I suspect this was probably done in CNN’s case out of an overzealous mania to report the news first–without insuring the report’s accuracy–and from ideological zeal in FOX’s case. Both news organizations have much to apologize for. Judging by one screenshot below, CNN has already issued a correction, no sign yet if or when FOX will do the same. Each network should also explain how the errors occurred. H/t Keith Boykin and David Folkenflik. Added: CNN not only tweeted its error, but even blared the error on its website.

Publishing People for Obama Fundraiser, June 18

June 23, 2012/1 Comment/in Media, Blogging, Internet, Publishing & Bookselling /by Philip Turner

I had a great week in Toronto, covering the North by Northeast festival (NXNE) for this blog, and working with my client Speakerfile, but when I booked the trip in late May, I deliberately scheduled my departure for mid-afternoon on the Monday, June 18, with a hoped-for return landing at LaGuardia before rush hour. This was designed to give me some time in Toronto that workday, while also allowing me to make it to the Publishing People for Obama reception and undraiser that was being held that evening from 6-8 in the Midtown Loft at Fifth Avenue and 29th Street. I lucked out last Monday. Though the day was extremely hot and hazy in Toronto and only a bit less so in NY, there were no thunderstorms messing up the northeast corridor and nothing delayed my departure and rapid return home to Manhattan.

Since I had not flown in a sportcoat and dress shirt, I wanted to change in to an outfit that would come close to business attire, or semi-business attire. How was I going to do this? In the back of a livery cab? I didn’t think so. I lucked out again and had a funny sort of sitcom moment when I found a “family restroom” at LaGuardia, with a door I could lock and then dig into my luggage for my toothbrush and a suitable change of clothes. So far as I know, I didn’t inconvenience any desperate parent with a baby in need of a diaper change–at least no one banged on the door begging entrance, nor did any airport guard see me go in and out of this inner sanctum of airport privacy.

With luggage in tow, I reached the loft space, showed my passport at the front table (since it was handy) and stowed my stuff in a nearby coat closet. (I’d wondered if a security detail would want to inspect my belongings, but luck prevailed again and no one did). Unencumbered at last, I began greeting publishing friends who had also donated to the president’s reelection campaign via our organizing committee and, like me, were eager to hear from our guest speaker, presidential advisor David Plouffe, and later Rosanne Cash, the evening’s entertainment. I saw the event co-hosts Barbara Lowenstein, Roger Cooper, Tom Dunne, and Bob Miller. Over the next few minutes I saw and spoke with Will Schwalbe, whose second book, The End of Life Book Club will be out this fall; Fauzia and John Burke, of the indie publicity firm FSB Associates, which set up the Facebook page for the event; Linda Johns and George Gibson, of Bloomsbury Publishing, as well as Peter Ginna, of Bloomsbury; Mike Shatzkin and Martha Moran, longtime book biz friends going back to my bookstore days; book packager and publishing consultant David Wilk, and his wife Laura, a watercolor artist; Brian DeFiore, Irene Skolnick, Deborah Schneider, Scott Waxman, and Alice Fried Martell, all literary agents with their own agencies; Michael Coffey, co-editor of Publishers Weekly, and his wife Rebecca Smith, a sculptor; and Marc E. Jaffe, a publishing advisor whom I hadn’t seen in ages. It should also be said that many people from outside of New York donated, but didn’t attend the event. Thanks to them all too!

Many of these people I saw up on the rooftop, where we enjoyed a great view of the Manhattan skyline all around us, including the Empire State Building at 34th Street, which seemed close enough to touch. Soon, with the evening’s program approaching we were urged to head back downstairs to the main room, which by now had become very crowded. Pretty soon there were so many familiar faces I couldn’t keep track of who I was seeing. The space got full very fast.

Plouffe is slender and perhaps around 5′ 10″. He has thin hands and long fingers on a slight frame, with a rather bird-like profile. He spoke for about twenty minutes, and then took a half-dozen questions. He thanked us all for contributing to the campaign, and said he believes it’s going to be a close election, and tougher to win than in 2008. He referred to the possibility that Mitt Romney could win, though he also expressed confidence the president will be re-elected. He said only one president has ever been re-elected amid an economy overcoming a depression or recession as severe as the one we’ve endured. That was FDR, in 1936. Plouffe also talked about the veritable flood of Super Pac money flowing against the president and other Democrats, and observed that at times it feels as if their opponent isn’t Mitt Romney, but all the Super Pacs. He pledged that the campaign will do everything possible to remind the American people of how damaging the stated policies of Mitt Romney and the Republican congress would be for the country. He said there is still much that the American people has to learn about Romney–for instance, he said that barely 50% of the country even knows he served as a governor, or what his record was while in office. He promised the campaign will draw sharp contrasts between the president and Romney whenever possible. He asked for our help, and our time as volunteers, for instance by making calls to swing states, or visiting them if you’re able to do so. In 2008 I made calls to Ohio (the state I was born), Virginia, Colorado, and Pennsylvania and will do so again. // more . . . // Click through for entire post and all photos and captions.

