"Congress needs to understand the people of St. Bernard lost everything, including loved ones, due to the negligence and lack of responsiveness by the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers in the maintenance of that structure," Taffaro said.
But the port has an ally in U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans. In a statement issued last week, Jefferson signaled his support for keeping MR-GO open until the locks are completed.
"I will continue working with the Port of New Orleans and other interested parties so that New Orleans does not lose valuable business at the port," the statement said.
Pray tell, Congressman, whose business are you so worried about? Might it be Bollinger Gulf Repair, one of Bollinger Shipyards' many subsidiarys:
If the MR-GO closes without an alternative route opening first, Bollinger Vice President Robert Socha said the repair dock's 300 jobs could go, too.
"If one or the other isn't met, Bollinger Gulf Repair would probably cease to exist," he said.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A nonprofit group formed to tout Gov. Bobby Jindal's political and policy plans raised nearly $750,000 since forming three months ago — nearly all of it from 10 big money contributors.
I don't know what you were doing on Monday, but our friends at the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM) made time in their busy schedules to write two checks totaling $64,000.
According to a campaign finance report filed on Tuesday with the State Board of Ethics, the LCRM sent a $5,000 check to GOPAC, the ideological bench-building organization of the Republican National Committee that works on candidate recruitment and activist training.
The LCRM then wrote a $59,000 check to the Louisiana Republican Party, allegedly to cover the cost of "polling/research."
I say allegedly because in recent days, Democrats across the state have reported receiving calls from Houston-based Promark Research Corporation, to which the LCRM paid $64,495.44 on August 21, 2007. Could the LCRM be trying to cover their tracks by using the Louisiana Republican Party as a pass through to pay for work that they ordered done?
Why would the LCRM want to hide their tracks? Perhaps to conceal the extent of their involvement in/control of the campaigns of Republican candidates in run-off races.
This originally appeared in The Daily Advertiser's Left Blog, to which Stephen Handwerk generously provided me access. A link to the original post can be found at the end of this piece.
• • • • •
The Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM) is a very small, deeply-pocketed special interest group that was convened by Senator David Vitter and his wife Wendy in late 2005. The group's roots, means and methods position it to be a formidable and destructive force in the upcoming election.
The declared objective of the group is to establish Republican rule in Louisiana, starting with control of the Legislature in this year's election. The leaders of the group committed themselves to raising $2.5 million to accomplish this goal. Until this summer's sex scandal involving Senator Vitter, the organization's core membership group of about 25 individuals and companies were on track to raise more than $2 million on their own. In the campaign finance report filed last week, it is apparent that the Vitter scandal has forced the LCRM to look outside of Louisiana for financial support. Still, the organization has $700,000 cash on hand.
More ominously, the latest report indicates that the organization has endorsed no candidates for office, meaning it will be able to spend the money it has without regard to spending limits imposed on organizations that contribute funds to candidates' campaigns.
In an article in Friday's Baton Rouge Advocate, John Diez of the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM) tried to dismiss my charges about the sinister nature of the LCRM by declaring that Bob Perry does not attend LCRM board meetings. (See Diez's full comments to The Advocate's at the end of this post.)
Nice try, John. But, this is not about whether Bob Perry is spending any time hangin' with Joe, Boysie, Phyllis and the gang; it's the business model, stupid!
The problem, John, is that LCRM modeled itself after a criminal enterprise — Tom DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority — at a time when leaders of that Texas group had already been indicted and convicted for violations of Texas election laws.
Texans for a Republican Majority PAC was itself indicted by a grand jury in Austin, Texas, on September 8, 2005, less than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit Southeast Louisiana and the levees collapsed in New Orleans. Tom DeLay was indicted for his role in those violations by that same grand jury in Austin on September 28, 2005, four days after Hurricane Rita made landfall — which may account for why that action may have escaped the notice of many Louisianians. Upon the announcement of the indictment, DeLay resigned his position as Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives.
James W. Ellis, who ran DeLay's national version of that PAC (Americans for a Republican Majority), was also indicted in the DeLay indictment, according to the Washington Post.
The new campaign finance report filed by the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM) confirms the organization's commitment to launch smear campaigns against Democrats just prior to the October 20 primary even as the organization's fund-raising efforts took a hard hit from the prostitution scandal engulfing its co-founder Senator David Vitter.
The LCRM reported that it took in $301,650 from 11 contributors making 13 contributions between June 5 and September 10 — a decent number, but one evidently depressed by the eruption of the sex scandal focused on Vitter that erupted just before the July 4th holiday.
The organization spent more than it took in ($329,993.32) during the period even though it produced no materials that affected any race in the state. The LCRM also reported that it had endorsed no candidates, meaning that all of the money it spends on campaigns can be done so in the form of independent expenditures, which are not capped under Louisiana election law.
The numerically small special interest group ended the period with $731,601.91 on hand. How much of that will be able to be brought to bear in legislative races will depend in large measure on the organization's ability to reduce the rate at which it is burning through cash or find new sources of contributions - something that proved to be a formidable challenge in the wake of the Vitter sex scandal.
