Entries by

Rachel Sklar, Changing the Ratio one Mind at a Time

July 7, 2012 /1 Comment/in , /by

I admire Rachel Sklar’s Change the Ratio initiative, from which she advocates for a more equitable proportion of women in tech fields, and now want to recommend this column of hers about the recent list of major tech influencers from Newsweek/Daily Beast that unaccountably managed to identify only 7 women listed out of 100 total standouts. To the credit of  Newsweek/Daily Beast they solicited Rachel’s critique and are running it in their own pages, but the lingering question is, “Why does this list skew list so heavily toward men?”

Rachel’s analysis makes clear that the answer to that question goes well beyond what simply happened in this one instance. She offers many women candidates who could have been included and closes her piece on an admonitory note,

“
Next year, please don’t make me write this article again.”

H/t Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum for his editorial in TechPresident, “Let’s Change the Ration Once and For All,” which first brought Rachel’s column to my attention.

#FridayReads, July 6–“The Double Game,” Dan Fesperman

July 6, 2012 /3 Comments/in /by

#FridayReads, July 6–Reading a galley of “The Double Game,” Dan Fesperman’s terrific homage to spy fiction, a Knopf novel coming late August. Terrific dialogue, characters, and use of dozens of classic espionage books as clues and plot points. Sonny Mehta’s letter on the back is right: “For anyone who loves a good spy thriller–and who has loved them for years–this will be a treat.”

A Jet-Ski Vacation

July 6, 2012 /1 Comment/in /by

Fresh off revelations in Vanity Fair and on the AP wire that Ann Romney had become the sole owner of an opaque investment vehicle called Sankaty High Yield Assets the day before her husband was sworn in as governor of Massachusetts in 2003, the candidate’s wife gave a rather bizarre interview on CBS TV Thursday morning. Over at my Great Gray Bridge tumblr, I’ve posted commentary on this with the ridiculous photo of Ann and Mitt Romney jet-skiing around their lakefront vacation home earlier this week.

I should add that Ann Romney, though reputed to be an electoral asset for her husband, has hit a few bumps along the campaign trail:

  • There’s her lordly and expensive sport of dressage, which I posted about in 2011;
  • On that matter of Sankaty High Yield Assets, she was Mitt’s sole beneficiary for the fund which for unknown reasons he transferred to her under the wire before taking the governor’s office. He then failed for years afterward to report it on his federal elections filings, as he was required to do, according to those Vanity Fair and AP stories.

More Questions about Mitt’s Money

July 5, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by

Update: The Obama Campaign jumped right on the AP story on Mitt’s finances that I blogged about yesterday. Above is the video they’ve made about the issues raised by the story. It includes numerous statements from voters on Mitt’s offshore money. In the statement accompanying the video campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt says,

“Yesterday’s Associated Press story raises serious questions about whether Mitt Romney established a Bermuda corporation to avoid U.S. taxes and attempted to hide it from the public. According to the report, Romney transferred the mysterious corporation to a blind trust in his wife’s name one day before taking office as Governor in order to avoid disclosure. In fact, he left this entity off of seven different personal financial disclosure statements he was required to file under state and federal law since 2001. We already know about Romney’s $3 million Swiss bank account and millions of dollars of investments in foreign tax havens like the Cayman Islands. Bermuda does not tax corporate income or capital gains. Until Romney releases additional years of tax returns, the American people will never know whether he created this shell corporation to intentionally avoid paying U.S. taxes. What is Mitt Romney trying to hide?”

For my part, I hope reporters keep asking questions about the registered-in-Bermuda Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors, Ltd. Though it’s a mouthful to say, I think this opaque Romney-owned investment vehicle could have a lot of resonance with voters.

Mitt’s Most Secret Offshore Investment

July 4, 2012 /2 Comments/in /by

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 , , /by

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.

Andy Griffith as a Young Actor

July 3, 2012 /2 Comments/in /by

Sad news being reported today about the death of Andy Griffith at age 86. Though he will mostly be remembered as the avuncular Sheriff of Mayberry, I prefer to recall him as the naif, a country singer who gets schooled in the sorry ways of the world in Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan’s 1957 film with Patricia Neal, “A Face in the Crowd,” a great black & white movie, in the same cinematic family as Billy Wilder’s bitter classic “Ace in the Hole,” aka “The Big Carnival.” Both of these ’50s b&w classics take sharp aim at the jaded ways of the media and modern celebrity-making. Here’s the original trailer:

Jonathan Krohn’s Political Evolution & a Couple Welcome Updates

July 2, 2012 /0 Comments/in , /by

Day Later Update: Jonathan Krohn went on Last Word w/Lawrence O’Donnell Monday night and did a great job explaining the evolution of his political views over the past few years. He’s a very mature 17-year old and I can’t help being a fan of his, and admiring his transformation. You can watch it via this link.
—
Late Afternoon Update: After I tweeted out my blog post about Jonathan Krohn I heard from him, and the Twitter exchange we shared is below. I must say I admire his candor and his broad-mindedness in continuing to quest for a political philosophy that suits him. For proper sequence, the tweets should be read from top to bottom.


—

Onetime young favorite of the conservative movement, Jonathan Krohn, now 17, has largely disowned the doctrinaire ideological positions he seemed to favor at age 13, when he gave a widely covered speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Politico‘s Patrick Gavin has the story on Krohn’s transformation into a gay marriage-favoring, healthcare-supporer who would probably vote to re-elect President Obama voter, if he were of age in November.  From Gavin’s article, partly in Krohn’s own words,

“’I think it was naive,’ Krohn now says of the speech. ‘It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough. . . .  One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative,’ said Krohn. ‘It just didn’t seem right to me anymore. From there, it branched into other issues, everything from health care to economic issues.… I think I’ve changed a lot, and it’s not because I’ve become a liberal from being a conservative—it’s just that I thought about it more. The issues are so complex, you can’t just go with some ideological mantra for each substantive issue. . . . I’ve been trying to tell people,’ he added, ‘but it’s a lot harder to get stuff out there when your mind changes on things because a lot of people who supported you when you’re on one side of the issue aren’t really going to help you get your changing ideas out there when people still think I’m that conservative kid. . . . People don’t realize I was 14 when I wrote that book.'”

Soon after the speech and all the coverage Krohn garnered, publisher Roger Cooper of Vanguard Press signed him up for a book. Roger, for whom I’ve edited manuscripts, asked if I would be interested in working with Krohn and editing his book. I had seen the speech, which I watched it with my own son Ewan, who’s a year younger than Krohn. Ewan found his beliefs and his celebrity, weird and unappealing. Though committed to the idea that every author has a right to tell his story, I declined to make a bid for the editorial assignment, largely because I didn’t want to work on political material I found inimical to my own or Ewan’s views; nor did I anticipate I could have a vigorous exchange of ideas with the smug boy I’d seen on C-Span. He seemed so convinced of his ideological positions, I just didn’t relish the thought of working with someone like him. The weird thing for Krohn now is that he’s got this unenviable Youtube and Internet history that he can’t escape, and which he’s already tired of dealing with, and being forced to explain to people. He’ll soon be going to NYU where he plans to study philosophy and filmmaking. The last word in the story is from Krohn:

“‘People don’t realize I was 14 when I wrote that book. I’m 17 now. In terms of my life, three years is a long time in a 17-year-old’s life. . . .  Come on, I was thirteen,’ he said. “I was thirteen.’”