A “Model for Entrepreneurial Journalism”

May 30, 2012/0 Comments/in Media, Blogging, Internet /by Philip Turner

Interesting article by Jeff Sonderman at poynter.org, the journalism and media hub, about the model that forbes.com has created for itself, “’a full-fledged platform’ for 1,000 expert contributors and Forbes staff alike, and ‘a social media operating system’ to engage 30 million monthly unique visitors.” I know two of their thousand bloggers, friends Rick Ungar and Tom Watson–last month Tom invited me to cover the Hillman Awards as one of a posse of bloggers–and I’m definitely intrigued by the platform, what its originator Lewis DVorkin calls “our model of entrepreneurial journalism.” Unlike Huffington Post, to which it’s been compared, forbes.com pays many of its contributors, and seems to have developed reasonable metrics for rewarding writers based on their readership. They are also developing their own style of social media that their contributors can draft off of, what DVorkin calls the “FORBES Follow Bar,” making “it easier for our growing audience to follow and find all our staffers and subject experts.”

Importantly, given their connection to Forbes magazine, forbes.com goes well beyond just business and finance, and it is not in thrall to the conservative ideology identified with Steve Forbes. Ungar has a blog covering healthcare and politics, while Watson is a contributor commenting on “social ventures, media, and change.” Forbes.com’s audience doubled this year, from 15 million monthly visitors to 30 million. According to Sonderman, “Fifty-five writers have more than doubled their audience since last June, DVorkin recently wrote, and ‘a handful’ periodically draw more than 1 million readers a month.” Sonderman reports “that Forbes hires each contributor to write about a specific subject, and requires them to stay in their lanes.” Considering that I cover more than half a dozen subjects on this blog–city life, books, music, culture, media, current events, and city life–I wonder how writers do operating in a narrower silo like that. Of course, people like Tom don’t write only for forbes.com, as he also has a site and blog of his own.

I don’t hear too much about Forbes magazine nowadays, and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that forbes.com is increasingly important to the company’s

A Renovated Digital Home for the CBC Archives

May 24, 2012/0 Comments/in Canada, Media, Blogging, Internet, Music, Bands & Radio, Publishing & Bookselling /by Philip Turner

Cool stuff on the Web from the CBC Archives is now accessible to virtually all computer users. The national broadcaster of Canada goes back to 1936 but until now their Internet archive was more frustrating than enlightening. Now, however a post on the CBC’s in-house blog explains that the old site has been updated, with a side benefit that MAC users–formerly shut out–should now have as full access as folks on Windows machines. It does look much better now and you can savor TV and radio clips of musicians Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Gould, writers Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Farley Mowat, and Pierre Berton, comedians Bruce McCullough and Scott Thompson from Kids in the Hall and Catherine O’Hara of SCTV and Patrick Watson* (the longtime broadcaster, not the current day musician), to name only a handful. I should add it’s not all about the artistic luminaries–the correspondents and journalists who’ve long made up the CBC, such as Patrick Watson* (the longtime broadcaster, not the current day musician) and the late Barbara Frum, co-host for many years of “As it Happens,” Canada’s “All Things Considered,” represent great broadcast talent. This archive is a veritable youtube for Canuckaphiles and honorary Canadians like me. For a taste of one artist, enjoy this 2 1/2 minute clip on stellar rapper Cadence Weapon, celebrating his selection in 2009 as Poet Laureate of Edmonton, Alberta.

*In 1979, one year after my family bookstore Undercover Books opened for business, Patrick Watson published an excellent suspense novel titled Alter Ego. My brother Joel read it and wrote to Patrick inviting him to visit our store. With the participation of his publisher, Viking, Patrick visited our store for an autographing and a great book party that moved from the store to my family’s nearby home. I recall that Patrick, an accomplished pilot, flew his own small plane from Toronto to Cleveland. I bumped into him in 2003 on the convention floor at Book Expo Canada. We had a pleasant reunion. He’s a grand fellow and has had a fascinating career as broadcaster, actor, author, and engaged citizen. Apart from the thriller Alter Ego, Patrick is also the author of a book in my art book library, Fasanella’s City, on the American painter known for his colorful canvases that depict May Day celebrations and demonstrations of workers’ rights amid clamorous scenes of urban density.