(Originally posted at democrat2democrat. - promoted by pointecoupeedemocrat)
mo-dus ope-ran-di (mO-dus-au-per-'ran-dE, -dI) noun. A method of procedure; especially : a distinct pattern or method of operation that indicates or suggests the work of a single criminal in more than one crime.
On November 3, 2006, the general strategy and tactics of the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority were set in stone. That's the day that Houston homebuilder Bob Perry gave the orgnization $100,000 to help it achieve its declared goal of gaining Republican control of the Louisiana House of Representatives since Reconstruction. Perry's was one of two $100,000 contributed on that day, but it was his involvement in and contribution to the LCRM that committed the organization to conduct smear campaigns against Democratic candidates for the House, some Senate races and, possibly, some statewide races.
Bob Perry has given more money to political campaigns than any other American since the 2000 election. according to a March 2007 article in Texas Monthly magazine, giving something like $29 million in the 2004 and 2006 federal election cycles alone.
Smear campaigns are Bob Perry's political modus operandi. That he was among the earliest and heaviest hitters to contribute to the LCRM is a clear indication of what LCRM is about and what it will be doing to Louisiana Democrats in the final days leading up to the October 20 primary.
cabal — Pronunciation: k-'bal Function: noun. 1 : the artifices and intrigues of a group of persons secretly united in a plot (as to overturn a government); also : a group engaged in such artifices and intrigues.
Sometime in late 2005 and early 2006 — when just about everyone else in Louisiana was working to recover from hurricanes Katrina and Rita — Senator David Vitter and his wife Wendy gathered some of his strongest financial backers and laid out a plan to use the backers' deep pockets to fund a Republican takeover the Louisiana House of Representatives in 2007.
The Vitters' plan was not original. It was modeled after an organization that former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had built in Texas. Texans for A Republican Majority had successfully financed the election of a Republican majority to the Texas House of Representatives in 2003. In 2004, the group rammed through a mid-decade congressional reapportionment that at least temporarily further depleted the number of Democrats in the Texas Congressional delegation in beginning that year. Because the Texas organization violated that state's campaign finance laws, DeLay ended up in legal trouble that ultimately cost him his seat in Congress.
The Vitters' plan is based on the idea that term limits (which David Vitter helped pass as a member of the Louisiana House) would create opportunities for big Republican gains. The Louisiana Committee for A Republican Majority, as the new organization was called, would provide the financial muscle to ensure that the resources were available to the candidates that the group would help recruit.
On January 20, 2006, William J. Vanderbrook deposited $50 in a new account at First Bank & Trust Company in New Orleans in the name of the Louisiana Committee for A Republican Majority. Vanderbrook, a CPA, was the treasurer of the organization. The Chairman of the Board of First Bank & Trust, Joseph C. Canizaro, became chairman of the Louisiana Committee for A Republican Majority. It recruited Courtney Gaustella as its chief fundraiser. John Diez was hired as its CEO.
The DP informs us that "Senator David Vitter has scheduled a 5pm news conference in Metairie today where he is expected to finally speak publicly about his admitted ties to a Washington, D.C. prostitution ring". In light of this news, I've collected a long review of facts and claims made in the past week about L'Affaire Vitter.
(In honor of the 2 year anniversary - July 16, 2007 - of the Sinning Senator's revelations that he was, um, a Sinning Senator, Daily Kingfish will be promoting diaries from that time. Here's the first one. - promoted by ryan)
Boysie Bollinger, the New Orleans shipyard tycoon and a major force in the Louisiana Republican Party, a man who has "served as a delegate to every Republican National Convention since 1976, and was the State of Louisiana’s Finance Chairman for the George W. Bush for President Campaign and Campaign Chair for his General Election.... was State Finance Chairman of the Louisiana Republican Party on three occasions and served on the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee," recently told reporter John Hill something that, until he said it, no other Louisiana Republican political insider had been willing to admit: That insiders have known quite well and for quite some time about the allegations that David Vitter was a frequent patron of prostitutes and that they understood the damage it could inflict if the story were made public.
Hill quotes Bollinger as stating, "We (Louisiana Republican party insiders) discussed this exact fact, that this bomb could go off." Hill writes party insiders had known about these allegations as early as 2002, though he doesn't specify when Bollinger and other insiders had these discussions.
Of course, although it is disturbing that insiders knew and discussed these allegations yet still decided to support Vitter during his 2004 Senate race, it's not too surprising. After all, in a 2002 interview with Vitter, Jeff Crouere, a conservative talk show host, fielded a phone call from a caller who went by the name "Flaming Liberal," who directly asked Vitter if he would be willing to "sign under the penalty of perjury an affidavit saying you have never had an extramarital affair and you have never known, met or been in the company of one Wendy Cortez," to which Vitter "accidentally" responded by saying those allegations were "absolutely true." And it's not surprising because Republican Chris Tidmore and Republican State Central Committee member Vincent Bruno had made similar accusations against Vitter.
But in this onslaught of Vitter coverage, one of the most interesting stories, a story that clearly shows that Vitter and his team of insiders were aware of the real threat of the ticking "time bomb" way back in 2002, has been somewhat glossed over.
The new campaign 
Bob Perry has given more money to political campaigns than any other American since the 2000 election. 
Sometime 
Boysie Bollinger
